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Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2019 7:53 pm
by IanF
Jimmy Choo wrote: โ†‘Sun Sep 01, 2019 7:50 pm
Rich B wrote: โ†‘Sun Sep 01, 2019 7:14 pm
Jimmy Choo wrote: โ†‘Sun Sep 01, 2019 7:05 pm

David (the one who had his eye shot out) found the production company on line and approached them. I was asked 3 times if I wanted to appear. No fucking way! In all honesty, the family has been even more fucking ridiculous since then but that's a selection of stories I need a stiff drink to talk about.
wait, you were serious?!๐Ÿ˜ฏ
Oh yes.
๐Ÿ˜ฎSort of want to watch it now.

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2019 8:05 pm
by Jimmy Choo
It's got it all. Adultery, child abandonment, two lost eyes, my late father saying he was an alcoholic while holding a bottle of beer, bankruptcy, grudges...

And the rest is even worse.

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2019 8:10 pm
by Jimmy Choo
The FT review says wrote:
Television is a relationship as well as a one-way projection: it can, in its nervy and ceaseless search for an audience, often seem jaded and fevered, like one whose affection you no longer wish but who is desperate to keep hold of yours. Yet when television breaks through, to narrate something of heartfelt value, for me no other medium can match it for emotional power. It is as if it speaks to you.

It happened this past week, in We Are Family (BBC2 Friday), the first programme of a four-part series. It was advertised as another species of the reality family, something along the lines of Who Do You Think You Are?, the genealogy series that takes celebrities in search of their roots. In the main, though, taking celebrities to do anything of this sort on television is to expose that least attractive side of them: their inability to stop asking for your affection (securing it is the great celebrity trick) when given the task of โ€œacting naturalโ€.

This programme was the polar opposite. It took some obscure folk, unknown beyond their localities, and showed, in a one-hour, carefully planned exposure of a selection of their family dramas, the life games they play with each other and with themselves. Where too much of reality television puts inflated egos in empty spaces and pumps them up further to see who explodes first, this was a project of some seriousness and delicacy. We Are Family showed three tenses of learning: having learnt, learning, and about to learn. Learn what? Ways of living decently, against the odds.

Mary Campbell, a young Ulsterwoman, came to Gloucestershire during the second world war and found work as a maid. She also found a GI, with whom she had two children, Beryl and Denis, before he left for Omaha Beach. A few years later, she had two more children (Noel and one other, who did not wish to appear in the programme) from another relationship. Neither knows who fathered them.

Finally, she was lucky (1950s tongues must have clacked); she met Harry Minchew, a generous and easy man, with whom she had four children โ€“ Stewart, David and two more who also chose not to appear โ€“ and who insisted that they should adopt her previous two offspring. Although Mary, who is still alive albeit very ill, was absent from this revelatory piece, she was everywhere present in it.

Thus, gathered by the programme for a weekend in a plush house, five middle-aged men and one woman, who shared a mother and had three fathers, set about sorting out the feuds and silences that had built up like plaque upon their unscrubbed lives. Beryl, the first born, and her full brother Denis were adopted by her motherโ€™s employers and knew Mary as โ€œthe maidโ€. When she left, they stayed โ€“ to be suddenly abandoned, reduced to sleeping in lavatories, then taken into a care home for six years, until the age of maturity.

These were, said Beryl, happy days โ€“ and not of the Beckett sort, but really happy, with an affectionate matron, her brother and friends. Later in life, learning her parentage, she acknowledged Mary as her mother and even had a happy meeting in the US with her GI Joe father.

โ€œI never blamed my mother for my childhood,โ€ Beryl told us. In saying this, she revealed herself as someone strengthened by her vicissitudes, someone who would not succumb to self-pity. You wished she could be given her own show (but then, alas, she would become a celebrity).

Stewart and David, the two โ€œrealโ€ Minchews and thus the youngest there, had their brotherhood weakened by suspicions, slights and pride โ€“ and by an incident in their childhood when Stewart, the elder, had accidentally put Davidโ€™s eye out in a shooting accident. Stewart had, he said, been recently diagnosed with cancer; the heavier moral cancer he carried was his guilt, whenever he saw (and he had come to prefer not to see) his one-eyed brother. Their reconciliation was, to be sure, staged: how could it be other, since they were wired for sound and stood still for the camera. But it seemed no more phoney than breathing.

Noel, from the second, mysterious father, was a self-conscious black sheep. When starting a trucking business, he had ruined his stepfather, Harry Minchew, who had guaranteed a ยฃ2,000 loan he could not repay. Stewart had hated Noel for this, the others in varying degrees disapproved, and when Stewart had it out with him, Noel, after a bit of โ€œI was a victim tooโ€ (no Beryl he) recognised, perhaps sincerely, his trespass.

Renouncing any claim to his motherโ€™s estate, he made a flourish of a speech at the final dinner โ€“ โ€œI go away from here with brothers and a sister โ€“ not half anything!โ€ โ€“ catching a mood that had been earned, an insight into the futility of feuding when forgiveness was possible.

Earned, perhaps, too easily. On the last shot, of the column of modest cars winding down the grand drive, you were reminded that this was, after all, a show, and the bilious grudges and moral evasions that had preceded it waited at the end of the drive and might seize the Minchews again. But they, men and women who had worked with their hands and on their feet most of their lives, had shown to themselves and to us a common realisation of civility and charity, deep and moving, which might endure.

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 10:40 am
by Broccers
That sounds quite horrifying too :lol: :o :shock:

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 11:19 am
by JLv3.0
Jimmy Choo wrote: โ†‘Fri Aug 30, 2019 7:42 am "We are family". The Minchew family show off what a dysfunction cunch of bunts they are while the relatives who refus d to go on hide behind the sofa, cringing so hard they get an injury.
OK hands up who didn't know this was actually a thing ๐Ÿ™‹โ€โ™‚๏ธ

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 2:26 pm
by dinny_g
Yep - over here...๐Ÿ™‹๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 2:30 pm
by Zonda_
JLv3.0 wrote: โ†‘Mon Sep 02, 2019 11:19 am
Jimmy Choo wrote: โ†‘Fri Aug 30, 2019 7:42 am "We are family". The Minchew family show off what a dysfunction cunch of bunts they are while the relatives who refus d to go on hide behind the sofa, cringing so hard they get an injury.
OK hands up who didn't know this was actually a thing ๐Ÿ™‹โ€โ™‚๏ธ
I knew Jimmy had 'issues' with his family, I didn't realise it was a storyline to rival Dallas!

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 2:52 pm
by Jimmy Choo
Zonda_ wrote: โ†‘Mon Sep 02, 2019 2:30 pm
JLv3.0 wrote: โ†‘Mon Sep 02, 2019 11:19 am
Jimmy Choo wrote: โ†‘Fri Aug 30, 2019 7:42 am "We are family". The Minchew family show off what a dysfunction cunch of bunts they are while the relatives who refus d to go on hide behind the sofa, cringing so hard they get an injury.
OK hands up who didn't know this was actually a thing ๐Ÿ™‹โ€โ™‚๏ธ
I knew Jimmy had 'issues' with his family, I didn't realise it was a storyline to rival Dallas!
The other side are a bit weird too.

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 7:41 pm
by NotoriousREV
Do you want a brother-in-law, Jimmy? I can offer one free to a good home.

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Tue Sep 03, 2019 11:01 am
by Zonda_
NotoriousREV wrote: โ†‘Mon Sep 02, 2019 7:41 pm Do you want a brother-in-law, Jimmy? I can offer one free to a good home.
Well you're shit out of luck at Jimmy's families place then!

Re: Worst tv prog you have ever seen?

Posted: Tue Sep 03, 2019 11:14 am
by Jimmy Choo
NotoriousREV wrote: โ†‘Mon Sep 02, 2019 7:41 pm Do you want a brother-in-law, Jimmy? I can offer one free to a good home.
No. You have an equal quantity of batshit but yours is just in one person.