Another excellent column, just posted up! :D
The Princess and the Pee
Posted on FRI 8 SEPTEMBER, 2:00PM
Princess NikkiIt's a wet Wednesday in Folkestone and a tiny-framed woman in a stained Eskimo-hood jacket lies on the bed in a depressing, bird-crap splattered "budget" hotel room. Curled in the foetal position, sobbing hot tears onto rough antique sheets, "Princess" Nikki Grahame is extremely agitated.
Bewildered, lonely, exhausted, angry, abusive: that familiar feeling of Nikki's emotions running amuck over virtually nothing takes hold again. Nikki lies on her side and roars like a wounded beast.
Quickly, a male E4 producer arrives and tries to talk Nikki back down to earth. "I don't understand what's so wrong, Nikki? Why are you so upset?" the producer says, as if one can apply logic here.
She's Nikki Grahame, the girl who'd cry quite literally over spilt milk. Or a chilly draft, or a speckle on her fruit, or being asked to play tennis, or not being able to turn on an MP3 player.
At 24, Nikki's celebrity "hook" is that she's like a three-year-old girl. When life doesn't go Nikki's way, her face can crumple into deep, breathless, demented sobs in a millisecond.
While most three-year-old girls grow out of the tantrum stage, Nikki is the Peter Pan of petulance; eternally trapped, but now with her own E4 spin-off series - for the time being it's all worked out rather well.
"I f***ing hate this! I hate this! I haaaaaate this!" Nikki roars, shouting her dainty oesophagus into ribbons. The footage of this emotional breakdown will be cut and spliced with a comedy Toni Basil title track and quirky animations, then served up on E4 as light entertainment. I've not felt so grubby laughing at '"lovable eccentrics" since I watched that woman who lived in a house full of cat poo on How Clean Is Your House?
With a bit of thought, Princess Nikki could have been trashily brilliant. Just like Paris Hilton's The Simple Life, it might have been fun to watch Nikki take a normal job over the space of a week or two, develop unlikely friendships, cope with the daily 9-5. Yet with Nikki's diary jam-packed with nightclub PAs and interviews about her famous boyfriend, E4 clearly needed to act extra quickly for maximum results.
Shoved out on a fishing trawler for four hours in the rocky-watered English Channel, surrounded by dying fish, crabs, blood and guts, then forced to urinate in a bucket as there is no loo, weirdly enough Nikki wasn't very jolly at all; even if the crew taping her pitiful wailing were over the moon.
Job done, Nikki was then dispatched to a chip shop, cleaning out congealed fat for a gorgon of a woman called Esther who was meaner than Simon Cowell and twice as masculine. For some bizarre reason, Esther was determined to keep Nikki without drinking water (which is well documented as one of Nikki's biggest phobias.)
One good thing that came from Princess Nikki was that when Nikki stood beside Esther, who controlled the pickled egg, whelks and battered sausage output of Folkestone as if she was in charge of the war cabinet, Nikki looked comparatively well balanced.
And although I always retched at Nikki during BB7, I came away from her E4 show feeling more than a twinge of empathy. If they'd made me drop my jeans and wee in a bucket on a bumpy trawler before an audience of sniggering, smelly fisherman, I'd make a sound like a three-minute nuclear warning, too.
Brainteaser phone-in of the week Charlotte Church comes from?
a) Kazakhstan B) Romania c) Wales
Calls cost £1. Courtesy of The Richard and Judy Show.
Mercury Prize Live "We are incredibly lucky this evening to have an actual interview with The Arctic Monkeys!" panted Jools Holland, compere of The 2006 Mercury Music Prize (Tuesday, BBC4). On the VT, Mercury-nominated Monkeys' frontman Alex Turner was shown backstage at Reading, being probed by Steve Lamacq about his relentless good fortune: the tours, the hits, the awards, the rabid fans.
"Aye, it were awgood, like," mumbles Alex in a non-committal way, his bottom lip perpetually on the brink of a jut. During his reign as Britain's Jammiest Boy, Alex's face has never been a millisecond short of deep umbrage. I put it down to his youth.
He could be picking up three NME awards or knocking back Kate Moss's phone number, he'd still be wearing the dry, enduring face I used to reserve, aged 16, for a lovely Sunday drive with my parents to view Auntie Joan's "ship in a bottle" collection.
"I want you to know that I'm humouring you," Alex's face always seems to suggest, "But all the while I am secretly mocking you in the DVD director's commentary inside my head."
Back at the Dorchester, Jools Holland, resplendent in Uncle Munster's green velour smoking jacket, introduces performances by several of the 12 acts short listed for the Mercury prize; arguably the UK music industry's most slavered-over trophy.
I love the annual BBC4 coverage; from the comfort of your sofa, you really can experience all the tension, agony and macho willy-waving of a real music awards ceremony without the dire hassle of shinning through the toilet windows or frottaging a drum roadie from The Roaring Squirrels in the grubby hope of a spare aftershow laminate.
TV OD's top three Mercury 2006 moments were:
Electropop five-piece Hot Chip - resembling a minibus of demented drama supply teachers, led by a rejuvenated Timmy Mallet.
Richard Hawley - who sounds like the bloke who sings The Littlest Hobo theme tune and looks like a sexy version of Reg Varney from On the Buses. He's very good. Jools Holland admits that he has a cheeky £100 bet on him. "Call 999!" Alex Turner later quips as he collects the main award, "Richard Hawley's been robbed."
Thom Yorke - spooking the audience during the intro to his performance of Analyse, by suddenly fixing them with a hard milk-curdling stare, which dissolved into a small, disgusted snigger. "It gets you down/It gets you down/There's no spark/No light in the dark," chanted Thom beautifully, as BBC4 viewers pondered getting into their baths and hugging a plugged-in toaster.
The Arctic Monkeys won, in case you didn't notice. They were apoplectic with joy. The drummer smiled and everything.
The X Factor audition tactic of the week: Tina, 18, wants stardom from the bottom of her heart:
Simon: "So Tina, tell me your story. Why are you here?"
Tina: "Well, I've got a heart condition, you see. But I discharged myself from hospital to come to the auditions."
Simon: (horrified stare)
Sharon: "Why did you do that?"
Tina: "Cos I want it so much! I'm going to sing Killing Me Softly…"
Simon: "Oh, god, no."
Tina: "What? What's up? Have you heard it already today?"
Can't wait for: The Towers of London coming to Bravo, 26 October 10:30pm. Real-life Spinal Tap, taking rock dumbness to new mesmerising levels in this ten-part rock 'n' roll fly-on-the-wall series. One louder than your average reality rubbish. Absolutely brilliant - for all the wrong reasons. More action in the first five minutes than in two seasons of MTV's Meet the Barkers.
You Are What You Eat "Och, this is revolting!" crows diet-velocorapter Gillian McKeith, staring at the box of poo like it's, well, a box of poo. "This is worst the poo I've ever smelled!" shrieks the angry bag of bones, sloshing about the contents. "Poos should not smell like that! Or loooook like that either! They should look like sausages and curl out in the shape of a letter S and…"
I'll spare you the detail, but Gillian has very firm ideas about the perfect excretion. The Saunders family stare guiltily at their bad bum work as Gillian rants and gags. Personally, I'd be more worried if poo popped out smelling of nothing, but, hey, enough about poo, it's time to move on. And by series four, I wish Gillian would, too.
Nevertheless, there's something brilliantly watchable about You Are What You Eat (Wednesdays, Channel 4). I love the limitless fury of McKeith as she goose-steps around supermarkets and rifles through kitchen cupboards, greeting double chocolate mini-muffins like anthrax and replacing chocolate buttons with sugar snap peas.
"Mmm! Sugar snap peas! They're so sweet! Delicious! Just as good as chocolate!" she loves to cry, as if repeating the utter falsehood makes it any less risible. I hope the film crew take it in turns to crouch in the downstairs airing cupboard sharing contraband jelly babies, just out of spite.
I love Gillian's trestle table of shame, filled with jam roly-poly, pork pies and pains au chocolat, which the victims always sob in front of and repent their sins, while at home I secretly fancy a large slice of that Battenburg cake washed down with a nice glass of supermarket pop and vodka. "Nooo! Have a spoonful of this beetroot and flax-seed stew with natural yoghurt, then we'll go and do some squat thrusts around the park in Aertex gym knickers! It'll be fun!" Gillian says. Why does no-one ever slap her?
I love the bizarre ritual of filming the victim in a one-piece neon swimming costume looking almost suicidal, which always finishes with a cellulite close-up.
And if there are kids in the family, I love how they're always sent to school with a lunchbox rattling full of macadamia nuts and granola wrapped in chinese leaves sprinkled with cinnamon. Perish the thought you give the kids a wholemeal roll with lean meat and an apple; no let's send little Johnny to school with a lunch so bizarre that news spreads around the yard that mum is actually a giant mutant squirrel.
Despite all the daftness, as a short, sharp shock You Are What You Eat certainly does the trick. The message is clear: sugar and processed food is bad, fruit and veg is good. Four series on, Gillian McKeith is still coming up with the goods. Sadly, it doesn't stop the trestle table of shame looking bloody delicious. Even if one vanilla slice will mean your poo comes out in a letter Q and smells of purest Satan.
Paxman moment of the week (from University Challenge): "Which Roman emperor oversaw the completion of the Colosseum and was responsible for introducing fighting between women and dwarves? No? The answer is Domitian… He should really have been in charge of the ITV daytime schedule, shouldn't he?"
Surprisingly brilliant: Intervention: We're Coming to Get You, (Thursday, Channel 4). This must have been lifeline TV for thousands of families with drug addicts in their midst. After eight years of heroin abuse, the families of 27-year-olds Richard and Anna took drastic measures, performing an "intervention" - the addicts are lured to a hotel, confronted about their demons, then "kidnapped" and taken to rehab.
While Intervention used many of the snappy TV techniques of a standard reality show, it was beautifully powerful and never tackily voyeuristic. In the closing scenes, watching the cleaner, sharper and happier Richard and Anna would have planted hope in even the most desperate parent's heart. Excellent telly.
Surprisingly rubbish:The Charlotte Church Show (Fridays, Channel 4). Lovely Charlotte is so charismatic, pretty and witty, plus a fantastic singer, she could certainly front her own show. Just not this bloody show. One where the main joke is that she's a Welsh fishwife that shouts "w***er" and "b******s" every three minutes like BB7 Jayne Kitt's younger, dirtier sister. Grim.
Surprisingly brainwashing:The Beginner's Guide to Ron L Hubbard, (Monday, Channel 4). Should I be worried that I began the hour sniggering at the Scientology trainees in beige anoraks modelling playdough, but quickly began to see some sanity amongst the mess? Presenter comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli felt the same: "It's funny how we can't accept aliens, but we can accept angels and demons," he muses finally, "Because surely aliens would make more sense." No more, please, I'll need an intervention.
Psychic TV Next week I'll be watching, among other things:
The All Star Talent Show, Fridays, 8.30pm, Five. Talent show for Zelebrities fronted by national treasure Julian Clary. Did you know Malandra Burrows, who was once on Emmerdale, can eat fire!? Do you want to see Carol Thatcher doing a flapper girl routine? Of course you do. Myleene Klass is a judge. Because, like, she's an expert on talent.
Entourage, Tuesdays, 10:00pm, ITV2. They're all with Vince Chase. Are you?
A New Life: Risking it All, Tuesdays, 8:00pm, Channel 4. Gemma and her mum are sinking £1 million into a boutique hotel in Dorset. Obviously, they have no hotel experience, but they like staying in them and are familiar with a trouser press, so that's as good as, isn't it?
Extras, Thursdays, 9:00pm, BBC2. Series 2 - this time with David Bowie, Daniel Radcliffe, Chris Martin, Ronnie Corbett, Sir Ian McKellen and Cheggers.
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