Banned: Live from Studio 5

Please Make It Stop

Here’s some stuff that happened in the world on September 28, 2009. The death toll from a flood in the Philippines rose to over 240. A bus bomb killed dozens of civilians in Afghanistan. Iran was accused of developing its nuclear warhead capabilities. A new vaccine for cervical cancer killed a 14-year-old schoolgirl. The Royal Navy seized 5 ½ tonnes of cocaine off the coast of Colombia. Gordon Brown tried to win support from a slowly dying Labour Party. Economic meltdown. Global warming. War. Crime. News.

Here’s what Live from Studio Five led with: Elton John’s adoption dream. The X Factor. An interview with Jermaine Jackson. Katie Price. Lots of whoops. Lots of cheers. Lots of teeth. This would all be fine if Live from Studio 5 hadn’t replaced Five News at Seven, and if it wasn’t made for Channel 5 by Sky News. Horribly, this slot is supposed to be a news slot. Light news, granted, but news. Not a grim moving version of a dumbed-down dog-eared copy of Heat, only with no wit and no angles. This stuff can be done and done well (TFI Friday springs to mind) but to do it well you need originality and humour. You need to engage and amuse your audience and speak to them above the level of a pet poodle. You need talent.

Ian Wright is particularly stupid as the male host. ‘How ya feelin’ ladies?’ is his usual opening gambit to fellow-hosts Melinda Messenger and that insipid bint who didn’t win The Apprentice. At this Messenger usually offers some homily about telling her kids not to wake her up the previous night, as she is ‘so excited about the show.’ Wright, wriggling around in his chair like he’s just sniffed a line of Ajax and necked a box of blue Smarties, butts in constantly to remind us, in case we were thinking of changing channel or ramming our face through a plate glass window ‘We’ve got so much on the show tonight So much! So Much!’

So much what? Light news is, we soon realise, bottom of the barrel celebrity PR. Here’s the terminal dull Messenger to comedian Katy Brand:

“I’m loving your new series! Loving it! Whens it start then?”

“It started two weeks ago.” Fuck me, they can’t even get their PR fluff right.

Wright then leads us into some ‘hot stories’, all of which are neither hot, nor, indeed, stories. He urges viewers to e-mail in if they ‘fink same sex adoption is alright. Do you fink it is? I dunno. I dunno.' How stupid do the producers of the programme imagine their audience is to sink this low? What was the remit? ‘Look, there is no really stupid light news programme which doesn’t do light news. We could just do ‘celebrity’. But not really do that either. Fuck it, they are all morons. Stick anything on, and make sure it makes no sense at all.”

When the three heavyweights chat informally about, say, Madonna or smoking, is when the audience reach for some kind of opiate to numb the pain. They babble on with no direction like a group of primary school children playing around with new words, which they aren’t sure, what to do with, but like the sounds they make as they gush out. Here’s Melinda and Ian on how to stop people smoking:

Messenger: “My mum stopped smoking because my little boy Morgan said to her, you know, ‘granny I just don’t want you to die.’ And it was the one thing that stopped her and she’d been smoking for twenty, thirty years, so I think it is the only thing that does work.”

Wright: “It’s not the only thing that works, it’s not the only thing, you know, it’s not the only thing, it’s not the only thing.”

Messenger: “Well, anything that works then. I think is a good idea.”

Wright: “Patches! Patches!”

There is, of course, another thing that stops smoking. Death. Which is how this show should be stopped. Michael Parkinson said when Channel 5 launched LFS5 “If there was a category for the worst ever show, it would win hands down.” It’s hard to disagree with the man. Fortunately, after two weeks of being on air its audience had halved to 230,000, so perhaps something I’ve banned will actually get banned. Still, it’s worrying that there are 230,000 people tuning in: I’ve checked, and there are only 260 patients in Broadmoor, so where are the other 229,740 lunatics?