James reviews Celebrity Gogglebox and 2 episodes of The Twilight Zone

Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the eighth episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’ 

There is a short intro podcast, which you can listen to if you like. But really it’s straightforward: you suggest upcoming Freeview programs and I review them. If no-one suggests anything, then I have a look and choose something myself. 

Remember: send suggestions and comments to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or go to IReviewFreeview dot com.

In this episode I will be reviewing:

Celebrity Gogglebox on E4, and

A couple of ‘The Twilight Zones’ on Legend

That’s a celebrity version of a program I’ve never managed to watch all the way through and 2 episodes of a 30 minute, 60+ year old black and white series probably now only remembered by crinklies like me. Nostalgia or what?

By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

a Van Gough painting of a mysterious TV abandoned in a creepy landscape.

So, here we go.

Celebrity Gogglebox (S2 Ep 4) on E4, Thursday 28th March at 9:00pm 

For me, this has one of the absolute TV killjoys right there in the title: ‘celebrity’, yuck! Pardon me while I vomit. It nearly always means people I’ve never heard of, never seen and don’t recognise arrogantly assuming I know who they are. 

The thing is, if - like me - you avoid anything or any person with a sobriquet of ‘celebrity’, it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Celebrities tend to gather in flocks, like sheep in a field. A little world where they might bleat at each other. And if one of them has - for instance - a talk show on TV, the rest of the flock come flocking. They are known for being known. So if you avoid knowing them in the first place, their world and your world don’t overlap and seldom collide.

Now, let’s turn to the other word in the title of this program: Gogglebox. I’ve tried to watch normal gogglebox, or non-celebrity gogglebox, whatever you want to call it, on several occasions. I’ve never lasted more than 5 or 10 minutes. I suspect its because I’ve never seen them watch a program I’m remotely interested in, and I found their comments bland and rather stupid. 

So for the past year or so I’ve given it a miss. Now, it feels like we’re a couple of ships passing in the night, occasionally farting out a dreary foghorn to say stay clear.

I’m only watching now because John Oliver - a man I respect as he once created a legal Church (called ‘Our Lady of perpetual income’ if memory serves) in the USA to show the insane way tele-evangelists get monstrous tax breaks from fleecing gullible believers - well he once plugged Gogglebox on his show, enthusiastically saying ‘it’s great. Really, it’s great!’

So I thought, OK, let’s give it another shot. Against all experience to the contrary, I thought maybe the celebrities might have something interesting to say.

Ha! Oh dear oh dear: it was simply dreadful. All my worst prejudices confirmed in spades. Let’s take the celebs first. There were probably 12 - maybe 16 - sitting in pairs gawking away, over reacting, and pretending to be dumb. 

I recognised Jonny Vegas from some panel show, Rylan’s teeth from have I got news for you, Maureen Lipman because she was once miscast in a TV play set in a cricket pavillion and Gyles Brandreth for ruining every show he’s ever been on. As for the rest? God knows who they were.

They watched and commented on a whole smorgasbord of TV programs, from Boris Johnson twice - twice! As if we haven’t suffered enough - a nature film from Disney+ with ducklings throwing themselves from a cliff, a woman who claims she can talk to mermaids, and ended with a whole flood of lachrymose reactions to a mended wooden horse in that god-awful program ‘the repair shop.’

I ask: where is the considered criticism, the analysis, the sober judgements of the programs being shown?

Nowhere.

But (chuckles) that’s not what they are there for, is it? They’re not there to review programs, only to react and do the things people do, like eating crisps, stroking dogs, arguing and organising a birthday cake stuffed with candles. Puff puff: oh dear, there’s wax on the sofa. 

I was forgetting - as I often forget - it’s a TV show. No more, no less. They’re not that interested in anything useful or constructive. All they want are well known faces going ooo and aah and aah and ooo, and perhaps having a bit of banter.

What we see is not what they see. They see a complete program; we see a clip from that program lasting maybe a minute, and the reactions of the people watching. It’s all spliced up and cobbled together.

Or am I extrapolating from the skinny evidence of just one program? Condemning the whole on the evidence of a brief 60 minutes? A surprising thought. So I did a little bit of research.

Apparently, the aim is to capture the viewer’s authentic, real time reactions to current TV content. This only really works if at least some of the participants are watching the same thing at the same time. So they’re presented with a list of TV shows the producers would like them to watch. Then they are filmed watching and the results are all put together and shown as a complete program.

In other words, it’s been curated, which is just a fancy word for selective editing.

Fair enough and, all things considered, it’s probably the only way it could be made.

But for all I know, Rylan and his Mum might have given some astute political remarks about Covid and one of the nameless ones a scientific reason why a duckling can survive a 300 ft drop onto solid rock. 

But somehow I doubt it. I have a strong suspicion what you see is just about all there is to see which, in many regards, is very depressing. If all they can come up with is some ooos and ahhs, moans about Boris wanker Johnson, some below par banter and an inability to blow out birthday candles, we’re in a right old mess.

And if I have the inclination and time to have a rant about it, and the arrogance to post it up on an obscure website I can’t be arsed to market, then I’m just as badly off as the rest of us.

Ah well: I’m glad that’s off my wrinkly chest. 

Now: Onwards! Upwards! Sideways(?) time for: 

The Twilight Zone (S2 Ep7: Nick of Time) on Legend, Saturday March 30, 8:30pm

This do-it-by-numbers little drama is an unexpected delight. There is one basic idea, which - as long as you don’t want to be too critical - is deftly developed into a very watchable half hour of slightly fuzzy black-and-white TV. 

And there was what we would now call a special guest star. Woo! But more of that later.

It starts with newly-married young couple (Don and Pat) being towed into a small one-horse, 1950s mid-western town. In the USA, of course. All jeans, T-shirts, cars with fins and slow-speaking curtesy.

While we watch this, a slightly hollow voiced narrator unnecessarily sets the scene:

‘ In one moment, they will be subjected to a gift most humans never receive in a lifetime. For one penny, they will be able to look into the future. The time is now, the place is a little diner in Ridgeview, Ohio, and what this young couple doesn’t realize is that this town happens to lie on the outskirts of the Twilight Zone.’ 

(Chuckle) Oh, really?

Anyway, their car has broken down and it’ll take maybe 4 hours to fix so - talking about the possibility of Don getting promoted - they wander into a diner and sit at a table with a small coin-in-the-slot machine, which will answer a yes or no question.

Don asks it to tell him if he’s going to get the promotion, and the answer is positive, so he rings his work and finds this is true.

He becomes intrigued, and asks about how long before the car is fixed. The answers are generalisations, but could be meaningful. You can see him being led down a logical rabbit hole, and eventually Don believes they have to stay in the diner until after 3pm.

But Pat has been getting increasingly frustrated with all this, so she insists they leave and - on the stroke of 3 - they are nearly run over!

Wow: who would have thought!

So back they toddle to the diner, sit in the same booth, and Don obsessively interrogates the machine once more. Pat tries with a couple of trick questions like ‘is this a lie?’ but the answer: ‘this could be correct’ can again be called accurate.

By the way, I couldn’t remember her trick questions, so I just made those up.

Don asks again about the car, and the machine tells him it’s been fixed. 

Moments later - surprise, surprise - the mechanic arrives and says the car is ready!

Don - now convinced the machine is accurate, wants to stay, to keep interrogating it, but Pat reads the riot act and says they can make their own future.

Don sees the sense of this, so they leave and drive off.

As they go, a somewhat haunted looking older couple, who have been waiting to occupy the booth, sit down and start asking questions of the machine. It is obvious they are basically stuck in the town for ever, trying to make sense of the answers.

And to finish, the narrator steps in:

‘Counterbalance in the little town of Ridgeview, Ohio. Two people permanently enslaved by the tyranny of fear and superstition, facing the future with a kind of helpless dread. Two others facing the future with confidence — having escaped one of the darker places of the Twilight Zone.’

(hahaha)

Well, there y’go: a neat little tale, well told. Makes you think a bit - but not too much: and that’s 30 minutes gone.

And as for the special guest star: Don, the chap just avoiding getting sucked into a meaningless logical vortex was played by William Shatner, who - a few years later - became Captian James T Kirk of ‘Star Trek’ fame, and continued getting entangled with vortexes and so forth. So, good practice!

I kept thinking, is that him? Yes, it is him. But he looks so young!

But then we all did in 1960. Ah well. 

And, while I was in the mood, I went on to watch:  

The Twilight Zone (S1 Ep33: Mr. Bevis) on Legend, Sunday March 31, 2:35am 

Once again, a simple tale, efficiently told, this time featuring a hapless but kind and cheerful young man (Mr Bevis) that everyone likes, having a complete shit of a morning: he’s fired, his car crashes and he’s evicted.

Then his guardian angel, inherited from some more ‘worthy’ ancestors, turns up and lets him repeat the morning, but this time as a sober suited, straight-laced, entirely conventional office worker. He gets a raise, his car is nice and modern and his rent’s payed. On the downside, no-one seems to like him much and the boys in the street don’t want to play ball with him.

Now we all recognise a Faustian pact when we see one, but it’s usually with the devil, not your guardian angel, so I was expecting a twist at the end with the angel suddenly sprouting horns and developing a cackling laugh (ha-ha-ha!) before dragging his victim to a hellish eternity.

No such luck: Mr Bevis opts out, returning to his previous life of penniless, happy ineptitude. But the angel continues to give him a helping hand. So perhaps, in many ways, the best of both worlds.

Umm …… Heartwarming? Yes. Thought provoking? Not really. Any famous faces waiting impatiently to be discovered? Nope, not that I saw. And - compared with the Shatner one - this Twilight Zone lacked impetus: more a pleasant stroll in a wood than an adventure in an increasingly creepy forest. 

There’s little denying the series is of variable quality but, have I put ‘The Twilight zone’ on series record? I most certainly have, in the same way as - when I was a kid - I’d hide sweets somewhere and try to forget exactly where so - when I came across them later, it was a double delight. And so what if some are not quite as good as others. You need the downs to appreciate the ups.

And that unoriginal bromide concludes the reviews in this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Don’t forget, contact me through the website Ireviewfreeview.com or email contact@ireviewfreeview.com.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.