Keeping smut in the family

Ed Hall, Liza Tarbuck and Sue Perkins in Win, Lose or Draw

11 April 2012

HOW do nepotistic families live with their consciences, knowing that they're shamelessly prising every single relative into their lucrative profession, irrespective of merit?

Admittedly, some families do have a genuine talent gene running through the generations (Johnny and Zoë Ball, Paul and Stella McCartney, Clement and Matthew Freud), but while eating in a slummy crummy Italian spa-ghetto house recently, I happened upon a shockingly illinformed review of the self-same place by Giles Coren (a poseur who clearly spends hours cultivating his angry young man five o'clock shadow, and whose father Alan probably gave him a generous bunk-up into print journalism).

Nothing in his fawning write-up of the restaurant tallied with the mulch on my plate or the execrable service I received, but that's hardly surprising, because his irascible style has always been as unconvincing as his knowledge of gastronomy.

Indeed, it frequently gives me dyspepsia, so it's just as well that I work part-time for the Milk of Magnesia company. Yes, every morning I get up at 6am, call in our prize herd of Magnesias, then plonk myself down on a three-legged stool, grab an udder, and start squirting the milk into those little bottles. Well, it's a living, and at least I got the job entirely on my own merits, having been personally chosen by the company chairman, Ebenezer Lewis-Smith.

Nepotism has always been rife in television, from Test Card girl Carol Hersee (whose father George was the engineer who designed it) to her successor Lisa Tarbuck (well, she'd make an ideal model for the widescreen test card, anyway).

Tarbuck is currently hosting Win, Lose or Draw Late (ITV1), and could be seen last night standing in front of an easel daubed with pictograms, posing next to a large penis and saying: "I'm sorry dad."

Well, she was posing next to two large penises, actually, because representing the "boys" was Paul Ross, whose family have taken nepotism to stratospheric heights (I bet even the family cat works for Animal Hospital), while captaining the "girls" was Sue Perkins.

She's the erstwhile partner of Mel, you may recall, a duo who I would describe as "a comedy act consisting of two straight men", except that they're both women and Sue isn't straight. Sorry, but lesbianism always leaves a funny taste in my mouth.

Being someone who remembers this charades-with-a-drawing-pad game as a harmless daytime amusement from the late 1980s (when it was hosted by the quick-witted Danny Baker), I wondered what changes would have been made, to transform it into a late-night show.

None to the rules, it transpired, but instead of a little mild flirtation between the sexes, we were now assaulted with a constant barrage of low-level smutty answers, lewd drawings, witless and gratuitous references to naughty bits, and other pre-pubescent drivel.

Watching a trio of female thirtysomethings bragging about how some of them weren't wearing any panties was desperate, not titillating, and at least if this had been on the Granada Men and Motors channel, the show would have been called Strip Win, Lose or Draw, and we'd have been able to do the underpant arithmetic for ourselves.

So, before long, I'd deduced that the Late in the title referred not to its adult content, but to the show having died prior to transmission.

The sheer lack of talent that had been assembled for this show can be appreciated if I tell you that Ross and Perkins weren't there merely as ballast, they outshone the other guests (or to be precise, the other guests outdulled them).

One of those pointless blonde women from GMTV said "cock," then beamed delightedly as though she were Oscar Wilde delivering a particularly cutting riposte, while a former accountant told us that he'd become a comedian after deciding that laughter was the best medicine, although judging from his performance on this show, I assume that his family have by now been wiped out by tuberculosis.

ROSS at least had the decency to explain his televisual ubiquity by admitting that, "I'm a cheap tart who does anything for money ... I've got five children, they need shoes," and even joked that, "I've got an answering machine that just says 'I'll do it'." Hang on a minute. That's my line, which first appeared in my review of one of his innumerable TV appearances back in the Nineties. Let your children go barefoot Mr Ross, I want my writer's fee.

If you're going to revamp an innocuous daytime format for a latenight audience, then do it properly or not at all. Let obscenity and political correctness reign unfettered on the drawing board, and instead of hiring a schoolma'am to present the series, get somebody truly dangerous and edgy like Jerry Sadowitz.

The girls won last night, but the viewers lost, and I wonder if the great Schoenberg is spinning in his grave, despairing at the way his advice has been scorned yet again.

I refer not to Arnold (the serial composer) by the way, but to Sir Isaac, one of the inventors of television, who back in the 1930s gave us all a warning about the new medium, which we ignore at our peril. "Gentlemen, you have come up with the greatest device for wasting time ever invented. Use it well."

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