Carol Vorderman wasn’t going to miss her chance to dance on The Tories’ political grave
IS Carol Vorderman all right?
I only ask because she’s seemed a little “overwrought” of late.
She’s been a bit, you know, over animated. A touch overzealous.
And more to the point, she’s also been hugely overexposed and overdressed on shows like The Last Leg: Election Special, where Carol and others gathered on Friday to give Rishi Sunak a well-deserved kicking and also prostrate themselves before Saint Keir, with host Adam Hills surpassing everyone else’s efforts when he claimed the new Prime Minister had given us all “a promise of hope”.
Words that no one who claims to be a “political satirist” should ever use.
But he did, along with lots of other fawning eulogies to the Labour leader on a version of the show that had been extended to TWO HOURS, which was a torment almost without end for the unconverted and created a problem for the Channel 4 production team.
Swivel-eyed routine
For, deep in their hearts, they all know Adam, Josh Widdicombe and Alex Brooker have only about three minutes of passable material between them and nothing that ever comes close to being laugh-out-loud funny, despite the show grinding on for 30 series.
Just for the night, then, they had to be joined by a rolling team of like-minded, left-of-centre guests including Chris McCausland, impressionist Matt Forde, comedian Fatiha El-Ghorri and Jonathan Ross, who I know divides opinion among readers but on this show came across as a television giant.
In the absence of anyone else being fit for the job, he also gradually took over hosting duties and without fear or political favour began battering everyone, including his fellow guests.
A valuable public service because Vorderman, hotfoot from auditions for Bet Lynch: The Musical, wasn’t going to miss her chance to dance on The Tories’ political grave without an OTT pirouette or two.
“Oh my God,” she groaned, when Hills asked her how she felt about the election.
“It was fantastic. Jacob Rees-Mogg, GONE. Penny Mordaunt, GONE. Johnny Mercer, GONE, GONE, GONE. It was just, oh, bliss.”
The odd thing about Vorderman’s “bliss”, though, is that it never sounds like anything of the sort.
It comes across more, in fact, like she fancies the pants off Johnny Mercer and has been scorned by the entire party, which may be no accident.
For it’s always forgotten, by shows like The Last Leg and HIGNFY who indulge her, that Vorderman performed the same swivel-eyed routine about Gordon Brown’s Labour government before the 2010 election.
Coincidentally, in 2009, she was also appointed, by David Cameron, to chair a Conservative Party education panel, along with Michael Gove.
Whether she was expecting to become his Chancellor of the Exchequer I do not know, but during the intervening years the poor woman began to mistake the toxic and manipulative approval of social media for genuine affection and went off the deep end.
On Friday, this process culminated with Vorderman crunching some numbers on behalf of her own tactical voting website and claiming it was “hugely significant” to the outcome.
I’d no need to guffaw at the suggestion, though, because an incredulous Jonathan Ross did it for me and asked: “Are you claiming you won it for Labour?”
Yes, she was indeed and it’s conceit that would make Donald Trump blush.
In her giddy state, though, she may not have noticed that now all their political dreams have come true there is no point to her, The Last Leg or any other show that’s done nothing but tell us how much they hate the Tories for the last 14 years.
It wasn’t just Rishi’s funeral they were attending here, it was their own, as was almost acknowledged by Adam Hills, who ended the night by desperately claiming: “We have to be on our guard with Nigel Farage now, ’cos he does lie.”
Equal brutality
Farage’s ego would be thrilled by the attention, of course, but as a means of producing a satirical show, concentrating so much energy on one MP among 649 other liars would be a disaster.
There’s no chance of Hills changing direction, though.
He’s already cut off that escape route with his “promise of hope” grovel.
Nor is there the remotest possibility of organisations as institutionally biased as Channel 4 and the BBC, where they’re both overrun by useless left-wing comedians, rooting out all of the other political propagandists, sycophants, virtue-signallers and woke mediocrities and giving us proper satire, based on the old Spitting Image model where they used to treat everyone with equal brutality, regardless of the rosette they were wearing.
When he’s squirming to justify yet another Keir Starmer disaster, though, I just hope Adam Hills remembers one salient fact.
It was The Vordersaurus wot won it.
‘Tec is a bit of a turkey
FROM the word go, BBC2’s new eight-part drama series The Turkish Detective looked like a right load of over-caffeinated cobblers, with a set-up that predates the Ottoman Empire.
A crumpled old-school detective, Cetin Ikmen, from Istanbul homicide, is teamed up with Mehmet Suleyman, played by Ethan Kai, a raw young recruit who’s been seconded from The Met and can outrun a speeding moped doing 40 miles per hour, but is otherwise so blandly forgettable he’s almost invisible for most of the show.
Every other worn-out cliché, including the feisty female sidekick, is also catered for here.
I vowed to stay mentally tuned in to The Turkish Detective, though, for as long as The Beeb resisted the temptation to trash Britain as a racist, Islamophobic hell-hole, which is always a sure sign a drama’s got its priorities in a hopeless mess and isn’t for me.
Ikmen: “You worked with the world-famous Met, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, the Met wasn’t a good fit for me. Wrong name, wrong skin, wrong religion.”
Click.
Two minutes ten seconds.
WORST mental image of election results morning?
Good Morning Britain, Liz Kendall: “I will do whatever Keir Starmer wants me to do, on the backbench, on the front bench . . . ”
On the floor of the Strangers’ Bar, with the entire Privy Council watching.
Easy, tiger.
Unexpected morons in the bagging area
THE Chase, Bradley Walsh: “Which legendary footballer played his last league game for Stoke City in 1965?”
Chester: “Ian Wright.”
The Finish Line, Roman Kemp: “Louie is an American slang word for what army rank?”
Mickey: “General.”
Roman Kemp: “Land Of My Fathers is the national anthem of which UK country?”
Michelle: “Scotland.”
And The Chase: Celebrity Special, Bradley Walsh: “Someone with an attitude of moral superiority is said to be ‘holier than’ . . . ?”
Sonny Jay: “Water.”
TV gold
FINALLY, after a gap of several weeks, a show that really deserves the billing “TV Gold”.
Guy Martin’s Lost WW2 Bomber on Channel 4, which documented the astonishing task of retrieving an RAF Lancaster Bomber (ED603) and the bodies of three of its heroic crew, who were shot down in 1943 over Lake lJsselmeer in the Netherlands.
It’s a feat of engineering that’ll blow your mind.
It’s the eternal gratitude and respect the Dutch people have for the men who liberated them, though, that make it such a wonderful piece of television.
Please watch.
Random TV irritations
GMB Labour luvvie Kate Garraway almost going the full “Meg Ryan” over Sir Keir Starmer at the Royal Festival Hall.
Channel 4 axing arguably its best show, Banged Up.
Bloody tennis trampling over everything. All London-based tosspots referring to Wimbledon as “SW19”.
And EastEnders imagining it’s defined by its matriarchs when it’s actually now defined by Reiss’s comatose wife Debbie, who’s been in a persistent vegetative state for years and, like the show itself, is undergoing the most painfully drawn-out death in soap history.
Lookalike of the week
THIS week’s is Britain’s youngest MP Sam Carling, and Beavis of Beavis & Butt-Head fame.
Sent in by Peter Scott, Glasgow’s Southside.
Great sporting insights
MICAH RICHARDS: “Concentration is the only thing you need. Patience and concentration.”
Martin Keown: “Mother time is catching up with Pepe.”
Gareth Southgate: “I can stand here, sitting here and talk as much as I like.”
(Compiled by Graham Wray)
lTV quiz. Complete the following sentence, culled from Olivia Attwood’s The Price Of Perfection (Penis), on ITVX.
Cosmetic surgeon Doctor Carlo Debbas: “I once saw a patient in Brazil who injected cooking oil into his penis. He went to the beach, it was a hot day and . . . ”
A) “It gave him third degree burns.”
B) “Takings doubled at the Ipanema hot dog stand.”
C) “He’s now through to the final of German MasterChef.”
GREAT TV lies and delusions of the month.
BBC continuity: “Our election coverage will make sure your voice is heard.”
ITV Election Night, Tom Bradby: “It’s been an unforgettable, gripping and dare I say it, occasionally entertaining night.”
And Glastonbury, Jack Saunders: “The only appropriate way to describe Bobby Friction is ‘the GOAT’.”
You say “only” . . .
WIMBLEDON: Best Subtitle: “Danielle Collins is up against Bob were strictly cougar in the next round.”
Or, as she’s known on the WTA tour, Barbora Krejcikova.