Taking trips down memory lane

Jasper Rees the week on television

Jasper Rees
Friday 11 April 1997 23:02 BST
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There's no such thing as a disc jockey who doesn't want to make it on television. No matter that radio, a free-form medium that lets the roving intellect chase its own tangents, is perhaps the worst training imaginable for the strait-jacket of television. Only two Radio 1 graduates have ever really crossed the Rubicon satisfactorily - Jimmy Savile and Noel Edmonds - and they did so through programmes that mimicked the shapelessness of radio. Jonathon Coleman, heard to best effect giving it some antipodean lip on Virgin Radio, is the latest mouthy Jock to have willingly donned the small-screen gag - he gets to say about two desperately emasculating things an episode on Exclusive! (Channel 5, every week day).

Auntie's TV Favourites (BBC1, Sat) is Steve Wright's second stab at a television career. If I could be bothered to look it up I could tell you what the first series was called; there's a dim memory of a half-baked trio-of-celebs panel show of some sort, but the rest is a blank. The new vehicle ought to be safe as houses: Wright hosts a collective saunter down television's highways and byways, of which the main drag is memory lane. A few quotes from That's Life here, a couple of snatches of Fawlty Towers there. An old woman becomes the 4,972nd EastEnders addict to visit the set of Albert Square. Paul Whitehouse is the studio guest, affording another chance to see most of the last series of The Fast Show.

It's not Wright's fault that this all seems such an uninspiring variation on a theme. Terry Wogan hosts another old cuttings show. Gaby Roslin has just joined the BBC to front a wish-fulfilment show called Whatever You Want (BBC1, Mon) that modernises the old model driven by Savile, and there have never been more venerable comedies taken out of the library and wedged into the schedules. Television's narcissistic streak, in which it serves up old programmes or programmes about old programmes, looks uncommonly like an empty well of ideas in the light entertainment department. Even The Mrs Merton Show (BBC1, Thurs), making its maiden voyage to "The USA of America", went all that way to ask Patrick Duffy and Tony Curtis about British television presenters: "What were Richard and Judy like?" she asked Curtis, four times, because he didn't understand what she meant.

There can be no other explanation for the exhumation of Through the Keyhole (BBC1, each weekday). It was, let's be fair, quite a clever programme in a miserably low-brow sort of way. To be caught digging stuff out of your own dustbin is almost forgivable but God did not create the licence fee so that the Corporation could rummage through the black bags put out the backdoor by ITV. The show is still presented, most incongruously, by David Frost, who has been knighted since ITV dropped the show (for services, presumably, to the naming of breakfast cereals). One of the guests who consented to have his property exposed to the refined Bostonian taste buds of Loyd Grossman in the comeback show was Sir James Savile. But no amount of Ks can cover up for the fact that this show looks like it's trespassing, especially when the notoriously chaste Sir James used the guest slot to reinvent himself as a nine-times-a-night Lothario. "What are you going to do next in your life?" asked the ever penetrative Sir David. "Anybody I can lay my hands on," replied Sir James.

The show is still compartmentalised into two sections, for which the commercial break was always a natural piece of punctuation. So when Frost had finished with David Wilkie and said, "I wonder who's next?" you were wondering where the ads had gone. Thanks be to Grossman: ineffably snooty, he drops the cleverly concealed bombs into his guided tours. "What could be nicer?" he said on finding a selection of Royal Marine marches in what turned out to be Savile's record collection.

And then there's Night Fever (Channel 5, Sat), television's first attempt to incorporate karaoke into its fabric since, er, Karaoke. Dennis Potter it ain't. Suggs, formerly of Madness, invites 10 minor celebs each week to sing along and along (and along) for a full hour. The show's wittiest touch was seating Rhona Cameron, the well-known sapphist, next to Kathy Lloyd, the well-known pair of breasts. Suggs can expect his Knighthood after Channel 5 drop this garbage but before the BBC recycles it.

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