NICE

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Just a clever name.

Last night, I had the servere misfortune to be up late and at the mercy of the late night television schedules.

I could have gone to bed, but then I would not have had the pleasure of watching ‘The Poor Man’s Eurotrash*’ Sexcetera.

Sexetera is a late ‘nite’ adult themed program featuring travelogues from insanely peppy Americans, reporting on all sorts of porn based madness from around the world.  It is the stalwart of cable TV, capturing the imaginations of drunk people and horny teenage boys, who are the only people that can possibly gain any pleasure from the experience of watching it. It’s always on, despite the last episode being shot in 2005.

My interest, or rather, horror was piqued by the 2nd of last night’s dispatches, from ‘Club Relate’, a masturbating club peopled exclusively by monstrous old men and women who are most likely all teachers. The main just of Club Relate was to all get in a room and get freaky in the manner of Lemon Party or similar. My notes, recorded in a facebook conversation with my co-writer, proclaim ‘I HAVE NEVER WANTED TO HAVE SEX LESS THAN RIGHT NOW’.  I was so turned off; I could have quite happily passed up the Cumberbatch should he have come a’knocking.

I captured the images for posterity.

Urgh

Please God. No.

  Horribly scarred for life, I did not turn off, nay, I carried on in the hope it might get better. Therein lay my downfall.

The next feature was on the hellish ‘Sex Survivour’ which involved placing 30 odd pornstars in a house, filming them 24 hours a day and making them have a lot of sex. The prize was $350,000, a heady sum for all that ‘fucking and sucking’.  Whilst they rutted by a pool, in a pool, on a pool table, they did tasks to ‘spice things up.’ With salacious names like ‘Muff Diving Mambo’ and ‘Team Circle Jerk’ it promised to be the nastiest thing since Caligula.

Essentially, I thought I was about to witness a murder.

However, the odd bitch fight not with-standing, the participants got voted off one by one till only the most drugged up were left standing and 350 grand richer. The worst part was when the female winner declared that the money was for her husband and family. I felt sorry for her then that her only option was to compete in this mental sex-a-thon, without even being allowed to use condoms.

Oh yes, that’s right, they didn’t allow the use of condoms BECAUSE THAT IS A TOTALLY SANE DECISION.

Sex Survivor was declared a success by everyone, none more so than the coked up impresario behind it, who was probably counting his dollars whilst he listened to classic rock and got a blow job off his ‘assistant.’

The summation is always made in ‘the studio’ where they do that ‘filming through other cameras that are also filming’ thing that was very popular in the late 90s. It looks like it smells like urine and fag smoke.

All was well.

The programme did continue, including a morally bankrupt hypnotist who made people have sex on stage and an Australian brothel winning competition.

It’s the seediest fucking programme I’ve seen. The attempts at wit and variance are disastrous. I want to punch all the hosts in the face and storm Channel 4 with a baying mob, chanting ‘BRING BACK EUROTRASH, BANISH THIS FILTH.’

In conclusion, I spent an hour of my life watching something I could have turned off and got the added bonus of being walked in on by my housemate whilst doing so. At which point I felt the best thing to do was to shout ‘YES LOOK AT ME, I AM WATCHING PORN.’ 

It is so bad it’s good, but I reiterate, not Eurotrash good.

*Eurotrash was a bawdy, brightly coloured adult programme that everyone watched even if they were not of age. Eurotrash is where most of my peer-group first experienced sex, Swedish people and Jean Paul Gautier.

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Why Do We Love Smash?

Something has happened to Saturday. A day otherwise unmarked if you, like us are unemployed/a student.

NBC have moved their much-plagued, bombastic, insightful Broadway tell- all Smash to it.

Smash started out as the perfect pitch, in a world seemingly obsessed with people bursting in song at pivotal times in the plot, Smash was marketed as a ‘Glee for grown-ups’ a series set in the competitive world of Broadway, coupled with the optimistic possibility of the central Mise en abyme becoming it’s own actual Broadway musical. Broadception.

The line up was sparkly too, Angelica Huston, Debra Messing and Jack Davenport as the ball-busting producer, flaky writer and sarky British director respectively and a chick from American Idol. Oh and the musical was about never- waning, screen Icon, Marilyn Monroe.

So far, so great. ‘Eagerly awaited’ was the phrase bandied around.

Smash turned out to be the most bizarre, ridiculous cluster-fuck, dead on arrival. Plagued by a despotic sounding creator, the demise of the show was fast. For more information on this, read this great article on Buzzfeed.

We find it hard to explain our love of it to normal people (our boyfriends, family, friends, anyone that isn’t each other)

It’s great because it is so outrageously awful, it’s that simple.

One of the central storylines for the first series revolved around whether the glorious Ivy, played by Megan Hilty, the good Marilyn, would beat out the money, Katherine Mcphee, (also known as shit Marilyn) for the lead role. And it was hard not to hate-watch as we saw Megan Hilty, beat out by what was essentially, a broom in a wig.

This story line was surrounded by more preposterous ones, with even more preposterous acting. For instance, Debra Messing promising her son a Chinese sister but then ruining it by having an affair with a man who was starring in a Bruno Mars musical despite the fact she had a perfectly good husband who sang to her while playing guitar hero. Ellis, perhaps the worst character ever conceived, trying to kill Uma Thurman with a peanut laced smoothie and then explaining this with the words ‘if you put them in a blender they grind right up’. Shit Marilyn responding to her boyfriend’s proposal with “I’m in tech”. Naturally, we were captivated.

Somewhat alarmingly, Series two dawned and we were happier than Jack Davenport was at being in something not cancelled after one go around. The fact that Smash got a second series and actual good things like Freaks and Geeks didn’t means we shall never be able to understand the execs who make these decisions and subsequently ruin our lives.

The high point of this series is the overhaul in the writing. They got the showrunner from Gossip Girl, a show that went from guilty pleasure, but actually quite well done, to, well a guilty pleasure. (Towards the end of the run, our favourite thing about it was watching dead-eyed Penn Badgely visibly protest his contract-locked prison by growing his hair into a divine piece of ugly)

This was the qualification they went with to save a show that was ailing. Someone who once had a hit show that they then shot, repeatedly, in the face.

Smash now was the never- ending location scenes, with characters impossibly but constantly bumping into each other all over New York- going on to have coffee in Times Square, something I’m sure people NEVER DO, adding a sexy bad boy Brooklyn element, they even managed to con Lisa Milleni into a guest star.

The undeniable winner though, is our man Jack, looking like he doesn’t have to go too far to play his ‘seen it all, get me a coffee and fuck off’ director. We like to think he’s sticking at it, the way when you get a job in a call centre and you have to stay for three months so you can include it on your CV with all your other dead hopes and dreams.

Anyway, Jack, or should we say Derek Wills, has had some great surreal moments this run, mostly all including him shouting one word, once. ‘Obstacles’, he will exclaim, somehow without a weary look in his eye. In the first season Derek was a supposedly brilliant director with megalomaniac tendencies who, as the New Yorker artfully put it, eventually goes “full Black Swan”. Now, he has been reduced to a sad, lonely man whose attempts at gaining power lead to him having sex with Megan Hilty (I don’t even understand this plot). His character is no longer working on the Marilyn Monroe musical that was once central to the show. Instead, he and Shit Marilyn have decided to make a musical with a ‘genius’ songwriter who is perhaps less convincing as a genius than Shit Marilyn is as a new superstar.

This new musical is amazing because it is constantly being described using words like ‘edgy’, ‘fresh’ and ‘forward-thinking’ despite the fact the songs sound like shit American Idol victory songs. The few scraps of the plot that have emerged are bizarre. It apparently involves Shit Marilyn changing her identity because, as a rich girl, she will find it very hard to be a successful popstar, her stealing songs from the man she is sleeping with, and then a character who is only known as ‘The Diva’ shooting her while on stage for some reason. This Off Broadway musical is a probably the worst part of the show but still incredible. As well as Jack Davenport shouting ‘OBSTACLES’, it has given us a spectacular range of characters, like Shit Marilyn’s new love interest WHO HAS A DARK PAST. Sometimes he takes drugs when he isn’t writing power ballads for his musical or, weirdly, Jennifer Hudson.

And what of the Broadway?

Well there is singing, it’s not exactly the high point. They sing rather well, but the singing sort of has no place in this story about Musicals. When it’s not actually a song from one of the musical they are working on, its shit. The concepts range from ‘weird dream sequence’ to ‘outright offensive Bollywood rip-off’ and back to ‘weird dream sequence, but this time on a bed’ and are all cringeworthy. More so because the rest of the show is trying to be a real proper grown-up drama and then it has these adolescent angst fests that make you want to strangle kittens.

However, without these, the show would be nothing, it would be another choppy drama set in New York, entertaining enough for its 40 minute time-slot. The difference here is that you actually think about the show from week to week because it is so bone-crushingly terrible. This is, fundamentally the reason we love it. It is almost like how some people slow down as they are going past car accidents to look. This is our car accident, and it’s strangely captivating to watch the cast try to escape the wreckage (while, of course, bursting into song).

Smash is a gift. The storylines are predictable, but it doesn’t put us off. No other show has such a unique but terrible sensibility. They’ve finally pulled the plug on it, no series 3 for Jack Davenport, (who ought to just come back to England, where he will be welcomed with open arms) and we’re now genuine fans.

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Tumblr, we need to talk.

[djprim]

Kate Moss, Cliff Richard, Cilla Black… Best photo on the interweb! #whosondrugs #katemoss #cliffrichard

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- I have made official cliff richard our url. Fucking yes! - I KNOW