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.Still, I came away having learned two valuable lessons: 1) never believe anything any ‘expert’ says; and 2) whatever the appearance may be, any televised conversation is going to be about as unforced and natural as a chat between Lieutenant Columbo and a man with a blood-encrusted shovel in his toolshed.It’s surprising, then, that talk shows don’t go abysmally wrong more often.Just about every instance over the last twenty years in which they have done is covered in It Shouldn’t Happen to a Chat Show Host (ITV), a compilation of car-crash television which manages to entertain from beginning to end despite the presence of Gloria Hunniford (an achievement on a par with successfully climbing a spiral staircase with a dead horse strapped to your back).Ignore the regulation-dull talking-head soundbites; the archive footage is great.Watching talk shows derail themselves completely is immeasurably more interesting than sitting through successful ones, which tend to be as diverting as an automated platform announcement.Michael Aspel, so bland he probably poos boiled eggs, features heavily: for a man with a reputation as a steady albeit uninteresting hand, he’s been responsible for a surprising number of calamities.First, there’s the infamous appearance by an impossibly drunk Oliver Reed in which the bearded alco-sponge reeled around the set looking like he was about to start vomiting eels.Aspel describes it as ‘a great TV moment’, although ‘an unplanned and monumental embarrassment’ is nearer the mark.Still, were this a humiliation contest, his subsequent encounter with Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger would surely take first prize.Desperate to bag this all-star triumvirate, the producers agreed to their every demand.Unfortunately the three were hell-bent on turning the entire show into an extended commercial for Planet Hollywood, their newly founded chain of mediocre dunce-troughs.The result was mesmerising for all the wrong reasons: a trio of world-famous waxworks plastered head to toe in Planet Hollywood logos (Willis even had one painted on his chest) smirking openly while Aspel asked meaningless questions about burgers and cookery, at one point reduced to reading the menu out loud.He’d have retained more dignity if he’d dropped to his knees and fellated the lot of them, clapping his hands like a circus seal and playing the kazoo with his backside.Other highlights include Anne Bancroft drying completely for a 10-minute trial-by-awkwardness during a live edition of Wogan (all the fun of a slow-motion hanging), and the jaw-dropping moment Keith Chegwin unexpectedly confessed to alcoholism in the middle of a chirpy Richard and Judy chinwag.Anyone sheeplike enough to doubt Chegwin’s credentials as a genuine TV hero should be forced to watch this – he’s one of the most honest, couldn’t-give-a-monkey’s people on television.Concrete and Piss [4 November]If you like your drama gritty, uncompromising and guaranteed to depress, then boy oh boy are you in for a treat, because this week on Channel 4 there’s a major new series called ‘Concrete and Piss’, in which an unemployed alcoholic stands in a tower block stairwell on the Thatcher’s Legacy estate, mindlessly thrashing a mouldy old mattress with the ulcerated leg of his dead junkie son, pausing every three minutes to scream, swear, and receive violent blows to the face and neck from a hunchbacked loan shark.OK.Not really.But you have to admit it’s a brilliant title.Instead, there’s a new mini-series called Never, Never (C4), which fulfils pretty much every other criterion of ‘gritty, uncompromising’ drama you could think of.Let’s run through the recipe and check off the ingredients.First, and most important, do we have a bleak contemporary setting? Check: the action takes place on a grim London council estate that looks as though it was designed by a misanthropic concrete fetishist with a massive grudge and an even bigger migraine; a sprawling campus of despair that sucks all the hope out of everyone inside, then pisses it down the walls of the malfunctioning elevators.This is not The Vicar Of Dibley.How about some social comment? Check: the series centres on a cold-blooded salesman (John Simm) who makes his living coercing downtrodden inmates of said estate into buying expensive brand-name goods from a sinister company charging absurd rates of interest.Thanks to their undesirable postcode, the customers can’t get credit anywhere else – but their kids are demanding Phat Nikes and Pokemon play sets, and won’t stop screaming till they get them
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