Bag lady Kerry Katona’s the best thing in this tripe about trash
WEIRDEST TV sight of the week? Former Celtic manager John Barnes waddling around his local supermarket, dressed neck-to-toe in domestic waste, telling a cameraman: “I’ve always had enough money to buy lots of rubbish.” Which may be perfectly true, but where once he’d blow it all on Parkhead biodegradables, like Eyal Berkovic and Rafael Scheidt, […]
WEIRDEST TV sight of the week?
Former Celtic manager John Barnes waddling around his local supermarket, dressed neck-to-toe in domestic waste, telling a cameraman: “I’ve always had enough money to buy lots of rubbish.”
Which may be perfectly true, but where once he’d blow it all on Parkhead biodegradables, like Eyal Berkovic and Rafael Scheidt, roly-poly John now spends it on chicken biryanis and chilli fried rice ready meals that choke the local landfill.
This was the point, I think, of Celebrity Trash Monsters: What’s Your Waste Size?
A one-off experiment that began in a Kent field where Channel 4 had assembled Barnes, Kerry Katona and former model Jodie Kidd along with the contents of their rubbish bins and a single question: “Why?”
Moral busybody
Well, truth be told, television’s appetite for humiliating minor celebrities is almost as great as its hunger for lecturing their viewers, who they clearly regard as sexist, racist, polluting morons who are destroying the planet one takeaway at a time.
But they could hardly be so brutally honest to their faces, so the official plan was: “To make the celebs feel the full weight of their consumption by getting them to wear tailor-made suits, pre-filled with a week of their waste.”
They had to keep them on for an entire fortnight as well, with a trophy being awarded to the celebrity who’d man-aged the biggest reduction in their litter and carbon footprint by week two.
An idea that must have sounded great at the planning meeting and even as the three of them clinked and tottered their way back home, like Judy Finnigan clearing the Duty Free queue at Palma airport.
Most read in Opinion
If Sunday night’s show taught me anything, though, it’s that the ideas and gimmicks which sound good at a meeting nearly always turn out to be, in the immortal words of John Barnes’s old Lucozade advert: “90 minutes of sheer hell.”
Trash Monsters fitted the description well.
Although, in fairness to the production team, they did realise they’d been saddled with a “Monkey Tennis” format and tried to lift it with a couple of tricks which both crashed and burned.
The first part of the salvage operation was to hand the presenting duties to Jon Richardson, who may describe himself as “a comedian” but is one of those comedians who’s not even the funniest person in his marriage. He is, however, a moral busybody of the highest order who never tired of telling us just how much he cared about the environment, not even when he’d just pulled up at Kerry’s house in his flash 4X4.
As well as keeping on the celebs’ case, for the duration, it was also Jon’s job to try to introduce a bit of jeopardy into proceedings via some challenges.
Jodie was forced to put scavenged vegan food on her pub menu, which nearly emptied the joint. John Barnes endured the appropriate humiliation of wearing his “rubbish suit” to a Tranmere Rovers game, another club he mismanaged.
And Kerry was ordered to steal food from her neighbours’ bins in Alderley Edge. A task at which, I hardly need to tell you, she excelled.
Indeed, Katona was by far the most interesting and lively thing about Trash Monsters, even if she was surprisingly useless at “carrying 48 kilos of rubbish”, for a woman who was once married to Mark Croft. Neither she, nor anything else, though, could possibly save this one from its own lousy format and all the dreadful hypocrisies and evasions at the heart of the enterprise.
Jon Richardson’s car was an obvious one. As was the choice of sponsor, another car company.
But, like nearly all documentaries bleeding with concern for the environment, the real elephant in the room was overpopulation.
John Barnes (seven) and Kerry Katona (five) have 12 kids between them, so it’s little wonder mother-of-one Jodie Kidd won the landfill trophy, even if Trash Monsters never felt brave enough to link the two details.
Whether John Barnes’s new-found environmental awareness extends to his own breeding habits is, of course, none of my damn business.
If it has moved him or anyone else to take action, however . . .
I’ve come up with a Trash Monsters spin-off that would satisfy this network’s love of humiliating minor celebrities and help save the planet as well.
Celebrity Vasectomy: Live.
Channel 4: Are you in?
Road of fascist drivel
IF you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of Colin Jordan, the real-life Nazi bogeyman on BBC1’s lukewarm drama Ridley Road, it’s because he was a pathetic social inadequate with about as much real political clout as Citizen Smith’s Tooting Popular Front.
Contrary to the Beeb’s series preamble, fascism was not “on the rise across the country”, in the early Sixties, either.
Soviet communism, on the other hand, had infiltrated everywhere from the British establishment to the same Labour and Trade Union movement which was infested by anti-Semitism between 2015 and 2020 and led by a man who never seemed to meet an anti-Semite he wasn’t prepared to call a “friend”.
Strangely enough, though, the idea for a drama about anti-Semitism didn’t seem to occur to the BBC until after that toxic boil had been lanced at the last election.
So instead they’ve created one which draws clumsy parallels with Brexit through the slogan: “We’re taking our country back.”
A crushing irony given the most significant line of the drama was barked out, with real feeling, by Eddie Marsan’s Soly Malinovsky character: “An anti-fascist fights, an anti-fascist does.”
Unless it’s coming from his own side, obviously, when an anti-fascist sits on their hands and just hopes it goes away.
- RED button alert: Sky Comedy (Channel 114) Monday, October 25, 3.40am – New: Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Unexpected morons in the bagging area
THE CHASE, Bradley Walsh: “What letter of the alphabet sounds like a small round green vegetable?”
Amanda: “Cod.”
Tipping Point, Ben Shephard: “Which shipping forecast area shares its name with the nearest English port to France?”
Meryl: “Orkney.”
Winning Combination, Omid Djalili: “Which British airport has the international code LGW?”
Graeme: “London Glasgow.”
TV quiz. Can you complete Kelly’s opening gambit on E4’s The Love Trap: “I like my men like I like my dogs . . . ?”
A) “Loyal as hell.”
B) “Able to lick their own genitals.”
C) “Registered with Guide Dogs For The Blind.”
Random TV irritations
CORRIE’S “Horror Nation Street” week making Scooby Doo look like The Silence Of The Lambs.
E4’s The Love Trap recycling Too Hot To Handle contestant David Birtwistle. Jim Davidson’s bone-brained hissy fit on Britain In Black And White. And host Ashley Banjo lecturing viewers about “freedom of expression” and dancing round the issue of BLM extremism while also wearing a T-shirt celebrating Stalinist dictator Fidel Castro, who would have sent Diversity for “re-education” after their BGT routine, just as surely as he imprisoned black activists in Cuba.
Though don’t expect an ITV documentary celebrating the relative tolerance of Britain any time soon.
Rylan… back so soon?
ON Tuesday, licence fee owners learned the BBC had “urged Rylan Clark to take a year off”, to cope with his marriage split, without a thought for people who actually pay his wages.
Tell him to take the whole decade, guys.
We’ll cope.
lRE: Tipping Point: “With which sport do you associate Johnny Revolta and Wiffy Cox?”
All of them, except netball and lacrosse, surely?
Great sporting highlghts
JOE COLE: “The first touch was perfection. The second, even better.”
Glenn Hoddle: “It should be a great second first 45 minutes.”
Robbie Savage: “Two words. Viva Ronaldo goodnight.”
(Compiled by Graham Wray)
INCIDENTALLY, who do you think is going to be responsible for EastEnders’ Christmas terror bomb?
A) Christians.
B) Buddhists.
C) Scientologists.
Or D) Israel?
’Cos I don’t see the BBC putting any other likely lads in the frame, do you?
TV Gold
TRUMP’S madness reaching its logical conclusion on BBC2’s brilliant documentary Four Hours At The Capitol.
The return of Succession on Sky Atlantic. Matt Allwright beating The Chasers for £75,000.
The satisfactory outcome of another absorbing 24 Hours In Police Custody, on C4.
And the MacGregor’s bowerbird, on BBC1’s The Mating Game, luring in dozens of females with his uncanny range of impressions, a bit like Steve Coogan, except likeable.
Lookalike of the week
THIS week’s winner is Newcastle United chief Amanda Staveley and Ron Perlman in Beauty And The Beast. Sent in by Peter Scott, Glasgow.
Picture research: Amy Reading