Sam Wollaston Is The Witless Antidote To Clive James’ TVGuardian
Mic Right’s Remotely Furious: Sam Wollaston and Charlie Brooker
SAM Wollaston is my favourite TV critic of the modern age. While Clive James continued in his dotage to be pure genius, Wollaston is a performance artist, the Andy Kaufmann of sitting around gawping at other people’s work then witlessly hammering out some half-thought out bibble for The Guardian. Nice work if you can get it.
A typical Wollaston review is a counter-intuitive masterpiece. If Sam hates a show or simply doesn’t understand it, I’m sure to be delighted by it. However, such is the confused and confusing approach of La Wollaston that often his reviews contain very little about the show in question and more about his personal life, something he saw out of the car window or someone he once met who told him he had nice hair. Wollaston is truly a 21st century reviewer, so distracted that he can barely focus on writing about the telly programmes he’s paid to watch.
A prime example of Wollastonian TV reviewing was his take on the rather delightful Liberty London documentary series. Three paragraphs of his eight paragraph review are dedicated to talking about himself. Another three focus on how confusing and boring he found the show. I realise that I’ve dedicated the majority of this column to pooping on Wollaston’s Easter Island head immovability but I’m nothing if not a hypocrite. I thought the documentary from Channel 4 was fun, light and smart, fizzing with little details. Perhaps there just weren’t enough explosions for La Wollaston.
Jumping to another denizen of Guardian Towers who actually has a fully functioning brain we come to Charlie Brooker’s How Video Games Changed The World. Wollaston was baffled by this one as he hates games and couldn’t work out why women like them. For those of us who do like computer games and Brooker’s acerbic take on everything this two-hour feast of clips and blathering was pure heaven. Shame every clip show about anything vaguely ‘geeky’ has to feature Jonathan Ross, the second best Ross brother, but you can’t have everything.
Finally, on the topic of TV and guardians, I stumbled upon some Christian telly tech this week – The TVGuardian. Plug this circuit board censor into your television and it will automatically mute it whenever there’s any sort of profanity. Sounds like the perfect Christmas gift for the pea-brained, knob-juggling cu*t in your life.
See you next Tuesday. MW
Posted: 5th, December 2013 | In: Technology, TV & Radio Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
