Mic Wright’s Remotely Furious: Richard Hammond Builds A Planet But Fails To Go And Live On It
Mic Wright is Remotely Furious about Richard Hammond Builds A Planet:
ON the first day, Richard Hammond looked at the darkness and said: “THIS is the GREATEST darkness EVER!” Then Hammond said “Let there be light” and there was light and the light was proper tasty. And Richard Hammond he was happy. Happy, grinning, goonish god of denim and middle aged delinquency.
Richard Hammond Builds A Planet represents everything that’s wrong with modern TV and, in fact, with humanity in general. Top Gear is brilliant telly but do we need James May presenting every programme about masculinity, Jeremy Clarkson contemplating a run at parliament and Richard Hammond cleaning up the overspill like a human snot rag or a pair of particularly unloved curtains? We do not.
Science used to be the preserve of interesting men with beards and women in fetching tweed. Television took it seriously and viewers in turn watched with awe. Now we have to have Professor Brian Cox turning the universe into an impressive screensaver and Stephen Fry popping up to explain anything about technology with the over-caffeinated exuberance of a teenager who needs to leave his Xbox alone for more than 10 minutes at a time.
Richard Hammond Builds A Planet was just idiotic. Richard, his face fixed in a rictus grin, stood in the desert somewhere and toyed about with CGI to create some sort of visualisation of a planet. No one explained why he was doing this. Presumably his poor wife is at home explaining to the children that daddy has gone off to do something of no consequence again but don’t worry because it means they can buy a new Aga.
Apart from “building a planet”, Richard spent the rest of the show doing silly things in planes and helicopters, pretending he was an astronaut, firing machine guns, making DIY volcanoes and basically spending licence fee money on stuff he thought might be a laugh. It obviously was a laugh to do but was about as entertaining as having a lady called Gladys explain her shingles to you while your wisdom teeth are removed with a pair of rusty pliers by a man who claims to have been to dental school once, for a morning.
And truly we have had enough shows where the audience is patronised by the presenter who explains that a 30-metre object is as big as two double decker buses or the 40,000 tonnes of meteorites equate to 30,000 Transit vans. Here’s the real calculation you need to get your head around: one Richard Hammond ego equals half a Jeremy Clarkson ego but about 1/1000 of the average man on the street’s ego. Richard Hammond Builds A Planet? No. Richard Hammond makes a bill that you have to pay for him to go and play. God is dead but Richard Hammond is still going.
Posted: 7th, November 2013 | In: TV & Radio Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
