Channel 4
Friday, 12th August
10.25PM
(Watch it here)
Not meaning to be rude or nothing, Channel 4, but if your programme is called How Hip-Hop Changed The World and the calibre of person you’ve got commenting on your thesis is Dappy N-Dubz, Tinchy, Jessie J, RoxXxan, Norman Lamb MP, and “Ashley Walters From So Solid Crew”, it might be that you’ve set your sights a bit low. With big name guests like these, you shouldn’t just be talking about hip-hop’s rise from Bronx block parties to trillion dollar social phenomenon, you should be tackling something bigger. Maybe the entire arc of civilisation, from Pleistocene Man to Second Life. Or how about a survey of life itself – all living matter – told through the metaphor of DNA? When genially shit host Idris Elba told me that the 38th most important moment in the history of hip-hop was John Barnes’ rap in "World in Motion", a moment at which “he became the celebrated voice of multicultural Britain”, I felt I understood what it was to be black, far more vividly than in all my time spent hanging around Peckham’s Chickenlands wearing boot polish.
1
DAVID STARKEY
ΔΙΑΦΗΜΙΣΗ
BBC4
Thursday, 11th August
8PM
(Watch it here)
I once went on Dragons' Den with an idea for a "Starrot”. It was a stick, with a flexible bamboo end for smacking botty-bots, and another from which a carrot could be conveniently dangled on a length of elastic rope. "No one would need to choose between the use of the carrot and the stick anymore," I explained to Duncan Bannatyne, as he glowered at me as though I'd just shot his pet Pekingese. "The two could be used simultaneously." Duncan looked puzzled, so I continued: “This represents a net saving of 50 hours a year to busy executives,” I kept on, really going with it, “time that hard-pressed CEOs could productively use elsewhere. Projected net income: £70 mill.” Ultimately, I walked away that day having paid £30,000 for a 20% stake in Deborah Meaden. That it's best to use a combination of carrot and stick was also the milky, BBC fudge of a conclusion that this archive-trawl documentary comes to. Because it’s actually pretty obvious, really, isn’t it? Bit of both. As a fan of tough love, though, I most enjoyed the controversial US child psychologist who stages interventions on children with severe behavioural problems by getting their parents to live in the same room as them and never be more than 3ft from the misbehaving sprog at any time.
7
JASPER STARROT
BBC2
Monday, 15th August
8PM
(Watch it here)
No one has ever said University Challengers were remotely cool. To know who conducted the Leipzig orchestra two hundred years ago but not be able to recognise a five-second snippet of Madonna’s "La Isla Bonita" seems like a sad indictment of falling levels of Madonna education in our schools. I’m sure as soon as he heard those rum-soaked, loping Latin chords, Paxman was instantly whisked back to all the time he spent in Magaluf in the 80s, fingering sunburnt totty on package holidays and wondered, yet again, where the fuck Leipzig is.
6
ZIGGY STARBURST
More4
Wednesday, 10th August
9PM
(Watch it here)
If, when I was nine, I had announced to my mother that what I most wanted was to be a child star in Hollywood, I like to think that she would’ve instantly whisked me off to the far side of the world, checked us into the Oakwood Motel, and generally pissed her life’s savings down the tubes vainly trying to get me a gig playing Ben Affleck’s mawkish foster child in a straight-to-video romcom. If she didn’t, she definitely wouldn’t have been a fit mother. But after "no Playstation for ninth birthday-gate", I knew she was pretty shit anyway, so I didn’t want to tempt fate. Anyway, here’s what I could have won: the 14-year-old girl who is advised by her 95th casting director to change her name to Presley Ca$h. The ones who have been living in LA motels so long they can no longer remember why they are there. The dads who are still back east, working two jobs, bankrolling their children’s delusions like reverse migrant labourers. The poisonous support industry that suckles on their naïve dreams, offering up yet more rounds of expensive profile photos and lots of pricey "Believe! Achieve! Receive!” LA mindwash. The old saw about nothing being so clear as through the eyes of a child is proven to the limits here, as the full, dark satanic underbelly of Tinsel Stadt washes over you like buckets of cold sick. Hollywood is truly, as one man dubs it, “the only town on earth where you can die from encouragement”.
9
HOLLY VIOLENCE