This week’s television, reviewed by the blind.

Holiday Hijack
Channel 4
Sunday, 28th August
8PM
(Watch it here)
Every episode of Holiday Hijack contains a section where the Brits – who have been hoodwinked into abandoning their 5-star hotels to live with C4-approved Real People, proper ethnic, native povvos – try to work out what x amount is in UK money, conclude that it is a very small amount, and then look a bit sad about the world. Like up until that moment, they’d genuinely assumed that the 400 components in an individual smartphone could all be mined from the earth, smelted, moulded, assembled and shipped right round the globe for £60 while still paying £6.70 an hour. Their brains take in this complete reversal of the polarity of the economic universe, accept it, and unblinkingly move on to what’s for lunch. It’s comforting to see how elastic a human mind can be. And of course it’s lovely to see lots of povvos.
5
JACK HAMMER

Five Minutes With…
BBC News
Saturday, 27th August
12.30AM
(Watch it here)
A man with a big clock interviews five famous people for five minutes apiece. Pitch meeting over. Any questions? No? Good. Sign us up, because Five Minutes With… has a cost-to-excellence ratio that knocks spots off of everything else you’ve seen this year. The British bent for making a virtue out of cheapness is something that has made this country great. Well, to be more honest, has made this country’s steady economic decline more palatable. Why, if this were America, they’d have to make the clock 10 foot high out of neon, and Ke$ha would have to be setting it off in front of a live studio audience in LA who need fantastic goodie-bags containing box fresh Motorola mobile phones lodged under their seats to yelp at. Fuck that shit. Yankees go home. A man with a clock asking Matthew Parris what his favourite film is – that is the glory of the Empire in digest form.
7
BILBO BAGHEED

Hollyoaks Music Show
Channel 4
Saturday, 27th August
9AM
(Watch it here)
Last weekend, there was a major musical event on television, during which a generation-defining band played a headline set that marked out why they remain so very important. Yes, Hard-Fi showed the haters exactly what they were made of as they tore into a scintillating one-song show in the Hollyoaks living room area. The crowd went wild. Then Katy B was asked whether she was happy to be nominated for the Barclaycard Mercury Music Prize. She indicated that she was. But that it was ‘a bit weird’ too. Everyone inferred that Katy B was pretty down-to-earth, and ‘still dealing with fame’, and so the crowd went even wilder. Then a child called Lil Tom started interviewing Loick Essien. Essien was asked who his favourite Hollyoaks character was. He replied “you” to the child. The child liked this. He liked it a lot. Conclusion: children are very easy to charm, even precocious little thugs like that one, who by rights should probably be held down with gaffer tape at all times to stop him trying to nick your fags.
7
KT BEEEEEEE

Comedy Prom
BBC2
Saturday, 27th August
9PM
(Watch it here)
Tim Minchin. What am I missing? The rise, rise and sinister rise of this colonial upstart is verging on the disturbing now. Inch by inch, he’s gotten more and more famous, worming his way into the hearts of the many without anyone ever being able to define why he is any good. One day I will wake up, come downstairs, and Tim Minchin will be making pancakes in my kitchen, entertaining all my friends by rhyming “promenade” with “hasn’t paid”, as they collectively discuss why Richard Dawkins is right about everything, and there will be nothing left for me but the bottle of whisky and the revolver. In many ways, Minchin is the perfect host for the BBC’s first-ever ‘Comedy Prom’ at the Royal Albert Hall. These, it soon becomes clear, are his people. Someone raps about wishing David Attenborough was his dad. Cheeky. A synthetic fox sings a song about what it means to be middle class (Sample line: “We drink too much Chilean Chardonnay.”) Biting. A duo called Kit And The Widow are introduced as ‘the latter-day Flanders and Swann’. Witty. Sue Perkins arrives, bang on shitty cue. Sort of like the Royal Variety Performance’s summer twin without the relief of Circque Du Soleil or a snatch of Cats, stillborn titter after stillborn titter echoes around those history-weeping walls. It is widely understood that, were she alive today, Queen Victoria would have bloody loved Sue Perkins, though Minchin would long ago have been tied to bricks by his stupid fucking hair and thrown into the sea.
4
RUSSELL GLAND