Televisionaries is a new weekly column in which we review television programs. It is partially named in honour of the second tier cartoon series Visionaries (above). This week we look at the work of: The Ivory Coast, Queen, and the guys from League of Gentlemen.

Unreported World: Inside the Battle for the Ivory Coast
Channel 4
Friday, 7.30pm
Cheery knockabout travel show scouting out the best African holiday destinations to experience necklacing and involuntary limb-dismemberment. It’s an enjoyable romp, though presenter Seyi Rhodes is possibly a little reliant on his catchphrase: “The crowd was becoming increasingly hostile. We were advised to leave the area immediately”.
This week, Rhodes does some consumer tests. Which is better, he asks: discredited despotic president Laurent Gbago? Or his arch-rival and democratic challenger Alassane Outtara? The answer, as always, is “the guy with the most truckloads of nihilistic youths with AKs”.
Ever the good sport, Rhodes joins in by getting robbed with an AK, forced to shelter in a refugee camp, and finally, beaten up in a hospital. Then the crowd gets increasingly hostile and he has to leave the area immediately.
8
MANGE HILL

Louis Theroux: Miami’s Mega Jail – Part Two
BBC 2
Sunday, 9.00pm
If last week‘s edition of Miami’s Mega Jail was defined by the surprising amount of wanking featured in it, Part Two was a let down for anyone geared up for another 60 minutes of death row jerks jerking off in a row. There was literally no masturbation in this revealing portrait of a judicial system so warped it can lock a fourteen-year-old in a cell full of sex-starved adult gangsters awaiting trial for murder. Seriously, there was no bloody wanking whatsoever.
6
DIM REAPER

Queen: Days of Our Lives
Sunday and Monday
BBC2, 10.30pm
Jesus Christ, how big were Queen? I knew they were popular, but, much like The Universe, I had failed to grasp quite how huge they were before television explained it to me in very basic terms. At one point during this show their manager joyfully recalls bullying an Argentinian dictator into letting the band play a 50,000 capacity stadium. “It’s panacea for the people,” he told the military rulers, either unmoved by or unaware of any charges of immorality which could be levied at a band for supporting an autocratic regime. But who cares about democracy when you’re knee deep in coke and stupid guitar solos? The only real disappointment about this documentary was the heavy focus on one-time Queen frontman Freddie Mercury and absolutely no mention of the ‘fifth-Queenie’, Ben Elton and the expectation confounding West End mega-hit; We Will Rock You.
5
U. PLONKER

The Ten O’Clock News
BBC 1
All week, 10.00pm
Joyless bandwagoneering by the BBC this, as they attempt to ape Channel 4’s satirical magazine show, 10 O’Clock Live and end up with a sack of snores. You wouldn’t get Jimmy Carr interviewing some stuck-up Serb about Ratko Mladic without dropping a name-based lol or two, yet that’s exactly what happened here. Thirty mirthless minutes, seven times a week.
3
CHARLIE HOOKER

Psychoville
BBC 2
Thursday, 10.00pm
What do a handicapped clown, a disturbed librarian, a pissbowl-headed murder groupie, a fag-hag make-up artist and a dead blind man have in common? Increasingly little it seems, as the brilliantly neat script of series one of Psychoville has given way to a sequel series of convoluted plotting. I know the story has something to do with a locket and Tony Hancock and that dwarf, but I’m not sure what… Not that it really matters as we’re watching two actors so gifted they could probably make a BT commercial funnier than seventeen Inbetweeners wank jokes falling through a bar.
8
SCREW LYF

Wiley old Wilson

Heath vs Wilson: The Ten Year Duel
BBC4
Wednesday, 10.40
This is basically bullying at the workplace, televised. It only goes to show how confused the squires from the shires were by the arrival of the pop-era that the Conservative Party thought that Ted Heath could be their response to the ‘modern man’ glamour of Harold Wilson. They voted for this hapless plank because he was as close as they came to cool, yet Heath turned out to be just about the most uncomfortably shy, anti-social figure who ever inexplicably rose to high office. Basically, he was a great whopping pussy who couldn’t compare to Wilson, who was the Jerry to his Newman.

To end the Three Day Week, we are told, Heath agrees a deal with the miners’ union over being paid for time spent washing. Then, before he can announce it, Wilson writes an open letter to the papers with a simple suggestion: ‘”Why doesn’t Mr Heath agree a deal with the miners over time spent washing?”, effectively making Heath’s plans look like Harold’s idea, and sinking his premiership in 300 words. When Wilson died in 1995, I imagine Heath went down to his grave every so often and wiped his arse all over it.
9
MICHAEL JERK