Sunday 7 June 2009

TV blues

1989 and 1990 were the years which gave us Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Round The Twist, Blackadder Goes Forth, Twin Peaks, Have I Got News For You, and The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, so let's pinpoint those 2 years as the genesis for the golden age of tv we've been experiencing ever since.

The one area where tv has rapidly declined, at least here in the UK, is in the music-on-telly department. Even the glut of music channels on Sky are little more than endless cycles of videos and on terrestrial tv we no longer have Top Of The Pops or any kind of genre-specific BBC2 shows like Snub-TV or Dance Energy. Performances on Cretinous shite like T4 and the muso-dullard hades that is Jools Holland aren't quite as exciting as seeing a young Snoop doing Gin And Juice on The Word and being attacked by Rod Hull & Emu after the obligatory Awkward couch interview with Mark Lamarr.

C4 clearly had the best bookers in the early 90s as they were getting Snoop, Onyx, The Pharcyde and Hammer during his gang$ta-rap comeback, as well as rawk groups like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Sepultura, Huggy Bear (someone needs to upload that performance asap) and Corrosion Of Conformity for The Word, whereas poor old BBC2 could only attract The Fu-Schickens for Dance Energy with Normski :



What's more, the few appearances we do get are just so anaemic and predictable. Compare that fat bird from The Gossip and her anonymous male session musician band plowing through their 5th rate post-punk cack on Jonathan Ross the other night to The Muppet Show having Diana Ross on to perform Love Hangover and Shirley Bassey to do Goldfinger :





Related note : The Kaliphz - a multi-cultural Mancunian hybrid of MC Tunes, House Of Pain and East 17, who are best described as being the crowning turd in the u-bend of nineties UK hip hop. How, prey tell, has the time they appeared on The Word been uploaded to Youtube, yet the performances of Onyx doing Throw Ya Gunz and Pharcyde doing Ya Mama from the show remain a.w.o.l in some dusty VHS tape abyss, which also possibly includes my video tape of an old German porn movie where various hotties were blackmailed into sex by Rudy Völler resembling men and whose wicked webs of lies could only be untangled when all parties involved submitted to an orgy at the conclusion of the movie.

Where's shit at, yo?

3 comments:

rossfan said...

For more on Diana Ross, check out Dick's Diana Ross Website at http://raketler.angelfire.com/

Thanks!

bradley said...

kenny rogers doing THE GAMBLER on the muppet show is good times :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNnrTNFWcsg

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

I need to learn when to fold 'em on a more regular basis.