Maureen Barnes Down the tube
One of the advantages of being a TV critic is being able to watch television at odd times and since Oprah left SABC3, I’ve been tuning in at 5pm. I rather liked the Canadian series, Side Effects, set in an urban clinic, but that ended after a couple of weeks and turned into Memories of Midnight, based on a Sidney Sheldon novel – which unfortunately showed.
It was one of those series made jointly by several countries using different crews and lots of otherwise out-of-work actors. The scenes were shot in a whistle-stop tour of luxury hotels in glamorous towns – St Moritz, Athens, Paris, and Amsterdam – which meant yards of credits at the end for all the freebies.
And even longer credits for the crews, most of which seem to come cheaply from Eastern European countries, if the number of names with no vowels or ending in “vic” is anything to go by.
Memories starred Jane Seymour, the actress whose claim to fame is her waist-length hair, who recovered from amnesia to find herself in a threatening situation.
Villain of the piece was a nasty Greek billionaire played by Egyptian Omar Sharif. Age definitely has withered poor Omar, although luckily he never had much variety to stale.
Every eligible male in the story fell in love with our lady of the hair, and most met an ugly end at the hands of Omar. Still, I always say, if you’ve got to meet an ugly end, it’s nice to meet it in a luxury suite, on a yacht or on the ski slopes of Switzerland. Jane liked them all and ended up with the survivor.
As Memories of Midnight faded into the distance, not a moment too soon, along came Roseanne Barr and her daily talk show, The Roseanne Show. What a relief after Oprah, whom I used to enjoy immensely but who, recently, has become too happy clappy to be true. She’s heavily into motivational tripe and seems intent, not only on learning everyone’s innermost secrets, but on changing their lives forever.
That’s the problem when you start to believe you’re God.
Anyway, Roseanne may go that way eventually, but at the moment she is gloriously tasteless – she arrived on a moving platform, scattering rose petals at her audience (probably plastic), snapping herself with a polaroid camera and obviously having a great time. Her arrival on stage was greeted by two angels who slowly descended from above, declared her to be “the chosen one” and disappeared whence they came.
Her audience, she announced, after market research, included “white women on Thorazine, Muslims on Prozac, Jews on Zoloft and the occasional Amish on a nice mustard plaster . the deaf, the obese and mentally-deranged, the wrongly convicted inmate and the slightly disturbed serial killer – My People!”.
Well, who could fail to respond to an intro like that? Her first guest was Whoopi Goldberg and, among other things, they discussed – well maybe shouted each other down is a more appropriate description – the Clinton scandal. Both women were delightfully caustic and the interview was, spontaneous and revealing.
Roseanne’s second interview was a spoof with a comedian impersonating Linda Tripp and revealing how and why she’d videotaped and spied on her erstwhile friend, Monica Lewinsky. “Do you still have any friends, or do they frisk you when they visit?” asked Roseanne. “I have many friends but they wear a scrambling device when they call,” replied “Linder Tripp”.
“Ms Tripp” related that during the Bush administration “nothing was going on with anyone at any time – and even I was celibate”.
Well, all this insanity did come as a relief after so much of Oprah’s sanitised sanctity but whether it will pall remains to be seen. A daily show is perhaps asking too much of any entertainer.
While on the subject of bad taste, the good news is the return of the wonderful Simpsons on M-net, Friday evenings at 6:30pm. Last season ended with a Dallas- style “Who Shot JR?” cliff-hanger but the stricken man was the wicked owner of the nuclear power plant and Homer Simpson’s employer, Mr Burns. For a change the culprit wasn’t Bart.
An e-tv show worth watching is A Wing and a Prayer, the legal series screened on Monday nights – a pity really, as this competes with Frasier and Ally McBeal, which have large followings. They should try attracting viewers on Saturday, Sunday or Tuesday nights when there’s nothing for the type of audience who would enjoy this drama.