Channel 4’s Come Dine With Me features a group of strangers who take part in an amateur cookery competition, rating each other at the end of each evening. The show has become very popular in the last few years, reflecting the sustained success of reality television in the 21^st century. However, from a personal perspective, the contestants on Come Dine With Me almost always appear to be very eccentric. It also appears that all of the individuals have particularly difference culinary tastes, personalities and cultures.

An excellent example of why reality TV is so popular

Having a diverse group of contestants in a show like Come Dine With Me is essential for stirring up disagreements and arguments, which always attracts viewers. Without this drama, there would simply be no justification for reality TV to exist. Think of Big Brother, X Factor or any other major TV show and the the same rule also applies. Usually, each format will include two introverts and two extroverts or a group people working in diverse professions (ranging from reception desks workers to HR directors).

Learning about individual differences

What makes Come Dine With Me so interesting is that people not only have the chance to meet other individuals who have completely different lifestyles, tastes and philosophies, it also gives people the chance to see how other people life. Before the starter begins, each contestant can explore the house of the host, free to discover any unusual features that could spark up an interesting conversation over dinner.

It is unfortunate that very few Come Dine With Me shows appear to end on a good note. Of course, the winner receives £1,000, although the prospect of every contestant keeping in regular contact in the future is grim. Time and time again, arguments erupt and personalities conflict. Then again, perhaps it is not so different to the average evening at a British dinner table.

Now that we have so/too many channels, it is east to sample some of the more bizarre TV shows from around the world; weird Japanese %u2018game'shows that verge on torture, Australian soaps with cardboard sets and dodgy American docudramas. However, we don’t necessarily have to visit foreign shores to find strange television programmes… because we have our very own %u2018Jeremy Kyle Show'right here! And you really can’t get a lot more bizarre than this!

Enter then Jeremy Kyle – part man, part weasel and larger part slime ball. Kyle (affectionately known as %u2018Jezza'to his legions of adoring fans) is really, really good at winding people up and he is well known for being completely over the top when insulting folk for the benefit of the cameras. In fact, I’m pretty sure that many regular viewers only tune in hoping to witness a disgruntled guest putting him on his ass. This has (sadly) never occurred to date, but give it time; it’s not a matter of %u2018if'but %u2018when’…

And the guests on the %u2018Jeremy Kyle Show'are also really %u2018special'in their own way. I think that the show’s production people must travel to one of the very roughest of areas in Britain and leave behind a pop up stand requesting fresh %u2018Kyle fodder'for the programme. I don’t mean to sound like a snob, but the type of people you get on stage with Jezza leave a great deal to be desired. Let’s put it this way; if you took one of them round for tea and scones at your grandmas’, then she would quite likely disown you shortly afterwards.

Perhaps it is the %u2018confrontational'thing that makes the %u2018Jeremy Kyle Show'so enormously popular (it most certainly isn’t the %u2018intellectual'side, that’s for sure…). After all, bitching, shouting and bleeped-out swearwords will often make %u2018great television’. It’s just a shame that so many people appear to get their jollies from watching this stuff.

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Question – What could possibly be even more painfully dull and boring than watching, ‘Big Brother’?

Answer – Watching, ‘Coach Trip’!!

Have the public not yet tired of ‘reality'TV shows? It would appear not… And that is why ‘Coach Trip'is now a regular part of Channel 4’s schedule. Yawn.

I had the misfortune of unearthing this programme after a cruel twist of fate. It was late, the remote was just too far away and I was simply too tired to go and retrieve it. This is the only reason that I am even aware of this show. Believe me; I don’t normally dribble my life away by watching stuff like this. I’d rather check out strike solitaire online or even stick pins in my own eyes instead!!!

This excuse for a programme is basically ‘Big Brother'on wheels; all the same sorry tedium of seeing people bickering about dumb things, except that it takes place on a coach rather than in a house. There is also a suspense-fuelled ‘eviction process'where viewers are probably expected to sit biting their fingernails. How wickedly original and utterly stimulating.

‘Coach Trip'is fantastic viewing, but only if you are blind drunk, intellectually challenged or clinically dead. And that’s about all there is to it really (unless I am completely missing out on something). It takes a certain type of person to create such drivel as this and they must place themselves on a ‘witness protection programme'once that it goes out on air. Or at least they damn well should do…

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Television really is full of the most bizarre programmes and you only have to watch ‘Tarrant on TV'a couple of times to realise this! After all, we have all seen clips from some of those Japanese ‘game shows'where contestants are subjected to all manner of horrors simply for the sake of ‘entertainment. But did you ever stop to think about some of the strange shows that we have here in the UK? And a fine example of this is ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’…

I am fully aware that everyone has different ideas when it comes to entertainment; however, why anyone would want to sit through this particular programme remains an absolute mystery to me.

Basically, each dose of Jeremy Kyle will follow exactly the same formula; young, irresponsible people with problems being verbal torn apart by the weasely Mr Kyle in front of millions of regular viewers.

It’s all a bit silly really. You’ll get some spotty young girl who is far more interested in organising her Durham wedding venue than learning how to look after her thirteen children properly. Or sometimes it will be a teenage lad who flat-out refuses to look for work and just sits around smoking Ganga all day instead. Yawn, what tedium!

Of course, although these stories are sad (in more than one way…) there is a comedy element attached to it all. And perhaps it is this which attracts such an enormous television audience each day.

And if Jeremy Kyle were not enough to keep us amused, then there is always Graham (The ‘Genius’) on hand to provide us with the occasion ‘deep'psychological insight. Watch his ‘expertise'as he confronts a serial wife beater… ‘You’re a very angry person, aren’t you?' Nice one, Graham; once again you have hit the nail squarely on its head!

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You might have noticed a surge in wedding-based reality TV programmes recently- from Don’t Tell the Bride to My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding through to Four Weddings, all the UK terrestrial channels have been at it. And now Channel 5 has taken it all one stage further.

They’ve given us Celebrity Wedding Planner.

You can almost imagine the pitch meeting:

“So, something big, something dramatic, something wedding-y, that’s what we’re going for…”

“Ok, great, couple planning their wedding, dreaming of their life together, but they can’t afford a big party so we agree to step in with some cash as long as we can film it, warts, drunken relatives and all… But how do we make it a bit different?”

There’s a pause. Papers rustle. Then the work-experience girl pipes up.

“You could get random D-list celebrities from other reality TV shows to plan their reality TV show wedding for them…”

“AMAZING!”

“I love it!”

“Celebrities and weddings in one show!”

“…and the celebrities get to do whatever they want with all the money, and the couple aren’t allowed to know who they are til the end when maybe they’ll burst into tears with shock, joy and or horror.”

“BRILLIANT!”

“Get me Jedward on speed dial.”

If you’re not that interested in weddings and dresses and cakes and all that, you might think a show about celebrity wedding planners would be as interesting as organising your caravan insurance. You’d be wrong. Not only is organising your caravan insurance pretty damn important, Celebrity Wedding Planners is like an apocryphal work of genius. You might not recognise the celebrity involved (I’ve only watched the Jedward and Kerry Katona episodes so far, but I don’t recognise anyone else from the trailers yet) but that’s not really the point of the show, now, is it? They might have thought that the celebrity was the point of the show when they started filming the series, but they were wrong. The point of the show is the silliness.

Get me Jedward on speed dial.

Because it is ridiculously, gloriously silly. It’s basically giving some random person (who is sometimes in the papers for doing something and who is famous for, you know, stuff) a big lump of money to organise some other random peoples wedding.

The couple get a friend each to assist the celebrity, but their main job is to look worried and say ’I don’t think she likes orange'whilst the celebrity ignores them and orders 400 orange balloons, a orange limo, orange chairs and a giant inflatable orange church.

It’s Kerry Katona designing your wedding dress (she did pretty good, actually)

It’s Jedward visiting a costume shop for your grooms outfit and ordering a huge plastic gorilla for your reception.

It’s Celebrity Wedding Planner. It’s so silly, it actually is brilliant.

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Channel 4 have really outdone themselves this time; not only have they created a TV show that everyone can hate – yes, they’re not just offending a minority in this particular instance – but they’ve created a TV show that has the potential to make us all hate ourselves for laughing at the contestants. Because in this show, the laughs come thick and fast, and they usually come when the two sit down to eat…

If you haven’t seen the premise of this ridiculous shocker of a show, it goes like this: two people, one very obese and the other underweight, meet up and find out how the other person lives; usually one of them will care a lot about how they look – possibly making regular visits to clinics for face-lifts and the like and looking after their weight a bit too much – and the other won’t as much as they should. Then they are suitably shocked by what they find, and shortly after that the torture begins. Because with the next phase of the show, each person is forced to live the lifestyle of the other. This means eating the same foods as them as well, and for some people that can prove a bit too much…

Or maybe we’ll see people having tattoos who haven’t ever considered that idea before?

Before this happens, though, something truly nasty takes place: the food that each person consumes in a standard week is chucked down a huge transparent tube so everyone can see it piling up in a truly disgusting way. The presenters then belittle the contestants by pointing out, quite obviously, that the overweight person is eating MUCH too much, and the underweight person needs to eat more. Classy stuff.

But as we said before, it’s when they sit down to eat what the other eats that it gets really horrible. Usually this means a massive chip-based dinner being plonked down in front of the poor underweight person, and hardly anything being placed in front of the overweight person. Which person would you rather be?!

But there is a serious side to this show, of course: it does genuinely highlight a significant problem. But you do have to ask yourself, what next? Might we see people who usually go for the natural make-up look trying out botox for a few months to see what the fuss is all about? Or maybe we’ll see people having tattoos who haven’t ever considered that idea before? Either way, with the pressure to look good on the rise – and beauty clinics in every major city – shows like this stand on the knife-edge between teaching a valuable lesson and coming across as worryingly shallow.

And if you didn’t catch Supersize Me when it came out, definitely watch the trailer above. It should make you really think twice about eating anything but healthily!

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If I mentioned the words executive office furniture to you swiftly followed by the words Takeshi’s Castle, you might flinch and imagine yourself trapped in some weird castle type apparatus, with office furniture attacking you and refusing to let you go until you break out in a fit of hysterical giggles. And you’d be forgiven for freaking out a bit about office furniture, we think! This kind of oddity and much, much more was exactly the kind of thing that might have happened in the infamous Japanese gameshow of the same name. A TV spectacle which held the Japanese'minds hostage between 1986 and 1989, the show – which was made famous thanks to the Tokyo Broadcasting System – soon became legendary, and for good reason…

Perhaps the silliest overall thing about this show was the lack of prize money…

Hosted by Beat Takeshi – a well-known and respected Japanese actor who officially goes by the name Takeshi Kitano – the main premise was this: Takeshi was a count who was the overlord of his castle and set challenges for people…hard challenges…impossible challenges, and things which were very rarely accomplished by anyone in the show’s history (not to mention so preposterous that a total lack of seriousness made concentration more or less impossible!). A cult hit of a TV show, it was something which many thousands if not millions of people looked forward to watching, sniggering at the ridiculous situations which the count made happen time and time again.

So, as if you hadn’t guessed so far, silliness and stupidy was very much the name of the game with this show – one which broke new ground in a number of ways and was a source of relief for a generation of hard-working people. And with 142 contestants — from executives to students — competing overall, there was plenty of time for both of those things to happen in abundance and with all kinds of hilarious results that had many a side all over Japan splitting. While the Japanese are famed for their honour and integrity and such, don’t think that this meant that this gameshow wasn’t one of the most ridiculous ever produced! It definitely, definitely was…

Perhaps the silliest overall thing about this show was the lack of prize money. Because, while plenty was spent on making the set look good, the contestants never got to walk away with anymore than around £5,000 in today’s money. But then again, laughter is the best medicine, and there was certainly never any shortage of that where this lunacy was concerned.

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OK, so the title of this post isn’t exactly accurate: Channel 5 has awful as it’s default setting, and it really doesn’t know any different, and it never will. I know, I know, I’m harsh and judgemental and all that. But seriously, if you don’t agree with me just calm down and hear me out: when the channel keeps kicking out utter rubbish followed by bizarre pointlessness dressed up as quality TV then someone has to stand up and tell it how it is! If they don’t then the risk is that more people will end up watching this pants and thinking it is great TV. In my quest for quality I just can not afford to let that happen! I’m sure you at least half understand that.

Point in question: Candy Bar Girls. A show like no other. Truly a show which stoops to depths so deep that there is no source of light and oh, wait a minute, apparent quality control. The show, which philosophically follows a group of lesbians who like to have fun all together, was said to be groundbreaking in many ways. It was said to break stereotypes and present lesbians in a new and never-before-seen light which would have people all over the UK nodding in agreement. But in fact all it was was an excuse to film lesbians doing what they do best. I have nothing against this kind of thing, of course, but when it is done I want it to be done tastefully. In this case you could say that isn’t quite achieved…and that’s being GENEROUS.

Seriously, the channel has no limits!

What next for Channel 5? A reality show following the lives of Red Diesel London employees who believe themselves to be part of a secret society of people who plan to steal the world’s petroleum resources in order to travel back to their home planet where tractors rule over cars? I wouldn’t put it past them. But there again, Channel 5 have proved that you can’t put anything past them. Seriously, the channel has no limits!

If you want another example of stupidity gone mad, then why not tune into OK! TV? It’s not…OK. In any way. Presented by that Kate Walsh from The Apprentice, it’s basically a real slog to get through, as Kate and her fellow presenter go about exploring some of the most uninteresting things about celebrity life. Brilliant!

I suppose, though, at least you can never accuse them of not trying…

By the way, if ANNOYING is your thing then have no fear, Jedward are here!

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A small mountain town called South Park. This adult comedic cartoon has been airing for approximately 13 years and has never quenched its thirst in ridiculing the arrogant and daring to offend.

The cartoon started out on a very low budget and subsequently had to be created using cut-outs that looked like a child had cut out some digital printing. But this didn’t affect the programmes popularity, oh no, the use of vulgar language and the philosophy of everything gets slander or nothing does proves that the creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are entirely committed to being fair and funny.

If you’re looking for bizarre television, something different and eternally original and amusing, this is undoubtedly the programme that will fulfil those requirements. Ever entertaining, the 14 season series offers a wide variety of humour and lovable characters.

Seemingly preaching the idea of a pro-active, intelligent younger generation. The programme features four main characters Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick who are all outrageously “grown-up” in their individual respects.

First there is the everyman, Stan, who has matured in terms of common sense, then Kyle who is morally developed. Eric Cartman, who is often seen by many as the “evil genius” is quite blatantly the most intelligent, and Kenny (poor Kenny) is the most sexually advanced of the group.

With other additional characters such as the gullible Leopold ’Butters'Scotch, and the constant supply of victim celebrities the town of South Park is indeed a bizarre and …unusual place.

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There was a time when you had to search for silly television shows within your own country. Today, one can make use of the internet to check out television shows from all over the world. All it takes is the right software or membership to the right forums to find the oldest television shows possible.

One thing that I have understood from watching all these shows is that stupidity is a universal phenomenon. A female model in desperate need of hair loss treatments will prance around in front of the screen pretending as if she is the most beautiful person on the planet. What is more, this show will have many sponsors, indicating its popularity and appeal. One just has to wonder what sort of people would watch these shows.

The answer comes very quickly. Bored people. People who have no other form of entertainment. People who cannot afford anything better. People who know that this is a very bad show that they are watching but still do so because they don’t have a choice. Of course, the cultural aspect also enters the picture.

People watch it because they have become used to it. Just download a Soviet television program from the 80’s and you will be astounded by the sheer crudeness of work. One would have expected the communist state to have something better for its masses. However, people accepted this even though they may wish to forget today that they were watched such a show in the past.

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