For years Garry Bushell was the symbolic and literal black beast of modern television. As TV critic of the trite and dreary 'The Sun', Bushell had too privileged a position, skittering out columns of heavily edited illiterate manure that almost always concluded with him demanding ITV "bring back the variety show"
His prosaic prayers have been answered double fold - once with Popstars/Pop Idol and Xfactor - all homogeneous shows as impressive and empty as an Easter egg - and with the celebrity "showcase".
Invariably the latter type are scheduled at Christmas, the implication being that this is the soap star and light entertainment personalities' work's night out.
This would be true were it not for the fact that many of the faces in ITV's 2009 Christmas 'The All Star Impressions Show' were either on their way out of work - half the cast of axed show 'The Bill' - had not worked for years or were schilling for work (the mildly amusing and out-of-place Mackenzie Crook and Iain Lee sketches were cut from a Bob Mortimer-penned pilot test tape the two had peddled about TV stations in years prior to 'All Star'.)
Steven Mulhern, his body still marinated in the echoing tantrums you imagine he had as a boy prodigy magician, presents. Mulhern was engaging enough as a children's TV presenter - but his Dorian Gray youth and possessed-vent-dummy charm cannot hold a show as unwieldy as this together, and so it proves.
Veteran performers who used to stalk UK Saturday Night Television as colossi, such as Paul Daniels and Les Dennis, have been drafted in to prove how little a knowledge of the crowd or entertainment they have left. Dennis' dining out on his post-modern ironic reappraisal by the likes of Ricky Gervais and public sympathy for his post-traumatic stress induced breakdown screened for millions on 'Celeb Big Brother' has long outstayed its welcome. His attempts at impressions of Gary Barlow and Louis Walsh are hand-me downs from other better impersonations. Post-Theroux tales of Daniels, his unappealing politics and curmudgeonly nature still haunt his attempts at "funny" and so a sketch involving him and Tim Healey as Ant and Dec draw nothing but 'All Star's ubiquitous canned laughter.
Lisa Maxwell, formerly an impressionist, does a fair attempt at Babs Windsor with a less than helpful script. A Gallagher Bros sketch n 2009 - the equivalent of the Grumbleweeds doing a sketch about The Bay City Rollers in 1989 - falls utterly flat.
The one true highlight comes, surprisingly, from Joe Pasquale who most "trendy", self-regarding comedy connoisseurs last saw with their grandparents on a variety show in 1992 and thought was a bit poor. Pasquale disarms such preconceptions as, though his material may not be, his approach to the audience is fresh, enthusiastic and infantile. In short, he knows what is funny, how to breathe life into the yellowing parchments that pass for his scripts - reminding me of a Bob Monkhouse rule of thumb that Pasquale must have framed in his hallway - that of "Getting little chocolate hand prints on the telly".
Monkhouse waxed that if your delivery and performance, whether presenting a show or chatting on one, stopped a family chatting and made toddlers drop their chocolate and try to grab your face, you were on the right track. Other than Pasquale, the rest of 'All Star Impressions Show' are leaving sticky brown stains on your TV and it isn't chocolate. Compellingly awful.
His prosaic prayers have been answered double fold - once with Popstars/Pop Idol and Xfactor - all homogeneous shows as impressive and empty as an Easter egg - and with the celebrity "showcase".
Invariably the latter type are scheduled at Christmas, the implication being that this is the soap star and light entertainment personalities' work's night out.
This would be true were it not for the fact that many of the faces in ITV's 2009 Christmas 'The All Star Impressions Show' were either on their way out of work - half the cast of axed show 'The Bill' - had not worked for years or were schilling for work (the mildly amusing and out-of-place Mackenzie Crook and Iain Lee sketches were cut from a Bob Mortimer-penned pilot test tape the two had peddled about TV stations in years prior to 'All Star'.)
Steven Mulhern, his body still marinated in the echoing tantrums you imagine he had as a boy prodigy magician, presents. Mulhern was engaging enough as a children's TV presenter - but his Dorian Gray youth and possessed-vent-dummy charm cannot hold a show as unwieldy as this together, and so it proves.
Veteran performers who used to stalk UK Saturday Night Television as colossi, such as Paul Daniels and Les Dennis, have been drafted in to prove how little a knowledge of the crowd or entertainment they have left. Dennis' dining out on his post-modern ironic reappraisal by the likes of Ricky Gervais and public sympathy for his post-traumatic stress induced breakdown screened for millions on 'Celeb Big Brother' has long outstayed its welcome. His attempts at impressions of Gary Barlow and Louis Walsh are hand-me downs from other better impersonations. Post-Theroux tales of Daniels, his unappealing politics and curmudgeonly nature still haunt his attempts at "funny" and so a sketch involving him and Tim Healey as Ant and Dec draw nothing but 'All Star's ubiquitous canned laughter.
Lisa Maxwell, formerly an impressionist, does a fair attempt at Babs Windsor with a less than helpful script. A Gallagher Bros sketch n 2009 - the equivalent of the Grumbleweeds doing a sketch about The Bay City Rollers in 1989 - falls utterly flat.
The one true highlight comes, surprisingly, from Joe Pasquale who most "trendy", self-regarding comedy connoisseurs last saw with their grandparents on a variety show in 1992 and thought was a bit poor. Pasquale disarms such preconceptions as, though his material may not be, his approach to the audience is fresh, enthusiastic and infantile. In short, he knows what is funny, how to breathe life into the yellowing parchments that pass for his scripts - reminding me of a Bob Monkhouse rule of thumb that Pasquale must have framed in his hallway - that of "Getting little chocolate hand prints on the telly".
Monkhouse waxed that if your delivery and performance, whether presenting a show or chatting on one, stopped a family chatting and made toddlers drop their chocolate and try to grab your face, you were on the right track. Other than Pasquale, the rest of 'All Star Impressions Show' are leaving sticky brown stains on your TV and it isn't chocolate. Compellingly awful.
