I approve of this message. What was the BBC development hierarchy thinking? As Vowl says, it wasn’t even so much the content, awful though it was, but the quality. Airport documentaries: might have been funny, in 1998. Stelios hasn’t actually been in charge of EasyJet in years, and IIRC he doesn’t own it any more either. An Asian character who’s obsessed with hip-hop and constantly talks about “bitches”: well, Ali G was funny, in 1996, and he’s somebody else’s material anyway. Sacha Baron Cohen should sue but he probably doesn’t want to associate himself with this shite. Stealing jokes is one thing, but stealing ones that will soon be old enough to join the Army is pathetic.
Also, if you’re going to poke fun at crappy low-cost airlines’ grasping, self-publicising executives, surely Michael O’Leary’s endless grandstanding and bullshitting must be a seam of comedy gold…unless you’re Matt Lucas and David Waillams, in which case you’re clearly too scared he might sue, so the other bucket shop is still Irish but has to look like Aer Lingus.
Something else: production values. Obviously something posing as a cheap docusoap has to look cheap, but once you spend a certain amount of effort pretending to be shit, the face grows to fit the mask. I didn’t actually see any sets falling over, but perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. Perhaps I don’t watch enough TV, but was this the worst slab of dreck broadcast in the last 10 years? Further, you, me, and everyone else is going to be rolling out to defend the BBC enough times in the next twelve months that we’ll all get even sicker of it than we did during the Hutton inquiry, and this isn’t going to help.
Update, July 2014: Waillams voices a dancing dog.