Crimewatch
BBC1, 9pm
Freezing
BBC2, 10pm
FIRST, a heart-felt statement which will have grave consequences for my own future wellbeing. Nevertheless, I must voice it: my fave show, Crimewatch, has been utterly ruined by its vapid new mock-baritone host, Kirsty Young.
As soon as Kirsty appeared, I turned the darn show plumb off. Yon slightly-stricken, self-regarding way she addresses every camera if she's admiring her own reflection in its lens! That artificially deepened voice to make herself sound as though her head's not full of high-pitched mince! Yecch!
Real Crimewatch means Nick Ross assuring us with the words: "Don't have nightmares, do sleep well." Real Crimewatch has no place for the stunned-mullet gaze of Kirsty Young, nightmare preener. But what are the grave personal consequences of me saying all this?
Dagnabbit, now I've revealed my antipathy towards Kirsty flipping Young, there's no way I'll ever get to share my eight favourite records with the world via the other show she currently deadens with her dulled tones: Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
Here are my dynamite discs anyway: Over, Under, Sideways, Down by the Yardbirds; Turn Back the Hands of Time by Tyrone Davis; Down On the Street by the Stooges; I Dig Your Act by the O'Jays; Virginia Plain by Roxy Music; Truly Yours by Ivy Jo Hunter; Too Much Time by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, and in particular Mr Soul Satisfaction by Timmy Willis.
If only these mighty tunes could have been aired, inspiring legions of Radio 4 listeners to dance on the spot with tears of joy streaming down their faces, having been hipped to the mellow bellow of Mr Willis and such couplets as "Mr Soul Satisfaction/ That's my name/ A positive reaction/ That's my game"
(as a female chorus urgently trills "Du-doo!" in the background).
There's also Timmy's singular boast: "I'm so baaaad/ I shudda bin born twins, ooh yeah!" But now it's not to be. Damn and blast you, Kirsty Young!
Thankfully, there was something good on the box: the opening part of the comedy of middle-aged metropolitan manners, Freezing (don't miss parts two and three tonight and tomorrow).
Hugh Bonneville is foiled, failing, fortysomething ex-publisher Matthew. One-time Hollywood leading lady Elizabeth McGovern plays Matthew's equally-thwarted wife, a one-time Hollywood leading lady called Elizabeth McGovern.
Uneasily contemplating life on the media scrapheap, the unemployed duo somehow still have enough ackers to live in swanky Knightsbridge in a dreamy house, lunching in exclusive bistros and forever bumping into such gilded media scrap-merchants as Richard E Grant and Alan Yentob.
Yes, yes, yes, Freezing is very London-centric media-in-jokey, owing its cosiness to the fact that Elizabeth McGovern is in real life married to Freezing's director, Simon Curtis. But that doesn't make it any less funny.
For one thing, there can rarely have been a more monstrously-hilarious sitcom character than bullying, amoral and oddly vulnerable Leon, shoutily declaimed by Tom Hollander. Leon is a showbiz agent who loathes his clients as heartily as he hypes their meagre talents.
For another thing, there's Hugh Bonneville, his doughy face a pained study in exasperation, disappointment and despair, along with a permanent fear of exposure and social death.
Best of all, Freezing creates a witty commentary on the plusses and minuses of marriage from knowing gags about the cliched bathos of Holby City and sly digs at cultural philistinism. Freezing: in its own coolly understated way, it's a hot ticket.
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