Jason Manford is a self-confessed telly addict.
In this show he indulges his passion for the weird and wonderful that TV has to offer. It’s all about why the wildest, weirdest and wonderful television from all over the place that is sometimes, quite literally, all over the place.
This isn’t bloopers. This is Clive James on TV for the Goggle-box generation, the shows that you can’t quite believe that they got made. This isn’t bad TV. Bad TV is amateur and unwatchable and easily banished with a channel change. Weird TV is wonderful by default and truly terrible TV is an artform. Both are the TV equivalent of a car crash, paralysing but impossible to turn away from.
This is the artform of weird, wonderful and mad TV that in the streaming age of a million channels there is no shortage of, a mass of content for a show that is ready, willing and waiting to celebrate, castigate and satirise for mass enjoyment.
Using archive clips from the golden gongs this series revisits telly turkeys and meets the people who made them, the people whoremember them and - often - the people who adore them. This series is dedicated entirely to the 'what were they thinking of' moments of cathode crime. Highly repeatable and returnable Jason Manford: Telly Addict can run forever.
Examples:
Don’t Scare the Hare? Was announced as an innovative family game show packed with humour and jeopardy, and featuring a 4-foot animatronic robot hare. Yeah. It was.
Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme. It was out of sync.
Happy Families? The BBC's answer to Gladiators, It went head-to-head with the steroid strappers by pitching 2 families against each other in a series of archaic combat games; jousting. The prize? Well nowt. As the families competed in a series of pointless and dated challenges and games (jousting!!) the Granny of each family was suspended high above the crowd in a cage. The prize was to release your granny from the cage. It hadn't occurred to anyone that if they didn’t put the grannies in the cages to begin with, then the families wouldn't have to play these pointless games and we could all go home a bit earlier.
Scavengers - a former Blue Peter presenter and a bunch of people in wetsuits scrambling through what looked like the drainagesystem at the Dome.
Hotline with Mary Parkinson and a pair of roller-skating twins cast straight from Hyde Park that aimed to unite the nation via telephone and television. Great, except they hadn't figured that when people got through they would be complaining about the programme rather than participating
