Charlie Parsons has been reminiscing in The Guardian about The Word. No, not the disappointing music monthly bathchair which reinforces more than perhaps anywhere else just how male music journalism is (it has its token two women, but otherwise...), but the annoying Channel 4 youth show of the 1990s also known as 'Club X Series 2'. Next Tuesday will be the 20th anniversary of the very first edition. As Parsons, its executive producer, points out, the first two months of it went out at 6pm on Fridays, before being shunted to late-night by C4 controller Michael Grade. What he doesn't say is that it was moved purely in order to accommodate the much-ballyhooed and legendarily unwatched thrice-weekly chat show, Tonight with Jonathan Ross.
Let's get it out of the way. I didn't like The Word, never liked it, though until BBC2 tempted me across with Larry Sanders and Fantasy Football League, I often saw it, usually as a postscript to Clive Anderson's chat show or Absolutely. When Charlie congratulates himself on helping to change television, I think I know what he means, though, and not just the many number of current TV executives who cut their teeth on it. It was the sort of programme that week in week out advertised at least three things you'd theoretically want to see on television (one band, one guest, one idea), and proceed to make events - whether noisy, squalid or 'edgy' - out of all three. In other words, even if much of what surrounded such events was dull and uninvolving, what mattered were the bizarre occasions which the production team willed you to take to work the following Monday or to the pub the next day. "Did you see the bit where... ...L7 showed their bits?/...Mark Lamarr said 'bollocks' to a homophobe?/...that dentistry graduate drank his own sick?" The Big Breakfast, a warmer and much more likeable dawn cousin born in 1992, also relied on water-cooler moments. Its star Chris Evans has, for better or worse, built a career on them.
But at least the worst you could say of the early Words was merely its defiant amateurism: Amanda de Cadenet's stupefying absence of talent, interviews on the sofa that went nowhere very very slowly and awkwardly, the phrase "You're a bit controversial, arencha?" which Terry Christian clung to like a comfort blanket. Even the likeable Katie Puckrik, perhaps the only one of its hosts to wear irony lightly, struggled. But when Paul Ross arrived as the series editor in 1992, licking his wounds after his disastrously-received mix of current affairs and satire A Stab in the Dark (featuring a very young Michael Gove as one of its presenters!), the spirit of the show grew meaner.
The Word originally devised its humiliating Hopefuls slot specifically for budding presenters who crumpled during their screen tests, in order to see how far they would go to get on TV. It did anticipate the desperation of the X-Factor auditionees, and made the viewer delighted with themselves that they're not so deluded. (Just bored.) But I could never quite escape the nagging thought that the humour behind such enterprises was a public version of a private joke between braying public school products.
Yes, I did find aspects of The Word shocking and squalid. But just as it wasn't for the Daily Mail, who consistently used the show to berate Michael Grade and Channel 4 for a perceived lack of morality, so it wasn't for me. Just as I had enjoyed Who Dares Wins... aged 14 (a show that is practically unwatchable in retrospect) because it said 'fuck', because there was nudity, because it said 'yah-boo' to everything (including jokes), so The Word was really for people too young to go out and get pissed. Indeed, its title sequence imagines a teenage boy's fantasy about a 'good night out', as seen through a TV screen.
I already knew how shit a 'good night out' could be. Luckily, I also knew that the best of my 'good nights out' would probably not be orchestrated by members of the Oxford University Union, would not feature a young woman snorkelling around in cowshit (well, not usually anyway), and wouldn't have songs by Intastella cut short by a Swatch logo. Or have them introduced by Cindy out of EastEnders.
Me the Annoyed
2 hours ago
Was reading this article yesterday and wondered if you'd seen it. I sighed a lot.
ReplyDeleteYou'd have been about 10 or 11 when it started, about 14/15 when it ended (1995). Did you see much of it first time round? I associated late-night TV with The Late Show and After Dark so The Word was never going to tickle my fancy. Mighty theme tune, though, courtesy of 808 State.
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