by Ethan Johnson
January 29, 2007
I watch waaaaay too much TV. I have been trying to cut back, but boy howdy, there's some really compelling stuff on these days, and even with the magic of Tivo&0153; it's hard to keep up. Rather than prattle on about the shows I watch regularly, here are some off-the-wall shows I've seen recently:
The F Word: (BBC America) F-bomber chef extraordinaire Gordon Ramsay tries to put together the best "brigade" in each episode, but with a twist: The participants are not professional chefs (or anything close). The episode I caught featured 4 guys who I believe were involved with mattress (or furniture?) delivery. Next week, it's 4 women from an emergency room. This premise was slightly more refreshing than these other "who wants to be a chef" sorts of competitions, where we have to hear all about the awards so-and-so received, and how everyone loves his or her rabbit a la mode. All of that is replaced with calls of "yes, chef!" in response to Ramsay's rapid-fire drilling.
The premise is that the restaurant is filled with 50 diners. The diners know that this is for TV, so they are somewhat forgiving about delays and so forth. The question is, would they actually pay for what they are served (course by course)? Ramsay is outraged when one diner says that she would not pay for the main course, which featured rabbit liver. He pays her a tableside visit, and upon questioning, he looks at her mouth and asks, "are you chewing gum?!" "Toffee." He lectures the diner that she has no right to refuse a dish when she can't devote 100% of her taste buds to the food. Wowww.
There's no question that Ramsay is an excellent chef, but he's also (admittedly) an ass. I can see his show as being OK in small doses, frankly. It's not a great "teaching" show, in that recipes are thrown together quickly and steps are skipped camera-wise. Even the part that IS meant to be instructive suffers from overclocking. Finally, the diners wait a stunning 90 minutes for souffles. So the show isn't entirely uneducational... I learned that I have no interest in making a souffle, ever.
How Clean is Your House? (BBC America) Britain's "queens of clean" come to the aid of some of the nastiest, grossest homes imaginable. I can't use enough hyperbole about how nasty the homes are. Seriously, I was going to retch several times, and when it was all said and done, I grabbed a bottle of Clorox spray and went gonzo cleaning our kitchen. Not that our kitchen is nasty, but what's a little more cleaning? I want to sue whoever writes the copy for Direct TVs channel guide, as they said that this show was merely a "cleaning tips" show. Yeah, right. Tip #1: Don't let your house become uber-nasty. One show is enough, really.
Mythbusters: (Discovery) Two guys prove/bust various myths. One myth concerned whether an inflatable raft could be filled with helium and made to float away - with a passenger. They don't say where this myth came from, so I was left wondering who is propogating this. James Bond? MacGyver? Needless to say, no, it doesn't work, ever. And they try. Another myth concerned cell phones on airplanes. At first, it seems plausible, but only because their test cockpit was not RF shielded. Testing cell phones on a live flight is illegal, so they tried again inside of a real corporate jet on dry land. The instrument panel didn't acknowledge any RF interference whatsoever. The team concluded that the FAA decided that it was easier to ban all cell phones rather than pay for expensive in-air testing. Interesting show.
XXX-Treme Weight Loss: (Discovery Health) This was in interesting "one-off" show. 5 people all lost at least 100 pounds and kept it off at least 2 years, without any radical surgery or crash dieting. One goes on a radical 600 calories/day "soy" diet (they do not provide details, probably to prevent rash me-tooism) and loses 270 lbs in a year. They never say if anyone needed plastic surgery to deal with, uh, loose skin issues. At least 3/5 did not make any changes to their diet, but instead increased, as in, radically increased their exercise regimen. I once worked with a woman who was a former mail carrier. She claimed that she could "eat anything" back in those days. Now that she worked a desk job, she was marshmallowy as all get-out. Anyway, the show was interesting and inspiring, for all of the right reasons. I'm very wary of these quick-fix surgeries, and denial-based dieting is a time bomb waiting to explode. It was nice to have my suspicions validated that the road to safe, effective weight loss literally begins with the first step. <EM>
