No Rock And Roll Fun

STILL, AT LEAST ITS NOT TOMMY LEE DISCOVERS BOOKS: The desire of Sharon Osbourne to be connected with not-very-good TV shows shows no sign of dying down: after The Osbournes¹, her chat show, the terrible X-Factor and pushing her daughter into that fat girl sitcom (because, what, we're meant to believe that Kelly is fat?) comes Battle for Ozzfest, which turns out to be yet another yawn-a-thon "reality" series. Incidently, when did "reality" become the replacement for the term "game show"? Or does the presence of a camera backstage make anything reality? In which case, Friday Night with Jonathon Ross must be a reality TV hit, thanks to its "green room" camera.

Anyway, MTV are going to get some young bands together who'll "compete" for a chance to be bottled off at next year's Ozzfest. Sharon, bless her, seems to think it's going to be an anthropological revelation:

Each episode is set to show the bands being put through events surrounding everyday life on tour.

“Life on the road isn't always what it's cracked up to be and our bands are going to find that out, the hard way,” Sharon explained.

Really? There are people still alive who don't know that life on the road is a hard slog, sleeping in old pants, dealing with vomit and sitting around bored as a man on a pole waiting for soundchecks? And even if there are - isn't making a programme about how shit and dull life on the road is a little bit like having a gardening show that consists of a camera trained on manure? Hang about a moment... I'm off to phone up Jana Bennett...

¹ - The Osbournes: If you had a low entertainment threshold, the site of Ozzy being shit at programming his video recorder may have held your interest for about three minutes, and as such would have made a nice little distraction for, say, Johnny and Denise's Passport to Paradise, or a running gag on The Graham Norton Sausage. To believe it made a worthwhile use of people's finite lives churning it out for seventeen seasons of sixteen half-hour episodes suggests that the good people at MTV may finally have gakked out the last of their judgement. It was TV on a par with watching old people searching for slippers.