No Rock And Roll Fun

MUSIC TELEVISION: We can't let Monday slide by without mentioning the big music telly event of the weekend - no, not the laughable Hall of Fame, which managed to make a bad idea progressively worse each week until crescendoing with the ceremony itself on Sunday night; not the re-appearance of Alice Nutter from Chumbawamba on Fast Friends (which took non-Muslims and put them into Muslim homes to talk about Ramadam - fast friends, you see?): the lowspot was ITV's Great British Music Test, a pisspoor straight rip of BBC1's The National Music Test. The one difference between the ITV version and the BBC original was there was a thick wodge of cash on offer: ten grand; but to qualify to win the prize you had to fanny about registering, and then the prizewinner was going to be drawn at random from anyone getting more than a few right, so it was basically a raffle.

The show itself was exactly as creaky as you'd expect from ITV: hosted by Gabby Logan and Neil Fox from behind possibly the least attractive stands ever seen on television, from behind which they didn't step once during the entire programme. There was an attempt to get some banter going - Neil's old, Ha-Ha! - but the pair might as well have filmed their parts at different times there was so little chemistry between them. It's not totally Logan's fault - she was just in the wrong sort of show, whereas many decades of research would fail to create a programme in which Fox would seem at home. His stiff, forced jollity brings all the air of a junior diplomat hosting a garden party for local children to any programme he hosts; at least when he wore stupid glasses we could never tell that he was staring at the autocue like an especially poor medium hoping to find some sort of hint of the future in a broken crystal ball.

The quiz element dragged on until eleven o'clock, which isn't really the best point to be trying to engage the audience at home: kids half asleep, adults half pissed. Too many of the questions were about things that were so dull they barely counted as trivia - Dido won the 2004 Brit for best female, did she? It might be a fact, but it isn't really an interesting one, is it? - and there was an entire round dedicated to Status Quo, which just summed up the whole endeavour, really.