THERE is a series on Channel 5 that makes me so exhausted with the awfulness of modern entertainment that I want to put my head down the toilet.
It is called Monkey Magic. For those who may be tempted to tune in I'll warn you now that the name, filched from a crazed, badly dubbed but brilliant 1970s TV show, is the best thing about it.
It is a magic show for a post-modern generation (can't you feel yourself twitching for the flush?) consisting of a group of overgrown geeks, with 'wacky' nicknames (The Colonel, Papa, Monkey Boy, Tufty )
At one point Tufty stands on one leg, on a brick, topless sporting a pair of goggles while Papa (a fat bald man with a goatee who would be better named Babapapa) hurls playing cards at his chest in a bid to knock him off. Why?
How did anyone in TV land give this the green light? At one point, when he's been standing, immovable on the brick for what feels like about five minutes in a feeble hail of cards Tufty says 'This is awful...this is pathetic...'
Tufty, you took the words right out of my mouth. It is cringe TV for all the wrong reasons. It is the kind of giddy kipper behaviour more suited to computer science students who get their kicks from reciting every single Blackadder sketch at break time.
It is the kind of show that is called 'Irreverent' when irrelevant is nearer the mark. In short, it's awful.
Why do they have to do this to magic? Is nothing scared?
Once magic used to have splendour and glamour. Well okay, I never actually found Paul Daniels splendid, or Debbie McGee glamorous, for that matter, but at least the art of magic had its own unique, if slightly twee, charm.
Then came David Copperfield -- part magician part mahogany chest -- a man who put the 'oooooh' back into illusion by pulling off the second greatest trick of all time; making the Statue of Liberty disappear (the first was persuading
Claudia Schiffer to date him.)
And then came the coolest of all magicians -- David Blane. If Magic is Happy Days, Blane is the Fonz to Monkey Magic's Richie, Ralph and Potsie.
Famous for his astonishing 'street magic' (as well as for the time he gave Eammon Holmes the evil eye) Blane likes to push the boundaries of magic, often verging into areas other, more sane, magicians would avoid like the plague.
So far in his career he has been buried alive for a week, encased in ice for three days and stood atop an 83-foot pillar in Manhattan for 36 hours.
Now I'm no TV executive but I'd wager that this makes better viewing than having someone flick playing cards at you while you're stood on a brick.
And if The Great Soprendo is reading this, if you'd agree to be sunk in a casket into shark infested waters for three weeks, I dare say you'd find yourself back at the London Palladium before you can say 'Piff Paff Poof.'
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