Ladies and Gentlemen, I know I’ve said this before, but this time, I mean it. I’ve seen the worst TV show ever transmitted in broadcast history. There have been some incredibly bad shows on over the years, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Touch The Truck, Keith Chegwin’s Naked Jungle, Nigella Express, absolutely anything with Gillian McKeith in… but Coming of Age (BBC Three, Tuesday, 30 September, 10.30pm) trumps the lot by some distance. Imagine the most tawdry, lazy, vapid, vacuous show you’ve ever seen and then multiply by a million. If you can imagine that, then you’re about a third of the way to understand just how dismal this show is.
So bad is Coming of Age, that all sense I once had has gone out of the window in favour of far fetched threats. Normally, I’m happy to slag a show and leave it at that, but everyone involved in this – the producers, script writers, actors, hell, even the runners for the team, should be rounded up and horsewhipped in public. So why is it so bad? Well, Coming of Age scrapes the barrel so much that it makes Two Pints look like Pan’s Labyrinth. Bearing in mind that, of said show, I once wrote “The jokes were so mind-numbingly obvious that they announced their arrival minutes before the punchline. Imagine a one-man band on fire running at you from across a perfectly empty field for 3 minutes and when they finally get to you, they shout “Ho ho! I’m on fire!” It’s like that, only less funny.”
To give you a flavour of this show, I’ll point you in the direction of Robin Askwith films. The jokes are like thumbs stuck down underpants and then tittering as they smell poo-fingers and then giggling at every single aspect of sex. One guy looks at a girl and says: “I’d love to stick my jam in her doughnut.” Someone else says: “Fancy a game of Pull the Purple Party Popper” Then, a student tells a teacher (more on him later), “If you give me an A, I’ll give you a B…lowjob!” Some other gnat-fer-brains uses the ol’ “I’m a black belt in feng shui!” There’s even a Hitler joke with a Nazi salute. This show would make a Carry On… scriptwriter blush. It’s less ‘saucy postcard’ and more ironic student rape jokes. Only without the balls to make a rape joke.
Not that all abuse is glossed over. There’s a segment that sees a teacher saying that all he hears from his pupils are excuses, “that and ‘please stop touching me”. Doesn’t stop there either. He then tells a pupil that he’ll see her after school for a “One-on-one session, as in (wink) a one-on-one session… (another wink) like a one-on-one session” before finally getting ’round to adding “one where we’ll take all our clothes off”. It’s so painful and irritating that I couldn’t believe someone had actually commissioned it. You can only guess that someone had some blackmail on a top spud at the BBC… and probably threatened them with a B…lowjob.
Aside from this, there’s almost constant jokes about “wanking”, having sex and… it’s so tiresome and poor that it feels like someone could have filmed a fishtank with a human floater in it for 30 minutes and it would have been funnier and wittier… not to mention that my analogy was about as highbrow.
My advice is that you steer well clear of this garbage. It’s easily the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed, on or off the box. It’s under the impression that it’s an edgy and real show with the liberal use of swearwords, but when your jokes go little further than the swearing itself, then essentially, it’s just someone desperately trying for a gag. Well, I did gag. This is a turgid show made for, and by, idiots who will laugh at absolutely any old shite. It’s the TV equivalent of a dog getting an erection.
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