Quite a Lot of Static…
FM (Wednesdays, ITV2, yes ITV2) is a very odd little concept, but kind of works, I think?
So you get 20 minutes of him off the IT crowd and her off of teachers doing pretty standard “embarrassment and swearing” comedy set in a thinly-veiled Xfm clone and it kind of works cos chris o’dowd is good at that sort of thing, and the script is a bit obvious but has some decent set-ups and one-liners and visually it’s pretty decent, not unlike Nathan Barley but without the vicious, crippling evil that made NB so wonderful.
But then, because he’s an indie DJ at an indie radio station you get five minutes of the guillemots or the wombats playing a song “in session” in the studio whilst the characters occasionally talk over the top of it. It’s really weird. Really really weird. It’s not like in, eg The Young Ones where a band would suddenly appear for no reason, clearly the production company has thought about this and sold these slots (and it appears future bands include Ladyhawke and The Subways) as a way of increasing their income stream. And, they’ve even monetarised the playlists of the music in the show, with handy click-throughs to 7digital so you can buy what you’ve heard…
CarsmileSteve in Do You See /FT • TV • 75 views
Saw this, and thought it was pretty ho-hum…even more depressing is this poster I’ve seen for a new brit film about ’60′s boat radio…ugh.
Which also features Chris O’Dowd as a DJ. Typecasting ahoy!
Does anyone remember Channel 4′s ‘The Kit Curran Radio Show’ of 1986, starring Dennis Lawson and Clive Merrison? I certainly found that funny at the time.
I thought Kit Curran was an ITV show, but yes, small me liked it a lot (possibly because I liked radio a lot). It is odd that radio has a pretty large set of sitcoms based around it, WKRP In Cincinatti, NewsRadio, Frasier, er – The Lenny Henry Show…
Re: 4 – There was a terrible early 00s American one called Rock Me Baby, too… I really liked WKRP at the time (I was about ten and I haven’t seen it since) and NewsRadio – although with NewsRadio the radio element, bar a couple of classic Phil Hartman moments, was actually fairly irrelevant; it was essentially an office sitcom.