20
Aug 04
Catch them on the Flipside
Innovative, audacious, useful…unimaginative, cowardly, lazy…You could apply any or all of these adjectives to Channel 4’s new late night show Flipside, that consists of a bunch of K-listers (MTV dudes), pwned props (Victor Big Brother) and meeja pundits (Heat’s Boyd Hilton) watching different channels on digital TV and commenting on them. My first instinct: you’ve gotta be kidding me. The logic behind it is highly apparent though: Let them watch other channels, but whilst still watching our channel. Genius. No. Bloody cheeky. Channel 4.
Funnily enough I had an idea similar to this a while back when people still cared about what should replace RI:SE. If C4 are exposing loopholes regarding broadcasting copyright then hats off, because I can’t imagine other channels are that happy about this. The sweetener is perhaps that they tend to only look at things like UK Gold+1 (so it’s not ‘live’ as it were), Babestation, E! and those terrible channels that get bundled with your Sky box that you never watch. Of course now that I know the latest incarnation of Japanese ‘punishment wins prizes’ show Endurance can be found somewhere in there, I don’t have to watch late night Channel 4 ever again – yay!