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!