Grace Dent

cymrococh · November 6, 2007

http://talk.radiotimes.com/thread.jspa?threadID=400000577

Grace Dent's edited highlights of the star-studded 120-minute ceremony (Wednesday 31 October, ITV1):

Start: Scenes from the red carpet: soap starlets are jumping out of limos wearing little more than t** tape, Marmite-shade fake tan and costume jewellery. Most dresses come courtesy of the limited amount of fashion PRs who will lend out items to women with a tendency to throw up on them, stretch the spaghetti straps trying to flash their scones, or eventually pass out splattered in vomit beside a bottle bin behind Movida.

5 minutes: Studio runners finish waxing the main stage. It seems a shame to have this ceremony going out live on ITV and have all these nominees in brand-new shoes and women in high heels and long dresses and NOT maximise the potential for someone to break a wrist. Oh, how David Tennant laughs as he slides across the floor like a bored eight-year-old at a wedding, before picking up his award with his newly ricked shoulder.

7 minutes: Host Sir Trevor McDonald appears on stage, armed with a script of half-amusing jokes that his terrible timing will kill off altogether. "This is live, so if you see the Queen storming out, she is REALLY storming out, right?!" Somewhere in the gallery, the producer is quietly wishing he'd hired Jane McDonald. Or at least the X Factor McDonald brother who could have sung his crap script to the tune of Shang-a-lang.

11 minutes: Kelly Brook appears looking really irritatingly gorgeous and slim in a white dress that would make me look like Makka Pakka from In the Night Garden. I hate you, Kelly Brook. You're the reason I drink. Kelly is presenting an award with hapless hunk o' spunk Kel Knight, Kim's fiancé from Kath & Kim.

13 minutes: My mistake; Kelly Brook is presenting an award with hapless hunk o' spunk Brendan Cole. Kelly and Brendan do that dance show on Saturday nights that my mam watches then rings me up and says, "Oooh, are you watching t'dancing?" So I say, "What dancing?" and she says "Dancing!" as if I'm actually a cretin for not immediately associating the common finite verb "dancing" with Willie Thorne doing the funky gibbon to Ottowan.

15 minutes: Dean Gaffney collects the prize for I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! They show the clip of him with his head in a sink full of cockroaches, screaming like a man with his head in a sink full of cockroaches would. Everyone in the audience is laughing. Dean is laughing. Trevor is laughing. I'm laughing and I've seen it 15 times. We get the television we deserve.

17 minutes: The cast of Channel 4's Shipwrecked are gutted not to have won the best reality TV prize. This is a shame as the girls of Tiger Island worked so hard giving all those lap dances and pole-dancing displays every single week. "It's Joshua's birthday and the girls have been planning a special treat all day," says the voiceover. "Ooh, I wonder what that can be?!" I cry in true puzzlement as the girls cast aside sarongs and start dry-humping a coconut tree in the name of "empowerment" again.

21 minutes: Lacey Turner wins the best actress award for playing EastEnders' Stacey Slater and convincing Britain that she really is overcome with lust for Max Branning, who has a head like an Action Man that a child has coloured in with an orange felt-tip.

27 minutes: The adverts bring light relief. I sit mesmerised by the Twinings Tea advert, featuring Stephen Fry as a tea-shop owner and a younger black man "Tyrone" as his employee, where all the jokes seem to revolve around ladies wanting their tea "served black". There's another one where Tyrone teaches Stephen about Notorious BIG in return for some knowledge about teabags. And then Tyrone tries to teach Stephen a funny "black" handshake. This whole campaign is so badly misjudged and clutch-your-face cringeworthy on so many levels that there isn't an internet screen large enough to vent it.

35 minutes: Jeremy Kyle really wants the best factual TV award. They show a clip of him giving even more TV airtime to The Westboro Baptist Church and their God Hates Fags campaign. Except Jeremy is teaching them a real lesson by shouting at them about how they're a "total disgrace". Wow, I bet they never hear that 345 times a day when they're picketing soldiers' funerals. That insult from Jeremy must have really stung. Sadly the award goes to Top Gear.

40 minutes: "Bread: the stuff of life" muses Diarmuid Gavin in the new Morrisons ad. What the hell is he talking about as he traipses over cobbles with a silly shopping trolley? Did you know they make and prep their bread in store? Of course I bloody did. Everyone (ie not you or Denise Van Outen) who has ever been near a Morrisons knows that. Tell them about Market Place where you can get chicken-tikka balti pies and big boxes of cream cakes, and the Whoops! reduced section where you have to shoulder-charge local bargain hunters for cut-price pork tongue. I love Morrisons. I should do the adverts.

47 minutes: Back at the TV awards, two Fungus the Bogeyman-types in suits stumble on stage and present an award to Doctor Who for best drama. Oh, they're rugby players. Everyone is very excited at the mixture of English sporting legends and "the Doctor". I'm not sure what award this is - maybe the "Grace Dent - not on my cultural radar award". They show a clip of Doctor Who involving a man with felt-tip squiggles on his face chasing someone through a forest. I can see why so many people watch this. Felt-tip squiggles are terrifying.

50 minutes: Lou and Andy from Little Britain appear to do the usual mentally-disabled-man-in-a-wheelchair-with-lightly- mentally-ill-carer routine. Except they're the other way round. Lou is played by Matt Lucas, Andy is played by David Walliams. Andy wants to read the nominations, so he opens the envelope doing the slack-jawed face, then says "I can't read!" The audience laughs politely. After all, disabled people who can't read are always funny.

55 minutes: ITV is plugging a new First World War drama called My Boy Jack, which features that kid from Harry Potter running about in trenches getting his glasses knocked off by shrapnel and images of women howling for dead sons, and funerals, and corpses, and blood. I must set my Sky+ and get a bottle of whisky.

70 minutes: David Platt from Coronation Street appears on stage in what appears to be the sodden jacket he got pulled out of Weatherfield canal in. It later turns out to be just a "trendy" jacket that looks soggy. It must be from one of those top-of-the-range designers that the soap starlets borrow their togs from. You can get all sorts of haute couture on Fleetwood market.

75 minutes: Fearne Cotton and Holly Willoughby accept an award for Ant and Dec in the vain hope that this will fix them in the nation's mind as the "female Ant and Dec" despite them never having said a mildly amusing or noteworthy sentence in their entire lives. Go on - I challenge you to tell me one thing off the top of your head you can remember them saying. It is impossible.

100 minutes: Jeremy Clarkson gets an award for being Jeremy Clarkson. It's presented by Lewis Hamilton, who appears to be standing in a hole on the stage. Lewis doesn't like all this attention, that's why he's standing centre stage on primetime ITV enjoying riotous applause. I feel sorry for him. He can't even enjoy the pleasure of attending the multiplex or the bars in Stevenage leisure park. The leisure park that the NHS decided to simply drive a hospital bus to on Friday night and sit outside as it saved money in ambulances. Poor Lewis. Let him enjoy Fatty Arbuckles!

105 minutes: Opera singer Katherine Jenkins and ballet dancer Darcey Bussell appear to publicise their new show Viva La Diva. Except neither of them are truly divas as the word "diva" to me suggests plenty of attitude and charisma and not Katherine Jenkins, who basically shows up in pastel chiffon with her baps escaping, then simpers her way through operatic Enrique Iglesias to a bontempi beat.

110 minutes: The X Factor wins best talent show. Simon Cowell insults Andrew Lloyd Webber. Sigh. I think I'm secretly quite in love with Simon Cowell. I want to be Terri Seymour and follow him about in £500 Oscar de la Renta pumps looking doe-eyed and fragrant and submissive. Oh, dear. Did I just type that? I must remember to delete all this before it goes on a website that the whole world can read. EMBARRASSING!

115 minutes: The best soap award goes to EastEnders, not the soap that everyone actually enjoys right now, Corrie. Even Barbara Windsor nearly falls off her seat in shock. The entire cast go up on stage in their best clothes and stand in a rabble swaying and grinning like a flash mob that have gone mad in Uniqlo and tried on all the latest evening wear.

120 minutes: The awards ceremony is over but if you like you can tune into ITV2 and see Kelly Osbourne presenting extra footage with the flair and panache for reading out loud she displayed during last year's I'm a Celebrity... No, thanks - I've got low standards, but I'm not actually mental.

Woodsyla · November 6, 2007