Glass Candle Grenades

I work incredibly close to Church Street in London. Those of you unfamiliar with Church Street will no doubt be unaware of the market which takes place there everyday, selling everything you can imagine (if the limit of your imagintaion is cheap shoes, knock off t-shirts and plenty of odd-smelling food).
Unfortunately I only ever get the pleasure of walking through said market after 6pm, when most traders have packed up and gone home, and all that is left are boxes of unsold fish, pieces of halal meat and, if I'm lucky, the council's bin men picking up the crap (and on one special occasion pretending to be pirates with bits of cardboard tube. What a spectacle!). It smells at the best of times.

If you live in London, you will have noticed the extremely hot temperatures of the past few days, and while the sun may be adored by humans, dead fish in rows of boxes aren't quite as fond, neither are the shops selling meat. The stench that fills the air on these hot evenings, mixed with the sickly sweet smell of Hookah pipes and the, well, rubbishy smell of the bin men can be incredibly overpowering, and on more than one occasion has made me gag and run for safety.

The reason I mention this, is that on Sunday, television presented me with an opportunity to feel exactly the same way, without leaving the comfort of my sofa. Thanks TV!
I'm talking, of course, about 'An Audience With Michael Bublé', which, no matter how I hard I try, I just cannot find a reason for.

Michael Bublé

A quick search of lethargy's friend Wikipedia allows me to see that other people who have had 'an audience' include Mel Brooks, Billy Connolly, Peter Ustinov and Joan Rivers (The 80's), Elton John, Axl Rose and Sooty (The 90's), Lulu, Joe Pasquale and Coronation Street (The 00's).

Two things:

1. How does one go about having an audience with a street? Sounds boring.
2. You may notice that the quality of guest droops quite considerably over time. Compare Peter Ustinov to Joe Pasquale. Or compare Sooty to Joe Pasquale. Or anybody. Even Hitler was a better comedian than Pasquale.

So it seems that the BBC started off with the good and honest intention of putting interesting characters in front of an audience and letting them talk. So far so good, but somewhere along the line things took a turn for the worse. Instead of people who were renowned, respected and loved for their skills they got Freddie Starr. And while that's bad, the real problems start when you begin to invite singers on. Singers can sing, it's rare you can find one capable of speaking in a semi-coherent manner between songs, let alone being able to hold an audience's attention with a stream of auto-cued bilge for an entire hour.


To be fair the singers that were granted 'an audience' were popular and not entirely retarded, and while I would never sit down specifically to watch a hardline religious nut singing about summer holidays, I guess that millions of others would. That's entertainment. Unfortunately.

It seems the BBC spent decades slowly ruining the show, purely so they could hand it to ITV and go "See what you can do with this".
What ITV can do with it is somehow make it even worse.

Michael Bublé is not in the least bit interesting. There is nothing remarkable about him. He has a voice like a closed library. He is not funny. He is not charming. He was autotuned to Holy Hell.

The above sentences are fact. However people beg to differ. The wonky faced, fat tongued one from McFly was in attendance, and wanted to know 'If he ever got lonely on the road'. What was probably an innocent question sounded, to my ears, like a desperate plea for some rampant buggery in a dirty motel room. Filthy, filthy McFly.

Other people there to witness the mind-numbing spectacle were:

"Imelda Staunton, Keeley Hawes, Lemar, Joanna Page, The Saturdays, The X Factor’s Stacey Solomon, Dervla Kirwan, Dermot O’Leary, Paul O’Grady, Fern Britton, Larry Lamb, Holly Willoughby and X Factor winner Joe McElderry."

Well, isn't that a cross section of absoulutely no-one of interest?

Michael's voice is boring. No matter what the backwards invalids in attendence will tell you, it is dull. If you are going to make vapid, empty pop music, at least make it interesting and fun. Like this:

His voice is, to paraphrase Derek Smalls, 'Like lukewarm water'. There is nothing of interest happening there. It's one tiny step away from being elevator music. Just thinking about it makes me want to fall asleep.

He is not funny. I hear him routinely described as 'cheeky'. Bollocks! His humour was predictable, forced and as dull as his voice. Not that this seems to have deterred his army of potential dowdy, middle aged cat horders. Facebook was alive with girls squealing about how funny and cute he is. Pffft, girls.

OMG U GUYS! I HEART BUBLE

Just because he made your gusset damp doesn't mean he is deserving of his own relentlessly tedious show. Find someone good to fancy. Like Rob Halford from Judas Priest.

In conclusion; Fuck this.

While this show was broadcast, people with taste were avoiding it, and people with even better taste were still coming to terms with the horrible loss of Ronnie James Dio.
Dio is as far away from Bublé as it's possible to be. A man who oozed passion, and lived for what he did. Sure what he did was sing about dragons and trolls while being 4ft high, but still, he believed in it in a way that most cannot comprehend. When anyone like that dies it is a genuine loss. At 67 many people would have packed up music, especially music as rigorous as heavy metal, but Dio plowed on, even through the initial stages of his battle with throat cancer.

While I was never a huge Rainbow or Dio fan, his loss has cetainly been felt, and music is less colourful without his presence. Rest In Peace Sir, we shall continue to ride the tiger for you.

(As I went to get the link for this video an ad for Bublé tickets popped up on screen. Stop mocking me you boring cunt!)