The return of Telly Addict. Can it really have been a whole week since the first “soft launch” broadcast pilot went live under my new roof at UKTV’s YouTube site? I have yet to wean myself off the “refresh” key, as it’s a new toy to me. There was no way of monitoring views on the Guardian website, but YouTube make it too easy to fixate and tap. We’re also under a whole new dictatorship of stats, so when I ask if you wouldn’t mind awfully clicking on “like” and “subscribe”, be gentle with me. I’m new here. It’s fortuitous that Celebrity Masterchef gets a nod this week. Regular viewers will know that I have no defences against this brand and have even succumbed to Masterchef The Professionals, thus swelling my portfolio. It’s a tired old dig to remark that you have not heard of some of the “celebrities” on Celebrity-prefixed formats, but having been on Celebrity Mastermind myself (I came second), I can hardly mither. Not knowing who this young gentleman was is my failing, not his.
He’s Marcus Butler, 24, and he has over 4.5 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, despite not enunciating his words very well. He seems nice enough. hey, I am over the moon to have had 817 views of the first Telly Addict. But give me time. (Oh, I watched the first of Marcus’s clips, and it seemed to be about him saying that men should be more empathic of women, and then trying to put on a pair of tights as if to prove what a hard life women have. It was pretty thin stuff.) I am not in competition with Marcus Butler. I’m not in competition with anybody. I review three or four programmes that I watched last week, which this week also includes: the series finale of Penny Dreadful (Sky Atlantic), the series finale of The Good Wife (More4), and, to please my UKTV overlords, the new series of format-of-formats Taskmaster (Dave), which I raved about on Telly Addict long before UKTV came to my rescue. Also, a tip of the hat to The Secret Life of a Bus Garage (ITV), which is on ITV Hub here. It’s a heart-warming, pre-Brexit vision of a functioning South West London multicultural utopia, in a place of work where 50 languages are spoken. I hope everybody we see on the show still has a job and has not started getting sly abuse from emboldened thickos.
Get clicking.
Telly Addict 
Taskmaster is one of the highlights of my week now – a show I make sure to watch “live”. Such a glorious blend of absurdity and genuine competition – with nothing and everything at stake.
And yes, the filming and editing is a marvel; there’s proper story-telling going on at times, and the occasional surrealism is allowed to flourish.
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I know the series director, a man called Andy, and he has also done many series of Bake Off, another show that pulls a wealth of material together to create narratives without anybody noticing the join.
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Wasn’t Jon Richardson’s take on 3 Blind Mice just brilliant?
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The Nursery rhyme task in the latest episode of Taskmaster was just brilliant. Loved 3 Blind Mice.
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I expect that you’ve heard of Brain Dead, the series by the same authors of the Good Wife. Have seen the first episode and it looks quite promising.
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I haven’t. But I’ll seek it out.
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Hi Andrew, enjoying the new/ reanimated Telly Addict and glad to see you’ve not changed too much. In the past I remember you reviewed Thirteen from BBC3 but that was also shown weekly on the terrestrial channels. Are you going to review any online only stuff? If so, I highly recommend Reggie Yates’s new documentary about spending a week in a US jail, ‘The Insider’. It really is excellent, and is perhaps the best I’ve seen of his increasingly interesting set of documentaries.
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