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| TV,
Jeremy Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F5
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Saturday mornings can be the deadliest of times for today's toddlers. Get up too early and you’re trapped in a zone of poor toy franchise cartoons, leave it too late and you’re stuck with sport. The time in between has long been designated for The Big Fun shows. Years ago, the likes of mini-myself was being entertained by a deadly cocktail of Noel Edmonds, Pop bands, and Pink Panther cartoons on Swap Shop. The last two years had seen some real dogs at the weekend. When it comes to the point you’re watching a crudely animated Dragon talking to a blank faced Pop non-entity over a shaky pre-recorded link (ITV’s summer 1999 morning show), you know standards have been sucked round the U-bend.
But this latest ITV effort is fuelled by the unstoppable force that is Ant and Dec, and these boys rarely fail – unless you count that bad, bad xmas song. It’s well documented that your modern kids TV presenter is a younger, ‘hipper’, better looking breed that your Cheggers, and Chris Tarrants of yesteryear. But the Achilles heel of these bubble-eyed bouncy kids is often their inexperience, and for flashes between the boy-band interviews and cartoon introductions you’ll often catch the look of fear and unease in their eyes. Flick over to the Greenies running ‘Live and Kicking’ for prime examples of this.
So you’ve got the pint-sized old hands whose rapport with the kids, bands and ‘you at home’ is peerless. You have healthy doses of ‘Pokemon’ and ‘Sabrina’, you get the hour-long live Pop bonanza ‘CD:UK’, a couple of jolly phone-in competitions and some hit-and-miss comedy skits (the weird school flashback ‘Dec says’, the grim laughless ‘Chums’), and you get Cat Deeley. Ahhh, Ms Deeley, who started out sticking out like a sore thumb, but now has absorbed savoir-faire off the boys and plays through the show like a pro. All this and Steps seem to appear every two weeks like it’s written into their contract, so it’s full thumbing up from my end of the sofa.
ITV Sat 9.20 BST
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