Che scandalo!

A British TV presenter has recently come under fire for wearing 'racy and revealing' outfits on a family show which is aired on Sunday evenings in the UK. Holly Willoughby has apparently been horrifying the public by demonstrating proof that she is female by showing cleavage and wearing a backless dress. Mamma mia! I love this story - it is very English and a great antidote to the topless images we see here everyday on the lunchtime news. In what could easily be a homage to the classic Letters to the Editor section of The Times "Disgruntled from Doncaster" etc, one viewer commented in the Daily Mail:

"My husband and I have great fun trying to bet how low her top will be each week. She does struggle to keep them in, doesn't she?"

The article goes on to say:
"Others suggested Miss Willoughby's revealing wardrobe was far from suitable for Sunday night family viewing."

When I think of the lunchtime “news” programme “Studio Aperto”, and its daily reports on who’s stripping off for a raunchy calendar shoot, complete with images of the shoot itself (strictly for journalistic purposes of course!), I can’t help but smile at the “scandal” which poor Holly has brought about. I wanted to include some pictures of Italian TV presenters showing their assets, but 1) I can’t get the photo thing to work properly, and 2) the pictures that I found on the web are mostly too pornographic for my innocent little blog (seriously!). Do a google image search for Simona Ventura, Elisabetta Canalis, Ilary Blasi, or – scraping the bottom of the barrel – Le Veline, and you’ll see what I mean!

I take it back!!

Having waxed lyrical about the comedy show Zelig, I have to say that last Friday's episode was awful - it was 80% Claudio Bisio (who I personally don't find very funny) singing out of tune, and lacked the proper stand-up routines from previous weeks. They must have run out of money to pay their performers or something! Just in case anyone saw it and wondered what the hell I was talking about....

SKY's the limit....

Don't get me wrong - I don't enjoy being ill, much less missing all the "fun" I could be having in the office (ha ha) but there is one thing that eases the pain greatly, and that is Sky TV ALL DAY LONG. Or, to be precise, Fox Life, BBC Prime and Discovery Real Time. I just watched two episodes of the American series "So you think you can dance?" - I was drawn to it originally as it's hosted by the lovely Cat Deeley, who I remember fondly from the hangover-haze that was my university years, when she co-hosted the Saturday morning kids' show SM:TV Live with Ant and Dec. Ahhhhh how I miss Ant and Dec - none of their current programmes seem to have made it to BBC Prime yet, and Bruce Forsythe on Strictly Come Dancing is all very well, but just not the same. If you are not English you will probably have fallen asleep by now so I will get back to the point.

I'd love to say that I don't buy into these reality "Pop Idol" / "X Factor" / "Make a fool of yourself to entertain the masses"- style programmes, but the truth is I get easily hooked. There's something strangely addictive about watching real people's real struggles, talents, and geniune emotions.... I've even found myself welling up over a quiz show when one of the contestants picked the number 14 as he married his wife on the 14th of the month and had been married for 14 years. Sad but true. Aside from reality / talk shows, I find myself getting emotional over any TV show that reminds me of home and / or my childhood. Mary Poppins dubbed into Italian, without Dick Van Dyke's classic mid-Atlantic cockney accent is just not the same...

There is only one programme on Italian TV that I will watch and enjoy, and that is the stand-up comedy show Zelig, which is currently being shown on a Friday night at 21:00 on either Canale 5 or Italia 1 - I can't remember which. Since Luca and I have turned a bit middle-aged, and now stay at home on a Friday night as we're too tired to go out, Zelig has provided us with our end of the week entertainment and often has us rolling around clutching our stomachs in hysterics. Last week the show-stopper for me was a singer who took the p**s out of Tiziano Ferro quite spectacularly. Neither Luca nor I can stand Tiziano Ferro so it made us laugh even more. And this is the only example that you will ever see of me praising anything on Italian TV. OK, I like Le Iene too, I admit it. That's all though. This post is not going to degenerate into a rant about the dancing quiz show girls, or the amount of cleavage shown by news readers, although it easily could. Suffice to say I miss English / American TV and whilst I know it "rots your brain" ( in my mum's words ), I am appreciating this one-off all-day I'm-sick-so-I-can-do-what-I-like TV extravaganza...