Channel 5

Some people still cannot receive Channel Five where they live. While they may moan about it, they don’t know how lucky they are. I’m not sure what the competition comprised of when C5 won the right to broadcast, but it must have been pretty awful. What follows is my first completely negative review of a TV station. If you like C5, it’s best you look away now or prepare to be offended.

If C5 has one redeeming feature it is that few people are actually stupefied enough to watch it. Its viewing figures are awful, only just better than the subscription-based Sky One, a channel that offers marginally better programming. Its only other redeeming feature is that it has news on the hour, but with its horribly tasteless and bright graphics and studio, it is sore on the eye to watch. And when I have BBC News 24 I know where my zapper turns for news bulletins.

And that’s as far as C5’s redeeming features reach. The last Tory government might have been convinced that the controllers of C5 could offer the nation a sufficient service, but maybe that’s an adequate summing up of the reign of Major and his pack of publicly schooled imbeciles. There is no TV station that I receive that is worse than C5 and I can back this up in court if need be.

Part of the station’s promise in its beginnings was to bring a movie a night. It doesn’t take Barry Norman and Eddie George to figure out that C5’s budget would equate to them only being able to afford Made-For-TV movies, in turn leading to shite movies…every night. For some reason they all seem to be true stories about a mother’s search for her kidnapped daughter or a daughter’s search for her long-lost mother. These movies are invariably called "Help Me Find My Daughter" or "In Search of Mom". Moving stuff, I can tell you.

C5 also offers soap operas. Most of these are American affairs made on a budget smaller than Partick Thistles like The Bold And The Beautiful and the cult tripe Sunset Beach. It also offers its own home-grown soap, Family Affairs. The last time I watched this show, they still hadn’t blown up all the main characters, so I’m unsure of the ‘plot’, if it can be blessed with such a description, at present.

In terms of sport the channel used to offer a football show called Turnstlye on Saturday mornings. Scarily, they have the rights to every Ireland and Scotland away fixture, so without RTE here in Scotland, I’ll have to watch their truly awful coverage with the ever annoying Jonathan thingy. They also seem to offer crappy American sports in the middle of the night, not to cater for minorities but because it’s all they can afford.

Clogging up the graveyard schedules with American sports means that C5 has no time to show soft pornography…during the night. Instead this ‘entertainment’ has filled their primetime airwaves. So C5 certainly caters for paedophiles and people with sex fetishes when most of us are tucking into our dinners.

C5 seems to model itself on it’s Americanised counterpart Sky One, but without the odd big American show, it has absolutely nothing to offer. Like Sky and ITV it enjoys bringing us such hilarious gems as America’s Biggest Tidal Waves and Africa’s Longest Famines (probably). There’s nothing like watching human beings die in the face of disaster eh?

During the day it could be argued that C5 is little worse than anyone else. Daytime schedules seem to be designed to get the unemployed back to work. And with Leeza and Gloria Hunniford to digest (no, not literally) just after breakfast, I know what I’d rather do.

This has been my shortest TV review so far, but that’s because I have so little to say about this channel. I could write paragraphs blaming the Tories for unleashing this horror, but would it do any good. I honestly think I’ll rearrange my channels so that C5 doesn’t even need to be skipped over anymore. If you can’t receive C5, you my friends, are truly blessed.