MTV is free for a month on Telewest Essential, and as a result I stumbled across "Pimp My Ride UK" (Sunday 5:30pm). God help me.
Basically, the point of this programme is that celebrities with supposedly "clapped out" cars get an OTT make-over by (Tim) Westwood and a bunch of blinged-out morons – in this case, the one I'm watching is making over a black cab owned by ex-Happy Mondays dancer (and Celebrity Big Brother winner) Bez, and turning it into a psychedelic nightmare.
These are people who think putting 42" plasma screens in the back of a black cab is a good idea; they make the interior of the car look like a 70s disco with leopardskin and garish red leather; they add eight power amps and twenty speakers in the rear (in reality, it'll sound like a bassed-out nightmare); they put a DJ booth in where the front passenger seat used to be (a cheap mixer and a HP laptop running NI Traktor) and to cap it all off they paint the cab purple. Purple. A bad purple, at that.
So now we've established that the design is frigging awful, defiling the classic London cab – pretty much deserving of Bez, to be honest – what do I think of the show? It's unbelievably awful – no-one actually needs a video camera in the rim unless you're James Bond, Westwood is as annoying as he is on the radio, and everyone talks in an obviously faked "wazzup?" lingo.
And that's not going into the implications of referring to something as being "pimped up"; especially since, unless you're really rich, you're going to have to sell your sister to be able to afford such a makeover. People think that doing something like this will make them admired, whereas in reality they'll just look like a prat. And their peers tell them to do it.
No, it's a stupid, stupid, stupid show. And like most stupid shows, it's watchable in an open-mouthed way. Happily it's blatant enough that everyone should see that Westwood's a fake prat and Bez is a prat and the car is a Bad Thing, and the craze will burn itself out. We can only hope.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 