The Guardian has recently caused something of a stir with their rundown of 'TV's Most Criminally Overrated Shows'. If you've not read it, this basically reduces down to a list of ten relatively recent critical favourites, each unflinchingly 'debunked' by a columnist saying little more than 'my friends all liked it but when I watched it I didn't!!'. Meanwhile, quite what criminality is involved here is sadly not clarified.
The correct response to this and indeed anything like this, of course, is to ignore it as lazy 'outrage'-courting clickbait nonsense of the first order and just get on with holding your own opinion on the criminal overratees. After all, even if you find This Is England to be patronising misery-porn with distractingly glaring chronological inaccuracies, are bored senseless by The Walking Dead's 'edgy' rehashing of cliches that you saw in a million straight-to-video epics back when 'zombies' weren't quite so trendy, want to punch everyone involved in Lost for their smugness over that weak lemon drink con-trick of an ending, and aren't even entirely sure of what Downton Abbey actually is, you should at least be able to concede that this is entirely a matter of personal preference and that they are all genuinely in the top ten percent of television made in the digital age (if not ever in some cases), and on top of everything else should simply be able to come up with a better argument.
Except that they've now chosen to follow it up with a list of 'TV's Most Underrated Shows' - essentially a collection of uber-hip programmes that their friends haven't discovered yet and so are presumably OK to like, punctuated by Top Gear which at least gets talked about more than practically any other current TV show, and Time Trumpet, a misfiring sketch show that even hardcore fans of the participants would be hard pushed to describe as anything stronger than 'quite good'. True, you would hardly expect such a list to feature Colour Me Pop, The Secret Service, Ask The Family and Rik Mayall Presents, and indeed nor should it. There's not even anything particularly wrong with the majority of the actual choices on either list, just the smug, mock-'iconoclastic', I'm-in-a-secret-club-and-you're-not attitude underpinning the entire venture. Nobody needs to be told off for watching or not watching something. Unless it's Captain Butler.
Yes, that's all very well and good, as some shirty individual is probably already saying on Twitter, but I didn't like Mad Men either!!!!!8 so what are you going to about it eh eh? Well nothing, frankly, other than to suggest that maybe you read the first three paragraphs again. This has started off an interesting train of thought, though - what are the ten most popular programmes ever covered on here, and what do they say about what people really think is over-and-underrated in television? Probably very little if we're being honest about it, but you're getting that top ten and you're liking it. Doctor Who has been left out, though, as it quite obviously eclipses anything else by a long margin. Anyway, we're starting somewhat inevitably with...
10. Skiboy
Amazingly, when my feature on Skiboy first went up, there were quite a few accusations that it was all an elaborate hoax. Some suggested it might have been some kind of sophisticated satirical prank on the obscurer-than-thou element of archive TV enthusiasm, while others even named a couple of likely-sounding films that I might have lifted screengrabs from and pulled off some convincing Photoshop trickery. But no, it's a series as real as they come, and one that for all its flaws and ridiculousness I would love to see released on DVD in full; it's certainly more underrated than sodding Treme. And judging by the number of hits it continues to get, I'm not the only one.
9. This Life
A surprisingly high entry, given than on the whole posts about more 'modern' stuff never do even half as well, and that these days This Life seems to get at best written off as self-conscuiously trendy 'of its time' fluff and at worst to blame for any given malaise currently afflicting the broadcast industry. But within minutes of going live the link was being shared like crazy - certainly faster and more enthusiastically than the Ask The Family piece - which suggests that there's a silent majority out there who actually quite like it and aren't ashamed to say so. This Life probably wasn't too far away from that 'Most Overrated Shows' list. To which we say yah boo sucks, frankly.
8. Rentasanta
The week of in-depth features on seventies Children's BBC Christmas Specials was a huge success all round (well, apart from the one on Bod for some reason), and it's a format that's probably worth revisiting. But for some reason, the one about the little-seen feature-length Rentaghost Christmas Special went way beyond all the others, and is still hovering inside the top ten most viewed posts each week even now. Part of this can be explained by someone noticing that some of the panto costumes were actually recycled from Doctor Who And The Robots Of Death, but beyond that, presumably people just didn't remember it and REALLY wanted to know where Dobbin came from.
7. Buzzfax
This was actually technically the first part of an epic-length look at the Battle Of The Planets two-parter The Fierce Flowers, but the huge drop-off when it came to the (actually impressively viewed in themselves) instalments proper points towards it being the weird one-week-only Ceefax Linking Saturday Morning TV experiment that everyone was really interested in. There's probably a serious point to be made here about how these sort of odd one-offs were both more likely to get through and indeed more likely to be remembered in a pre-multichannel/streaming landscape, but probably everyone would just get huffy that you were dissing Joss Whedon or something.
6. Orbiter X
Not strictly a TV programme - well, not actually a TV programme at all - but the response to a bit of background detail on a creaky old radio serial that I thought only I was listening to was little short of phenomenal, widely shared and even picked up on by a couple of academic and archive literature sites. I'd deliberately tried to make it more than just a 'review' and give as much of a feel to the information on the context and production of the show as to the descriptions of the show itself, and this must presumably have struck some sort of a chord with people. I'd very much like to do more about forgotten old radio on here so this is a good incentive.
5. Days Like These
It took a long time to put together a decent comparison of the first episode of That 70s Show with its tepid point-missing ITV remake, and it first it seemed that this might have been wasted effort. Nobody really appeared to be that interested, and it was rapidly eclipsed by a jokey look at a couple of Doctor Who clippings from Radio Times that went up shortly afterwards. However it eventually took off and even Days Like These scriptwriter Sam Bain got in touch to say he'd enjoyed it. As an attempt to look at why a notorious TV flop didn't work rather than just sneering, I'm quite proud of it I have to say. But please don't try rehabilitating Days Like These.
4. The Mersey Pirate
For reasons that will become obvious if you scroll back a couple of posts, this look at the strange story behind ITV's most ill-advised idea for a Saturday Morning show ever wasn't exactly written in the brightest and most upbeat of circumstances, but in some ways that made me more determined than ever to turn it into an interesting and amusing account and I'd like to think that the staggering popularity it met with reflected this. Identifying which actual ferry Gerry Marsden was on in which promo film is probably verging on madness, but it's also the sort of detail that people seem to enjoy and which really gives an extra sense of depth. Yes, depth and The Mersey Pirate in the same sentence...
3. How Do You Do!
When I announced that I'd found some wiped episodes of this long-forgotten BBC children's show, some prat decided for no obvious reason that this meant I had found Doctor Who And The Power Of The Daleks and went around saying as such on various sodding forums, leading to badmouthing and threats when the 'truth' emerged. Other more general archive TV enthusiasts were unstinting in their gratitude. And then there were the massive number of teary-eyed late thirtysomethings who got in touch to thank me for letting them see Carmen, Greg and Miss King's Class again. Happy to be of service to all of you, including the mad Doctor Who fans.
2. Play School
Perhaps a bit of an obvious one, and also it's a 'score' based on a couple of posts combined (though even separately they'd still sneak into this list), but there's no getting away from the fact that both the look at the Christmas Eve edition from 1970 and the complete rundown of Play School and Play Away albums attracted massive interest from the off, as indeed did my trivia-drenched live-Tweeting of that edition that BBC4 repeated recently. While we really shouldn't be encouraging Hamble, perhaps this is an indication that Play School is a programme that the BBC really ought to be doing more to exploit?
1. Hardwicke House
Well, it looks as though more people want to see ITV's notoriously banned sitcom than perhaps anyone had expected. This is certainly true if you look at the sheer number of sites that have copied the content of my Hardwicke House pieces uncredited - only with more italics and exclamation marks! Scandalously, of course, it's still not available for ridiculous and quite possibly spurious reasons, which you can read more about here. And I say again, you may find my obsession with this show baffling (though I'm clearly not alone), but what possible good is being done for anyone by continuing to withhold it. There's your entire overrated, underrated, good, bad, best, worst list right there, Grauniad!
Although, as we've already established, there is one individual, whose many and varied adventures across time and space would apear, in terms of popularity at least, to have no equal:
Hang on a minute... Parky? What's he doing here?!
You can hear me talking to writer Rae Earl about Battle Of The Planets in an edition of Looks Unfamiliar here.
