“Lily Allen & Friends” Debuts, Is Sure To Fail
Lily Allen & Friends debuted on Tuesday night to a stream of skepticism, The Times‘ Adam Sherwin adding “Lily Allen reduced BBC Three’s average audience for the 10:30pm slot by some 200,000 viewers. The E4 channel attracted a higher share of the target youth audience during the evening. ITV2 attracted more viewers than Allen with an Arnold Schwarzenegger film.” Sherwin also notes that it “was billed as the first television show designed for the social networking generation. But not even Lily Allen could rescue the BBC’s latest attempt to lure the ‘youth’ market.”
While the show’s success rests on Allen’s ability to overcome her non-musical inabilities it also rests on that “social networking generation,” or more importantly – just who the heads at the BBC think the social networking generation may be. The first example of the show’s ineptitude comes in the form of Tay Zonday, who performed a brief rendition of Allen’s smash “Smile” following an equally unenlightening interview.
Call it a criticism on the state of entertainment, or at least an outsider’s view of what the term entertainment may mean in the context of BBC Three, but the sample in the following clip is not what television has the capability of being. The execution is dull, the material is dry, self-serving and unimaginative and for chrissake – is Cuba Gooding Jr. even remotely relevant anymore?! Even during the writer’s strike on this side of the Atlantic late night figureheads such as Stephen Colbert and Conan O’Brien have delivered segment after segment of brilliance – the majority of which subsequently drawing praise from the BBC’s target audience.
(via Heart on a Stick)
If one aspect from Lily Allen & Friends’ debut suggests a quick death to the show it would be the appearance of “YouTube legend” Tay Zonday. His appearance results in a moment of confusion rather than interest as it is honestly depressing to think that “Chocolate Rain” exclusives are still what’s being shat out of television producers’ think tanks months after the social networking generation started to lose interest. Rather than continuing to dig into Zonday (real name Adam Bahner)…though it irked me to no end how he attempted to describe “Chocolate Rain” as a universal theme whereas he once got it right, describing the song for what it is as “something silly”…I will conclude by saying that this show is doomed simply because the market that it is aiming for is in need of fresh, innovative entertainment and the show is certain to fail to deliver. This is a target audience that has no problem with moving on to something new because there is and will always be something more interesting out there and I’d like to think that I’m apart of such an audience…so much so that even I lost interest in this post about three hundred words ago.
Tay Zonday “Smile (02/12/2008)” (mp3)
(Official) (MySpace) (Wikipedia)
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Also: (Common featuring Lily Allen “Drivin’ Me Wild” Video) (Blondie & Lily Allen on The Today Show) (Lily Allen on Late Night with Conan O’Brien) (Lily Allen on SNL)
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i’m REALLY not interested in this….
nice end to the post – I was starting to lose interest by that point too!
should have said as well… I live in the UK, I’m 26 and caught a bit of this… looked like a lot of tosh to me… but then again I don’t really like or wtahc much TV anyway… which is perhaps part of the problem of marketing TV to the ’social networking generation’ (uuughhhhhh I hate that term!)
It was painful to watch. Lily Allen, as much as I enjoyed her music, isn’t as “graceful” when chatting to d-listers. She seemed to be quite bored by the whole thing herself. My guess is she will stop showing up for shoots in a few weeks like she did for her tour a year ago.
Haha, well, I actually never considered that option. It never dawned on me to think that if the show continues to suck that she’ll just give up. Very plausible though!
I think Tay wasn’t all that bad. Maybe he should have been on a “BETTER” show than Lily Allen and Friends. She laughed at him when she asked the first question. She acted like a high school student presenting their first report. She was nervous and very unprofessional. Tay shouldn’t had sung that song. It wasn’t even in his vocal register. I felt embarrassed for him. I think he is a phenomenally talented person, but this show did little justice for him. The previews of him reading the 80s pop hit was pretty cool and the tour of the Pinewood studios was excellent. Maybe if the show didn’t take Mr. Zonday as a joke…it would had went better.
How should the show’s producers have approached Tay, if not as a joke?
What type of question is that? Did you read my post? Obviously, you think he is a joke. If you actually watch some of his videos, he is quite talented. He even said that did not like the fact that the producer’s made him look like an idiot. The producer’s should have just let him sing a better song and given him alittle more respect….and maybe a better audience and hostess. I don’t know.
Quite the contrary – I don’t think Tay is a joke…it’s really unfair to call anyone that. Rather, I think he’s a novelty act. All the same, he is talented as you said…much like a number of other YouTube celebrities like Corey Worthington, Jessica Lee Rose and the Dramatic Chipmunk are talented.
Either way, it wasn’t the intent of this post to poke fun at Tay, but rather suggest the inevitable failure of this show.
Failure of the show is right. Novelty Act? Again, have you seen any of his other videos on Youtube? “Dramatic Chipmunk” is a novelty act because that damn chipmunk will NOT produce anything special past the 5 second video. What I am trying to say is not to categorize Tay as a “novelty act”. The guys got alot of talent.
Another thing…if you think that the “dramatic chipmunk” is talented …well hell, it doesn’t take much to please you.
It doesn’t take much to please me? Pot…kettle…black.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JPu4uErBFks
Let’s see the “dramatic chipmunk” do that. There are other good ones that day composed, sung, and created the video…”Chasing Eden”. You seem to like to point out the bad thing or what you call talentless.