Goggle Box returns

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Silent1

19,761 posts

234 months

Wednesday 29th October 2014
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Oakey said:
article said:
Witty comments by families watching the box are scripted by producers, says the cast member.

The telly watchers are also allegedly warned in ­advance about which scenes to be “shocked about”.

And each Channel 4 show is filmed on just one night with participants watching hours of back-to-back recordings.
That would explain the massive amount of takeaway the two black women have
I thought that was common knowledge, this article mentions it and quite a bit more it's an interview with Bill Hartston - Cambridge Evening News - Cambridge Gogglebox star Bill Hartston on how - and why - the hit TV show works

The Article said:
Gogglebox - the TV show where we watch people watching TV (keep up!) - has taken the nation by storm. Ahead of tonight's new series and a special Gogglebox book signing next week, EMMA HIGGINBOTHAM catches up with Cambridge’s very own goggler, William Hartston

He's a Cambridge maths graduate, a chess champion, an erudite author and a national newspaper columnist. But let's face it, if you recognise William Hartston it's almost certainly because you've seen him sitting alongside his pal Josef - and a pair of enormous painted breasts - on the hit Channel 4 show Gogglebox.

The phenomenally popular (and BAFTA award-winning) programme returns for a fourth series tonight, which is why I'm dialling a London number to speak to Bill - who's currently in Gogglebox's production office - rather than knocking on the door of his Cambridge home.

“YO!” booms a voice down the line; not quite the greeting I’d expected from the acclaimed super-brain. After confirming that it is him, I ask whether I should call him Bill or William. “I don’t know,” he muses. “The thing that inclines me towards William is that 'William Hartston' is an anagram of ‘It thrills a woman’.”

Crikey. Maybe let's stick to Bill.

If you’re not familiar with Gogglebox, it goes something like this. A collection of different households are filmed watching TV shows from the previous week – comedies, news reports, dramas, you name it – and chat between themselves about what they're seeing. Yes, we're literally watching them watching telly.

It sounds ridiculously dull, but somehow it just works. Laugh-out-loud funny, heart-warming and occasionally very moving, it gives the viewer a glimpse into the lives of ordinary folk around the country - be they homosexual hairdressers, blended families, tipsy posh folk or, like our Bill and Josef, a couple of boffins.

It's addictive too, attracting an audience of a whopping four million every Friday, which could explain why Bill's having to get used to being recognised in the street. But does he mind? Not a jot.

“It’s fun!” says Bill, who's far bouncier than he seems on TV. “It’s a nice level of fame. Once a woman said to me ‘Excuse me, are you the man from Gogglebox?’ and I said ‘Why are you watching such rubbish?’ And she said ‘Oh it’s my favourite programme! And knowing you’re from Cambridge – it makes us so proud’. I thought about mentioning the 81 Nobel Prizes that Cambridge has won, and I thought hmm, maybe not...”

It’s all Josef’s fault that Bill is on Gogglebox. Both board game addicts (World Cluedo Champion Josef has a collection of 800 board games, while Bill played chess competitively for 25 years), they met two decades ago on a charity walk around London's Monopoly sites, and have been firm friends ever since.

“After the first series of Gogglebox, which was quite a success, they decided they could improve it by having a couple of rational people rather than purely emotional ones,” explains Bill. “I think the producer already knew Josef, and they decided that he was rational and eccentric, which is a nice combination. So he was asked if he’d be interested in being on it.”

Josef agreed, and asked his wife to join him, “but she said that she didn’t want to be within a mile of it, so he asked me. I said ‘Is it total nonsense?’, and he said ‘I think so’, and I said ‘Yes, then. Fine’.”

Producers visited Bill’s house to interview the pair, “and I think they liked the painting on my wall rather more than they liked me.” Ah yes, the famous boobies. “It’s beautiful,” he sighs. “We’re not an elderly gay couple, as I gather the internet thinks! I love the incongruity of us appearing as a gay couple with this distinctly un-gay picture behind us.”

If you've ever wondered how the programme's done, pay attention: once a week, a production team descends on Bill’s Willow Walk house, and sets up a mobile 'control room' in the room above his lounge, with meters of wires snaking down to two remote cameras pointing at Bill and Josef (the latter having driven for three hours from his Southampton home to be there). Nobody else is in the room as they watch their allotted programmes, some of which are live, some on DVD.

“They do their best to make things as natural for us as possible, and I think we act fairly normally,” says Bill, although he admits that there are mild 'cheats': “The trouble is that they’re encouraging us to talk all the time, which rather interferes with watching the thing, so we tend to miss quite a lot of what’s going on. So sometimes, particularly with news items, we watch them and give an initial reaction, and then they will play them again.”

The whole process takes between four and seven hours, “a whole day really. But I enjoy it, because I actually watch very little television, and it gets me watching things that would normally make me flee from the room.” Such as? “X Factor, anything with dancing in it… actually almost anything.”

Especially, it seems, Through the Keyhole with Keith Lemon: “It’s an appalling programme!” bellows Bill. “And he instantly became one of my least favourite people on television. I said when it was on, ‘Oh no, they’re going to go into some D-list celebrity’s home that I’ve never heard of’, and that’s what they did.”

Is there anything he does like? “I watch The Big Bang Theory - Josef says there’s no difference between Sheldon and me, certainly in terms of pedantry - and Saturday Kitchen, which is wonderful.” And Gogglebox? “Sometimes, but more to watch the other families.” And it doesn’t, he insists, feel strange seeing his fizog on screen: “Long, long ago I did lots of chess programmes for the BBC, so no.

“But I’m always amazed at the lines they actually use compared with the other brilliant lines that I utter,” he adds with a twinkle. “The one great disappointment was when we were watching Mastermind, and there was a guy whose specialist subject was the chess player Bobby Fischer. I was just rattling off the answers; in fact I scored one more than the guy on it! But they didn’t use any of that in the programme, because it didn’t go with the rather bemused looks from everybody else.

“There was a funny moment in that one when one of the families said ‘Who on earth sets the questions for these?’ and it cut immediately to me saying ‘I set the questions for this once…’”

Originally from London, 67-year-old Bill “wasted my youth playing chess” before coming to Cambridge to read Maths at Jesus, “and I then stayed on at Cambridge for several years not doing a PhD, but writing chess books instead, so it never got completed. I like to think that Maths and I grew fed up with each other and amicably separated.”

He bought his house in the mid-70s, but ended up letting it and moving to London where he carved out a career as a chess player, commentator, author of assorted brainy books and writer of the Daily Express's surreal comedy Beachcomber column, which has run since 1919. Twice married (and currently separated) with two grown-up sons, he returned to Cambridge eight years ago “when I needed to flee London and hide. We won’t go into that.” (National TV isn't a brilliant hiding place, Bill. Just saying).

He's also renowned for coming up with a formula to pick Grand National winners, after being commissioned by William Hill. “I know nothing about horse racing,” admits Bill, “so I did this analysis based entirely on the names of the horses. I made these extraordinary discoveries, like horses with 8 and 10 letters in their names tend to do much better, but there’s a great dip on 9; and also horses beginning with the letter R have done better than any other.”

This year his two predictions came 7th and 8th, “which was as good as any other tipster! I’ve done it twice now, and I have some ideas for how to refine the formula for next year.” He laughs. “We’ll get there eventually.”

Bill’s never met any of the other Goggleboxers, but feels he’d get on well with “the allegedly posh couple, the drunken pair – they’re fun, they’re bright, they’re interesting. The rest I love watching because they’re just so ridiculous.

“I once went on a course for comedy writing for television, and they said that the key to a good sitcom is defining your characters very well and leaving them to do the writing for you. In particular, you must define them to be examples of just slightly over-the-top human archetypes.”

And that, he says, is exactly what they have in Gogglebox: “They’ve taken people who exemplify all the faults of the average viewer, but taken one step beyond towards eccentricity and emotionality. So people can laugh at themselves because everybody they see on it is just a little bit more ridiculous than they are.

“That’s why it works,” he muses. “The whole thing is basically a sort of sitcom.”

Gogglebox is on Channel 4 tonight (Friday) at 9pm.

On Wednesday, Bill and Josef will be at Waterstone’s to sign copies of the new Gogglebox book. It’s part of a mass Gogglebox signing in which the show’s stars will scribble ‘Best wishes’ at bookshops up and down the country (so popular is the show that they’ve staggered the signings to give fans the chance to visit more than one location). The book, The World According to Gogglebox (Canongate, £18.99), includes behind-the-scenes titbits about the cast, courtesy of two comedy scriptwriters who interviewed every household. “They were great fun; they chatted with us at great length,” says Bill. “I think they should have called it ‘Gogglebook’, though.”

The event is at Waterstone's, Sidney Street, Cambridge on October 1 at 6pm. Call (01223) 351688 for details.

iva cosworth

44,044 posts

162 months

Friday 31st October 2014
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4 minutes gone and Leon is moaning.

No change there then !

poing

8,743 posts

199 months

Friday 31st October 2014
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I think we'd all be witnesses at the trial if his long suffering wife murdered him, nobody can really blame her.

iva cosworth

44,044 posts

162 months

Friday 31st October 2014
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Seem to be watching light hearted telly again now.

CH4 read this thread.

Antiques Roadshow.

The Queen Tweeting on the News.

Countdown.

iva cosworth

44,044 posts

162 months

Friday 31st October 2014
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And now "24 hours in A and E"....all serious again.

This was only on TV yesterday and not happy viewing .

iva cosworth

44,044 posts

162 months

Friday 31st October 2014
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How dare they moan about Stevi Ritchie on X factor ?

1.He's having a LOT of fun.

2.He's from Colchester I believe.

3.He just performed with about 7 hot dancers.

Who cares if he can't sing and dad dances.

poing

8,743 posts

199 months

Friday 31st October 2014
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I use Goggle Box to give me my weekly summary of x-factor so that I don't have to watch it.

anonymous-user

53 months

Friday 31st October 2014
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Robbie Williams - what a tosspot.

greygoose

8,224 posts

194 months

Saturday 1st November 2014
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Symbolica said:
Robbie Williams - what a tosspot.
Completely, has there ever been a more blatant example of attention seeking?

FiF

43,957 posts

250 months

Saturday 1st November 2014
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Agreed Robbie Williams utter tit.


LOL'd at the Michaels dad asking the driving question, the most basic of questions : "Dunno where's the answers? "
FFS

We reckon we're closest to the Siddiqui family, sitting analysing stuff accompanied by a fair bit of piss taking.

Our theory as to why June agreed to take part is to acquire enough footage for her defence in the forthcoming trial when she shanks Leon. No jury would convict.

iva cosworth

44,044 posts

162 months

Friday 14th November 2014
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Dom said:
It's America,they haven't seen pubic hair since 1983
LOL.

greygoose

8,224 posts

194 months

Saturday 15th November 2014
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The three Asian men discussing the dangers of launching a drone from their house was amusing.

nicanary

9,749 posts

145 months

Saturday 15th November 2014
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The Malones :- the look on his face when his missus said she was going to get a handbag hanger! We've all been there, mate. They're unfathomable. Meanwhile, she sat there with the dog's nose up her quim.

BTW which one of the biskwits is missing from the box? The selection was full except for one empty tray. It must be a really good one.

Edited by nicanary on Saturday 15th November 13:19

Antony Moxey

8,014 posts

218 months

Saturday 15th November 2014
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nicanary said:
The Malones :- the look on his face when his missus said she was going to get a handbag hanger! We've all been there, mate. They're unfathomable. Meanwhile, she sat there with the dog's nose up her quim.

BTW which one of the biskwits is missing from the box? The selection was full except for one empty tray. It must be a really good one.

Edited by nicanary on Saturday 15th November 13:19
I did laugh at his comment about not wanting to live in a nudist colony as he'd miss walking about with his hands in his pockets.

The Don of Croy

5,975 posts

158 months

Saturday 15th November 2014
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greygoose said:
The three Asian men discussing the dangers of launching a drone from their house was amusing.
...and the following comment that the drones normally go towards the asians...

Lipstick on the bottle? You don't mind when it's on your dick...Steph steals the show again.

nicanary

9,749 posts

145 months

Saturday 15th November 2014
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WTF was it that Steph and Dom were drinking? "fk me, that's good!" A hint of vanilla, an aroma of toffee - what the f's "toffee vodka"? Sounds like a good night though.

FiF

43,957 posts

250 months

Saturday 15th November 2014
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Available in Tesco, apparently.

nicanary

9,749 posts

145 months

Sunday 16th November 2014
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nicanary said:
The Malones :- the look on his face when his missus said she was going to get a handbag hanger! We've all been there, mate. They're unfathomable. Meanwhile, she sat there with the dog's nose up her quim.

BTW which one of the biskwits is missing from the box? The selection was full except for one empty tray. It must be a really good one.

Edited by nicanary on Saturday 15th November 13:19
To satisfy my OCD I just had a look at the biskwits segment (my daughter is watching our recording) and the missing items are milk-chocolate triangular shaped ones. I think they're either digestive or wafer.

They left all the others but ate all those ones. Unless the dogs had them.

iva cosworth

44,044 posts

162 months

Saturday 22nd November 2014
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Leon wants to punch Ant n Dec.

Dom dreamt of Jennifer Aniston s lady garden which displeased Steph.

Stevie Ritchie is still awesome on X factor.......biglaugh

nicanary

9,749 posts

145 months

Sunday 30th November 2014
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The Malones - did you see the size of the chocolate gateau portions they had laid out?

How many dogs? I've counted 4 adults, and now the puppy as well. That house must stink.

PS That Moffatt girl can't even cut paper with scissors. That's taught to you at Primary school. I hope she doesn't drive.

Edited by nicanary on Sunday 30th November 15:13