Celebrities, they’re just like us, eh? Not really, but they love trying to be. There’s a trend among the rich and ridiculous of denying their entertaining Marie Antoinette antics and attempting to appear “normal” – like the bloke who modifies his accent when chatting to the taxi driver.
Now, to counteract Gwyneth Paltrow and her magical vaginal eggs, we must suffer Jennifer Lawrence and her ilk fetishising our dull lives. The outlandish want to appear unaffected and enjoy a cheap holiday in our mundanity.
Under the guise of charity, Channel 4 has again given stars the opportunity to behave like us povs on the celebrity version of Gogglebox. There’s a host of familiar faces all vying to out-ordinary each other, especially when watching posh-nosh chef Nigella Lawson’s new show. Deliberately misunderstanding an array of ingredients, singer Example (sat with pop’s most average star, Ed Sheeran) accuses professional food writer Nigella of suffering from first-world problems for owning more than one kind of chili. This is the same bog-standard Example who is married to an ex-Miss Australia and is making a documentary about the “subcultures of the supercar world”.
Coddled eggs
Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn is awkwardly perched alongside Spaced actress Jessica Hynes chatting about how to make his favourite coddled eggs, possibly not the best choice of breakfast food for a Labour MP man-of-the-people to rhapsodise over. Even Ed Miliband grappling with a bacon sandwich was grittier. Sporting bros Freddie Flintoff and Jamie Redknapp are one spray of Lynx away from the locker room, laughing at their own laddish innuendos: a catalogue of rejected Men Behaving Badly jokes.
Thankfully, there is joy to be found with Liam Gallagher and Ozzy Osbourne, although unfortunately not in the same room. The two "wild men" are the most down-to-earth. Ozzy, the first man of reality telly, is as natural as ever, wibbling on about coyotes and almost erupting listening to University Challenge questions. Liam is the pithy cousin at Christmas-time. Gogglebox is his domain as the cameras don't need to be rolling for him to criticise: this could be an average evening chez Gallagher jnr, who is a fan of all kinds of telly, as his addiction to Love Island this summer proves. This is a less-sweary Gallagher, conscious of his Irish mammy Peggy by his side, but he still manages to rustle up some magic moments – a kinship with a fish with an overly-large cranium on Blue Planet being a highlight.
Exposing body parts
There probably won't be a celebrity version of Walk of Shame Shuttle (E4), where impossibly photogenic drivers for a pretend taxi company ferry youngsters home from their supposed nights out, while hearing shocking tales of debauchery usually involving exposing body parts in a Rotherham nightclub.
It's Graham Norton's red-chair segment but on four wheels and sadly minus the ejection lever. This is no fly-on-the-wall show where garlic chips are guzzled and quickly regurgitated, but rather a Tattoo Fixers-style scripted effort that ends up being more tiresome than any real taxi journey home, with or without any dodgy accents.
