TOWIE Live: the worst thing on TV ever?
The Only Way is Essex's hapless attempt at a live broadcast wasn't just bad television; it was barely television at all
Like me, you might have naively blundered into last night's The Only Way Is Essex Live in search of answers. The machinations of structured reality shows such as TOWIE have always been murky, with viewers never really knowing how much of anything is a setup, so watching an episode that deliberately stripped away a few levels of artifice seemed like it would be a fascinating experiment in curtain-peeking. Then it started and, like me, you might have instantly wondered what the hell you were thinking.
If you missed it, there are barely any words to describe how awful TOWIE Live was. I'd suggest that you watch it on catchup, but I don't want to be billed for all the televisions and laptops that it'd make you destroy in a fit of frustration and despair. Maybe a comparison would help. Remember the live EastEnders episode from 2010 that was ridiculed because one actor forgot his lines and another was briefly seen jamming his fingers down his throat? Compared with TOWIE Live, that was Citizen Kane.
It really shouldn't have been that hard. At heart, The Only Way is Essex is a show about identical-looking people making utterly pointless small talk in precisely the same disinterested monotone for an hour. It's an undemanding, often quite charming way to spend an evening. And yet TOWIE Live represented some of the most embarrassing television in living memory. It was like watching Keith Chegwin from Naked Jungle presenting Minipops on the back of the elephant that crapped everywhere on Blue Peter that time. Cast members endlessly rabbited over each other. Entire scenes went by without any audible dialogue. Some scenes started with people looking offscreen for their cue from the floor manager, who was probably too busy drafting his resignation letter in his head to care. Most scenes would cut off mid-sentence, sometimes even mid-word.
Not that that was necessarily a bad thing. Stripped of the airless staging and careful editing that characterises regular episodes of TOWIE, the cast were all revealed to be incomprehensible mumblers of the very worst order. In one scene, two people did their best to work out whether they'd ever slept together or not. In another, two more people nattered about what they saw the other one do on the previous night's episode of The Only Way is Essex. Hopefully this isn't the way of things, because that means at some point they'll have to reference last night's live episode on the show, and I don't think I could take their tortured yowls of realisation. The entire show was supposed to culminate in a gripping will-they-won't-they marriage proposal scene, but that was rendered absolutely meaningless because the proposer was more interested in gnawing the side of his finger and gibbering a string of barely audible half-words at his knees.
Worse yet, all this chatter was merely window-dressing for the episode's main device: a cabaret show attended by everyone from Essex. Everyone. Minor cast members. Someone who looked like Colin Farrell, if you squinted, got really drunk and pretended that it was 2003. Pat Sharp, looking for all the world like a man punishing himself for unspeakable crimes. All gathered together to watch an asthmatic version of Singin' in the Rain, a handful of meaningless dance numbers and about 45 minutes of discordant, avant-garde pieces of Artaudian performance art. Presumably the show ended with everyone who has ever been involved with The Only Way is Essex forming a circle around the Bafta they won last year and taking turns to urinate on it. I don't know. This was TOWIE Live. The scene cut off in the middle.
It's hard to say if the TOWIE Live disaster will kill The Only Way is Essex, or the recent fad for live episodes. If there's any justice in the world, it'll kill both. This wasn't good television. It wasn't even so-bad-it's-good television. It was barely television. Technically, creatively and professionally, it was a complete failure. We can't let them get away with this. But first, I'm going to need every copy of the show so I can bury them in the desert. Our unborn descendants don't need to know this ever happened.
