I’d heard of American Chopper, but I wasn’t really into the whole “Chopper” scene. I love a big-block Harley, but the ludicrous stretches, rises and rakes of these choppers just wasn’t for me. But then I ran out of American Hot Rods. I can’t remember the first bike I saw, but it could have been the first ‘web’ bike (aka the Black Widow bike). From then I was hooked. This family was seriously talented .. and just a little dysfunctional.

Five seasons later they’ve moved from a small room under the old iron works to a massive “world headquarters” via several, ever larger, other sites. You can buy their merchandise all over the world. The barista at my local cafe wears an OCC t-shirt. They count Russel Crowe amongst their friends.

Unfortunately, towards the end of S04 and the start of S05, they started to get a bit too commercial. Building bikes for corporations where the main reason the corporations was involved was to get the exposure on the TV series rather than to own a bike. I felt that corporate style-guides were dampening their creativity and talent.

I’m guessing they smelt the coffee though, because they are back. I just watched S03E26 and it was totally mad. Sure, the customer was a corporation (Schussler Creative who create concepts for tacky theme restaurants) but the bike wasn’t covered in logos. It was a fantastic interpretation of a 57 Chevvy convertible as a Chopper. This beats their web-bikes for creativity by far. This bike is truly amazing.

Puppets are a great way to convey a message and to captivate children. Jim Henson and his team reportedly spent millions surveying American children and discovered that children responded most to animals and puppets, but of course the man is most famous for two television programs: Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.

I, like everyone else, have my favorite moments from these shows, so after all that preamble, I thought I’d share mine.

The Muppet Show

1.The first of my favorite moments from the Muppet Show actually doesn’t feature the Muppets. At the end of Season 1, the Swiss mask/mime group Mummenshanz were the guest artist. Since first seeing this episode in the late 80’s, I’ve seen Mummenshanz live a Hamer Hall and they were just as incredible to watch. Here’s part 3 of their appearance on the Muppet Show back on the 30th of November 1976.

The team are now in their 70s and are still thrilling Audiences around the world.

2.I’ve got you under my skin

3.Any moment featuring Staedler and Waldorf

4.And of course, how can I leave out Kermit singing “It’s not easy being green”

Sesame Street

1.The Pinball Counting. The voices are The Pointer Sisters! WARNING: If you play this video, you will get this song stuck in your head for days.

2.Monsterpiece Theater — featuring a pipe-smoking Cookie Monster

3.Who are the people in your neighbourhood?

4.But my all-time-favorite Sesame Street moment has to be their ode to the “Letter B”

So, what are your favorite moments from the Muppets? Maybe it’s from one of their other shows like Fraggle Rock or Dinosaurs? Or maybe it’s some of the work they’ve done in the movies?

Once it ended, in typical Rick-and-Fatima style, we “postmortemed” the series up to ep3. We’re armchair experts after all.

So what do we think went wrong? The pilot had great cinematography, direction and casting. So did the following eps. What’s missing? The writing. Whoever is in charge of these writers needs to seriously get off this show and let some real talent get in there.

Warning: Spoilers follow

In the pilot (ep1) we meet Jaime Sommers, a bar-tender who’s gotten herself pregnant to her apparently lovely boyfriend. They’re in a road accident and it turns out he’s a bionic engineer. To save her life, he takes her back to the lab and turns her into the BW. She wakes up, gets pissed at him, walks out of the ‘top secret lab’ and goes home to her sister. Really nice introduction to the main characters.

But then it starts to fall apart. See there used to be another BW: Sarah Corvus. They killed her, but she’s somehow back from the dead and somehow she’s stolen the entire plot and beaten it to a pulp.

TV shows fall into three main groups: Episodic programs have no relationship to each other. For example: The Simpsons. Serial programs continue a single plot point through the entire series (Heroes), or even the lifetime of the show (Lost). The third group sits nicely in the middle: Each episode contains a single, resolved plotline but also has a sub-plot that winds its way into each episode (Boston Legal).

Bionic Woman tries to be the third. Each episode contains a resolved plotline: In ep2 it’s the town in Utah and in ep3 it’s the bitchy daughter of a weapons manufacturer. And then there’s the continuing sub-plot: Sarah Corvus.

The writers have made the fatal mistake of trying to make Sarah Corvus’ (incredibly boring) sub-plot into the main plot of each episode to the point that the resolved plotlines are dealt with in such a superficial manner that they’re laughable: In ep3, a couple of hours with the company shrink and witnessing a BW fight turns bitchy-daughter into a quivering sniveling mess.

OK, in case it isn’t clear yet: WE DO NOT CARE ABOUT SARAH CORVUS. AT ALL.

Writers: it is your job to make us care about her. You have failed. She’s hanging around with BW’s BF’s Father who we don’t know if he’s a ‘goody’ or a ‘baddy’ (Fatima, a media teacher, is always telling her students how important it is to be clear about who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist). She’s shaking like she’s coming off a heroin addiction and she keeps trying to claim that Jaime ‘needs her’. WE DO NOT CARE.

Please fix this balance before making any more episodes (though rumor says it’s done and dusted). If you’re going to talk about Sarah Corvus, you can have 10 minutes per 42 minute episode as the recurring plotline. Then you can have a few minutes to show Jaime interacting with her sister and a few to have her interacting with the other people at the company (Fatima says: “Enough of the fight-training already!”). The rest of the show should be the resolved plotline. It should be treated with respect rather than just an annoying thing you need to do each week. We want to see the BW kicking some baddie’s butt. We want her solving crimes and keeping the planet safe.

If you’re still with me, you’re probably going to leave after the next confession: We’re watching Australia’s Next Top Model on Fox8: “Ahh! We got Jody mail!”.

Still with me? OK, that’s the end of the confessions for now, but feel free to leave your own confessions in the comments section.

What’s disturbed me about these two ‘unscripted television’ (there’s nothing ‘reality’ about it really now, is there?) is that they both show bullying between participants. Of course the hosts, producers, judges and commentators all feign horror (as well they should) but the problem is that it makes it to the TV. If they’re really so horrified, why do they show it? Apparently because it’s ‘real’. It’s ‘what’s going on’. They don’t want to hide any of the ‘journey’ (puke!) from the audience.

I had to laugh at the absolute cynicism of Jhodi Mheares when she started a program with a studio direct-to-camera piece a week after a group of girls taunted another participant until they got a reaction. She wanted to assure us that she was horrified also and that we should call some organisation or another if we were the victim of bullying. All of a sudden we’re supposed to laud them for ‘talking about it’ rather than pretending it didn’t exist.

On Big Brother, we’ve seen the constant bullying of Travis-of-the-squeeky-voice. The so-called Spa Mafia enjoy picking on him and leading him to the point where he makes a fool of himself. They then claim they’re trying to ‘educate’ him and that they’re really his friends.

We’ve seen this same group of bullies decide that blonde bimbette Bridgette should not receive any of her clothes back from Big Brother as some sort of punishment for being upset that he took them in the first place. Hello? What sort of moron-logic is this? She was upset she lost them so she doesn’t deserve to get them back? Dixie put it well: Whatever Bridgette’s reaction, Dixie would rather see someone happy than sad.

Now on Friday, the Spa Mafia broke into the toilet where Travis-of-the-squeeky-voice was having a poo and doused him with shower gel. Apparently this sort of bullying is called a ‘Poo Party’, like a few years back the bullying was called a ‘Turkey Slapping’. Travis ended up in the hospital overnight with an eye infection, and the Spa Mafia just shrugged it off.

Enough is enough! If society shuns bullying as much as they’d like to claim, then it needs to be stopped. In all these cases producers were watching it happen, cameramen were filming it, editors packaged it, directors approved it and television channels screened it. I first lay the blame at the feet of the producers who told the cameramen to just keep filming. Bullying must be stopped at the very first instance. It is not acceptable in any situation. I then lay the blame at the television stations who chose to air it: how dare you use bullying to make your television shows interesting?

So do we tacitly approve of bullying after all, so long as it makes for ‘good television’? If it happens on the television, are we so used to thinking of the world-in-the-box as being constructed that we lose sight of the fact that on these shows, they are real people being bullied by real people?

It’s time to enforce some rules: Bullying is out, or you’re out. There’s no second chances or forum for excuses. If you’re bullying someone in one of these unscripted television programs, you’re evicted, eliminated, kicked off the island, handed a rose or whatever. Zero Tollerance. ZERO.

Anyway, I’m off to watch Gordon Ramsay lambast some poor shmuck on Hell’s Kitchen.

Enjoy!

Update

After posting this I’ve been pointed to a whole pile of ‘tributes’. Some are good (X-Factor, Toy Monkey, Smoke on the Water), some are crap (Eastenders, 50-cent) and some are just bleeding fantastic (Angry Monkey).