Second Chances

‘TV can give celebrities a new lease of life when their original career has petered out.Tonight, we’ve got Suggs on Salvage Squad (Channel 4 8pm), seeing if he and his team can repair a 1950s Massey Harris 780 combine harvester.

Suggs is known to an entire generation as the nutty boy leader of Madness, the ska band who sang about Baggy Trousers and sailing across the sea to see Uncle Sam.

How times change: now Suggs wears overalls and Uncle Sam comes to see us on a high-speed jet - sometimes with bombs attached to it.

Meanwhile, on BBC2 at the same time, Terry Jones is leading us through his Medieval Lives. This week the former Monty Pythoner is investigating the role of monks in the Middle Ages.

This is history as “tremendous good fun”. Terry, a comedian by repute, tells us about something most of us find dull, so making it less dull and entertaining.

To some degree Jones succeeds. Indeed, Suggs makes a decent fist of passing himself off as a man with a working knowledge of the mechanics of farm machinery.

But you still can’t help pining for the real experts. What did happen to the Open University-type boffins who used to pop up on BBC2 in the early hours?’

Posted: 16th, February 2004 | In: Big Brother TV Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink