Mad Monk

By | January 7, 2014

It’s fair to say that friend of the Bar Gary Monaghan has made his fair amount of rubbish television (I think he basically admits as much) but at the same time he’s also been responsible for lots of quite groundbreaking exciting stuff like Banzai. Judge for yourself which is which on Mad Monk’s new site, featuring clips from shows that have made it to air and perhaps more interestingly, the pilots that didn’t. Some of which are a bit rude, so be warned.

I’m mildly thrilled to discover he worked on (in fact featured prominently in) TV Mayhem with Chris Evans because it was brilliant and I don’t know of anyone else who remembers it.

In other news here’s an episode of Give Us A Clue starring Celebrity Big Brother‘s Lionel Blair from 1979. Michael Aspel would have made a brilliant Professor Layton, no?

27 thoughts on “Mad Monk

    1. Mart with a Y not an I

      That’s except for viewers in the UK, where EMI appear to have claimed rights on the soundtrack, and YT have blocked it on these shores.
      Isn’t the inter web great sometimes..?

      Reply
      1. Brig Bother Post author

        Hold on, try watching it on a PC, I’ve noticed this a bit recently where things are blocked on mobile devices but work fine on desktops.

        Reply
  1. David

    I’ve always wanted to see an episode of Hercules- I remember the descriptions of the tasks Brig wrote up…

    Reply
  2. Clive of Legend

    I have somehow managed to pick two pilots in a row with full frontal male nudity.

    I’m surprised Crazy World of Russel Brand didn’t get picked up. suppose it didn’t make good enough use of its guests, but the characters were great.

    Reply
    1. Gary

      Crazy World was actually commissioned by Channel 4, annoyingly Russell then pulled out for various reasons, primarily because he wanted to do his own thing. Once he had gone it was tricky to get C4 to buy into a recast of the starring role

      Reply
      1. Brig Bother Post author

        Gary, I was asked on Twitter last night to ask how you calibrated the tasks on Hercules so that they were a) doable and b) wouldn’t kill somebody. Did you just make the distances up?

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        1. Gary

          The machines were built by a fantastic company called Steel Monkey from Bristol who normally made props for rock gigs. We had to have a balance of upper and lower body events to make it fair to the different disciplines our endurance athletes represented and also to give their bodies rest. A lt of the machines were based upon gym equipment so the mechanisms were known, there were some however that were a leap in the dark – event one the hoops of odysseus for example. When thinking of the machines and testing them we consulted constantly with the sports scientists and medics that eventually took part in the show about what they thought was possible, and we also knew from our endurance athletes what their limit was. We games tested the machines before the event with professional athletes and calculated what was possible in a given frame of time. Saying that no-one had ever attempted to do this kind of punishment for 12 consecutive days and the range of abilities between the competitors was also something we couldn’t calculate. So in short a lot of it was educated guess work that most of the time we got right

          Reply
          1. David B

            Very interesting, thanks for the reply.

            I never really understood why Hercules was on BBC Three – the average age of the athletes must have been substantially older than that of the target audience. Nevertheless, it would be nice to see another channel have a go at something like this again. There was something so magical about seeing people slug their guts out completing tasks that were (purposefully) futile.

          2. Gary

            Darrow was so brilliant and a lovely man. It was odd being on BBC3 but I think it was solely because as a producer I’m associated with more yoofy style shows that are a bit left field, so the obvious channels were and are BBC3, C4 and E4.

          3. Mart with a Y not an I

            Random sound bytes from Hercules are still uttered fairly regularly in our house.

            Still whenever grazing the sports channels and come across the Biathlon coverage on Eurosport (where the current series Champ resides as co-commentator), I will still find myself growling in a Darrow-esque way “Mike Dixxonnn”.

            And next door have a green gazebo, and during the summer evenings and they have friends around, as the booze flows and the noise gets louder, I’ll always say in a very camp Northern accent ” there’s a party going on in the green tent” which given it was only uttered once by John Browns support coach, must rate as the most obscure legacy of the (sadly) one series wonder…

  3. Andrew 'Kesh' Sullivan

    A veritable treasure trove of televisual goodies right there! Funnily enough, as well as finding Season 1 of The Bank Job on 4OD after catching up with yesterdays’ Countdown episode, I also found all 3 seasons of Banzai and even some very early editions of Whose Line Is It Anyway.

    Reply
  4. Mart with a Y not an I

    TV Mayhem. 3 words..
    The Window Leaners.

    I think I’m right in saying TV Mayhem was a replacment for Wide Awake Club farmed out to the indie sector as it looked good on TV-am’s monsteriously overambitious franchise renewal bid.
    Thus history told us the ITC decided to stab a finger on the Sunrise Television (GMTV) bid and this show was axed, as TV-am went into cost cutting mode ahead of packing up a year and a bit later..
    ..which was a bit of a shame. I was (just) out of target audience age, but remember laughing along to some of the very daft sketches.

    Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      I always used to quite like the recurring gag of sending your answers to ‘X Competiton’, where X was the answer to the set question.

      Reply
    2. Gary

      The Window Leaners was the first sketch that I wrote. I wasn’t very good but it was a funny idea

      Reply
    3. Gary

      That is pretty much right. We’d basically been doing the show on BSB’s music channel The Power Station for 2 years. Chris had already established himself as the next big thing and wanted to make a TISWAS for our generation. When The power Station was lost in the merger with Sky, they went looking for new home and found it surprisingly with TV-am

      Reply
  5. David

    FYI, there was a new ep of Run for Money this past weekend- difficult to find a place where you can see it without using some dark arts, but I think this should for now, but no guarantees:

    http://www.miomio.tv/watch/cc53110/

    (and there’s a Battle For Money ep coming up this weekend apparently- the end of the ep features some of the BFM shopkeepers taking a few of the RFM contestants away)…

    Reply
  6. Nico W.

    Soo yesterday was the first of 8 episodes of “Die Millionärwahl” (millionaire election) which will be broadcast on Prosieben and Sat.1 for the next four weeks (Prosieben on thursdays and Sat.1 on fridays). And it probably is a thing for the hall of shame 2014 already and causing quiet some trouble.
    Let me remind you of the format: After four weeks of internet voting in which more than 25,000 people registered, uploaded videos and blogged a bit, the most loved 49 people went on to take part in 7 shows. Every show will determine a winner who will take part in the finale, in which one person will become “the first democratically elected millionaire” (it’s the main catchphrase).
    In the first episode we had 7 people with various ideas, all of which were beloved on the internet. But that doesn’t mean it will make great television. In fact- it obviously doesn’t make great television!
    Here’s what the 7 people/projects taking part in this show were and how they were shown:
    1)A guy who likes jumping from something very high onto a giant pillow. He jumped from the roof of a Stadium (the one of Schalke 04) onto such a giant pillow. They showed him on his way to the platform throughout the show. In the end it was just one jump.
    2)5 guys who like to workout and do some gymnastics. They were showing off their muscles and hanging on some poles. It seemed ridiculous they were participating, since every acrobatic thing ever televised was more spectacular. On youtube it worked but not in a giant TV studio.
    3)A man and his female friend (only woman on the show aside from host Jeannine Michaelsen) who make sex education videos on youtube. They have acted like remaking one of the videos (showing how to masturbate with a sponge a glove and a cup) and that was just slow.
    4)Ralf Zanders, a man who can’t do anything he claims, but is willing to do everything for his handicapped goddaughter Neele. He already ran a half-marathon and some other stuff the community wanted him to do, so Prosieben chose to let him do some houserunning. Actually he’s afraid of heights and I thought he’d faint about all the time. But he did it.
    5) Some guy who wanted to spend most of this money for the community who voted for him, He already promised 550,000€ in goods to give away. He was actually just standing there, talking, and letting some women dance around him.
    6) A breakdancer with a tiny breakdance group who wanted to give young people some sort of opportunity or at least a hobby. He has danced with his group.
    7) A 70s rock group, who had minor succes back then and wantes to have a comeback. They were called Gift (poison) and I think they performed a song (I was already zapping around at this point).

    All this doesn’t seem to be enough to fill a 135 mintes slot but actually they overran the slot by half an hour or so.

    Now the big thing: the voting.
    Phase 1) Throughout the show no one was eligible for the entire public yet. Only 25,000 people (the online community) were allowed to vote. Giving the favourite: 7 points, second: 6,…. last one:1.
    After everyone was on stage once, this voting was revealed and the second phase began:
    Phase 2) Everyone was able to vote by telephone call, messaging (in fact i wrote massaging first, which would have made the show better) or Prosieben.connect app. Once again winner gaining 7 points,… last one gaining 1 point.
    By that time the clear winner with 14 points was Ralf, the godfather, breakdancer and punkers were last with 3 points each or so..
    Now Phase 3 was coming and there was one big mistake causing all the trouble:
    This is the Phase where the candidates have 4 points each to give to another candidate. They could split the 4 points up or give 4 points to someone immediately. The order of who voted first/second/… was drawn at random. And as they didn’t have to write the points down at any point, the last one was obviously able to change a lot if there were two people close to each other in the end.
    So almost everyone was splitting up the points and they alwas gave the breakdancer between 1-3 points. Ralf received only 2 points by our sex experts.
    So when the last candidate, Gift, had to vote Ralf was in first place with 16 points, the breakdancer in second with 13, and the rest had already lost. Now the trouble as you expect: Gift gave all the points to the breakdancer making the clear favorite a loser.
    Elton and Jeannine, the hosts, were almost speeechless, the audience was quiet, you really felt “This will make some headlines tomorrow”.
    And it did. As the hosts didn’t ask for any reasons, everyone wants to know, why Gift has done that and they accuse Gift of being heartless grumpy old men. Everyone also thinks that the Breakdancer, Benedikt, is an asshole (well he didn’t do anything, but tell that the twitter community), and they want him to resign his place in the finales, claiming he won’t win for sure. After the show had ended, Elton posted a video with some of the candidates including Ralf announcing how to donate money to Ralf’s goddaughter, so he could apologize a bit.

    My opinion:
    Yes, the voting system didn’t work as fair as it was meant to be, but the rules were clear to everyone.
    Yes, the breakdancer has no chance at all at winning the million.
    No, it wasn’t the breakdancer’s fault. And it’s not really sure if it’s Gift’s fault as they were playing by the rules. Though we know this isn’t always morally the best way to play.
    The hosts didn’t ask the candidates anything relevant (e.g. asking for the reasons) and they needed some time to be good, but they were really good all in all.
    The ratings by the way weren’t good at all, this will probably the last series so…

    Reply
    1. James

      Should the ratings pick up slightly, ProsiebenSat.1 may recommission. I saw this last night, and it was quite slow in places.

      – Acts were ok, nothing majorly special. Ralf should have won, but I don’t really think there is anyone to blame.
      – Studio and set were pretty decent. Full on light show and it felt like an arena.
      – Hosts were probably the best part of the whole thing. Elton and Jeannine held the floor well, but both are proven professionals.

      Ratings, as NicoW said, were very poor. It will be very interesting to see how the ratings hold up from here on in.

      Reply
      1. Nico W.

        Wow, the ratings got worse. Less than a million people watching it.
        Well I think, changing the voting system after everyone watched the first episode and was disappointed was a bit late. They should have thought about it before disappointing the few people watching it.

        Reply
        1. James

          Well it has now been axed because of the poor ratings. They’ll do a 1 hour show on Saturday 25th January to find out who wins the million. The contestants who were due to appear on the live shows, will now be put through a vote by their fellow ‘Millionaerswahl’ contestants, with the remaining 5 being put through to the final.

          To be honest, with hindsight, the idea is half baked. Really goes to show how important development and testing are in entertainment television.

          Reply

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