Paddy McGuinness

Someone at Channel 4 clearly had a brainwave that the success of ITV's Take Me Out was based on affable host Paddy McGuinness rather than voyeurism at herberts with dodgy fake tans, bad hair extensions and personalities more shallow than a 2-year-old's paddling pool. They were wrong.

Paddy's TV Guide is a weird mix of not particularly amusing video clips and buttock-clenchingly awful editing that squeezes hysterical audience laughter on top of every inoffensive but utterly unamusing comment from the show's host.

Filled with the most basic sort of 'do you remember Marathon bars?' nostalgic humour, you didn't need to stay tuned beyond the cringing intro last week (Paddy marching on to the set to the Dad's Army theme tune with some utterly bewildered audience members) to understand the terrors that lurked in this TV horror.

Bafflingly bad, Paddy will do well to wipe this whole project from his wiki page and pretend it never happened if he knows what's best for him.

TV Review: Paddy's TV Guide

It drones on with a smattering of sub-Harry Hill physical sketches and commentary that adds about as much as those dialogue boxes that pop up in front of YouTube clips. I don't think any of this is really Paddy McGuinness's fault - the problem is this format has been done before and much better; he's out of his depth.

The words "Paddy McGuinness" send shivers down your spine - and not in a good way. McGuinness made his TV debut on Phoenix Nights, if you recall, and his career has been going from bad to worse ever since in the eyes of just about every reviewer and critic around.

Paddy's TV Guide follows a spate of cheap clip shows, with McGuinness presenting clips from TV shows (old and new) using a weekly theme. The first episode focused on health and fitness, with shows recorded on his "Paddy Player".

The clips themselves are mildly amusing, from an old exercise show featuring a woman dancing with candles to a tough American fitness instructor shouting at just about any mode of transport. But this programme, along with others like it (BBC One's Animal Antics for example) illustrate what I think is the main problem with clip shows; the way they're presented.

If you have a show which is just about clips, from TV shows, the internet, or recorded by members of the public, then what you want to see is just those clips. You don't want to see Paddy McGuinness doing some small routine in-between them, or Matthew Crosby dressed up as a dog in the case of Animal Antics. All you need's a voice-over.

Harry Hill made You've Been Framed watchable. We all know it's the cheesiest programme around, but because Hill's contribution is minimal, the viewers get to see more of what they want, rather than putting up with Jeremy Beadle and Lisa Riley trying to be funny between the clips.

Of course, it could just be the fact that Hill's funnier than any of those people, and that's probably Paddy McGuinness' biggest flaw too; he's not much cop.

Paddy McGuinness takes time out from hosting guilty pleasure game show Take Me Out to lend his laddish charms to this light-hearted look at what they got up to on TV in the olden days. He'll be examining a different topic each week. First up is the multicoloured world of health and fitness, with a tongue-in-cheek look at such TV gems as the facial warm-up routine favoured by 1980s keep-fit queen The Green Goddess, aka Diana Moran, plus naked yoga - now that could catch on - and, from 1988, something involving a trampoline, a partition wall and bags of flour. Don't strain anything.

In the 80s we had the eye-opening and respectfully titled Clive James on Television to clue us in on bonkers overseas ads, foreign - usually French - TV titillation and Japanese salarymen undergoing elaborately devised torture techniques on the off-chance of winning a Teasmade. Then in the 90s we had Tarrant on TV. Shorter title, friendlier nomenclature, more smut. Now it's the new millennium and - mainly thanks to Tony Blair - we're all on first name terms. So we get Paddy's TV Guide, in which Paddy McGuinness - but really, who else? - cues up errant TV clips on his Paddy-player, all to reassure us that foreigners do still talk funny and there's nothing more hilarious under the sun than tikka-tinged septuagenarian bodybuilders (actually, the Padster might be right on that last point). The Pad-man's got form with the clips format, with 2011's charity gogglebox quiz Paddy's Show and Telly and last year's mysteriously dropped ITV QI manqué Mad Mad World, but, try and try as he might, his bid to dislodge Charlie Brooker as the nation's coaxial Pilate seems doomed to eventual failure.

Presented by Paddy McGuinness, this new series promises to be a guide through life via a 10-foot plasma TV screen, known as the "Paddy Player". McGuinness digs out rarely seen (and often downright bizarre) TV footage and will see what life advice he can glean from it. Essentially a clips show, Paddy's TV Guide is warmed up (slightly) by McGuinness's charm.

More frothy fun from Alan Carr as the ninth series of his effervescent chat show continues. Tonight Carr will be camping it up with fellow comedian and Take Me Out presenter Paddy McGuinness and chatting to formidable Dragons' Den entrepreneurs Theo Paphitis, Deborah Meaden, Duncan Bannatyne and Peter Jones. Music comes from Britain's own Justin Bieber, teen pop star Conor Maynard, performing his new single Turn Around.

Former Phoenix Nights star and comedian Paddy McGuinness hosts the last in the series of the entertainment panel show in his usual holiday-rep style. Treading ground previously pioneered by our TV critic Clive James and Chris Tarrant in the Eighties and Nineties, the quiz focuses on wacky news stories and video clips from around the world. Rhys Darby (Flight of the Conchords) and Rufus Hound (Celebrity Juice) head up two celebrity teams. Their guests this week are David Hasselhoff, Louie Spence and Coleen Nolan.

Such is the dearth of new programming during the Olympics that I am obliged to review Mad Mad World, a show well into its run which I had rather hoped to avoid ever setting eyes on.

My low expectations were met in full. Mad Mad World is yet another comedy panel show in an already saturated market that is more than happy to rehash other formats rather than attempt anything microscopically different. They even steal the funny buzzer noises as pioneered by QI.

The basic premise creaks with unoriginality and old age - aren't foreigners and their television shows funny? Clive James certainly thought so, three decades ago. Clips are exhumed, many already viral on the internet, and two teams make purportedly witty comments about them. Several of the rounds feature still photographs from news stories, which rather defeats the object of the exercise and suggests that any attempt at quality control was long since abandoned back in the pub where the idea was originally hatched.

Paddy McGuinness is the perfectly competent host, and the panellists make a decent fist of trying to make the show look unscripted. A sliver of spontaneity did infiltrate proceedings courtesy of guest Stacey Solomon, who was endearingly ditzy throughout, but even she could do little to lift the suffocating miasma of complacency engulfing the whole sorry enterprise.
"What is unique about this Venus de Milo?" asks McGuinness of a peculiar looking statue.

"Is it made of shit?" replies team captain Rufus Hound.

It was. But it certainly wasn't the only thing that evening.