Boom Town

One of BBC Three's more bonkers programme ideas, Boom Town was a bizarre attempt to blend two very different TV genres - 'structured reality' and the sketch show. They were hoping for TOWIE meets Pineapple Dance Studios with added laughs. What they got was a stream of 'I'm-mad-me' characters who were nowhere near as interesting, funny or quirky as they thought they were.

Although this structured reality/sketch show has been more miss than hit, Wednesdays will be decidedly more dull without the residents of Boom Town. The final episode of the series sees more weirdness from the crew: Jonny Nash tries to flog his Fifty Shades-inspired tome to a sex shop, Al continues his bizarre banter with the care home residents, Stella's inappropriate Afro British Gaga "fashion" gets an outing and Dorota fails to pronounce "hedgehog". Nervous laughter and confusion guaranteed for all.

From deadpan actor Dorota to white witch Kev, the "passions and interests" of those featured in this reality series/sketch show are genuine, albeit in exaggerated structured-reality form. Episode two sees them shock the public once again, with a stripper in search of housemates and sanitary towel-themed fashion alongside more silliness from rapping jack of all trades Cream and crooner Pablo. Maybe not an ethical way to get your laughs, but for the most part we are in cahoots with this motley crew.

'The people you are about to see are real. Their passions and jobs are genuine, but some scenes have been enhanced for your entertainment.' So reads the text that introduces Boom Town - a break from the structured reality formula that sees a cast of real-lifers playing it for laughs, not just for soapy cliffhangers.

Which sounds intriguing, all the way until the opening title sequence when the bubble promptly bursts. The snapshots of recurring characters, the construct of a fake town... it's Little Britain with real people. Worryingly, they've been given strange suffixes too. Get ready to meet 'Garth - Life Coach', 'Louis - The Stripper' and 'Kev - The Witch'. What's off-putting is the high number of 'eccentrics' (BBC Three's words) where the 'laughs' derive from their lack of English. A whole sketch featuring Donata (a middle-aged wannabe actress) hinges on her immigrant twang, while the same laughs are gleaned from 'Talina - The Temptress' (another ancient eastern European stereotype brought to life).

The real scoop here though, is that, like the plankton that turn up on the first-round of X-Factor to get laughed at on film, these people know the score and are still somehow comfortable with the idea of young kids laughing at their deeply unfunny and staged exploits for six half-hour episodes. Hard to tell who's sadder - the participants for signing up to it or the Beeb for commissioning it.

A sense of vulnerability permeated Boom Town, BBC Three's 'structured reality' series featuring a host of real-life eccentrics doing eccentric things in partly choreographed set pieces. (There's a wannabe fashion designer, who tries to sell her dresses made of sanitary pads, a man who thinks he's a witch, and so on.)

A couple - we never really know how aware they are of being made fun of - think they're terrifically good actors and the camera shows them rehearsing shudderingly amateurish scenes that are made all the more excruciating by the couple's apparent sincerity. I laughed, but my laughter was hollow.

BBC Three has picked 12 madcap individuals - 'real' people, it keeps reminding us - and shows them in situations that are allegedly partly spontaneous, but that look suspiciously well crafted. There's Roger and Rebecca, 'Knight Warriors' who dress up as superheroes to defend Salford; Joel the trainspotter, whose quiet, uneventful sequences contain a not unbeautiful melancholy.

How much are these characters hamming up for the cameras? Are they being exploited or are they exploiting us? Aren't we the real weirdoes, lolling on the sofa, deriving entertainment by sneering? In such freak shows, the biggest freaks are us. That is the saddest thing of all.

I'm having a tough time figuring out who exactly Boom Town was for. The programme was a mixture of constructed reality programme, hidden camera show and sketch comedy. We were told right at the start that all of the characters were real but the majority of the situations had been set up for our entertainment. These characters included rapper Cream, who we met as he wandered round his local Londis, and Kevin the Witch who was showing an estate agent around his flat. The most memorable characters of the ensemble were Salford-based superhero duo The Knight Warriors and Johnny Nash a self-proclaimed ladies' man who kept making inappropriate comments during a speed dating night.

If the purpose of Boom Town was to make me laugh then I'm afraid it didn't achieve its mission and instead I just sat dumbfounded in front of the screen wondering what I was actually watching. The only show that bares any comparison to Boom Town is Channel 4's Kookyville, which died without a trace last year, though that was more a spoof of shows like Towie and its ilk. Boom Town is more a celebration of the UK's biggest eccentrics, but done in a You've Been Framed-style in order to have these larger-than-life characters interact with travel agents and career advisors. Indeed the scene involving the career adviser and male stripper Louis was perhaps Boom Town's lowest ebb as the segment went on for far too long. Though the characters may be real, I feel a lot of what they say has been scripted, even though the credits listed no writers. I feel that BBC3 will rely on Twitter feedback to see how people felt about Boom Town but your writer still feels befuddled by the whole programme. I definitely don't think that we'll be seeing a second series of Boom Town, but then again BBC3 are the channel that recommissioned Coming of Age and Some Girls so I feel it's a case of never say never.

Structured reality? What does that even mean?

In the case of the bizarre Boom Town (BBC3) it means rounding up a bunch of idiots from around the country and letting their self-conscious lunacy loose in front of the video camera. That's about as much structure as you get in blancmange.

Stretching my charitable instincts to their outer limits, Boom Town could be intended as a satire on the structured reality boom that has made Z-list celebs of ego bandits from Essex to Chelsea by way of Geordie Shore and the Welsh valleys. The credits carry the same rider - real people in scenes 'enhanced for entertainment' - only here it has been taken to extremes.

The notion of town in Boom Town is a vague one, to say the least. What you get is a series of unrelated comedy sketches featuring the unappetising likes of Cream The Rapper, Pablo The Romantic and Jonny Nash Ladies Man, each and every one giving the impression they're drama school students on some kind of medication.

I felt a bit sorry for Joel The Trainspotter, a sweet bloke filmed waiting for trains (what else?) who seemed unaware he was being sent up something rotten.

Anthony The Struggling Pub Landlord's conceptual art take on the French Revolution supplied surreal light relief. But as for the rest of them, they deserved what they got. From Louis The Stripper to Talina The Temptress (each and every character defined by these mono-dimensional characteristics), these were sad attention seekers who should have been offered therapy, not a bit part on a TV comedy.

But maybe I'm taking it all a little bit too seriously. Perhaps they were all actors pretending to be real people and I've fallen for Boom Town's terribly clever in-joke and I'm busted. I can't say I care much either way, because if I wanted to spend half an hour with a bunch of crazies, I'd just pick any London night bus on a Thursday night. In short: go be mad somewhere else.

Boom Town review

Boom Town was one of those shows which I only watch until the end so that I can gauge how truly awful it is, and then write about it on this blog.

Even less effort had gone into Boom Town [than I'm Spazticus], which posed as a reality show but carried a disclaimer: 'Some scenes have been enhanced.'

Here was a bunch of unappealing show-offs, acting up for the camera. A self-proclaimed 'white witch' invited an estate agent to value his home, and brewed up a magic potion; a pasty-faced rapper tried to talk in ghetto street-jive; a married couple re-enacted scenes from films, badly.

They were delusional, they were attention-seeking, they were socially inept. They weren't genuine eccentrics.

And whatever else these awful programmes were, they couldn't be called comedy.

A bid to present real people as characters in a structured-reality-cum-sketch-show format. There is no affection for the eccentric subjects, just a cold lens trained on them as they are encouraged to say whatever comes into their heads. A lot of them are foreign, so we're supposed to reap bonus laughs from their loose grasp of English, are we? Not dissimilar to what Eurotrash was doing 20 years ago or what Tim and Eric did more recently. But one hundred million times worse. Dreadful, tooth-pulling, gag-free gloom.