Everybody loves Lil Chris Channel 4, 11am (Saturday) Headcases ITV1, 10pm Louis Theroux's African hunting holiday BBC2, 9pm Doctor Who BBC1, 6.20pm (Saturday) AS modern-day British chat-show hosts go, now Parky's been pensioned off, there's only Jonathan Ross. So if you enjoy watching a badly-suited man with large hair pleasure himself with frenetic brutality for a £6m salary, Wossy's your boy. But if you hanker for a chat-show with an appealing host who reveals stuff about his guests, try the new kids' show Everybody Loves Lil Chris. The prog's titular MC is 15-year-old Chris Hardman, the Lowestoft schoolboy whose now-defunct band won Gene Simmons' C4 music boot-camp Rock School.
Perky Chris is a wholesome-looking youth in a baseball cap. He has a disarming line in lightly-barbed questions for his mini-celebs, also seeming keen to hear their answers.
Chris's first batch of guests treated him and his studiedly-dumb inquiries in various ways. Either they signalled annoyance by being mildly patronising (20-watt Swedish popstrel Robyn), or they mucked in and waxed zanily comic with a faintly embarrassed air (indie-poppers the Hoosiers). Or, in the case of Leigh "Bo' Selecta" Francis, they tried to bludgeon Lil Chris into submission with a scarily unfunny alter-ego (self-made Yorkshire pudding Keith Lemon).
Either way, you learnt something (Robyn's a troll; the Hoosiers are OK; Leigh Francis is hard work - and Chris isn't easily deflected). In addition, Chris's chat with X Factor pop confection Shayne Ward, formerly a shoe salesman, established that he's no great loss to the high-street retail footwear trade.
Another new show, Headcases proved a worthy CGI successor to its latex-sponge satirical forebear, Spitting Image. With the latter, the longer you regarded its puppets, the more obviously unreal they became. In contrast, Headcases offered a computer-generated Victoria Beckham - drumstick legs surmounted by twin tennis balls beneath an immobile Plasticine visage - that was more warmly human than the real-life version.
Proper cutting the show's wit was, too. I fear I shall never again gaze upon the real David "Call me Dave" Cameron without hearing the cry which Headcases imagined him making to his trustiest Tory lieutenant: "Osborne! Where's my monocle?" Plus you have to love any show that repeatedly drops large objects - an anvil, a piano, a small mansion - on the cranium of the UK media's most inexplicably self-satisfied man (Piers Morgan). For a fellow who admitted to having no qualms about eating meat, Louis Theroux over-egged his pudding in bidding to manufacture shock over South Africa's new medium-to-small game-hunters: camo-clad Yanks bagging specially-bred near-tame impala, kudu and warthogs at close quarters on handily fenced-off sectors of the veldt.
The trouble was the amount of agonising - visible as well as audible - that Louis T felt he had to do over the lethal paradox he'd just uncovered: animals being carefully reared to be slaughtered! Another sausage, Louis?
On and on, Louis banged: "I felt I owed it to my hosts to try and get in touch with the killer inside me . . . but I'm not feeling an urge to do it . . . I'm feeling an urge not to do it." Long before Louis Theroux's African Hunting Holiday was over, I felt an urge to sympathise with its blood-stained hunters.
Doctor Who was joined by Ms What-the-Heck. Catherine Tate is sidekick Donna Noble, the runaway bride. She actually resembles a runaway bride's dowdy mum. Or the type of mother-in-law who'd make a prospective groom run away. She sure had me hiding behind the sofa. Eeek!
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