The discarded Davidson might never have been brought back to us were it not for the Channel 5 boss giving him a chance on Celebrity Big Brother. Now he's flavour of the month
Gold: Jim Davidson. Silver: Dappy. Bronze: that mahogany-effect cabinet out of Made in Chelsea. Have you ever seen a winner's podium so historically inspiring?
Yes, some might say – Mexico City, 1968, when the momentous civil rights salute given by US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos was quietly yet determinedly supported by the Australian silver medallist Peter Norman. But few records are unbreakable, and I think we all saw something rather special happen at Elstree Studios on Wednesday night. Which is to say, those who actually saw it did.
To the illustrious finale of this year's Celebrity Big Brother, then, in which Channel 5 helped a grateful nation to come to terms with the injustices it had visited on Jim Davidson. When the television history books come to be written – probably by Professor Dappington Contostavlos of the University of Sheffield – it will be clear that Britain discarded Davidson with shameful haste, permitting the not-very-funny funnyman just two-and-a-half decades of primetime television before wondering whether it might not be someone else's turn.
One man may well be credited with his rescue – and that man, of course, is Channel 5 boss Richard Desmond.
Yes, it is increasingly apparent that Richard saw his own humiliating exposure at the Leveson inquiry as a sort of personal Profumo scandal – in that, rather in the manner of that disgraced politician, he realised he must now devote himself to public service to atone for all the horrors and lies his newspaper titles visited so obsessively on the parents of Madeleine McCann and so on. His first quiet triumph in this redemptive quest has been the rehabilitation of the aforementioned fallen comic, and the air now buzzes with rumour that Davidson will be given his own Channel 5 chatshow. More on that tantalising possibility shortly.
Alas, such is the way of the modern world that the air also buzzes with conspiracies as to how Jim's CBB win happened, despite the fact that, within the strict confines of the show, he was the most obvious victor. Davidson was edited suspiciously flatteringly, claim these conspiracists, who refer pointedly to a blogpost he wrote back in November last year.
"Contrary to reports I have not been approached to enter the Big Brother house," this ran. "Not saying that I wouldn't go in, just saying I haven't been asked. My friend Richard Desmond owns Channel 5 and what he says goes, he is too scary to argue with. I've tried that and lost. The phone line wasn't good but I think he called me a currant!"
It goes without saying that any Davidson chatshow would be more watchable – for whatever reason – than almost every monotonously smug panel show now littering the schedules. Alas, with Desmond angling to sell Channel 5, you have to think it would be a one-series wonder, with its demise broken to Davidson in a meeting resembling that between Alan Partridge and incoming BBC controller Tony Hayers. "You are someone who has a proven track record for making mostly bad television programmes …"
But while Desmond is still having his bananas salvered to him in the Channel 5 boss's office, perhaps he could continue his revivalist mission by bringing back Play for Today, with the curtain raiser in the new series being an adapted-for-TV version of Davidson's own recent theatrical work, Stand Up and Be Counted. Remember this one? It was about a bigoted, out-of-favour comedian who has his prejudices challenged by the next generation and comes to realise his jokes have consequences. When it was pulled after poor ticket sales, Davidson said he was "already in talks with several West End producers and theatre owners"– so perhaps those epic discussions might finally draw to a positive conclusion now he is flavour of the month.
Before the play folded, though, this apparently Damascene conversion garnered Jim plenty of comparatively favourable attention. "In the play, my character is made to realise that he can't just carry on as he was," Davidson told this newspaper, "but the question is whether he is genuinely remorseful or just faking it to be famous."
Indeed that IS the question, given that the latter possibility would contrive to be even more cynical than the straight-up bigotry of yesteryear.
As for the answer to the inquiry, you must be the judge. On the one hand, Davidson was the Star Trek fan who cried when he discovered that Patrick Stewart was a Labour voter. On the other, he is far from an entirely stupid man, certainly not by the standards of most Big Brother contestants, compared with whom many amoeba take on the intellectual sheen of Mary Warnock. Either way, he has certainly learned what plays better with the audiences who now matter, and which parts of what he is thinking should actually be voiced. For instance, these days, when discussing the matter of his self-imposed exile to Dubai, New Jim emphasises his eventual return with appealing wryness, claiming it was precipitated by Lord Ashcroft asking him: "Don't you have to be rich to be a tax exile?" Or as Old Jim put it just when he nicked off there just a few years previously: "I may as well go to Dubai and be an ethnic minority there, than wait five years and be one here."
You don't hear an awful lot about New Jim's talent for domestic violence either, though Old Jim was at pains to emphasise this comic turn. "On the first occasion," he recalled in his autobiography of one of his marriages, "I poked her in the eye by accident. I actually went for the mouth. Thank heaven I missed, I'd have fallen in. I just took a playful punch. Unfortunately I caught her completely wrong. The second time I gave her a shiner. I threw a bunch of keys which whacked her in the eye. Just for a giggle she kept blackening it up to make it look worse."
Perhaps he could book Gloria Steinem for the chatshow – or indeed, Patrick Stewart, who is a patron of Refuge. After all, as New Jim put it on victorious emergence from the Celebrity Big Brother house: "Truth will conquer all." And if that sounds like the trailer line for an amusingly miscast superhero movie, then so be it. Sometimes you just have to stop fighting and settle in with the popcorn. Reported by guardian.co.uk 13 hours ago.
Gold: Jim Davidson. Silver: Dappy. Bronze: that mahogany-effect cabinet out of Made in Chelsea. Have you ever seen a winner's podium so historically inspiring?
Yes, some might say – Mexico City, 1968, when the momentous civil rights salute given by US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos was quietly yet determinedly supported by the Australian silver medallist Peter Norman. But few records are unbreakable, and I think we all saw something rather special happen at Elstree Studios on Wednesday night. Which is to say, those who actually saw it did.
To the illustrious finale of this year's Celebrity Big Brother, then, in which Channel 5 helped a grateful nation to come to terms with the injustices it had visited on Jim Davidson. When the television history books come to be written – probably by Professor Dappington Contostavlos of the University of Sheffield – it will be clear that Britain discarded Davidson with shameful haste, permitting the not-very-funny funnyman just two-and-a-half decades of primetime television before wondering whether it might not be someone else's turn.
One man may well be credited with his rescue – and that man, of course, is Channel 5 boss Richard Desmond.
Yes, it is increasingly apparent that Richard saw his own humiliating exposure at the Leveson inquiry as a sort of personal Profumo scandal – in that, rather in the manner of that disgraced politician, he realised he must now devote himself to public service to atone for all the horrors and lies his newspaper titles visited so obsessively on the parents of Madeleine McCann and so on. His first quiet triumph in this redemptive quest has been the rehabilitation of the aforementioned fallen comic, and the air now buzzes with rumour that Davidson will be given his own Channel 5 chatshow. More on that tantalising possibility shortly.
Alas, such is the way of the modern world that the air also buzzes with conspiracies as to how Jim's CBB win happened, despite the fact that, within the strict confines of the show, he was the most obvious victor. Davidson was edited suspiciously flatteringly, claim these conspiracists, who refer pointedly to a blogpost he wrote back in November last year.
"Contrary to reports I have not been approached to enter the Big Brother house," this ran. "Not saying that I wouldn't go in, just saying I haven't been asked. My friend Richard Desmond owns Channel 5 and what he says goes, he is too scary to argue with. I've tried that and lost. The phone line wasn't good but I think he called me a currant!"
It goes without saying that any Davidson chatshow would be more watchable – for whatever reason – than almost every monotonously smug panel show now littering the schedules. Alas, with Desmond angling to sell Channel 5, you have to think it would be a one-series wonder, with its demise broken to Davidson in a meeting resembling that between Alan Partridge and incoming BBC controller Tony Hayers. "You are someone who has a proven track record for making mostly bad television programmes …"
But while Desmond is still having his bananas salvered to him in the Channel 5 boss's office, perhaps he could continue his revivalist mission by bringing back Play for Today, with the curtain raiser in the new series being an adapted-for-TV version of Davidson's own recent theatrical work, Stand Up and Be Counted. Remember this one? It was about a bigoted, out-of-favour comedian who has his prejudices challenged by the next generation and comes to realise his jokes have consequences. When it was pulled after poor ticket sales, Davidson said he was "already in talks with several West End producers and theatre owners"– so perhaps those epic discussions might finally draw to a positive conclusion now he is flavour of the month.
Before the play folded, though, this apparently Damascene conversion garnered Jim plenty of comparatively favourable attention. "In the play, my character is made to realise that he can't just carry on as he was," Davidson told this newspaper, "but the question is whether he is genuinely remorseful or just faking it to be famous."
Indeed that IS the question, given that the latter possibility would contrive to be even more cynical than the straight-up bigotry of yesteryear.
As for the answer to the inquiry, you must be the judge. On the one hand, Davidson was the Star Trek fan who cried when he discovered that Patrick Stewart was a Labour voter. On the other, he is far from an entirely stupid man, certainly not by the standards of most Big Brother contestants, compared with whom many amoeba take on the intellectual sheen of Mary Warnock. Either way, he has certainly learned what plays better with the audiences who now matter, and which parts of what he is thinking should actually be voiced. For instance, these days, when discussing the matter of his self-imposed exile to Dubai, New Jim emphasises his eventual return with appealing wryness, claiming it was precipitated by Lord Ashcroft asking him: "Don't you have to be rich to be a tax exile?" Or as Old Jim put it just when he nicked off there just a few years previously: "I may as well go to Dubai and be an ethnic minority there, than wait five years and be one here."
You don't hear an awful lot about New Jim's talent for domestic violence either, though Old Jim was at pains to emphasise this comic turn. "On the first occasion," he recalled in his autobiography of one of his marriages, "I poked her in the eye by accident. I actually went for the mouth. Thank heaven I missed, I'd have fallen in. I just took a playful punch. Unfortunately I caught her completely wrong. The second time I gave her a shiner. I threw a bunch of keys which whacked her in the eye. Just for a giggle she kept blackening it up to make it look worse."
Perhaps he could book Gloria Steinem for the chatshow – or indeed, Patrick Stewart, who is a patron of Refuge. After all, as New Jim put it on victorious emergence from the Celebrity Big Brother house: "Truth will conquer all." And if that sounds like the trailer line for an amusingly miscast superhero movie, then so be it. Sometimes you just have to stop fighting and settle in with the popcorn. Reported by guardian.co.uk 13 hours ago.