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.‘Jake’, you see, is actually a girl disguising herself as a boy – a flagrant breach of school regulations and narrative authenticity.Having undertaken the challenge of concealing her gender within an all-male boarding school (for reasons beyond normal human understanding), ‘Jake’ makes the small mistake of trying to snog Hamilton almost immediately.Hamilton, who has presumably never seen the episode of Blackadder II in which Edmund fell for ‘Bob’, finds himself reluctantly falling for ‘Jake’, prompting fears he may have turned gay.Within a few weeks they’ll have to fly in a skilled negotiator to sort the mess out.Fortunately, such a negotiator already exists within the academy – infuriating ‘inspirational’ teacher and patriarchal linchpin Finn, who walks and talks like an absolute prick from the moment he appears.‘Just call me Finn,’ he says to the assembled boys, ‘no need for the “Mister”.’ Then, to their astonishment, he strolls straight into the lake fully dressed, to prove how unconventional he is.Combining the self-consciously eccentric traits of every ‘inspiring’ character Robin Williams has ever played, coupled with looks that hover somewhere between Harrison Ford, Ralph Fiennes and an understanding lion, Finn is the ultimate TV teacher.‘Spirit is the thing,’ goes his subliminal message, ‘but it helps to be telegenic, like me.’Young Americans looks slick and strangely golden, with the majority of scenes apparently shot on a warm, honey-coloured summer’s evening.The formula is identical to Dawson’s Creek: beautiful youngsters vapidly discussing complex problems.Emotionally compelling in the most anodyne way: an agony column crashing headlong into a Wrigley’s commercial.So provocative yet so bland: consequently, the fiercest criticism and the highest praise I can muster is this: ‘’S all right, really.’Las Vegas Swirling down a Plughole [26 May]Saturday evening, ITV? Not tonight, I’ve got a headache: is it my imagination or is some shadowy group of broadcast engineers applying an invasive audio filter to the entire Saturday prime-time stretch, transforming the mildest audience reaction into a massive discharge of ultra-compressed tinnitus that scrapes limescale from the inner walls of your skull as it blasts through your head?No? Then perhaps I just need to fix the treble on my television.Last week I was reduced to watching ITV’s Saturday offerings with a makeshift cotton-wool hood pulled tightly over my head.It took a while to pluck eyeholes in the thing, which meant most of You’ve Been Framed was hidden from view and had to be enjoyed in sound only.Still, once you’ve seen one blurry clip of a twirling prole fracturing their spine at a wedding reception, you’ve seen them all.In fact, with the visuals obscured, You’ve Been Framed is much more fun; a simple guessing game in which you attempt to deduce the nature of the footage from the sound of the audience reaction.An ‘aaahhh’ indicates a kitten poking its head from a wellington boot; an ‘ooohhh’ signifies a man falling off a roof to land headfirst on the patio.Oh, and a high-pitched stilted burbling noise means you’re in the middle of a piece to camera by Lisa Riley, a one-woman audio multi-tasker capable of sounding cheerful, terrified and condescending all at once – like a woman being forced to explain the alphabet to a class of remedial children at gunpoint.Then: commercial break! Incredibly, the PG Tips chimps are still going, still miming their way through a series of excruciatingly unfunny half-minute exercises in dignity-theft at the behest of a teabag company, despite the fact that half the audience become dewy-eyed with shame at the mere sight of them, and the other half aren’t paying attention and have forgotten these are real monkeys.They should ditch the ropey sitcom conceit and film a miniaturised remake of Nil By Mouth instead.That’d wake everyone up, although it might not shift quite as many teabags.First came Muppet Babies.Then Young Indiana Jones.Now ITV are pinning their hopes on Reeves and Mortimer Junior, in the form of Slap Bang with Ant and Dec, a genuinely uplifting slab of excitable primetime silliness that only the most stonehearted, cod-faced curmudgeon could object to.Slap Bang is essentially Noel’s House Party minus the beard and the whiff of contempt: a mish-mash of strands and sketches performed with such palpable glee that even their lamest gags (of which there are plenty) are instantly rendered more endearing than embarrassing
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