The World According to Gogglebox Read online

  WHOSE HAIR WOULD YOU CHANGE ON TV?

  STEPHEN: Beeny’s. Frizzy bleached chunk slices.

  CHRIS: We’ve always said that we’d like to do her hair.

  STEPHEN: And she’s nice, we love her. But the hair’s got to go. And the three box leather jackets: one’s purple, one’s black and one’s green. It’s all she’s ever got on. And she’s always up the fucking duff.

  CHRIS: And Simon Cowell. What’s going on with that? It’s a flat top with a centre parting.

  STEPHEN: He’s a pillock, isn’t he? All the money he’s got – why hasn’t he got a stylist? He wears his trousers up here, his tits are down here …

  CHRIS: And he wears the same clothes all the time, doesn’t he?

  STEPHEN: George Lamb’s got great hair.

  CHRIS: Beautiful hair. I’ve always really liked Drew Barrymore’s hair.

  STEPHEN: Pat Butcher. Can’t go wrong with a blonde crop, can you? That’s my kind of hairdressing: shit. Fuck knows how I get away with it. I used to lay tarmac before I hairdressed.

  CHRIS: I’m liking Cheryl Cole’s hair at the moment. Sort of rooty and blonde and all that. But how much of that’s really hers? Mind you, I had implants.

  STEPHEN: They took hair off his arsehole.

  CHRIS: No, they didn’t.

  STEPHEN: You can, though. You can take hair off your arsehole and put it in your head. As long as it’s yours.

  CHRIS: They can take your beard hair, they can take your chest hair, or armpit hair. Anywhere. And then insert it. I don’t know if, when they pull it into your head, it adapts. I mean, just imagine if someone actually had their pubes removed and put on their head.

  STEPHEN: Yeah, but you could have straighteners put on it.

  WOULD YOU NORMALLY WATCH TV TOGETHER?

  CHRIS: When we were dating, we used to sit in and watch TV.

  STEPHEN: Tsk. Fucking brilliant, it was.

  CHRIS: Because you never wanted to go out on a Saturday night.

  WHAT DO YOU DISAGREE ON?

  CHRIS: I love Millionaire Matchmaker.

  STEPHEN: I can’t stand that woman.

  CHRIS: She’s a bitch. But she knows her stuff. I love the fact that she really puts the millionaires in their place, because they think they’re bloody God’s gift. And she slaps them down, so I love her. She’s great.

  STEPHEN: It’s a load of old drivel. I love the History Channel. And I like anything to do with World War II.

  CHRIS: Oh God. Boring.

  STEPHEN: Come on, you’ve got to love all that.

  CHRIS: There’s so many other things that I quite like in history, like Pompeii – anything like that is cool. Spartacus: Blood and Sand was very homoerotic. You’re watching it literally peering through your fingers, but then you get all these full frontal naked men and you’re just, like, oh my God! So you have to watch it just for that.

  GAY MEN ON TV WHEN YOU

  WERE GROWING UP

  STEPHEN: I remember seeing Jimmy Somerville on TV and thinking, I know I’m like that, and I really don’t want to be. You know, the bleached hair and the dancing like he did. It wasn’t until EastEnders, when there was a gay couple that didn’t seem stereotypical. One of them was a tall fella with grey hair.

  But I didn’t come out until I was about twenty-five, because I was from a council estate, and you just kept your mouth shut.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: Shooting.

  STEPH: Shopping.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  KATE: The Suffragette movement 1897–1918. No. Forget that. Spaced.

  GRAHAM: The life and works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Or Grand Designs 1999–2003.

  THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON

  ANDREW: British politics since 1979.

  CAROLYNE: Akhenaten, the tenth pharoah of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt. Or the life of Elvis.

  LOUIS: The fantasy novels of David Eddings.

  ALEX: Disney Pixar films.

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  LEON: Everton FC in the 1980s.

  JUNE: I’m not clever enough to go on Mastermind.

  THE MOFFATTS, COUNTY DURHAM

  MARK: Newcastle United FC, 1999 to the present day.

  BETTY: Pop music of the 1980s.

  SCARLETT: Disney Pixar films.

  BILL & JOSEF, CAMBRIDGE

  BILL: Sloths.

  JOSEF: Round 1: Cluedo (I know the inventor’s daughter and have copies of the original patents and rules). Round 2 (if I get that far): Monopoly. I have copies of the original patents and also copies of the original patents for The Landlords Game 1901 and 1924 by Elizabeth Magie Phillips. Some say Charles Darrow pinched her game and renamed it – wrong! Don’t get me started.

  THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL

  RALF: Football.

  VIV: The Wars of the Roses.

  EVE: Tattooing, or Catbug. And Jay would do video games.

  THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON

  JONATHAN: Babestation.

  NIKKI: Cleaning.

  JOSH: Friends (the TV show).

  AMY: Harry Styles.

  LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  LINDA: Hairdressing.

  GEORGE: Pubs.

  PETE: Handing out money.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  UMAR: Columbo. I know an embarrassingly great deal about it.

  BAASIT: Batman comic storylines from 1985. Don’t judge me.

  SID: Indian cinema, 1950–1970.

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  CHRIS: Yeah. Derren Brown did this programme and he manipulated this woman to electrocute a kitten. Didn’t really. It was all a bit of an illusion. It was all about making someone do something that they really didn’t want to do. And this woman, she was crying, and she didn’t want to push the button – and then she ended up pushing it. And there were so many complaints about that. Anything to do with animal cruelty should not be shown on TV.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  KATE: Yeah, I wrote in to complain about a sexist advert once. Do you remember the oven cleaner advert that was ‘so easy even a man can do it’? I got really cross about that because it belittled men. It made men sound like they’re so stupid they can’t even clean an oven, which is just a ridiculous thing to say. I can’t abide sexism. And it works both ways.

  THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON

  NIKKI: I nearly did. It was EastEnders, to do with Tanya when she had cancer. And it was awful.

  AMY: They portrayed cancer in completely the wrong way. It was around the same time mum had cancer.

  NIKKI: Both me and my mum did have breast cancer. And at the time, me and my mum both said we were going to sit down and write to them because I was really put out by the way it was all put on. The way they portrayed the hospital thing and the chemo thing.

  JOSH: They made it look as if you can only die from it.

  NIKKI: It was nothing to do with that. The bottom line was the information that they were giving to the public, via the soap, was actually completely wrong. Instead of a positive thing, it was a negative thing. I’m sure they researched it enough, but whatever their research was, I didn’t think it was great. I just thought, ‘Hold on. This isn’t right.’

  JONATHAN: Yeah, but, Nikki, that’s where you’ve got it all wrong. People shouldn’t just watch a programme and say, ‘Oh, is that how it all really is?’

  NIKKI: But people do.

  JOSH: People don’t know unless they’ve experienced something like that.

  NIKKI: But then recently, they’ve done another story which has been much more factual, much better written.

  JOSH: I wrote and complained once because of a news story. It was a time where Israel and Gaza were having one of their wars and the BBC news, of course, they were being biased, but it was more that they had actual inaccurate information. So me and my friend wrote in and complained. And we got sent an email saying, ‘Thank you for the complaint. We’ll try and deal with it ASAP.’
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  LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  GEORGE: I don’t complain about things. This is probably a very bad view to have on life, but I believe that you should not complain. You should just pay for your entertainment and then leave the premises. And I know that is probably not the best way to be.

  DR WHO

  THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL

  EVE: Something we don’t agree on would be Doctor Who. I absolutely love it. I’ve got a thing about David Tennant.

  RALF: I have to watch it, because they watch it, but I am moaning. I don’t get my head around it. It makes no sense for me. What’s happening? I see a phone box flying around …

  VIV: It’s not. It’s a police box.

  EVE: It’s the TARDIS!

  RALF: I see people watching really weird things …

  VIV: So uneducated!

  RALF: I think you have to grow up with it.

  EVE: He’s a Time Lord! He’s from Gallifrey!

  RALF: So, I start moaning and then I get in a row with my daughter because she tells me to shut up because she wants to watch it.

  EVE: I’ve watched it since it was brought back onto TV. But nobody in school really liked it. There was a select few of us that used to watch it. And we all got picked on.

  RALF: You have to be a kid, or stoned, to understand it. Or English.

  BILL & JOSEF, CAMBRIDGE

  BILL: The Daleks are still just heavy-duty waste bins with a sink plunger, aren’t they?

  LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  LINDA: Is there little midgets in them Daleks?

  PETE: What, little Oompa Loompas?

  GEORGE: If you watch Doctor Who and you’re over the age of nine, you need to rethink your life.

  DOWNTON ABBEY

  THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON

  AMY: I know it’s the olden days, but it’s just so dull.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  BAASIT: When were curtains invented? I don’t know when anything was invented, you know.

  UMAR: I’d imagine they were invented after the window.

  BAASIT: I’m sure I just saw a chest of drawers from IKEA there.

  THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON

  NIKKI: I never ever watched it when it was originally on. And then somebody bought the first series of the box set.

  JONATHAN: Yeah. Let me get my hands on them.

  Steph & Dom

  SANDWICH

  Steph, 48, and Dom, 50, have been married

  for sixteen years. They live in Kent with their

  two children, Max and Honor, and their beloved

  sausage dog, Gigi. Most evenings,

  they crack open the drinks cabinet and settle

  down to watch their favourite TV shows.

  HOW DID YOU MEET?

  DOM: We met on a blind date about eighteen years ago. Steph was in Brussels at the time – she’d just left NATO and had gone into the private sector, and she was over for a training course. A friend of mine had been trying to get us together for about a year, and eventually I capitulated and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come.’

  Now, according to this chap, Steph had a thing about ginger beards. So, as he’d finally got me to drive up to London, he’d gone and bought hairy ginger hands from a joke shop, and he’d cut them out, so I had a pathetically bad, hairy, stick-on ginger goatee beard.

  We get to the house. I’m in a tweed jacket with a fake ginger beard, starting to laugh. We knock on the door, and Steph answers. And I think, ‘Well, that’s obviously his date. Where’s my date?’ And I was delighted to find out that Steph was my date.

  Halfway through dinner I said something about renting a house down at the New Forest – telling her a funny story about a garage door getting stuck or something – and she went, ‘Oh, my God, it’s you!’

  And it transpired we’d met ten years before in the New Forest. I was a landlord and Steph was my tenant. I know at the time I was very interested, but very much got the cold shoulder.

  And that was that. It was a done deal that night.

  HOW DID YOU GET ON GOGGLEBOX?

  DOM: We did this programme, Four in a Bed. We had an absolute blast. It was really good fun. We didn’t have to worry about our place, and we met some great people, and had a really good time pissing around.

  And then we got a phone call saying, ‘We’ve got this wacky idea – Gogglebox – would you like to come and join it?’ And we said, ‘Why not?’ And we agreed between us that we’d do it if it was fun, and it was only four shows, and we just had a blast with it. Really good giggles. We sit on a sofa, watch telly and get pissed. I mean, you couldn’t get much better than that, could you?

  STEPH: It’s a bit like date night for us. We have to sit and be with each other, and not get up and answer the phone, and not deal with the punters – not do anything, just sit and have a laugh with each other. So, for us, it’s quite special, because we get to hang out with each other for a change.

  DOM: And that’s why you see us sitting holding hands, smashed on champagne and being silly.

  LAUREN D: My ideal relationship has grown from Bella and Edward when I was younger to now wanting what @stephanddom from @C4Gogglebox have!! #idols

  WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOURSELVES ON SCREEN?

  DOM: We didn’t like the first show that went out. We were all a bit unsure at the start. Also, our language is probably not the softest in the country and we felt a bit self-conscious about that. And slightly self-conscious about the fact that we were being watched in our own home. But it’s just got better and better.

  STEPH: I thought I was fat. I just went, ‘Oh my fucking Christ! I look huge. I’ve got thousands of chins.’ All I could do was stare at my chins. I couldn’t listen to a word I was saying. I was mesmerised by this sort of moving flesh. It was vile. I know I’m not fat, but on telly I look fat, and everyone tells me I look fat on telly. But after the first series, I got over it.

  DOM: I thought, ‘Oh my God, I haven’t got any lips. And my hair’s all pokey out at the sides and looking strange. Bloody hell! I don’t look like that, do I? I don’t sound like that, do I?’

  STEPH: You’re so fucking vain now.

  WHAT WAS YOUR FAMILY’S REACTION?

  STEPH: Originally our family didn’t like our being on telly. ‘Dreadful idea! Absolutely shameful. People like us don’t go on television. No, no, no, no, no.’

  DOM: Oh, and ‘Stop swearing.’

  STEPH: ‘You’re potty-mouthed.’

  DOM: ‘Is it necessary to use the F-word all the time?’ And, of course, it was just us at home alone, forgetting. So, you know, the language is free and easy. We don’t care about that. Obviously, when our children are about, we try not to … but the odd one slips in. But, you know, that’s how it is round here.

  STEPH: One of the questions we get asked is, ‘What do your children think about it?’ And funnily enough, I asked our daughter Honor on Sunday. She said, ‘Well, you know, sometimes you do things that are embarrassing, but I don’t really mind.’ On Saturday she watches the show with me, and there was one where we were having to review this wildlife show about walruses in a zoo – and they were trying to get mummy walrus pregnant by daddy walrus, and they were having to extract the magic juice by hand …

  DOM: Someone was wanking a walrus.

  STEPH: And its tummy’s wobbling away – and they cleverly blocked it out, but you could see this woman’s hand going up and down. And Honor’s watching, and she goes, ‘Mummy … what’s wrong with it? Is it all right?’ I said, out of nowhere, ‘You know when you tickle a dog on its tummy and its leg goes? That’s what’s happening to the walrus.’ ‘Oh, so it’s really happy?’ ‘Oh, yes! It’s really happy!’ ‘Oh, that’s fine, then, Mummy.’

  BEING RECOGNISED

  DOM: The reactions have been fabulous.

  STEPH: Wonderful. People laugh as soon as they see us. They sort of point and start laughing. You can’t ask for more, really.

  DOM: ‘We love you on the sho
w’ and ‘Thank you for cheering us up’ …

  STEPH: There’s been a lot of that.

  DOM: Apart from one Scottish kid who did a rant on YouTube after we’d said something rude about the Scots. But Steph is Scottish, so we’re allowed.

  One of the interesting things we do is watch the show to find out who we’ve upset this week. I mean, at one stage I upset half of Scotland; another week I upset half of Ireland … We haven’t offended the Welsh yet. But we have got to go for the full set.

  We make some harsh comments about actors and actresses and presenters and things like that. But it’s very easy for us to take the piss, right? It doesn’t worry me very much, because I like to think that people understand it’s on the basis that I don’t know these people – I’ve never met them. I don’t think anyone should take it too seriously.

  I think Gogglebox is an amazing exercise into the world of finding out real-time, real-life points of view. And a lot of us, on occasions, are having the same reaction to a certain person or show.

  Posh people probably have not had a very good press over the years …