Forget reality TV - how would popstars fare in a TV drama?
Footballers' Wives Lipgloss, high heels and fake tan - who else but Girls Aloud to fill the shoes of Tanya Turner and friends? After all of the original cast were immolated in an unfortunate sunbed accident, the Aloud arrive in a hot pink stretch Hummer and daintily tread their spike heels into the turf before setting off to attend Cheryl's hen party at the latest swank celebrity nightspot. Nadine drinks too much and falls off her legs, and an unfortunate accident with an incense stick sets Nicola's hair on fire, leading to lots of "flame-haired" gags in the following morning's papers. Jenny Frost appears as the girlfriend of a rival team captain; everyone hisses and boos. Sarah steals Jenny's baby and covers it in turpentine to avoid suspicion. Kimberley becomes the club's new chairperson after being the first one to find the key to the office, and hires the other girls' boyfriends for the squad. Since they're still at least six players short of a full team, the club is promptly relegated, but the viewers don't care because they only tuned in for the hair-pulling and catfights (which Cheryl is careful to keep a considered distance from). The Girls spend what's left of the club's budget on more shoes. Hooray!
Desperate Housewives Wisteria Lane seemed like a quiet suburb of smalltown America, a place where nothing unusual or exciting ever happened. At least until that fateful day that Mr and Mrs Federline moved into the neighbourhood with their poorly-guarded DEEP DARK SECRET. Mrs Federline (Britney to her friends) tries her best to fit in with the neighbours: she flirts with the local handyman, she lets her child run riot, she wanders around the shops in a designer tracksuit all day and makes loud exclamations about her husband's shortcomings at dinner parties. Try as she might to look like a normal housewife, Britney is harbouring a terrible secret. Whenever people ask her what her husband does for a living, she stiffens, makes her excuses and runs away. At night she lies awake, terrified that people might find out. One day a neighbour pops in without knocking to borrow a cup of sugar and discovers the awful, sickening truth...Kevin is planning a pop career. Noooooooooo!
Charmed Okay, so there are these three girls, right? And they do good things for the world. In this case, three girls save the world from bad pop on a regular basis by making really good pop music for people to listen to instead. We could call them the Suga'd Ones for short. But the important thing that you need to remember is that their strength comes from the fact that there are THREE of them, right? The power of three, if you will. Except one day, one of them exits unexpectedly, leaving the other two - not to mention the rest of the world - in a sticky situation and quite possibly mortal peril. The power of two, after all, is no use to anyone. So what's the only possible way to resolve this problem? Simple: pluck a completely new third sister - er, member - out of nowhere and use her to reconstitute the power of three, while trying to remove all memory of the first one from existence. Mutya who? Exactly.
Lost Fade up on a desert island. The wreckage of a plane lies smoking in the distance as the few survivors scramble up the beach. A plane full of Pop's no-longer loved who crash landed on their solo journeys. Abs-out-of-Five sprints across the beach, doing his best to attend to the sick with his limited medical knowledge (it's a stretch, but work with us here). Having tended to the wounded as best he can, he sets off to a secluded area of beach to tend to his own injuries, where Rachel Stevens and her improbably-small-and-photogenic scratch on the cheek find him and offers to sew up his back. Geri Halliwell sits on the beach looking out to sea and everyone wonders what a heavily-pregnant lady was doing on the plane in the first place. Mark Owen and Lisa Scott-Lee sit bickering on the shore about who gets to order who around, and the viewers all hope that Lisa gets eaten by the monster as soon as possible. Michelle McManus finds the hostess trolley but doesn't let on, so after several weeks on the Island of Nowhere, people are very suspicious of her failure to lose weight. Steve Brookstein finds a series of numbers and becomes obsessed with their meaning, until he discovers that it's the voting numbers for the next series of The X Factor. The castaways suspect sabotage at the hands of Simon Cowell.
CSI: London Yet another spin-off from the successful forensic franchise follows the Crime Scene Investigation team as they set up a base on this side of the Atlantic, spearheaded by James Blunt, a man whose dependability and attention to detail both fascinates and bores his colleagues. He uses his army training to identify the forensic information, with the assistance of his willing team: Liz McClarnon, who uses her high IQ and sense of curiosity to solve crimes, specialising in blood splatter analysis (all that time spent with Jenny Frost came in handy); Lee Ryan, who is excitable and eager to learn, not to mention full of extremely interesting theories, specialising in hair and fibre analysis (chiefly his own); and KT Tunstall, the no-nonsense brainiac who is always pushing to make things better and more efficient, specialising in materials and element analysis (suddenly she sees the answer, y'see). The capital couldn't be in safer hands...
Footballers' Wives
Lipgloss, high heels and fake tan - who else but Girls Aloud to fill the shoes of Tanya Turner and friends? After all of the original cast were immolated in an unfortunate sunbed accident, the Aloud arrive in a hot pink stretch Hummer and daintily tread their spike heels into the turf before setting off to attend Cheryl's hen party at the latest swank celebrity nightspot. Nadine drinks too much and falls off her legs, and an unfortunate accident with an incense stick sets Nicola's hair on fire, leading to lots of "flame-haired" gags in the following morning's papers. Jenny Frost appears as the girlfriend of a rival team captain; everyone hisses and boos. Sarah steals Jenny's baby and covers it in turpentine to avoid suspicion. Kimberley becomes the club's new chairperson after being the first one to find the key to the office, and hires the other girls' boyfriends for the squad. Since they're still at least six players short of a full team, the club is promptly relegated, but the viewers don't care because they only tuned in for the hair-pulling and catfights (which Cheryl is careful to keep a considered distance from). The Girls spend what's left of the club's budget on more shoes. Hooray!
Desperate Housewives
Wisteria Lane seemed like a quiet suburb of smalltown America, a place where nothing unusual or exciting ever happened. At least until that fateful day that Mr and Mrs Federline moved into the neighbourhood with their poorly-guarded DEEP DARK SECRET. Mrs Federline (Britney to her friends) tries her best to fit in with the neighbours: she flirts with the local handyman, she lets her child run riot, she wanders around the shops in a designer tracksuit all day and makes loud exclamations about her husband's shortcomings at dinner parties. Try as she might to look like a normal housewife, Britney is harbouring a terrible secret. Whenever people ask her what her husband does for a living, she stiffens, makes her excuses and runs away. At night she lies awake, terrified that people might find out. One day a neighbour pops in without knocking to borrow a cup of sugar and discovers the awful, sickening truth...Kevin is planning a pop career. Noooooooooo!
Charmed
Okay, so there are these three girls, right? And they do good things for the world. In this case, three girls save the world from bad pop on a regular basis by making really good pop music for people to listen to instead. We could call them the Suga'd Ones for short. But the important thing that you need to remember is that their strength comes from the fact that there are THREE of them, right? The power of three, if you will. Except one day, one of them exits unexpectedly, leaving the other two - not to mention the rest of the world - in a sticky situation and quite possibly mortal peril. The power of two, after all, is no use to anyone. So what's the only possible way to resolve this problem? Simple: pluck a completely new third sister - er, member - out of nowhere and use her to reconstitute the power of three, while trying to remove all memory of the first one from existence. Mutya who? Exactly.
Lost
Fade up on a desert island. The wreckage of a plane lies smoking in the distance as the few survivors scramble up the beach. A plane full of Pop's no-longer loved who crash landed on their solo journeys. Abs-out-of-Five sprints across the beach, doing his best to attend to the sick with his limited medical knowledge (it's a stretch, but work with us here). Having tended to the wounded as best he can, he sets off to a secluded area of beach to tend to his own injuries, where Rachel Stevens and her improbably-small-and-photogenic scratch on the cheek find him and offers to sew up his back. Geri Halliwell sits on the beach looking out to sea and everyone wonders what a heavily-pregnant lady was doing on the plane in the first place. Mark Owen and Lisa Scott-Lee sit bickering on the shore about who gets to order who around, and the viewers all hope that Lisa gets eaten by the monster as soon as possible. Michelle McManus finds the hostess trolley but doesn't let on, so after several weeks on the Island of Nowhere, people are very suspicious of her failure to lose weight. Steve Brookstein finds a series of numbers and becomes obsessed with their meaning, until he discovers that it's the voting numbers for the next series of The X Factor. The castaways suspect sabotage at the hands of Simon Cowell.
CSI: London
Yet another spin-off from the successful forensic franchise follows the Crime Scene Investigation team as they set up a base on this side of the Atlantic, spearheaded by James Blunt, a man whose dependability and attention to detail both fascinates and bores his colleagues. He uses his army training to identify the forensic information, with the assistance of his willing team: Liz McClarnon, who uses her high IQ and sense of curiosity to solve crimes, specialising in blood splatter analysis (all that time spent with Jenny Frost came in handy); Lee Ryan, who is excitable and eager to learn, not to mention full of extremely interesting theories, specialising in hair and fibre analysis (chiefly his own); and KT Tunstall, the no-nonsense brainiac who is always pushing to make things better and more efficient, specialising in materials and element analysis (suddenly she sees the answer, y'see). The capital couldn't be in safer hands...
