The latest TV trend is risqué show titles, but Mark Solomon argues that they're not nearly as witty as they think they are
A recent TV show by the former Top Gear team was called A Massive Hunt. How Clarkson, Hammond and May, the public-school version of Last of the Summer Wine without the charm or wit, must have laughed.
There is a trend for nudge-nudge TV-show titles. The current crop includes Schitt’s Creek, PEN15, Trucking Hell, Pawn Stars and Hardcore Pawn. Snigger.
Even now, latte-drinking creatives are thinking up titles before fitting a programme round it. It’s not new. Remember when Channel 4 introduced TFI Friday, claiming it stood for Thanks Four It’s Friday, when we all knew otherwise?
Where TV gets edgy, Hollywood follows. The romcom Meet the Parents set the scene by creating a central character called Gaylord Focker, a play on words so funny it was stretched out to three movies.
Perhaps it came from the porn industry. To attract a wider audience, porn films began to parody mainstream Hollywood titles with their own puns: Shaving Ryan’s Privates, Forrest Hump, Pocahotass, Kinky Kong and ET the Extra Testicle. This inevitably fed into the mainstream, and soon middle-aged dads were sporting shirts emblazoned with FCUK, the new ‘edgy’ brand name for high-street retailer French Connection.
Is any of this really shocking? If not, what’s the point? To most intelligent viewers, it’s not big and it’s not clever.
No doubt TV executives think they are pushing back an imaginary boundary, like Kenneth Tynan, allegedly the first person to say the f-word on television, in 1965. You can be sure that someone, somewhere has thought up the title Tits Up – and is working out how to turn it into a dating show for birdwatchers.
