James May TV

Australian TV it has to be said, is pretty poor. Admittedly British TV is itself stuffed full of soaps and dancing/singing/skating/cooking talent shows, but nevertheless BBC and Channel 4 are cerebral feasts compared to Channel 7, 9, 10 etc in Australia.

The commercial channels here are apparently targeted by an age demographic, if they are I’ve never noticed. Mostly they contain American cop shows or re-run films interrupted with increasingly annoying regularity by adverts. There’s also a good dose of border security type programmes and advertorials.

The only saving grace in amongst the trash are channels SBS (which itself seems somewhat dedicated to showing Japanese cooking programmes) and ABC (who show a fair proportion of BBC re-runs) or copycat BBC news and current affair programmes (Question Time becomes Q & A in Australia for example).

Over the last couple of weeks though both ABC and SBS have been showing a huge assortment of James May programmes. So many in fact that I actually checked Wikipedia this morning in case he had died. There I learnt about his early career sacking from Autocar which is superb. Click here to read

On Australian TV at the moment we’ve got Top Gear, for which he does a good job as an affable host alongside the hideous Clarkson (shown twice weekly). Then we’ve got James May’s Toys, James May’s 20th Century and Oz and James big wine adventure. You can quite literally watch James May every night of the week.

Fortunately, he seems a nice bloke, and it’s preferable to the other option of watching Two and a Half Men, starring wife beater Charlie Sheen which is shown round the clock on one of the channels and must have run to something like 10,000 episodes. Apparently the show is no.1 ranking programme in America, which says something about the USA's take on 'comedy'