If there's two things I remember most fondly from the salad days of my television viewing career, it's the twin postmodern concepts of the '80s and '90s: television comprised of little more than... more television!

I searched for an image to best illustrate that mind-bending concept and came up with this:



Hideous, non? Oui.

Moving on, allow me to elaborate: what I'm talking about are those heady days that seemed to begin around the end of the 'Celebration Of The Nation' and fizzled out mid-'90s, when executives became uppity about things like "content" and "actual entertainment" (pfft).

In any given week there might be a collection of the world's most hilarious TV news bloopers - generally presented by either Doug Mulray or Sophie Lee, or both! (NB this pairing may actually never have happened anywhere but in my mind) - and then, my personal favourite, perhaps a show about advertising.

(And if you were really lucky, there might be a special edition At The Adults Only Time Of 9.30™ that featured ads with bums and tits in them.)

(If you were even more lucky, it'd be on on Saturday night when your parents were at a dinner party/you were having a sleepover, so you could watch it and guffaw yourself to the brink of death.)

Wrap your head around that concept, though: a show featuring little more than a curated parade of advertisements, with breaks to feature... more advertisements!

I think it's time to welcome our friend again:



Anyway, I fondly remember a time when both these concepts were par for the course. Beyond that, they were actually hotly anticipated (at least on my corner of the living room couch).

They served another purpose, too - if you will, a curatorial one. In between the shots of turkeys landing on roving reporters' heads and/or newsreaders collapsing into fits of giggles, true gold would be dug up. Where else could you see classics like this:



Indeed, I wouldn't have known about Graham Kennedy as early as I did were it not for clip shows (which would predictably give reason for Dad to then wax lyrical about the time some hilarious thing happened on IMT, and he'd give us a full, verbal rundown, in what was a strange, spoken-word precursor to the clip show, I guess).

It's difficult to imagine any station (except perhaps Nine) deciding to air either a bloopers or an ads show these days, and for one simple reason:



Taping music hurts the artists, and YouTube's democratisation of content has hurt lazy contentmakers the world 'round.

"Why would we watch the original versions of classic bloopers on television for free," posit the cynics, "when we can watch shoddy, fourth-generation re-recordings of them with terrible sound on the internet... er, for free?"

That's not to say a clip show is impossible in this post-content world.

In fact, far from it. Hey, why don't we get a couple of nonentities from Big Brother, throw them together with Mike Goldman, and show YouTube clips on the tele? It can't lose!

Oh, what's that? It can and it did?






Back to the drawing board, then.

I'm sure it's still possible for someone to recapture the slightly anarchic quality of mid-'90s clip shows in this day and age. In fact, I was very fond of the Ed Kavalee-presented TV Burp, which - while it had an unfortunate name - was actually hilarious, and repositioned the clip show in a modern and relevant way.

Naturally, it was canned before you could blink.

So, I live with hope that someday soon, someone will allow me to relive my youth, on the couch, bowl of ice-cream and milo in hand, ready to LOL myself sick at the best an over-worked and underpaid editor can do. 

In the meantime, and in the spirit of classic bloopers, I shall share with you my all time favourite, which I saw once and then scrambled to find for years after, finally stumbling upon it on YouTube.

It's the final clip in this assemblage (itself lifted from, whaddyaknow, a clip show), in which New England Cable News' sports pundits have to fend for themselves when one of the studio's cameras becomes self-aware and decides to wreak revenge on behalf of cameras everywhere:




Spare a thought for the poor thing; maybe it once had to work with Doug Mulray and Sophie Lee.