Dear Trisha, my pants are on fire, can I come and sing about it! (Trisha)

Member Name: Judgee

Product:	Trisha
Date:	08/11/01 (1260 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Better than watching Baseball

Disadvantages: Very stale

Trisha is a talk show, aired on ITV at 9.30am every weekday and is repeated in the very early hours of the morning. The topics are a mixture of the usual every day dramas that people face from "My husband run off with the milk MAN" to "I am seriously attracted to my best friends dog”"!


So who is this woman of such wisdom and does she know what she is talking about? Well, to be fair, her life has been somewhat traumatic. I will start at the beginning and finish at the end!


Trisha Goddard was born in London. In her teens she attended Chertsey Grammar school obtaining 11 O'levels. She quit sixth form to play keyboards in a band called "Eve". They toured Germany and after making a record, the band split up and she returned to England. She then worked as an airhostess for five years and eventually moved to Australia with her new husband Robert. The marriage only lasted a few months and years later,Trisha found out that he was gay and had died of AIDS.


Working on Australian television as a Presenter of currant affairs programs, she went on to marry her second husband Mark and they had a Daughter together.


Meanwhile back in England her sister Linda committed suicide. Soon after, Trisha had her second child Maddison. Unfortunately Maddison was born with respiratory problems of a life threatening nature. To make matters worse she found out that her husband Mark was having an affair. Kicking him out, she threw herself in to work but the strain was too much and she spent a month in a psychiatric hospital.


Giving up work to spend more time with her daughters she also found herself drawn to helping people with mental problems. Through this she found and married her third husband Peter, a psychiatrist. They married in 1998 and soon after, Trisha was given the call to return to England to present a new television program for Anglia tv, imaginatively titled "Trisha&quo
t;!


Well as you can see her background certainly explains why she was chosen to present a show like this, but is the program any good? In a word, no! The guests come on and sit in front of an audience to air their problems. This is where my first main criticism lies. If you have a genuine problem that is really bothering you, why air it in front of millions of viewers? Somehow, the guests motives stink of self-promotion and opportunism to ridicule someone that they don't like.


This leads to my second major gripe about the show i.e. Self-promotion. How many more times do we have to sit through the awful howling of a spotty teenager that just want's to sing and is just soooo depressed that they have to sing on Trisha? How often do we have to watch very skinny uncoordinated men hop up and down because they want to become a "Dream boy" dancer? More importantly why did these idiots not just sign up to appear on "Popstars"? Perhaps it's because they have no talent whatsoever and were too bad even to appear on that awful program!


The audience is a mixture of genuine, well meaning people and teenagers who want to look cool in front of their mates. The former contribute a lot of good advice from personal experiences and can often make you think more about the topic of the day. The latter, who can easily be spotted by when they stand up and say something like "well I would just like to say that your wife is a whore and you should dump her man, wicked, respect!" these people should be slapped about the head with a wet fish (however I should not say this as Trisha does not condone violence!)


There are occasionally appearences by "so called" experts such as Pam Spurr, who offer their little titbits of wisdom to anybody who will listen. These are "media" therapists, point a camera at them and they will tell you how to live your life. Their little nuggets of wisd
om are usually pretty useless, but they have perfected the technique of appearing on television or radio, and are probably very grateful for the huge appearance fees they get for it!


Trisha herself has a lot to say about every one and every thing. Initially her advice seemed quite genuine, reasonable and would probably often help a lot of people. Unfortunately she seems to have been taking lessons from Jonathan Ross on "How to make long and pointless speeches in order to maximise you close up shot"!


Overall I used to watch this program with interest. Now, I only glance at it when it is on the television at 2am in the morning. Not because I particularly want to, but because it's either that, Baseball or boring bearded lecturers talking about mathematical formulas! The show is no where near as entertaining or informative as it used to be, but it is still a far better than that awful show presented by Vanessa Feltz who used to host a similar program on the other channel. Recently the ratings have dropped and one measure to combat this seems to be the "put them in a ring and let them punch it out" scenario. This idea came from Jerry Springer, a talk show host in America. The bouncers are now carefully placed in the studio to enhance the tension, but is this really a path that the show should go down, after all it has already become stale on Jerry Springers show? Personally, I think the time has come to bring on the next new chat show host/hostess. Sorry Trisha but you are just too boring now and it is time to move on!

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