“OK! TV kicked off to a triumphant start,” said OK! magazine this week in an interview with the OK! TV host Kate Walsh. The Channel 5 show could be glad of one positive review, at least, even if the more cynical among us might suspect that due to printing deadlines it may have been written before the “triumphant start” had even gone to air.
But then this is the bewildering circle-jerk that is Richard Desmond’s empire right now. OK! TV, Channel 5’s new brightly coloured approximation of a couple of vapid office drones chattering about celebrities over a water cooler, promotes OK! magazine. The Daily Star and Daily Express promote OK! TV and OK! magazine, as well as giving remarkably positive reviews to the likes of the Channel 5 host Vanessa Feltz; OK! magazine has a two-page feature telling you what’s coming up this week on Channel 5 . . . and so on, and so on.
“We are beyond excited by the launch of OK! TV,” said the magazine’s editor in a leader this week. Beyond excited!
The incestuous vortex of cross-promotion gets to the point where if you see something in a Desmond publication that isn’t anything to do with another of his assets, you wonder why it’s there at all. And which one is meant to be the flagship? Is Channel 5 the jewel in the crown, or is it OK!, or the Daily Express? Or are they all fighting for the title of least mediocre? It’s hard to tell.
It was my own fault, really. I’d decided to watch OK! TV while reading a copy of OK! magazine. I think I got overloaded by it all. But one thing I did notice was that I was reading more than I was watching. I ended up being fascinated by Josie Gibson’s Big Fat Gypsy Wedding photo shoot, leaving Kate Walsh and Matt Johnson babbling away in the background.
Of course, this being a Desmond publication, the photo shoot is to tell you that Gibson is a reporter on . . . yes, you guessed it, OK! TV. But even as someone who isn’t the target audience of the mag, who couldn’t really care less about celebrity culture and all the trashy awfulness therein, I found her tales of growing up in a traveller family (hence the giant pink dress and caravan) quite intriguing.
OK! TV, in comparison, is pretty shabby. Gibson is, by a bus ride, the best thing about it, chirping merrily away about celebrity tweets in that delightful Bristolian burr (“Shane Warne, he’s a blancmange, in’t he?”), but her segment was a rare moment that strayed beyond the otiose. The rest just makes you yearn for the understated subtlety and class of the show’s predecessor, Live from Studio Five.
Besides, they’re missing a trick. If they called it Daily Star Daily Express Sunday Express New! Magazine Star Magazine Daily Star on Sunday OK! TV, they’d be able to promote even more Northern & Shell goodies at one go. Surely it’s only a matter of time.
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