ITV’s Sunday-night period crime drama,total with its supernatural twists and Victorian female police constable, stretches credulity, or as does hypnotist Keith Barry in You’re Back in the RoomWorld-famous hypnotist/escapologist Keith Barry (anyone?) returns with a second series of You’re Back in the Room (ITV),the Saturday-night entertainment format based around his “mentalist” capabilities and presented by safe pair of hands Phillip Schofield. Barry claims he can “hack” into the brains of his subjects and make them do inappropriate things while they perform Generation Game-style tasks, the studio audience hurting themselves laughing as they do. Schofield can watch down the barrel on any given weekday and sincerely urge viewers to check themselves for cancer, and so logic says he wouldn’t lie to us approximately this: Barry must be a lega student of the human subconscious who just happens to expend his powers for entertainment.“Let’s meet the man that will be messing with their heads,” grins Schofield, gesturing towards a screen on which we can see five contestants laying stricken on backstage sofas as Barry instructs them to “sleep”. Among them is a policeman and a law student; sensible sorts not prone to silliness or exhibitionism. apart from all of them seem surprisingly at ease in front of the cameras. When people step off the street into a TV studio, and they don’t tend to act like themselves. These camera-friendly everymen and women make it watch as if they’ve been on television for years and that’s even before they apparently go “under” and perform humiliating tasks to win money. I didn’t believe it and I didn’t devour their apparently complicit shame,either. Why resort to tawdry parlour trickery and credit the Saturday-night audience with so puny intelligence?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com