You’ve seen one episode, you’ve seen them all?

[WomanStanleyWoman]

Inspired by the ‘Vera’ thread - what are the shows you can see once, then theoretically never see again without missing anything?

My vote goes to Location Location Location. As much as I love it, the formula is eternally predictable:

‘Steve and Samantha Deluded-Twats are looking for a spacious two-bedroom apartment in west London. They love pricey Chiswick, but only have £300k to spend. They’re hoping that, with our help, they can find an area nearby with an attractive high street with a villagey feel and lots of independent shops and cafés, even though they buy everything off Amazon and get their lunch from Tesco Express like the rest of us. Today, I’ll be showing them a one-bed in need of work opposite a condemned council estate now being used as an unofficial skate park and drug den. I REALLY hope they can see the potential’.

Share your nominations…

Dinner date

Desperate singleton has three excruciatingly awkward meals with people who they wouldn't look twice at. Chooses the best of a bad bunch and goes for another meal where they both say it's going well but there's no spark. They swap numbers and never contact each other again.

In the Night Garden. Iglesias Piggle goes to bed. The end.

I'm desperate to watch "En el jardín de la noche"*. Are there subtitles?

*With thanks to Google Translate

@Unfashionable

In the Night Garden. Iglesias Piggle goes to bed. The end.

Great autocorrect.

Friends. I don't get why it's so popular. It's crap.

HOUSE! Whatever the diagnosis (99% cancer) you won't be right until after the third adverts!

Yes. You always know the first diagnosis is incorrect yet they are still allowed to practice medicine.

@Unfashionable

In the Night Garden. Iglesias Piggle goes to bed. The end.

OMG this gave me a much needed laugh 🤣🤣🤣

I’ve enjoyed all these summaries but honest to god Iglesias Piggle made me snort laugh
Perfect, just perfect

@Unfashionable

In the Night Garden. Iglesias Piggle goes to bed. The end.

Iglesias!!! 😂😂😂😂

@MazzleDazzle

I feel awful for saying it, but DIY SOS.

Before it was ordinary people a bit down on their luck. Now it seems like this isn’t enough and only families completely and utterly devastated by one disaster after another will do. I know they are doing something wonderful, but it seems a bit distasteful for the family’s grief to be entertainment. I find it a bit patronising.

I’m probably going straight to hell for thinking it!

I remember thinking the day Brexit happened that DIY SOS were about to pitch up on street…

Place in the sun

Well to do retired couple looking for small but authentic villa in Spanish hills. Just for them to relax in. Couple look constantly disappointed that their one bedroom villa doesn't come with 3 guests bedrooms for all family and friends who want to visit. Sad looking faces at size of “plunge pool” painted blue concrete hole up some steps.
Will find tiny 7 level villa that they can certainly retire and relax in with kitchen being on ground floor, toilet on 3rd and bedroom on 6th. But it has some migraine indicting tills in corner of kitchen which will swing the deal.

Four in a Bed

People stay at each others' B&Bs/ hotels/ etc

Take apart the sewage system to find something to complain about ("Someone has poo'ed in this toilet in the last 5 months")

5 Star Hotelier knocks 8 quid off a £15/night spotlessly clean B and B because there was no Earl Grey or Lapsang Suchong on the hospitality tray, and then goes crackers because someone docks them a fiver off their £240 a night boutique room because the bed was full of dead spiders.

No one will accept that they aren't comparing like-with-like, and you can't expect complimentary Creme de la Mer face cream if you're paying next to nowt for a bed and full English.

Someone storms out.

Sarah Beany's How to live mortgage free...

"John plans to live mortgage free... buy building a house out of cheese/tin cans/pallets in the grounds of his family's estate/farm/garden."

Every single weight loss type programme. The rotund person is vehemently in denial, the doctor/nutritionist wheels out their monthly food in a wheelbarrow or on a sack truck, they sob, the professional gives them a diet. They cheat on the diet. There is intense music as a the professional catches them with a Mars bar on it's way down their gullet. They have a bit of a row. Rotund person stomps off, cries, plinky plunky sad music as the professional comes over and the sob story is revealed. Usually something unrelated like "when I was a child, I was caught on a dinghy at sea for three hours and that's why I can't give up my eighteen takeaways a week"

[quote FlatteredFool]@Youdoyoutoday You obviously haven't paid attention to the lovely lieutenant Columbo as the opening scenes always show the murderer and murdered so we know exactly who did it but the fun is in watching Columbo figure out the exact how and why. There's usually one small thing that tips him off. It's a Sunday afternoon joy to behold. Especially when poorly and lazing on the sofa. I'll always have a place in my crime drama loving heart for Columbo. [/quote]
I adore Columbo, especially the earlier series and the episodes with Dog in.

I do like a horder / cleaning programmes, but they have the same formula too.

Lol at the grand designs recaps.
YY to the specially quadrupally glazed glass the size of a tennis court, shipped from Germany, and then delivered down a narrow gap between drives that a fiat 500 would struggle to get through.

Also
Escape to the country
Linda and Colin live in a 4 bed 1970s estate house in Reading but now all their children have left home, they want to retire to Devon. The new house must have character, and be rural with views but they want to be part of a community. It needs 4 bedrooms, a large kitchen diner because they love to entertain, a huge living area to accommodate family and friends, a large garden for growing vegetables and at least a double garage or outbuilding for (and this is where there are subtle differences) an art /pottery studio for Linda or to accommodate Colin's motorbike collection or potential to start a b and b.

Half way through the programme, for no point whatsoever, the presenter will take them to a nearby place to try wild swimming or basket weaving and Linda and Colin will look slightly bewildered and unenthusiastic, but make vaguely positive comments to camera about how they might try it again once they have moved.

Dinner date:
"Luke and Mia really liked each other but have yet to go on another date/have no plans to meet again."

Greg Wallace programme about a factory. Fundamental law of nature that various words meaning 'big' must be used frequently. Impossible to be made without superlatives. Suspect he would explode if he tried.

Heartbeat. I know it's finished but my brother will loves it.
Every episode: small crime committed by someone with a secret. Kind policeman, unlucky in love/in complicated relationship, goes above and beyond whilst remonstrating with elderly miscreant in tatty hat. Someone then chases someone else through the dusk on the moors.
End with elderly miscreant saying something mildly amusing in the pub. Local girl in a nice jumper kisses someone. Cut.

New Amsterdam:
An Issue arises in the hospital, probably to do with somebody's Rights.
Max makes a series of sincere faces and asks 'How can I help?'
Another Issue arises, apparently independently. Max has a lightbulb moment about how to solve both Issues using a radical and expensive plan that would, in the real world, involve months of consultations and paperwork.
The hospital administrator runs away from Max in the corridor to a soundtrack of jazz drumming.
Max ploughs ahead with the plan regardless, pulls together a team of random volunteers/builders/funders from thin air, and rewrites the entire hospital policy in ten minutes.
The Issue is magically resolved. Max looks on, through a window, making sincere faces again. Heartwarming music. The end.

Also great british bake off
All that glitters
Pottery throw down
Sewing bee
The dog grooming one
The make up one (glow up?)

Are basically all the same programme with different materials.

@MyCatEatsPrawnCrackers I love Columbo! It amazes me how so many scenes are entirely brown. So many shades of 70s brown.

New Life in the Country/Location x 3/Place in the Sun

Couple want to start again with the obscene profits from their ex council house. They get taken round and asked to guess how much the property is - it's either lower than their budget but about 4000 times the amount anybody who was born in the area can ever hope to have, or it's about half as much again and they magically have that stashed down the back of the sofa.

Despite wanting to move as far away from all the furriners family, friends and any social support in their original place whilst naturally getting the money for the move out of the people who need to live near where they work , they then insist that they need enough room and preferably another property on the land with which to 'have friends to stay' rent out as an Air BnB along with the initial house they never had any intention of living in.

They then fuck off shortly after the camera crew leave and live somewhere else that has public transport, shops and if it's abroad, a handy airport so they can fly back and get treated by the NHS for free when they get ill.

A tiny side plot is when they buy a beautiful old building with massive character and land because they're going to keep sheep and goats and enjoy the peaceful, rural lifestyle, then promptly flog off most of it for a barn conversion around 300 yards from the front door and a bunch of squat little conversions at the end of the paddock where the horses were claimed to be living.

If they decide to knock down the beautiful place or extend it gut it so it's an identikit open plan in modern materials and the missus is still fertile and obviously hankering to work as an unpaid Project Manager whilst shitting in a bucket in a knackered caravan throughout the Wettest Winter This County Has Ever Seen in between puking into the one remaining mature hedgerow until the builders tear it out for a gravel drive and some Architectural Planting Scheme around the edge complete with motorway service station Gabions trying to hold the soil at bay because the hedgerow, mature trees and other plants are now in the spoil heap, they apply to go on Grand Designs instead.

Nobody ever ends up together on dating shows!
Greg Wallace just goes to the same factory and they pretend it's a different one each time..

I’m loving these

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Come Dine With Me yet. “Battling it out for the £1000 this week are a big gobby woman who pitches her unbelievable rudeness as ‘telling it like it is’, a big-faced posh arsehole who looks down on everyone and then wonders why he doesn’t win, a very camp man who everyone thinks is hilarious on night one, but is grating by day three, an over-sensitive type in a floaty dress who throws in a few tears in the hope of sympathy points, plus a token relatively normal and quiet one who’ll come at least third merely by not pissing anyone off”.

Oh, and despite all being self-proclaimed ‘foodies’, none of them can pronounce ‘Provençal’.