What Have They Done To The Gadget Show?

The Gadget Show, Channel 5’s technology answer to BBC’s Top Gear, has been a show I’ve watched since practically it started thanks to being introduced to it by my granddad who, despite falling outside the demographic of the whizz-bang-geek television show, was an avid fan.

Over the years the show has gone through lots of changes, adding and subtracting presenters like that game on Nintendo’s Brain Training where people walk on and off the screen, but Jason, Suzi and Jon have always been the firm trio presenting the show.

In the past couple of years my granddad stopped watching it, complaining that it had become too frenetic and crazy and less about the technology and, though I continued to watch it and enjoy it, couldn’t help agreeing that it had perhaps jumped the shark a little and needed to reign itself in with fewer repetitive tested-to-destructions and crazy running-around challenges and go back to straight forward testing, but keeping the element of fun. It had started to retrace its steps a lot and doing the same thing series after series. So the message would be to give it a bit of a kick up the iArse. Sort of, keep the competitions but not spend ten minutes of having someone running around a house naming them, that sort of thing.

Sadly, after a gap of a few months, the team behind the show have really dropped the ball. Yes, I agree that the show needed some refreshing but what they’ve done is ridiculous. Gone are Suzi, Jon and Ortis, leaving just Jason and Pollyanna behind. Basically the show has lost the eccentric, but knowledgeable Jon, the enthusiastic Ortis and the sexy but informative Suzi, leaving Jason who, though he knows his stuff, is like a whippet on speed at the best of times and Pollyanna who is a little bit meh. It’s a bit like getting rid of Jeremy Clarkson and James May, giving Richmond Hammond speed and partnering him with Tulisa from N-Dubz.

Now this may sound like bitterness toward change but really, what have they done? The show is shallower than ever and filmed in a weird blurry soft focus. One shot I saw of the beach looked like the cameraman had been filming from the next country it was so distant. The show seems to now be like Katie Price: looks good on the surface but you wouldn’t trust it to recommend a DSLR with good optical zoom.

I have to confess that it’s the first episode of the show I’ve had to give up on. There’s refreshing the formula then there’s ripping it apart, gluing it together and dipping it into the shallow pool of bleurgh. It’s now even more superficial and the ‘world tour’ theme, which I hope is a one-off, losing everything that made the studio-based show successful.

Sorry The Gadget Show, you’ve lost a long-time fan. 1 ‘G’.