by Gogglebox
STEPHEN: If I was there, I’d chuck a cup of piss over him.
THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL
RALF: We have someone like him in Germany. His name is Dieter Bohlen in Germany, the man who is Simon Cowell in England. If I show you the jury in Germany and I put them in different places and I ask you who is the Simon Cowell, and you’ll say straightaway, ‘He!’ And you never saw him in his life.
EVE: I thought he would have been a bit nicer since he’s had a kid now.
RALF: But if I, as a musician, go on the stage, I couldn’t take it from him. It doesn’t matter, if he’s saying I’m shit, then I’m shit. That’s what I have to take. But I would say to him, ‘Can you sing?’ I would say to him, ‘Have you ever wrote your own song? I have. I have made six CDs already, you know? So I will take it, yeah, but don’t be so nasty. Because you see from the business side and not from the musical side.’
LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL
LEON: Sneering prat.
JUNE: I’ve been trying to find out what his talent is. All that money and, well … how did he get it? What is his talent? What has he done? And why has he got a name like Simon Callow? Because I love Simon Callow.
The Tappers
NORTH LONDON
The Tappers are Jonathan, 47, an executive driver,
and Nikki, 41, a nursery teacher.
Their two children are Josh, 17, and Amy, 14, who
is the youngest contributor on Gogglebox.
They live in North London.
HOW DID YOU MEET?
NIKKI: We met on holiday. But it wasn’t really a holiday romance.
JONATHAN: We met in Eilat. In Israel.
JOSH: He proposed to her two months after they met.
AMY: In a car. And his mum called halfway through asking if he’d done it yet.
NIKKI: I should have known, when your mother rang in the middle of you proposing to me, what my life was going to be like.
JONATHAN: You don’t even speak to my mother.
NIKKI: I do.
JONATHAN: When?
NIKKI: Occasionally.
AMY: Anyway, she said yes. So obviously she was desperate.
NIKKI: No, I definitely wasn’t desperate. But your father was. Eighteen years. It’s our anniversary next week. Eighteen years.
JONATHAN: I’m not celebrating now. That I can assure you.
AMY: Dad, if you take mum for dinner, why can’t me and Josh come with you?
JONATHAN: Because it’s our anniversary, not yours.
JOSH: Yeah, but I want dinner.
AMY: Father, can I get takeaway?
NIKKI: We went on honeymoon to San Francisco, Maui and Las Vegas. And we had one of the best holidays apart from I cried the whole way there.
JONATHAN: The whole plane journey.
NIKKI: How old was I? Twenty-three? I had lived at home, never moved out. I’d been travelling, but I’d never actually left home. And then I moved out the day we got married. And I was just, like, ‘Whoah!’ We got married yesterday and we got on a plane the following morning, and I just think I found the whole thing overwhelming.
HOW DID YOU GET ON GOGGLEBOX?
NIKKI: I did a programme on Channel 4 called Jewish Mum of the Year, which I have to tell you was absolutely horrendous. People nominated people to do it and you went through all these workshops. My mum put me forward.
JONATHAN: What she was saying is that she’s not Jewish Mother of the Year, but her daughter is.
NIKKI: The final ten were on telly, and I was in the final twelve, so I never got on TV. But one of the researchers had come to the house and interviewed the kids, and she rang me completely out the blue six months later, trying to find households to do this new programme, Gogglebox. I thought it would be brilliant.
JONATHAN: If she’d gone all the way on the Jewish Mum show, we would never have done this, though.
NIKKI: Everything they said the programme wasn’t going to be, it was. And believe me, you were not portrayed in the way you wanted to be portrayed.
JONATHAN: It was car-crash comedy.
NIKKI: I told Gogglebox exactly what I thought of the experience doing the Jewish Mum programme, and they said this show was going to be nothing like that.
JONATHAN: From Day One, I said I wouldn’t do this show if it’s going be anything like Come Dine with Me, where I find it funny but I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of it.
JOSH: That’s the good thing about Gogglebox. They don’t want to take the piss out of us. They want us to entertain everyone.
Josh (7) and Amy (4), 2004
HAD YOU BEEN ON TV BEFORE?
JONATHAN: I once nearly got kicked off Top of the Pops. It was nothing major. Years ago. Gary Davies was the DJ and I was in the audience. And he was introducing the next act: it was after Murray Head doing ‘One Night In Bangkok’, and going into Paul McCartney’s ‘Frog Chorus’. I was standing next to him, and I got my hand over his head, and went and did the rabbit ears. And then, afterwards, the producer came up and had a go at me, and said they’d have to reshoot the whole thing again. But they didn’t. It was on. I’ve got it on video.
JOSH: Sorry, what? What’s this?
NIKKI: I was on Top of the Pops, too, one time, dancing in the background to Five Star. And I was on Grange Hill as well.
AMY: Why do you not tell us anything?
NIKKI: I went to a big school in Elstree. When I was eleven or twelve, they asked our school for extras. And it was for the first day of term at Grange Hill and it was a massive episode, all in the hall. We met all of them because we spent the whole day with them. Ziggy was in it at the time.
JONATHAN: What was the little fat one they used to take the mickey out of?
NIKKI: Roland.
JONATHAN: Roland is the Augustus Gloop of Grange Hill. She calls me Augustus Gloop. So you ended up marrying your Roland.
NIKKI: Ziggy was in it, Banksy was in it. There was Ant. And that Jewish boy.
JONATHAN: Dec?
NIKKI: It was brilliant. I think Ziggy had been really naughty and taken a spider into the assembly and it escaped from his pocket.
JONATHAN: I only remember Tucker Jenkins and Roland.
JOSH: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
WHAT DO YOU THINK
OF YOURSELVES ON SCREEN?
JOSH: You just start laughing.
NIKKI: It’s like a video of yourself. A home video.
AMY: We don’t see it in the way that fans would, or other people. And neither do my friends. So my friends don’t understand how big it actually is. They just watch it and they see me, and they’re, like, ‘It was really funny.’ And then they’re out with me and I get stopped for a picture or something and then they’ll be like, ‘Oh my God! This is actually quite a big programme.’
JONATHAN: Every year, for this festival called Purim, the school makes a pro video. And this year, they wanted to give us the video, and film us watching it. And then they edited us watching the Purim video into the actual thing. And it got played at school.
AMY: Everyone just screamed.
Jonathan and Nikki on their wedding day, 27 May 1996
BEING RECOGNISED
JOSH: Me and Amy went out to the cinema in Borehamwood, by Elstree Studios, with Grandma and Papa. And we had just left the cinema when I saw that someone recognised us.
AMY: I see this figure coming up to me from the right, and there’s this young, really pretty woman, just standing there on the phone. And this man comes up to me and says, ‘Excuse me, you’re the kid from Gogglebox, aren’t you?’
JOSH: And then I walked round and I stopped and I went, ‘You’re Rufus Hound!’
AMY: And my Papa, he’s obsessed with Strictly Come Dancing. So he goes, ‘Oh my God, that’s Flavia’. He was so excited, because he couldn’t believe that they stopped his grandchildren.
JOSH: Us. They stopped us. And they asked us for a picture.
AMY: At this point, my papa grabs Flavia and
goes, ‘Come on, let’s have a photo.’ And he’s got it up on his desk at work. His girlfriend and his wife.
NIKKI: We were at this party and the next thing you know this photo is uploaded onto Twitter. Of Rufus Hound with our kids. And it’s so random. He’s written, ‘Just guess who I bumped into? The Gogglebox kids.’ And we’re at this party, completely wetting ourselves laughing. So Jonathan sent him a message to say, ‘Hope they’re behaving themselves.’
JOSH: And Rufus Hound sends a message back, going, ‘No, they’re round the back of Gala bingo, sniffing glue with their gran and granddad.’
AMY: Dad just put, ‘A standard Sunday night,’ in return. Something like that.
WOULD YOU NORMALLY
WATCH TV TOGETHER?
JOSH: Before Gogglebox, we didn’t much sit down, just the four of us.
AMY: Dad’s normally working. Mum’s in the kitchen. Or on the phone. But we’d watch X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent.
JONATHAN: One of the big shows.
NIKKI: Even if everyone goes out on a Saturday night, we’ll record family shows and then, on Sunday, we’ll all sit down and watch it. We used to sit and watch TV a lot more all together when the kids were younger.
AMY: But when it comes to programmes, we enjoy different things now. Like I enjoy trash like Geordie Shore or TOWIE.
JOSH: She likes all the rubbish. Me and Dad, we like watching American action programmes like Hawaii Five-0.
JONATHAN: It’s not really like the original. McGarrett is a totally different character. He’s an ex-Navy SEAL. It’s very well done.
AMY: I watch Gossip Girl on Netflix. I’m obsessed with it. I’ve got nearly up to the end, and it’s six series. Each one is twenty-five episodes and I’ve watched them for, like, two months. Dad watches Gossip Girl – sometimes. He pretends he doesn’t like it but he secretly does.
JONATHAN: I do not. I do not.
AMY: When he sits down to watch it with me he loves it.
JONATHAN: It’s called not having a choice.
AMY: Before I started watching Gossip Girl, I watched the last episode.
JOSH: Ruined the whole storyline.
AMY: Sometimes I go to the end of something, just to see the ending and then I’ll rewind back and enjoy all the pieces coming together. I’m reading a book at the moment on my phone, which is some fan fiction of One Direction. But it updates every week, so I can’t go to the end of the book.
WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE
THING TO WATCH?
JONATHAN: She only really watches the phone.
JOSH: She’s like, ‘I’m going to sit down, I’m going to sit down and watch TV …’ And then she sits down, and the phone rings.
NIKKI: I’m a bit of a chatterer on the phone.
JOSH: She’s on it for about a couple of hours and then the phone rings again. And she never ends up watching TV. And then she complains she didn’t have time to relax.
JONATHAN: I don’t think she’s ever seen a whole programme.
NIKKI: I used to watch Casualty and Holby City. And then the best thing on TV happened: Brothers & Sisters. And every week it was on, I’d not only end up crying, I’d end up hyperventilating. In my bed, every week, hyperventilating, thinking, ‘Why have I put myself through this?’ It was the best thing on telly.
WHAT DOES TV MEAN TO YOU?
JOSH: I don’t know what life would be like without a TV, honestly.
NIKKI: He’s a proper telly addict. For me it’s family time. Having fun together.
JONATHAN: It’s entertainment, but I use it for information as well …
NIKKI: You use it for schluffing.
JONATHAN: Yeah. For schluffing.
NIKKI: Snoring. He sleeps through it.
STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON
STEPHEN: More good dramas, like Broadchurch and Breaking Bad. Things like that.
CHRIS: One of my favourite programmes was Beautiful People, which Olivia Colman was in. I love that sort of stuff, because it’s family life but it’s funny as well, so I’d like more of that sort of thing. Comedy with that touch of escapism.
STEPHEN: Anything with Julia Davis in it. I love her. Nighty Night was fucking brilliant. And Human Remains. My favourite one of them is when she’s got the big glasses and she goes, ‘I’m not pregnant as such, but it could happen any time. Steven’s got quite a temper.’ Fucking dark.
CHRIS: Oh, The League of Gentlemen, that’s great. I think what we need a bit more of is comedy that’s got more shock factor.
BILL & JOSEF, CAMBRIDGE
BILL: Useless research programmes. There’s so much fun stuff done on animal behaviour. I wrote a book a few years ago called The Things That Nobody Knows, which is 501 questions that we don’t know the answers to. It’s a tour around the boundaries of human ignorance. And the very last question is: why do squirrels masturbate? And I found this piece of research by an American academic watching the masturbatory habits of Namibian squirrels. And the problem was that all the theories of masturbation would have predicted that it’s the ones who are getting the least sex that were doing it most – but, in fact, with the Namibian squirrels it’s the other way round.
JOSEF: He’s touched on something which annoys me about QI. QI is quite often wrong. And it annoys me. One of the questions that Stephen Fry asked once was ‘How many moons does the Earth have?’ Well, of course, the answer’s one. And the klaxons go. ‘No, there are five, because these other four have been discovered.’ And then, in a later series, they asked the same question again. And Alan Davies said five. And the klaxon’s going, and they said, ‘No: it’s six. Another one’s been discovered.’ This is utterly stupid. If you’re going to do this pedantic sort of argument, there’s either one moon because, as Alan says, it’s called The Moon, not One Of The Moons, or the answer is nobody knows, because we have found six, but how many more small ones are there which haven’t been picked up yet? If you’re going to be pedantic, then be correctly pedantic.
BILL: I once accused Stephen Fry of pinching items from my books, and he said, ‘Let’s just say we’re both pinching from the same sources.’
REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
GRAHAM: Greyhound racing.
KATE: Zombie movies.
GRAHAM: And more classical music.
KATE: But with zombies. I’d like to see another series of Blackadder. Or would I like to see another series of Blackadder? You see, the thing that I really love about British TV is we know when to stop. American shows never know when to stop. I’d like to see more new stuff. More new comedy, more new subversive stuff. I want my licence fee to take risks. I don’t want more of the same. Saturday night should be the night for TV, shouldn’t it? And what we’re getting fed is this mushy diet of baby food, of rusks soaked in water. And actually we need something that’s going to stick in our throat a bit and make us feel a bit uncomfortable, but then make us laugh.
LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA
GEORGE: There should be more stuff like DIY SOS. Those sorts of programmes that actually put the money back into helping someone. I know it’s only one person, and there’s loads of people that need help, but it would be quite nice. People will probably get bored of it, if there was loads of it. ‘I’m not watching the DIY SOS channel again,’ but if it was a possibility, I’d like to see more things like that.
LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL
JUNE: I’d like to see more drama. Last Tango in Halifax. That was brilliant. And Crimson Fields. I’d like to see another slot like Play for Today, because there must be loads of brilliant young writers who are coming up with good new ideas.
LEON: I like Susanna Reid’s legs.
POLITICS
SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON
SANDY: The only things I hate is all them lot that do parties. You know Labour, Liberal parties. Nothing’s been changed for years. No, they piss me off when they come on, you know they do.
SANDRA: But we don’t vote or nothing like that, do we, Sandy? We
don’t vote. We’re not a voter.
REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
KATE: Labour’s almost impossible to recognise these days. It’s such a watered-down version of itself. There’s no real socialism left. It drives me mad. I’ve no idea who to vote for.
DAVID CAMERON
THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON
JOSH: As Dad would say, he’s the best of a bad bunch.
NIKKI: Forget whether you like the Conservatives. Just as a person, the way he speaks, public speaking, how he portrays himself, how he comes across, he’s the only one who actually seems like he can do it.
JONATHAN: What tends to happen is you vote for a person, not for a party any more.
JOSH: And that’s why Labour in the next election probably won’t get the votes. Because it will be Ed Miliband.
LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL
LEON: He’s toadying to the Conservative right wing. He’s a weak man with his woman’s mouth. Oh, he’s a horror.
THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON
ANDREW: What does a kid who’s been to Eton actually know about the real world?
LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA
GEORGE: Do you reckon he got on one knee when he proposed to Nick Clegg?
STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON
STEPHEN: Did he just say ‘chillaxing’? Chillaxing! What a knob.