TV Hell

TV Hell was a BBC2 theme night broadcast on 31 August 1992, showing a whole evening of archive television clips widely regarded by critics and the public alike as among the worst ever produced in Britain. It followed an unrelated series of archive theme nights called "TV Heaven", shown on Channel 4 earlier in 1992.

TV Hell was defined as programmes and broadcasts where the conception of the production was misguided, even though it made use of established television cast and crew. Many of the resulting catastrophes caused promising careers to be curtailed, or in some cases led to a review of the commissioning process.

The term "TV Hell" has since been adopted in media culture to describe television programmes which are not very good.

The clips were linked by Angus Deayton, playing the part of the Devil, and Paul Merton, playing a shellsuited couch potato who had been condemned to experience the worst of British Television for all eternity following his death, caused ironically by a television falling onto his head from an upstairs window in the programme's opening sketch.

The comic sequences with Deayton and Merton were used to link several short documentaries, comprising, for example, Disastermind (a review of the worst performances on Mastermind), an A-Z of TV Hell moments, Storm in an Egg-Cup - a look back at the downfall of TV-am - and a short documentary about the production of the television soap Triangle, with interviews with cast and crew, followed by a repeat of the first episode. There were also humorous contributions from Victor Lewis-Smith. The evening also included a 60-minute documentary in the history of The Eurovision Song Contest narrated by Patrick Allen and featuring archive clips from the contest and interviews with (amongst others): Johnny Logan, Michael Ball and Katie Boyle.

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