Sarah Palin's Alaska has arrived in Britain. The critics don't like it, surprise, surprise!
Jasper Rees, from The Arts Desk:
Someone had moved in next door to the Palins. There was a camera shot of him, his face pixellated out. Apparently he was writing an exposé of the lady of the house. “I think it’s an invasion of our privacy and I don’t like it,” chirrupped Sarah Palin in that fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice of hers. “How would you feel if some dude who you knew was out to get you moved in 15 feet away from your kids?” I suspect I’d probably do something sane and rational like invite a camera crew into my home and make an access-all-areas reality TV series. That’d teach snoops to mind their own business.
Leave my children alone!The series has now canoed across the Atlantic and taken up residence on one of those channels whose name sounds like an off-road vehicle. Its eight episodes find Palin experiencing the wilds of the state - hunting, shooting, fishing, stopping boys from sneaking upstairs to impregnate her daughters.
Various people called things like Truck and Trog, Troop or Trib or Troll wandered about, walk-on players in this risible woman’s delusional pitch for power. Alaska looked very fetching though. It was a bit like being on a spectacular holiday marred only by the worst travelling companion imaginable.
Zoe Williams, from The Guardian:
I was looking forward to Sarah Palin's Alaska, but freed from her political brief of standing on the far-right talking rubbish, she is just this incredible force for boredom. It's like a magic trick; she can take an observation that is already inherently boring, then make it 10 times more boring with unenlightening statistics, a Newspeak vocabulary and this ghastly cheerleader delivery.
When this was shown in the US, lefties tried valiantly to stir some controversy out of her proximity to a bear. The truth is, there's nothing to see but a tedious, narrow-minded, pedantic, uncurious person. And some snow.
They don't say anything we didn't already know, but it's refreshing to read such candid opinions about our Sarah...