A brilliant writeup of this on the Guardian website by Charlie Brooker. Not sure if I can post a link, so instead I'll copy&paste the text.. He makes it sound unmissable. However I don't have Sky, so will have to enjoy the little bits that Harry Hill is picking up on:
"Reader, I apologise in advance. Words can't describe the exquisite mix of pain, fury and joy that is Pineapple Dance Studios (Sun, 6pm, Sky1). Yet words must suffice. I can't just sit here silently popping my mouth open and shut like a surprised mute, although that's precisely the reaction it provokes. You know how every so often the natural history unit throws up a documentary about hallucinogenically weird organisms that live 15 miles down in the deep, during which some undulating avant garde cross between a jellyfish, a diagram and an inside-out seahorse will wobble across the screen, defying any rational attempt at description? This is the docusoap equivalent of that.
Yes, it's a docusoap. That much we can cling to. It's a docusoap about the various characters around Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden. The most immediately noticeable example is a berk called Louie Spence, a creature so theatrically camp he seems perpetually on the verge of turning into a disco-dancing peacock. God knows what his job at the studio actually consists of: you could watch for a thousand years and never find out. All he does is mug for the cameras, perpetually striking poses, pulling arch faces, cracking lurid innuendo, shrieking, mincing and generally behaving in a way no fictional gay character has been permitted to do for decades. Given the right narrator, this could be a heartbreaking doc about an incurable mental condition whose sufferers lose their minds at the sight of a film crew and turn into a 1978 sitcom homosexual.
And incredibly it has been given the right narrator: former BBC news anchor Michael Buerk. You'd be hard pressed to find a more sobering voice of authority. Instant gravitas. Each time there's an establishing shot of a building exterior, I fully expect to hear him say: "Dawn – and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine; now, in the 20th century." But he doesn't. Instead he says something like: "9am – and Louie is pirouetting in a stairwell." Cut to Louie pirouetting in a stairwell. It's upsetting and funny and wrong and right. It's everything. This is madness.
Louie is a maddening show-off, but at least he isn't Andrew Stone. In reality, Andrew Stone is one of the resident dance teachers. In his head, he's a global pop superstar. The show focuses heavily on the ups and downs of his derivative, deeply uninspiring band Starman, which he fronts with a level of egomaniacal self-assurance hitherto undocumented on British TV. Seriously, they've captured lightning in a bottle here: the man is a tool of such breathtaking immensity, it's a wonder the cameras didn't simply explode out of horrified glee. One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people. This is the clearest possible illustration of that truth ever committed to videotape. Show this to your children. Make them learn from it.
On and on the show goes, swerving effortlessly from fist-chewingly mundane office-management sequences straight out of The Day Today's famous docusoap spoof The Pool one moment, into bizarre choreographed dance sequences the next. Yes: they've thrown in occasional fourth-wall-smashing musical numbers just to baffle you to death. One minute Louie is complaining to the builders next door about noise and then suddenly – boom! – they unexpectedly start dancing, as though he's stumbled into a dream sequence. And this breakdown of reality isn't acknowledged in Michael Buerk's voiceover at all. No, it simply occurs. And then the show moves on as if it hadn't. As though the TV fakery scandals never happened. And suddenly you question the veracity of everything you're watching. Except the rest of it is real. It just doesn't – just shouldn't – feel that way.
But that's Pineapple Dance Studios. A show designed to trigger life-threatening cognitive dissonance. As mundane as a breadbin; more outlandish than Avatar. As horrible as war; as funny as a guffing cartoon donkey. Words don't even graze the surface." |
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Sorry Hpc I just don't share your enthusiasm for it 
Freaky!
