Really Extreme Fishing with Robson Green

Because my life is sometimes so exciting, from time to time I find myself sitting in my armchair in my slippers reading my Radio Times, with my cup of tea and my toasted tea cake to hand.  And in these circumstances, as I peruse the cornucopia* of television entertainment advertised therein, I sometimes find myself utterly at a loss to understand what on earth is going on.  [* I wasn’t totally sure I was right to use the word cornucopia here, so I checked it out on Googlepedia, and Googlepedia said this: “A goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain, signifying prosperity. Also called horn of plenty,” and I thought, yes, that’s what I meant, so I left it in.]  It’s not that the programme titles are difficult to understand.  The problem is often the opposite of that—that I am left at a loss to understand what on earth is going on if I take the titles as literal descriptions of what’s in the actual programme.  I’m talking about programmes like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (there really is no punctuation), Embarrassing Illnesses, Embarrassing Bodies, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, The Only Way Is Essex, The Jeremy Kyle Show, and so on.  You’ve seen them too.  Of course, eventually I come to understand what these emissions comprise, either by watching them or by osmosis, the latter process involving glancing at  tabloid newspaper headlines and reading the more informative Facebook and Twitter feeds. 

But one programme I never either watched or got clues about via tabloids and social networking is this one: Extreme Fishing with Robson Green.  So, one evening recently my life got so overwhelmingly exciting that I decided to research what this programme was about by utilising the internet: the ultimate goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain, signifying prosperity.  Also called a horn of plenty.  And on the internet, or horn of plenty, I discovered, to my enormous disappointment, the nature of which is explained later, that Extreme Fishing with Robson Green involves the rather un-extreme actor fishing for unusual fish in unusual places. So the four episodes of series one, for example, involved Robson Green fishing for tuna in Costa Rica, for catfish in the USA, for sardine in South Africa, for blue marlin in Spain and Portugal, that kind of thing. This was admittedly evidently exciting enough for enough viewers to tune in to prompt Channel 5 to commission a second and this time nine-part series in which Robson Green fished for things such as sablefish in Canada, hapuka in New Zealand, and arapaima and fresh-water stingray in Thailand.  Now, I think you can already see what’s happening here: inflation.  The passage of time and the imperative to improve the viewers' experiences of piscatorial extremity led to more and then more extreme fishing in more and then more extreme places.  Indeed, by the time we get to series five (tellingly but inaccurately entitled “At the Ends of the Earth”), Robson Green is fishing for six-gilled shark in Ascension Island, ruby snapper in Papua New Guinea, Pacific giant crab in New Caledonia, and silver piranha in Argentina.  In a sign that the franchise was by this time reaching the end of its natural life, series five had only six programmes.  Besides, where do you go with Extreme Fishing once Robson Green has been to “the ends of the earth”? Okay, er, Slightly More Moderate Fishing, Again, with Robson Green?  I think we can all agree, that that means, in terms of television spectacle, and therefore viewers and therefore advertising revenues, we’re going nowhere any more.

So, here’s my pitch to get commissioned a sixth and maybe seventh and maybe even endless numbers of series’ of Extreme Fishing with Robson Green.  First, I propose, and herein is the source of the enormous disappointment mentioned above, that the whole concept the show was based on initially was wrong, even possibly misleading. But it’s not too late to change.  Indeed, now they’re running out of species and places, change is a matter of survival. The problem is that the first five series were all about “what” and “where”: all very salmon fishing in the Yemen, and therefore clichéd and boring.  And indeed, it means that the species of fish and places they were fished were “Extreme,” supposedly, rather than the extremity inhering in the fishing itself.  That indeed is where things get misleading, because, presumably, when Robson Green fished for barracuda in Cuba, he used tried-and-tested local Cuban methods of barracuda-fishing.  And that of course would have been highly advisable for health and safety reasons.  In other words, then, he did “Ordinary” fishing for “Extreme” fish in “Extreme” places.  Even then, though, it requires a certain Brit-o-centrism to describe barracuda and indeed Cuba as extreme.  They’re not extreme to either barracuda or to Cubans, presumably.  I, a Briton, would certainly think it odd if the Cuban equivalent of Channel 5 had a programme entitled “Extreme Fishing with Roberto Verde” in which Roberto Verde spent a quiet afternoon mildly fly fishing on the River Avon.  But, anyway, the main point is, the newly and more accurately re-conceptualised, revamped, and far more exciting version of Extreme Fishing with Robson Green needs to get away from what and where and move on to “how.”  Yes, HOW!  That is, not what fish you fish and where you fish them, but HOW you catch the fish.  A much more exciting idea, as we’ll see.  Also, a new series conceptualised this way would be much cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to make, because you would not have to worry about expensive or endangered species or hard-to-reach and exotic locations.  The catching of the fish is the spectacle.  And if the fish-catching methods are sufficiently extreme, then no one will care if the fishing is for tiger fish in Zambia; it could as easily be about fishing for trout in the Manchester Ship Canal.  So, to give specific examples that I believe will prove beyond all doubt the enormous potential viewing appeal of a sixth series of “Extreme Fishing with Robson Green,” here are some ideas for what could feature in particular episodes:

Robson Green goes pike fishing with a pump-action shotgun.
Robson Green goes cod fishing with hand grenades.
Robson Green goes crab fishing with a pneumatic drill.
Robson Green goes blowfish fishing with a steam roller.
Robson Green goes puffer fish fishing with a hat pin.
Robson Green goes catfish fishing with a dog.
Robson Green goes tiger prawn fishing with a real tiger.
Robson Green goes goldfish fishing in steel toe-capped boots.
Robson Green goes bream fishing with a cricket bat.
Robson Green goes trout fishing with a hockey stick.
Robson Green goes chub fishing, kicking the chub on to the river bank.
Robson Green goes carp fishing, stunning the carp with head butts.
Robson Green goes swordfish fishing, grabbing the swordfish by their snouts and smashing them against a rock.
Robson Green goes fishing for leaping salmon, chopping them in half in mid-leap with a samurai sword.  
Robson Green goes fishing for electric eels, throwing them into a wood chipper.
Robson Green goes tuna fishing in an underwater car with a machine gun on the front, like in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Robson Green goes lobster fishing with a remote control Transformer Robot.
Robson Green goes mussel fishing in a gigantic It’s a Knockout pirate costume, and has three minutes to put as many mussels as he can in a couple of big red buckets using his huge foam pirate hands, and then has to run though a large paddling pool while members of the production team try to knock him over by throwing water-filled balloons at him, until he reaches a skating rink, where he has to empty the buckets and try to stand upright while smashing as many mussels as he can to smithereens with an enormous yellow rubber mallet.
Robson Green goes fishing for shark by jumping them.
End of series.