From opening minutes at this “whackiest of TV stations”, also a real fast growing business (even though we were told more than once that it was run out of a shed near Birmingham), the action was “go-go-go!”. That was the background to Ian Denyer’s entertaining enough documentary, narrated with a seemingly straight face by Liza Tarbuck, though you couldn’t quite work out whether this was real-life serious fare, or something more artfully tongue-in-cheek. Their immediate problem was that supplies of Tanzanite were running perilously low
Clearly millions of viewers are regulars if the sales are anything to go by, both in the UK and, you suspect particularly, across the pond. Such was the world of ITV’s primetime offering last night: at least Gems TV tripped off the tongue a lot better than the working title “'Kings of Teleshopping”, didn’t it? The business is what’s known as a “reverse auction jewellery shopping channel”, and if you haven’t come across it before in the wider, wilder reaches of cable, then check out Sky Channel 655, Freeview Channel 43, or even “streamed live on our website ”. For the Bennets in Gems TV the truth universally acknowledged was, roughly: “That a £100 million family-run jewellery television channel risking running out of its best-selling African gem, not to mention suffering from a shortage of screen presenters who can flog the stuff, must be in want of a friendly television documentary format to get them out of their fix.” (For the record, no one seemed sure if it was a single “t” or a double one in Bennet: ITV gave them one – closet Janeites there, eh? – the usually canonic Radio Times, two.)
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