1/17/2024 0 Comments Gems tv shopping![]() The latter proved more straightforward, allowing viewers the anxious pleasure of those “will they, won’t they make it?” moments familiar from this documentary's closest cousin, reality TV. Hence, almost simultaneously, the double tasks of investigating the supply chain, and auditioning more presenters. ![]() Plus, the lucrative Christmas season was approaching, and the energies of on-screen presenters were flagging. Their immediate problem was that supplies of the outfit's best-selling blue gem Tanzanite (named after its country of origin, in case you were wondering) were running perilously low. A son-in-law ran the American operations. The descriptive irony was undisguised on the last two. This Mr Bennet was the “hunter for gemstones” – and he seemed very good at that job when we saw him out in the African mines – supported by Mrs Bennet (“the quiet one”) and Master Bennet (“the heart-throb”). Steve Bennet discovered a decade ago that in the jewellery business you could either sell one item a week for a lot of money, or thousands a week for rather less he’d chosen the latter route. 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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