Love Your Inner Loser!

Thank the good Lord for Glee.

I'm always excited about new years and new seasons on television - we've got a lot to look forward to over here in Blighty. Next week sees the return of some of my favourite dramas, Shameless and Skins; a brand new season of Doctor Who is on it's way; and there are some excellent one-off dramas on the horizon too. I'm always looking forward to the shows that come over from the States too. The Big Bang Theory has started again over here, and I'm interested in the first episode of The Good Wife, to be shown here on Saturday. Nurse Jackie has been another glorious find too.

But the pick of the crop so far has been Glee. I gotta be honest, I was never expecting to like it as much as I do. It looked a little too twee for my taste, a little too High School Musical. How wrong I was. This show has been described as the anti-High School Musical, and rightly so - somehow I doubt any of the HSM franchise would feature a line as darkly funny as "You think this is hard? Try living with hepatitis, that's hard!" screeched through a megaphone to a pack of cheerleaders.

Glee is about the losers, the dreamers, and the always hopefuls. For pursuing what you love the most. In this case, a glee club: singing in a harmonised fashion with some simple dance steps thrown in for good measure. They are the sub-basement of school life, lower than even the kids playing 'Dungeons & Dragons'. For now, at least.

Okay, so some of the elements of the show are a little predictable. You've got the star quarterback who has a wicked voice, and you have the very likely romantic relationship between him and the club's loser star female; but then it throws it right back in your face with the quarterback having major issues in...shall we say, holding back his excitement?

What really sells Glee, though, is the music. Taking classic songs, both contemporary pop/rock and old musical favourites and presenting them in an infectious glee club style has already sent many songs into the Billboard top 100, and does wonders for the original versions too. Case in point: the Glee version of "Don't Stop Believing" is currently at Number 5 in the UK charts and heading further up, breaking into the top 3 at the mo. Journey's version, albeit already helped by its use in last year's (shudder) The X Factor, was Number 6! Versions of Rhianna's "Take A Bow" and even, I'm predicting, Kanye West's "Gold Digger", will only serve to do exactly the same to the already great originals.

I've only seen two episodes and I'm already addicted. Glee is funny, warm-hearted and very loud, with an ability to seem fresh despite it being based on a formula we've seen a lot of over the last twenty five years or so. It's just what our television screens need in this rather bleak time - it's bright and colourful and absolutely rocks! It also won the Golden Globe for Best Television Programme - Musical or Comedy at this year's awards. So there you go - Hollywood Foreign Press loves it, so thats gotta mean something.

Laters.