Today's worst programmes should be measured not against the best products of yesteryear but the worst: so slackly plotted, vapid and slow-moving that they are now almost unwatchable.
It also isn't as if he's completely ditched the traditional politician's suit for the blue-collar garb of the working man – he wears creased and crumpled suits, and a slackly knotted tie, as if absent-mindedly pulled on, in haste, while he's dealing with other more pressing stuff.
She saw the white walls and porch-paint gray floor inside her mother's studio, in particular the floor, its smudged arabesques and dirty footprints of paint dripped from brushes held slackly in her mother's hand, year after year, as far back as she could remember.
His linen shirt and suspenders hung slackly on his frame, and his sunken cheeks gave him the look of a hardscrabble farmer from a century ago.
Unfortunately, in the director Jo Bonney's slackly acted production, the contents don't prove as fascinating to us today as we had reason to hope.
" 'The Other Woman' is absorbing -- at times moving -- but also frustrating, relying as it does on slackly staged, overacted, two-person scenes punctuated by uninspired New York montages," A. O. Scott wrote in The Times about this adaptation from Don Roos of a novel by Ayelet Waldman.
To carry on collecting works such as The Village Wedding by Luke Fildes, or Ramsgate Sands by William Powell Frith at a time when Bridget Riley and Henry Moore were the reigning deities was to risk seeming perversely in love with an art that was slackly anecdotal, stubbornly figurative, kitsch and camp.
He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of good begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising".
Fischer slackly plots his metaphysics, but styles them with brio.
Among the new songs, Come on Ghost feels the most authentically Idlewild-ian in its generosity of melody and harmony, knotty-wordy lyrics and arse-kick of a fuzzed-out riff from guitarist Rod Jones, and yet it goes to unfamiliar places, too, in its slackly rocking outro, featuring a skronking sax solo.
It's poorly made and slackly plotted.
