Shaun Ryder on UFOs, History, review In 2010, something strange, terrifying and, to this day, entirely unexplained occurred: TV's self-appointed hard man Danny Dyer made a documentary about UFOs for the BBC. Only a handful of people confessed to witnessing the event at the time and it has never been seen again. Case closed. Now though 51-year-old Shaun Ryder, the "mad-fer-it" lead singer of the Happy Mondays, has made his own documentary on the subject, and the same question so conclusively answered three years ago has resurfaced: is this the worst piece of television ever made? We were informed of Ryder's dubious credentials for the task of hunting extra-terrestrial life early on in the first episode of Shaun Ryder on UFOs: "As a 15-year-old lad in Salford, long before my hell-raising antics in the Happy Mondays, I saw a ball of light whizzing about in the night sky as I stood at a bus stop." He has been addicted ever since. Rather than returning to Salford to explore this phenomenon, however, and to assess whether the night lights flashed quite so brightly now as they did for Ryder in the late-70s, he was whisked off to Chile, "the UFO capital of South America" to meet a series of "ufologists." Alas, we were given no indication of what skills or experience qualified someone to bear such an apparently lofty title but their insight - "there is a relation between nature, energy supply and UFO phenomenon" - suggested an endless supply of tinfoil would probably suffice. Either way, it seemed an awfully long way for Ryder to travel to watch grainy video footage on a laptop in the back of a car - it had to be in the back of a car because rather hilariously the reflection of the Santiago sun was obscuring their view of the screen - and to stare hopelessly into a UFO-deserted night sky. "So when you're doing a sky watch, is it important to not talk, keep quiet and keep your eyes on the sky?" whispered Ryder, with no hint of irony. As it transpired, staring at the ground during said sky watch would have been equally productive. Unfortunately, we were not even in "so-bad-it-was-funny" territory. The show was so lacking in imagination, so lazily planned and tediously executed that only an alien abduction to erase my memory would have been a satisfactory conclusion. Instead we got an abnormally serious Ryder summing up yet another piece of grainy footage thus: "it looks like a Star Wars trooper stood on a pogo stick under a woman's hairdryer coming down from the sky."