Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (18 page)

Equity, the actors’ union, called it ‘an insulting affront to the men and women in our profession’. But you know it better as fun-filled
Soapstars
(ITV1), the show that aims to do for
Emmerdale
what no amount of fictional sex and skullduggery can: make at least four people in the country give a toss who’s in the cast and who isn’t.

I don’t think I’ve ever sat through an entire episode of
Emmerdale
, although I’ve walked out on plenty. The moment that signature tune rolls in I’m out of the room quicker than you can think the word ‘knife’. It’s like a bloody starting pistol.

Have you ever met anyone who actually watches it? Me neither.
Emmerdale
’s one of those things whose existence you’re dimly aware of but rarely witness first-hand – like early-morning milk deliveries or sex between your parents. They could sack the entire cast and replace them with spinning postcard racks with pages of script taped to the front and the odds are no one in Britain would notice for at least six months, and even then they’d only shrug indifferently and change channels in search of something less rural. It’s the TV equivalent of a Turkish Delight (come on, do you know anyone who likes those things either? They’re like a refrigerated internal organ dipped in chocolate). It’s
EMMERDALE
, for God’s sake.

Nonetheless, some persist in labouring under the delusion that
Emmerdale
Matters. Former cast member Jean Rogers isn’t happy with
Soapstars
, claiming ‘Most performers are in the business because they want to entertain, inform and enrich the culture of the country, not to be “rich and famous”’ – a statement containing more bullshit than all the cowsheds in
Emmerdale
’s 29-year history put together.

Of course, some members of the public clearly think
Emmerdale
matters too, swarming to the
Soapstars
auditions, queuing for a chance to land a regular stint on the show. Not, repeat
not
, that there’s anything inherently wrong with this – why push a pen all your life when there’s a possibility you could be paid to stroll round a make-believe farm spouting bollocks? – although if it’s fame they’re after they’d stand more chance of being recognised if they photocopied their faces and stuck them in a local newsagent’s window.

Anyway, the selection panel. Easily more entertaining than their
Popstars
equivalents. For one thing, there’s Cold Yvon, who resembles Miranda Richardson’s Queen Liz from
Blackadder II
and is more effortlessly abrasive than ‘Nasty’ Nigel Lythgoe ever was. Nigel looked faintly goonish and colloquial, as though he’d be equally at home judging a rude-vegetable contest beneath an awning in some rain-sloshed backwater; Yvon has the benefit of a mean, angular, glamorous face – the kind of face you’d expect to see on a woman accused of murdering her high-society lover with a poisoned olive. Also, she’s funnier.

Nigel aside, the remainder of the
Popstars
panel were so pointlessly anonymous, they may as well have stayed at home or worked behind the bar of the Woolpack. Yvon’s supporting players on
Soap
stars
are far better value. First there’s the camp and vaguely futuristic Paul De Freitas, swooning with proprietorial glee like a steward on the first cruise liner bound for Mars. Then there’s scruffy scriptwriter Bill Lyons, who looks like all seven Doctor Whos rolled into one and marched at gunpoint through Man at C&A.

Least interesting by far are the wannabe performers, who, when they’re not doing predictable things like crying and crying some more, just sort of shuffle around awaiting their moment of drama – skills that should serve them well if they eventually land the part.

At heart, of course, it’s a dignity-stripping contest. So is Equity right?

Are they heck. Half their members would dress up as a dancing turd in a bog-roll commercial if it helped pay the rent, so to start cracking on like the anointed guardians of some ancient craft is clearly nonsensical. Besides,
Hollyoaks
pulled a similar stunt last year (recruiting Joe Publics in a desperate bid to prove they don’t simply grow their own cast in a Petri dish), and last time I checked most of our theatres were still in business (and up to their usual tricks – showcasing airless tedium for the benefit of eggheads dumb enough to believe what they’re doing is somehow more worthy than sitting at home playing ‘Bollock Wars’ on a Dreamcast).

Whatever. It’s all irrelevant. Everyone knows the best soap on TV right now is the AA insurance website ad with the sulky Asian couple. Stick that up your Woolpack.

Glimpse the news and you’ll agree: what the world needs now is love, sweet love. Instead it gets the UK version of
Temptation Island
(Sky One). Tough luck, world.

I’ve never looked up the word ‘evil’ in an encyclopaedia, but I’d guess the creation of
Temptation Island
figures somewhere in the entry. Where was this hatched? Whose coal-dark, hardened little pig’s knuckle of a brain dreamt up this despicable affront to human kindness? Why is it here? Why? Why? Why?

You know the premise: four committed couples are flown to a Caribbean island for a luxury holiday. Once there, they are separated: the boys spend their time surrounded by and dating a selection of predatory single women; the girls do the same with a group of single men. Will they be tempted to cheat? Hyuk hyuk: pass the Doritos, Mikey, we’s a gonna watch us some screwin’. Yee-haw.

We’re all tempted to do things we shouldn’t. Right now, I’m tempted to smoke a cigarette. Later, I might feel like drowning a cat. I shall of course do neither: not because I’m a model of restraint (ask anyone who’s seen me eat – I can engulf an entire pack of bourbon creams in the time it takes a clown to clap his hands) but because like most people I’ve got a single molecule of lucid reason inside my skull, preventing me from doing anything rash. It tells me avoidance is the key to resistance. I don’t want to smoke so I bought a course of 24-hour nicotine patches (which give you astonishing dreams, incidentally), and I don’t want to drown any more cats so I’ve drilled a hole in the bucket and smashed up my taps with a hammer. See? Common sense, pure and simple.

As pure and simple, in fact, as the couples arriving on Temptation Island. This being the UK, they don’t seem quite as computer-generated as their American counterparts (every single one of whom resembled a Hollywood lead), but that just makes it all the more squalid – like amateur Internet porn.

First up, Anna and Damien from Wales. They’re engaged but aren’t entirely sure they trust one another: what better way to test
their neuroses than to venture into a camera-studded flirt-pit?

Next, there’s Kate and Greg, two absolute plums, who instantly lose your support by allowing themselves to be filmed browsing for aspirational breads in a fashionable Chelsea supermarket, a place so snooty the Battenberg cakes sneer at your shoes as you walk by.

Behind them, Dawn and Adam. She’s a model, he’s a ‘third assistant director’ who initially ‘wasn’t sure if she only wanted me because of what I do’ – although third assistant directors rank lower in the movie-industry food chain than the guy who irons George Clooney’s toilet paper.

Finally, Helen and Jamie, and with them the first glimmer of sympathy – because Helen seems uncomfortable with the whole thing. With any luck she’ll bolt.

The island itself looks genuinely gorgeous. Unfortunately the production team has populated it with two gangs of gurning simpletons – thirteen boys, thirteen girls, all of them as sincere as a Claims Direct commercial. The men are particularly hateful – half resemble leering uncles, and the rest are dullard goons, one in particular sporting a nose designed by Jim Henson. If you’ve ever fancied being violated by an imbecile, fill in those application forms now.

There’s an argument that says the participating couples deserve all they get. Wrong. Genuine heartbreak is like a death, leaving genuine grief in its wake. Whatever their motives for taking part in the first place (a free holiday, a little excitement, 15 minutes in the spotlight), none of these couples deserves to have their relationship ripped up and pissed on for the delight of us dribbling dunces back home. They may be idiots, striding open-eyed into the teeth of a booby trap, but it’s the ghouls that built the trap, and the ghouls who blob around watching the carnage, that truly deserve contempt.

But they signed a release form, you say? Since they’re now fair game, perhaps once we’ve done breaking their hearts we can up the ante by smashing their knees with a hammer and making them run an obstacle course? Dub ‘Walkin’ Back to Happiness’ over the top and lob in a few slow-mo replays each time their legs bend the wrong way.

Or in other words, shut up and be human. Once again: what the
world needs now is love, sweet love. Not orchestrated heartbreak. Tough luck, world.

Sometimes television is your friend. When you’re lonely, when you’re sitting in a bedsit eating microwaved bachelor slop (Spicy Cow-Hoof Scrapings in Tear-and-Onion Gravy – For One), the box comes into its own, blocking it out, soaking up time like a sponge. But like all friends, it sometimes lets you down. Just when you need it most.

Example: Few things are as depressing as insomnia taking hold when you’ve got to be up early the next day. Each passing minute underlines your failure. Suddenly you’re the world’s biggest loser. A dunderhead who can’t even lie down and close his eyes properly. Panicking motionlessly in bed as time drags by, neurotically calculating how many hours of sleep you could get if only you could go under right now – you need something crazy to distract you. Or you’ll go crazy. Reading won’t help: it strains your eyes and forces you to think. Perhaps a slug of TV is the answer.

So on goes the box. And suddenly you’re gazing at an ocean of shit.

The simple fact is this: for all the talk of us being a 24-hour society, once you go past 3 a.m., there’s nothing worth watching. BBC1 becomes News 24, absolute insomniac hell; the same scary stories being told over and over again, transforming your box into a recurring nightmare simulator. The Learning Zone on BBC2 is only slightly better; educational programmes by nature are intent on shaking your mind awake, but at 3.30 a.m. you need it shut down.

Channel 4 generally torments you with a subtitled film (eyestrain again), Channel Five is full of ponderous American sport (less exciting than watching a shop-window dummy play chess) and as for ITV – ITV is just hopeless. Often it’s showing soccer – and I use that term deliberately in a bid to enrage dullards – old, repeated soccer which I’d rather drink a trough full of tramp phlegm than sit through.

Failing that, there’s eerie video-game-review show
Cybernet
, a mind-addling combo of blurry in-game footage, repeated loops of an animated robot, and a stilted offscreen presenter quaking about polygon counts.

And then, around 4 a.m., just as gnawing psychosis sets in and your eyes begin to dart around the room in search of either a Bible or something sharp to kill yourself with, you’re abandoned completely and thrown to the mercies of ITV Nightscreen – static pages advertising forthcoming shows, accompanied by wallpaper music. Suddenly you’re no longer at home: you’re near an A-road somewhere in Middle England, watching the in-house information channel in a gaudy hotel chain (to complete the illusion, phone a neighbour and ask them to bring a decaying steak sandwich to your room for
£
14.95).

Here’s what should be on in the middle of the night: shapes and colours. And soothing music. And a voice telling you to close your eyes and breathe deeply. Anything else is torture.

Fascinating fact: your remote control has a button that can magically transform your TV into a muckspreader. It’s true. All you have to do is push the ‘1’ button on Friday night, pin back those eyelids, and gape in astonishment as it fires handfuls of molten crap directly into your eyes – in the form of
LA Pool Party
(BBC Choice).

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone; if there’s a Most Ill-Conceived Twatcast BAFTA up for grabs next year,
LA Pool
Party
’s going to walk away with it, because the concept must have looked bad on paper. Take three TV ‘babes’ with pretty faces and dubious interview skills – Jayne Middlemiss, Tess Daly and Lisa Snowdon. Hire out an LA mansion with its own pool and fill it with scores of buff airheads. Plonk a DJ in the corner and generate a ‘party atmosphere’. Add some who-the-heck celebrities. And hey presto. Trying to convey the resulting awfulness is like trying to describe the smell of sewage to a man with no nose.

OK – that’s mean. We can assume no one actually
knew
it would
turn out this bad. For one thing, basing the show in Los Angeles was a shrewd gambit for a British chat show; the logic, presumably, being that it’s easier to get A-list US celebs to put in an appearance if you’re shooting ten yards down the road from their homes. Cunning ruse, but uh-oh – show one featured such huge, happening stars as Ozzy Osbourne and Carmen Electra – as relevant to today’s yoof audience as Prince Albert and Wat Tyler. In the show’s defence, they did also bag an up-and-coming young actor whose name and face escape me, but since he a) stars in a movie as yet unreleased in the UK and b) spent his time sucking a lollipop with studied nonchalance, we’ll discount him completely.

Osbourne, at least, has tales to tell, although hearing them was rendered impossible by three obstacles: 1) he was being interviewed by Jayne Middlemiss, 2) he talks in an incomprehensible, melted slur and 3) any digestible words that
did
manage to crawl out were hopelessly lost in the ever-present clatter of background ‘party ambience’. To make matters worse, the interviews are intercut with footage of the ‘poolside guests’ – chosen on the basis of their looks rather than their conversational abilities – blathering inanely or simply grinning and leaping into the pool. After ten minutes of this, you pray for the unscheduled arrival of a misanthropic gatecrasher armed with a hammer and a deranged sense of justice.