Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (31 page)

The programme goes on, explaining how the biblical plagues might have happened, and skirting around the whole parting-of-an-ocean issue by pointing out that it’s based on a mistranslation – he actually led his people across a Reed Sea, not the Red Sea. As in a sea of reeds. As in a swamp. Not quite as impressive, but it’s feasible.

Ultimately, Jeremy decides that whether you believe the story of Moses is true or not comes down to a question of faith, thereby rendering the entire investigative process somewhat redundant.

Still, it passes the time, and if the BBC wants to give me a load of money, I’m quite prepared to travel the world trying to discover whether Sherlock Holmes really wore those hats or if ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ was a documentary.

Christmas is coming. The shops are full of gibberish and you can hear sleigh bells a-shinking in the background of every commercial on television. Even the ones for Anusol.

And, in TV land, they’re doubtless putting the finishing touches to the traditional ‘feast of entertainment’ we’ve come to expect: even as we speak, somewhere in a Soho edit suite, someone’s checking shots of French and Saunders pulling funny faces in a
Tipping the Velvet
spoof. The BBC will have shot special ‘Yuletide’ versions of those ‘dancing’ continuity links (my money’s on a troupe of snowmen pirouetting round a Christmas tree), ITV should be dusting down their copy of
Die Hard 2,
and Channel 4 will have taken delivery of a set of Mark Kermode intros to a mini-season of Mexican wrestling movies.

In fact, everyone in television is so busy concentrating on the annual climax, they’ve neglected to fill this week’s schedules with anything approaching decent programming. Take a look through this week’s
Guide
and you’ll see what I mean – it’s like gazing at the shelves of a particularly threadbare Poundshop, one that sells nothing but bootleg ‘Bobb the Bilder’ toys and
Pop Idol
wrapping paper.

Here are the highlights:
Alistair MacGowan’s Christmas Big
Christmas Impression At Christmas
(BBC1) – a repeat from last year;
Time Flyers
(BBC2) – that’s a bunch of archaeologists sitting in a helicopter looking at the ground;
The World’s Greatest Oil Rigs
(C5) – does exactly what it says on the tin;
Scalpel Safari
(C5) – people travelling to South Africa for plastic surgery followed by, yes, a safari; and
Extreme Ironing
(C4), a documentary which purports to follow ‘the progress of the UK team at the Extreme Ironing World Championship in Munich’ but, disappointingly, turns out to be a none-too-hilarious joke stretched out for an entire hour.

Then there’s the awards ceremonies:
Sports Personality of the
Year
(BBC1) – generally about as much fun as eating a handful of dried yeast; the truly loathsome
Record of the Year 2002
(ITV1) in which Dr Fox congratulates whichever soulless bunch of Tupperware
automata have appealed to the largest number of idiots this year;
The Turner Prize
(C4) – the pseudo-intellectual’s equivalent of the above; and
FHM High Street Honeys: The Winners
(Sky One) – essentially the TV equivalent of a dirty old man masturbating at a bus stop.

These celebrations of nothingness reach their peak with
Kylie
Entirely
(C4), a 90-minute brown-tonguing of Britain’s ‘best-loved entertainer’ cluttering up the schedules of the UK’s number-one ‘alternative’ broadcaster: further proof that Channel 4 have long since abandoned an imaginative agenda and are now committed to pursuing the lowest common denominator with all the dignity of a man with his trousers round his ankles chasing a Thai prostitute round and round a sofa.

Still,
Kylie Entirely
would be just about justifiable had they managed to secure an interview with Ms Minogue herself, but no: instead it’s yet another mélange of archive clips and talking heads.
Kylie Entirely
reaches its nadir with a full 10-minute dissection of the Minogue arse, which unfortunately isn’t carried out by Dr Bodyworlds, but a gaggle of pundits including – AAAARRRGGHHHH – Paul Ross, the Ghost of Rubbish Past, who talks soundbites in his sleep and indeed does so here, in a series of unflattering shots which make him look like a melted Benny Hill. Any show desperate enough to resort to Ross soundbites really shouldn’t be on television at all – it should be out in the street, wearing an ‘UNCLEAN’ sign and ringing a bell. In fact I shouldn’t even be writing about it – but there’s
nothing else on
.

Still, everyone in the media will be out at their Yuletide parties, so what do they care? Come to think of it, I’ll be out too – getting into the festive spirit by sitting in a skip at the end of my road, drinking meths till I bleed. And since it’s Christmas, you’re all welcome to join me.

Last week I bemoaned the state of the schedules in the run-up to Christmas.

A week later, and guess what? Zero improvement. The main difference: instead of
The World’s Greatest Oil Rigs
, this week Channel Five (oh, all right, ‘five’) brings us
The World’s Greatest Cranes
– I confess I didn’t bother ordering a preview tape since I suspect even the mightiest industrial hoist in existence couldn’t raise my enthusiasm for the subject matter. Particularly when said programme is hosted by Tiff ‘Quick, Turn Over’ Needell.

So, barren viewing: what’s to do? Obviously, writing for an upstanding publication such as the
Guardian
means I would never encourage readers to flout international copyright law by scouring the Internet for downloadable episodes of the next series of 24 (which I also wouldn’t suggest are easily available, particularly if you hunt for them using a peer-to-peer file-sharing program like Kazaa or WinMX, and I
certainly
wouldn’t suggest they’re as nail-biting as the previous series and therefore well worth the lengthy download time – no siree).

Instead, I draw your attention to
Vain Men
(C4), a documentary examining the increasingly methodical preening regimes of the British male.

Speaking as a man whose idea of sophisticated grooming involves dipping a sock in the toilet to swab his armpits each morning, it all came as a bit of a shock.

For starters, according to the voice-over, ‘the average man now moisturises daily’. What, really? Where was that survey held? Pussy-land? The Kingdom of Nivea? Nope: right here on earth apparently – and to prove it, the researchers have rustled up a collection of image-conscious males who blow far too much time and money on manicures, spray-on tans, diets, masochistic work-out routines and even ‘pectoral implant surgery’ (that’s a tit-job to you and me) in a desperate bid to resemble the exalted male ideal. Look, I’m no expert on the rules of attraction, but I do know this: any man who spends half his life agonising in front of a mirror simply doesn’t
deserve
to get laid. Not by a human at any rate, although I’d queue round the block to watch them take it from an undemanding Dobermann. I mean honestly. Lighten up and weather-beat yourself like the rest of us, you idiots: we’re practically drowning in ladies here in Slobsville.

Still,
Vain Men
does provide the hands-down ‘water-cooler’ moment of the week: a cornea-warping close-up of a maniac having his bumcrack and testicles waxed with terrifying efficiency by a nonchalant beautician.

The scrotum is a sensitive area at the best of times. Tap it lightly with a pen and your eyes can water for an entire weekend; actively volunteering to have it stripped bare is demented. The accompanying noise would be excruciating enough (the sound of all those wispy hairs being uprooted en masse is like someone wearing Velcro gloves tearing a rice cake in half), but the aftermath is worse: the scrotum emerges crimson and raw, like a napalmed dormouse. If this is what it takes to be considered handsome these days, I hereby retire from the mating game. In fact, I can only think of five more painful things you could do with your scrotal sack, which I’ll list for the hell of it: 1) Slam it in a filing cabinet. 2) Catch it on a lathe. 3) Place it inside a George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine and repeatedly wallop the lid with your fists. 4) Tie one end of a tow cable round the Marble Arch monument, the other round your egg basket, leap onto a motorbike and see how close you can get to Hyde Park Corner before losing consciousness. 5) Declare it part of the ‘axis of evil’ and convince the Americans to wage a five-week bombing campaign against it (don’t wax it first – it’ll help your case if it’s already wearing a beard).

Anyway, enough of this balls. Next week, the Yuletide broadcasting onslaught begins in earnest. Which means yet more painful bollocks on the telly.

Here’s an appalling but true story. I was in a taxi on the day the John Leslie story finally broke. The cabbie, who’d caught talk of ‘a mystery presenter’ on the radio, without actually hearing the golden name itself, spotted my copy of the
Evening Standard
, and asked me who the culprit was. ‘Says here it’s John Leslie,’ I replied.

‘John Leslie,’ he muttered, then ruminated for a moment before delivering his verdict: ‘The lucky sod.’ The Leslie debacle summed
up our confusion over celebrity – the year’s overriding televisual theme. Exalted one minute, tortured the next – we simply don’t know what to do with our famous people. Watching Leslie blank-eye his way through a standard edition of
This Morning
, aware he was the subject of frenzied Popbitch speculation, but unaware
The
Wright Stuff
had inadvertently fingered him hours earlier, was the year’s most haunting image.

Of course, Leslie wasn’t the only ‘lucky sod’ this year. So many TV careers were derailed by scandal you needed a metal umbrella to avoid being brained by falling stars, and when they hit the ground we tore into them like the confused, rage-fuelled zombies from 28
Days Later
. Angus Deayton discovered no amount of nonchalant smirking would prevent the tabloids from crucifying him, while Barrymore’s career was as dead as the man in his swimming pool, even though he was cleared of any involvement: proof, if any were truly needed, that light entertainment and corpses don’t mix. (The exception to this rule is Professor Scaryhat Bodyworlds, the walking Hammer Horror character who performed an autopsy for Channel 4 – I’d have loved to see him turn up on the now mercifully cancelled
Generation Game
, giving grandmothers from Preston marks out of 10 for the way they sawed a ribcage open – especially if said ribcage belonged to Jim Davidson, and he was still alive, and his feet were kicking about and everything.) The torturing of famous people never let up. Hit of the year was
I’m A Celebrity
–
Get
Me Out Of Here!
in which we were treated to the sight of Uri Geller scoffing live grubs and Christine Hamilton falling down a waterfall and blacking her eye. No sooner had that finished (granting Tony Blackburn an additional 15 seconds of adulation before we all got bored of him again) than
Celebrity Big Brother
took up the gauntlet, affording viewers an opportunity to sneer at Anne Diamond’s weight problem and publicly debate whether Les Dennis was going to commit suicide. And on BBC2,
The Entertainers
painted a sorry picture of Leo Sayer; oh how we cackled, even though his life to date has been 10,000 times more exciting than that of the average couch potato. Don’t forget, this man sold millions of records, travelled the world and performed live in front of thousands of
screaming fans. And what have
you
done? You’ve sat there, inert on your sofa, laughing about what a joke you think he is. So who’s the tragic figure in this equation?

The end result is that celebrity has never seemed so second-rate. With all mystery removed, the cachet of fame is plunging so rapidly, by this time next year it’ll actually be cooler to work down your local newsagent than to appear on telly.

Perhaps that’s why, in a desperate bid to boost the dwindling ranks of the famous, TV companies pulled out all the stops attempting to transform regular Joes into megastars –
Pop Idol
,
Popstars: The Rivals, Model Ambition, Fame Academy,
all of them acting as gigantic blandness sieves, ruthlessly weeding out anyone of interest; art defined by committee. Even the very public implosion of Hear’Say – last year celebrated in an hour-long prime time special, this year spat at in the streets – didn’t hamper the process.

The
Popstars
panel of judges pre-defined just how bland the end product would be: Louis Walsh, a squashed omelette of a man who wouldn’t recognise soulful singing if it crooned at him from a deathbed; the curiously self-righteous Pete Waterman and gushing Geri Halliwell, a national joke who has to wear her heart on her sleeve because there’s no room left for it in her sunken Belsen-chic chest any more. The end result is that, what with the combined cast of
Popstars
and
Fame Academy
AND Will and Gareth all releasing watery-bollocked singles in the space of a few weeks, we’re left with the worst Christmas Top 10 since records began – a situation so dire, even the producer of
Top of the Pops
started publicly complaining. Which makes him my hero of the year: after all, he’s the poor bastard who has to try to make this shit look interesting. And where were all our proper pop stars while this was happening? Liam got his teeth kicked out and Jarvis spent the year doing
Stars
In Their Eyes
and dangling off lamp posts in a BT commercial.

The tragedy of it all is that while we amused ourselves watching mallrat crooners burst into tears and Rhona Cameron inspecting Uri Geller’s pubic hair for lice, the Americans were creating some of the finest TV drama ever made – a veritable renaissance, in fact. In addition to the continued artistic successes of the
West Wing, Oz
,
The Sopranos
and
Sex and
the City
, they brought
us Six Feet Unde
r,
CSI
,
The Shield
and my favourite show of the year,
24
.