Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (36 page)

Anyway, having brought us a ‘Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ that isn’t, Channel 4 also offers
The Real Winona Ryder
(C4), who is. This is a look at the troubled star who is troubled and ran into troubles, but still engenders more than her fair share of sympathy because 1) she appeared in
Heathers
, which was really cool and 2) she’s got big watery eyes and porcelain skin. You know, a bit like Gollum.

As an even-handed celebrity portrait, you won’t learn anything astoundingly new – only that Winona's godfather was Timothy Leary, that she’s not happy and that her Hollywood nickname is ‘Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame’ because she keeps getting entered by famous musicians.

I made that last one up, by the way.

The pursuit of money makes gimps of us all. Some labour for years in jobs they despise, toiling for the benefit of faceless bigwigs, each day waving goodbye to yet another small portion of their precious unique lifespan, slowly degenerating into dispirited husks, devoid of hope, devoid of love, or pity, or the release of laughter; living cadavers with nothing but death to look forward to. And some attempt to defraud
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
?
with an arse-witted coughing scheme.

Last week’s disappointing
Tonight
special on the throat-clearing caper failed to shed any light whatsoever on the mindset of the culprits, concentrating instead on second-by-second analysis of the unbroadcast episode, as though we were looking at a previously undiscovered reel of the Zapruder footage instead of a daft incident on a quiz show. Meanwhile the major and co. were painted as a pack of pathetic, sweating sneaks.

Was it really so wicked, this childish attempt to bamboozle the nation’s no.1 pub quiz? This is a television show we’re talking about here, not a hospital fund for the blind and footless. Lest we forget, the prize money itself is drawn from the proceeds of the show’s premium-rate phone lines – money drawn from wannabe contestants, 
the vast majority of whom earn considerably less than the average TV executive. Besides, TV tries to wring money out of
you
at every turn. In fact, you might as well instal a cash point and attendant beggar in the corner of your living room.

Think about it: you have to pay a licence fee to watch the BBC channels, while the commercial channels carry adverts, the cost of which is met by you whenever you go shopping. Then there’s all the optional expenses: satellite subscriptions, pay-per-view events and, yes, premium-rate phone lines – usually supporting a multiple-choice question so simple it’s clearly designed to be easily solved by any life form on the planet from the potato upwards.

Here’s a typical TV phone-in question:

Which of the following currently plays James Bond?

A: Pierce Brosnan.

B: Superman.

C: A sycamore tree.

Of course, everyone knows they only make the questions simple so more button-punching cow people will phone in. But there’s more to it than that.

Ever wondered why they bother setting a question at all, instead of simply running it as a lottery? Because that’s a breach of broadcast regulations. They’d have to supply a free alternative entry method if they were going to do that (which is why reality shows allow you to vote via the Internet as well). To run a premium-rate TV phone-in, you have to prove it’s supporting a contest requiring some degree of skill – even if said skill is as cursory as knowing the difference between James Bond and a tree. In other words, the nice TV folk are cheerfully doing the
barest possible minimum
in order to avoid a slap on the wrist, while simultaneously raking in as much money as they can. That’s how much they respect you. Make no mistake; to the TV brigade you really are just a number. It doesn’t  matter how pretty you are, how many press-ups you can do, or how much your children love you – you’re naught but a potentially exploitable blob of matter in the dark.

Factor all this in and the major starts to look like the new Robin Hood – albeit a nervous, absurd and incompetent one. If there’s
any justice in the world, he’ll rake in a fortune from personal appearances, reality TV shows and a long run in panto. And the Sars virus will explode across Britain, filling the
Millionaire
studio with so much background coughing, Tarrant’ll end up bellowing questions through a loudhailer. At a corpse with a runny nose.

Speaking of Sars, anyone noticed the striking similarity between the Stella Artois commercial with coughing paupers and the Sars outbreak? How long until they pull it, do you reckon? A: Three days. B: Four days. Or C: Five days. Calls cost £1,000,000 a minute. All proceeds to the major’s appeal campaign. Get dialling.

‘Hell is other people,’ said Jean-Paul Sartre. But the egghead wuss never had to sit through ten years of awful television. There’s a problem with trying to recall the worst TV shows you’ve seen: your mind tends to blank them out, like some kind of repressed abuse memory. Initially, you have to strain to remember them, but once you’ve started, the floodgates open and the memories pour out like tears, or vomit, or some unholy combination of the two. Ever puked through your brain? It’s not pleasant.

Which brings me to my next problem: how to corral these recollections into some kind of coherent order. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to simply spew them onto the page in whatever order my reeling mind dictates. After all, we’re talking televisual dreck here. You can’t treat it respectfully. That’d be madness. So then, without further ado …

Hotel Babylon
Synopsis: Heineken-backed, late-night untertainment with additional
ethnic cleansing.
Comments: Lager-sponsored take on
The Word
, complete with Dani Behr, that caused a stink when a fax from a Heineken representative
in Holland came to light, requesting more shots of their product and complaining about the ‘proportion of negroes’ in the
audience. The resulting furore almost masked the fact that the
show itself was as much fun as eating a bowlful of milk and mud. Almost. 

Trisha 
Synopsis: Daily bellowing festival in which a sorry collection of 
confused and inarticulate commoners air their dirty laundry
before an audience of self-important, loudmouthed hags.
Comments:
Trisha
is the most depressing programme on earth,
regularly leaving me bereft of any hope for mankind. There are no
sympathetic participants, the audience is hateful and Trisha’s mannered
insincerity could be mistaken for mental illness if it wasn’t so
sinister. Furthermore, everyone in that studio is incredibly ugly: it’s
like staring at a cave full of trolls from
The Dark Crystal
. They
should brick up the exits and fill the room with killer bees.

Goodnight, Sweetheart
Synopsis: Novelty ‘time-travelling’ sitcom in which Nicholas Lyndhurst
discovers a side street that allows him to visit wartime London
and lay a bit of pipe supreme on a 1940s chick behind his wife’s
back.
Comments: In time-travel scenarios, it’s traditional to avoid meddling
with the past, but Lyndhurst’s character actively molests it.
You can’t relate to a man who cheats on his wife with a woman
who’s probably dead by now: what is he, some kind of necrophile?
It’s just stupid. No one ever watched
Goodnight, Sweetheart
and
said admiringly: ‘It’s funny … ’cos it’s
true
!’ Inexplicably, it ran for
years before finally suffocating under the weight of its own paradoxes.

Harbour Lights
Synopsis:
Heartbeat
-on-Sea.
Comments: You want bland? Here’s bland: a series in which Nick
Berry sails around gently solving wharf-related crime. Each punishing
episode of
Harbour Lights
seemed to last nine weeks –
which means somewhere, in another dimension, it’s still going on,
right now.

Selina Scott Meets Donald Trump
Synopsis: Doe-eyed husky (aka the poor man’s Princess Di) meets the man who can afford everything except a plausible hairstyle. Comments: Trump started the show by introducing Scott to his buddies as ‘the legendary Selina Scott from Europe’. But the admiration dried up when he saw the finished product: a hatchet job. Viewers could only sit there and argue over which of the two was the least likeable.

Jim Davidson’s Generation Game
Synopsis: End-of-the-pier meets end of days.
Comments: What do you do when you’ve got a tired old variety format
that’s dying on its arse? Why, hire no one’s favourite comedian
to host it, of course. The result was a hideous collision of bafflingly
witless sketches, clumsy pratfalling and gor-blimey condescension
that made
Chucklevision
look like
Frasier
.

H&P@BBC
Synopsis: The show that killed off Hale and Pace.
Comments: You think that title’s bad? Trust me, things went downhill
from there. It was hard to work out just what
H&P@BBC
was
supposed to be. Sketch show? Audience participation cabaret? Sorrowful
requiem? Hale and Pace didn’t seem to know. Viewer reaction
was so negative, the show got pushed back further and further
in the schedules until it was virtually appearing early the following
morning.

Anything Hosted by Steve Penk
Synopsis: The only man in Britain who makes you appreciate Denis
Norden.
Comments: Despite being cursed with the kind of demented, boggle-
eyed stare you’d expect to find on a haunted doll in a Hammer
Horror quickie, the erstwhile Capital Radio prankster has forged a
sturdy televisual career as the ‘racy’ alternative to Denis Norden.
He now fronts hour-long ‘naughty’ clipfests in which the single
gag is that someone from
Emmerdale
fluffs their lines and says
‘fuck’.

LA Pool Party
Synopsis: California Uber Alles.
Comments: Take Jayne Middlemiss, Tess Daly and Lisa Snowdon,
an LA mansion, some low-grade celebrities and about 100 Californian
pod people and what have you got? A talk show in which you
can’t hear what anyone is saying coupled with a
Stepford Wives
-
style nightmare vision of the future. The standard viewer reaction
was to smack the screen in with a bloody big spade, which may or
may not have been the whole idea.

‘Adult’
Hollyoaks
Synopsis: Racier, late-night version of the soap, starring Chapman 
Brothers’ dummies.
Comments: Ever watched
EastEnders
and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be
funny if, like, Phil suddenly got his winky out, or Dot said “bollocks”
or something?’ Late-night
Hollyoaks
proved the answer is
‘no’. Forced to justify its ‘red light’ slot by tossing in the odd swearword
or flash of buttock, things reached a nadir when a character
absent-mindedly tried to brush their teeth with a vibrator. Please,
we’re not this stupid. And if we want to see the
Hollyoaks
girls in
their underwear, we only need glance at the blokey shelf in the
newsagents. You can’t build a show around a fleeting masturbatory
fantasy. Well, not unless you’re Dennis Potter.

Doctor Who the Movie
Synopsis: Crazy Like a Who.
Comments: And you thought things had gone downhill with the
introduction of Sylvester McCoy. In 1995 the BBC joined forces with
the Yanks to make a pilot for a proposed future series of big-budget
Who-jinks that foolishly replaced the original series’ eccentric
charm with cookie-cutter action bullshit. Paul McGann as the Doctor?
OK! Eric Roberts as the Master? Hmmm. Doctor Who bombing
through an American city on a
motorbike
? Piss off.

They Think It’s All Over
Synopsis: Boorish pub jabbering brought to you at the licence-payers’
expense.
Comments: I hate sport, and I hate blokes shouting in pubs, so
They Think It’s All Over
was always going to leave me cold. What I
couldn’t have foreseen is what a thumping big success it’d be.
What are they up to now, series 85? Somehow, this self-satisfied
prick parade always conspires to be on television at the precise
moment I desperately need something to watch in order to
stave off the suicidal despair that’s been hanging around since
that morning’s
Trisha
. I’ve lost count of the times it’s nearly killed
me. 

Dishonourable Mentions … 
You could fill an encyclopaedia with this rubbish. Space prevents
me from going into detail on the following, but simply reading the
titles alone should be enough to set sickbombs bursting in your
head:
Dotcomedy;
The Girlie Show; Crocodile
Bloody
Shoes; Metro-
sexuality; Bushell on the Box; All About Me; Bonjour La Classe
;
Blind Men
(brilliantly, a sitcom about men who
sell
blinds
),
Temptation
Island; Pie in the Sky; Rockface/Merseybeat/Holby City
et al.;
Soldier, Soldier; Days Like These;’ Orrible; Sam’s Game; Babes in the
Wood; Married for Life
(Russ Abbot takes on
Married with Children
and loses);
The Vicar of
Bumming
Dibley; TFI Friday; The House of
Eliott; Peak Practice; Robot Wars; Airport/Airline/The Cruise
/any
fly-on-the-wall doc set in a shoeshop etc.; any cheapo, CGI effects-fest,
e.g.
Timegate; Littlejohn; Boys and Girls; Model Behaviour
. Oh
– and the
Late
Bastard Bastard Bastard
Review
.