Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (37 page)

There. Think that about covers it. Here’s to the next decade.

They said it would never happen. Actually, that’s not true – they said it most definitely would. And it did.
I’m a Celebrity
–
Get Me
Out of Here
(ITV1) is back, packed with people going mental, screaming and getting wet down under, just like the front row at a Blue concert.

I’m a Celebrity
was the surprise hit of 2002, so with the thudding inevitability of night following day, ITV has pulled out all the stops
(well, OK, three or four of the stops) for this year’s new, dramatically unimproved sequel.

For starters, we’ve got more celebrities to choose from: ten to be precise, which is too many for the human brain to process all at once, which means you’re surprised every few minutes – it’ll cut to a shot of Wayne Sleep and you’ll hear yourself going, ‘Ooh, I’d forgotten he was in this.’ Sleep’s probably the most famous one in there. The rest are a motley collection whose stars glow so dimly in the showbusiness firmament, they’re 50 per cent less famous than the red laughing cow that appears on a range of dairy products. So who are they? Here’s a handy cut-out-and-keep list:

1) Antony Worrall Thompson. Fresh from his success playing the dwarf warrior in
The Two Towers
, Worrall Thompson has already made a mark in the
Celebrity
camp by smuggling in a sachet of cooking spices strapped to his inner thigh, which means his scrotum’s going to smell like a pair of greasy dumplings with cumin for the rest of the series. He’s also lost weight, and now looks less like Henry the Eighth and more like an ageing Kiefer Sutherland.

2) Chris Bisson. A huge non-entity. Such a personality vacuum, in fact, his presence gives rise to an interesting philosophical question: if a tree falls in the rainforest when only Chris Bisson is there to see it, does it make a sound?

3) Sian Lloyd. Flirtatious Welsh weather girl with a hint of Wallace and Gromit round her chops. She’s a close pal of Huw Edwards, apparently, so if a freak tornado whips through the camp and everyone dies, his face during the news afterwards should be an absolute picture.

4) Phil Tufnell. A cricketer, which means I’ve no idea who he is, and on the evidence thus far, I haven’t missed anything. They should replace him with Ray Mears, who’d construct a jacuzzi out of bark within 10 minutes of arrival, then brew up some funnel-web-spider beer and watch them all get nekkid. Yee haw!

5) Catalina. Famous for playing the ‘sexy girl’ in
TFI Friday
’s ‘Ugly Bloke’ segment and … that’s … it. Still, at least she can open her mouth and make sounds come out, unlike Nell McThingbags last time round.

6) John Fashanu. My flatmate is convinced Fashanu’s voice occasionally becomes a perfect replica of Frank Spencer. Once you’ve noticed it, it’s impossible to take Fashanu seriously – just as well, since he seems to be undergoing some kind of frightening mental collapse, and it’s nice to be able to distance yourself from it a bit through the miracle of laughter.

7) Linda Barker. A glorified B&Q assistant who might as well be replaced by a mop for all I care. The same goes for number 8, the eerily feline Wayne Sleep. Vote ’em off.

9) Danniella Westbrook – it’s traditional for
Celebrity
to feature an ex-cokehead, and Westbrook’s this year’s candidate. With any luck a community of cockroaches will start nesting in her nose and liven things up for all of us.

10) Finally, Toyah Willcox, more scary now than during her punk days. At the risk of sounding cruel, she resembles a 98-year-old woman in pigtails, and every time she comes onscreen I think I’m watching that scene in
The Others
where Nicole Kidman’s daughter turns round, revealing a terrifying, prematurely aged fizzog.

Who’ll win? Who cares? It’s another dignity-shredding festival, and none the worse for that. Besides, it’s already nearly killed Worrall Thompson, who narrowly avoided being crushed by a falling lump of tree within minutes of arrival. And any show that does that deserves the support of the entire nation.

We’ve had the French Revolution. We’ve had the Russian Revolution. But both pale into dull insignificance compared to the great Australian Revolution of 2003. Years from now, our descendants will make a pilgrimage to Trafalgar Square to lay flowers at the feet of Antony Worrall Thompson’s memorial statue. And, as the bugler sounds his reveille, they’ll lower their heads in respect for this inspirational rebel, this rotund colossus – he who taught us to rise up, stare the forces of reality television in the eye and say, ‘Enough!’

Seriously though, last week’s
I’m a Celebrity
–
Get Me Out of Here
(ITV1) revolt – aborted though it was – could bring about a new
phase in the ongoing advancement of reality shows. For those who missed it (and being a
Guardian
reader, you were probably off on BBC4 watching a harpsichord masterclass, like a great big ponce), the ten-strong group of celebrity campers reached snapping point and threatened to walk out en masse if they didn’t get a decent meal.

The producers, sisting of nine single sausages and a bit of old bark, were at pains to make it look as though the ‘stars’ were being a bunch of precious whingers – but the fact is the producers were in the wrong, and if the entire camp
had
walked, the programme would have ended there and then. ITV would’ve had the production team lined up against a wall and shot. Probably in a Saturday night special hosted by Ant and Dec (two men who magically remain blameless whatever the circumstances – even if they hosted a live show in which sick children were torn to ribbons by wolves they’d somehow come across as likeable).

Accordingly, the producers caved in, bent over and took it like suckers, right there on the telly – on their own
show
! Never mind their face-saving bullshit about providing an alternative meal of ‘identical calorific value’ – we saw the replacement with our own eyes, you cowards: steak and potatoes, a whopping great feast by comparison. A victory for the inmates, and hopefully an inspiration to all subsequent reality contestants – direct action works!

It’s just a shame the campers merely issued threats. If I was in that group, I’d have grabbed Ant or Dec during the live section and held them to ransom by holding a jagged piece of flint to their throat. Never mind steak and potatoes – I’d demand a helicopter, 50 per cent of the show’s production fee in cash and a blow job from every single member of the crew, even the no-nonsense Australian safety instructor. In fact,
especially
the no-nonsense Australian safety instructor. And, under those circumstances, I’d probably get it.

Anyway, the upshot of it all is that Worrall Thompson has now gone up in my estimation by about 10,000 per cent. The same is also true of Danniella Westbrook, who showed Fashanu up as the
oddball faux-ninja chicken he is by gamely undertaking her ‘bush tucker trial’ with palpable relish. Cockroaches crawled in her hair, maggots frolicked in her cleavage, and this ass-kicking survivor simply laughed it all off. Fashanu would’ve screamed, hyperventilated, punched invisible samurai assassins and generally squealed like a pantomime dame being goosed by Dick Whittington. Danniella, by contrast, has gone from a national joke to the next Lara Croft simply by being game for anything. Better still, in the end, she didn’t even give a toss about winning the damn programme. Missing her kids, missing her boyfriend, and literally bored to tears, Westbrook did the sensible thing and bolted. Perhaps if they’d given her more to do she’d have stuck around, but they didn’t, and I admire her ah-well-bollocks-to-it attitude.

Worrall Thompson and Westbrook – recast as heroes. Proof that we’re living in unpredictable times. And equally possibly, proof that I need a good lie-down. I’m off for a week. See you in a fortnight.

Tick tock, tick tock … I’ve held off writing about
24
for weeks on end now, largely because last time round I became so obsessed with it I rarely mentioned anything else, and readers who weren’t following the series got so bored with each column they’d nod off in the middle, wake up with backward newsprint all over their foreheads, then spend the rest of the day wondering why strangers were squinting at them in the street.

That said, now seems like a good time to assess where this second series of
24
(BBC2) is heading. Or ‘Carnival of Torture’, as it might as well be called, given the amount of violent interrogation going on. You can’t go 10 minutes without bumping into a torture scene – it’s like the Spanish Inquisition with cooler haircuts.

So far we’ve had electrocution, scalpel hi-jinks, finger-breaking and a particularly touching interlude in which Kate Warner’s private detective had his spine carved out with some kind of rotating-blade power tool. Product placement for a new range of Black &
Decker gizmos aimed at oppressive regimes? I wouldn’t discount it.

Jack Bauer’s a particularly efficient inquisitor, ready to extract even the most trivial information via gruesome means – clearly, Jack’s suffering from horrendously chapped lips, probably incurred during the plane crash he survived a couple of hours ago, because he spent most of last week’s episode threatening to shoot a suspect’s entire family, starting with the kids, unless he told him the location of ‘the balm’. ‘Tell me where the balm is!’ ‘Where’s the balm!?!’ At one point he even claimed that ‘millions will die unless you tell me where the balm is’ – the man’s lost his mind.

And he’s not the only one. Even mild-mannered President Palmer’s got the torturin’ bug, sanctioning the repeated electrocution of the head of the NSA – a decision that initially caused Palmer no end of soul-searching (as indicated in traditional Palmer fashion, i.e. by flaring his nostrils and lolling his head around like a punch-drunk bull), but obviously grew on him, because he spent the next hour watching the proceedings on a private video link in his office, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to a man illicitly viewing pornography in the basement while his wife sleeps upstairs.

If Palmer keeps this up, by the end of the series he’ll be stalking the corridors of the Mexican restaurant that seems to double as his HQ, wearing a long dark cloak, wielding a scimitar and insisting on being addressed as ‘His Dark Highness Torquemada the Pitiless’. At which point Radioactive George Mason, who by then will have mutated into a lesion-covered Hulk-like monster, will fight him to the death on the roof of the White House.

None of which would be any less preposterous than Kim’s ongoing ‘storyline’, which increasingly resembles an entire series of ‘The Perils of Pauline’ reduced to the length of a diet Coke commercial and starring Britney Spears. Things reached a ludicrous high with the whole chased-by-a-cougar sequence, something I suspect was written into the script as a joke while the producer was on holiday; you can tell by the way it was abruptly done away with in the very next episode – as though the boss had gone away saying, ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ then came back and said, ‘You did WHAT?’

So what happens next? Being a downloadin’ Internet smart arse-stroke- bore, I already know, of course … but hardened
24
addicts alarmed at the prospect of ‘spoilers’ can rest easy, because I’m not about to spoil what’s
still
the best show on the television by spilling the plot beans … although I will tantalise you with the following question: which of the following names genuinely, honestly joins the cast of
24
to play a major character in later episodes?

1: David Yip, the Chinese Detective. 2: Ex-WWF star ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper. 3: Jim Robinson from
Neighbours
.

Answers on a postcard please. First 200 correct entries win a car, a knighthood, and a set of official CTU thumbscrews.

The answer was Jim Robinson from Neighbours, who played the vice-president.
 

Whenever I tell people I’m a misanthrope they react as though that’s a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God’s sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently?

Misanthropy’s the only thing that gets you through it. It’s not a personality flaw, it’s a skill.

It’s nothing to do with sheer numbers. Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I’d learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year. I can’t abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones. Bill Hicks called the human race ‘a virus with shoes’, and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses: I’d consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn’t so bad.

Thank God, then, for
Big Brother 4
(C4/E4), which provides the perfect cathartic vent for all this pent-up rage, in the form of a shack full of absolute squawking scum.

True misanthropes reserve their sourest bile for anyone younger and better-looking than themselves; consequently I
really
hate this year’s inmates, the
yoofiest
selection yet. They’re like the Doritos Friendchips crew, but worse.

(Speaking of the Friendchips berks reminds me: I’m looking forward to an entire spin-off series based around their rib-tickling antics – something like
This Life
, but with a greater emphasis on fried corn snacks. It’d run for nine years, and the final season would depict them as depressive mid-30s fatsoes, their bodies ravaged by years of nachogulping, dropping dead one by one of heart failure. Ratings dynamite!)

The
BB4
house contains not one, but
two
finheaded Nathans in the form of Federico and Scott. The fin haircut is visual shorthand: it screams
dingwad
as efficiently as a flashing icon hovering above the head of a pixilated character in
The Sims
. Scott’s 27 and has apparently written a play for Radio 4, an achievement that should impress anyone who’s never had to sit through one. Of the two, Federico is the more fashion-conscious, which naturally makes him the bigger arse: the man loves himself so much he probably sends a Valentine’s card to his own right hand each year. I hate him. I hate him so much I’m already fantasising about killing him. (Here’s how: I sneak into the
BB
house in the dead of night armed with a saw and a mallet; I swipe at his eyes with the saw, and while he’s crawling around blinded, finish him off with 15,000 blows to the back of the head. In all honesty, would that be such a crime?)