Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (40 page)

A mainstream black drama with genuine crossover potential is long overdue. Sadly,
Platinum
ain’t it. By chasing the widest audience possible, it feels more white than black, more software than drama. And who can aspire to that?

Don’t like the Americans much, do we? We’re jealous, because they’re better than us at everything. They’ve got better cars, better food, better scenery, better shops, better serial killers, better manners, better teeth and better faith in their own inherent superiority. They take everything we do and then improve on it, from farming to empire-building. Thank God they currently rule the world with an iron fist, because they do a far better job than we would. Can you imagine how a modern global British empire would function? It’d be like Railtrack with stormtroopers. Brrrrr.

For years we were better than the Yanks at making television, but they’ve recently overtaken us on that front, and I defy anyone to name a single TV genre in which the finest contemporary example is not of American origin. Drama?
Six Feet Under
. Comedy?
Curb
Your Enthusiasm
. Reality TV?
Big Brother USA
(which contains more intrigue in five minutes than Cameron and co. could ever manage, even if they’d been goaded with cattle-prods – a tactic I’d recommend for the next series). And so on and so on. We currently lead the world in antiques shows and sheepdog trials, but that’s about it.

Since Americans enjoy talking almost as much as they enjoy benign global oppression, they’ve always been masters of the chat show, although since their late-night yapathons were rarely screened over here, we Brits have been ignorant of the fact for years. Now, however, it being a glorious age of multi-channel digital cathode, we can finally catch up. Most of the major US talk shows are screened in some form or another:
Late Night with
Letterman
turns up daily on ITV2 in the dead of night, and the
Tonight Show
with Jay Leno airs regularly on satellite.

Of the two, Letterman’s show is by far the most watchable, although it takes a bit of getting used to: once you understand that the first guest won’t be called until Dave and co. have slooped their way through what feels like six months of enjoyably laidback shtick at the top of the show, you can settle down and relish the proceedings.

Leno, on the other hand, is simply one of the most punchable men you’re ever likely to encounter – facially, a cross between Popeye the Sailor and a bloated throw pillow; vocally, a mosquito trapped inside a harmonica. But he’s worth catching now and then, if only to see just how many times a man can kiss arse within the space of 10 minutes without visibly bruising his lips.

Both Leno and Letterman, however, feel altogether stale compared to the latest US import:
The New Tom Green Show
(C4). The spiritual successor to the Letterman show (which in turn succeeded the
Tonight Show
), it’s an utterly idiotic slice of joie de vivre that you’ll find yourself laughing at against your will. Channel 4 already has a homegrown Letterman pretender of course, in the guise of Graham Norton, but his one joke (shocking innuendo) outstayed its welcome several hundred centuries ago. And besides, Tom Green’s one joke – that he’s an obnoxious arsehole – is funnier.

Annoyingly, C4 are only showing a heavily edited ‘Best of’ compilation, rather than screening each edition in its entirety, so what we’re left with is a dissatisfying, thumbnail sketch of the full Green experience. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of laugh-out-loud material here – witness the pig-headed stupidity of the sequence in which our host borrows a super-expensive Segway scooter and uses it to repeatedly crash into things against the owner’s express instruction.

Until we can come up with something as relaxed and carefree as this ourselves – a situation that’ll probably only come about the moment TV stations stop plopping their collective pants over every half-percentage of a rating – we really shouldn’t bother. And in the meantime, let’s be big enough to just admit defeat: put Norton
back to one show a week (on the basis that a single dose is just about palatable) and run Tom Green in the slot left behind. Please?

Young adults: they’re everywhere. They’re a virus. And they turn everything they touch into dog dung. I know precisely how brainless young adults are because I used to be one myself. Throughout my 20s I was a selfish, clueless, clumsy, ignorant jerk. As were all my contemporaries. It’s safe to assume that subsequent generations of young adults are equally bone-headed: the sole difference is these days, their every squeak, squawk and belch is broadcast on television.

In this torturous summer we’ve already endured
Big Brother 4
, which featured the youngest set of contestants yet and was therefore the most boring household to date. Tellingly, the oldest contestant won. Undeterred, the Stormtroopers of Youth return, courtesy of
Fame Academy
(BBC1) and
Pop Idol
(ITV1). Two talent shows separated by a gigantic class divide:
Fame Academy
is stiflingly middle-class, while
Pop Idol
is sheer Asda-economy-range plebbish. But weirdly, the musical output from both is identical: music with all the interesting nobbles and rough edges smoothed away. These are people who earnestly admire Robbie Williams, which in the mind of any sane observer is akin to earnestly admiring the My Lai massacre.

Pop Idol’
s big draw, of course, is Simon Cowell, a fool who knows everything about selling music and zilch about what makes it touch your soul. He’s a walking fart cloud of poor taste: poor taste in music, poor taste in clothes, poor taste in women … he probably thinks Chicken McNuggets are bursting with flavour. In fact his brain probably
is
a Chicken McNugget, held in place with two strands of tinned spaghetti, generating just enough power to keep his eyes blinking. He’s an idiot. And he’s an idiot who’s made a name for himself by being ‘nasty’ to the contestants. But, as with everything else about the programme, Cowell’s ‘scathing’ comments are bland and misguided. Why pour scorn on someone who clearly
can’t sing? Just be nice to them. Reserve your insults for the more demented Robbie Williams wannabes, the ones who’ve studied his every move and honed their voice into a shiny plastic bum gasp.

In fact, sod insults: just get up from behind the desk and hit them. Get me on that show; I’ll do it myself. I’ll take a cricket bat to the bastards. Dash those talentless brains right up the wall. They could use a lingering shot of grey matter splattering across the
Pop
Idol
logo for the break bumpers. A hundred security guards couldn’t hold me back. That’s genuine bile, Cowell, not your piss-weak excuse for venom. Get off my screen or I’ll sue. In fact, I hereby challenge you to a duel. Fought with shoes. Come round my house and I’ll kick you round the garden like the fey rag doll you are.

Fame Academy
doesn’t have Cowell; its gimmick is round-the-clock live coverage of self-satisfied dullards, courtesy of digital television.

Hilariously, they’re all so boring, they were sitting around the other day holding laminated cards with topics of conversation printed on them, presumably handed out by the production team in order to spark some signs of life (this is also how
Hollyoaks
is made, fact fans). Just how much of a blank sheet do you have to be to require that kind of prompting? A quick check on the contestants’ biogs reveals the answer: among their ‘musical idols’ they list legends such as Celine Dion, Lenny Kravitz, George Michael and of course Robbie Williams. THESE PEOPLE BELONG IN HOSPITAL, FOR GOD’S SAKE, NOT IN A TALENT CONTEST. In fact, that’s a good idea: ‘Fame Rehab’, a show in which the academy is turned into a kind of psychological deprogramming unit, in which teams of psychiatrists and talented musicians work round the clock to knock some artistic sense into these simpering dumb-bells.

And Simon Cowell undergoes ten weeks of electric-shock therapy. Not to cure him of anything, mind. Just for a laugh.

Here’s a great idea for a TV show. You find an unsuspecting member of the public who’s about to have an operation, and secretly
research their background. They go into hospital, have the op, and when they come round from the anaesthetic, they discover they’ve died and woken up in heaven, where they’re surrounded by dead relatives and angels playing harps. Except of course it isn’t
really
heaven – it’s a set-up, and you’re filming it with hidden cameras. And the dead relatives aren’t
really
spirits – they’re actors wearing painstakingly accurate prosthetic masks. Hilarious! And a bit cruel, perhaps, but you could hand out prizes for anyone who susses out what’s going on before the end of the day.

What really happens after death is a mystery of course. Lots of people believe we appear in the afterlife and sort of float around like wispy humanoid clouds, which is a charming image but not really very likely, if you sit down and think about it for more than nine seconds. I’m a cynic: I reckon if there really
is
an afterlife, chances are it’s a bit like a small, clean town in West Germany.

It also seems the afterlife has phone lines, given the number of patently dishonest psychic mediums doing the rounds. Communicating with the dead has never been so popular – in fact, next week Nokia are launching a new mobile phone that lets you exchange SMS messages with deceased relatives (this is a lie). C4 are reacting to the fad by hosting a dedicated
Psychic Night
.

First up,
Living with the Dead,
a fascinating, even-handed potted history of séances, spirits and mediums (albeit one that’s a tad too reliant on filmed ‘reconstructions’ and abstract imagery of cadavers to spice up the narrative, but since it’s impossible to send a camera crew into the afterlife and interview ghosts first-hand, we’ll let it go).

Chief among the highlights is a chunk of footage from
The Spirit
of Diana
the infamous pay-per-view US TV special in which ‘professional mediums’ Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker attempted to contact Princess Di. They start by visiting Paris to retrace her final steps, in the belief that this will bring them closer to her spirit.

Once they’ve finished goosing Di and Dodi’s anguished spirits at the point of impact, it’s back to the studio for the séance itself. Or rather it isn’t, because the ITC have barred its transmission, presumably on the grounds that it might cause the opening of a portal
to the spirit world, swamping the nation with asylum-seeking spectres.

The show also features a flatly ludicrous ‘medium’ called Derek Acorah, who tours the UK foisting his unique brand of supernatural bullshit onto grieving people in exchange for money. Naturally, he claims to be a serious spiritualist, in which case he really ought to hand out tickets for free and tell the audience they can settle up in the afterlife. Using ‘ghost coins’.

He also makes regular appearances on UK Living, the channel that’s rapidly becoming the deranged housewife’s network of choice, thanks to shows like
Antiques Ghostshow
, in which Our Derek handles heirlooms and gets possessed by the ancestors who once owned them – side-splittingly funny, until you remember he’s essentially exploiting someone’s fond memories of a loved one.

Living with the Dead
is followed by the tacky
Ultimate Psychic
Challenge,
in which GMTV presenter Kate Garraway (dressed, for some reason, like she’s auditioning for
Chicago
) invites psychics and sceptics to battle it out before a studio audience, who get to vote on whether they ‘believe’ or not.

It’s ‘Robot Wars with Ghosts’, in other words, but 200 times less interesting than that makes it sound.

Remarkably, despite a rigorous unveiling of many of the tricks so-called ‘psychics’ employ in their acts, by the end of the show, the number of people believing in séances actually goes up. Well, pah. I’m not convinced. But if any dead readers out there want to get in touch and put me right, be my guest.

It’s madness, the sheer amount of television there is out there. Hundreds of channels, filling hundreds of hours. No wonder the majority of programmes are churned out like sausage meat: unloved swathes of videotape whose sole purpose is to bung up the schedule. They used to call TV ‘chewing gum for the eyes’, but most of the time it isn’t even that good any more. Modern chewing gum has flavour; it’s constantly updated in new and exciting ways
(like the new ‘melt in the mouth’ gum strips that turn your tongue blue and your breath fresh, then vanish like a benevolent menthol ghost). Most modern TV is uniformly nondescript, the equivalent of oxygen-flavoured gum.

Apologies if I sound despondent and cathode-weary, but I’ve just sat through an episode of
Boot Sale Challenge
(ITV1), and it’s left me violently disillusioned. Don’t get me wrong. I love television. I grew up licking screens with delight. Maybe I was young and impressionable. Maybe I never noticed how boring the majority of TV shows were back then. Or maybe these days I’m bitter … but when you’re confronted with meaningless ‘will-this-do?’ dregcasts like
Boot Sale Challenge,
it’s hard to shake the notion that things never used to be this clawingly, embarrassingly
desperate
.

Because unbelievably,
Boot Sale Challenge
is a poor man’s
Bargain
Hunt
. Read that phrase again: ‘a poor man’s
Bargain Hunt’
. Let it sink in. Pop that notional gum strip on your brain and feel it dissolve. Got it? Understand the full horror we’re dealing with here? Good. Let’s continue.

As you’ve probably deduced from the title, it’s a show in which two teams of dull viewers dawdle round a car-boot sale seeking out bargains. At the end of the show two ‘experts’ evaluate their purchases: the team whose purchases are judged most likely to turn a profit win a prize (generally, a big hunk of chintz). And. That’s. It.