Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (44 page)

Great fun – although I did feel a brief shudder during a sequence starring an ugly blank-eyed sea monster whose jaws are locked in a permanent sneer. Just for a moment I thought I was watching a mirror.

You are all scum. Common, cap-doffing, bottom-of-the-food-chain scum. Don’t argue. Compared to our glorious royal family, you’re just another dark streak on humanity’s toilet pan.

But don’t despair. The
Mirror
’s recent undercover scoopery uncovered invaluable details regarding their personal habits, making it a doddle to simulate the royal lifestyle in the comfort of your own hovel. Simply use these easy-to-follow instructions, and hey-presto – you’ll believe you
are
Her Majesty the Queen!

Here’s what you’ll need: a partner willing to dress up as a footman, a television set, a remote control, a tray, and some dinner. For the sake of accuracy, the dinner should consist of something suitably 
hoity-toity, like chargrilled swan’s brains in a fox-blood jus, and the footman should stand in the corner, repeatedly tugging his forelock so hard that he keeps bashing his forehead against the ground. Oh, and you should probably pull a face like the Queen as well: try to capture her effortless charisma by locking your features into a permanent half-hearted grimace, as though you’re trying to excrete a tinfoil pine cone without anyone noticing.

As the clock strikes eight, sit back as your subservient footman brings you your dinner (trying not to slosh fox blood down your lap as he does so), then pick up the remote control that he should have placed carefully to the left side of your plate and plunge head-first into Her Majesty’s favourite TV programmes. And realise what a flat-out bozo we’ve got on the throne.

Yes, because first up on the Queen’s viewing schedule it’s
East-
Enders
(BBC1). This is progress in action, folks. The late Queen Mum got to know London’s cockernee rabble by personally touring the East End in the wake of the Blitz, and was rewarded with years of mindless gratitude from tedious Pearly Kings (whose glittery costumes doubtless attracted the attention of low-flying Luftwaffe pilots in the first place). Queen Elizabeth II doesn’t need to be quite so pro-active, since the BBC helpfully brings all the grit of East London kicking and screaming into her living quarters four times a week (with an omnibus on Sundays).

Since the Queen lives inside an impenetrable bubble of pomp and horseshit, she doubtless thinks
EastEnders
is a hard-hitting documentary. Think about it: she has more contact with the plebs in Albert Square than the plebs outside her own front gate. Right now, she probably believes the East End is teeming with unconvincing gangsters and resurrected publicans. None of whom ever swear, spit, or sound off on controversial topics. Even Michael Jackson has a firmer grasp on reality than that.

Worse is to come, because next up, Her Gloriousness likes to watch
The Bill
(ITV1/UK Gold). Or rather, she doesn’t. According to the bogus footman, she said, ‘I don’t like
The Bill
, but I can’t help watching it.’

Funny that. I feel exactly the same – but only because it’s always
fucking on. ITV show it 89 times a week, and it’s heavily rotated on satellite. They say you’re only ever three metres from a rat in London – I say you’re only ever three seconds from the opening credits of
The Bill
. And if
EastEnders
is supplying Her Superiorness with a warped view of Londoners,
The Bill
must convince her that her own constabulary spend more time shagging than, say, tracking down would-be royal assassins. Which explains why she looks so nervous whenever she’s in public.

So much for the soaps. For a dose of cold hard realism in the royal household, it falls to the Queen’s final favourite –
Kirsty’s
Home Videos
(Sky One): impossibly, a down-market version of
You’ve Been Framed
. Terrifyingly, this supplies the only unguarded, unsanitised look at everyday citizens the Queen will experience in her entire life. And what does she see us doing? Mooning, gurning, and tumbling like idiots, accompanied by comedy sound effects.

No wonder she looks like she hates us.

The singer Gabrielle once claimed ‘dreams can come true’. She was lying. Dreams don’t come true. If they did, the nation’s offices would be full of people who’d accidentally turned up for work with no clothes on. And I’d have slept with Madonna when I was 13.

Besides, if they
did
come true, they wouldn’t be ‘dreams’; they’d be ‘premonitions’. Of course, Gabrielle already knows this – but hey, ‘premonitions’ would’ve been harder to scan.

Anyway, to recap:
Dreams do not come true
.

Nightmares, however, come true on a daily basis – and usually on television.

I’m currently working on a theory that much modern TV is actually derived from the collective nightmares of our national subconscious. It works like this: machines have become self-aware, Terminator-style, and have decided to punish mankind for years of abuse by slurping our darkest fears from the ether and relaying them back to us via our beloved TV screens in the hope that we’ll all go mad. I call this the Freddy Krueger Manoeuvre, and it
explains, among other things, the peculiar chill you feel each time you see Linda Barker miming a scissor motion at the end of those Curry’s adverts. For another prime example of this, look no further than
Rolf Harris at the Royal Albert Hall
(BBC1). Rolf’s famous for asking, ‘Can you tell what it is yet?’, but despite having wracked my brains for several hours, my answer is, ‘No, I don’t actually know what this is.’ On the one hand, it’s a tribute to Rolf’s fifty years in showbiz. But it’s also a charity concert in aid of the Prince’s Trust. Which aspect is least important? I don’t know.

Rolf himself is centre stage throughout: does that make him a tiresome egomaniac or a born entertainer? I don’t know. Why does Jon Culshaw turn up halfway through, wearing two false legs, doing an impression of Russell Crowe as a four-legged gladiator?
I
don’t know
.

There’s no doubt that Rolf is – as Prince Charles himself puts it in a VT mini-tribute – a ‘much-loved institution’. He’s certainly stuck his thumb into a wide variety of pies: art, cartoons, music, consumer electronics (well, the Stylophone anyway), silly sound effects and dying household pets. I’m referring to
Animal Hospital
there, incidentally.
In no way
am I suggesting Rolf has
ever
stuck his thumb into a dying household pet. Although that’s just about the only thing he hasn’t done in the name of entertainment.

Look up the word ‘wacky’ in a dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of Rolf. Chances are he put it there himself. He’s not shy. In fact, he spends this entire show – a tribute to himself, don’t forget – wearing a shirt whose pattern consists of the words ‘ROLF HARRIS’ repeated over and over in block capitals. In the real world, that kind of egomania would be unforgivable, but since this is Rolf – zany uncle to several generations of British telly viewers – it’s somehow completely acceptable.

See, it’s hard not to love Rolf. No, really – and it’s just as well, because he tests the goodwill of a nation to breaking point here. Among the surreal highlights: Rolf performing an excruciating rap with Big Brovaz (you can actually see their credibility imploding on stage); Rolf playing the Stylophone with John Humphrys and Sally Gunnell; Rolf performing a cover version of ‘Roll with It’ (renamed
‘Rolf with It’) alongside Jon Culshaw (who’s impersonating Rolf and Liam Gallagher
at the same time
); Rolf doing an eerie song about a dying sailor, accompanied by a tiny, dancing, wooden doll. Beloved entertainer? Maybe … but can you imagine being stuck in a lift for six months with this man? You’d end up dashing your own brains across the floor just to make it stop.

At least that’s how you’ll feel until halfway through the show, when Rolf pulls off a flawless, engaging performance of ‘Jake the Peg’, and suddenly you’d forgive him anything.

Why?
I don’t know
. But it
must
be a nightmare. Because dreams don’t come true.

You can hunt high, you can hunt low, you can sift through the gene pool … but I defy you to unearth a more instantly objectionable little berk than Sam Nixon, the pudge-faced sea monkey currently tipped to win
Pop Idol
(ITV1).

Aside from a briefly dipped toe at the start of the season, I’d managed to completely avoid Cowell and company this time round. Or so I thought, until last week, when I unexpectedly stumbled across it in much the same way you might unexpectedly step barefoot on a dog turd.

Once I’d got over the shock of discovering
it’s still bloody going
(the current series seems to have been running since 1913), I found myself reeling at the remaining four popettes: a 12-year-old advertising executive (Chris), a male Stepford Wife (Mark), Sonia from
EastEnders
scowling at a funhouse mirror (Michelle) and, most disturbing of all, one of the puppets from the 1970s children’s TV series
Cloppa Castle
(Sam). Of the four, Mark was worst, but at the end of the show it was Chris – the only one with a sense of humour – who got hoofed out, leaving a one-horse race in his wake. With only Alison Moyet junior and a piece of singing cardboard for competition, Sam simply cannot fail. And that’s a tragedy. Because he’s a tit.

It’s wrong to judge people by appearance alone but in this case I’ll make an exception. Sam is a gnome. A troll. A claymation
Photofit of Mo Mowlam. And he sports a semi-ironic mullet explosion on his head, like the bastard offspring of Limahl and Pat Sharp. That’s not a haircut – that’s a cast-iron guarantee of mediocrity.

Well, look here, ITV. It’s getting cold, Christmas is coming, everyone’s stressed out and to be honest we could do without Sam’s hypnotically punchable mug soiling our screens, papers and record-shop windows for the next two years. Which is why I implore everyone reading to tune in tonight and turf him out. Oh, and if you’re out shopping this afternoon and you see someone buying the
Pop Idol
Christmas single – a soul-bummingly dreadful cover version of ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’ – kick them to death on the spot.

Speaking of rubbish, have you SEEN
You’ve Been Framed
(ITV1) lately? It’s never been sophisticated – as entertainment, it’s always been on a par with sharing a tent with someone who thinks performance farting is hilarious – but now the bottom of the barrel has been scraped clean away and the programme is frenziedly digging its way toward the earth’s core.

First, they’ve replaced Lisa Riley with Jonathan Wilkes, which is a bit like substituting a lump of sick for a lump of snot: equally bad yet somehow worse. Wilkes has hair like a brown wave of effluence and a dimple that makes him look like he’s been leaning chin-first on a pool cue for the last six days.

Worse still, there’s a new string of palpably desperate ‘format points’ which help them repeat their dwindling selection of footage again and again. There’s a segment in which kids introduce their ‘favourite’ classic clips (i.e. whatever the production team has shown them that morning), a bit where Wilkes exposes a suspected ‘fake’ clip by rewinding it and showing it several times in a row (despite having cheerfully introduced countless obvious fakes moments earlier) and, most shameless of all, a finale in which he invites us to enjoy several of that episode’s highlights again (which in the case of the ‘fake’ clip was actually the
third
time we’d seen it).

In summary then: both
Pop Idol
and
New You’ve Been Framed
are rubbish, particularly compared to this week’s low-profile, low-budget
edition of
The Art Show
– something called
How to Watch Television
(C4), which was written and narrated by me and is therefore great. Don’t miss it!

Fight for a ticket!

Once upon a time, if you wanted to be famous, all you had to do was get your face on television – and bingo, that was that. There were only a handful of channels; no websites or Xboxes vying for the audience’s attention. It was just you and several million viewers at home. Getting on the box was like sticking your head through every window in the country simultaneously, grinning like crazy and shouting ‘Look at me!’ – yes, just like that, except it didn’t terrify the occupants. Instead they grew to love you as a ‘famous person’. They’d harass you in supermarkets; bug you for autographs at motorway service stations. Kiss you at the urinal. All you’d done was appear on their screens, but to them you were magic incarnate. Not any more. There are 15 billion channels out there. You’ll need to do more than smile and wave if you want to get noticed. In fact, in 2003, the only sure-fire way to command attention was to risk your own life, live, on camera.

First came
David Blaine: Above the Below
, a sort of one-man
Big
Brother
with a smaller catering bill. The moment Blaine’s perspex door slammed shut, the nation was divided. Was it a trick? Was it art? Was it a man doing tit-all in a box for ages? Whatever it was, lucky and/or demented Sky viewers could sit watching it 29 hours a day (OK, 24 hours – it just felt longer). Those without satellite dishes had to make do with popping along in person to hurl abuse and tomatoes.

While the drawling, soporific Blaine committed slow-motion suicide over a 44-day period, the altogether twitchier
Derren Brown
threatened to achieve similar results in a nanosecond, by blasting his head apart on live television. Of course, had Brown’s stunt actually culminated in an onscreen bonce-burst, C4’s broadcasting licence would’ve been revoked before the first skull fragment hit
the floor, and consequently the outcome was never in doubt. Nonetheless, the finale made supremely creepy viewing, largely because Brown himself is one of the canniest showmen to have emerged in years: the sight of him gulping, sweating and holding a gun to his head was the year’s third most frightening image.