Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (45 page)

In second place: Linda Barker’s ‘snip snip’ mime from the Curry’s commercials, narrowly pipped to first place by ‘The All-New Shock and Awe Show’, available round the clock on most channels throughout March and April.

Never one to turn a blind eye to suffering, particularly when it’s accompanied by eye-popping explosions, Sky News welcomed the war with open arms, rapidly mutating into an exact copy of the fascist TV news network from
Starship Troopers
, replete with spinning 3D graphics (rippling flags, advancing tank columns, soaring jets; if they’d thrown a 200-foot flame-throwing penis into the mix no one would’ve batted an eyelid), white-knuckle shakycam reports from the field and a ticker tape filled with ‘breaking news’ cunningly disguised as hysterical conjecture.

The BBC, meanwhile, found itself a sex symbol in the form of Rageh Omaar, dormouse of doom. ITN had to make do with John Suchet shouting over an endless procession of blurry green JPegs that apparently constituted ‘live footage’.

Despite the surfeit of cameras, very little blood was shown on screen. A fusty ignoramus might sneer that the TV coverage treated the war like a video game, whereas the reality is actually worse: the average modern video game is more realistic and even-handed than the average TV news bulletin.

Speaking of news,
Tonight with Trevor McDonald
secured the year’s biggest TV scoop: Martin Bashir’s remarkable interview with Michael Jackson, during which the unhinged superstar cheerfully confessed to sharing his bed with children. After some predictable mud-slinging, Jacko bounced back with a starring role in a Santa Monica police mugshot, in which his face looks disturbingly like a child’s drawing: as though they asked a four-year-old to create a likeness in crayon.

With all this bizarre non-fiction pouring into our living rooms,
it’s not surprising common-or-garden reality TV finally began to falter, the lacklustre
Big Brother 4
a case in point: a household of identikit yoof-droids (eerily reminiscent of the hateful Doritos Friendchips gang) who consistently failed to screw, argue, or do anything of interest, and proved so wholly unmemorable that even Federico himself has forgotten who he is.

The follow-ups to
Pop Idol
and
Fame Academy
also failed to generate much interest – indeed, the only reality show to really make a mark was C4’s
Wife Swap
, which brought middle-class milquetoasts and warty proles into direct contact, then invited us to enjoy the inevitable slanging match as though it were a sitcom; Penelope Keith and Kathy Bates playing neighbours at war. The formula spawned a surreal one-off ‘celebrity’ special featuring Jade from
Big Brother 3
and Charles ‘Coughing Major’ Ingram – a programme so hazardously post-modern it was in danger of creating a wormhole into an alternate universe filled with dense ironic matter.

Jade also featured briefly in an episode of
Boys and Girls
, a shameful, insulting, unwatchable bum-spill of a programme, and the most embarrassing mistake Channel 4 have made since the broadcast of
Mini Pops
. Still, every cloud has a silver lining – the show’s microscopic viewing figures finally proved once and for all that Chris Evans really isn’t the genius he assumed he was throughout the late 1990s.

If
Boys and Girls
was the year’s worst programme, what was the best? It’s a toss-up between reliable, ongoing imports such as
The
Sopranos, Six Feet Under, CSI
, etc., and the newcomers:
State of
Play, Buried, Curb Your Enthusiasm
and
Little Britain
. The programme that kept me most firmly glued to the screen was
24
, although on the evidence of the few episodes I’ve seen, the third series (airing here next year) is a crashing disappointment. And thank God for that, because I was starting to turn into one of those frightening ‘series disciples’ – the sort of person who walks around
Buffy
conventions with a cape and a hard-on, taking it all far too seriously.

So that’s 2003 over, then. Coming next year: ‘Shock and Awe II: The Shockening’, on Sky’s all-new 3D news channel. Probably.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Yes, he is. He’s there on your screens this week in
The Story of Doctor Who
(BBC1), a blob of festive nostalgia serving twin purposes: to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Doctor’s first outing, and to whet viewers’ appetites for the forthcoming remake.

Thankfully, this is the first retrospective clip show in years that doesn’t consist of the most obvious archive footage interspersed with Paul Ross and company firing crap out of their mouths. Instead, it takes the daring step of actually interviewing the people involved, from the toppermost star to the bummermost Dalekoperator. As a result, you might actually learn new things about the Doctor, as opposed to being told how Kate Thornton used to watch from behind the sofa while Vernon Kay hums the theme tune over and over again until you feel like machine-gunning everyone in the world to death.

For instance, we learn that many of the monsters were played by PC Tony Stamp from
The Bill
(aka actor Graham Cole), who admits that he got so into it he used to pull scary faces from inside the costume. We also learn that Jon Pertwee was so tickled by the line ‘I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow’ in one script, the writers subsequently included it at every opportunity (henceforth, whenever Dr Pertwee had to fix anything, he claimed to be ‘reversing the polarity of the neutron flow’ (a handy phrase I once heard a plumber use shortly before charging me £300). We learn about the preposterous ‘Whomobile’ – a risible ‘flying car’ complete with British licence plate (introduced at Pertwee’s suggestion) and the most terrifying monster in the show’s history (a toy troll that silently strangled people).

In fact, just about the only thing we
don’t
learn about is the God-awful 1996 TV movie in which the Doctor, played by Paul McGann, was shown racing through the streets of LA on a motorbike and snogging his assistant. That seems to have been airbrushed from history completely, and quite right too – although it’s a shame we can’t go back and pretend Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester
McCoy never happened either (because the one thing Doctor Who should never be is a fey wuss). Which brings us to the burning question of who’s Who next. Whoever’s in charge – he who safeguards Who – must choose an actor who can do Who justice.

They’ve already made one great decision by bringing in Russell T. Davies to write the scripts; here’s hoping they don’t louse it all up by hiring Alan Davies to play the Doctor (as has been rumoured and, given the brainless casting on display in most mainstream BBC dramas, not entirely unlikely). The sight of that curly-haired, mumbling, joy-strangler shuffling his way around the galaxy would cause an epidemic of outraged vomiting among all but the most mentally stunted viewers. Result: a ratings malfunction, which no amount of polarity-reversing could save. They might as well cast Sylvester McCoy again and have done with it.

In fact, I can only think of seven people who’d be worse than Alan Davies. And they are: Ross Kemp, Paul McCartney, Jamie Oliver, Neil Morrissey, Julian Lloyd Webber, Paul Simon and Peter Sutcliffe.

The bookie’s second favourite is Richard E. Grant, and they could do far worse than him: he’s suitably British, he’s tall, unhinged-looking and Americans would recognise him. He’s also played the Doctor a couple of times on the radio. Yes, he’d be better. Basically, what I’m saying is:
anyone but Alan Davies
. Or Ralf Little. Or Vernon Kay. Or anyone from
EastEnders
,
Holby City
or
Merseybeat
(unless you’re also casting Leslie Ash as a Sea Devil). And no comedians either, apart from Jerry Sadowitz. Oh, and if you’re looking for someone to play Davros, would it be cruel and childish to suggest Glenda Jackson? Ah. Right. Thought so. Sorry.

PART FIVE 2004

 

 

I
n which Peter André achieves erection,
Friends
cease to be there for
you, and television get s a village idiot of its very own
.

 

Booze used to be the Brit’s greatest ally. Take Churchill: he practically sweated whisky. A taxi driver once described 1950s London to me in terms of everyone being permanently sodden – ‘everyone drove drunk back then – if you had a crash in the middle of the afternoon, chances were the bloke you ran into was drunk, the copper who nicked you was drunk, the witnesses, the ambulance driver, the doctor that patched you up – all of ‘em drunk’ – and it all sounded rather jolly. In reality the capital’s pavements probably just stank even more of urine and sick then than they do now.

But our relationship with alcohol has cooled over the years. Alcohol isn’t our friend any more, which is why any soap featuring a scene in which anyone so much as sniffs the cork from a wine bottle has to run a liver cirrhosis helpline number in the end credits. It’s also why we have programmes like
Drunk and Dangerous
(BBC1), a tut-tutting look at the havoc wrought by the nation’s glugging habits, and why booze ads have started urging you to ‘drink responsibly’ (thereby annihilating the whole point of drinking in the first place).

The social stabilisers are firmly on, in other words – which is why it’s refreshing to run into shows like
Shameless
(C4) and
Toughest
Pubs in Britain
(Sky One), both of which openly celebrate the joys of drinking, swearing, spitting and getting your head kicked in. One’s fact, the other’s fiction, and each is as cartoon-like as the other.

Shameless
revolves around the Gallagher family, a bunch of hand-to-mouth Mancunians living on the sort of housing estate that slowly knocks itself down from within, thereby saving the council the bother of sending in bulldozers in a few years’ time. They’re teenage scallywags with obligatory hearts of gold, tumbling around their oblivious, boozy dad Frank (played by David Threlfall as a clownish, Ghost-of-Christmas-Future version of Liam Gallagher). Each night, Frank ends up sparked out on the living-room floor, languidly vomiting his way through an alcohol-induced coma. It’s hard not to admire the man.

Reading some of the pre-transmission hype for
Shameless
you could be forgiven for expecting the finest drama serial ever made. This happened for two reasons: 1) it’s from Paul Abbott, who wrote
State of Play
, most journalists’ favourite show of 2003, and 2) it’s jam-packed with earthy, poverty-stricken northerners who swear a lot, with funny accents and everything, and there’s nothing us professional southern sissies love more than that.

None of which is to say
Shameless
isn’t really, really good – because it is – but if you approach it expecting something akin to a council estate version of
Teachers
, as opposed to a work of life-altering resonance, you’ve less chance of walking away disappointed.

You’ve less chance of walking away
at all
if you venture into one of the
Toughest Pubs in Britain
(Sky One), a cheerful pop-doc hailing a selection of downright terrifying establishments which put the ‘hole’ into ‘watering hole’.

Cue uplifting stories of East End hard men crapping in pint glasses, and a man walking into a Sheffield pub wielding a machete because he’d misplaced his hat there the previous night. Windowless scum-pits, sawdust-and-blood-spattered guzzle houses … you name it, it’s here, discussed with a disarming frankness: one landlord describes his clientele as ‘losers … you know – going-nowhere people’.

The highlight has to be the Wyndham Arms in Merthyr, which bristles with toothless, white-haired Welsh psychopaths, every single one of whom would fight you to the death, if only on the grounds that they’re so near death anyway it makes little difference to them.

The star of the Wyndham Arms is the decrepit Bob (looks-wise, imagine Bill Oddie getting his teeth kicked out in a thunderstorm), a man whose personal mantra is ‘Fuck everybody else’. Bob once set his own hair on fire in order to intimidate a pair of French tourists who walked into the pub by mistake – proof that old-fashioned knockabout comedy isn’t dead, even if Bob himself isn’t far off.

But that’s booze for you. Cheers!

Is it just me, or are the 1990s turning into the 1980s, and the 1980s into the 1970s? Tonight on Channel 4 there’s a superb documentary called
Strike: When Britain Went to War
(C4), and it’s full of clips from 1984 that appear to have been shot in 1974 – a wash of dull colours, fag smoke, manky teeth and grey skies.