Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (48 page)

Fran’s lack of progress seems hopelessly magnified because all the other brats have undergone seismic personality changes since arriving in the Utah wilderness. Take Dan, who’s blossomed from a brooding, nihilistic rain cloud of skunk-infused misery into someone who actually smiles now and then. OK, so he still looks like Mick Jones circa
Big Audio Dynamite
, but RedCliff Ascent can’t cure everything.

Then there’s Tom, aka Mike Skinner from the Streets, who spent his first few weeks pretending to be mad before realising he wasn’t fooling anyone. Now he’s a transformed man, funny and likeable, as is the aforementioned Charlie.

This week marks the final instalment of
Brat Camp
: here’s hoping the now-inevitable ‘catch-up’ Christmas special finds Fran fully cured of her self-flagellating mindset. If she can channel that energy into something useful, she could be the next female prime minister. Or she could just sit around crying in the desert. Time will tell.

Speaking of female prime ministers, this week’s edition of the increasingly ludicrous
If
… (BBC2) tackles the thorny problem of what might happen if women ruled the world. Well, nearly: actually, in this nightmare vision of the year 2020, men still rule parliament but the chicks have everything else sewn up. The majority of businesses are owned and run by women, the American President is a bitch, and Walkers have announced a new range of oestrogen-flavoured crisps.

Men are increasingly redundant – not just in the workplace, but the bedroom too, since scientific advances have rendered our testicles superfluous to requirement (so you might as well slam them in
a car door for a laugh – go on, it’ll be funny). Most terrifying of all, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett are forced to wear dresses and escape the attention of Diana Dors’ sexy leather-clad death squad. Yes: this is just like The Worm That Turned, but with bigger, unintentional laughs.

We men must fight back now before this nightmare comes to pass, so thank God shows like
Zero to Hero
(C4) are here to show us how to make sense of masculinity in the twenty-first century. Essentially
Scrapheap Challenge
meets
Batman
, it’s a show in which ‘comic-book fans’ construct ridiculous gadgets against the clock in order to complete a ‘superheroic’ task. This week they have to scale an eight-metre wall of metal. Contestant one decides to use magnets, while number two knocks up a wall-clinging suction device from a pair of old vacuum cleaners.

Throughout their ascent, both are forced to wear humiliating ‘superhero’ costumes while a masked woman in a pink leotard dangles from a wire firing silver balls at them.
X-Men
it ain’t. But brothers, at least it’s a start.

‘I saw six men kicking and punching the mother-in-law. My neighbour said, “Are you going to help?” I said, “No, six should be enough.”’

‘I went to my doctor and asked for something for persistent wind. He gave me a kite.’

‘Come drink from my brimming tankard of despair.’

Three quotes from beloved entertainer Les Dawson there. And in case you’re looking for the joke in the last one: forget it. It’s taken from
Les Dawson’s Lost Diaries
(C4), a surprisingly moving portrait of a fantastic comedian and Britain’s finest bad pianist. Raised in a Manchester slum, he initially tried his hand at boxing, despite being a frustrated author at heart: he later visited Paris and tried to write a novel, before returning home to embark on his comedy career in grim northern working men’s clubs (which, according to
programmes like this, were all subterranean ogres’ caverns with real ale dripping from the stalactites, populated by ruthless, grunting, brown-toothed bigots). Instead of being ‘toughened’ by these no-nonsense audiences, Dawson went down like a lead balloon night after night, never tasting success until he appeared on TV’s glitzy
Opportunity Knocks,
from which point on his career skyrocketed, while gnawing self-doubt festered in the background.

Still, forget ‘tears of a clown’: Dawson was a professional miserablist, and it was this grim, permanently disappointed persona that made him so popular. That and the face. He had an amazing face, like Shrek opening a court summons; a toad with a stomach ulcer; a semi-inflated warthog on 60 Rothmans a day.

This all makes for a diverting programme, my main bone of contention being the presence of Air’s latest album on the soundtrack. It’s only been out a few months and already it’s becoming a cliché – if I hear ‘Alone in Kyoto’ accompanying one more montage sequence I’ll puke. This is supposed to be a TV show, not an advertising creative’s dinner party. Isn’t there an EU Air limit that we can apply?

Speaking of limits,
If
…
We Don’t
Stop
Eating
(BBC2) this week examines what might happen if, well, if we don’t stop eating. Drawing on painstaking research, predictive theory and expert opinion, the programme soon uncovers the startling truth: we’ll get fat. By 2020, it seems, the average backside will be the size of a cottage, the inner cities will consist of ‘fat ghettoes’, and the obese will be forced to sit inside gleaming white pods by research scientists working on special pie-thwarting technology. Imagine
Gattaca
starring Giant Haystacks and you’re halfway there.

But hang on – according to last week’s show, by 2020 women will be in charge, so it’s all their fault. Oh, and according to the editions before that, this’ll be taking place during an inter-generational war, while a black prime minister oversees the carnage. Except he can’t, because we’ve run out of electricity and the lights have gone out. That’s the problem with following the extrapolation highway: it leads directly to Nonsense Avenue.
If
… has provided reasonable entertainment and a fair few unintentional laughs, but perhaps instead of trying to scare us they should’ve examined even more arbitrary hypothetical scenarios – such as ‘If … They Don’t Ban Ringtones’, or ‘If … It Starts Raining Hammers’, or ‘If … Dogs Could Play the Guitar’, or ‘If … We All Suddenly Turned into Hairless Egg-Like Blobs and Made a Sort of Humming Sound Whenever We Went to the Toilet’.

After all, given the current state of the world, with the news closely resembling a terrifying hi-tech ‘re-imagining’ of the Old Testament, it’s hard to get that worked up over a ‘nightmare scenario’ in which everyone looks a bit Johnny Vegas thanks to the doughnut industry. Anyway, by 2020 you’ll probably be able to lose weight by simply e-mailing all your excess fat to an undernourished Cambodian baby. That’s what I’m banking on anyway.

Now shut up and pass the lardy cake.

It’s pretty-boy week on Channel 4, what with
The Truth About Take
That
and
Battle of the Boy Bands,
so let’s celebrate with a friend-of-a-friend story someone once told me, about a bloke who worked on CD: UK who complained the worst thing about it was the smell.

Once the lights go on, a TV studio becomes a hot, dank cavern, so you can imagine how bad it gets when you’re also dealing with an audience of several hundred pubescent girls getting physically aroused each time Charlie from Busted raises one of his massive eyebrows. Sweat pours down the walls and the air’s so thick with musk if you jumped in the air it’d take you half an hour to sink back down to the floor. What, exactly, are they getting so worked up about? Not the music, but the faces, the pretty boy-band faces – bland, non-threatening, impish little fizzogs, grinning and pouting and oohhing and aahhing their way through one safety-scissor melody after another. And as I accelerate into my 30s, the boy-band faces grow more youthful with each passing month. Take McFly. To my weary eyes, they look like a troupe of cub scouts trying for their Pop Proficiency badge. They should be advertising Wall’s Balls, not standing astride the Top 40. And the audiences are
even younger. The other week T4 showed a Blue concert, and I swear the front row consisted entirely of squealing foetuses.

These aren’t musicians. They’re not even pop stars. Let’s be honest. Let’s call them what they are: children’s entertainers. In fact, let’s tattoo that phrase on their foreheads. And if they protest, let’s ship them off to Balamory and burn them to death inside a gigantic wicker Fimble.

Naturally, I’m just jealous because they’re pretty and I’m not. In fact, look up the word ‘pretty’ in the dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of my face – listed under ‘antonyms’. But at least I’m not as desperate as Mike and Matt Schlepp (I swear that’s their real surname), twin subjects of MTV’s new plastic-surgery horror show
I
Want a Famous Face
(MTV).

At the start of the show, Mike and Matt are ugly. Very ugly. Greasy hair, beak-like noses, and dense constellations of pus peppering their faces. Squeeze their cheeks you’d get enough lemon curd to fill a bathtub. Naturally, the local girls shun them, but Mike and Matt have a plan: to undergo extensive plastic surgery that will leave them both looking like Brad Pitt. Holding up a pair of DVD covers, Mike explains he’s going for the
Meet Joe Black
look, while Matt favours
Legends of the Fall
. And then they’re off, under the knife: having their faces sawn open, sliced, mashed, carved and sewn.

In case the gruesome surgical footage isn’t enough to put impressionable viewers off, while Mike and Matt recover, the programme finds time for a sob story aside. A young man, aspiring to become an actor after seeing
I Know What You Did Last Summer
, who underwent surgery and ended up with a crooked nose that makes a squishing sound whenever he pinches it. ‘I think it’s full of blood or something,’ he moans.

Then it’s back to Mike and Matt, and some hilarious footage of them sitting around in bandages, clutching bags of frozen peas to their swollen faces and wondering aloud whether they look like Brad Pitt yet. When the bandages finally come off, we see the truth: no, they don’t. They look like slightly blander versions of themselves. The local bimbos now embrace them: good news for
Mike and Matt, bad news for anyone who respects basic human values.

It’s great that Mike and Matt can afford $10,000 worth of surgery each in order to gain the respect of their peers, but I do wish they’d simply carried out a Columbine-style massacre instead. It would’ve been cheaper. And funnier. And somehow less depressing.

Saturday … Saturday … Saturday is
Tiswas
day. And in most people’s heads, it always will be. The gleefully anarchic weekend kid’s show lobbed its last custard pie way back in 1982, yet despite the number of paunchy media-industry blokes banging on endlessly about how fantastic
Tiswas
(‘Today is Saturday, Watch and Smile’) used to be, nothing’s surpassed it in the twenty-two years since the last edition.

Until now.
Dick and Dom in da Bungalow,
which has just finished its run on BBC1, has single-handedly atoned for the BBC’s unbroken quarter-century run of turgid, anaemic Saturday-morning fare, which started with
Swap Shop
and continued with dull children’s tea parties like
Saturday Superstore,
Going Live,
and the desperately-titled
The Saturday Show
(which sadly returns today, replacing
Dick and Dom
until September). So what’s so good about
Da Bungalow
? It’s simple really: Dick and Dom spend most of their screen time sloshing gloop around, smashing things, cracking toilet gags and pulling goonish faces – and they do it with total conviction and obvious relish. There’s also – and this is important – there’s also a vague sense of menace surrounding it: a faint whiff of unhinged, cackling carnival clowns that makes the show feel genuinely subversive, genuinely alive.

The nation’s children should be forced to watch this show, preferably with their heads clamped in position so they can’t turn away. Because what’s the alternative? Answer: crap like
Ministry
of Mayhem
(ITV1), ITV’s embarrassing answer to
Dick and Dom
. The title is fitting, because this feels like government-approved ‘mayhem’: anarchy with the jagged corners smoothed away. It’s a
show that says, ‘Hey kids! Let’s have a wild, chaotic time! Within a set of closely monitored parameters, obviously!’ The hosts try hard, but there’s no disguising the black glint of death in their eyes. It’s half-hearted fun conducted at gunpoint. The most telling difference between this and
Da Bungalow
is the attitude toward celebrities.

Ministry of Mayhem
makes the mistake of thinking every kid on the planet wants to see shiny, hairless presenters shoving their tongues so far up the arses of the boys from Busted they could lick their ribcages clean from the inside (actually, there
is
a sizeable audience, but it’s older, gayer, and frankly unlikely to be up so early on a Saturday morning). And of course, this being ITV, there’s a commercial break every three seconds, meaning the freewheelin’, devil-may-care, let-it-all-hang-out wackiness is regularly interrupted by high-pressure sales pitches designed to turn your child into a grasping, selfish idiot. It’s been ages since I last saw the Saturday morning kiddie ads, so naturally the products on offer horrify me. It’s all ‘Little Baby Bluetooth’ and ‘My First GM StrangleBot’. Most disturbing of all, Action Man has undergone a radical makeover: back in the 1970s he looked like the kind of man who’d knife you in the throat if you stepped on his toe, now he’s a cookie-cutter pretty boy who resembles Keanu Reeves on steroids and rides a gay ‘combat surfboard’ into action. Christ, what a loser. The choice is clear: if you want your offspring to become cretinous, sycophantic, fashion- obsessed pod people, let them watch
Ministry of Mayhem
. If you want to expose them to something that will make their brains skip around with glee, tune in to
Dick and Dom
.