Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (49 page)

Except sod it, you can’t until they return in September. Ah, well. Until then, fill the kids with sugar and sit them in front of ‘Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell’ on the Xbox. The graphics are great, it contains precisely no Girls Aloud videos, and best of all it’ll teach them how to kill a blameless security guard by lurking in the shadows for half an hour before sneaking up behind him and snapping his neck like a fucking breadstick.

Scoff all you like, but it might come in handy some day.

All things must pass. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Death comes to us all. The lights are going out all over Europe. The final edition of
Parkinson
(BBC1) goes out tonight and the world wipes a tear from its eye. It’s the end of an era. In fact it’s more than that. It’s the end of an era as viewed from the deck of an epoch crashing bow-first into the iceberg of time. A sign of the times, and a moment to pause for sober reflection. Let’s join hands, bow heads, and hold a fortnight’s silence to mourn its passing.

Actually no. Let’s not. Parkinson was off our screens for sixteen years from 1982 to 1998 and the world never once stopped turning on its axis, so why the forthcoming transition from BBC1 to ITV1 is being discussed as though it holds any significance whatsoever is beyond me. It’s a chat show. Who gives a toss? Besides, since its 1998 return, the Parkinson show’s been a nauseating load of old celebfellating claptrap anyway. Watching Robbie Williams burping on and pointlessly on about his struggle with the bottle and his own irrepressible brilliance is no compensation for a glaring lack of Muhammad Ali or Rod Hull and Emu.

By and large, present-day Parkinson guests fall into two camps: glassy-eyed Hollywood stars who treat the whole thing like just another junket, and smaller home-grown names so thrilled to be considered ‘big’ enough to grace the chat icon’s line-up they practically grin themselves to death right there onstage.

Then there’s ‘Parky’ himself, who seems to spend half his time revelling in his image as a curmudgeonly professional Yorkshire-man unafraid to call a spade a spade, and the other half fawning over his guests like an obsequious peasant granted an audience with a minor royal. When I watch Parkinson, I don’t see amiable rapport, fearless questioning, or stunning revelations: I see a bum-kissing contest between an inexplicably revered silver-haired tortoise and an entourage of chummy, twinkle-eyed chancers. The air’s so thick with bumptious self-celebration it makes your gut churn.

And the stars aren’t that big anyway. Take tonight’s line-up: Bruce
Forsyth, Boris Becker and Patrick Kielty. I wouldn’t cross the street to watch them piss in a teacup. There’s also musical support from two perfect examples of the sort of painfully unchallenging pap-merchants routinely lauded as ‘proper music’ by idiots: the Corrs and Jamie Cullum.

Cullum deserves special mention, because he’s particularly odious – an oily, sickening worm-boy, presumably grown in a Petri dish specifically for appearances on middle-of-the-road chat shows like this. Swear to God, if I have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode ever again – rising from his seat to jazz-slap the top of his piano wearing a fake-groove expression on his puggish little face – if I have to witness that
one more
time
, I’m going to rise up myself and kill absolutely everybody in the world. Starting with him and ending with me. Cullum should be sealed inside a barrel and kicked into the ocean, not hailed as a genius on Saturday-night TV. I hope they spend more time with Patrick Kielty than they do with him, which is saying something, because he’s a man who exudes likeability like a rock exudes blood.

So I won’t miss Parkinson. In fact for me, the sole note of remorse accompanying his evacuation to ITV is the reason behind it: he’s flounced out because the BBC wants to broadcast highlights from the Premiership in his prized 10 o’clock slot. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a disaster, since watching football is one of the very few things on earth I enjoy even less than watching Jamie Cullum slap his bloody piano. And, knowing my luck, he’ll be hosting it.

You should always judge people by their actions, not their words. Obvious, really. You wouldn’t believe Peter Kurten, the ‘monster of Düsseldorf’, who murdered nine Germans in 1929, had your best interests at heart just because he told you he did. Especially if he was sticking a bread knife in your eye at the time.

‘Actions, not words’ is the mantra of
Body Talk
(C4), an absorbing two-parter in which Dr Peter Collett examines the body language of the rich and famous in a bid to prove what tossers they are. And
succeeds. Programme one deals with the language of power, and concentrates on politicians. Collett identifies the characteristic movements (known as ‘tells’) that Blair, Bush and co. make whenever they’re feeling nervous, confident, aggressive, or sexually aroused. Actually, he doesn’t cover arousal. Thank Christ.

Take Gordon Brown, who can’t sit still when Blair is speaking. Collett observes him at a Labour Party conference, anxiously fidgeting his way through a well-received speech from Blair. On fast motion, he turns into Robert Lindsay in
GBH
.

Blair, meanwhile, has a habit of sliding his hands into his front pockets when he’s feeling awkward. He thinks it makes him look relaxed: in reality, it makes him look like an embarrassed shop-window dummy with some sort of bum disorder. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he often affects this stance when he’s required to pose alongside psychotic, lying drink-drivers. Called George Bush.

Bush is a body-language goldmine. He often looks more like a frightened boy than a president, albeit a frightened boy with 24-hour access to the most fearsome nuclear arsenal the world has ever seen. Whenever Bush feels scared and out of his depth, he chews the inside of his mouth. Alarmingly, he chews the inside of his mouth pretty much all the time. That’s probably how he choked on that pretzel.

There are other examples of Bush’s give-away buffoonerisms, including some fascinating games of physical one-upmanship between him and Bill Clinton. Ask the pair of them to walk side by side and it quickly degenerates into a hilarious dick-swinging contest, with each attempting to stride in a more commanding, statesmanlike manner than the other. The berks.

And this is just the stuff that’s been caught on camera. I’d love to see Bush’s private body language: the faces he pulls while trying to pass a particularly rigid stool for instance, or the delighted reeling jig he doubtless performs each time he bombs another town full of unarmed brown folk. Or when he was choking to death on that pretzel – I’d love to have seen the way his legs shook and popped around as he clawed at his throat, desperately gulping for air. Hoo, boy – if the White House has CCTV footage of that they should
release it on DVD, backed with comic piano music and a voice-over track of Iraqi schoolkids laughing at his hateful, shuddering face.

Anyway. It’s a good programme and you should watch it. The same applies to
I Am Not an Animal
(BBC2), the new comedymation (someone bread-knife me for inventing that phrase) about a group of recently liberated talking animals coming to terms with the outside world.

If, like me, you spent the first half of last week’s episode bewildered by the sheer weirdness of the animation (which looks a bit like a colour supplement hallucinating into your eyes) and the number of characters, fear not. Consider that your learning curve: now it’s taken care of, you can get your teeth into the rest, which is funny, clever, demented, and, perhaps most importantly, the only TV show you’ll ever see in which a horse has to build himself a makeshift hand out of twigs in order to ring a doorbell. Well, until something called ‘Horse Twig Doorbell Challenge’ turns up on cable, that is. And according to Nostradamus that isn’t due for another fifteen years – a full twelve after Bush finally blows us all up. Get your kicks in while you can.

‘I’ll be there for you …’ Not any more you won’t. Wave goodbye to your
Friends
(C4) because they’re about to vanish for ever. Apart from Joey, who’s poised to enter the spin-off dimension, presumably in a show that consists entirely of him crying alone in an empty room.

In case you’re a rabid fan who’s spent the past fortnight trying to avoid finding out what happens in this final episode, don’t worry – I won’t blow any ‘surprises’ here, so relax. Breathe out. Unbutton yourself. Not that much.

Of course, you’d have to have poked your eyes out with a teaspoon to somehow dodge the finale-spoiling screengrabs and photos plastering the tabloids the day after its US broadcast, so you’ll be enjoying the show in sound only – but you can’t have everything.

(While we’re on the subject, the single worst spoiler in history is the front cover to the VHS edition of the original
Planet of the Apes
movie, which is largely taken up by an artist’s impression of Charlton Heston slumped disconsolately in front of a half-buried Statue of Liberty. What next? A collector’s edition of
Seven
housed inside a full-scale replica of Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head?).

Anyway:
Friends
. Or more specifically, ‘The One I Warmed to Against My Will’. When it started a full decade ago, I was virtually pre-programmed to despise it. That clean-cut, anodyne cast. Those newspaper articles about the wonderful haircuts. The whooping audience. That bloody theme tune.

Unfortunately, my steel-clad cynicism was permanently undermined when I accidentally caught an episode and found myself laughing. Afterwards, shuddering, I vowed to avoid it at all costs in case it shattered my cosy misanthropic worldview.

But recently, given its ubiquity in the Channel 4 schedule, I realised I’d become a fan by osmosis. I think it’s the writing. No matter how many accusations you hurl at
Friends
, you can’t deny it’s funny. And engaging. And tightly plotted.

In fact, the way the plotting works is impressively shameless: most episodes open with a pre-credits sequence in which Character A bursts into Central Perk to nakedly deliver some crucial exposition – ‘I’ve got a job interview tomorrow!’, ‘I just met this really hot guy!’, ‘I found a magic whistle!’ and so on – to be met by a chorus of quickfire gags from Characters B to D that a) make you laugh and b) distract you from the sheer cheek of establishing the storyline in such an unabashed manner. What’s not to admire?

Then there’s the performances, which are absurdly cartoon-like, yet rarely seem quite irritating enough to make you want to kick the screen in and start machine-gunning the neighbours. Matt LeBlanc, in particular, is responsible for more violent mugging than all the crackheads in New York put together. It’s appropriate that he’s going on to star in a spin-off called simply
Joey
, because he spends most of his screen time pulling silly faces and going ‘durrrrr’, like the matinee-idol equivalent of a mid-1980s English schoolboy. They should shoot his new show through a horse collar and enter it into a gurning contest.

Still, Joey’s the only cast member who hasn’t become a wizened old twig, as evidenced by the title sequence, which cuts jarringly between contemporary snippets of our diet-ravaged chums and the ancient original opening credits in which they cavort in a fountain like bloated Cabbage Patch kids. It seems the NBC canteen serves nothing but soil and tiny pebbles to keep its million-dollar superstars in trim; compare this to
EastEnders
, where every cast member blobs out after three weeks in the Square and, in between takes, there’s a guy shovelling battered pies down their necks in a desperate bid to ensure they’re too fat to fit the narrow aperture of the Internet wank-cams in their dressing rooms.

What with this and
Frasier
evacuating our living rooms, it’s hard to see how our American cousins can ever make us laugh again. Unless they re-elect Bush. But that’d be very hollow laughter indeed.

So, then: the BBC appoints a new director-general, and once again I’ve been inexplicably overlooked. Cowards, the lot of ’em. Still, just in case the government goes mad again and decides to scapegoat Mark Thompson out of office, I might as well lay out my wares for the first time in public with a quick game of ‘Fantasy DG’. Here, in no particular order, is a list of the changes I’d implement if I were suddenly placed in charge of the Beeb.

1 Remove all trace of football from the schedules
I firmly believe all sport should be tucked away on pay-to-view
satellite channels, not smeared across the public-broadcast schedules
like brown goo in a dirty protest. OK, this policy is founded on
personal prejudice –
I hate sport
and football is the worst offender
– but I’m in charge now, so we’re getting rid of it. Actually, no – we’ll
still show it, but in a form that’ll deliberately enrage the fans – by
superimposing an obtuse East European cartoon over the footage,
accompanied by the sound of loud, atonal trumpets. Consider it
retribution for the years of tedium and bellowing I’ve had to 
endure from the fans, every single one of whom is a despicable idiot.

2 Revamp
Casualty
and
Holby City
The storylines are boring, the characters uninspired – so let’s distract
attention from that by upping the gore quotient 2,000 per
cent. Patients aren’t allowed in unless they’ve got an eye hanging
out at the very least, and all operations will be carried out with
crowbars and chainsaws. Charlie from
Casualty
will be put in
charge of a new Anal Trauma wing for obese people with hideous
gaping bum wounds, and it’ll all go out in surround sound, daily, at
teatime.

3 Poach Trisha from ITV and lock her in a windowless room full of
clueless council-estate scumbags
And broadcast the results 24 hours a day on a dedicated digital
channel. I defy anyone to think of anything more entertaining.