Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (5 page)

Then we get Marie Helvin lording around Hawaii, in perhaps the single least informative travel report ever shot. All we really learn is a) that Marie Helvin likes the landscape, b) that Marie Helvin likes hula dancing, c) that Marie Helvin likes everything else about Hawaii as well. The one decent piece of advice she dishes out is this: bring a riding hat with you if you’re considering an afternoon’s pony trekking. Hands up everyone affected by that piece of essential guidance. Considering the towering wisdom of these experts, it’s surprising none of them manage to pack more information into their reports – there’s little you couldn’t discover by scan-reading two paragraphs of an average travel guide.

To prove the point, before you can scream ‘This programme is rubbish’, dull blonde vet Trude Mostue bounds onto the screen, to tell us the shops in Oslo are good but expensive, quickly followed by Sean Maguire in the Algarve (who reckons the beaches are nice), and finally, spoiling your view of St Petersburg, woo-hoo! it’s Jeremy Spake – the only man in existence who can sound overly enthusiastic and embarrassingly wooden at the same time.

During Spake’s piece, repeated cutaways to apparently bemused Russian onlookers watching him camp it up are used in an attempt to underline his loveable quirkiness – instead they appear to be thinking, correctly, that he’s a bothersome prick.

Really, what’s the point of this infuriating half-hour wrongcast? While these gurning chimps swan around the world on behalf of your licence fee, you’re sitting at home in front of a box, a motionless black plastic box with a huge glass screen, pissing this sanitised marionette’s pageant into your bloated little eyeballs, while you pork out on Jaffa Cakes, wishing you were dead or at the very least too wounded to see.

Still, if you binge on too many biscuits, tune in to the disturbing
Witness: Living on Light
(C4), which examines the idiotic charms of Jamuheen, a deluded Australian woman (a sort of evil, blonde Sian Lloyd) who claims to have mastered the art of existence without food.

Three people have died trying to follow her ‘21-day process’, which consists of a merciless starvation regime, at the end of which you’re supposedly able to take leave of food for good. The documentary crew visits a group of would-be fasters: the sight of them lying on the floor, barely able to move after four days without food or drink, smiling weakly even as their kidneys start to fail is hands-down the most upsetting image of the week.

Oh, all right, apart from Jeremy Spake.

Confessions: several years ago, I had a brief spell as a TV news ‘expert’; specifically, I was a high-tech pundit, occasionally called upon to pass comment on computer-related current affairs even though my qualifications were shaky, to say the least. I was billed as a ‘technology journalist’, an astoundingly highfalutin way of saying I reviewed video games for a living (which in most people’s eyes is the lowest a man can sink short of playing the role of ‘anguished receiving-end farmhand’ in a bestial-porn movie).

I was appearing on BBC News 24 at around midnight so hardly anyone was watching – fortunate, considering most of the time I didn’t know what the hell I was going on about. Computer games were simple enough, but the moment I was asked to comment on anything else we entered extremely shaky ground. Knowing my
pearls of ignorance were being spilt on live television exacerbated the situation: I still get the sweats when I recall the moment the host turned to ask whether I’d seen any evidence the Internet was having a thawing effect on Chinese society, and I responded by making a long, strangulated, non-committal ‘Mmmmmnnnnnuuuurrrmmm’ – the sound of my brain drying, live on air.

Still, I came away having learned two valuable lessons: 1) never believe anything any ‘expert’ says; and 2) whatever the appearance may be, any televised conversation is going to be about as unforced and natural as a chat between Lieutenant Columbo and a man with a blood-encrusted shovel in his toolshed.

It’s surprising, then, that talk shows don’t go abysmally wrong more often. Just about every instance over the last twenty years in which they have done is covered in
It Shouldn’t Happen to a Chat
Show Host
(ITV), a compilation of car-crash television which manages to entertain from beginning to end despite the presence of Gloria Hunniford (an achievement on a par with successfully climbing a spiral staircase with a dead horse strapped to your back).

Ignore the regulation-dull talking-head soundbites; the archive footage is great. Watching talk shows derail themselves completely is immeasurably more interesting than sitting through successful ones, which tend to be as diverting as an automated platform announcement.

Michael Aspel, so bland he probably poos boiled eggs, features heavily: for a man with a reputation as a steady albeit uninteresting hand, he’s been responsible for a surprising number of calamities. First, there’s the infamous appearance by an impossibly drunk Oliver Reed in which the bearded alco-sponge reeled around the set looking like he was about to start vomiting eels. Aspel describes it as ‘a great TV moment’, although ‘an unplanned and monumental embarrassment’ is nearer the mark.

Still, were this a humiliation contest, his subsequent encounter with Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger would surely take first prize. Desperate to bag this all-star triumvirate, the producers agreed to their every demand. Unfortunately the three were hell-
bent on turning the entire show into an extended commercial for Planet Hollywood, their newly founded chain of mediocre dunce-troughs.

The result was mesmerising for all the wrong reasons: a trio of world-famous waxworks plastered head to toe in Planet Hollywood logos (Willis even had one painted on his chest) smirking openly while Aspel asked meaningless questions about burgers and cookery, at one point reduced to reading the menu out loud. He’d have retained more dignity if he’d dropped to his knees and fellated the lot of them, clapping his hands like a circus seal and playing the kazoo with his backside.

Other highlights include Anne Bancroft drying completely for a 10-minute trial-by-awkwardness during a live edition of
Wogan
(all the fun of a slow-motion hanging), and the jaw-dropping moment Keith Chegwin unexpectedly confessed to alcoholism in the middle of a chirpy Richard and Judy chinwag. Anyone sheeplike enough to doubt Chegwin’s credentials as a genuine TV hero should be forced to watch this – he’s one of the most honest, couldn’t-give-a-monkey’s people on television.

If you like your drama gritty, uncompromising and guaranteed to depress, then boy oh boy are you in for a treat, because this week on Channel 4 there’s a major new series called ‘Concrete and Piss’, in which an unemployed alcoholic stands in a tower block stairwell on the Thatcher’s Legacy estate, mindlessly thrashing a mouldy old mattress with the ulcerated leg of his dead junkie son, pausing every three minutes to scream, swear, and receive violent blows to the face and neck from a hunchbacked loan shark.

OK. Not really. But you have to admit it’s a brilliant title. Instead, there’s a new mini-series called
Never, Never
(C4), which fulfils pretty much every other criterion of ‘gritty, uncompromising’ drama you could think of. Let’s run through the recipe and check off the ingredients.

First, and most important, do we have a bleak contemporary setting? 
Check: the action takes place on a grim London council estate that looks as though it was designed by a misanthropic concrete fetishist with a massive grudge and an even bigger migraine; a sprawling campus of despair that sucks all the hope out of everyone inside, then pisses it down the walls of the malfunctioning elevators. This is not
The Vicar Of Dibley
.

How about some social comment? Check: the series centres on a cold-blooded salesman (John Simm) who makes his living coercing downtrodden inmates of said estate into buying expensive brand-name goods from a sinister company charging absurd rates of interest. Thanks to their undesirable postcode, the customers can’t get credit anywhere else – but their kids are demanding Phat Nikes and Pokemon play sets, and won’t stop screaming till they get them. The hapless parents sink into a mire of debt while the salesman cackles himself sick.

Next: Casual violence? Check: a major character endures a vicious baseball bat attack within the first 25 minutes.

Additional unpleasant, hand-wringing, gracious-me-isn’t-modern-society-going-tits-up touches? Check: immediately after the beating, the comatose victim is robbed of his shoes by a pair of opportunistic schoolkids (who could have scored bonus points for weeing in his face and laughing, but didn’t).

Rasping cockneys? Check: you know that unbelievably raspy and weather-beaten young cockney bloke who played a scrawny nihilistic smackhead with a spider’s web tattooed all over his apocalyptic chops in
Nil By Mouth
? The one who could never, in a million billion years, land the head role in a Noel Coward biopic but could convincingly play all four members of the Sex Pistols at once? He’s in this, playing a scrawny nihilistic cockney in a stained vest.

Perhaps I’m alone on this, but I’ve always found him incredibly watchable: he should have his own series, playing an unconventional inner-city detective who chases suspected criminals down alleyways, wielding a bit of scaffolding with a razorblade taped to the end, signing off each episode by squatting in a phonebox pumping smack into his eye. Come on, ITV: you could do with gritty new Morse for the twenty-first century.

Speaking of heroin, does
Never, Never
also feature substance abuse? Check: toilet-bound coke-snorting, an old man plied with whisky, and an unconscious junkie flopping to the pavement. There’s also a bit where John Simm spoons custard into his mouth as though it’s a tub of liquid crack, but that doesn’t really count.

Gratuitous bad language? Big bold check: this is possibly the most swearsome broadcast of the year. Someone says ‘fuck’ every couple of seconds. It’s like product placement for the Fuck Corporation. Even the walls and ceilings appear to be saying it at times. All your other slang favourites put in an appearance too, with the exception of the c-word, although I think at one point a trail of saliva dribbling from the mouth of a collapsed drug addict is trying to spell it out, and gets as far as the letter ‘n’ before someone else says ‘fuck’ and the spittle sighs and gives up and it cuts to a different scene.

Of course I might be making that bit up, and am.

Anyway, overall
Never, Never
fulfils its quota admirably. Oh, and it’s also a reasonably good piece of television drama, despite a lot of padding in the form of pointless slow-motion sequences of John Simm wandering around the squalor pit while a long piano chord chimes mournfully in the distance.

They can be let off for that. What can’t be forgiven is not having the guts to call it ‘Concrete and Piss’. Cowards.

I’m a coward. I’m scared of everything. Last night I got up to fetch myself a drink of water and, while filling a glass in the darkened kitchen, briefly glimpsed a scrumpled-up carrier bag that looked a bit like a grinning skull. Terrified, I leapt on the sideboard and screamed for the neighbours to call the police, but instead they just hammered a shoe against the wall for 28 minutes before venturing outside to hurl rocks at my window – which failed to scare the bag away.

In fact I’m still up on the sideboard now, tapping away on a laptop, with a tea towel draped over one side of my head as a kind of
makeshift sightscreen that prevents both me from seeing the skullbag, and the skullbag from sensing my fear.

Whimsy aside, cowardice is one of my driving characteristics, which is why I’ve always regarded anyone engaged in ‘extreme sports’ as inherently alien and untrustworthy. Skateboard, snowboard and BMX aficionados all seem to lack the fear of a snapped ankle or shattered pelvis, while anyone prepared to climb rock faces or take part in a street-luge event is clearly just insane. (For the uninitiated, a street luge is a kind of gigantic skateboard for maniacs to lie down on and race through steep city streets in the most precarious and vulnerable manner possible. It’s a sport that raises questions, namely: 1) How do you casually ‘get into’ it? 2) Where do you practise? And most baffling of all, 3) where do you actually buy a street luge? Halfords?)

All of the above explains why I found this week’s
Cutting Edge:
Seconds To Impact
(C4) so terrifying. It takes a hideously involved look at the world of BASE jumping – a pastime in which eerily calm men and women climb high objects, leap off, plummet toward the ground and release a tiny parachute at the very last possible second. Unsurprisingly, it’s illegal in the UK. As sports go, this is as perilous and extreme as it gets, short of wolf-raping.

The programme follows three jumpers called Rob, Jon and Greg, as they spend the summer hopping off a variety of vertigo-magnets, including the Cheddar Gorge, the Park Lane Hilton, various Norwegian mountains, and in one especially shiversome sequence shot with tiny helmet-mounted digicams, an impossibly tall and exposed chimney stack slap bang in the middle of nowhere.

For a bunch of fearless lunatics, the trio are pleasant and normal enough, although I wouldn’t invite them round for dinner on the grounds that anyone prepared to leap off the Cheddar Gorge for kicks is probably equally prepared to unexpectedly lunge forward and poke a fork through your eye for the sake of a momentary adrenaline rush.

Few viewers will doubt the macho credentials of anyone about to hurl themselves from the top of the Park Lane Hilton, yet during
the preparations for just such an event, Rob is curiously at pains to inform us just how heterosexual he is.

He squints accusingly at the camera: ‘Normally I’d never cuddle a bloke in a million years,’ he grunts, going on to explain, almost apologetically, that he and his fellow jumpers occasionally share a vaguely tender slap on the back and a few kind words in the moments before a jump – restrained behaviour under the circumstances, yet Rob appears genuinely more troubled by the thought of viewers at home laughing and ‘calling us faggots or whatever’ than by the immediate prospect of the potential death plunge.