Dawn of the Dumb (14 page)

Just to reiterate: Barry’s quite fat.

Now, it’s often the case that when you’re physically repellent, celebrities don’t want anything to do with you (that’s the voice of experience talking—I’ve been phoning Jenny Powell non-stop for seven years now, and all she ever does is hang up or apply for injunctions). But TV’s Richard Hammond is clearly made of more sympathetic stuff. He’s perfecdy happy to get intimately acquainted with fat Barry. In fact, he’s prepared to physically enter him on television.

The result is
Inside Britain’s Fattest Man
(Sky One), best described as a cross between
Fantastic Voyage
and an extended public information film. This is high-concept stuff for a documentary—the concept being that Hammond has magically shrunk to minute proportions and been injected into Barry’s backside. Using his hi-tech nano-explorer craft, we’re told, Hammond can travel around Barry’s hulking carcass for 24 hours and see what sort of state the internal organs are in. Cue computer-generated footage of Hammond peering through the window of a bubble-shaped spaceship, pointing at bits of stomach and looking disgusted.

As well he might, because Barry’s interior is a wreck. His lungs are so restricted by the surrounding blubber, he sometimes stops breathing in his sleep: his liver is sib heavier than average and is marbled with grey fat, like a slab of pat. Well, it is in the CGI recreation we’re shown, anyway—although by that point the show had become so overwhelmingly disgusting they could’ve shown his liver vomiting into a bucket and I’d have taken it at face value.

These ‘indoor’ CGI shenanigans are accompanied by live action ‘outdoor’ segments following Barry’s grotesque daily routine. Over an average 24-hour period, Barry wolfs down two or three full English breakfasts before moving onto fish and chips at lunchtime and a couple of curries for dinner—interspersing this ceaseless carnival of food with around twenty packets of crisps and countless pints of lager (each of which he swallows in a single gulp). His mouth’s like a plughole to another dimension: a vacuum hell-bent on magnetically inhaling all the edible matter in the universe.

The programme recounts much of this with a sort of amused respect, backed by comedy parp-parp music, even though you’re keenly aware that you’re watching a man eat his way to the grave, especially during the sections when you see him suffering with leg ulcers and almost wheezing to death.

For a show involving large quantities of food, it all leaves a funny taste in the mouth. We understand Barry’s extremely unhealthy the moment he waddles onscreen—so to then spend a whole hour circling his gall bladder feels morbidly pornographic. To sit through the entire broadcast, you’d have to be a seriously committed vulture.

Still, as a dietary aid, it’s unbeatable. Here’s my advice: tape it, then watch it in eight-minute segments, every morning for a week, eating a pork pie as you do so. You’ll be anorexic by Sunday. You might lose your hair, your skin and your sanity, but those jeans’ll fit you like a condom. And who knows? Instead of playing parp-parp music behind your back, those nice TV people might invite you to form a girl band instead.

Half an hour of stab wounds

[1 October 2005]

I
f you live in a town, venturing outside at night is dangerous. Anything could happen to you. Here are just seven examples.

1. You could get stabbed in the chest.
   
2. You could get stabbed in the neck.
   
3. You could get stabbed in the knee, which would really hurt, because the blade would sort of glance off your kneecap without puncturing it, and—ugh, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?
   
4. You could stab yourself to death in an argument over which half of your brain hates prostitutes the most.
   
5. You could get stabbed in the neck again.
   
6. You could witness a stabbing so hideous, the images continue to haunt you for the rest of your life, so that even if ten years later you sat down to watch
   Finding Nemo
   on DVD, all you’d actually see is that blade going in again and again and again, which isn’t quite what Disney had in mind.
   
7. You could get stabbed in the neck some more.
   

Basically, what I’m saying is it’s a world of knives out there: knives, and hands holding the knives, repeatedly jabbing them in your direction. You’d best stay indoors and watch
Maclntyre’s Toughest Towns
(Five), the show that convinced me the outside world is one big knife-fight in the first place.

In case I haven’t made it clear yet, what I’m saying is this programme is chock-full of knives. If you don’t like sharp objects, don’t go near it. It basically consists of half an hour of stab wounds being described aloud by Donal Maclntyre. During the first 30 seconds there’s a hideous colour photograph of a man with a kitchen knife buried hilt-deep in his chest, and it just gets nastier from there.

OK, there’s more to it than knives. A bit more. Five are actually showing a double-bill of Maclntyre episodes: the first one, dealing with Glasgow’s criminal underclass, is the knifey one; the second episode, examining Liverpool’s drug gangs, focuses more on guns, crowbars and nail bombs—which by this point simply makes a nice change.

Disappointingly, Maclntyre himself doesn’t go ‘undercover’ at any point in either show—a crashing shame, as I wanted to hear him ask for heroin in a Scouse accent. Instead, he just pops by every now and then to shout at the camera, in a series of links shot against generic backdrops signifying ‘urban hell’ (i.e. graffiti, rubbish strewn about, cars with smashed windscreens, tattooed babies begging at cashpoints, etc). The show itself is cobbled together from interviews with local crime reporters, hospital staff and police, and footage of silhouetted youths bragging about the number of times they’ve seen people having their legs broken.

It’s all rather depressing. What with this and
Ross Kemp on Gangs
(Sky One), it’s a good week for hair-raising tales of urban violence and a bad week for songs about dandelions. The only question is why anyone would want to broadcast this kind of thing in the first place.

The answer? It’s the ‘Coast effect’, innit?
Coast
was a huge hit for BBC2, partly because each week, cuddly middle-class people who lived on or near the coast tuned in to see if their locale was going to be on the telly. Maclntyre’s
Toughest Towns
and Sky’s grisly Ross Kemp travelogue are doing the same thing for townies.

The major difference is that while people tuning into
Coast
were rewarded with glorious scenery and classical music, Maclntyre and Co. offer nothing but incidents in grimy stairwells. And since the people who have to live in this squalor won’t want to be reminded of it, its primary audience is middle-class urbanites seeking a vicarious thrill.

After all, if you’ve got no rolling scenery to speak of, you might as well brag about something else, such as how brave you are for living where you do—a stone’s throw from the local sink estate, where people eat smack for breakfast and chop each other’s arms off with sharpened bits of tin. You know: as seen on TV.

The Little Bo Peep Show

[ (
&
October 2005]

K
ids rarely make me laugh, but a few months ago I saw a bunch of youngsters doing something hilarious. It was late afternoon—about 5
PM
—and they were dancing in a West London street, belting out Eamon’s number one hit F**k It (I Don’t Want You Back’) at the top of their minuscule lungs. In case you’re unfamiliar with the lyrics, they’re as follows: ‘Fuck what I said, it don’t mean shit now / Fuck the presents, might as well throw ‘em out / Fuck all those kisses, they didn’t mean jack / Fuck you, you ho—1 don’t want you back!’

Lovely. Anyway, the kids were word-perfect, and their spirited performance was accompanied by an equally spirited dance routine. This was happening in the centre of a relatively busy pavement a stone’s throw from Olympia, so every few seconds the kids were passed by a disapproving adult—which just made them sing that little bit louder. The words were rude, but the innocent joy on their faces was a marvel to behold.

I was reminded of this while watching
Whatever Happened to the Mini Pops?
(4), a documentary examining the storm that erupted in 1983 when Channel 4 broadcast a series in which kids impersonated pop stars.

On its original outing,
Mini Pops
actually did pretty well in the ratings. I’d imagine the core audience consisted of doting grandmothers who smell faintly of biscuits—you know: the sort of person who actually buys those hand-painted porcelain figurines of Little Bo Peep that get advertised in the
News of the World
magazine. The sort of harmless old love who thinks kiddywinks are charming no matter what they’re doing—and who, if you showed them a gory reconstruction of the My Lai massacre re-enacted by toddlers, would simply point at the kids’ outsized shoes and gently chuckle themselves to sleep.

Yes, grandmas enjoyed
Mini Pops
. But children didn’t. Not normal ones, anyway. I was twelve, and can still recall recoiling in horror at the sight of it—but only because I thought they were a bunch of show-offs. The papers, however, were outraged—because unbeknown to the simpering grandmothers who loved it, it was a disgusting assault on the innocence of youth that bordered on child pornography.

Given the size and nature of the furore surrounding the show, you’d expect any archive copies to have been erased, impounded or picked up with tongs and tossed into a pot of molten steel by a man wearing a biohazard suit. But no. Consequently, this documentary features plenty of footage from the original
Mini Pops
series itself—which now doesn’t seem pornographic at all, just ill-advised and rather creepy.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s undeniably distressing to watch a heavily made-up pre-pubescent girl dancing in a nightdress while singing about ‘making love’. But there’s something funny about it too—funny because the poor bastards filming it had no idea anything was amiss in the first place. As far as they were concerned, she was just doing a cute Sheena Easton impersonation (which, in all fairness, she was).

The documentary contains interviews with the series creator, the choreographer and the commissioning editor, none of whom saw the criticism coming: a bit like a team of well-meaning bakers who’ve accidentally created a child’s birthday cake in the shape of a penis, and served it up at a party without noticing. It’s hard not to feel sorry for them.

And as for the Mini Pops themselves, now in their late twenties and early thirties? Well, judging by the interviews on offer here, they’ve got nothing but fond memories of the show itself, and some residual sourness about the arguments that surrounded it.

One thing’s for sure: they’re far less bitter than any past
Pop Idol or X Factor
contestant you care to mention. Especially Steve Brookstein—who, ironically enough, is probably impersonating Sheena Easton somewhere right now, just to make ends meet. But that’s showbiz.

Thank God for Harold Bishop

[15 October 2005]

Y
ou know that feeling when you unexpectedly bump into somebody you were at school with years ago, and they look far older than they used to, and you find yourself staring at the silvery streaks in their hair, and the way their face has puffed out and gone saggy, and their stoop, and their middle-aged clothing, and their yellowing, desperate eyes, and you think ‘I hope I don’t look as bad as that’, and then you realise it’s not an old schoolfriend at all but your own reflection in a shop window, and you come to understand, fully and permanently, that youth has deserted you forever, and that basically you might as well be dead? You know that feeling?

Well, that’s the feeling I got watching the twentieth anniversary episode
of Neighbours
, which is on this week.

I haven’t seen
Neighbours
in years, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. As it is, it starts like any other episode. The theme tune is as colon-twitchingly cheesy as ever. Less reassuring is the fact that most of the ‘young’ cast members look about nine years old.

OK, so
Neighbours
has traditionally had a lot of teenagers in its cast—but surely they never looked
this
young? During the title sequence, which, as per tradition, displays each Ramsay Street householder in turn like a lab specimen, the cast seemed to decrease in age before my very eyes, to the point where I actively expected it to end on a shot of a foetus in a crop top grinning down the lens.

Thank God, then, for Harold Bishop, who looks precisely the same as he always did—just slightly more so. His is probably the friendliest face on television—a cross between ten Toytown mayors and a baby. Furthermore, something about his mannerisms reminds me of a man pushing his cheeks between a tubby pair of breasts then spluttering side to side for comic effect. So thank God for him.

He’s not the only old face hanging round the street, mind: Stefan Dennis is back as Paul Robinson. I’ve got no idea how long that’s been going on, nor do I know how come he’s lost a leg, or why all the other Neighbours seem to hate him
because
he’s lost a leg. But to be honest I doubt it really matters.

So. You think you’re getting a contemporary episode starring Harold and Paul and a bunch of nine-year-olds—when suddenly a load of characters from yesteryear show up, thanks to an improbable storyline in which glamorous former resident Annalise, now a famous film-maker, returns to screen her documentary about Ramsay Street.

Next thing you know, blast-from-the-past Joe Mangel’s strolling around Erinsborough, rubbing shoulders with Phil, Lance, Doug and God knows who else, all of whom are greyer, fatter, or more knobbly and wizened than you recall—turning what’s intended as a cheery retrospective salute to a much-loved soap into a heartbreaking visual meditation on the ageing process.