Dawn of the Dumb (20 page)

Inside lurk about 2,000 adverts for the new Motorola RED phone. If you buy one, an Aids charity receives an initial payment of £10, followed by 5 per cent of all further call revenues. This is clearly a good idea. But somehow, it’s also annoying. For starters, the phone costs £149, of which £139 goes toward helping Motorola. Second, it’s bright red and seems doomed to appeal to arseholes who want to add conspicuous compassion to their list of needless fashion accessories. I’m not just jabbering mindlessly on the phone in your train carriage—I’m saving fuckin’ lives, OK?

Page 11: a piece of artwork by renegade graffiti artist Banksy, who has defaced a wall in Chalk Farm with a picture of a hotel maid. It’s called
Sweeping It under the Carpet
and ‘can be seen as a metaphor for the West’s reluctance to tackle issues such as Aids in Africa’—or another example of Banksy’s tireless self-promotion; take your pick. Banksy says the maid in question ‘cleaned my room in a Los Angeles motel…she was quite a feisty lady’. Presumably his next portrait will depict some poor minimum-wage sod cleaning graffiti off a wall in Chalk Farm. Provided they’re ‘feisty’ enough to appeal to him.

On it goes, with one Bonoriffic chum after another: noted philanthropist Condoleezza Rice picks her top ten tunes (including one by U2); Stella McCartney interviews Giorgio Armani, who has designed a pair of sunglasses for the RED charity range. These cost around £72 and will make you look like Bono: buy a ten-quid pair from Boots, bung the remaining £62 to an Aids charity and not only will you enjoy a warm philanthropic glow, no one’s going to shout ‘Wanker!’ at you when you walk down the high street.

In summary: it’s a worthy cause, rendered annoying—and that’s annoying in itself. Bono genuinely cares, cares enough to risk ridicule, which is more than most people would do, myself included. It’s just that, well, it’s bloody
Bono
, isn’t it?

CHAPTER FIVE

In which Noel Edmonds tests quantum theory,
Doctor Who
turns pornographic, and Adam Rickitt pays tribute to disaster victims by pretending to eat them.

The dumbest story ever told

[21 January 2006]

H
ooray! Hooray for
Prison Break
(Five), because it’s wholly bloody stupid and doesn’t care who knows it! In fact, it’s so ridiculous, it might just single-handedly usher in an all-new golden age of inanity, thereby confounding anyone who thought society had reached its ultimate idiocy threshold a few years ago with the invention of novelty ringtones.

Prison Break
is possibly the dumbest story ever told. It makes
24
look like
cinema verite
. It’s as realistic as a cotton-wool tiger riding a tractor through a teardrop. I’ve played abstract Japanese platform games with more convincing storylines. And the American public recently voted it Favourite New TV Drama at the People’s Choice Awards. Suddenly, the farcical tragedy of current world events makes perfect sense. I’m not saying the Americans are stupid. They’re not. All I’m saying is a substantial number of them may well have lost their minds. Centuries from now, historians will cite
Prison Break
as the quintessential artefact of a civilisation sliding into absolute babbling madness. It’s that good.

The set-up is as follows. Justin Timberlake has a problem—he’s not called Justin Timberlake any more. He’s called Wentworth Miller and he’s a structural engineer. But that’s not the problem. His brother’s the problem. His brother’s a Clive Owen lookalike with jawbones so square he looks like he’s trying to hide a box in his mouth—and he’s on death row for murdering the vice president. Except he didn’t do it! He’s the victim of a shadowy conspiracy! And only Justin Timberlake knows the truth!

Now, Justin loves his brother. Loves him with the kind of unquestioning intensity mere acting, dialogue and direction can’t possibly hope to convey. So he cooks up a plan. Step one: he robs a bank—and gets caught on purpose!

Following the trial, Justin’s lawyer (and close personal friend) can’t work out why the previously intelligent, mild-mannered structural engineer would do such a thing. More perplexingly still, he seemed to actively welcome his prison sentence. ‘This just isn’t like him,’ she muses. ‘He just rolled over—he didn’t put up a fight.’ Two qualities that should prove handy in prison.

But he hasn’t gone crazy. He’s simply entering step two of his plan—because he’s now in the same prison as his brother! And he’s going to help him escape! It all sounds like the sort of scheme Elmer Fudd might dream up while drunk. It isn’t. It’s far stupider than that. You’d need a supercomputer to work out all the drawbacks.

But Justin has an ace up his sleeve—an ace that might, in our universe, be considered implausible: he designed the prison himself. Remember I said he was a structural engineer? For Whopping Contrivance, Inc? Well, he is. So prior to committing his armed robbery, he had the prison blueprints tattooed all over his body! Brilliant!

Hilariously, Justin is so certain of success, he actually enters the prison with a smirk on his face. This immediately irritates a guard, who asks him whether he’s religious man. No, says Justin. ‘Good,’ replies the guard, ‘because the Ten Commandments don’t mean a box of piss in here.’ The dialogue continues in this vein for the rest of the programme and, I hope, the entire series.

And so it begins—headlong we plunge, headlong into the very maw of folly. Gasp! as Justin has a fight with the tall scary bloke from
Fargo
. Coo! as Justin bonds with the absurdly cute female prison doctor! Cry! as the governor begs Justin to help him construct a matchstick model of the Taj Mahal for his fortieth wedding anniversary!

I’m not making this up. All of this happens in the pilot episode. It’s like they took a two-year-old to see
The Shawshank Redemption
, asked him to recount the plot three weeks later, wrote down everything he said, and filmed it. It’s flabbergasting.

Got the stomach for it? Then tuck in. But tread lightly. Because
Prison Break
is so astronomically dumb it could genuinely damage your brain.

Noel’s red box party

[28 January 2006]

W
e’ve had gameshows based on card games. We’ve had gameshows based on pub quizzes. But never have we had a gameshow based on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Until now.

I’m talking, of course, about
Deal or No Deal (C4
). In case you haven’t seen it, I’ll try to sum up the rules in a way that (a) makes sense and (b) isn’t so boring you fall asleep halfway through and start dreaming up surreal, sexually charged rules in which Noel shaves parts of his body at random while you shrink to the size of a bee and lick specks of milk off them.

So. The game starts with twenty-two contestants, each guarding a sealed, numbered suitcase. Each suitcase contains a sum between ip and £200,000. One of the contestants is chosen to play: the object of the game is for them to open the other suitcases in whichever order they choose, continually evaluating the likely value of their own suitcase as they go. So, if I open box number five and it contains the ip, I know my own box doesn’t. It might contain the 200 grand. Every so often, Noel takes a phone call from ‘the Banker’, a shadowy offscreen figure who offers the contestant a sum of money to make them stop playing. So, if die banker offers me £3,000 to stop, but I reckon there’s still a chance my box contains the jackpot, I’ll reject his deal. Hence the title.

In other words, my suitcase contains the financial equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat: a sum that exists in a theoretical super-position, being both substantial and meagre until I open and observe it, thereby assigning it a quantifiable value in the physical universe.

Obviously, this raises complex philosophical issues about the nature of reality, which is why
Deal or No Deal
is hosted by Noel Edmonds. He’s well into this shit. Did you know
Noel’s House Party
was based on Hilary Whitehall Putnam’s twin Earth theory of semantic externalism? Well it was.
Fact
.

Still, Noel’s central task isn’t to chinwag about collapsing wave functions or the viability of consistent histories. No. He’s there to distract you from one glaringly obvious fact, which is that the game is actually a massively pointless exercise in utter bloody guesswork.

Because, hilariously, even though there’s no applicable strategy whatsoever, Noel spends the entire show pretending there is. He continually says things such as ‘What’s your game plan?’ and ‘What drew you to that box?’ and ‘Ah, I see where you’re going with this—I like your style’, as though it’s a game of 3D space chess between Einstein and a Venusian supercomputer.

In other words, the game largely exists in Noel’s head. In fact, he’s the only person in the studio with any game plan whatsoever, since he has to employ various cunning strategies to maintain the viewer’s interest if the £200,000 prize is eliminated early on.

I say ‘cunning strategies’. I mean ‘different facial expressions and/or tones of voice’. Every afternoon, Noel’s basically taking part in an improvisational drama workshop in which he plays the hysterical id of a man arbitrarily flipping a series of coins.

‘Christ, I hope it comes up heads. If it doesn’t come up heads we’re in serious trouble. I do nor want to see heads now. Not heads. Please God no…IT’S TAILS! HOORAY! Well played! How skilful! OK, time to flip the next coin…’

The weird thing is, it sort of works. Something about Noel’s ceaseless interest in unpredictable events draws you in. Best of all are the moments when he lifts a telephone receiver to discuss proceedings with the Banker, who I suspect exists solely in his mind. In fact, he might as well do away with the prop phone, and instead simply roll his eyes up and have pretend conversations with God. While dressed as Peter Sutcliffe.

So there you go. It’s all a figment of Noel’s imagination. Maybe we all are. Maybe he’s dreaming us now. And he’s about to wake up and we’ll cease to exist.

The average Nazi official

[4 February 2006]

Y
ou know what this country needs? More TV makeover gurus. There just aren’t enough of them—only a few hundred or so, and between them they’ve got an infinite quantity of airtime to fill. The numbers don’t add up, I’m afraid: unless we start teaching our schoolchildren the prerequisite skills (meddling with each other’s lives, tutting disdainfully, delivering acid putdowns, etc) and unless we start teaching them now, the planet will suffer a chronic shortage of TV makeover gurus within our lifetimes—and millions could die.

Thank Christ then, for Anthea Turner, former GMTV presenter, confectionery promoter and unwitting star of a notorious health—and-safety instruction video almost everyone in telly has had to sit through (she appears in a touching sequence in which a motorbike backfires, setting her hair on fire). Now the gods have decided she’s been away from our screens for too long, and they’ve reincarnated her as—hooray—a TV makeover guru.

Her vehicle is
Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife
(BBC3), a ‘light-hearted show’ in which she ‘mentors two hopeless housewives’ and attempts to transform each of them into ‘a domestic goddess—Anthea-style’. Trouble is, ‘Anthea-style’ apparently means ‘in the manner of an uptight regimental harridan who’s twice as organised and half as sexy as the average Nazi official’.

Cue an hour of relentless badgering in which everything has to be folded, ironed, steamed, pressed, labelled, filed, timed, polished and processed, lest it displeases Anthea. And when Anthea is displeased, she gets a face like thunder and looks like she’s about to lamp you. It’s genuinely scary. So you drop to your knees and you scrub and you scrub and you scrub, and all the time you know she’s there—you know she’s
behindyou
and her eyes are boring holes in your back and she hates you, truly hates you, and her disgust is so palpable your brow starts to sweat, and it drips into your eyes and mixes with the tears and you’re crying, you’re crying so hard your eyes feel like they’ve been peeled, but you CAN’T STOP SCRUBBING because you KNOW SHE’S THERE and you MUSTN’T DISPLEASE HER AGAIN. It’s like a nightmare vision of the future. They might as well replace Anthea with the Emperor Dalek and have done with it.

I mean really. It makes you wonder. How does someone this uptight achieve orgasm? At the sight of a neatly arranged linen cupboard?

Anyway, having weirded us out with Anthea’s Tidiness Reich, the BBC continue to mess with our heads by broadcasting
Animal Winter Olympics
(BBC1), a programme so pointless it beggars belief. What they’ve done is take a load of
Walking with Dinosaurs-style
computertrickery, and used it to create a photorealistic sportscast in which animals compete with humans in a pretend winter Olympics—so there are ice-skating polar bears, tobogganing penguins and a ski-jumping leopard, all for no reason at all.

Sadly, it’s not as good as it sounds: the polar bear isn’t actually wearing skates, just running alongside a human who is. That’s because this is an educational show, OK? Which is why, alongside the fancy CGI, we’re treated to explanatory sequences which detail how polar bears’ feet grip the ice, or what an emperor penguin’s plumage is like, and so on.

Of course, cynics may scoff that the educational, fact-based content is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that we’re watching these animals compete in the Olympic games, but so what? The important thing is that the BBC is dicking about with computer graphics for the sheer bloody hell of it. What next? The Eurovision Song Contest re-enacted with horses?
⁹
/
₁₁
with cats?

And why stop with animals? How about a remake
of Butterflies
starring Winston Churchill and Marilyn Monroe? Or an edition of
How Clean Is Your Home
hosted by Joseph Goebbels? Oh hang on. They’ve already done that last one.