Dawn of the Dumb (21 page)

There’s no Iranian bobsleigh team

[18 February 2006]

Q: When is a sport not a sport?

A: When it’s part of the Winter Olympics.

Before aggrieved snowboarders start writing in to complain, let me clarify what I mean by ‘not a sport’: I mean something that doesn’t feel like a sport in my head, as opposed to athletics or football or rugby or any of those other pursuits I can’t stand and can’t watch and would willingly drown in a sack if it were possible. I mean a sport whose presence on television I can actually withstand.

Yes, even though I’m not in the remotest bit interested in winter sports, and actively distrust anyone who is, there’s something I find strangely watchable about the Winter Olympics. Perhaps it’s all that soothing white space. Or the fact that most of the movement is so smooth and dreamy. Or because the contestants are dressed like Power Rangers. Or maybe it’s the comforting repetition of events, many of which merely involve someone plummeting from one end of a slope to the other, over and over again.

Whatever it is, it works for me. It’s much better than the regular summer Olympics, which is frantically hot and shouty and has far too many clashing colours for my liking (blue sky + green grass + magenta leotards = my eyes have just thrown up).

In fact, I’d be happy to see the Winter Olympics last a whole year because for the few weeks it’s broadcast, it’s a bit like having a cheerful screensaver channel at your disposal. An icy televisual lava lamp you can leave on in the background as you go about your business. Just don’t ask me who’s won what or which country they were representing when they did so. I haven’t got a clue.

My favourite events are those which, to my ill-informed eyes, appear to involve no skill whatsoever beyond a demented willingness to take part; events such as the luge or the ski-jump, where the athlete is reduced to the level of a coin dropped into one of those seafront arcade penny-drop thingamajigs, bouncing off the pins of fate as they hurtle toward oblivion. It’s all incredibly dangerous, yet somehow calming on the eye: a bit like watching an endless stream of people quietly jumping off an especially picturesque cliff. (That’s another sporting event I’d be more than happy to watch all year round: in fact, I dare say it’s already being televised somewhere in the former Soviet Union.)

Perhaps the sole event I don’t really like is the snowboarding, and that’s only because yer average gold-winning Olympian snow-boarder tends to be a gawky, iPodded nineteen-year-old cross between Napoleon Dynamite and the entire cast of
The OC
, and this makes me feel so impossibly old I can’t watch them compete without experiencing an aching sense of loss that surely marks the premature onset of a mid-life crisis (is thirty-four too soon for one of those? No?).

Oh, there is one other inherent flaw—the Middle East is somewhat under-represented at the Winter Olympics. There’s no Iranian bobsleigh team, for example, which is a crying shame because the world could do with a fun, globally inclusive gala at the moment, and I always thought that’s what the Olympics were meant to represent. It seems a little unfair to base the whole thing around a single weather condition (i.e. snow), especially one that’s going to become scarcer once global warming gets properly stuck in.

Still, with any luck, fifty years from now we’ll have knackered the environment so comprehensively the Winter Olympics will have to take place entirely on sand. The upside: desert-based Arab nations get a fairer shot at gold. The downside: anyone coming off a sand-luge at 200
KPH
is going to get all the skin on the underside of their body sanded away in about 4.2 nanoseconds, then writhe around howling in agony, getting yet more sand in the wound. And that might prove a little less soothing to watch.

Slow down and watch the car crash

[
[is
March 2006]

R
eal life’s badly overrated. I mean, what does it consist of, really? Puddles. Grey skies. Stiff breezes. Boredom. Milk past its sell-by date. Empty carrier bags blowing round your feet. The Lord Jesus Christ urging you to kill that passer-by. It’s mind-stubbingly mundane.

Little wonder we find solace in escapism. As Jarvis Cocker once sang, why live in the world when you can live in your head? And come to think of it, why live in your head when you can live in someone else’s? Particularly when that someone else is fantastic, blazing US stand-up Chris Rock, and the part of his head you’re living in is his memory sac.

‘Memory sac’ is the correct biological term for it, by the way. It’s situated right beside the imagination kidney; the two organs are joined by a network of tiny veins, and sometimes there’s interaction between the two, leading to the production of creative reminiscences, or ‘fibs’ as they’re more commonly known. And that’s pretty much what
Everyone Hates Chris
(five) consists of: embellished memories and obvious fibs, presented as a cross between an autobiography and a sitcom.

And it’s good—really really good. Set in 1982, it tells the story of Rock as a thirteen-year-old, lumbered with an eccentric family and a full set of teenage neuroses, struggling to get by in a cruddy area of New York. It’s sentimental (his parents wuv him) without being insipid (the school bully calls him ‘nigger’) and sharp and funny throughout.

‘I’ll beat your butt so bad, you’ll need crutches in your sleep,’ the young Chris tells his bullying nemesis. And when said bully responds, beating him up in slow motion, ‘Ebony and Ivory’ plays sarcastically in the background.

In other words, it’s
The Wonder Years
meets
Crookfyn. Cider with Motherf***in’ Rosie
, if you will. Chalk up yet another superb US import for Channel Five—their schedule’s groaning with so many top-flight American shows, it’s like visiting another country- one far more committed to quality than our own. Pretty soon you’ll have to apply for a visa before tuning in.

Anyway,
if Everybody Hates Chris
presents a massaged, amusing take on reality,
My Reality TV Breakdown
(ITV1) is the opposite: a warts-and-all look at former American child star Danny Bonaduce. Once a member of TV’s Partridge Family, he’s now a confused, self-obsessed, forty-five-year-old mess. Years of substance abuse have left him with a volatile temperament and a voice so gravelly it scrapes the skin off your ears on the way in.

As the series opens, Bonaduce and his wife are attending (televised) therapy sessions with a creepy counsellor (one of rnose guys you only get in America, whose age is impossible to determine: he could be anywhere between twenty-five and eighty).

Initially the show documents their attempts to save their marriage; before long it becomes a portrait of a man free-falling into a hell of his own making- alcoholic binges, steroid abuse, paranoid confrontations and yes, even an apparent suicide attempt.

What happened to the days of the
nice
low-brow American import? You know—like
Scarecrow and Mrs King?

Anyway, in the States, this was called
Breaking Bonaduce
. Since Bonaduce—pronounced ‘bonna-doochy’, in case you’re a stickler for correct internal elocution—since Bonaduce isn’t exactly a household name over here, they’ve rechristened it
My Reality TV Breakdown
so viewers browsing the EPG get a sense of what they’re in for.

God knows how many other alternate titles they rejected first—ten quid says they seriously contemplated calling it
The Adventures of Boozy Wrist-Slash Man
for an entire afternoon.

It’s car crash TV, and proud of it. The ‘star’ himself even says as much during the opening titles. ‘I’m a car crash, man’, he growls, ‘and you have every right to slow down and watch the car crash.’

Yeah, well. I have every right to stare up a cat’s bum if I want to. That doesn’t make it right.

Adam Rickitt’s well of courage

[25 March 2006]

T
hirty-four years ago, Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 crashed in the Andes, leaving twenty-seven survivors fighting for survival in one of the most unforgiving, inhospitable areas on the planet. For seventy-two days they battled extreme cold, exposure and avalanches. Worse still, there was a complete lack of food. As starvation loomed, they made an agonising decision: to eat the flesh of those killed in the initial crash.

Using a shard of glass, they sliced strips of meat from the corpses, dried scraps of flesh on the fuselage, and gobbled them down between guttural sobs of despair. Sixteen of them eventually lived to tell the tale, only to be haunted for decades by the knowledge of what they’d done.

Now, I’ve got no idea what kind of thought zips through your noggin when you find yourself huddled on a mountainside, guzzling Brian from seat 24A in a desperate bid to survive—but I’m prepared to bet my shoes and spine that at no point would you think, ‘Hey, this’d make a great Channel Five reality show!’

But that’s precisely what’s happened in
Alive: Back to the Andes
(Five): four celebrities find themselves stranded up a mountain with nothing but a few tents and a pile of raw meat for company.

I say ‘celebrities’, but to be honest, we’re talking Adam Rickitt, Jean-Christophe Novelli, Carole Caplin and Lord Freddie Windsor—who, combined, are about 1900 per cent less famous than the Coco Pops Monkey.

Come to think of it, they’re also less famous than the Andes survivors themselves, who at least had a Hollywood movie made about diem. The only way Adam Rickitt’s getting a film made about his life is if he devises a cure for cancer, becomes a serial killer, or blasts into space to defeat Zoltan the Mighty.

Still, at least he’s taking part for a good reason. It’s not about him. No. It’s about honouring the survivors’ ordeal. I know this because he says as much during the programme (he even uses the word ‘honour’, shordy before munching a load of raw meat) and on his website, Officially Adam Rickitt.

‘We tried to manage even a millionth of what they suffered basically to highlight what an incredible group of men and women they were,’ he writes, adding that it provided ‘a real insight into the well of courage the survivors endured’.

There’s a whole series in this,
suiely-Adam Rickitt Honours the Well of Courage
, in which the former soap star pays tribute to survivors of various tragedies by re-enacting their plights. Episode one: Adam Rickitt honours the well of courage endured by survivors of die 2004 tsunami by smearing himself in mud and lying down in die bath. Episode two: Adam Rickitt commemorates
⁹
/
₁₁
by setting fire to a napkin on the roof of a skyscraper. And so on and so on. It’d be the most moving television programme ever made.

(Actually, right now he’s appearing in
The Games
on Channel 4, presumably in tribute to the eleven Israeli athletes massacred at the 1972 Munich Olympics.)

Anyway, me programme itself is easy on the eye (I suspect it’s been shot in HD because it looks like a sodding movie) but disappointingly boring.

Remove die ‘easy on me eye’ bit from that sentence and you’re left with a working description of me week’s odier celebrity chow-fest,
Eating With…Cilia Black
(BBC2), a stunningly poindess biography-cum-cookery programme.

During a seemingly endless half-hour, we learn that Cilia likes offal and bacon, and watch her cooking cheese on toast. Not much else happens, although at one point she rubs an Oxo cube on an orange and then eats it. Somehow, this is more disgusting than watching Adam Rickitt eat raw meat.

Still, Cilia isn’t claiming to be a great chef. ‘As my mother used to say, life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’, she says. And it all goes down the same hole, don’t it?’

Just like telly, really.

Faintly baffling mini-movies

[1 April 2006]

H
ere’s a little project for you. Stroll up to someone in marketing, and after punching them square in the face because they bloody well deserve it, ask them to define the term ‘branding’. Chances are they’ll start babbling about ‘consumer consciousness’ and ‘product personality’, at which point you can punch them square in the face for a second time. Hey presto! You’re getting a cathartic workout, and they’re learning something valuable. Everybody wins. Apart from them, obviously.

But don’t go feeling bad. After licking their wounds (with their lizard-like tongue) they’ll drive off in a car so obscenely expensive the glove-box is worth nine times more than your house, and spend the rest of their lives dancing around in a shower of banknotes, champagne and beautiful naked people, all paid for by their fat-bollocked marketer’s salary. Because despite being utterly pointless, theirs is one of the most well-rewarded careers in existence. Which is why you punched them in the face in the first place, remember?

Anyway, ever since there was more than one of them, TV stations have felt the need to brand themselves, just so you can tell them apart. And I have to admit, their efforts have provided some of my fondest telly memories since year dot. They may consist of little more than an animated logo and a tinny fanfare, but the lovely old bygone stings for TVS, ATV, Central or LWT still make me glow with nostalgia.

You can find these and many more on an excellent website called TV Ark (www.tv-ark.org.uk) which serves as an unofficial repository for all manner of broadcast ephemera (including continuity and adverts). It’s a wonderfully evocative hall of forgotten memories, and an insanely addictive one at that. (I had to take a short break after typing the URL in just then, during which I repeatedly clicked-to-view the flowering ATV ident about sixteen times in a row, like a lab rat instinctively nudging a lever for sugar.)

Anyway, that was then. Right now, the trend for idents seems to have moved away from bold, stark logos in favour of quirky little films incorporating subtle corporate livery—the latest example being ITV1’s faintly baffling mini-movies in which children cartwheel around, elderly men slap their tummies, and a couple stand in a cornfield hugging a tree, to a pseudo Sigur Ros soundtrack. Presumably it’s meant to convey a sense of warmth, accessibility and fun, and to be fair, it pretty much succeeds—it’s certainly less nauseating than past efforts involving ITV ‘faces’ such as Chris Tarrant larking around on a studio set. Trouble is, the other terrestrial channels are all doing something similar.