Dawn of the Dumb (33 page)

The trouble with
Who’s
freshly-minted anagrammatic ‘sister’ serial
Torchwood
(BBC2) is that it’s not really clear who it’s aimed at. It contains swearing, blood and sex, yet still somehow feels like a children’s programme. Thirteen-year-olds should love it; anyone else is likely to be more than a little confused. Which isn’t to say
Torchwood
is bad. Just bewildering. And very, very silly.

The central presence of Captain Jack Harkness, one of the most pantomime characters ever to appear in
Doctor Who
, doesn’t exactly help. He’s like Buzz Lightyear, but less realistic. The moment you see him running around being all larger than life, you think ‘aha—so
Torchwood’s
a camp space opera? Fair enough.’

But then the storyline goes all dark and unpleasant and people are getting their throats torn open and shooting themselves in the head, and suddenly you don’t know where you are. Not in Kansas any more, maybe—but where?

Cute and dark, sweet and sour, up and down. It’s like tuning in to watch
Deadwood
, only to discover they’ve replaced Al Swearengen with the Honey Monster. Or sitting through a ‘re-imagining’ of the Captain Birds Eye commercials, in which the white-haired skipper traverses the oceans in a raging thunderstorm, ruling his child-crew with an iron fist, tossing dissenters overboard into the rolling, foaming waves—but dances the hornpipe with a big cartoon haddock while the credits roll. Or stumbling across an episode of
Scooby-Doo
in which Shaggy skins up on camera.

In fact
Scooby-Doo
(more than, say,
The X-Files
or
Buffy
) is probably the show most analogous to
Torchwood
, in that both series revolve around a fresh-faced team of meddling kids tackling an ever-shifting carnival of monsters in a world of childlike simplicity. The
Torchwood
gang even have their own version of the Mystery Machine, although theirs is a spectacularly ugly SUV with two daft strips of throbbing LED lights either side of the windscreen whose sole purpose is to make the entire vehicle look outrageously silly—they might as well have stuck a big inflatable dick on the bonnet, to be honest.

The inside’s not much belter—LCD screens embedded in every available flat surface, each urgently displaying a wibbly-wobbly screensaver…it must be like driving around in a flagship branch of PC World.

There are other glaringly daft touches: the countless overhead helicopter shots of Cardiff (what is this, Google Earth?); the ridiculous severed hand-in-a-jar (straight from the Addams Family); the protracted sequence from episode one in which Captain Jack stood atop a tall building surveying the cityscape like Batman
for no reason whatsoever
. Oh, and the team’s insistence on using the silly invisible elevator that slowly, slowly ascends through a sort of ‘magic hole’ in the pavement—even though there’s a perfectly reasonable
back door
through which they can enter and leave the Batcave at will.

And on top of all that, there’s a bizarre emphasis on bisexual tension thrown in for good measure. You half expect the
Torchwood
gang to drop their slacks and form a humping great daisy chain any moment. It’s
Shortbus
meets
Goober and the Ghost Chasers
meets
X-Men
meets
Angel
meets
The Tomorrow People
meets
Spooks
meets Oh God I Give Up.

Still, the act of jotting down some of
Torchwood’s
thundering absurdities has put a big dumb smile on my face. Whatever the hell it’s supposed to be, there’s nothing else like
Torchwood
on TV at the moment, and that’s got to be worth something. I just don’t have a clue how much.

Haunted porcelain dolls

[4 November 2006]

T
old you so. Last week Dionne got the boot from
The X-Factor
(ITV1), despite having far and away one of the best voices in the contest. Originally, I put this down to racism on the part of the voting audience, but maybe I’m doing them a disservice. Perhaps the average ITV1 viewer isn’t that shallow. Perhaps they voted her out because of the gap in her front teeth.

They also ousted Kerry, the sexy wheelchair-user (who the tabloids would’ve dubbed ‘Hot Wheels’ if they had any balls), which is just as well because she wasn’t the greatest singer.

Anyway, all the remaining acts deserve their place on the stage, with three notable exceptions—the first being Ray, an unsettling cross between Harry Connick, Jr, Chucky from
Child’s Play
, and a boy raised by wolves. Ray needs to stop grinning. Whenever he smiles it’s like watching Jack Nicholson leering through that shattered door in
The Shining
. And he’s got a weird cold-yet-needy look in his eye, which screams ‘STAGE SCHOOL!’ so loudly it almost drowns out his actual singing voice.

I say ‘almost’, because in practice his be-bop transatlantic slur is too infuriating to ignore. (Why do some people think it necessary to sing Rat Pack numbers with a voice so slack it mushes all the consonants and vowels, so a simple lyric like ‘She gets too hungry/ For dinner at eight’ becomes ‘a-she gess a-too hunnnryyfoh/ a-zzinner-a-eighh’? Sinatra’s diction was crisp as a bell, you morons.)

Exception number two: the MacDonald Brothers, whose continued presence in the competition is proof that a large proportion of the British public have no idea what they’re doing. Seriously, no sane mind could possibly enjoy their performances, which combine piss-weak crooning with an indefinable sense of creeping dread. They’re sinister and horrible, like a pair of haunted porcelain dolls who’ve suddenly come alive on the sideboard. Each time one of them gets close to the camera, I imagine he’s going to slither out of the screen and calmly strangle me in my living room. Please make it stop, Lord.

The third and final notable exception is Eton Road, the emaciated boy band who look like they’ve staggered on stage to beg for basic rations. I keep expecting the UN to start dropping food parcels in the middle of their act. One of them’s so thin he sometimes stands between the individual pixels on my LCD television and completely disappears from view.

Anyway, those are the three acts that need to be sent home first. Oh, and the producers really need to cut down on the amount of unnecessary lighting in
The X Factor
studio before George Monbiot shows up to kick their arses. There must be 10 million bulbs in there: it’s like the whole of Las Vegas crammed into one hangar. That show’s costing us an iceberg a week.

Perhaps they should follow the lead set by
Unanimous
, Channel 4’s new who-gets-the-money reality show, which leans in the other direction, being so gloomy and underlit it’s like venturing into the underground realm of Fungus the Bogeyman.

Curious show, this: nine contestants are locked in a bunker until they can unanimously decide which of them deserves to win the jackpot (which starts at a million, and drops by a pound a second). The whole thing’s harsh and downbeat, with oppressive walls and no natural light, and it revolves around a group of people who grow more ruthless and greedy by the minute.

It’s not a barrel of laughs. In fact, it’s a bit like the aftermath of a nuclear war. Bet they’re catching and eating rats by week five. Hungrily wolfing them down while they squat in the corner. Biting ratty’s head off while his paws kick and scratch at their chinny-chins! Rat blood and rat fur; gobble it, gobble it! Tee hee hee hee!

Sorry. Been watching too much of Ray and the MacDonald Brothers. It gets in your head and it changes you, badly.

Not Buck Rogers

[11 November 2006]

T
he future is a foreign country. They do things differently there. They wear tinfoil and fly around in hovercars, for starters. You wouldn’t get that in the Dark Ages. Their most advanced piece of technology was the pointy stick, used for jabbing peasants in the eye or throwing at jabberwockies. Compared to the future, the past is rubbish, which is why TV science fiction is always a billion times better than costume drama. I don’t want to watch people dressed in doilies curtseying to each other until everyone dies of consumption. I prefer lasers and dry ice. Give me the camp nonsense of Buck Rogers over the painful earnestness of Jane Eyre every time.

Actually, no. Not Buck Rogers. It’s far too gee-whizz. Give me something British. Something depressing and dystopian. Something angry and idealistic and imaginative and scary and…well, give me half the things discussed at length in
The Martians and Us
(BBC4), an unmissable, timely documentary series examining the history of UK sci-fi.

I say ‘timely’ because it arrives a few weeks after the death of Nigel Kneale, who, in creating the BBC serial
Quatermass
back in the 19508, single-handedly set the tone for all British TV sci-fi to follow. Kneale’s work, which pops up repeatedly throughout this series, is well worth seeking out (and there’s no excuse for not doing so, since it’s largely available on DVD)—as a TV writer, he’s up there with yer Dennis Potters and yer Jack Rosenthals, and with any luck the BBC will see his passing as a great excuse to screen everything he wrote all over again. In order. And ideally in 3D, even though that’s not possible.

Anyway, back to
The Martians and Us
, which rather than being a dry chronological trawl through the past, tackles a different theme with each edition and sees how it evolved. Fittingly, episode one is about ‘evolution’; specifically, the way Darwin’s theories influenced H. G. Wells, who in turn influenced just about everyone else. Future episodes examine dystopian societies (2984 et al) and Armageddon; they’re all superbly researched and clearly sewn together with an almost unhealthy love for the subject matter (with an obvious bias in favour of television, but in this case that’s no bad thing).

TV sci-fi is subjected to more than its fair share of derisive snorts, but as this series (misleading tide aside) makes clear, it’s always been about more than starships and rayguns. The best sci-fi explores ideas—often deeply uncomfortable, challenging ideas about human society—in the most imaginative way possible. You may think ‘dark’ crime serials like
Cracker
or
Prime Suspect
tell you a lot about the sinister side of the human psyche, but they’re nothing compared to the likes of
Quatermass
or
Threads
.

As a bonus, and in an apparent bid to make my last point sound like babbling nonsense, BBC4 is also repeating
The Day of the Triffids
, their early Bos adaptation of John Wyndham’s biopocalypse pot-boiler. Yes, the one where a bunch of giant walking daffodils rise up and take over the Earth.

It’s undeniably silly, with inadvertently funny FX, some dialogue so clumsily expositional it might as well be replaced with a diagram explaining who’s who and what’s what, and some alarmingly stiff performances (which serve as a jarring reminder that just a few decades ago, most TV actors sounded twice as posh as the royal family and spoke VERY CRISPLY AND LOUDLY as though appearing on stage before an audience of bewildered half-deaf paupers).

But get beyond all that, and you’ll discover that at its core lurks a tale of startling bleakness, the likes of which rarely make it on screen in this mollycoddled day and age, when broadcasters think we prefer our entertainment with all the sharp edges sanded down, all the unpleasantness reduced to black and white shades or cuddled away completely. Stupid wobbling plant monsters aside, our TV used to have some bite—and our sci-fi often provided it. Laugh if you like, but cherish it too.

Might as well be dead

[ us November 2006]

A
s winter rolls in and the days shrink to the length of a depressive sigh, so a man’s thoughts gradually acquire a melancholic timbre. Especially when said man is staring at
I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!
(ITV1) and sadly contemplating his symbiotic relationship with the people onscreen.

They bicker and preen; I write about it. They scrabble on their knees eating maggots; I mock them for it. They blow off in a hammock; I describe the smell. I am pathetic. My life is pathetic.

I truly, genuinely, might as well be dead.

Still, as I sit here, typing these words with one hand and clutching a kitchen knife to my neck with the other, I suppose I might as well run through the traditional abusive
Who’s Who
list, to which the usual caveats apply, since the insane nature of newspaper-supplement lead times means I’m typing this on Tuesday morning—so if Toby Anstis hangs himself with a makeshift vine noose on Wednesday afternoon, not only will you find no mention of it here, but any abuse I pour on his head will seem particularly callous.

Then again, fuck him: this is Anstis we’re talking about, not Hawking or a Beatle. Human civilisation might just survive his passing.

The chief freakshow draw this year is David Gest, the peculiar human-like organism which married Liza Minnelli a few years ago and divorced her a short time later. It looks as though plastic surgery has left Gest closely resembling the halfway point in a horror-movie transformation sequence; at a glance it’s hard to tell which bits of his head it hears, sees, or talks through. If he didn’t wear sunglasses all the time it’d be hard to know whether his face was on the right way up. Weirder still is his hair, which doesn’t seem to be hair at all, but rather some kind of fine black smoke, loosely enveloping his scalp like a faint atmospheric haze. Whenever the sun hits it, it turns semi-translucent and looks like a force field effect from a computer game. This alone makes him the most interesting person in the camp.

Jason Donovan is also there, wearing the precise expression of a Teddy Ruxpin toy that’s been through some tough times and currently finds itself timidly edging down an alleyway, toward an untended restaurant dustbin, hoping to steal some scraps without being spotted by the thickset whistling chef in the kitchen. At least that’s what he looks like to me.