Dawn of the Dumb (34 page)

Others include erstwhile Thatcher substitute Faith Brown, owner of a bosom so outrageously huge it must render sitting at a table eating from a plate impossible, and former newsreader Jan Leem-ing, this year’s posh—‘n’—feisty mature matronly offering; you can just about picture her sponging down a retired colonel in a tin bath. And enjoying it. With any luck that’ll be one of the bush-tucker trials.

There’s also some frightened pop-eyed scamp from Busted, a who-the-hell fashion designer, Phina Thingypants with the broken accent from
Footballer’s Wives
, Cherie Blair’s sister, and Myleene Mass, professional eye candy.

It’s a terrifying sign of age, and the most pathetic thing it’s possible to admit, but the other day, while leafing through a tabloid paper, I stumbled across a picture of Klass in a bikini and 10 minutes later realised I was still staring at it, like a dog in a Perspex box dumbly contemplating a lump of meat dangling cruelly outside. Christ, I hate me.

All-oUt war with Scotland

[25 November 2006]

O
K. That’s it. I’ve never been a patriot, because nationalist pride is clearly the pastime of choice for furious thimble-minded morons so thoroughly inadequate they need to leech off the history and status of an entire nation to bolster their own self-worth.

But all that’s changed in the face of a sustained, maddening dose of the MacDonald Brothers, courtesy of
The X Factor
(ITV1). Suddenly, I’m declaring myself 100 per cent English and demanding all out war with Scotland.

Yes, Scottish readers, I’m sorry to tar you all with the same brush, and even sorrier to call for your heads on a silver platter—which, make no mistake, is precisely what I
am
doing—but I’m confused and I’m angry and you’re the only easily identifiable group I can blame. This weekly atrocity cannot be allowed to continue. It’s time for the Scottish community to stop making excuses and start policing itself; time to root out the extremists hell-bent on voting MacDonald and confront their twisted ideology head-on.

The extremists claim that by voting MacDonald they’re simply doing their bit for Scotland. Yet their actions have caused misery and suffering for millions.

Imagine a world in which the MacDonald Brothers have won
The X-Factor
. Gigantic billboards carrying their image dominate the skyline as a terrified populace scurries past. An anodyne MacDonald cover version of ‘Unchained Melody’ blares from a million speakers, drowning out the screams of men and dying children. Insane and unthinkable as it sounds, the extremists want to make this nightmare vision of the future a reality. We must stop them at all costs.

In return for the Scots co-operation, the rest of us can set about tackling anyone who votes for Ray, preferably by cutting their voting fingers off with pliers. Ray, a pirouetting kiddy vampire with a demented penchant for the big band sound, is even worse than the MacDonalds.

When Ray sings, music itself throws up. Not just a bit, like when you unexpectedly bring up half a gobful of baby sick and have to swallow it back down, but a lot. When Ray sings, music buckles in two, swings its jaws open and unleashes an unprecedented jet of acrid vomit. And it doesn’t stop vomiting until strips of stomach lining are hanging off its teeth and it’s spat its own ringpiece out like a hot rubber coin.

That’s what Ray does to music. This is the worst
X Factor
line-up ever.

Meanwhile,
I’m a Celebrity
(ITV1) trundles on. Having spent a large portion of last week’s column picking on David Gest, I’ve now warmed to him, just like the rest of the viewing public. Facially, he still resembles a cross between Paul Simon and the outermost fringe of madness, but inside lurks an endearingly dry sense of humour. Clearly he should win.

In other news, according to both the tabloids and the programme itself, Dean Gaffney’s inaugural bushtucker trial was the single funniest event in recorded history. But it could’ve been far funnier. After all, he was on live television. He missed a golden opportunity.

If I was doing it instead of Gaffney, I’d have waited until the bit where they put me in the big wooden box thing, then deliberately stamped on a rat’s head at the earliest opportunity. I’d crunch my heel around in its skull, pick its twitching carcass up by the tail and swing it in Ant and Dec’s faces, shrieking ‘LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! THIS PRODUCTION HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS! MURDERERS! MURDERERS!’ at the top of my lungs.

And before they could respond I’d start sobbing and fighting the pair of them, mussing up their hair and getting rat blood all over their shirts. And then I’d whip down my trousers and unleash a curler, right there on the jungle floor.

And I’d sit there poking it with sticks and rubbing leaves on it and giggling. Although I guess they’d probably cut to a commercial by then.

A great leap forward

[ tie December 2006]

T
his being a special ‘award ceremony’ edition of
The Guide
, it would be remiss of me not to devote this week’s column to some awards of my own. So, let the ceremony commence with an awkward crunch of gears, as the award for the Year’s Most Jarring Show goes to the
Doctor Who
spin-off
Torchwood
, which somehow managed to feel like both a multicoloured children’s show and a heaving sex-and-gore bodice-ripper at the same time. The constant clash of mutually-incongruous tones meant watching it felt like stumbling across a hitherto secret episode of
Postman Pat in
which Pat runs down fifteen villagers while masturbating at the wheel of his van. Interesting, but possibly aimed at madmen.

The Most Relentlessly Harrowing Drama was
Prime Suspect 7
, in which Jane Tennison attempted to solve the murder of a pregnant fourteen-year-old while simultaneously battling alcoholism, nursing her dying father, facing retirement, and dealing with a world full of absurdly exaggerated ASBO youths who cared about ring-tones and stabbings and very little else. There wasn’t a chink of light in the whole thing. It was like being trapped in a coffin watching a depressed mouse slowly build a tiny gallows for itself out of lolly sticks, and being unable to stop it because you couldn’t lift your arms. Well, vaguely.

An awkward silence now as the award for Career Suicide goes to nobody whatsoever. By rights it should have gone to George Galloway for his cat-impersonating antics on January’s
Celebrity Big Brother-except
in retrospect, it didn’t dent his career at all. He even introduces himself using the ‘Top Cat’ theme on his
TalkSport
radio show, just so no one forgets about it. Meanwhile, Busted’s Matt Willis chewed his way through a kangaroo’s anus on
I’m a Celebrity
and almost immediately won the public vote. In short, the public are now so desensitised to all manner of extreme or absurd behaviour, it’s almost impossible to genuinely disgrace yourself on television. I can’t imagine what you’d have to do to permanently wreck your career. Eat your own shit on Monday and you’d be cracking jokes about it on
The Paul O’Grady Show
by Friday. I’m all for tolerance and forgiveness but somehow I doubt this represents a great leap forward.

Speaking of advances and the lack of them, the Year’s Most Outmoded Thing was the television set itself- yes, even the fancy HD ones. What with torrent sites, YouTube, DVDs, PSPs and iPods with video playback, you don’t need a telly to watch ‘telly’ any more. I probably spent a third of my telly-watching time in 2006 watching ‘TV’ on a laptop. And aside from the news, I saw hardly anything go out at its appointed time; thanks to PVR devices the entire notion of channels and schedules is rapidly becoming meaningless. The only problem is working out what we’re going to call ‘television’ (as in the programming) now it’s drifted free of’the television’ (as in the box itself). Tossers call it ‘content’, but that’s (a) hideous and (b) so vague it might as well be French. Anyway, we’d best hurry up coming up with a name, or before long water-cooler conversations won’t make sense any more (‘Did you see that thing on the thing last night?’, ‘Nah, I was thinging the thing on the other thing—maybe I’ll thing it tomorrow.’).

Finally, the award for Hugest Breakthrough goes to Channel 5, which made history by actually showing it going in, then out, then back in again—right there on the telly. Yes,
The Girl’s Guide to 21
^st
-century Sex
got away with showing hard-ons and fannies and full penetrative sex by claiming it was educational to do so (I certainly learnt a lot about how shocking it was to unexpectedly stumble across actual fucking on television).

By boldly introducing sweaty hardcore action to the TV schedule, they did more to blur the line separating TV from the internet than anyone else this year. See that spurting all over your screen? That, my friends, is progress.

Thus I win

[13 lanuary 2007]

Celebrity Big Brother
(C4) is one of those totemic shows people define themselves by. No, really.

Haughty types who consider it a glaring affront to humanity argue over which of them watches it the least (‘I’m proud to say I haven’t witnessed one second of that garbage’/ ‘Really? Well I tune in, then turn the sound down and deliberately sit with my back to the screen in protest—THUS I WIN’).

At the other end of the scale, self-confessed trash addicts fight about how gloriously tacky they find it (‘I sit for hours transcribing the live stream so I can read it back and chuckle about it later!’/ ‘Oh yeah? Well I watch it while literally reclining in a tin bath full of warm milky scum, farting and giggling and imagining I’m participating in one big steadily unfolding live-action cartoon version of the apocalypse—THUS I WIN’).

Frustratingly, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think it’s neither a work of lowbrow genius, nor a genuine harbinger of cultural death. I think it’s a TV show. THUS I WIN.

Anyway, at the time of writing, this year’s helping is a grinding, boring mess. It began with an uninspiring cast, then rapidly worsened as the most potentially interesting characters were prematurely driven out by the injection of Clan Goody.

Donny Tourette (Rick Parfitt from Status Quo impersonating Nathan Barley) was the first to bolt. Then surprise choice Ken Russell (a cross between
Withnail’s
Uncle Monty and a soo-year-old Pauline Quirke) decided he’d had enough, which was a personal relief since my attention span’s so hopelessly depleted it can’t cope with elderly contestants who move in slow motion. When he finally staggered for the exit, he took so long crossing the room I had to hit the fast-forward button twice, muttering ‘hurry up’ under my breath (I swear, if it were possible to grab the screen and tip the house sideways till he fell out the side, I’d have done it).

Now then. Jackiey. Picture a sandpapered orang-utan on the verge of grabbing a pool cue in anger and you’ve constructed a mental image more accurate than ten photographs superimposed on top of each other. It seems safe to assume the public will have ousted her by the time you read this, assuming the voters misspelled her name correctly when the texts were sent. (Jackiey. Jackiey. Jackiey. All that’s missing is a wayward apostrophe and a few capital letters in the wrong place: jAcKie’y.)

This leaves us with a houseful of relative dullards. Jade we already know. Her silent Cylon boyfriend, Jack, is ultimately unknowable. Apparently too dense to speak or even perform basic facial expressions, he spends his time mutely propped up in the corner, like a broom leaning against the wall, or a tattooed sapling. At least Ken fidgeted from time to time.

Then there’s Leo Sayer, who simply burbles the contents of his forebrain round the clock, like a radio station ceaselessly relaying the dislocated thoughts of a ball of pocket fluff as it drifts out of sight on a warm air current. Carole Malone, so repugnant in print you want to climb inside the page and vomit ink down her eye sockets, is merely tedious onscreen.

Cleo Roccos, Shilpa Shetty, Dirk Benedict and Danielle Thingy-bobs are equally dull. Likeable, attractive, but still dull. And the same goes for H from Steps and Jo O’Meara (the latter, incidentally, is played by Starbuck from the re-imagined
Battlestar Galactica
, which is well worth watching instead).

In other words, it’s a long slow shrug so far. It’s telling that the most interesting thing that’s happened is something that
hasn’t
happened: to date, no one’s laughed uncontrollably in Jermaine Jackson’s face when he mentions his son, Jermajesty.

Yes, Jermajesty: a name so bad, it never loses its magic. Jermajesty. Jermajesty. Still funny: Jermajesty. With any luck, inspired by his
Big Brother
experience, he’ll hold a text vote to let the public decide the name of his next kid. In which case, I’d like to make an early bid for Jermwarfare.

The world’s thickest coven

[20 January 2007]

A
s per tradition, whatever I write about
Celebrity Big Brother (C4
) on a Tuesday turns out not to be true come the time it’s printed on a Saturday. Further proof that traditional print journalism is doomed. By the year 2015 all newspaper articles will be delivered to your cerebral cortex via wireless connection the moment they’re written. Apart from Richard Littlejohn’s columns, because he won’t be writing them any more. Instead he’ll scrape a living masturbating for pennies in abandoned shop doorways. I hope.

24?

Anyway, last week I described the current
Celebrity Big Brother
as ‘a grinding, boring mess’, just before Leo Sayer livened things up immensely by turning into an enraged fusion of Alan Partridge and Derek-and-Clive-era Dudley Moore, then throwing a series of increasingly spectacular tantrums which culminated in the first proper ‘break-out’ the series has seen. In another weird first, we were shown plenty of footage of him outside the house, bickering with producers and tussling with security guards like a protester at the Downing Street gates. This is an alarming development—events outside the
Big Brother watts
aren’t usually included in the highlights show, and lifting the ‘fog of war’ in this way raises the spectre of an endless, access-all-areas edition that follows escaping housemates wherever they run, like a fox hunt, shooting them in the thigh with a dart gun each time they get too far from the lens.