Screen Burn (20 page)

What with this and
Blood of the Vikings
, I’m thinking of starting an official Campaign Against Realism for shows like this. Why schedule an exposé of ghosts and then tell us there’s no such thing? Lie, for God’s sake: pay a silver-haired actor to dress in a lab coat and point at a chart and say they’re real and JESUS CHRIST there’s one behind you RIGHT NOW. Even
Walking with Beasts
could be improved with the judicious use of fibs: lob in a few shots of dodo-monsters walking around in monocles, puffing on cigars, and bingo – you’ve got a runaway hit on your hands.

Think your job’s rubbish? Think again. Neal Smither mops up human brains for a living. He’s a
Crime Scene Cleaner
(C4).

While you spend your days toying idly with paperclips, he’s up to his elbows in putrefied intestines and discarded hunks of scalp. He’d raise the roof on
What’s My Line?

In the state of California, where Neal’s self-owned company is based, there’s no government agency devoted to disposing of the bodies of the deceased: if your sister blows her brains out in the bathtub, or your misfit room-mate fills himself with enough heroin to mong a blue whale, the cops simply turn up to take notes, then leave you to sort out the mess. They won’t even leave you a souvenir squeegee. And unless you’ve got an iron constitution and a huge supply of Mr Muscle, you’ll end up dialing Neal’s cellphone. And doubtless getting the busy signal: Neal’s cellphone rings a lot.

It rings, in fact, right at the start of this fascinating documentary. ‘Shotgun suicide? You’re looking at $1,500 bucks,’ he explains to a client, ‘$1,800 max.’ And then, snapping the phone shut with a grin, he heads off to work. Minutes later he’s singing impromptu songs
about money to himself as he scrubs blood from the wall of a grimy apartment.

‘This is your brain on carpet,’ he grins, holding aloft a rug soiled with the deceased’s headguts. It’s hard not to warm to him after that, and indeed throughout the rest of the programme he takes obvious delight in grossing out the film crew at every possible opportunity. ‘Look out, you’re stepping in brains,’ he says at one point, as a cameraman accidentally does just that at the scene of a car-park suicide. As you’d expect of a man who spends his working day tossing strips of decomposing flesh into bin bags, Neal’s world-view is pretty bleak. ‘Eighty per cent of people are dirtbags,’ he explains, with considerable authority.

‘Most people live like animals, and behave like animals – violent, territorial animals.’ He has zero sympathy for the victims, and only a few soft ebbs of compassion for the ones they leave behind. If he ever quits the gut-swabbing trade, he’ll make a fortune penning greetings-card mottos for Hallmark.

Not that he’ll quit. As far as Neal’s concerned, he’s just a man with a job to do – but while he claims it doesn’t turn his stomach, I bet he doesn’t eat much spaghetti Bolognese of an evening.

Hideous though
Crime Scene Cleaner
is, in the gruesome-spectacle stakes it’s not a patch on the moment in
One Night with Robbie
Williams
(BBC1) when Our Rob ‘hands over’ to a recording of Sinatra halfway through a counterfeit rendition of ‘It Was a Very Good Year’, and as Frank’s spellbinding vocals fill the Albert Hall and show the audience precisely how it
should
be sung, Rob closes his eyes, mouths along with the lyric and feigns an agonising teeter on the verge of tears. Ickkkk.

This experiment in Rat-Packery is a curious thing: not an absolute failure, since Williams has the requisite showmanship, but his voice is pure Tupperware. When he sings, the words melt into one another, and not in a good way. Pass it through the Williams filter, and a simple couplet like ‘let’s face the music and dance’ liquefies into a messy transatlantic ‘lezface-thermusic-undens’, devoid of any discernible emotion. Expect an ‘Aloha from Hawaii’ Elvis special some time in 2003. Probably.

More rock-idol indulgence in
Being Mick
(C4), an astonishingly boring hour-long commercial for Mick Jagger’s solo album, Mick Jagger’s recent movie (
Enigma
), and – well – for Mick Jagger himself. If the point was to prove that Jagger’s life isn’t nearly as exciting as the tabloids make out, it’s a resounding success. We watch as he wanders around the globe with a face like a wet flannel hanging off a doorknob, attending dull meetings, dull recording sessions, and yakking to lots of dull paunchy men in coloured sunglasses, until your brain starts craning its neck in search of something interesting to chew on.

It even manages to make a party at Elton John’s house seem boring. I always imagined a party round Elton’s would involve carnival streamers and copulating Minotaurs, but no: on the evidence of the one Mick attends, it’s all awkward chit-chat and dry white wine. Perhaps the fun took place off camera. Officially sanctioned celebrity documentaries are always a bad idea, but rarely do they make their subjects seem dreary: you’d have more fun following Stephen Hendry through a branch of MFI.

Following a brief lull, the dumbing-down debate has flared up again, leaving those of us who are dumb already more confused than ever. The question: is TV getting worse, or is it getting better? Curmudgeons would have you believe the former, while optimists (who, it has to be said, tend to have careers in television) insist on the latter. As for me, I’m sitting dizzy-faced on the fence, chewing a hayseed while spitwads fired from both directions sail clean over my head. We thickos never get a proper look-in in debates like these.

The complainants’ argument runs roughly as follows: British TV is becoming a hotbed of tinsel and idiocy, obsessed with youth and sex; intellectual nourishment of all kinds is nudged embarrassingly to the sidelines in the blinkered quest for ratings. The optimists say there’s nothing to worry about – far from having our options restricted, today we have more choice than ever, with entire channels 
devoted to our every whim (usually with names like Soup Network, or Puppeteer 24). There may be more crap than ever before (and make no mistake, it’s always been there), but there’s also more quality.

And the view from this fence-sitting doofus? Well, miss, I think both sides have a point. But it seems to me the main problem is the human race itself.

The majority of the human race prefers crap to gold; subsequently, we now have entire networks devoted to it. That’s just natural efficiency. Trouble is, over the past few decades, crap technology has steadily improved, leaving us with crapper crap than ever. We now have vicious, blank-eyed, multicoloured crap; crap with lungs, crap that shouts louder and harder than ever before. The good stuff (and there
is
just as much as there’s always been) can’t, by its very nature, raise its cultured voice above the bellowing. It hasn’t disappeared – it’s just easier to ignore. Of course, no one likes being ignored, so even the more heavyweight programmes try a bit of yelling now and then, with embarrassing results.

Case in point: this week, a fairly grim documentary about the exhumation of the dead finds itself lumbered with an atrociously gimmicky title –
Changing Tombs
(C4) – in a bid to attract vultures. This is a curiously placid look at the grim business of corpse relocation, following workers from the London Necropolis Company (I kid you not) as they dig up a disused graveyard in Islington and replant the coffins elsewhere – out in the countryside, where the rent’s less expensive and the quality of life is better by far.

Ghouls won’t be satisfied: there isn’t much footage of dripping human mulch, and at no point does anyone crowbar open a coffin lid to uncover a boggle-eyed skeleton clutching a silver pentagram. Instead there’s lots of mud, some tatty clumps of corpse-hair, and a chilling snap of a freakishly well-preserved body unearthed at a previous dig (which wouldn’t look out of place in a Dazed and Confused photoshoot, particularly now the ‘Edwardian look’ is in).

Disappointingly, the workers are not exactly heaving deadsters out of the soil and tossing them cheerily into the back of a van
either. No. Corpses are afforded far more respect than us breathing plebs, with officials on hand to ensure they’re not upset by the move. Typical: you wait your whole life to be pampered, but only when you’re too decomposed to appreciate it will anyone actually indulge you.

More corpse action in this week’s
Kenyon Confronts
(BBC1), in which Paul Kenyon investigates people who’ve faked their own deaths in a bid to collect insurance money. And again, it’s a disappointment: no Reggie Perrin-style hilarity, just a bit of clumsy fraud involving a bogus death certificate, and not enough conflict by half. Kenyon (who looks more like an ex-choirboy or a sweet-faced orderly from
Holby City
than a journalistic Force to be Reckoned With) should ditch the detective work and concentrate fully on the confrontation, which, after all, is the reason you’ve tuned in in the first place. Perhaps he should just stand on Oxford Street, obstructing passers-by, tripping up pedestrians with a mike lead.

It’d make a great Christmas special.

Just like the artefacts it showcases, interest in the
Antiques Road-
show
(BBC1) accumulates with age. When I was a child, the
Antiques Roadshow
was a televisual Sahara I had to cross on hands and knees; a slow-motion assault on the boredom cells, physically painful to withstand. Every Sunday evening I’d writhe like a pig glued to an armchair, huffing indignantly at the tedium of it all, eventually sliding broken to the floor, close to tears.

At least that’s how it used to be, back in the days of one-box-per-household, with four terrestrial channels and bugger-all else, when youth had no option but to sit there and suffer. Plonk a twenty-first-century whippersnapper in front of
Antiques Roadshow
and they’ll merely shrug for a nanosecond before whipping a Game Boy Advance from their back pocket and tucking into level 98 of ‘Borstal Oblivion X’. The little bastards have a portable escape hatch.

Having flown the parental nest, you doubtless swore never to
glance at the
Roadshow
again, but over the years it wears you down. Pass 30 and it seems like quite a charming little programme, a pleasant diversion over coffee and biscuits.

This is a danger signal: you’re a gnat’s pube away from becoming your parents. Before you know it you’ll be hopelessly infected with a sincere interest in antiques and no one will ever want to sleep with you ever again. Here’s a tip: fight the urge to succumb by concentrating on the onlookers skulking in the background during each evaluation. Really
look
at them. Ashen-faced, sunken-eyed cadavers haunting the rear of each shot like lost spirits trapped inside your TV set, anxiously craning their necks in search of a way out. Carry on watching the
Roadshow
and that’s how you’ll look, age 50. Just you think about that.

But if the
Roadshow
is a guilty pleasure, daytime antiquefest
Bargain
Hunt
(BBC1) is an innocent joy, largely on account of host David Dickinson, the most dapper man on earth. Dickinson is sometimes referred to as ‘the real Lovejoy’, but he’s actually more like Lovejoy squared, Lovejoy to the power of 10. He surfs into view on a wave of liquid polish and is impossible to dislike from the moment you slap eyes on him.

It’s the hair you notice first; a bushy helmet dimly reminiscent of Patrick Swayze’s swirling mane circa
Roadhouse
– but darker, woven with grey and infinitely more distinguished. Then there’s his skin – shiny, terracotta – and his eyebrows, which seem to have been applied with a chisel-tip marker pen.

He looks like an ageing Thundercat. He also dresses with genuine panache, and throws continual glances to the camera, generating a palpable erotic charge. My girlfriend fancies him more than any other man on earth, including me.

The show itself works thus: two pairs of punters have
£
200 to spend at car-boot sales and antique fairs, with experts on hand to provide advice and gentle bullying. Then it’s off to the auction room to see their purchases go under the hammer – a nail-biting, unpredictable finale as they discover the haul’s true value. The team with the largest profit (assuming there is one) gets to keep their winnings – on a good day as much as
£
40. The losers go home
with a pat on the back and a good-natured chuckle from David. No one gets hurt, shot or belittled; it’s all clean simple fun, and why it isn’t broadcast in an early-evening slot is a mystery on a par with the origins of Dickinson’s sexual charm.

Also this week:
Cold Feet
(ITV1), which is whipping past at a bewildering rate, like a soap opera viewed from the side of a fairground ride. Worth watching to see how many additional storylines they can plough into before the whole thing collapses beneath the weight of its own angst – and because the little girl Adam and Rachel are adopting looks precisely like Neil Hannon from
The
Divine Comedy
.

Then there’s the increasingly hilarious
Taboo
(BBC2), in which Joan Bakewell examines the forbidden by placing it in a stark white studio and squinting at it, in the vaguely disapproving manner of
Antiques Roadshow
bystanders discussed earlier.

In week one, she peered at an erect penis; by week two she’d graduated to watching full sexual intercourse. This week’s topic is violence, so expect to see her pacing around, glaring over the rim of her spectacles at two transsexuals thumping each other to death with their own johnsons. Possibly.

Fashion terrifies me. It’s the fear of the unknown. Once it was so easy: a pair of slacks and a vaguely ironic T-shirt and I was perfectly acceptable.