Screen Burn (7 page)
Authors: Charlie Brooker
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #Television programs, #Performing Arts, #Television, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Television personalities
This year’s television has been particularly disappointing since the last few months of nigh-on uninterrupted drizzle have meant we’ve had little to do except sit indoors watching the box (or if you’re in a flooding hotspot, watching the box bob up and down).
And by God we must be bitter: this year’s most talked-about programmes
all revolved around cynical voyeurism and mean-spirited in-fighting. The inescapable
Big Brother
flummoxed everyone by being both appealing and mesmerising at the same time, drawing a huge audience as it slowly whittled down ten cackling boredom-droids to one goon-eyed dum-dum. Craig’s elevation to hero status was always going to be short-lived the moment he stepped outside that rickety little house; hopelessly inarticulate, he’d have trouble explaining the price of a chisel in a B&Q commercial let alone wowing the crowd on a chat show – and besides, he doesn’t really do anything annoying, unless ‘having large biceps’ counts as a bona fide gimmick these days.
Still, at least he had the decency to donate his winnings to a worthy cause – the others would have blown the lot on jet-skis and fun. Next year they’re reportedly raising the stakes by dragging the contestants away from the isolation of the diary cupboard to vote one another out in a bad-tempered, face-to-face Judas session in the main living room. And come series three you’ll be able to go on the Internet and click a button to make the ceiling rain piss, while the ejection process will consist of effigy-burning and lethal injection.
The Weakest Link
was a huge success, thanks to the simple device of letting Anne Robinson tell the contestants they were rubbish and stupid. Trouble is, they weren’t rubbish and stupid – the questions were often genuinely tricky. What we really want is a quiz show in which authentic dimwits have their efforts mercilessly pilloried – a version of
Family Fortunes
in which millions of viewers can phone a special number to collectively heckle the idiocy of everyone participating, with the resulting cacophonic abuse relayed live in the studio. Or maybe just an edition of
Wheel of Fortune
where John Leslie finally snaps and cracks a simpleton in the face with a broom.
After months of smirking foreplay, life-wrecking pub quiz
Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire
?
finally achieved climax, awarding its maximum payout to an upper-class woman who everyone agreed didn’t really deserve it (she’s already spent the proceeds on a mechanised android horse that fires chillum-seeking missiles at hunt saboteurs and a pair of solid-gold wellies for the next Countryside
March). Of course, now the magic figure’s actually been handed over, the stakes no longer seem so unattainably impressive. Don’t be surprised if it transforms into ‘Who Wants to Win Two Million Pounds and Some Shoes and a Kite?’
And now, a quick break for a word about adverts, and in particular the Year’s Most Baffling Commercial: the AA insurance ad, in which a woman who has organised a policy via the AA website bickers with her petty, sulking husband. There’s no punchline and no love-you-really resolution; either I’m missing something, or it’s actively intended to make you associate AA insurance with loveless, sniping relationships. Still, at least neither of them tries to scare the viewer into obeying, unlike the terrifying angry money-throwing man in the Direct Line Home Insurance commercials, who’ll make an excellent alternative Bond villain one day.
Irritating phenomenon of the year was, of course, the Budweiser ‘whassup’ ads; the initial, mildly amusing lo-fi opening ‘episode’ soon turned out to be merely the opening salvo in a cynical pre-mapped campaign designed to bully its catchphrase into the mouths and minds of imbeciles nationwide.
If you – yes,
you
– greeted a friend with ‘whassup’ just once – yes,
once
– then congratulations: you’re an inexcusable dunce. Please make the most of the festive season by drinking yourself to death (but don’t pick Budweiser; it’ll make you fat and take far too long).
Welcome back to part two. Now, if there’s a particular genre that really took off during 2000, it’s the iconic retrospective clip show. All year long the schedules heaved beneath the collective weight of thousands of tiny footage blips jostling for position alongside patronising soundbites from Paul Ross (shtick: blokey enthusiasm), Stuart Maconie (shtick: sarcastic nit-picker), Phil Jupitus (shtick: scripted one-liners) and if you were really unlucky, ‘entertainment journalist’ Rick Sky (shtick: looking like he’d been shaken awake in a shop doorway and ordered to enter a Malcolm McLaren lookalike competition).
What with
I Love the Seventies
(BBC2),
100 Greatest Moments
from TV Hell
(C4),
It Shouldn’t Happen to a Chat Show Host
(ITV),
The TV Years
(Sky One),
Top Ten
(C4), the completely useless
Smash
(ITV) and countless theme-night ‘celebrations’ of everything from David Frost to Morphy Richards (probably), trying to watch a single channel felt more like flicking through 600 variations on UK Gold in a green room full of sneering B-list celebrities, rendered even more depressing by the knowledge that in 20 years’ time you’ll be tuning into watch Ant and Dec’s sniggering offspring introduce archive footage of Paul Ross discussing archive footage of
fingerbobs
.
So was there anything worth watching? Of course there was, notable examples being
Black Books, The Sopranos, Jam, Louis
Theroux’s Weird Weekends
and, of course,
Renegade
, the abysmal 80s throwback action series which looks like a cross between a Patrick Swayze movie and a Jon Bon Jovi video and goes out on ITV at about 3 a.m. or whenever you’re least expecting it.
Now, let’s wave goodbye to grumpy old 2000 and welcome the arrival of a sunny, smiling 2001. We could all do with a laugh, so look forward to Simon Munnery’s
Attention, Scum
(BBC2) and with any luck, a big-budget Jerry Sadowitz Channel Five vehicle that’ll make up for
The Jerry Atrick Show
being shot on tuppence.
That’s it. Now run along and enjoy yourselves. Oh, and if you only picked this up to watch while digesting your Christmas lunch, then tough: they’re showing
Octopussy
(ITV).
PART TWO 2001
In which Simon Cowell makes his debut
, Jim Davidson’s
Generation Game
makes a poor impression
, and
Touch the
Truck
heralds a new golden age of television
.
Got Sky digital? Or an ON Digital box? Yes? Great! Quick! Turn to Discovery Wings – the exciting digital channel dedicated solely to aviation documentaries – you might just get there in time to catch
Flight Deck: DC9-41
.
And hoo-boy, it shurrr does sound like a treat: according to the listings it’s an in-depth look at the flight deck of the DC-9 and the MD-80 aircraft. For a whole half-hour! Here’s hoping they show us which button makes the thingy flap do that flappy thing.
Naturally, there’s stiff competition from the other digital stations: why, at any moment you could tickle the remote and watch Yvette Fielding doling out DIY tips in
Simply DIY
(Granada Breeze), Alan Coxon preparing aubergine fritters in
Coxon’s Kitchen College
(Carlton Food Network), or Paul Coia sitting in a trough full of urine, rolling marbles down the inside of a scaffolding pole in ‘Roly-Poly Piddlebox Paul’ (Distraction Network).
Of course that Paul Coia vehicle was a figment of my imagination. But you knew that anyway – it was the only one that sounded remotely interesting. Question is, who’s watching the other programmes? Answer: everyone with a digibox – but only for a nanosecond, as they flutter from station to station, grazing acres of vacuum television in search of a watchable programme that somehow never arrives.
Where are they, these elusive nuggets of must-see TV? Somehow they’re never around when you need them. And even when they are, you just can’t latch on. Take tonight’s schedules; at 6.30 p.m. there’s the first-ever episode of
Rising Damp
on Granada Plus. Should be interesting, but I’ll watch for five minutes before my trigger finger twitches – 6.30 in the evening is too early to settle down to a single channel for a whole half-hour, and besides, aren’t they showing that Bill Murray comedy which doesn’t sound very good, but you might want to watch anyway, on one of the movie channels at the same time? (Yes:
The Man Who Knew Too Little
, Sky MovieMax.)
Of course, that’s no solution. Lingering at the back of my mind is
Hundreds of channels in crystal-clear digivision, and I can only procrastinate about the stuff I want to see, even while I’m seeing it. The one thing I would stay put for is a welcome repeat of
It’s Garry
Shandlings’s Show
on the Paramount Comedy Channel – but that’s on at 3 a. m., and I’m not that carefree nocturnal scamp I used to be. I need pre-midnight dazzlement.
So I slump there, static, staring, prodding, fritzing one image onto the next. An MTV video ends and an advert begins: a soft-metal compilation with a leather-clad catwoman pirouetting through a warehouse of fire and chains. At one minute long, it’s too much to bear. Fetch the remote and enter freefall. There goes
Knots
Landing
. There’s a man grilling tuna. She’s pretty. Don’t want to buy one of those. That is Keith Barron. Not
Fargo
again. Phonebox vandalism is a sport? Couldn’t eat a whole Poirot. Didn’t he used to be Kelly Monteith?
And so on and so on, until the programmes I contemplated have ended unseen, and I feel so empty inside you could screw a handle to my back and use me as a cupboard.
How long before my remote has a ‘random play’ feature that automatically carousels its way through every channel at a rate I can barely withstand? Or, if it’s truly attempting to mimic my viewing habits, repeatedly fiddles with the widescreen settings in an obsessive bid to fill as much of the screen as possible without rendering everything hopelessly horizontally elongated (am I the only person in the country who can’t watch 14:9 ratio broadcasts on a 16:9 screen without feeling drunk or irritable?).
Fuck progress. There’s too much choice and I’m sick of it. Take the extra channels away. Just leave me the regulation five.
And smash that remote while you’re at it. Let me stand up and prod when I want to flip sides. My muscles are turning to limp
strips of tripe and according to the Health Channel I must work out or die.
Fame! They want to live for ever!
Who? Why, the glory-chasing wannabes of
Popstars
(ITV), of course – ITV’s prime-time approximation of
Making the Band
, ‘the boy band genesis’ documentary Channel 4 used to air on Sunday lunchtime; the show about which I said the following back in November: ‘Note to anyone working on a British version of
Making
the Band
: stop what you’re doing right now. Just put your hands down and walk away. Please. Or there’ll be an uprising, and we’re talking heads-on-poles.’
And did they listen? No. The arrogance!
Still it’s here now, so we might as well get used to the idea, which is this: a trio of talent scouts tour the country auditioning an endless procession of potential teenage pop icons, slowly whittling them down from 16 billion amateur shriekers to five polished automatons, while we sit on the sofa enjoying the inevitable humiliation that occurs en route.
Two initial impressions. First: tragically, this is nowhere as hideous as
Making the Band
. Yet.
MTB centred exclusively on a dizzyingly hateful boy band full of preening Yank jockboys with names like Eric and Brett and Shunt and Testosterone Zitpop Jr.
Popstars
is packed with UK multiplex livestock rather than US mallrat scum. Plus it’s got girls in it. The final line-up is likely to consist of fresh-faced interchangeables called Sarah, Sandra, Lorraine, Simon and Tom, and it’s going to be far harder to get wound up by them, in the same way that getting annoyed by S Club 7 is a bit like waving your fist at a Lakeland Plastics catalogue.
Second, and more worryingly, some of the participants show signs of being genuinely likeable – such as Claire, the uncompromising chunky Scot with the powerful voice. In order to enjoy
Popstars
, the viewer should ignore any glimmer of congeniality
emanating from a contestant at all costs. Concentrate on Darius, the slick-haired beanpole who manages to combine inarguably strong vocals with a nauseating overconfidence that makes you want to tattoo an indelible ‘kick me’ sign on his back, so that one day, years from now, a disaffected orderly in an old folks’ home will spot it during bath time and plant their foot so far up his arse it’ll get jammed between his vertebrae.
