The Hell of It All (15 page)

All things considered, he took his nationwide humiliation rather well; vowed to learn from it politically, and when that didn’t pan out, jumped ship and went into broadcasting, where he’s subsequently
carved a niche as a pundit (
This Week
), occasional stunt journalist (getting CS-gassed for
Horizon
) and political historian.

Fair enough – although this particular show is rather meandering, unfocused and not nearly revelatory enough to justify the running time. Oddly – and here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write – there’s not enough Margaret Thatcher. Still, if you want to gawp at a parade of wobbling old Tory faces and remember how much you despised them, here’s your chance. Throw spitballs. Knock yourself out.

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Cutting Edge: Phone
Rage
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Hello? It’s me. Yes. I was going to talk about this week’s
Cutting
Edge
. A journey into the dark heart of the call centre that somehow manages to sum up everything that’s wrong with our world. It starts by introducing us to three hideously ugly average schmoes, each of whom has been driven insane by call centres. They whinge to camera for a bit, then we see them in action: being held in a queue, arguing with the poor sod on the other end, sighing with despair, and so on. It’s a joyless existence, made all the more depressing because it’s so easy to relate to.

One of them sorrowfully describes how he sometimes finds himself venting his anger by shouting at the hapless lackey at the other
end, even though he knows it’s pointless, and that by doing so he’s simply contributing to what he calls ‘the cyclical wheel of hate’.

Then the cameras venture inside a call centre – for Powergen – and we discover the staff are so used to being shouted at, they scarcely even notice any more. Half their job seems to consist of simply letting the customer scream for a bit to blow off steam. You roar yourself purple; they sit and soak it up, like an anger sponge. The cyclical wheel of hate is revolving in a vacuum.

Then we visit a different kind of call centre: a smiley one belonging to First Direct. The thinking here is that the happier the staff, the happier the customer. So the staff are forced to be happy.

They hold sumo wrestling tournaments in paddling pools full of foam balls. They have to form teams with wacky names (like pub quiz teams) and attach kerrrazy photos of themselves to the ‘team wall’. The boss says things like ‘Hey, who wants to win a Creme Egg? First one to get the phrase “that’s tremendous” into their next call…’

And they’re coached in ‘Above the Line Language’, so they only ever say things like ‘I’d love to’ or ‘I’d be happy to’ instead of ‘I must’.

It’s the most terrifying, awful place I’ve ever seen, and it’s the size of the National Exhibition Centre, for Christ’s sake. It’s madness. Any sane person working there would pray daily for a massacre. As the gunmen burst in, firing indiscriminately, the first genuine smile in six months would spread wide across your face, and you’d leap, giggling, into the line of fire.

And just when you think things can’t get any more tear-jerking, we’re introduced to Mandisa, a black single mum in South Africa, who hopes her new call centre job should make ends meet. Thing is, it’s for a UK firm, so first she has to attend an ‘Accent Reduction’ course, which knocks all the fun out of her voice, so she won’t frighten the horses.

Then she’s given a crash course in British culture, which involves watching
The Full Monty
on DVD. Then she sits an exam. She passes! She’s excited! She goes to work, smiling broadly! And the British phone up. Yeah, us. And we sigh and we whine and we hang up and
shout at her. Her smile shrivels into oblivion. The cyclical wheel of hate turns again. And somehow you know it won’t ever, ever stop.

Of all the music in all the world, easy-listening pop is the very best kind there is. That’s why minicab drivers listen to nothing else. I’ve debated this with imbeciles who think the drivers are only listening to Heart or Magic or Smooth or whatever FM in the first place because they think that’s what their customers want to hear. Rubbish. It’s what the cabbies want. They’ve had hours on the road. They’ve tried all the other stations. This is the music that makes them happiest. Every single minicab driver in existence, regardless of age, background and position on the sex offenders’ register, winds up tuned to easy listening. All roads lead to Rome. Like I said, it’s the best music there is.

Now, a lot of this music is sneered at by rock aficionados, who’d rather we brushed our teeth to the uncompromising sound of British Sea Power and emptied our bums while listening to Devo on our iPod shuffles. We secretly want to hear Dolly Parton and Lionel Richie. But we can’t. They’re guilty pleasures.

That’s the idea behind sing-along special
Guilty Pleasures
. It’s a real curio. On the one hand, it features plenty of acts you don’t often see on ITV1, like the Magic Numbers. On the other, it feels precisely like any number of bog-standard karaoke talent contests of the sort we’ve been bombarded with for the past five years. Except it isn’t a talent contest: they’re just doing it for fun (and exposure of course, but fun definitely comes into it).

Of course, this being mainstream ITV, they’ve also felt the need to rub an extra bit of shit all over it by interrupting proceedings with talking-head contributions in which a galaxy of ITV stars, such as GMTV presenter Andrew Castle, babble about how we all had big hair and shoulderpads back in the 80s ha ha ha ha ha ha yes we did didn’t we ha ha HA HA HA.
Guilty Pleasures
deviser Sean Rowley also pops up in these segments, disguised as an Edwardian postman for some mad reason.

Just to underline its mainstream credentials, it’s presented by Fearne Cotton – a genetic splicing of the twins from last year’s
Big
Brother
and Beaker from the
Muppet Show
. I always feel vaguely sorry for her without ever knowing why.

Still, if you can mentally edit those sections out as you go, the show itself represents a chance for several non-ITV acts to showcase themselves on ITV, and that’s surely a Good Thing For ITV To Be Doing … like
Top of the Pops
with an old setlist. Except the moment it starts, confusion enters the building. The Feeling kick things off with a decent cover of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, a song approximately 200 times better than anything The Feeling have written themselves, and whose pleasure doesn’t strike me as particularly guilty.

It soon transpires that for the purposes of this programme, ‘guilty pleasure’ sometimes simply means ‘old song’. For instance, two-thirds of Supergrass close the show by covering Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ – again, there’s nothing ‘guilty’ about that particular track, unless you’re spectacularly uptight.

Worse, the acts themselves have roughly a 75% failure rate. KT Tunstall farts out an awful version of ‘The Voice’ by John Farnham. Craig David (looking a tad burly) has a feeble, watery take on Terence Trent D’Arby’s ‘If You Let Me Stay’. The aforementioned Magic Numbers utterly slaughter Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ ‘Islands in the Stream’ (a song I used to think was about ‘Ireland’s Industry’, incidentally). And Amy Macdonald sings ‘Sweet Caroline’ in a weird, low register that doesn’t suit her, the song, or anybody’s ears or mind.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor pulls off a reasonable ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, and that Supergrass closer isn’t bad, but overall, you’re left wishing that instead of watching these guilty pleasures performed live on the telly, you were enjoying them in their natural habitat: sitting in the back seat of a minicab at 3 a. m., listening to ‘Say You, Say Me’ by Lionel Richie dribbling through the stereo, as the driver skims you home.

Is it just me or is everything a sham? The real world doesn’t feel real any more, as though we’re separated from it by a thick layer of Perspex: we can see it, but can’t sense it. Perhaps it isn’t there.

Take the war. Not the Afghan war, not the ‘war on terror’, but the other one: Iraq. I call it a war, but really it’s a TV show – a long-running and depressing one that squats somewhere in the background, humming away to itself; a dark smear in the Technicolor entertainment mural. We know it’s happening – we catch glimpses of it happening – but we don’t feel it any more. It’s like a soap we don’t watch, but keep vaguely up to speed with by osmosis.

Even as it unfolds, we have to strain to remember it’s there. News stories about suicide bombers bringing death to Baghdad markets are as familiar as adverts for dog food. Our bored brains filter them out. Novelty and sensation – that’s what our minds crave. Iraq just offers more of the same: death after death after death after death, until each death becomes nothing more than a dull pulse on a soundtrack; the throb of a neighbour’s washing machine we learned to filter out months ago; the invisible ticking of a household clock. We’ll notice if it stops, but not before. The average response to the rash of programmes marking five years since the start of the war is likely to be: ‘Hey, is that still happening? Bummer.’

ITV1 are doing their bit with
Rageh Omaar: Iraq by Numbers
, which, should you even detect its existence, is a violently dispiriting ground-level look at the life of the average Iraqi civilian. Rageh Omaar, of course, is the ‘Scud Stud’ who became a minor celebrity back during the war’s earlier, more exciting episodes. Because he’s a celebrity, his name comes before that of the war in the programme’s title: someone’s decided you’re more likely to tune in if you see the words ‘Rageh Omaar’ in the EPG. Certainly worked on me.

In some ways, this feels like a comeback special: he left the BBC in 2006 to join Al-Jazeera’s English-language service, and the majority of viewers won’t have seen him since. So when he walks
onscreen it’s all, Ooh, it’s him – the bloke from that thing. Used to stand on the balcony with all the bombs going off behind him and all sorts. Shock and awe or whatever it was. I used to like him. Think I’ll watch this.

Which isn’t Omaar’s fault, of course. If he’s ‘using’ what celeb status he has, then he’s doing so simply to encourage us to pay fresh attention to an ongoing tragedy that’s grown too stale and too sad for us to even notice. To ease the viewer in gently, he pitches the show to us as a personal journey, not a stone-faced journalistic investigation. He meets one of the civilians who tore down Saddam’s statue. He revisits a hotel where one of his cameramen was killed. He tours the Green Zone with some US troops. And he goes in search of his old friends.

Trouble is, seeking out old friends requires him to travel abroad, because so many of them have fled the country in fear of their lives. In Syria, he’s reunited with one (his former driver), who was kidnapped and threatened. As his friend recounts his story, Omaar weeps on camera. Normally such a reaction would seem cynical and contrived: here, it feels justified and honest.

Interspersing each encounter are the numbers of the title: bald statistics served up as chilling graphics. Particularly striking is the figure regarding the total number of Iraqi dead – striking because it’s so huge, and so vague. It lies somewhere between 150,000 and 1 million.

Between 150,000 and a million. That leaves 850,000 people who may be dead or alive. We simply don’t know. They currently exist, or do not exist, within a cavernous margin of error. Our minds can’t process this degree of horror. No wonder we change the channel. No wonder nothing feels real.

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: an out-of-control French Cityboy has accidentally lost the Société Générale bank the grand sum of £3.7bn – a large amount by anyone’s standards. And how did he do it? By betting the wrong way, then trying to dig himself out of the hole by continuing to bet the wrong way, covering up the mess he made along the way using some cunning ninja-style inside knowledge of how the system’s ‘warning lights’ worked, which meant he was pissing money away undetected until the losses grew so huge they were visible from space.

Some analysts say the actions of this one poor panicking sod may have helped cause the stock market hoo-hah that kicked off last week: nice to know that even in today’s world of faceless global corporations, the little guy can still make a difference.

If it’s hard to imagine what £3.7bn looks like, it’s even harder to picture an absence of £3.7bn. Presumably it resembles a dark, swirling vortex, like a portal to another dimension in a supernatural thriller. All the money got sucked into it, and emerged … um … where? Where’s it gone? Is it lodged away somewhere to the side of the stock market, slightly to the left of the screen, where computers can’t get to it?

As you may have gathered, I don’t understand the stock market, because it’s so boring my brain refuses to get to grips with it. Say the word ‘economics’ and I reach for my pillow. But even I know enough to realise it’s largely an imaginary construct: abstract numbers given shape by wishful thinking. If the traders suddenly stop believing it’s healthy, millions of people lose their jobs. Maybe one day they’ll stop believing in it altogether; they’ll collectively blink and rub their eyes, and the entire global economy will vanish, like a monster under the bed that turns out never to have existed in the first place, or an optical illusion you’ve suddenly seen through. And on
News at Ten
that night they’ll say, ‘Business news now … and, er, there is no business news. It’s gone.’ At which point we’d better come up with some kind of replacement barter system, pronto. Let’s hope it’s not based on
sexual favours, or a simple trip to the supermarket’s going to be downright harrowing.