The Hell of It All (19 page)

By contrast, the new
Galactica
nonchalantly pisses out one state-of-the-art FX sequence after another, making it look easy. Its space battles are immense, densely populated affairs that often veer into psychedelic complexity. Yet the show offers them up with a shrug because the dogfights are little more than pleasant distractions; it’s far more concerned with pursuing its complex allegorical storyline.

And said storyline is so complex and so allegorical, there’s hardly any point in trying to sketch an explanation for newcomers, mainly because I don’t really understand it myself. There are humans and Cylons, see. The Cylons are these sort of robot things that look like people, and they’re the bad guys, except sometimes they’re not.

The two sides are at war, with the Cylons being a bit like the terrorists and the humans being a bit like the Americans, except sometimes it’s the other way round. Oh, and it’s essentially a religious war because the humans believe in lots of old-school multiple gods, like the ancient Egyptians (who they may or may not be closely related to), while the Cylons believe in ‘the one true God’, who presumably has a microchip for a face and sits on a big throne of pixels in the sky.

In other words: if you haven’t watched the show before but fancy tuning in this week, don’t bother. It’ll make less sense than a wool piano. Go back to the start on DVD first. It’s well worth it, although you’ll have to adjust your filter in order to overlook some glaring drawbacks: half the cast look like underwear models, there’s a lot of
gung-ho
Top Gun
bullshit, and it often takes itself so insanely seriously you start wishing someone would bend over and blow off in a Cylon’s face or something just to lighten the mood.

Regular viewers, meanwhile, will be pleased to know that as season four opens, it’s business as usual, i.e. moody and complicated. All your favourite characters are present and correct. The deeply conflicted Colonel Tigh stands on the deck hammily swivelling his one good eye around like a tortoise impersonating a pirate, while pineapple-faced Admiral Adama stands alongside emanating one gruff, depressive sigh after another. And my favourite character – sweaty, panicking, Withnail-look-and-sound-alike Dr Gaius Baltar – is still getting space-pussy thrown at him by the bucketload for no apparent reason: now a reluctant guru, he’s been whisked off and hidden away in a sort of Temple of Quim, full of lithe young women worshipping his every pube.

Overall, it seems just as preposterous, glum and strangely compelling as ever, so hooray. This being the last season, they’re presumably going to reach Earth in the final episode and live unhappily ever after, squinting suspiciously at each other until the end of time.

No, I don’t get it either. Why fire Simon? Why? Why? Why, Sir Alan, why? You could carve the reasons directly on to my mind’s eye and I still wouldn’t understand. Why? Why? Why?

By some measure the most likable, competent candidate in
The
Apprentice
, Simon was inexplicably hoofed out this week, in perhaps the most dispiriting miscarriage of justice since the trial of the Birmingham Six. I’m writing this on Tuesday, the morning before the broadcast, and can only imagine the nationwide outpouring of indignant fury that accompanied his sacking. The rest of Europe probably stopped what it was doing and looked round to see where all the yelling was coming from. Bet you could hear the shouts on the moon.

It was the final proof that the show is a SHOW first and foremost, not a test of business acumen. Even so, it may prove too audacious a narrative twist for the audience to bear. Killing the hero in week three? Jesus.

The Apprentice
traditionally engages in a little sleight of hand during its opening weeks, hiding the eventual winner somewhere at the back, letting them slip past unnoticed until somewhere around the final three episodes where they suddenly transform into a serious contender. That’s what’s happened with the previous three winners, all of whom were ‘the quiet one’ in their respective packs. Since the victors are essentially boring, the show instead concentrates on villains and clowns – yer Katie Hopkinses and Syed Ahmeds.

But this year, there seems to be a surfeit of shitbags – not one central baddie, but three: Jenny, Claire and Alex. All three employ the same basic tactic: blame and belittle your opponent at every turn.

Jenny was the first to emerge from the undergrowth, pummelling the hapless Lucinda into a blubbering heap with her monotone cosh of a voice. There’s a terrifying lack of emotion to Jenny at the best of times, but it really comes to the fore when she’s dishing out a bollocking. She becomes possessed by the spirit of nothing at all. The light in her eyes goes out. Her elocution flat-lines. It’s like being nagged by a Sat Nav. If you ever wondered what it’ll be like when the machines rise up and take over, look no further. Forget images of robot warriors thrashing us with electric whips; it’ll be an army of Jennys slowly talking us to death.

Claire, for her part, is essentially Ruth Badger gone wrong. Apparently convinced she’s a bastion of straight-talking common sense, she instead comes across as a huffing, eye-rolling bully. It’s easy to picture her standing up to give her two cents’ worth in the audience of
The Jeremy Kyle Show
, which is surely reason enough not to employ her.

And rounding out the bastard pack, my least favourite of all: Alex, who I’ve disliked intensely since week one. If the final edits are anything to go by, Alex is an objectionable, buck-passing,
jumped-up, passive-aggressive, know-it-all streak of piss with a short fuse, a sour mouth, and a petty, needling, finger-pointing demeanour. Unless you’re a woman, of course, in which case he’s a blameless dreamboat. Every girl I know swoons like all the oxygen’s vanished the moment he dribbles onscreen, which only serves to make him even more irritating. I want to run in front of them clapping my hands and clicking my fingers, like a man trying to prevent the invasion of the bodysnatchers. Can’t you see, girls? Can’t you see? He’s tricking you with his beauty! Wake up! See through the matrix! He’s a bastard! Stop batting your eyelashes like that! That’s how he feeds! Stop feeding him! Stop it!

Anyway, the sheer amount of bad feeling from these three threatens to unbalance the show as a whole. Who are we supposed to like, exactly? My current favourites are posho Raef and weepo Lucinda; the former because he’s an affable arse, and the latter because the girls keep kicking her around like a rag doll and I’m a sucker for underdogs.

They’ll do. But Simon was my first choice. Why? Why Sir Alan? Why?

I haven’t been stabbed in the eyes recently, but I’ve got a fair idea how it might feel thanks to some of the weekend’s early evening entertainment. There’s been a spate of programmes of late which seek to disguise their inherent ordinariness by distracting you with set designs apparently based on the climactic scenes of
Close
Encounters of the Third Kind
. Neon strips, sweeping floodlights, brightly coloured bulbs – it’s like being smashed in the face with a mobile disco.

Take
The Kids Are All Right
, a gameshow which has absolutely nothing in common with Sky’s
Are You Smarter than a 10-Year-Old?
aside from a near-identical premise. At heart it’s a cutesy-poo bit of fluff, in which fully grown adults pit their wits against a team of cleverclogs kiddywinks. Twenty years ago it would’ve been a daytime
show hosted by Michael Aspel, with a beige set and a title sequence backed by simpering acoustic guitar music. This being the cold, hard 21st century however, it looks and feels like a nighttime SWAT raid on a robot factory.

The host is
Torchwood
and
I’d Do Anything
star John Barrowman, a man so insanely ubiquitous he’s rapidly becoming the TV equivalent of desktop wallpaper. To ensure you notice him, Barrowman spends most of
The Kids Are All Right
bellowing at the top of his voice. And he’s the quietest thing on the show. Thumping great sound effects punctuate every onscreen decision. The camera swings in and out. Gaudy graphics whizz past at dizzying speed. You can only broadcast this sort of thing on a Saturday evening. Put it out in the morning and you’d kill people.

There’s even a round where John Barrowman shouts, ‘It’s time for INFORMAAAATION OVERLOOOOAAAAAADDDD!!!!!’ and we’re treated to a nonsensical three-minute montage of archive footage, unrelated bursts of dialogue, flashing words, and cut-out photographs of ice-cream cones spinning around the screen. Ostensibly it’s part of a memory test, but that’s clearly a cover story. I’ve seen
The Ipcress File
. I know a psychedelic brainwashing technique when I see one.

Apart from the visuals, the funniest thing about
Kids
… is that the format requires Barrowman to make repeated reference to adults beating children. At one point he said something like, ‘OK, remember: beat all six kids and you win pounds 20,000.’ Blind viewers who aren’t paying attention must think civilised society has collapsed completely.

Speaking of beatings, the following night ITV treats us to the clunkily titled
Beat the Star
, which dares to couple an even noisier set with an even more mundane set of activities. The premise: each week a member of the public has to conquer a famous sports-person in a series of games. Woo hoo. Last week, it was a policeman versus Amir Khan. Round one: who can hammer nails into a plank the quickest? Remember: if they bend, it doesn’t count! This proved so exhilarating, the audience screamed and shouted throughout, just like the terrified passengers from
Snakes on a
Plane
. Later on, Khan and the copper went head-to-head in a cow-milking contest. There was also a round where they had to look at a scrambled photo and guess which famous person it represented. Photo number two was Alistair Darling. This was exciting. And in between each round, the set exploded in a cornea-skewering frenzy of searchlights, neon, and Vernon Kay’s nuclear-white teeth.

Beat the Star
is about 75 minutes long, incidentally.

Just to reiterate: 75 minutes.

Are you clear about that? Good. Tomorrow night it’s a fireman versus Darren Gough. With any luck there’ll be a round where they have to see who can hang a dessert spoon off the end of their nose the longest. Or just a quick game of pass the parcel. Either way, it’s sure to be an unforgettable thrill ride, or at least resemble one thanks to the near-death-experience whirlwind of flashing lights that’s bound to accompany it. Buy a glow stick, neck a few pills, and you can join in at home – provided you’re not brainwashed into vegetative oblivion first.

Is it just me, or should the current series of
The Apprentice
come packaged with its own laughter track? Last week’s edition in which we bade farewell to Kevin, the bizarrely self-assured Frank Spencer/Daffyd hybrid, was the funniest, most sustained work of comedy I’ve seen in months. I’m still not quite convinced it was real. The whole thing felt like pure mockumentary.

Poor Kevin. Poor boy-faced Kevin and his daft bloody gob. I watched the episode with a friend of mine and each time he appeared onscreen she guffawed and said ‘he really is a twerp’. And sadly she was right. A twerp. Judging by the heavily edited, skilfully packaged evidence, there’s no better word to describe him. And it’s a term of abuse that deserves a revival. It’s fun to say. Try it. Twerp. Twerp twerp twerp. Bring back twerping, say I.

Anyway. Charged with the task of inventing a new ‘special occasion’ designed to shift their own range of greetings cards, Kevin’s team plumped for National Send A Sanctimonious, Hectoring And
Ultimately Wasteful Card To Show How Concerned You’re Pretending To Be About The Environment Day – a notion as dumb as it was oxymoronic, as it was dumb again as it was rubbish. Why not launch a range of diet books encased in a three-inch chocolate shell, you dum-dums? Every single member of his team deserves firing for not pointing out the obvious contradiction at its heart (with the exception of Sara, who was picked on throughout the task, partly for being much smarter than the others but mainly because the regular whipping boy, Lucinda, happened to be on the other team this week).

The environmental greetings card ‘concept’ sprang from the addled mind of the increasingly nightmarish Jenny, a woman so pig-headed she’s probably got a curly tail at the back of her skull. Jenny has managed to achieve the impossible by making Katie Hopkins (last year’s villain) seem warm-hearted and gregarious, albeit only in retrospect. You could imagine having a drunken laugh on a boating holiday with Katie Hopkins, chuckling as you negotiate a lock in the dark. Whereas, after 28 minutes on a barge with Jenny, you’d leap ashore and dash your own brains out against the nearest tree, just to be rid of that droning self-assured station announcer’s voice, offering nothing but relentless criticism disguised as mission statements. There just doesn’t seem to be any humanity there, goddammit. Did you see her attempt at a welcoming smile? It was like watching a horse climb a ladder. It wasn’t natural. It didn’t go.

My pet hate, the dreamboat tosspot Alex, was disappointingly quiet for the duration of the episode. His input largely consisted of repeatedly practising his nervous lip-pursing tic, which he’s developing into quite a piece of performance art. Whenever he spots something bad looming, he anxiously sucks and clenches his lips until his mouth starts to resemble a cat’s arse.

Before long, project leader Kevin was in the boardroom, swallowing and gulping like Churchill the nodding dog trying to bluff his way through a police interview as Sir Alan dished out the kind of obligatory monstering he can probably now do in his sleep, while Nick Hewer sat beside him, peering so hard you could almost
hear his scalp straining under the pressure. Sir Alan, incidentally, is looking pretty dapper this year. I’m not making it up: go and find a repeat of one of the earlier series and see the change for yourself. He used to look like a water buffalo straining to shit in a lake. Now he’s Russell Crowe. He’s clearly lost weight and may well be working out (perhaps by lugging box after box of unsold Em@iler phones into an almighty skip). Perhaps he’s been on
Ten Years
Younger
. However he’s done it, for the first time in
Apprentice
history, he’s now better-looking than most of the contestants.