The Hell of It All (21 page)

And then it’s over. Justice prevails – provided you overlook the several billion troubling aspects to the show. The overpowering whiff of entrapment, for one thing. The collusion between reporters, vigilante groups and police for another. And that ‘attractive young actress’ who greets them by the door: make no mistake, she’s hot. And at 18, she’s US legal. Presumably someone at
To
Catch a Predator
HQ sat down with a bunch of audition tapes and spooled through it, trying to find a sexy 18-year-old who could pass for 13. They’ll have stared at girl after girl, umming and ahhing over their chest sizes, until they found just the right one. And like I say, she’s hot. But if you fancy her, you’re a paedophile.

It’s a pity robot technology isn’t more advanced than it is, because the ultimate
To Catch a Predator
show could do away with the actress altogether. Instead, the men would be greeted by a convincing 17-year-old android, who’d instantly start having sex with them. But oh! Just before they reached climax, a hatch would open in the top of her head, and a robotic version of Chris Hansen’s face would emerge on a big bendy metal neck, barking accusations at them, and then the android’s vagina would snap shut, trapping the pervert in position, and the robot body would transform into a steel cage from which they couldn’t escape, and start delivering near-fatal electric shocks every five minutes to the delight of a self-righteous, audience, chanting Justice Prevails, Justice Prevails. Justice Prevails. Forever.

Just before
The Apprentice
shimmies to a conclusion, let’s go back – way back – all the way to last Wednesday, and the penultimate ‘job interview’ special. By now an
Apprentice
tradition, this is the episode that routinely sorts the wheat from the chaff. It’s also the point at which the show’s narrative gears start audibly crunching. Squint closely, and the notion that the series represents a genuine test of business skill is exposed as the preposterous gobbet of cockflob it is.

We know the drill for this episode by now. The candidates are grilled by some of Sir Alan’s business buddies, including Bordon Staryface and a stubbly Johnny Vegas type who looks like he’s just chucked a chip wrapper in the bottom drawer seconds before calling you into the room. Their job is to sit opposite the contestants pulling unimpressed faces. Having spent the previous 10 episodes making each candidate look like a twat tied to an arsehole, the programme suddenly performs an about-face. No one wants a bastard to win, so it must persuade the viewer that – hey! – there ain’t no bastards here. All sorts of previously hidden positive qualities are brought to the fore.

Take human cat puppet Helene. Since week one she’s been shown rolling her whopping great fist-sized eyes and lazily bullying Lucinda. But within minutes of the job interview starting, she’s asked about her hitherto-unmentioned troubled background and is instantly transformed into the plucky outsider who triumphs over adversity. She’s been in the background throughout each task; now it’s impossible not to root for her on some level. This is the Michelle Dewberry manoeuvre and – just to be clear – it’s the programme being devious, not Helene herself appealing for sympathy at the last minute. Each candidate will have been thoroughly vetted beforehand. The producers knew her heart-rending back story. They just hid it until now, because it makes for a good twist.

Ditto the white lies on Lee’s CV. His fibs about attending university for two years instead of four months could have been (and almost certainly were) detected at some point during the audition stage. If Sir Alan was genuinely solely interested in selecting the best candidate, it’d make sense to comb through each candidate’s CV in the first 10 minutes of the very first episode, quizzing them over any inconsistencies. But that’d make boring television. Far better to introduce a note of jeopardy for Lee at the 11th hour.

While we’re on the subject of Lee, there was a glaring example of the show unfairly setting him up to look like a prick the moment his interview kicked off, when Johnny Vegas asked him to impersonate a pterodactyl, then sneered at him for not taking the interview seriously as soon as he did so. What is this, Guantánamo Bay?
Why not really dick with his mind by asking him to take a seat, then kicking it out from under him and calling him a subservient seat-taking imbecile? Still, making Lee look a bit dumb is easy. Making the sour, defensive, prickly Alex seem likable is a trickier prospect, one even the magic of the edit suite couldn’t quite pull it off. Instead it banged on about how young and handsome he is, like it’s an audition for a daytime soap.

They have to accentuate the positive in Alex’s case because, like Helene, he’s a weaker candidate. Presumably they go positive on the weak ones and negative on the strong ones to make the final feel like less of a foregone conclusion. Claire, for instance, has been an obviously strong contender for weeks, and appeared to sail through her interviews. But that’s dull, so Sir Alan had to loudly voice doubts about whether she’s too gobby for him.

Anyway. The mechanism may be visible, but the machine itself works. It’s entertainment. I won’t be missing the climax, although I’m worried about the way the teams are split, because it raises the hideous prospect of either Alex or Helene winning – in which case they might as well have picked the winner at random by flipping a coin.

– Lee won, in the end. You know. Lee. LEE
.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning. Last week I watched, open-mouthed, a
Newsnight
piece on the spread of ‘Brain Gym’ in British schools. I’d read about Brain Gym before – a few years back, in Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science column for this newspaper – but seeing it in action really twisted my rage dial.

Brain Gym, y’see, is an ‘educational kinesiology’ programme designed to improve kiddywink performance. It’s essentially a series of simple exercises lumbered with names that make you want to steer a barbed-wire bus into its creator’s face. One manoeuvre, in which you massage the muscles round the jaw, is called the ‘energy yawn’. Another involves activating your ‘brain buttons’ by forming a ‘C’ shape with one hand and pressing it either side of the collarbone while simultaneously touching your stomach with the other hand.

Throughout the report I was grinding my teeth and shaking my head – a movement I call a ‘dismay churn’. Not because of the sickening cutesy-poo language, nor because I’m opposed to the nation’s kids being forced to exercise (make them box at gunpoint if you want) but because I care about the difference between fantasy and reality, both of which are great in isolation, but, like chalk and cheese or church and state, are best kept separate.

Confuse fantasy with reality and you might find yourself doing crazy things, like trying to wave hello to Ian Beale each time you see him on the telly, or buying homeopathic remedies – both of which are equally boneheaded pursuits. (Incidentally, if anyone disagrees with this assessment and wants to write in defending homeopathy, please address your letters to myself c/o the Kingdom of Narnia.)

Perhaps the Department for Children, Schools and Families confused fantasy with reality the day it endorsed Brain Gym. Because while Brain Gym’s coochy-coo exercises may well be fun or relaxing, what they’re definitely good at is increasing the flow of bullshit into children’s heads.

For instance, according to the Brain Gym teacher’s manual,
performing the ‘brain button’ exercise increases the flow of ‘electromagnetic energy’ and helps the brain send messages from the right hemisphere to the left. Brain Gym can also ‘connect the circuits of the brain’, ‘clear blockages’ and activate ‘emotional centering’. Other Brain Gym material contains the startling claim that ‘all liquids [other than water] are processed in the body as food, and do not serve the body’s water needs … processed foods do not contain water.’

All of which sounds like hooey to me. And also to the British Neuroscience Association, the Physiological Society and the charity Sense about Science, who have written to every local education authority in the land to complain about Brain Gym’s misrepresentation of, um, reality.

Wander round Brain Gym’s UK website for a few minutes. It’s a festival of pseudoscientific chuckles where impressive phrases such as ‘educational kinesiology’ and ‘sensorimotor program’ rub shoulders with bald admissions that ‘we are not yet at the stage where we have any scientific evidence for what happens in the brain through the use of Brain Gym’.

Look at the accredited practitioners of the art: top of their list of qualified Brain Gym ‘instructor/consultants’ is a woman who is apparently also a ‘chiropractor for humans and animals’. That’s nothing: I read tarot cards for fish.

And check out the linked bookshop, Body Balance Books. Alongside Brain Gym guides and wallcharts, it stocks titles such as
Awakening the Child Heart and Resonance Kinesiology
, which, apparently, ‘holds information on how to move forward with truth, without the overlays of people’s beliefs and ideas about what is best for themselves and others’. Huh?

If we mistrust the real world so much that we’re prepared to fill the next generation’s heads with a load of gibbering crap about ‘brain buttons’, why stop there? Why not spice up maths by telling kids the number five was born in Greece and invented biscuits? Replace history lessons with screenings of the
Star Wars
trilogy? Teach them how to whistle in French? Let’s just issue the kids with blinkers.

Because we, the adults, don’t just gleefully pull the wool over our own eyes – we knit permanent blindfolds. We’ve decided we hate facts. Hate, hate, hate them. Everywhere you look, we’re down on our knees, gleefully lapping up neckful after neckful of steaming, cloddish bullshit in all its forms. From crackpot conspiracy theories to fairytale nutritional advice, from alternative medicine to energy yawns – we just can’t get enough of that musky, mudlike taste. Brain Gym is just one small tile in an immense and frightening mosaic of fantasy.

Still, that’s just my opinion. Lots of people clearly think Brain Gym is worthwhile, or they wouldn’t be prepared to pay through the nose for it. If you’re one of them, here’s an exciting new kinesiological exercise that should dramatically increase your self-awareness – and I’m giving it away free of charge. Ready? OK. Curl the fingers of your right hand inward, meeting the thumb to form a circle. Jerk it rhythmically up and down in front of your face. Repeat for six hours. Then piss off.

A few years back, during the run-up to the Nathan Barley TV series, my co-author Chris Morris and I briefly kicked around a storyline about an animated MP running for election. When I say ‘animated’, I mean literally animated. He was a cartoon – the political equivalent of Gorillaz – fashioned from state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery so that he could move and talk in real time, like Max Headroom. His speech would be provided on-the-fly by a professional cartoon voice artist working in conjunction with a team of political advisers and comedy writers, so he’d have an impish personality not dissimilar to the genie in Disney’s
Aladdin
. Debating against him would be impossible because he’d make outrageously goonish statements one minute and trot out cunning political platitudes the next. Because he wasn’t real, he’d never age, die, or be bogged down in scandal – and huge swathes of the population would vote for him just because they found him cool or fun or different.

Fast-forward to now. On 1 May London chooses its mayor, and
I’ve got a horrible feeling it might pick Boris Johnson for similar reasons. Johnson – or to give him his full name, Boris LOL!!!! what a legernd!! Johnson!!! – is a TV character loved by millions for his cheeky, bumbling persona. Unlike the cartoon MP, he’s magnetically prone to scandal, but this somehow only makes him more adorable each time. Tee hee! Boris has had an affair! Arf! Now he’s offended the whole of Liverpool! Crumbs! He used the word ‘picaninnies’! Yuk yuk! He’s been caught on tape agreeing to give the address of a reporter to a friend who wants him beaten up! Ho ho! Look at his funny blond hair! HA HA BORIS LOL!!!! WHAT A LEGERND!!!!!!

If butterfingers Johnson gets in, it’ll clearly be a laugh riot from beginning to end, like a series of
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
in which Frank Spencer becomes mayor by mistake. Just picture him on live TV, appealing for calm after a terrorist bombing – the scope for chuckles is almost limitless.

Assisting Boris in his run, the London
Evening Standard
is running an openly hostile anti-Livingstone campaign, which means every other page carries a muckraking down-with-Ken piece from crusading journalist Andrew Gilligan, played by Blinky, the three-eyed fish from
The Simpsons
, in his byline photo. All the articles blend into one after a while, but their central implication is that Ken’s a boozy egomaniac surrounded by a corrupt circus of cronies, so you might as well vote for a rightwing comedy pillock instead. You know, him off the telly. With the blond hair. LOL!!!! WHAT A LEGERND!!!!!

Now, even if the
Standard
photographs Ken carving a swastika into a dormouse’s back, I’ll vote for him for the following reasons:

1. I’m genetically predisposed to hate the Tories. It’s my default, hard-wired position. If Boris wins, their simpering pudge-faced smuggery is going to be unbearable. Picture the expression Piers Morgan makes when he’s especially pleased with himself, then multiply it by 10 million, and imagine it looming overhead like a Death Star. That’s what it’s going be like. Therefore I don’t care who wins provided Johnson loses, and loses hard, preferably in close-up, on the telly.

2. Ken’s other main rival is solid-but-dull Lib Dem candidate Brian Paddick. He probably deserves a shot, but as he’s not going to win, voting for him would be a waste of a perfectly good X, which might otherwise be used to pinpoint buried treasure, indicate affection, or mark a plague victim’s door.