The Hell of It All (39 page)

That’s the full extent of the format: Heston researches and cooks something absolutely psychotic, then serves it to a table full of celebrity guests (fittingly, a weird selection, encompassing Richard Bacon and Rageh Omaar). It’s like a special edition of
Come Dine
With Me
hosted by the unhinged artisan murderer from the movie
Se7en
.

Each week there’s a vague overall historical theme (this week, the Victorian era), but that’s really only a springboard to inspire Heston to do something daft and usually quite frightening. And he really does go above and beyond in his quest to create mad food; at times it borders on insane ritualistic behaviour. At one point this week, he cheerfully boils a cow’s head in a pan, reduces it to a concentrated stock, then freezes the resulting fluid into the shape of a fob watch before serving it to his guests in a tea cup. He also deep-fries a mealworm and injects it with mayonnaise.

And then there’s the dildos. For dessert, Heston decides to serve an outsized jelly with terrifying sexual overtones, which means spending an afternoon experimenting with gelatine and vibrators in a Hoxton sex shop. The jelly itself contains absinthe. Rather than just pouring a load in, he first travels to France to have a drinking contest with an absinthe expert, to discover whether the drink will,
as rumoured, induce visions. Some way into the boozing session he looks confused and turns to camera.

‘I’ve got no hallucinations yet,’ he says unsurely, ‘but I always think bananas taste better with three-legged cows in a vegetable shop.’ I had to rewind and check three times: that’s what he says, word for word, with no further explanation offered. Shortly afterwards he announces he can’t drink any more and goes to bed.

This really is one of the most creative shows I’ve seen in quite a while; not in the construction of the programme itself (which takes the familiar ‘mission’ format to provide a fairly spurious narrative), but in Blumenthal’s inventive craziness. It’s basically a bloke deliberately dicking around to extreme effect for an hour, dabbling in a weird form of art, seeing how far he can go. Halfway through, I realised why this was so refreshing: you very rarely see such genuinely ingenious and imaginative processes being followed this clearly on TV. Each course Blumenthal serves is like an edible
Python
sketch: meticulously constructed and very, very silly.

There’s absolutely no need for this show to exist, or for old Mad Specs the Chef and his helpers to put so much effort into it. But it does, and they do. It’s daft and great. Hooray for this.

The digital station FX punches above its weight in terms of topnotch TV series.
The Wire. Generation Kill. Dexter. Breaking Bad
. All of them received their first showing over here on Sky channel 164. Well now it’s got
The Listener
to add to that list. Just to bring down the average.

The Listener
isn’t a very good example of a high-quality American import. Mainly because it’s Canadian, but more importantly because it’s rubbish. In fact even the title is rubbish. You know why it’s called
The Listener
? Because the main character listens to things.

OK, so they’re not common-or-garden things. He listens to people’s thoughts. He’s telepathic, just like the chubby Keanu Reeves-lookalike policeman in
Heroes
. That’s actually a fairly interesting
premise, so why pick the most boring title imaginable? It’s like creating a Superman series and calling it
The Flyer
.

Anyway, the Listener himself is a paramedic called Toby. And this is the next disappointment; he’s a massive puss. He looks like a cross between Frodo Baggins and the mono-browed teenage pie-full-of-twat who used to star in the 1989 Yellow Pages commercial about the kid who needed a French polisher to fix a scratch on a coffee table following an early example of a Skins party in his parents’ house. Apparently Toby’s been a telepath since birth, which is odd, because each time he hears a thought dribbling out of someone’s skull he pulls a confused face, as though it’s never happened before. I call it a ‘confused face’: actually he just looks gormless, as if he’s about to start going ‘buhhhhh’ and bumping into the scenery. It’s like he’s trying to impersonate a stupid dog being amazed by its own bowel movements.

His powers aren’t even particularly impressive. For one thing, he can’t hear everything, only just enough stuff for the writers to be able to move the plot along a few notches. In the first episode, he’s trying to find out where a bad guy has hidden a kidnapped woman and her kiddywink, yet despite standing RIGHT NEXT TO HIM several times, he doesn’t pick up anything, thereby forcing him to break into said bad guy’s house later to look for clues. For all the good his powers do him, he might as well be pulling fortune cookie predictions from his arse and following their instructions to the letter. That would pull in 20 times more viewers, even if they stuck to their literal-titling policy and called it The Adventures of Magic Bum Man.

Anyway, 99% of the stuff he does manage to hear (when the screenwriters let him) consists of useless trivia. At one point he hears his boss thinking, ‘Man, I’m grumpy when I don’t get to watch the wrestling’, so he decides to cheer him up by offering to lend him a WWF video. It really is that exciting.

And wait! It gets even worse than that. The writers can’t even decide exactly how his powers work, because sometimes he sees thoughts as well as hearing them. For instance, he ‘sees’ the bad kidnappy guy in a vision at one point, which is why he recognises
him when they cross paths later. That’s not listening! That’s looking! Why didn’t they call it The Looker-and-Listener? These people are idiots.

I could go on, because the questions keep mounting up. Why, in the dull romantic subplot, doesn’t the Listener just immediately know whether his girlfriend wants to continue their relationship or not? Why is the version of Toronto the Listener lives in so incredibly underpopulated that a whopping great 4x4 vehicle can crash in the middle of a central city street, and end up on its roof, on fire, without a single bystander looking on? Why does the whole thing feel like a bad cut-scene from a late-90s ‘interactive movie’ CD-ROM game? Why? Why? Why?

I doubt the Listener himself knows. The thought processes involved in creating this series must’ve been so horrendously unfocused that no matter how hard he strained, they’d just sound like a low fuzzy hum. Or, more accurately, an uninterrupted 55-minute raspberry.

The Apprentice
throws up many questions. Such as: what’s the plural of apprentice? Apprentii? Apprenticeese? Let’s go with the former. And now we’ve established that, what’s the correct collective noun for a group of Apprentii? A pillock of Apprentii? A wankel? A swagger?

Swagger it is. Right. Now we can proceed.

As this year’s swagger of Apprentii marched into view over the Millennium Bridge, I was struck by two things. Firstly by the way that during the initial stages when there are far too many of them to really focus on, they all fall into one of two categories: interchangeables and aliens. The interchangeables are nondescript, hovering around in the background as though auditioning for Nick and Margaret’s job, a bit like visual filler. Sometimes you’ll spot one in the boardroom and scratch your head trying to remember their name. But don’t be fooled: the series is always, always won by an interchangeable. They start developing names
and personalities somewhere around week five. Think of them as hatchlings.

The aliens, meanwhile, draw the eye. I was once told that the mark of a well-designed cartoon character is that they remain recognisable even in silhouette – think of Bart Simpson or Mickey Mouse. Some of this year’s Apprentii already fall into that category: there’s one physical characteristic or affected visual quirk that makes them stand out. Mona, for instance, has fascinating eyes: beautiful, but exactly the same as Nookie Bear’s (Google it if you don’t believe me). Howard is a genetic cross between previous winners Simon and Lee, albeit one with the downward gaping mouth of a depressed coelacanth moaning about all the damp weather they’ve been having underwater. Ben looks exactly like hitherto-undiscovered footage of Aidan Gillen (AKA Tommy Carcetti in
The
Wire
) playing a local businessman in an imaginary episode of
Emmerdale
from 1999. Even so, as I mention their names, chances are you won’t quite be able to recall who I’m talking about yet. There are just too many of them. It’s still just a swagger of Apprentii.

A youthful swagger at that. The cliché that you know you’re getting old when policemen start looking young applies even more strongly to Apprentii. Half of them dribble. One is seven years old. I keep expecting them to pull out a set of toy cars during the boardroom scenes and start making brrmm brrmm noises while Sir Alan’s trying to bollock them.

Speaking of Sir Alan, it’s heartening to see that these stormy financial times haven’t beaten an ounce of humility into him. Despite an ongoing makeover which sees him becoming physically leaner and slicker each year, his character remains constant: the level of unwarranted, snarling belligerence hasn’t dropped a single share point. Even though last week’s inaugural task was a fairly pedestrian car-washing challenge, he conducted the final showdown like a murder trial – not any old murder trial, but a gangland, kangaroo court,
Long Good Friday
sort of trial, the sort that takes place in an abandoned warehouse and ends with one of the defendants being hung upside down and having their knees sliced off with an angle grinder.

If he’s this angry during week one, with any luck by week six he’ll be throwing furniture around in a rage and grabbing candidates by their ties. And instead of sending the fired loser out of the room to meekly collect their suitcase, he’ll nod a small gesture in Nick’s direction and leave the room.

At this point Nick quietly taps a button under the desk (locking the doors), silently pulls on some tight leather gloves and advances slowly towards the victim, brandishing a syringe filled with a sinister clear liquid. The victim beats their fists against the exit to no avail, as Nick moves in, smirking coldly, moving ever closer, relentless as a Terminator. Close up on the glistening tip of the needle as it draws near. Cut to black. Tortured scream. Roll credits in silence.

This, my friends, is precisely the kind of entertainment we need during a recession.

Sorry for being away for weeks. I’ve had a pain in the neck, literally. Not just the neck, but the shoulder, elbow, fingers … you name it, it’s screwed. I’m told it’s probably a herniated C7 disc, and it’s a constant source of joy. Numbness, tingling, a ceaseless sharpening ache … it’s not agonising, more accumulatively infuriating; like sitting in a cinema with someone continually kicking the back of your seat. And you can’t get out of your chair.

Each day brings a revolving carousel of dispiriting symptoms, all of them apparently set on ‘shuffle’. On Monday the tingly numbness in my fingers might be a main concern. Tuesday may feature unrelenting shoulder pain. Enfeebling tricep weakness on Wednesday. And so on.

I bring this up not because I want your pity (well, maybe slightly), but because it’s the perfect metaphor for the current series of
The Apprentice
, in which the primary source of discomfort shifts with each episode.

A fortnight ago, for example, I decided Ben was the villain of the piece. Everything about him irritated me as much as someone tossing a handful of staples in my face. For starters, he displayed an
almost satirical level of self-confidence, claiming to the best at this and the champ at that and the King of the Galaxy and so on. He seemed to earnestly believe he had the ability to cleave entire universes in two using his mind alone, like Doctor Manhattan from
Watchmen
but markedly less blue and without a big pubeless dick swinging around like a loose sleeve, threatening to slap the entire front row in the face.

And if Ben’s manner alone wasn’t enough to earn him a poke in the mind’s eye, his silly head was there to take up the slack. What’s with the surprised eyebrows and the trim cartoon eyelashes? He looks like Top Cat with stubble. Or a He-Man figurine with the head of a six-year-old girl. Where’s his neck? Has he got a neck? His head seems to be growing straight out of his chest cavity, like an emergent conjoined twin suddenly gasping for your attention. Perhaps he’s got a second head sprouting from his arse, dribbling business-speak between each greasy fart and turd.

Anyway, that’s what I’d have said if you’d asked me about Ben a fortnight ago. But it seems a bit cruel and unnecessary now. He’s calmed down a tad, and besides, he’s only 22. Who isn’t a prick at 22? I certainly was.

No. The real enemy is clearly Philip, the 29-year-old former estate agent with the Durham accent. He was actually my favourite for a while. Not any more. He’s flared up. He’s gone horrible.

Philip seems to spend 98% of his screen time shouting his own opinions over anything anyone says. And if they’re a woman, he’ll shout twice as loud, for twice as long, like some previously unseen character from
Life on Mars
, only less amusing because he’s wearing a smart suit and some hair gel instead of a zany kipper tie. And boy does he love himself.

He looks like he throws himself roughly on to the bed each night, hungrily moving his hands all over his own body, trying to kiss himself deep in the mouth. If it were legal or even possible to do so, he’d probably marry himself, then conduct a long-term affair with himself behind himself’s back, eventually fathering nine children with himself, all of whom would walk and talk like him. And then he’d lock those mini-hims in a secret underground
dungeon to have his sick way with his selves, undetected, for decades.

If you asked Philip if he thought the world revolved around him, he’d blink and ask you what exactly a ‘world’ was, then go back to staring in the mirror, drooling and smiling and pointing and saying ‘Philllllippp, Philllllipppp’ over and over again like a mantra.