Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  I was appearing on BBC News 24 at around midnight so hardly anyone was watching – fortunate, considering most of the time I didn’t know what the hell I was going on about. Computer games were simple enough, but the moment I was asked to comment on anything else we entered extremely shaky ground. Knowing my pearls of ignorance were being spilt on live television exacerbated the situation: I still get the sweats when I recall the moment the host turned to ask whether I’d seen any evidence the Internet was having a thawing effect on Chinese society, and I responded by making a long, strangulated, non-committal ‘Mmmmmnnnnnuuuurrrmmm’ – the sound of my brain drying, live on air.

  Still, I came away having learned two valuable lessons: 1) never believe anything any ‘expert’ says; and 2) whatever the appearance may be, any televised conversation is going to be about as unforced and natural as a chat between Lieutenant Columbo and a man with a blood-encrusted shovel in his toolshed.

  It’s surprising, then, that talk shows don’t go abysmally wrong more often. Just about every instance over the last twenty years in which they have done is covered in It Shouldn’t Happen to a Chat Show Host (ITV), a compilation of car-crash television which manages to entertain from beginning to end despite the presence of Gloria Hunniford (an achievement on a par with successfully climbing a spiral staircase with a dead horse strapped to your back).

  Ignore the regulation-dull talking-head soundbites; the archive footage is great. Watching talk shows derail themselves completely is immeasurably more interesting than sitting through successful ones, which tend to be as diverting as an automated platform announcement.

  Michael Aspel, so bland he probably poos boiled eggs, features heavily: for a man with a reputation as a steady albeit uninteresting hand, he’s been responsible for a surprising number of calamities. First, there’s the infamous appearance by an impossibly drunk Oliver Reed in which the bearded alco-sponge reeled around the set looking like he was about to start vomiting eels. Aspel describes it as ‘a great TV moment’, although ‘an unplanned and monumental embarrassment’ is nearer the mark.

  Still, were this a humiliation contest, his subsequent encounter with Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger would surely take first prize. Desperate to bag this all-star triumvirate, the producers agreed to their every demand. Unfortunately the three were hell-bent on turning the entire show into an extended commercial for Planet Hollywood, their newly founded chain of mediocre dunce-troughs.

  The result was mesmerising for all the wrong reasons: a trio of world-famous waxworks plastered head to toe in Planet Hollywood logos (Willis even had one painted on his chest) smirking openly while Aspel asked meaningless questions about burgers and cookery, at one point reduced to reading the menu out loud. He’d have retained more dignity if he’d dropped to his knees and fellated the lot of them, clapping his hands like a circus seal and playing the kazoo with his backside.

  Other highlights include Anne Bancroft drying completely for a 10-minute trial-by-awkwardness during a live edition of Wogan (all the fun of a slow-motion hanging), and the jaw-dropping moment Keith Chegwin unexpectedly confessed to alcoholism in the middle of a chirpy Richard and Judy chinwag. Anyone sheeplike enough to doubt Chegwin’s credentials as a genuine TV hero should be forced to watch this – he’s one of the most honest, couldn’t-give-a-monkey’s people on television.

  Concrete and Piss [4 November]

  If you like your drama gritty, uncompromising and guaranteed to depress, then boy oh boy are you in for a treat, because this week on Channel 4 there’s a major new series called ‘Concrete and Piss’, in which an unemployed alcoholic stands in a tower block stairwell on the Thatcher’s Legacy estate, mindlessly thrashing a mouldy old mattress with the ulcerated leg of his dead junkie son, pausing every three minutes to scream, swear, and receive violent blows to the face and neck from a hunchbacked loan shark.

  OK. Not really. But you have to admit it’s a brilliant title. Instead, there’s a new mini-series called Never, Never (C4), which fulfils pretty much every other criterion of ‘gritty, uncompromising’ drama you could think of. Let’s run through the recipe and check off the ingredients.

  First, and most important, do we have a bleak contemporary setting? Check: the action takes place on a grim London council estate that looks as though it was designed by a misanthropic concrete fetishist with a massive grudge and an even bigger migraine; a sprawling campus of despair that sucks all the hope out of everyone inside, then pisses it down the walls of the malfunctioning elevators. This is not The Vicar Of Dibley.

  How about some social comment? Check: the series centres on a cold-blooded salesman (John Simm) who makes his living coercing downtrodden inmates of said estate into buying expensive brand-name goods from a sinister company charging absurd rates of interest. Thanks to their undesirable postcode, the customers can’t get credit anywhere else – but their kids are demanding Phat Nikes and Pokemon play sets, and won’t stop screaming till they get them. The hapless parents sink into a mire of debt while the salesman cackles himself sick.

  Next: Casual violence? Check: a major character endures a vicious baseball bat attack within the first 25 minutes.

  Additional unpleasant, hand-wringing, gracious-me-isn’t-modern-society-going-tits-up touches? Check: immediately after the beating, the comatose victim is robbed of his shoes by a pair of opportunistic schoolkids (who could have scored bonus points for weeing in his face and laughing, but didn’t).

  Rasping cockneys? Check: you know that unbelievably raspy and weather-beaten young cockney bloke who played a scrawny nihilistic smackhead with a spider’s web tattooed all over his apocalyptic chops in Nil By Mouth? The one who could never, in a million billion years, land the head role in a Noel Coward biopic but could convincingly play all four members of the Sex Pistols at once? He’s in this, playing a scrawny nihilistic cockney in a stained vest.

  Perhaps I’m alone on this, but I’ve always found him incredibly watchable: he should have his own series, playing an unconventional inner-city detective who chases suspected criminals down alleyways, wielding a bit of scaffolding with a razorblade taped to the end, signing off each episode by squatting in a phonebox pumping smack into his eye. Come on, ITV: you could do with gritty new Morse for the twenty-first century.

  Speaking of heroin, does Never, Never also feature substance abuse? Check: toilet-bound coke-snorting, an old man plied with whisky, and an unconscious junkie flopping to the pavement. There’s also a bit where John Simm spoons custard into his mouth as though it’s a tub of liquid crack, but that doesn’t really count.

  Gratuitous bad language? Big bold check: this is possibly the most swearsome broadcast of the year. Someone says ‘fuck’ every couple of seconds. It’s like product placement for the Fuck Corporation. Even the walls and ceilings appear to be saying it at times. All your other slang favourites put in an appearance too, with the exception of the c-word, although I think at one point a trail of saliva dribbling from the mouth of a collapsed drug addict is trying to spell it out, and gets as far as the letter ‘n’ before someone else says ‘fuck’ and the spittle sighs and gives up and it cuts to a different scene.

  Of course I might be making that bit up, and am.

  Anyway, overall Never, Never fulfils its quota admirably. Oh, and it’s also a reasonably good piece of television drama, despite a lot of padding in the form of pointless slow-motion sequences of John Simm wandering around the squalor pit while a long piano chord chimes mournfully in the distance.

  They can be let off for that. What can’t be forgiven is not having the guts to call it ‘Concrete and Piss’. Cowards.

  A Momentary Adrenaline Rush [11 November]

  I’m a coward. I’m scared of everything. Last night I got up to fetch myself a drink of water and, while filling a glass in the darkened kitchen, briefly glimpsed a scrumpled-up carrier bag that looked a bit like a grinning skull. Terrified, I leapt on the sideboard and screamed for the neighbours to call the police, but instead t
hey just hammered a shoe against the wall for 28 minutes before venturing outside to hurl rocks at my window – which failed to scare the bag away.

  In fact I’m still up on the sideboard now, tapping away on a laptop, with a tea towel draped over one side of my head as a kind of makeshift sightscreen that prevents both me from seeing the skullbag, and the skullbag from sensing my fear.

  Whimsy aside, cowardice is one of my driving characteristics, which is why I’ve always regarded anyone engaged in ‘extreme sports’ as inherently alien and untrustworthy. Skateboard, snowboard and BMX aficionados all seem to lack the fear of a snapped ankle or shattered pelvis, while anyone prepared to climb rock faces or take part in a street-luge event is clearly just insane. (For the uninitiated, a street luge is a kind of gigantic skateboard for maniacs to lie down on and race through steep city streets in the most precarious and vulnerable manner possible. It’s a sport that raises questions, namely: 1) How do you casually ‘get into’ it? 2) Where do you practise? And most baffling of all, 3) where do you actually buy a street luge? Halfords?)

  All of the above explains why I found this week’s Cutting Edge: Seconds To Impact (C4) so terrifying. It takes a hideously involved look at the world of BASE jumping – a pastime in which eerily calm men and women climb high objects, leap off, plummet toward the ground and release a tiny parachute at the very last possible second. Unsurprisingly, it’s illegal in the UK. As sports go, this is as perilous and extreme as it gets, short of wolf-raping.

  The programme follows three jumpers called Rob, Jon and Greg, as they spend the summer hopping off a variety of vertigo-magnets, including the Cheddar Gorge, the Park Lane Hilton, various Norwegian mountains, and in one especially shiversome sequence shot with tiny helmet-mounted digicams, an impossibly tall and exposed chimney stack slap bang in the middle of nowhere.

  For a bunch of fearless lunatics, the trio are pleasant and normal enough, although I wouldn’t invite them round for dinner on the grounds that anyone prepared to leap off the Cheddar Gorge for kicks is probably equally prepared to unexpectedly lunge forward and poke a fork through your eye for the sake of a momentary adrenaline rush.

  Few viewers will doubt the macho credentials of anyone about to hurl themselves from the top of the Park Lane Hilton, yet during the preparations for just such an event, Rob is curiously at pains to inform us just how heterosexual he is.

  He squints accusingly at the camera: ‘Normally I’d never cuddle a bloke in a million years,’ he grunts, going on to explain, almost apologetically, that he and his fellow jumpers occasionally share a vaguely tender slap on the back and a few kind words in the moments before a jump – restrained behaviour under the circumstances, yet Rob appears genuinely more troubled by the thought of viewers at home laughing and ‘calling us faggots or whatever’ than by the immediate prospect of the potential death plunge.

  In the event, Rob and Jon survive to cuddle in an entirely nonsexual context another day. But not all BASE jumps go according to plan, and just as you’ve become accustomed to the sight of these likeable daredevils hurling themselves off ledges and somehow escaping unscathed, death makes an appearance and the programme takes an altogether darker turn, and the carefree blokey thrill-seekers suddenly start to look more like self-destructive junkies, pornographically videotaping each new conquest then gathering to watch the recording later, endlessly driven to jump and jump again, hooked on life affirmation through the repeated defiance of monumental risk.

  Still, their collated footage makes for genuinely exciting television, so who cares, eh?

  Next week in the same time slot: a man with a camcorder glued to his forehead feeding himself face-first into a threshing machine. If we’re lucky.

  Casualty Is Rubbish [18 November]

  Casualty (BBC1) is rubbish – sick, thick, knee-jerk, leery, cynical rubbish; so unrealistic it might as well revolve around an imaginary hospital in the centre of a glass pig’s eye.

  Above all, it’s a mess – a local-pantomime-standard blend of patronising hand-wringing and reactionary finger-wagging, slung together into a single, predictable awkward soap (the dull inter-staff feuds and romances are so calculated and forced, they may as well be conducted at gunpoint) and stuffed to bursting point with as much needless gore as possible.

  This is (and always has been) rubberneckers’ television, appealing to the sort of closet ghouls who, on spotting the remains of a car smash, gently slow down the Rover for a good slow-motion porno-peer at the limp arm dangling over the side of a stretcher.

  If the BBC went mad and broadcast Zombie Flesh Eaters in the same mid-evening slot, Casualty viewers would be the first to complain – even though Zombie Flesh Eaters is a) only 4 per cent more gruesome, b) 44 per cent more exciting and believable, and c) 2006 per cent less likely to feature yet another variation on the scene in which a pretty nurse delivers a stinging put-down to a man impatiently banging his fist on the reception desk.

  Incidentally, hands up everyone who couldn’t give a pliant duck about the ongoing child-custody subplot involving Charlie Fairhead. He’s a smug, soft-spoken, holier-than-thou dishcloth of a man, who deserves as much misfortune as scriptwriters can throw at him. And he’s got tiny eyes. He looks like a cross between a drama teacher and a dormouse: his son’s better off without him.

  Charlie’s method of dealing with anyone runs as follows: calmly talk them down in the manner of a pre-school children’s TV presenter demonstrating how a quiet, steady voice can hypnotise livestock, while simultaneously exuding the faintest whiff of malevolent sarcasm that suggests he doesn’t actually give two shits about the trowel they’ve got lodged in their forehead. For a man who’s supposed to represent trust and dependability, he’s strangely incapable of maintaining a fixed gaze on the person he’s talking to. Instead, whenever delivering one of his regular appeasement monologues, his pixel-thick eyes continually wander left or right, or stare into the middle distance, while the rest of him shuffles from toe to toe like a man reluctantly sharing half-hearted conversation as he waits for the in-flight toilet to free itself up. I wouldn’t trust him to fix a cup of Lemsip.

  Tonight’s episode contains all your other Casualty favourites: vomit, blood, a visit from the police, glassy-eyed extras, an unsympathetic patient who relentlessly complains, staff friction of metronomic predictability, and a lonely-but-noble old woman gasping her last on a starched white hospital bed. In true Casualty tradition, this last character is played by an ‘ooh-what-have-I-seen-them-in-before?’ celebrity (Lou Beale from EastEnders).

  Best of all, there’s a textbook example of that most knuckleheaded Casualty cliché, the Case of the Injured Tearaway. According to the rules of this overfamiliar subplot, all gangs of teenage ruffians are led by a painfully soft-looking, middle-class actor struggling to project an air of gritty urban malice by means of an unconvincing display of shrugs, slouches, and half-hearted scowls, generally accompanied by an indisputably terrible stab at a working-class accent. Furthermore said gang leader is a one-dimensional coward at heart, who will lamely bully his cohorts into participating in a major criminal misadventure during which the most innocent teenager in the group will suffer nightmarish injuries.

  Tonight’s example doesn’t disappoint – a cheerfully naïve Pogo Patterson lookalike rips his face open trying to vault a barbed-wire fence during a bungled robbery. Then there’s the additional bonus of a deep-rooted dysfunctional family dynamic of poster-colour improbability that gets completely straightened out within 28 minutes of his parents’ arrival at the hospital. Plus we get to see him bleed and scream a few more times.

  A few hours later, further porn in Amsterdam: City Of Sin (C4), which gawps at the sex industry. We see everything from a woman squatting over a live webcam to a man cheerfully browsing through a range of forearm-sized dildos racked up on a wall like weapons from some hideous future sex war.

  And what do we learn? Nothing, bar this: these days you’re shown naked breasts every 18 seconds on Channel 4: i
t’s nothing more than Live! TV with a WAP phone in its pocket and a punnet full of sushi on its lap.

  Sadowitz [25 November]

  Quick, name a likeable magician. Three … two … one. Time’s up.

  Think of any? Course not: they’re bastards. For all their supposed skills at achieving the impossible – sawing women in half, making doves fly out of their faces, tying tigers in knots in a box full of fire – they’re useless at making themselves seem even vaguely human.

  Paul Daniels? A seething, dry-lipped pepperpot. Siegfried and Roy? Upholstered aliens with too much gold and a big-cat fetish. David Copperfield? Look into his eyes for six seconds and shudder as the yawning abyss within swirls out to engulf you.

  Then there’s Jerry Sadowitz; best known as a nihilistic comic, also a gifted magician. Sadowitz doesn’t use dry ice and strobe lighting to mask the fact he’s a shit: he performs spartan close-up card tricks and wears his unpleasantness on his sleeve – nailed to his forehead, in fact – and for this he deserves our support.

  His new C5 vehicle The Jerry Atrick Show is an endearingly shambolic attempt to showcase his talents.

  An uneasy mix of card tricks, gleefully puerile sketches, and stonefaced four-letter misanthropy, it’s like an edition of the Paul Daniels Magic Show fronted by Howard Beale, the suicidal newsreader from the movie Network.

  And it doesn’t quite work: confused direction renders many of the card tricks hard to follow, while the sketches, taken from his live show Bib and Bob (an exercise in escalating puerility that would make any sane person laugh till their eyes pissed acid), suffer in isolation from the motiveless, enthusiastically infantile whole. But amongst the misfires and disappointing VTs lurk some tantalising moments unlike anything else on TV, and while the tricks need to be seen live to be appreciated, they represent a rare opportunity to watch someone doing something they genuinely, passionately adore.