Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  For proof of why the presence of wrecked-but-authentic performers like Sadowitz in the schedules is more necessary than ever before, stare no further than Making the Band (C4) a reality show chronicling the genesis of a manufactured American boy band.

  Perfectly scheduled between Hollyoaks, Futurama and a whirlwind of adverts for garage compilations, pay-as-you-go mobiles and spot cream, Making the Band is essential viewing for anyone who suspects the world might be fucked and secretly hopes it is. It’s mesmerising.

  The idea is simple: 25,000 hopefuls slowly whittled down to five band members while the camera looks on. If you’re tuning in tomorrow, I’m afraid you missed the final pruning, in which two wannabes got the chop in a hilariously cruel and drawn-out firing session. But don’t worry: tomorrow, as the chosen ones enter the recording studio, there’s still time to appreciate the show’s core appeal: the hateful insincerity of everyone involved.

  The five remaining ‘performers’ are a bunch of hissing Styrofoam meerkats desperately clawing over each other, craning their necks to suckle from the withered tit of fame; whining, mewling, preening, bitching – they coupart thrrldn’t be more dislikeable if they strode around in Nazi regalia firing nailguns at ponies. (Note to anyone working on a British version of Making the Band: stop what you’re doing right now. Just put your hands down and walk away. Please. Or there’ll be an uprising, and we’re talking heads-on-poles.)

  The music is nondescript, the band is called O-Town – the ‘O’ apparently stands for Orlando although it may well represent the ice-cold hollow zero lodged in the heart of this absolute shit.

  They should, of course, have used one of the following names instead: a) Puppet Squad, b) Edifice, c) Apocalypse Yo!, d) Attack of the Omen Five, e) Grinning Despair, f) Your Dreams Lie Crushed Beneath Us, or g) The Petri-dish Kids.

  One minute banging on about ‘living their dreams’ and ‘realising their destiny’, the next moaning about their workload, this is a tale of five repugnant egos. Every time they speak, every time their bleating little mouths pop open, you’ll feel like standing on your chair to hurl shoes at the screen. Artless gimps like this shouldn’t be on television or in the charts at all: they deserve to be locked in a cupboard with a gigantic genetically engineered mantis that’ll shift and itch and scratch its spiny little legs against their weeping faces, for a period of no less than sixteen thousand years.

  Still, don’t just take my word for it: tune in and learn to hate them yourself.

  Cynical Scoffing at Saddos [2 December]

  Here’s what watching TV will be like in the year 2006: you stroke a nubbin on the tip of a matchbook-sized mobile phone, and with a satisfying ‘schhhhick’ sound a gigantic plasma screen unfurls, covering the wall like a tapestry. Next, a huge holographic head rotates slowly in the centre of your living room, reading a list of your favourite programmes, while behind it in the screen it lists 19,000 stations catering for all conceivable interests, from the James Belushi Movie Channel (‘Curly Sue to Red Heat and back again, 247’) to the Santa Goose Hedge Pointer’s Network (‘all people leaning over hedges to point at a goose dressed as Santa, all the time’).

  Having made your choice, the programme begins – except it isn’t a normal programme at all. No: thanks to ‘convergence’, it’s a magical cross between TV, the Internet and the most sophisticated arcade game you’ve ever seen. If you’re watching Ground Force 2006, for example, you’ll be able to push a button to digitally graft Alan Titchmarsh’s head onto the body of a dancing cat, and take potshots at it with a light gun, earning Amazon tokens for each paw you blow off.

  LSD users can do that already, of course, but until 2006 arrives the rest of us have to make do with the likes of BBC Choice’s E-Mail Weekend – a selection of programmes that ‘gives viewers a chance to browse through the ups and downs of online life’ and – oops – a few myths into the bargain.

  Alongside documentaries on cyber-talking, a simplistic and self-conscious comedy-drama ‘about communication, or rather miscommunication’ called Talk to Me (BBC Choice) and the unflinchingly realistic movie Weird Science (BBC Choice), lurks a series of 10-minute shorts called Looking 4 Love (BBC Choice), in which goonish presenter Dan Rowland visits people using the Internet to further their love lives, expecting us to gaze in astonishment as though he’d uncovered a race of talking unicorns. Since the banal reality of a typical online romance (two parties aimlessly exchanging flirtatious e-mails) isn’t significantly salacious or peculiar, the show largely focuses on the predictable extremes – an unpleasant ageing Stringfellow type using the net to woo women, a lanky oddball with a cybersex addiction, and a fat man from Barnsley who married an American he met online, only to have her scarper back to the States a short while later.

  Trouble is, not one of the assembled interfreaks is half as strange as Rowland himself, who perpetually gurns and mugs like a man sitting on his hands trying to stop a bee crawling up his nose, and has an incredibly annoying habit of facing the camera to raise an eyebrow whenever someone says something even vaguely risqué, which they manage to do approximately every six seconds.

  His final visit brings him to a fetishwear convention with an incredibly tenuous online link (it’s advertised on the web – just like say, the Ideal Home Exhibition, which wouldn’t have made prurient viewing). By now utterly uninterested in talking about the Internet at all, he simply walks around pulling ‘oo-er’ faces at leatherwear and strap-ons until you feel like crawling into the screen to slap him back to normality.

  As with the majority of programmes about hobbyists, the underlying attitude is one of cynical scoffing at saddos – but who’s the more tragic: the person using the Internet to communicate with a living, breathing person, or the bloated sofa-bound dunderhead who spent hundreds on a digital box, just to watch Dan Rowland jig around like a sneering marionette?

  Westlife and Rain [23 December]

  This year’s been a swindle. As a child the mere mention of ‘the year 2000’ conjured up images of people with purple hair piloting miniature bacofoil hovercraft round and round inside a gigantic doughnut-shaped space station. Yaay! Exciting! And what did we get? Westlife and rain. Thanks a bundle, history.

  This year’s television has been particularly disappointing since the last few months of nigh-on uninterrupted drizzle have meant we’ve had little to do except sit indoors watching the box (or if you’re in a flooding hotspot, watching the box bob up and down).

  And by God we must be bitter: this year’s most talked-about programmes all revolved around cynical voyeurism and mean-spirited in-fighting. The inescapable Big Brother flummoxed everyone by being both appealing and mesmerising at the same time, drawing a huge audience as it slowly whittled down ten cackling boredom-droids to one goon-eyed dum-dum. Craig’s elevation to hero status was always going to be short-lived the moment he stepped outside that rickety little house; hopelessly inarticulate, he’d have trouble explaining the price of a chisel in a B&Q commercial let alone wowing the crowd on a chat show – and besides, he doesn’t really do anything annoying, unless ‘having large biceps’ counts as a bona fide gimmick these days.

  Still, at least he had the decency to donate his winnings to a worthy cause – the others would have blown the lot on jet-skis and fun. Next year they’re reportedly raising the stakes by dragging the contestants away from the isolation of the diary cupboard to vote one another out in a bad-tempered, face-to-face Judas session in the main living room. And come series three you’ll be able to go on the Internet and click a button to make the ceiling rain piss, while the ejection process will consist of effigy-burning and lethal injection.

  The Weakest Link was a huge success, thanks to the simple device of letting Anne Robinson tell the contestants they were rubbish and stupid. Trouble is, they weren’t rubbish and stupid – the questions were often genuinely tricky. What we really want is a quiz show in which authentic dimwits have their efforts mercilessly pilloried – a version of Family Fortunes in whic
h millions of viewers can phone a special number to collectively heckle the idiocy of everyone participating, with the resulting cacophonic abuse relayed live in the studio. Or maybe just an edition of Wheel of Fortune where John Leslie finally snaps and cracks a simpleton in the face with a broom.

  After months of smirking foreplay, life-wrecking pub quiz Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? finally achieved climax, awarding its maximum payout to an upper-class woman who everyone agreed didn’t really deserve it (she’s already spent the proceeds on a mechanised android horse that fires chillum-seeking missiles at hunt saboteurs and a pair of solid-gold wellies for the next Countryside March). Of course, now the magic figure’s actually been handed over, the stakes no longer seem so unattainably impressive. Don’t be surprised if it transforms into ‘Who Wants to Win Two Million Pounds and Some Shoes and a Kite?’

  And now, a quick break for a word about adverts, and in particular the Year’s Most Baffling Commercial: the AA insurance ad, in which a woman who has organised a policy via the AA website bickers with her petty, sulking husband. There’s no punchline and no love-you-really resolution; either I’m missing something, or it’s actively intended to make you associate AA insurance with loveless, sniping relationships. Still, at least neither of them tries to scare the viewer into obeying, unlike the terrifying angry money-throwing man in the Direct Line Home Insurance commercials, who’ll make an excellent alternative Bond villain one day.

  Irritating phenomenon of the year was, of course, the Budweiser ‘whassup’ ads; the initial, mildly amusing lo-fi opening ‘episode’ soon turned out to be merely the opening salvo in a cynical pre-mapped campaign designed to bully its catchphrase into the mouths and minds of imbeciles nationwide.

  If you – yes, you – greeted a friend with ‘whassup’ just once – yes, once – then congratulations: you’re an inexcusable dunce. Please make the most of the festive season by drinking yourself to death (but don’t pick Budweiser; it’ll make you fat and take far too long).

  Welcome back to part two. Now, if there’s a particular genre that really took off during 2000, it’s the iconic retrospective clip show. All year long the schedules heaved beneath the collective weight of thousands of tiny footage blips jostling for position alongside patronising soundbites from Paul Ross (shtick: blokey enthusiasm), Stuart Maconie (shtick: sarcastic nit-picker), Phil Jupitus (shtick: scripted one-liners) and if you were really unlucky, ‘entertainment journalist’ Rick Sky (shtick: looking like he’d been shaken awake in a shop doorway and ordered to enter a Malcolm McLaren lookalike competition).

  What with I Love the Seventies (BBC2), 100 Greatest Moments from TV Hell (C4), It Shouldn’t Happen to a Chat Show Host (ITV), The TV Years (Sky One), Top Ten (C4), the completely useless Smash (ITV) and countless theme-night ‘celebrations’ of everything from David Frost to Morphy Richards (probably), trying to watch a single channel felt more like flicking through 600 variations on UK Gold in a green room full of sneering B-list celebrities, rendered even more depressing by the knowledge that in 20 years’ time you’ll be tuning into watch Ant and Dec’s sniggering offspring introduce archive footage of Paul Ross discussing archive footage of fingerbobs.

  So was there anything worth watching? Of course there was, notable examples being Black Books, The Sopranos, Jam, Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends and, of course, Renegade, the abysmal 80s throwback action series which looks like a cross between a Patrick Swayze movie and a Jon Bon Jovi video and goes out on ITV at about 3 a.m. or whenever you’re least expecting it.

  Now, let’s wave goodbye to grumpy old 2000 and welcome the arrival of a sunny, smiling 2001. We could all do with a laugh, so look forward to Simon Munnery’s Attention, Scum (BBC2) and with any luck, a big-budget Jerry Sadowitz Channel Five vehicle that’ll make up for The Jerry Atrick Show being shot on tuppence.

  That’s it. Now run along and enjoy yourselves. Oh, and if you only picked this up to watch while digesting your Christmas lunch, then tough: they’re showing Octopussy (ITV).

  PART TWO 2001

  In which Simon Cowell makes his debut, Jim Davidson’s

  Generation Game makes a poor impression, and Touch the

  Truck heralds a new golden age of television.

  Roly-Poly Piddlebox Paul [6 January]

  Got Sky digital? Or an ON Digital box? Yes? Great! Quick! Turn to Discovery Wings – the exciting digital channel dedicated solely to aviation documentaries – you might just get there in time to catch Flight Deck: DC9-41.

  And hoo-boy, it shurrr does sound like a treat: according to the listings it’s an in-depth look at the flight deck of the DC-9 and the MD-80 aircraft. For a whole half-hour! Here’s hoping they show us which button makes the thingy flap do that flappy thing.

  Naturally, there’s stiff competition from the other digital stations: why, at any moment you could tickle the remote and watch Yvette Fielding doling out DIY tips in Simply DIY (Granada Breeze), Alan Coxon preparing aubergine fritters in Coxon’s Kitchen College (Carlton Food Network), or Paul Coia sitting in a trough full of urine, rolling marbles down the inside of a scaffolding pole in ‘Roly-Poly Piddlebox Paul’ (Distraction Network).

  Of course that Paul Coia vehicle was a figment of my imagination. But you knew that anyway – it was the only one that sounded remotely interesting. Question is, who’s watching the other programmes? Answer: everyone with a digibox – but only for a nanosecond, as they flutter from station to station, grazing acres of vacuum television in search of a watchable programme that somehow never arrives.

  Where are they, these elusive nuggets of must-see TV? Somehow they’re never around when you need them. And even when they are, you just can’t latch on. Take tonight’s schedules; at 6.30 p.m. there’s the first-ever episode of Rising Damp on Granada Plus. Should be interesting, but I’ll watch for five minutes before my trigger finger twitches – 6.30 in the evening is too early to settle down to a single channel for a whole half-hour, and besides, aren’t they showing that Bill Murray comedy which doesn’t sound very good, but you might want to watch anyway, on one of the movie channels at the same time? (Yes: The Man Who Knew Too Little, Sky MovieMax.)

  Of course, that’s no solution. Lingering at the back of my mind is

  the knowledge that said film will be rebroadcast ad nauseam, so I’m under no obligation to watch it right now: one hour in, and during an inevitable slow patch I’m likely to bring up the channel menu and idly browse for an alternative. Ooh: at 7 p. m., Eminem’s choosing two hours of video programming on MTV (EMTV). That’ll stave off the boredom for a moment. I’ll get back to the movie later … Hundreds of channels in crystal-clear digivision, and I can only procrastinate about the stuff I want to see, even while I’m seeing it. The one thing I would stay put for is a welcome repeat of It’s Garry Shandlings’s Show on the Paramount Comedy Channel – but that’s on at 3 a. m., and I’m not that carefree nocturnal scamp I used to be. I need pre-midnight dazzlement.

  So I slump there, static, staring, prodding, fritzing one image onto the next. An MTV video ends and an advert begins: a soft-metal compilation with a leather-clad catwoman pirouetting through a warehouse of fire and chains. At one minute long, it’s too much to bear. Fetch the remote and enter freefall. There goes Knots Landing. There’s a man grilling tuna. She’s pretty. Don’t want to buy one of those. That is Keith Barron. Not Fargo again. Phonebox vandalism is a sport? Couldn’t eat a whole Poirot. Didn’t he used to be Kelly Monteith?

  And so on and so on, until the programmes I contemplated have ended unseen, and I feel so empty inside you could screw a handle to my back and use me as a cupboard.

  How long before my remote has a ‘random play’ feature that automatically carousels its way through every channel at a rate I can barely withstand? Or, if it’s truly attempting to mimic my viewing habits, repeatedly fiddles with the widescreen settings in an obsessive bid to fill as much of the screen as possible without rendering everything hopelessly horizontally elongated (am I the only person
in the country who can’t watch 14:9 ratio broadcasts on a 16:9 screen without feeling drunk or irritable?).

  Fuck progress. There’s too much choice and I’m sick of it. Take the extra channels away. Just leave me the regulation five.

  And smash that remote while you’re at it. Let me stand up and prod when I want to flip sides. My muscles are turning to limp strips of tripe and according to the Health Channel I must work out or die.

  Multiplex Livestock [13 January]

  Fame! They want to live for ever!

  Who? Why, the glory-chasing wannabes of Popstars (ITV), of course – ITV’s prime-time approximation of Making the Band, ‘the boy band genesis’ documentary Channel 4 used to air on Sunday lunchtime; the show about which I said the following back in November: ‘Note to anyone working on a British version of Making the Band: stop what you’re doing right now. Just put your hands down and walk away. Please. Or there’ll be an uprising, and we’re talking heads-on-poles.’

  And did they listen? No. The arrogance!

  Still it’s here now, so we might as well get used to the idea, which is this: a trio of talent scouts tour the country auditioning an endless procession of potential teenage pop icons, slowly whittling them down from 16 billion amateur shriekers to five polished automatons, while we sit on the sofa enjoying the inevitable humiliation that occurs en route.

  Two initial impressions. First: tragically, this is nowhere as hideous as Making the Band. Yet.

  MTB centred exclusively on a dizzyingly hateful boy band full of preening Yank jockboys with names like Eric and Brett and Shunt and Testosterone Zitpop Jr. Popstars is packed with UK multiplex livestock rather than US mallrat scum. Plus it’s got girls in it. The final line-up is likely to consist of fresh-faced interchangeables called Sarah, Sandra, Lorraine, Simon and Tom, and it’s going to be far harder to get wound up by them, in the same way that getting annoyed by S Club 7 is a bit like waving your fist at a Lakeland Plastics catalogue.