Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  On ITV, GMTV decants its standard blend of celebutainment, human-interest stories and garish background fauna; just behind the sofa, peeping o’er the presenters’ shoulders, lurk the sort of floral arrangements usually depicted on canisters of Shake ’n’ Vac. Fitting, since if GMTV had a smell, it would be lavender – the antiseptic, chemical lavender that wafts from cheap plastic air-fresheners and vaguely reminds you of hospitals and death. Good morning, Britain!

  In the absence of scent-broadcast technology, they have to make do with undemanding interviews with celebrity guests, who generally look about as comfortable as someone trying to rectally ingest an entire garden rake. And who can blame them: woken at the crack of dawn, perched on the edge of a sofa in a brightly lit set apparently modelled on a Travelodge lobby, answering questions too bland to pass muster in a Marketing Now readership survey, half the interviewees seem too oddballed out to know what’s happening. It’s useless until Lorraine Kelly comes on, useless.

  Then there’s Channel 4 and the revamped Big Breakfast, whose set now resembles a cross between a Hanna-Barbera space station and one of those trendy London bars that looks more like a diagram than a watering hole.

  New frontman Paul Tonkinson is good, being both funny and reassuringly ugly. His face is at rest most of the time, but every so often it springs into ‘gurn’ mode and looks as though it’s about to leap off his head and go beat up some daffodils; in full grimace he starts to resemble one of the melting Nazis from the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  One glaring problem: the programme is rendered nigh-on unwatchable by the relentless offscreen bellowing of the crew, who accompany every utterance with gibbonoid barking and laughs so forced they’ve probably been dislodged with a broom. Shut up: you sound like witless old drunks at a megaphone convention on the Planet of the Apes, and some of us are trying to listen.

  There you have it: breakfast television. I vote for oversleeping every time. Prise off that snooze button: you may wind up unemployed, but you’ll never see Eamon Holmes again.

  The Low End of the Stupidity Spectrum [24 February]

  I’m a dimwit. I’m a dufus. I am not a Clever Man. Sometimes I’ll be sitting round a table with people cleverer than I, and as their conversation wanders into the realms of Roget’s Thesaurus, I find myself struggling to keep up, so instead I nod and smile and stare at the fruit machine and pray they’ll find their way back to discussing a topic I can relate to, like ‘Battle of the Planets’ or things that would hurt if you sat on them accidentally.

  Many, many things go clean over my head. But Jim Davidson’s Generation Game (BBC1) is the first thing that’s ever gone under it. As a child, I watched Larry Grayson’s tenure, and found the programme dull but easy to follow. Now it’s transformed into something I simply don’t understand. In trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the entire show has managed to drop off the low end of the stupidity spectrum, to a point where the human brain is incapable of interpreting its signal.

  Once the cacophonous signature tune has died down, cheeky Jim scampers onstage, winking and twitching like a man with a fishhook in his glans, and immediately launches into a fractured comic pantomime of such awkward, ill-conceived clunkiness, you can’t help but wonder whether it’s been scripted by a human with a laptop or a dog with a Fisher-Price Activity Centre.

  Assisting him are gaudy assistant Melanie Stace (the pair crackle with the kind of instant chemistry you’d more readily associate with a meeting between Peter Sissons and Roland Rat) and loveable pratfall king Mister Blobby (swear to God, stick your ear out the window the moment he bounds into view and you can hear the faint, descending murmur of a nationwide moan of dismay).

  Of course it doesn’t help that the frontman brings so much baggage with him. Even forgetting the hateful, hackneyed nature of the opening comic skits for a moment, it’s hard to warm to this widely demonised comic – unless of course you’re an imbecile, in which case you’re probably too busy gurgling at Blobby, and the show could just as well be hosted by a bit of rag on a stick for all you care.

  Actually, that’s not a bad idea, for three reasons: 1) A bit of rag on a stick would be 100 per cent less likely to saunter around the set casually patronising women (last week, virtually the only occasion he resisted the urge to call a female contestant ‘love’ or ‘darling’ it was to call her a ‘stupid woman’ instead). 2) It would also be easier on the eye. If you ask me, Davidson’s got a creepy head, all tight and desiccated, like a length of vinyl ‘woodgrain effect’ wall covering, topped with a haircut that seems to have taken place by accident. 3) A bit of rag on a stick would be funny.

  But enough about Davidson himself. The whole concept of the Generation Game feels spiteful and cold. Skits and challenges exist as an excuse for Z-grade celebrities and grubby salespersons to plug themselves; presumably the reason they agreed to stand next to Jim in the first place, although it’s hard to believe anyone could consider this effective advertising – it’s like glimpsing a commercial flyer bobbing in a cesspool. The hapless contestants are rarely asked to speak – they’re just jostled and humiliated, grinning like dunces, their dignity round their knees, all for the chance to sit in front of a conveyor belt watching the contents of the Argos catalogue scroll by. This junk doesn’t belong on TV a moment longer: it should be stuffed down a hole and destroyed.

  On the other side, Popstars (ITV) is eating itself, as it charts the effect its own success is having on the five dullards that maketh the band. But all the suspense has vanished. They’re even trailing it with the words ‘Popstars – it’s far from over’, when it quite clearly is. Doesn’t look like they’ll be using any of your suggested band names, either: I’ve chosen the final winner: Dad Erector. Congratulations to Mellors Karloff, who suggested it, although I suspect that isn’t your real name. This correspondence is now closed.

  Oh, before I go: just realised that Nigel Lythgoe is the absolute spit of Admiral Ackbar from Return of the Jedi – you know, the lobster-headed one in the Rebel control room during the battle at the end. It’s true. Tell your friends.

  Inadequate and Miserable [3 March]

  There’s this theory that television is depressing us all. By pumping images of successful, beautiful, witty people into your home around the clock, it forces you to compare your humdrum existence with the knockabout lives of the onscreen funsters, even the fictional ones. Since real life can’t compare to fantasy life, you wind up feeling inadequate and miserable – and the more inadequate and miserable you feel, the more television you watch, and the more boring your life becomes. Plus, you’re inert, so you start to get fat. Before you know it, your fingers are too chubby to successfully stab the ‘off’ button on the remote control, and you’re doomed to spend the rest of your days slumped in front of the box like a semi-deflated hot-air balloon, occasionally breaking into a sweat as you struggle to open the day’s thirtieth packet of bourbon creams.

  If this is the case, our ongoing obsession with handsome celebrities starts to look downright masochistic. It also explains why over the last two years I’ve become a) averse to watching slim, good-looking people, b) pudgier, and c) sick to the tits of bourbon creams. It’s self-defence.

  One unexpected side effect is that I’ve started actively warming to any unconventional-looking humanoid who makes it on TV. With more and more presenters being chosen on the basis of their looks alone (the only logical explanation for Donna Air), the homely ones are getting rarer, and therefore easier to spot. You can also guarantee they’re going to be good at their job; after all, with a face like that, they’d have to be.

  Take Alan Titchmarsh; he may look like something looming unexpectedly at a porthole in a Captain Nemo movie, but he’s friendly, engaging, and he knows his subject matter inside out. But you won’t be seeing his photograph on the cover of Heat magazine – partly because it’d curdle the milk in the newsagent’s tea, and partly because customers might mistake it for ‘Hobbit Monthly’, but mainly beca
use he isn’t young and attractive enough. Oh, and because they don’t cover gardening either. That might have something to do with it. But I digress.

  As I say, for the last few years I’ve avoided watching anything peopled with pretty faces, on the grounds it might make me weep down my gut. One show I swerved away from in particular was Dawson’s Creek (C4), but recently I’ve found myself ‘getting into’ it, seemingly by osmosis.

  First it just happened to be on in the same room as me. Someone else was watching, while I pottered around, grumpily hunting for an Ab Roller Plus, pausing every so often to snort disdainfully whenever someone said something heartfelt. Then I discovered I’d accidentally learnt the names of several key characters. Then one day, somehow, I realised with a start that I’d sat down and watched the entire programme from start to finish, without an ironic sneer cracking across my head for a second. Now it’s a guilty pleasure. And you know what? I don’t care. Naturally, I still despise Dawson himself, for the following reasons:

  1) He looks precisely – precisely – like the featureless lead in any bland Disney cartoon you care to mention. In fact, I suspect he’s actually a piece of incredibly sophisticated computer animation developed to play the lead in ‘Toy Story 3’. He’s probably got a hidden ‘cheat mode’ where his head spins round and breathes fire. Still, he’s obviously a work-in-progress; with any luck once they’ve finished beta-testing he’ll actually be capable of pulling facial expressions.

  2) His character is boring. So boring in fact, they could replace him with a damp oven glove, and call it ‘Oven Glove’s Creek’, and it would probably liven things up a bit. Thankfully, even the other characters have noticed how boring he is, and started deserting him for his best friend. Well, one did, anyway, and that was his girlfriend, so ha ha ha, Dawson! Take that, dullo!

  3) Everyone else who watches Dawson’s Creek dislikes Dawson as well, and I’m trying to fit in here, OK?

  Still, I think the programme is helping me overcome my aversion to anything popular that features a good-looking cast. Emboldened, I’ve recently started re-appraising Shipwrecked (C4), which I laid into a few weeks ago in these very pages.

  I say ‘re-appraising’. What I actually mean is ‘unironically watching’. Yes: that’s sucked me in as well, and I can only hold my hands up and apologise to all concerned.

  So now I’m not just developing the viewing habits of a teenager, I’m an appalling hypocrite to boot. And that’s depressing me. You can’t win. Where are the bourbon creams?

  An Exciting Journey into the Unknown [10 March]

  Glance through the TV schedules and you might mistake present-day TV producers for a pack of coked-up jackals happy to sling any old hoo-hah at the screen so long as their cheque arrives on time and they’re still in with a shot at that good-looking 22-year-old runner they’ve had their eye on for the past six weeks.

  You couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, TV people care too much about their output. They fret over the tiniest details: Is that word too long? Is this subject too dry? Have we got a higher-quality close-up of the blood leaking out? Why has the runner brought me regular Lilt, instead of the Diet Lilt I asked for? How quickly can I sack her? Will she still sleep with me afterwards? And so on.

  In fact, they worry so much about the minutiae of the content, they often lose sight of the bigger picture. Instead of asking themselves, ‘Is this new?’, ‘Is this ground-breaking?’, they think, ‘Is this suitable for our viewing demographic?’, and creativity flounders and the world’s joy supply trickles further down the drain.

  But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are still those willing to take a risk, to chance their arm on a show so original, so utterly innovative, it shatters the epoch, pushes the envelope, and heralds the dawn of a new era all at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen: Touch the Truck (C5) is almost upon us, and it will change the face of broadcasting for ever.

  Finally, someone somewhere has twigged that it’s entirely possible to transmit simply anything – absolutely anything – and boom! you’ve made a prime-time television programme. By default.

  The concept couldn’t be simpler. Gather twenty contestants. Drive them to the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Thurrock. Get them to gather round a brand new truck worth over £30,000. Then ask them each to place one hand on it. Tell them the last contestant to take their hand away wins the vehicle.

  Oh, they’re not allowed to sleep, of course, so by day three they might well be sobbing, collapsing or hallucinating. But that’s all part of the fun. At this point, I’d like to interrupt this sentence to remind you that this programme is entirely real. And wait, it gets better: one of the contestants is a 42-year-old homeless man called Jimmy who plans to stay awake by ‘singing Elvis songs in his head’. Woo-hoo. Other contestants include a zany vicar, a Kosovan refugee, a tattooed Cockney and a ‘flirty clubber’. In other words, all human life is here. And it’s standing round a truck.

  The show is scheduled to run live over six days, starting tomorrow. There’s a 40-minute update broadcast every evening, or you can witness the inaction unfolding live on the web, 24 hours. Why not keep a window open permanently on your computer desktop? Hopefully there’ll be a live audio feed too, so you’ll be able to hear them weeping softly in the background while you toy with Microsoft Excel.

  Disappointingly, there are a few minor concessions to basic human dignity, presumably included to appease the United Nations. Contestants are allowed one 10-minute toilet break every two hours (we’re in for a treat if someone gets diarrhoea), and one 15-minute food break every six hours. They also have a ‘co-pilot’: a friend who’s on hand to offer encouragement and back-rubs. Thankfully, they’re also allowed to try and put each other off by saying sarcastic things and generally annoying one another, which shouldn’t be too hard, since chronic sleep deprivation tends to make people a bit irritable.

  Our host is Dale Winton, who, according to producer Glenn Barden, ‘brings an air of credibility’ to proceedings. Dale reckons Touch the Truck is ‘an exciting journey into the unknown’. He’ll be chatting to sleep experts and interviewing the contestants, who, incidentally, should become increasingly incoherent as their minds attempt to cling on to consciousness, like a drowning man clutching at pieces of driftwood after five days at sea. Apparently we can expect the participants to start dreaming while awake – a feeling the audience at home should be able to closely empathise with, as they struggle to remind themselves that what they’re looking at is real.

  So there you have it. Don’t know about you, but I’ve been rubbing my hands together with anticipation so hard I’ve taken the skin off my palms. After Touch the Truck, British television can go anywhere, do anything. Dale’s right. This truly is ‘an exciting journey into the unknown’. And you should be glad you’re alive to witness it.

  Why Am I Thinking about Knives in the Head? [17 March]

  I’ve never tried to stab someone through the skull with a knife, but I imagine it requires a great deal of skill. Without a steady hand, the aim of an Olympic marksman and, above all, an immensely powerful swing, it’d be all too easy for the blade to ricochet off a knobbly bit of skull, sending the dagger spinning out of your hand and leaving you looking like the biggest prick in the room come the next murderers’ convention; worse even than that bloke in the corner who tried to batter his own brother to death with a handful of breadcrumbs.

  Why am I thinking about knives in the head? Because it’s hard not to after watching Ouch! (C5), a documentary that gleefully examines some of the most excruciatingly painful things that can happen to a human body. The knife-in-the-skull incident occurs early on, with the tale of Atlantan Michael Hill, whose life changed for ever the day a next-door neighbour decided to settle a dispute by turning up at the front door to plunge an eight-inch hunting knife into the top of Michael’s head, burying it hilt-deep in his mind. Inevitably, a camera crew were waiting down at ER, so we’re assailed by garish footage of him lolling about with the knife jutting
out of his head, like a man going to a fancy-dress party as the sword in the stone.

  The X-rays are remarkable, with the full length of the knife picked out with ghoulish clarity, looking as absurdly incongruous against its surroundings as a battleship in a cheese sandwich. Astonishingly, the blade somehow slid between vital arteries in the brain and Hill made a full recovery, although in his memory all numbers are divided in two and his friends have the top of their heads sliced off like poorly framed family snaps.

  Now, people have different ways of dealing with gore and, provided it’s fictional, I’ll lap it up, from a bowl if necessary. I love video nasties: name any household implement, and the chances are at some point I’ve watched someone plunging it into a zombie’s eye. I’ve sat through films so bloody, you could actually see scabs forming on the lens.

  But put me in the real world, and squeamishness rules. I get giddy looking through the transparent pane on a packet of mince. I simply can’t recall ever flinching so much at a single programme as I did watching Ouch! – especially since the tale of Michael Hill and the bloody big knife is only the tip of an undulating iceberg of blood-spattered sinew. Over the course of an hour, you’ll meet a man who tangled his genitals in the whirring spindle of a cement mixer, a girl who fell from a bedroom window and impaled herself on the leg of an upturned table in the back garden, a man who got a door hook caught under his upper eyelid, and a woman who accidentally fired a 12-inch length of metal up her nose with an industrial rivet gun. The end result is almost impossible to sit through, but if you do, rest assured you’ll have accumulated more than enough to appal co-workers with come Monday morning. Commit enough grisly details to memory and I guarantee you’ll be able to make someone vomit. Right there. Right on their own shoes.