Three things make Banzai work. First, it’s blessed with some of the finest TV graphics in years: hyper-kinetic idents which emulate the sensation of drinking too much wine, being smacked in the temples with a cricket bat, and left to wander through a Japanese typography exhibition searching for the exit. It’s exceptionally close to the look and feel of ‘Bishi Bashi Special’, an obscure PlayStation game that could probably sue if it grew feet and walked to a lawyer.
Next, they’ve managed to talk a squadron of minor celebrities into participating in some spectacularly degrading games. In the first programme, we’re treated to Harold Bishop knocking on doors and running away, Peter Davison voting on which other Doctor Who he’d most like to sodomise and erstwhile Channel Five chef Nancy Lam having her left breast hoisted in the air to find out how much it weighs. Good sports – but the true hero is surely the researcher who had to explain the idea to them on the phone.
Finally: the gambling. Originally on E4, the show came with an interactive option that kept track of your guesses and provided a final score – in effect turning it into a primitive computer game and making it infinitely more compelling as a result. Sadly, C4 either can’t or won’t retain that bit of high-tech hoo-hah for this mother-ship channel re-run, thereby forcing viewers to revert to old-fashioned interactivity – watching with a friend and holding discussions out loud. Damn them. And there is a slight aftertaste. Like so many other programmes these days, Banzai is tainted by a vague, sneering misanthropy directed toward anyone who isn’t a middle-class twenty-something media git; it uses fat, old and disabled people as participants precisely because of their ‘freak’ value and prompts us to laugh at faded celebrities as though a lack of media exposure renders human beings worthless.
A quick recommendation: watch Alt TV: The Lift (C4), in which film-maker Mark Isaacs stands in a council block elevator for days, starting brief conversations with everyone who gets in. Unless someone lends you a copy of Kes or you get a job beating newborn kittens to death with a hammer, odds are it’s the most heartbreaking thing you’ll see all week.
Licked to Death by Cows [23 June]
Being neurotic has plenty of drawbacks, but on the positive side you never get bored. I, for example, am completely paranoid about accidents. As far as I’m concerned they’re lurking everywhere, waiting to strike – and this constant sense of impending doom imbues every second of my life with exciting nervous tension. Sit me on a train and I anticipate a crash. Stand me on a balcony and I imagine a freak gale gusting me over the edge. Leave me in a meadow and I picture myself being licked to death by cows. In its own way, my everyday existence is just as thrilling as the climactic scenes of Die Hard. Even now, sitting here typing, I’m acutely aware of danger: you never know, the ‘M’ key could fly off and lodge in my eye. It could. It could.
You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. There must be similarly morbid cowards all over the country – hence the widespread appeal of real-life It-Could-Be-You horrorthons such as 999 (BBC1) – now in its tenth series.
Tenth. That’s a lot of broken bones and sudden impalements. It shouldn’t be called 999 at all, of course. No. It should be called ‘Fuck!’ because: 1) that’s precisely what you’d shout if any of the things detailed in the programme actually happened to you; 2) such a title would complement the dimly pornographic nature of the reconstructions, which share plenty in common with the average video skinflick – voyeur-friendly activity, a cast of unknowns, seasick camerawork, gasps, grunts, and the occasional slow-motion shot of bodily fluid arcing through the heavens.
The best accidents, of course, are the ones you can easily imagine happening to you – which makes this week’s show a slight disappointment, featuring as it does an unusual yachting boo-boo, a freak electrocution involving farming machinery, an earthquake, and an arresting sequence in which a charity skydiver dressed as Santa Claus shatters his bones against the roof of a football stadium before landing comatose on the pitch, thereby earning himself a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the man who disturbed the greatest number of spectating children in the shortest period of time.
The calamities are ushered into position, as ever, by Michael Buerk, a man whose head looks like its been whittled from a particularly gnarled tree stump by a demented midget armed with a sharpened spoon.
And what’s up with his eyes? He permanently squints at the camera as though it’s a small sun. Squint back and he starts to vaguely resemble Clint Eastwood – until he opens his mouth and starts pouring out his links with the same kind of mock-sympathetic timbre Simon Bates used to employ during Our Tune, albeit with the additional gravitas that goes with a) being a widely respected television journalist and b) knowing he doesn’t have to play ‘Too Many Broken Hearts’ by Jason Donovan immediately afterwards.
George Best’s Body (C4) tells the familiar tale of the footballer’s slow-motion plunge from grace, but does so in an innovative way – by charting the toll his lifestyle has taken on various parts of his body, from his legs (relentlessly hammered by brutal tackles – the only chance the opposing side had of stopping the light-footed genius) to his liver (which probably resembles a screaming walnut by now). Taking a historical tour around your subject’s body is an interesting way of presenting a biography – there’s scope for a series of these, surely. They might even be able to explain the origins of Michael Buerk’s squint. Should they bother, the results would probably be more entertaining than American Vampires (C4), an isn’t-this-nasty shockumentary about ‘real-life blood drinkers’, which contains footage of people in eyeliner standing around drinking small amounts of one another’s gorejuice.
Amidst the yuks we’re offered mind-boggling statements such as ‘Teens are attracted to the vampire scene because it offers stability’ in an apparent attempt to convince us vampirism is a burgeoning social phenomenon, instead of being precisely what it looks like: a tiny subset of goths trying to be scary. If they dressed up as ghost-train skeletons and ran around going ‘whoooo’ I’d have far more respect for them.
‘Personal ads on the Internet suggest there are blood drinkers all over the world,’ concludes the narration. And with reliable sources like that, who can argue?
Not me. I’m far too busy prising this ‘M’ key from my eye socket. Can you injure yourself dialling 999? Bet you can.
Whassup? [30 June]
The dot.com crash has had unforeseen consequences. First, and most importantly, the price of novelty mousemats has plummeted. Then there’s the effect it’s had on our advertisers, who have lost their minds.
Eighteen months ago they were sitting pretty, handling huge accounts from huge online clients. It was ‘branding’ and ‘identity’ and ‘massive fourth-quarter spends’ all round. Huge sums were blown creating high-production TV commercials that only served to make already baffling online ventures appear twenty-six times more baffling. Take the epic ad for breathe.com in which a miserablelooking couple stood on the beach making the tide go in and out with their breath. Cost a fortune. Explained nothing. Looked great on a showreel.
Now the dot. coms have limped offstage, taking their marketing budgets with them, and the only ‘massive fourth-quarter spends’ most agency creatives are going to encounter this year will be in the form of psychoanalysis fees. Like the cast of Alive, they’re turning to cannibalism to survive. TV commercials are eating themselves.
Take Budweiser. First came the Budweiser frogs. Then came the Budweiser lizards, discussing the Budweiser frogs. Then came ‘whassup’. Now the lizards are back, discussing ‘whassup’. It’s enough to turn you to drink. Which is presumably the idea.
Weirdest of all is the current ad for some male-oriented skincare glop, in which two men are shown sitting at home scowling at a TV commercial for Nivea. ‘It’s ads like this that irritate me,’ mutters a Johnny Bravo lookalike with gigantic floppy hair, apparently oblivious to the fact he’s appearing in an advert himself.
The overall effect is unsettlin
g, like watching scientists tamper with the natural order of things. If they bring out a follow-up in which a further two men take the piss out of the first pair, it might cause a rip in the time-space continuum. And with Doctor Who out of action, who’s going to save mankind?
Not BBC 1, which intensifies an already frenzied air of cannibalism by summoning up A Question of TV (BBC1), a new television-themed spin-off from A Question of Pop (BBC1), which in turn is a spin-off from the original A Question of Sport. Ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching critical mass.
Let’s not beat about the bush here – A Question of TV makes for excruciating viewing, thanks largely to the unmistakable stench of desperation hanging round the entire affair. Stranded in a set apparently modelled on a particularly cut-price motorway service station cafeteria, Gaby Roslin appears haunted and ill at ease from the outset – rigidly sporting the kind of forced grin usually adopted for those moments when a friend’s baby burps a gutful of puke down your shoulder. The team captains are Lorraine Kelly and Rowland Rivron (testing his innate likeability to the limit), while the guests are massive prime-time draws to a man – Bradley Walsh, Max from Brookside, Angela Rippon and, ridiculously, Trude Mostue, who, having been born and raised in a fjord, displays little knowledge of classic British TV.
It gets worse. One question is simply an excuse to give the antiquated footage of Lulu the elephant crapping on the Blue Peter studio floor, yet another unwelcome airing. They’ve even got the gall to acknowledge that it’s been shown ‘hundreds of times before’ – as if admitting you’re hopeless makes hopelessness less of a crime.
And for a light-hearted quiz this is astonishingly dreary. The contestants seize on the meagre laughs with the same mindless desperation of the flesh-eating zombies in a George Romero flick, and the results are equally gruesome – stumbling gags stretched way beyond breaking point, strangled, swallowed, regurgitated. It’s the very definition of strained joviality – like watching people pull crackers on a crashing plane. Lord alone knows what’s up with the guffawing studio audience – perhaps a sound engineer fed their reaction through a digital filter capable of replacing loud sighs of dismay with shrieks of enjoyment.
But it’s the overwhelming pointlessness of it all that really grates. What’s next? ‘A Question of Themes’? ‘A Question of Questions’? ‘A Question of Diddle-Dum-Doo’? After all, there’s already one TV-related quiz on BBC1 (It’s Only TV but I Like It) – why inflict another? Perhaps they think we don’t care any more. And as long as they carry on like this, they’ll have a point.
A Fascist Chorus Line [7 July]
Terror! It springs from nowhere. Sometimes triggered by something tiny, like an unexplained whispering that wakes you in the dead of night, sometimes by something altogether more palpable, like a bearded stranger chasing you round the garden with a grin and a dildo and a big sharpened spoon. Fear Factor (Sky One) is all about terror. And greed. Oh, and ratings. It’s a truly remarkable US game show in which six contestants undertake a series of ‘extreme stunts’ in a bid to lay their hands on a prize of $50,000.
The challenges range from the scary (get dragged through the mud by a pack of wild horses) to the gross (lie in a box filled with 300,000 writhing maggots), and the whole thing is overseen by a sleazy, leering host called Joe Rogan, who’d look equally at home slowly breaking someone’s fingers in an alleyway, and indeed probably did precisely that on his audition tape.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Sounds like a new high in lows. But it’s boring. For one thing, the participants are made out of plastic. The six droids on offer in this week’s edition seem to have wandered from the set of ‘A Fascist Chorus Line’. One has a face so impossibly bland, shop windows probably forget to reflect it when he strolls past. Another somehow manages to resemble the entire cast of Friends all at once. In any sane world this would qualify as a disability. In America, it’s a TV requirement.
Not only is it impossible to care whether these synthetic dicks live or die, there’s the tedious rigmarole of watching them all perform the same stunt, one after the other. Once you’ve seen one Tupperware cretin jump a crevasse, you’ve seen ’em all – and it certainly doesn’t get any more exciting by the tenth slow-motion replay.
Of course, genuine terror springs from unexpected sources, so forget Fear Factor, and instead tune into Animal Park (BBC1). On the surface, there’s little promise of dread – it’s a daily post-Kilroy blandcast in which Kate Humble and Prince William (played by Ben Fogle from Castaway) wander around Longleat pointing at lions and smiling: the kind of transmission that could be replaced one morning by a static photo of a kitten emerging from a flowerpot without anyone really noticing. But hang on in there and the horror surfaces, in the form of gruesome artworks and murals produced by King Longleat himself, the Marquess of Bath, showcased in a report with its tongue so deep in its cheek it could lick the man next door.
First, the Marquess leads us through a nursery he’s transformed from agreeable playroom to fearsome hellbox by the simple act of daubing garish demonic-looking figures all over the walls and ceiling. He says his intention was to ‘trigger [the children’s] imaginations in a fantasy vein’ – presumably a fantasy involving hunting down and murdering the bastard who invented paint.
It’s nothing compared to the portraits. The Marquess mixes sawdust with oil-paint to create textured, slightly three-dimensional paintings: the sort of thing you might win during a visit to the worst fairground in the world. Imagine the ugliest painting you’ve ever seen. Then punch it. Puke on it. You’re still nowhere close.
Seventy-three of these lumpy monstrosities hang on the walls of an otherwise agreeable stairwell, each depicting a past romantic conquest. And if they’re accurate likenesses, the man must have slept with the entire cast of the Muppet Show.
‘Some people have notches on the bedpost, but I think this is much more flattering,’ he claims, standing in front of a particularly horrid example with the number 34 beneath it, placed flatteringly between paintings 33 and 35 in the stairwell of love.
Finally, a quick but enthusiastic nod in the direction of The Office (BBC2) – it might be another spoof documentary series, but it’s a spoof documentary series distinguished by superb performances and regular belly-laughs, and is not to be missed. Even if a bearded stranger really is chasing you round the garden with a grin and a dildo and a big sharpened spoon: set the video beforehand.
More to it than Meets the Eye [14 July]
Busy? Of course you’re not. It’s a Saturday. You’re probably still lolling around in your pants. I wrote this several days ago, so technically speaking I’ve been up for hours. Slobs like you make me puke.
Still, it’s a different matter during the week, when you’re an absolute flapping pterodactyl of activity. Monday through Friday, your life’s a whirlwind of phone calls and appointments, e-mails and car alarms, spooling through the calendar at a thousand miles an hour. Can’t keep up, can you?
Fortunately, the nice people at BBC Choice know how busy you are. This week, they’re introducing ultra-fast news bulletins aimed at people who don’t have time to read papers and are feeling vaguely guilty because they only discovered Neil Kinnock was no longer leader of the Labour Party two weeks ago.
60seconds (BBC Choice) aims to ‘quench modern viewers’ thirst for news in an instant’. It’s so efficient, even the title’s been compressed for easy consumption: there’s no space between the ‘60’ and the ‘seconds’ because that might waste valuable nanoseconds of your time.
Quite how it’s going to pack ‘the main national, international, sports and entertainment news headlines’ into less than a minute isn’t yet clear, but with any luck, it’ll consist of a series of flashcards upon which the day’s main stories are represented by simple geometric shapes and colours (a red hexagon means there’s been another train crash; a green rhombus indicates controversy at the UEFA Cup). That or Peter Sissons bellowing single-word summaries of the top six stories at gunpoint.<
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It’s a sign that broadcasters have realised viewers don’t have much time to invest, which is why the BBC’s new cop drama Mersey Beat (BBC1) collapses the period it takes an audience to familiarise itself with a range of new characters by making the officers of Newton Park incredibly simple to understand and hiring a gallery of recognisable faces to play them. Thus the station is populated by a veritable Déjà Vu Patrol, including That Nice Bloke from Casualty, That Nasty Girl from The Lakes, Thingybob from Brook-side, and God He’s Been in Loads of Things from, well, from loads of things. Within five minutes, Mersey Beat automatically feels like a series that’s been running for five years – thereby saving you years of repeated viewing at a stroke.
In the lead is Superintendent Susan Blake, played by Haydn Gwynne (aka Oh It’s Her from Peak Practice). Blake never takes her coat off, and rarely sits down. In fact, she seems to spend her entire day on foot, walking in and out of corridors, frowning, issuing instructions and generally looking pained and knackered. And why? Because she’s not just a hard-working cop, she’s a mother of two; something the script strives to point out with metronomic regularity, as though the notion of a police superintendent with a functioning womb is an epoch-shattering concept. According to the producer, ‘Blake knows the score: if she has to leave her daughter’s birthday party because there is a murder inquiry – she does.’ Way to go, Superintendent Blake: that’s just the kind of steely, selfless dedication we viewers admire.
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 11