Like Derren Brown: Mind Control 2 (C4). Derren Brown, who looks like a man playing the Master in ‘Doctor Who: The Soho Years’, is a psychological street magician who wanders around bending minds: a kind of David Blaine for the brain.
Brown pulls astonishing tricks, such as guessing a PIN number by staring into the cardholder’s eyes, and talking a group of girls into suffering collective hallucinations. Clearly the greatest dinner party guest in history, he’s either a balls-out con artist or the scariest man in Britain.
The Winsome Lens of Haiku [1 September]
Writing television listings – it’s a bit like writing poetry, isn’t it?
Well, no, obviously it absolutely isn’t, in any way, shape or form, but bear with me because I’m trying to go somewhere with this, and if you’re not prepared to suspend your disbelief (and your critical judgement) for 10 minutes this is going to be embarrassing for both of us.
So then. Surely there’s no doubt that writing accurate listings is something of an art form. Squeezing a precise description of a potentially complex programme into a single sentence is a rigorous test of anyone’s prose skills, and the end result is often more functional than emotive – a mere explanation of events rather than a flavoursome portrayal. How, for instance, could anyone hope to convey the unique tear-jerking magic of This Is My Moment (ITV) in just twelve words, without hand signals?
The answer is this: television listings writers really ought to turn to poetry. Or, to be more specific, they should write their listings in the form of haiku. Yes, haiku – the wistful, 17-syllable Japanese art form that’s as delicate as a bone-china teacup and almost twice as beautiful. What better device to evoke the mood of a broadcast than a five-seven-five-formation stanza?
And so, with this in mind, and in the spirit of wild experimentation, this week, in place of the usual guttersnipe sneering, I bring you art. I bring you poetry. Ladies and gentlemen – I bring you the week’s television highlights, as viewed through the winsome lens of haiku.
Don’t snigger. They’ll be doing this next week in the Radio Times. Just you wait and see.
The National Lottery: Winning Lines (BBC1)
Applause detonates
as bubblegum balls fall in line;
you have won fuck-all.
The Weakest Link (BBC2)
Disgraced, her target
eats ginger malevolence.
Now, the walk of shame.
The Weakest Link (BBC2)
Disgraced, her target
eats ginger malevolence.
Now, the walk of shame.
Midsomer Murders (ITV1)
Bergerac returns
but this time round there is no
Charlie Hungerford.
Kilroy (BBC1)
Anguish spluttered
into antichrist’s mike: next it’s
Garden Invaders.
TOTP 2 (BBC2)
Spangled archive fun
sneered at pornographically
by DJ Steve Wright.
A Touch of Frost (ITV1)
Didn’t the force once
exclude dwarves like Frost? They did?
No wonder he’s cross!
The X-Files (Sky One)
The truth’s still out there?
Stuff your UFOs: we don’t
give a flying one.
ITN News (ITV1)
Dermot Murnaghan –
crazy name, crazy guy? No:
I’m sure he’s quite sane.
The Bill (UK Gold)
Officer arrests
actor running amok with
criminal accent.
Changing Rooms (UK Style)
Here’s a makeover –
brand new title, free of charge:
‘Brighten Your Prole Hole’.
Top Gear (BBC2)
Cars and penises:
if I can tell them apart,
why can’t Clarkson?
Real Sex (C5)
Don’t pass the Kleenex:
you’d get more aroused in a
helicopter crash.
Emmerdale (ITV1)
Who watches this farm?
Resolutely undiscussed:
mud and soap don’t mix.
Newsround (BBC1)
Gruesome news reports
quickly made palatable
thanks to pleasant shirt.
So there you go. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, but most of all we’ve come away with a far better sense of how it feels to sit down and watch these shows, haven’t we? Try writing some of your own. Right now. Send them to me and I’ll print the finest examples in a forthcoming column. Together, we can change the face of TV listings.
Throw Them a Fish, Someone [8 September]
Do you trust fish? I don’t. It’s the tiny bones. I can’t taste fish without simultaneously picturing myself choking to death, hands clawing desperately at my throat, wheezing purple-faced into the afterlife. No amount of tartar sauce can disguise that. I know. I’ve tried.
Fish apologists like to point out that they’re only full of tiny bones because they’re intrinsically tiny creatures. I disagree. I think the fish are just being bloody-minded. But then I’ve had it in for them ever since a friend told me I had the face of a bloated, disconsolate cod. Now each time I look in the mirror I feel like a man staring at a doomed aquarium. Bitter? Of course I’m bitter.
Still, if you think cod are ugly, you clearly haven’t seen some of the deep-sea yuksters dredged up in Blue Planet (BBC1). There are things down there that would make Captain Birdseye shit his beard through his arse: living, wobbling hallucinations, with big bug-eyes and gleaming tentacles, quivering around in the darkness like the inmates of some ghastly biological ghost train.
Fortunately, the programme also contains enough magnificent beauty to render the more unattractive moments palatable.
If you thought the computer-generated majesty of Space was impressive, you’ll be astonished by the quality of the graphics Mother Nature has thoughtfully provided for this series. Swirling tornadoes of fish, colossal blue whales with hearts the size of automobiles, incoming squadrons of eerie hammerhead sharks – it’s all here, and there isn’t a pixel out of place. There’s even the unsettling sight of an entire coastline engulfed by a mile-wide slick of discarded herring semen; the by-product of a mass underwater love-in. Delightful.
Far less impressive creatures shoal their way through a different kind of Bluewater in Shopology (BBC2), which sets out to disclose the devious means by which shopping mall architects and snivelling brand-management succubi induce the entire population of the world into blowing its wages on superfluous pap, but instead spends so much time flitting around the globe gathering soundbites that you wind up none the wiser.
It also contains the gruesome spectacle of Trevor Beattie (hair by Michael Hutchence; facially, a cross between Jim Broadbent and notorious pornographer Ben Dover) blathering on about his deeply tedious French Connection ‘fcuk’ campaign, which convinced idiots nationwide to spend their Saturday afternoons trotting up and down the high street decked out in grubby slogans, when they really ought to have stayed home doing something constructive, like plunging screwdrivers into their own thighs.
And once Trevor’s finished Explaining His Art, it’s over to Joe Public for the people’s say. ‘I love all this fcuk stuff; it’s crazy,’ gurgles an impressed imbecile, instantly condemning himself to three hours of vividly imagined blowtorch torture in a corner of my head.
If I were king, anyone who’d ever so much as smirked at an fcuk billboard would be drowned in a giant bucket during a live Christmas broadcast.
Seriously: what does someone that dim actually do when they’re not out consuming or trying to mate with other dunces? My guess is this: they lie slobbering on their backs, clapping their hands together and barking like seals. Throw them a fish, someone. We’ll gather round, watch them choke on tiny bones.
Last week’s Stilgoe-style request for TV-l
istings-as-haiku prompted an unexpected deluge, which I shall trawl through at leisure, selecting the primest examples for your future enjoyment. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with my two favourite entries thus far.
The Tweenies (BBC2)
Bright terratomas
Nightmare heads scream, your children
Wet collective beds. [Karen McDonald]
Neighbours (BBC1)
To impress a girl
Toadie catapults himself
Through a French window. [Mark Griffiths]
Keep them coming – with any luck I’ll eventually receive enough to compile one of those hateful ‘Little Book of …’ things, the profits of which will go towards some pioneering plastic surgery.
I’m having a set of gills installed. The way I figure it, if you already look like a cod, you might as well go the whole hog. Wish me luck.
The Miracle of Outside Interference [15 September]
Six things you shouldn’t do on a date: 1) pick your teeth; 2) pick your companion’s teeth; 3) cry and smash plates over your head; 4) confess to murder (of course it’s been eating away at your conscience all these years, but for God’s sake save it for later); 5) dab a finger in your armpit and ask if they think your sweat smells like fried onion; 6) bring a camera crew and a team of ‘dating experts’ to dissect your every move in minute detail.
The latter, of course, is precisely what happens in Would Like to Meet (BBC2) and Perfect Match (C4), two programmes this week aimed at curing singletons of their isolated status through the miracle of outside interference.
Both shows are abysmally watchable, of course, because they relentlessly tickle the throbbing voyeur tonsil that dangles somewhere in the centre of your brain. Or maybe that’s just my brain I’m referring to – I’ve been told I’m the nosiest person in Britain (I don’t like the term ‘nosey’ – I prefer ‘aggressively observant’).
The two shows have opposed points of view. Perfect Match operates on the assumption that, hey, people should just be themselves, then it sets about finding them an ideal partner in a bid to create a couple so compatible they’ll quickly osmose into a single two-headed creature. Would Like To Meet, on the other hand, simply encourages its subjects to lie in a desperate bid to make themselves seem more attractive. OK, I’m exaggerating: it doesn’t actually encourage them to lie but it does fling them at the mercy of three irritatingly confident ‘gurus’ – a ‘body-language guru’ (top tip: don’t spend the entire date sitting on your thumb and squealing), a ‘conversation guru’ (top tip: never try to slip the word ‘infanticide’ into casual conversation), and a ‘style guru’, who, somewhat bizarrely, dresses more like a pharmaceutical rep than a fashion editor (top tip: don’t turn up with glue in your hair and a crude biro swastika on your forehead).
Together they aim to turn dowdy sadsacks into dynamic sexbags, through the simple method of relentlessly picking apart their subject’s unattractive qualities (slumping, self-deprecating, gargling phlegm in mid-conversation, etc.) and demanding change within six weeks. Overseeing this somewhat bullish transformation process is the aggressively mumsy Lowri Turner, bubbling about like a cross between Bridget Jones and a boxing coach, practically turning pink at the life-affirming niceness of it all.
Irritatingly, their combined advice seems to work, apparently having a positive effect on their quarry’s confidence level – and therefore their attractiveness – by the end of the programme. Of course, it’s possible that as soon as the cameras leave they will make a clumsy bid to harm themselves with a teaspoon before slumping to the floor in a shuddering heap.
Perfect Match is altogether creepier, except this time there’s only one professional guru on the panel (in this case an orange, vaguely Beppe-like ‘relationship guru’ sporting a micro-beard). The other two instant experts are friends of the singleton in question (a 25-year- old Essex-born subeditor for the Sun, no less, who alarmingly peppers his conversation with grammatical errors). Together the trio audition potential partners on his behalf, à la Popstars, whittling an initial flurry of fifty girls down to one, who then ‘wins’ the opportunity to move into the Sun sub’s house for three weeks to see if the pair hit it off (i. e., have sexual intercourse). It all goes wrong before it goes right, of course, and therein the voyeurtainment value lies.
So, two more programmes that feed Ordinary Joes through the public scrutiniser. A good thing? No, but anything that distracts nosey parkers like me from peering at the neighbours for an hour shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. At least these saps signed release forms first.
Finally, on a totally different note, two last examples of the TV listings haiku you’ve been sending me:
Pingu (BBC1)
Plasticine wasteland
Proof that even wildlife go
Mad without some friends. [Ann Cooper, age 14]
Absolutely Fabulous (BBC1)
Patsy and Eddie
Once lined faces with laughter
But the Botox smoothed. [Carol Barron]
It’s Emmerdale, for God’s Sake [22 September]
Equity, the actors’ union, called it ‘an insulting affront to the men and women in our profession’. But you know it better as fun-filled Soapstars (ITV1), the show that aims to do for Emmerdale what no amount of fictional sex and skullduggery can: make at least four people in the country give a toss who’s in the cast and who isn’t.
I don’t think I’ve ever sat through an entire episode of Emmerdale, although I’ve walked out on plenty. The moment that signature tune rolls in I’m out of the room quicker than you can think the word ‘knife’. It’s like a bloody starting pistol.
Have you ever met anyone who actually watches it? Me neither. Emmerdale’s one of those things whose existence you’re dimly aware of but rarely witness first-hand – like early-morning milk deliveries or sex between your parents. They could sack the entire cast and replace them with spinning postcard racks with pages of script taped to the front and the odds are no one in Britain would notice for at least six months, and even then they’d only shrug indifferently and change channels in search of something less rural. It’s the TV equivalent of a Turkish Delight (come on, do you know anyone who likes those things either? They’re like a refrigerated internal organ dipped in chocolate). It’s EMMERDALE, for God’s sake.
Nonetheless, some persist in labouring under the delusion that Emmerdale Matters. Former cast member Jean Rogers isn’t happy with Soapstars, claiming ‘Most performers are in the business because they want to entertain, inform and enrich the culture of the country, not to be “rich and famous”’ – a statement containing more bullshit than all the cowsheds in Emmerdale’s 29-year history put together.
Of course, some members of the public clearly think Emmerdale matters too, swarming to the Soapstars auditions, queuing for a chance to land a regular stint on the show. Not, repeat not, that there’s anything inherently wrong with this – why push a pen all your life when there’s a possibility you could be paid to stroll round a make-believe farm spouting bollocks? – although if it’s fame they’re after they’d stand more chance of being recognised if they photocopied their faces and stuck them in a local newsagent’s window.
Anyway, the selection panel. Easily more entertaining than their Popstars equivalents. For one thing, there’s Cold Yvon, who resembles Miranda Richardson’s Queen Liz from Blackadder II and is more effortlessly abrasive than ‘Nasty’ Nigel Lythgoe ever was. Nigel looked faintly goonish and colloquial, as though he’d be equally at home judging a rude-vegetable contest beneath an awning in some rain-sloshed backwater; Yvon has the benefit of a mean, angular, glamorous face – the kind of face you’d expect to see on a woman accused of murdering her high-society lover with a poisoned olive. Also, she’s funnier.
Nigel aside, the remainder of the Popstars panel were so pointlessly anonymous, they may as well have stayed at home or worked behind the bar of the Woolpack. Yvon’s supporting players on Soapstars are far better value. First there�
�s the camp and vaguely futuristic Paul De Freitas, swooning with proprietorial glee like a steward on the first cruise liner bound for Mars. Then there’s scruffy scriptwriter Bill Lyons, who looks like all seven Doctor Whos rolled into one and marched at gunpoint through Man at C&A.
Least interesting by far are the wannabe performers, who, when they’re not doing predictable things like crying and crying some more, just sort of shuffle around awaiting their moment of drama – skills that should serve them well if they eventually land the part.
At heart, of course, it’s a dignity-stripping contest. So is Equity right?
Are they heck. Half their members would dress up as a dancing turd in a bog-roll commercial if it helped pay the rent, so to start cracking on like the anointed guardians of some ancient craft is clearly nonsensical. Besides, Hollyoaks pulled a similar stunt last year (recruiting Joe Publics in a desperate bid to prove they don’t simply grow their own cast in a Petri dish), and last time I checked most of our theatres were still in business (and up to their usual tricks – showcasing airless tedium for the benefit of eggheads dumb enough to believe what they’re doing is somehow more worthy than sitting at home playing ‘Bollock Wars’ on a Dreamcast).
Whatever. It’s all irrelevant. Everyone knows the best soap on TV right now is the AA insurance website ad with the sulky Asian couple. Stick that up your Woolpack.
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 13