Orchestrated Heartbreak [29 September]
Glimpse the news and you’ll agree: what the world needs now is love, sweet love. Instead it gets the UK version of Temptation Island (Sky One). Tough luck, world.
I’ve never looked up the word ‘evil’ in an encyclopaedia, but I’d guess the creation of Temptation Island figures somewhere in the entry. Where was this hatched? Whose coal-dark, hardened little pig’s knuckle of a brain dreamt up this despicable affront to human kindness? Why is it here? Why? Why? Why?
You know the premise: four committed couples are flown to a Caribbean island for a luxury holiday. Once there, they are separated: the boys spend their time surrounded by and dating a selection of predatory single women; the girls do the same with a group of single men. Will they be tempted to cheat? Hyuk hyuk: pass the Doritos, Mikey, we’s a gonna watch us some screwin’. Yee-haw.
We’re all tempted to do things we shouldn’t. Right now, I’m tempted to smoke a cigarette. Later, I might feel like drowning a cat. I shall of course do neither: not because I’m a model of restraint (ask anyone who’s seen me eat – I can engulf an entire pack of bourbon creams in the time it takes a clown to clap his hands) but because like most people I’ve got a single molecule of lucid reason inside my skull, preventing me from doing anything rash. It tells me avoidance is the key to resistance. I don’t want to smoke so I bought a course of 24-hour nicotine patches (which give you astonishing dreams, incidentally), and I don’t want to drown any more cats so I’ve drilled a hole in the bucket and smashed up my taps with a hammer. See? Common sense, pure and simple.
As pure and simple, in fact, as the couples arriving on Temptation Island. This being the UK, they don’t seem quite as computer-generated as their American counterparts (every single one of whom resembled a Hollywood lead), but that just makes it all the more squalid – like amateur Internet porn.
First up, Anna and Damien from Wales. They’re engaged but aren’t entirely sure they trust one another: what better way to test their neuroses than to venture into a camera-studded flirt-pit?
Next, there’s Kate and Greg, two absolute plums, who instantly lose your support by allowing themselves to be filmed browsing for aspirational breads in a fashionable Chelsea supermarket, a place so snooty the Battenberg cakes sneer at your shoes as you walk by.
Behind them, Dawn and Adam. She’s a model, he’s a ‘third assistant director’ who initially ‘wasn’t sure if she only wanted me because of what I do’ – although third assistant directors rank lower in the movie-industry food chain than the guy who irons George Clooney’s toilet paper.
Finally, Helen and Jamie, and with them the first glimmer of sympathy – because Helen seems uncomfortable with the whole thing. With any luck she’ll bolt.
The island itself looks genuinely gorgeous. Unfortunately the production team has populated it with two gangs of gurning simpletons – thirteen boys, thirteen girls, all of them as sincere as a Claims Direct commercial. The men are particularly hateful – half resemble leering uncles, and the rest are dullard goons, one in particular sporting a nose designed by Jim Henson. If you’ve ever fancied being violated by an imbecile, fill in those application forms now.
There’s an argument that says the participating couples deserve all they get. Wrong. Genuine heartbreak is like a death, leaving genuine grief in its wake. Whatever their motives for taking part in the first place (a free holiday, a little excitement, 15 minutes in the spotlight), none of these couples deserves to have their relationship ripped up and pissed on for the delight of us dribbling dunces back home. They may be idiots, striding open-eyed into the teeth of a booby trap, but it’s the ghouls that built the trap, and the ghouls who blob around watching the carnage, that truly deserve contempt.
But they signed a release form, you say? Since they’re now fair game, perhaps once we’ve done breaking their hearts we can up the ante by smashing their knees with a hammer and making them run an obstacle course? Dub ‘Walkin’ Back to Happiness’ over the top and lob in a few slow-mo replays each time their legs bend the wrong way.
Or in other words, shut up and be human. Once again: what the world needs now is love, sweet love. Not orchestrated heartbreak. Tough luck, world.
Insomnia Takes Hold [6 October]
Sometimes television is your friend. When you’re lonely, when you’re sitting in a bedsit eating microwaved bachelor slop (Spicy Cow-Hoof Scrapings in Tear-and-Onion Gravy – For One), the box comes into its own, blocking it out, soaking up time like a sponge. But like all friends, it sometimes lets you down. Just when you need it most.
Example: Few things are as depressing as insomnia taking hold when you’ve got to be up early the next day. Each passing minute underlines your failure. Suddenly you’re the world’s biggest loser. A dunderhead who can’t even lie down and close his eyes properly. Panicking motionlessly in bed as time drags by, neurotically calculating how many hours of sleep you could get if only you could go under right now – you need something crazy to distract you. Or you’ll go crazy. Reading won’t help: it strains your eyes and forces you to think. Perhaps a slug of TV is the answer.
So on goes the box. And suddenly you’re gazing at an ocean of shit.
The simple fact is this: for all the talk of us being a 24-hour society, once you go past 3 a.m., there’s nothing worth watching. BBC1 becomes News 24, absolute insomniac hell; the same scary stories being told over and over again, transforming your box into a recurring nightmare simulator. The Learning Zone on BBC2 is only slightly better; educational programmes by nature are intent on shaking your mind awake, but at 3.30 a.m. you need it shut down.
Channel 4 generally torments you with a subtitled film (eyestrain again), Channel Five is full of ponderous American sport (less exciting than watching a shop-window dummy play chess) and as for ITV – ITV is just hopeless. Often it’s showing soccer – and I use that term deliberately in a bid to enrage dullards – old, repeated soccer which I’d rather drink a trough full of tramp phlegm than sit through.
Failing that, there’s eerie video-game-review show Cybernet, a mind-addling combo of blurry in-game footage, repeated loops of an animated robot, and a stilted offscreen presenter quaking about polygon counts.
And then, around 4 a.m., just as gnawing psychosis sets in and your eyes begin to dart around the room in search of either a Bible or something sharp to kill yourself with, you’re abandoned completely and thrown to the mercies of ITV Nightscreen – static pages advertising forthcoming shows, accompanied by wallpaper music. Suddenly you’re no longer at home: you’re near an A-road somewhere in Middle England, watching the in-house information channel in a gaudy hotel chain (to complete the illusion, phone a neighbour and ask them to bring a decaying steak sandwich to your room for £14.95).
Here’s what should be on in the middle of the night: shapes and colours. And soothing music. And a voice telling you to close your eyes and breathe deeply. Anything else is torture.
LA Prick Convention [20 October]
Fascinating fact: your remote control has a button that can magically transform your TV into a muckspreader. It’s true. All you have to do is push the ‘1’ button on Friday night, pin back those eyelids, and gape in astonishment as it fires handfuls of molten crap directly into your eyes – in the form of LA Pool Party (BBC Choice).
It shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone; if there’s a Most Ill-Conceived Twatcast BAFTA up for grabs next year, LA Pool Party’s going to walk away with it, because the concept must have looked bad on paper. Take three TV ‘babes’ with pretty faces and dubious interview skills – Jayne Middlemiss, Tess Daly and Lisa Snowdon. Hire out an LA mansion with its own pool and fill it with scores of buff airheads. Plonk a DJ in the corner and generate a ‘party atmosphere’. Add some who-the-heck celebrities. And hey presto. Trying to convey the resulting awfulness is like trying to describe the smell of sewage to a man with no nose.
OK – that’s mean. We can assume no one actually knew i
t would turn out this bad. For one thing, basing the show in Los Angeles was a shrewd gambit for a British chat show; the logic, presumably, being that it’s easier to get A-list US celebs to put in an appearance if you’re shooting ten yards down the road from their homes. Cunning ruse, but uh-oh – show one featured such huge, happening stars as Ozzy Osbourne and Carmen Electra – as relevant to today’s yoof audience as Prince Albert and Wat Tyler. In the show’s defence, they did also bag an up-and-coming young actor whose name and face escape me, but since he a) stars in a movie as yet unreleased in the UK and b) spent his time sucking a lollipop with studied nonchalance, we’ll discount him completely.
Osbourne, at least, has tales to tell, although hearing them was rendered impossible by three obstacles: 1) he was being interviewed by Jayne Middlemiss, 2) he talks in an incomprehensible, melted slur and 3) any digestible words that did manage to crawl out were hopelessly lost in the ever-present clatter of background ‘party ambience’. To make matters worse, the interviews are intercut with footage of the ‘poolside guests’ – chosen on the basis of their looks rather than their conversational abilities – blathering inanely or simply grinning and leaping into the pool. After ten minutes of this, you pray for the unscheduled arrival of a misanthropic gatecrasher armed with a hammer and a deranged sense of justice.
There’s an intensely patronising hypothesis amongst TV farmhands that goes something like this: build a show around glamorous people in glamorous locations and the proles will switch on in droves; wishing they were there, wishing they were like them. Perhaps that’s true of the nation’s most imbecilic viewers, but those bozos would probably tune in to watch Tania Bryer ride a goat around a funfair, and that’s no justification for inflicting it on the rest of us. Any rational human exposed to LA Pool Party is going to wind up despising everyone onscreen – don’t sit too close, or you may catch sight of your own reflection and feel like smacking yourself in the teeth. LA Pool Party? LA Prick Convention, more like.
If you still haven’t been force-fed enough tinsel, watch FANatic (C4) an absolutely terrifying programme in which various Barry Bulsaras-in-waiting are granted the once-in-a-drudgetime opportunity to meet their celebrity idols. Already in this series we’ve seen a girl blubber like a bereaved parent at the prospect of stroking Jennifer Lopez’s hair, and another girl confess to vomiting with nerves prior to sitting opposite irradiated mantis Victoria Beck-ham. Last week, a whooping buffoon who worships the Red Hot Chilli Peppers almost kicked himself to death with excitement en route to an audience with his heroes.
Why such a big fan? Because, he claimed, their music is ‘about being an individual, about being yourself’. And how can he best express his own individuality? Well, other fans have tattoos, so in order to be different, he had the band’s logo burnt permanently onto his chest with zinc oxide. Then, to further underline his uniqueness, he reveals his favourite hobby – slavishly impersonating the band’s bass player.
In the meeting itself, the Peppers seemed appalled and embarrassed (as do most of the other stars in the show), at one point earnestly trying to dissuade him from scoffing a bagful of genuine red-hot chilli peppers in an attempt to impress them.
Saddest of all is that now, having achieved his greatest dream, his remaining existence will be one long ride downhill. Celebrity worship – just say no, kids.
Punched in the Face by Father Christmas [27 October]
In order to contain my excitement at the imminent return of Monarch of the Glen (BBC1) – and that’s not irony, I am genuinely excited by this – I’ve been sitting through Pop Idol (ITV1) agape with astonishment. I haven’t witnessed so much crestfallen weeping since I last caught sight of myself naked in a changing-room mirror.
Enough Bob Monkhousing already: Pop Idol is, of course, little more than an exaggerated version of Popstars. Realising that the main draw of that show lay in the sadistic thrill of seeing eager young hopefuls having their dreams torn apart, they’ve trimmed away most of the fat and concentrated fully on cranking up the humiliation. The result is a bit like watching a programme in which young children queue up to be punched in the face by Father Christmas. Absolutely riveting for all the wrong reasons.
‘Nasty’ Nigel Lythgoe, perhaps tiring of the abuse he suffered at the hands of tabloid newspapers and Guardian ‘Guide’ columnists, has sensibly opted to concentrate on his backstage role this time around, leaving the role of chief abuser to A&R man Simon Cowell, who’s instantly made a name for himself by behaving like an unpardonable bastard, unafraid to stare a contestant in the eye and overstate their uselessness with the sub-zero precision of a misanthropic character from a Neil LaBute movie. It’d be easier to forgive Cowell’s deadpan cruelty were it not for his track record. He’s been responsible for such musical luminaries as Girl Thing and Westlife – the former a hideous failure, the latter a finely honed joy-crushing machine – it’s hard to believe he even understands pop music, which is surely supposed to make people feel better, not like diving beneath the nearest juggernaut. Perhaps he’s just following orders. Perhaps he was issued an instruction sheet with the words ‘Be Cruel’ printed on it in 72-point Arial Black. Whatever: he’s overdone it by about 5,000 per cent, and as a result looks less like an expert and more like a man clawing at fame with even more sad desperation than the hopefuls anxiously awaiting his judgement. And the rest of the panel? Well, alongside mumsy Nicki Chapman (previously in Popstars) there’s Dr Fox (last seen hammering a nail through a crab in the Brasseye Special) and Pete Waterman (no introduction necessary). It’s hard to imagine a more cast-iron guarantee of blandness. In between their blatherings, official court jesters Ant and Dec are on hand to arse about and console rejected hopefuls, as though they’re somehow not as involved in the programme’s casual nastiness as everyone else.
The whole thing’s on a hiding to nothing of course; you might be able to get away with manufacturing a band from thin air, but solo idols rarely appear overnight. Lasting pop megastardom takes years to ferment; in dramatic parlance, it requires a ‘back story’ – preferably one that involves a deprived upbringing (Elvis/Eminem) or a ruthless struggle to the top (Madonna/Glenn Medeiros). It also requires a distinctive voice, and since 95 per cent of the contestants simply adopt the characterless transatlantic warbling of the average pseudo-soulful pop puppet rather than actually doing anything interesting with their throats, their potential careers seem destined to closely resemble the lifespan of a mayfly. Perhaps they should have called it ‘Pop Patsy’ instead.
There are exceptions, although they’re clearly doomed to be weeded out before the final push: the quietly spoken fat guy (surely destined to be jettisoned once they’ve stopped toying with him for the novelty value), and Danny, the lad with the cleft palate and by far and away the finest voice in the contest. And then there’s the most deserving winner: Darius, who deftly combines undeniable vocal talent with more unfortunate back story than the rest, and has thus far displayed more quiet dignity than anyone else in the programme.
Still, everybody’s talking about it, so ITV must be cock-a-hoop. Next year, expect a further escalation of humiliation and brutality: male contestants forced to sing with their testicles in a cup of hot coffee, perhaps, or live DNA sampling, with results sneered at by Simon Cowell (‘I have medical proof you will never amount to anything. You’ll balloon in size once you pass 27, and you’ve inherited at least three debilitating diseases from your ancestors. In all honesty – you are awful’). And I’ll doubtless tune in like everyone else. Provided it doesn’t clash with Monarch of the Glen.
Stop Spoiling the Vikings! [3 November]
The clocks go back. The nights draw in. Cadbury’s Christmas selection packs deck the halls of Safeways. It’s winter. And what we need of an evening is comfort television; the brain’s equivalent of a warm bowl of leek-and-potato soup – something bland and reassuring requiring minimal digestion.
In TV terms, that means countryside and quirkiness, and shows that feel like an e
longated Mr Kipling commercial crossed with a widescreen reproduction of The Haywain – shows like Monarch of the Glen (BBC1), the most shamelessly pleasant series since Bally-kissangel.
As I mentioned last week, I was genuinely excited when BBC1 began running trailers for this latest series, which must be as sure a sign of encroaching age as a grey pubic hair or an inexplicable urge to place a doily beneath every object in the house. Quite why I enjoy the programme is a mystery – perhaps my hate receptors are at their lowest ebb on a Sunday evening.
Nothing much happens in Monarch of the Glen – at least, nothing unpredictable happens – and therein lies the appeal. Each character is a mild eccentric, from Richard Briers’ batty laird (signature move: dressing as a pilot and shouting ‘Tally-ho!’) to dimwit Duncan (signature move: getting tangled in a hedge). The exception to the rule is Archie, the world’s dullest man, around whom the programme revolves.
Every week, against gorgeous scenery, Richard Briers gets up to some vaguely potty antics, a guest star tumbles down the glen, and the omnipresent incidental music chortles away to itself like a senile pensioner reading a saucy postcard. Ideal viewing if there’s nothing else on and you’re curled up on the sofa, massaging the feet of a loved one; absolute hell if you’re single and bad-tempered.
I haven’t caught its competitor, My Uncle Silas (ITV), yet, but judging by the trailers, it has twice as much scenery and stars Albert Finney as a sentient toby jug. Perfick.
Later in the week, Blood of the Vikings (BBC2) is a slight letdown, thanks to its pretty insistence on sticking to the facts. Opening with footage of cinematic Vikings on the rampage, it sadly soon turns studious, and sure enough, within 10 minutes we’re in Time Team territory – watching archaeologists scrabble about in the mud.
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