For too long, broadcasters have been afraid to confront the harsh reality of bodily functions head-on, but there’s recently been some headway, notably from the Americans – first they set half the action in Ally McBeal in a unisex toilet, then followed it up with a truly spectacular open-door bathroom sequence in last week’s Sex and the City. Now, in the spirit of solidarity, and to show support for this new world order, the British are following suit with Toilets (BBC Choice), an entire series about all things lavatorial, hosted by walking seal-of-quality Claudia Winkleman.
Isn’t it exciting, living in a renaissance?
This week’s edition is concerned with how to go to the toilet. Subsequently, it’s jam-packed with information that absolutely everyone on the planet knows already. Here are just a few of the startling revelations uncovered.
Revelation #1: Men behave strangely at urinals.
According to the programme’s exhaustive research, when having a tinkle, men eschew conversation entirely and concentrate instead on staring dead ahead like unfazed shop-window dummies. It then goes on to explain how peeing alongside one another gives some men the jitters, to the extent they dry up completely and have to stand in silent humiliation until the room empties and emission resumes.
What it fails to say is that, for a sure-fire cure for this kind of urinal stage fright, you have to look to the world of contemporary literature, specifically Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, in which the narrator explains how he overcomes his pee-pee nerves by picturing himself urinating on to the face and head of the person standing next to him. The astonishing thing is that this tactic actually works – precisely the kind of useful information this programme could have done with.
Revelation #2: Men’s toilets are dirty; women’s toilets are clean.
Now there’s a surprise. Most public gents’ look like the aftermath of a water-pistol fight at an incontinence convention. By contrast, women’s toilets are kept ultra-clean, generally resembling a cinematic vision of an eerily anodyne future society.
There’s the glimmer of some useful information during this section – a writer advises men appalled by the cave-like funk of public conveniences to nip into the disabled loos instead, on the grounds that they’re spacious and clean. Plus it’s easy to barge past the cripples on your way in.
Revelation #3: People don’t like other people overhearing their ‘noises’ – so they cough, flush, or run taps loudly in a bid to disguise them.
Perfectly understandable this, because the moment your backside starts misbehaving loudly, you feel entirely stripped of all nobility – although in my experience, that’s a very British trait. The Americans don’t seem to suffer from it – on several occasions I’ve found myself standing in stateside craphouses reeling with amazement as cubicled rows of clean-cut, Gillette-model businessmen nonchalantly unleash a truly thunderous din – a choir of coughing rectums accompanied by the sound of plummeting mud. And as for the French – well, they’re currently lobbying the Olympic Committee to make loud, undignified defecation a team sport.
Revelation #4: People used to wipe their bums on old bits of corn on the cob.
To give the show its dues, this did come as a genuine surprise.
So there you have it. I can’t help thinking there’s a good show to be made out of lavatories (perhaps a Scrapheap Challenge special), but sadly, this ain’t it. Rather than providing any real insight into precisely why we’re so anal about our anuses (as C4’s Anatomy of Disgust did last year), it seems content to simply reiterate obvious facts, in the manner of a particularly uninformative retrospective ‘I Love’ nostalgia blast. Perhaps they should have called it ‘I Love Going Plop-Plop’ instead, and given us a clearer idea of what to expect.
That’s it. Now wash your hands.
A Tin of Beans and No Can Opener [26 January]
When the shit hits the fan, you’ll wish you’d seen Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival (BBC2). Sitting in an irradiated wasteland, longing to snare, skin and spit-roast a passing mutant rat – if only you knew how – you’ll pause and kick yourself for not having paid attention while Ray was on our screens.
So why didn’t you? Answer: because on the evidence of this week’s edition, Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival is actually rather boring, that’s why. So if you don’t tune in then maybe one day you’ll starve to death up a hillside in a tent clutching a tin of beans and no can opener, but at least you enjoyed slightly more entertaining television before death swooped down to snatch you away.
Perhaps I expect too much, but when I see the word ‘extreme’ in a programme title, extreme is what I want. But this feels decidedly softcore. For starters, Ray looks more like a plump village butcher than a weather-beaten survivalist. I was hoping for more macho excitement – even some brutality perhaps. I wanted to see Ray snap the head off a swan, then use its beak to jemmy open a coconut. But no. Instead he seems to spend half his time trudging around New England, setting up tents and making tedious little fires. That may be survival, but it sure ain’t living, and having spent many a miserable, uncomfortable night under canvas myself, I for one would sooner die than ever go camping again.
Still, in case you find yourself stranded in an emergency situation this week – marooned in your living room with the remote control out of reach and Ray Mears on the box – here’s some tips on how to survive the programme itself:
1) Drink strong coffee. 2) Sit with your arms folded, staring straight ahead at the screen. 3) When your attention starts to flag, simply imagine the programme is more exciting – and if that fails, try glancing at a more interesting object in the room for a few minutes (a rolled-up sock or coffee cup should do the trick) until you feel ready to leap back in.
Still thirsting for macho kicks, I was forced to take a look at Have-a-Go Heroes (BBC1), a pop-doc blend of real-life stories and psychobabble aimed squarely at the Tony Martin in all of us. The best bits are the almost shamefully unpleasant candid-camera stunts, designed to test the public’s willingness to intervene when crimes appear to happen beneath their noses. Early on, two actors feign a road-rage incident in the middle of Primrose Hill, tossing each other around the pavement, swearing and swiping at one another in an increasingly violent manner.
If Ray Mears were in the vicinity he could doubtless fashion an impromptu bow and arrow out of some nearby railings and put an end to the carnage, but sadly he wasn’t available. Instead, the fight takes place before an audience of gawping pedestrians, with all but one unwilling to step in. Afterwards, the camera crew nose around asking the inert civilians to justify their apparent cowardice.
‘You just stand and watch, don’t you?’ says a man who did just that, before adding cheerfully that even if he’d lived in Ancient Rome he’d ‘still watch the Christians being burnt’.
Once the eye-popping stunt footage has spooled away, impossibly glamorous rent-a-shrink Dr Sandra Scott (as seen on Big Brother and – well, pretty much anything else that requires an impossibly glamorous rent-a-shrink) is on hand to provide the analysis, helpfully bothering to explain why passers-by are more likely to come to the aid of a young woman in smart clothing than a dishevelled man clutching a bottle of beer. (Apparently it’s because people make snap judgements about a person’s appearance – something Dr Sandra Scott, who resembles an icy Bond villainess, should know all about.)
This is an overlong show which runs out of steam about 100 years before the end, so in all likelihood you’ll have nodded off before the spectacular finale, in which the genuinely tragic tale of a man who died attempting to defend a stranger is turned into one of the most jaw-droppingly mawkish pieces of television you’re ever likely to see. Do we really need to see staged shots of a murdered man’s son climbing a ladder in a bid to catch a glowing star representing his late father? Answer: no – but they went ahead and filmed them anyway. It was a taste crime in progress, and someone should have intervened – but all they did was stand and stare.
Humanoids with Funny Foreheads [2 Februa
ry]
Q: When is nostalgia not nostalgia? A: When it’s set in the future. Which pretty much sums up Enterprise (Sky One), the latest mutated offspring of Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek series, boldly going where countless men have gone before.
In the grand tradition of The Phantom Menace and, er, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Enterprise is a ‘prequel’, set in the days before Captain Kirk hauled his paunch around the galaxy in search of strange new worlds and alien hippy chicks hungry for some Earth-man lovin’.
It’s a mixed bag. On the plus side, teleportation devices don’t appear to have been invented yet, so there’s no preposterous ‘beam me up’ nonsense on show. Nor is there any high-concept faffing around in a ‘holodeck’ to confuse matters. Instead the format is more stripped-down, more in tune with the easy-to-grasp original: visit alien planet; discover hostile species; teach them a lesson; kiss and make up; wave goodbye; captain’s log; the end.
All sounds good on paper. But there are drawbacks. The retro touches (old-fashioned phaser effects, endearing nods to the 1960s in the spaceship design, a female Spock) feel at odds with the up-to-date production values. And just to further muddy the general sense of what-era-is-this-anyway? they cast Quantum Leap time-hopper Scott Bakula in the lead role. Sensors indicate Bakula’s Captain Archer contains no character traits whatsoever; he simply walks around looking permanently constipated (presumably he’s having trouble producing the captain’s log).
Then there are the aliens, who in fine Trek tradition seem to be little more than humanoids with funny foreheads (generally shaped like someone’s fired a handful of crab parts into their brow). In these days of CGI dinosaur fun, we deserve better than mere make-up – we want permanent crewmembers with the bodies of spiders and the heads of donkeys, sporting Jamiroquai hats.
And the theme music – Jesus. The worst kind of 1980s soft-metal wanking imaginable; a Gillette commercial from hell. I’m all for rock music in theme tunes – Channel Five’s CSI benefits greatly from having the Who play out over the credits, and if I were in charge Newsnight would open with an uninterrupted three-minute blast of Motorhead’s ‘Ace Of Spades’. But the makers of Enterprise have commissioned an absolute dirge, whose unironic presence betrays an inherent lack of wit at production level. Sure enough, the programme itself is far too humourless for its own good; overall, it’s got the feel of a bland motivational poster on the wall of a software house (you know the kind of thing: a photograph of some dolphins and a greetings-card motto extolling the virtues of teamwork – distract the worker ants with enough of them and you can reduce desktop wrist-slashings by 13 per cent a quarter).
Marginally more successful prequel confusion can be found in Smallville (C4) or ‘Superman: The Pubic Development Years’. Telling the tale of Clark Kent’s teenage existence – a sort of Dawson’s Kryptonite, if you like – it’s just as confusing as Enterprise in that it’s set firmly in the present day, when in your head it should all take place on the set of Happy Days.
Clark himself looks like a young Rob Lowe, and as befits the future man of steel, he’s nauseatingly pleasant. Any normal hyper-powered teenager would be abusing his abilities to pull off superhuman Jackass-style stunts – tossing live cows onto the roof of the local high school, that kind of thing – but namby-pamby Clark contents himself with tidying up at the speed of light and insipid do-gooding. Boo to that.
The young Lex Luthor is a far more interesting prospect – a slap-headed 19-year-old whose inexplicable baldness hasn’t yet turned him bitter and evil. Instead, his wilfully unpleasant father is the Darth Vader of the piece, simultaneously spoiling and corrupting his offspring.
Staying on a retro tip, Scrubs (Sky One) is a medical comedy splicing elements of M*A*S*H with the stylings of Ally McBeal. There are plenty of good lines, but the whole thing’s in constant danger of being undermined by the McBeal influence – an overreliance on quickfire ‘fantasy’ sequences and self-consciously kooky cartoon sound effects.
And for a black comedy, it’s not quite black enough – more dark grey with occasional neon flashes. Patients die left, right and centre, but the show tends to chicken out and turn mawkish at the very last moment.
Cuh. Americans.
Arrogant, Unrepentant, Ugly and Rich [9 February]
This week, Channel 4 brings you the tales of two notorious sexual predators whose names have become synonymous with iniquity and manipulation. One was an uncontrollably demented holy man who exerted a dangerous level of influence over the Russian royal family and inadvertently sowed the seeds of revolution. The other recorded ‘Una Paloma Blanca’.
The latter is profiled in Jon Ronson’s The Double Life of Jonathan King (C4). Anyone expecting a kooky Theroux-style stalkathon is likely to be disappointed, since the programme largely consists of sobering talking-head interviews with King’s former friends and victims, intercut with grimly comic archive clips illustrating the maestro’s oeuvre.
It transpires King used his celebrity status to dazzle a succession of under-age boys, befriending them, showering them with gifts, exhibiting interest in their opinions, and then, just as they began to trust their exciting altruistic chum, spoiled it all by bringing his erect penis into the equation.
Convicted sex offenders don’t tend to arouse much sympathy in the general public – particularly when they’re arrogant, unrepentant, ugly and rich – but King himself comes across as such a miserable wretch, it’s hard not to sense a small mouse of pity gnawing at the edges of your mind. An insecure misfit, who developed his odious, grating persona specifically to provoke a reaction from an otherwise uninterested world, King’s crimes seem motivated more by crushing inferiority – coupled with a deeply misplaced craving for acceptance – than simple tabloid malevolence.
More disturbing is the fact that he got away with it for so long simply because he was famous – despised by huge swathes of the population, but famous nonetheless – and this pathetic glamour hypnotized his victims into returning.
One interviewee, whose relationship with King spanned 18 months, explains how exciting it felt to ride around in a Rolls Royce, accompanying a star.
‘But he was only Jonathan King,’ remarks Ronson.
‘He was the most famous person I knew,’ comes the poignant reply.
While wonky mouthed, troll-faced King had to deploy a rainbowcoloured wig and a string of novelty records to impress his prey, mad monk Rasputin had more natural advantages, namely piercing eyes and the apparent ability to heal ailments.
Like many people, my knowledge of Rasputin has to date been based solely on Boney M lyrics – I knew he was ‘Russia’s greatest love machine’, and ‘a cat that really was gone’, but little else.
Until now. Masters of Darkness: Rasputin (C4) is one of the most entertaining historical documentaries I have ever seen, partly because it deals with the nefarious deeds of an absolute shit, and partly because it’s brilliantly put together – a genuinely thrilling combination of informative talking-head opinions, archive footage and creepy reconstruction, liberally swathed with horror-movie sheen.
Rather than leaping head first into his most unhinged period, the programme carefully charts Rasputin’s evolution from childhood freak (apparently his parents were ‘disturbed by his ability to heal horses by touching them’ – try finding that in ‘Parenting for Dummies’) to influential lunatic, lending weight and momentum to what could have easily been a gaudy ho-ho at a shagging monk.
As it is, Rasputin’s shenanigans were fuelled by warped religious logic. Believing that redemption was the ultimate spiritual experience, it followed that the only way to garner redemption was to commit sin first – and the bigger the sin, the bigger the redemption that came after. Spiritual bulimia, in other words.
Which is why, in his prime, Rasputin would have sex with anything. Toss a ham sandwich across the room and he’d fuck it twice before it hit the floor. Russian society, gripped by a craze for spiritual weirdness and convinced of his
healing abilities, gave him free reign to indulge, even though he stank like a sink full of mouldy fur.
Just like Jonathan King, Rasputin got away with it because of the aura of celebrity surrounding him. Yet both cases took place some time ago – today, we’re more fame-obsessed than ever, so I’ve got no idea what insane acts of depravity our modern A-list stars get up to.
Although if you have, and you fancy drawing me an accurate picture (in crayon), send it in, care of the ‘Guide’. Most repulsive example wins a pack of bourbon creams and a shoe. Promise.
‘I didn’t “get away with it”’ [2 March]
After his dissatisfying (and overlong) encounter with the Hamiltons, Bridget Jones pin-up Louis Theroux does himself no favours whatsoever in When Louis Met Anne Widdecombe (BBC2) pestering her about her virginity (or lack of it) in a downright unpleasant manner within the first few minutes. And when she objects – having consented to the documentary on the understanding that her sex life (or lack of it) would not be discussed – her gruff complaints to the offscreen producer are left in the edit, thereby making her appear guarded and unreasonable.
Theroux is at his best when pitching his blatant insincerity against that of an equally insincere subject – fighting fire with fire – but, unfortunately for him, Widdecombe doesn’t appear insincere in the slightest. A distant, stunted control freak with a face like a haunted cave in Poland who espouses depressing political views, maybe – but so are half of the pricks in the House of Commons. And aside from her ghost-train looks, Widdecombe has little that is strange or weird about her. The end result is an uncomfortably sneery hour-long amble in the company of someone who doesn’t warrant the effort of a sneer in the first place.
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 17