Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  Speaking of which, no advance tapes of Being Victoria Beckham (ITV1) are available, presumably on the basis that the programme’s content is so universe-poppingly mind-blowing, its release must be cautiously timed and controlled, lest epochs start shattering around our quaking ankles. Therefore, in a fit of nihilistic despair, I opted for Michael Landy: The Man Who Destroyed Everything (BBC2) instead. Landy hit the headlines in 2001 when he spent a fortnight systematically dismantling and shredding his every possession in a deserted C&A store in the middle of Oxford Street. Everything was torn apart and mangled, from the big (his Saab car) to the small (a pen he stole from a friend’s house). A detailed roster of all the destroyed items is all that remains – a list of 7,226 deceased belongings.

  This documentary follows him in the weeks immediately afterwards, as he stumbles around, trying to make sense of his actions and gingerly making his first post-shredding purchases. There’s also background information on Landy himself, and comments from dealers, critics, relatives and artists.

  Ah, artists. They’re always good value for money, and there’s plenty of them here. Hilariously, some cantankerous old auto-destructive artist named Gustav, actually wearing a beret and pointedly sitting with his back to the camera (because he ‘shuns all publicity’), explains that ‘Landy demonstrated the artist should not be the centre of attention’. He’s saying this to a crew making a documentary on artist Michael Landy, the man who destroyed everything, and you don’t get much more centre-of-attention that that.

  So why did Landy do it? Take your pick: it was either a brilliant attack on consumerism or a brilliant piece of self-promotion. Either way, a brilliant spectacle, and an unexpectedly touching piece of television.

  Finally, an aside: a few weeks ago, writing about the Jon Ronson documentary on Jonathan King, I foolishly – and to be honest, somewhat lazily – invited readers to send in crayon sketches of A-list celebrities engaged in hypothetical wanton exploits. The response was disappointing. In fact, only one person bothered entering: Jonathan King himself.

  Using prison notepaper, Belmarsh inmate FF8782 drew a stick man sitting at a desk, captioned ‘Charlie Brooker at word-processor (A-list star in act of modern depravity)’.

  He’s a one.

  ‘I didn’t “get away with it” because of the aura of celebrity surrounding me,’ he writes, ‘I got away with it because I didn’t do it – a terribly boring explanation, although true.’

  He also takes issue with my describing him as ‘ugly’ (‘very handsome, as your picture showed’) and ‘insecure’ (‘I don’t feel the slightest bit insecure – in fact, at the moment, rather too secure,’ before going on to mildly berate me for not describing him as an ‘easy target’ or the victim of ‘delusions, exaggerations, compensation [or] false allegations’.

  Quite an amusing letter, as it goes, and had you received it you’d probably find it hard not to warm to him – unless, of course, you were one of the under-age kids he once waved his dick at. Ah well. What a wonderful world.

  A Sure-Fire Recipe for Chuckles [9 March]

  Jesus pole-vaulting Christ, you absolutely MUST watch All About Me (BBC1). There are no words in the English language to adequately describe it, so I’ll have to invent one: flabbertrocious. That’s a combination of ‘flabbergasting’ and ‘atrocious’, and it’s as close as I can get to conveying the programme’s perverse car-crash appeal without resorting to wild gesticulations, donkey noises or daubing a six-foot illustration of a weeping swan on your living-room wall.

  This is that most unlikely of things: a joint Jasper Carrott/Meera Syal vehicle, in which they play a multi-racial couple with children from previous marriages, one of whom is severely disabled. A surefire recipe for chuckles if ever there was one.

  I’m extremely fond of tortoise-headed Jasper Carrott, largely on the basis of warm teenage memories of his stand-up routines – but a versatile actor he ain’t, and his performance here single-handedly redefines awkwardness. He spends the entire half-hour looking about as comfortable as a horse trying to balance in the middle of a see-saw. Your heart goes out to him, and indeed to everyone else in the cast – thoroughly decent sorts who’ve found themselves unexpectedly shipwrecked on the rocks of Bumwipe Island.

  Bad sitcoms are ten-a-penny, but All About Me transcends them all. It’s not just the shoddy jokes (half-hearted gags that lie around like dying soldiers on a battleground; sample exchange: ‘Does your son like football?’ ‘No – he supports Man United!’), but the inclusion of frankly astonishing ‘poignant’ interludes that render the programme unique. The final five minutes of this week’s episode – a belief-beggaring laugh-free sequence in which Jasper Carrott revisits his childhood home, has a flashback, and leaves in tears – constitute the most awesomely misjudged piece of television I’ve seen in years. As I said at the start, words can’t do it justice, and with every cell in my body I urge you to tune in and witness the mangle for yourself.

  Speaking of incommunicable spectacle, after weeks of being urged by friends, I finally got round to catching Club Reps (ITV1), and – well, what is there to say? It’s like staring at footage of a football hooligan spinning round on a plastic sheet, dribbling and soiling themselves while ‘Sex Bomb’ plays in the background. I felt like dressing up as Travis Bickle and wandering onscreen to dispense a little smoking-barrel justice.

  Why, precisely, are they filming these ugly, self-aggrandising, slack-jawed, leering, drunken, pointless buffoons? Answer: so we can all have a good cathartic sneer. And naturally, the cynical gambit works – but lest we forget, you could create an equally effective Bickle-baiting hatefest by training the cameras on the kind of snide, boneheaded, bellowing, drug-pumped, upper-middle-class scum who populate the media and consider this kind of programme a worthwhile addition to the tapestry of contemporary culture. Morons filming morons for the benefit of morons: it’s one big imbecilic circle-jerk.

  Do I sound bad-tempered? It’s not all hatred and despair. Thank the Lord for 24 (BBC2) – utterly preposterous and impossible to leave alone. The big gimmick actually works. Each episode takes place in ‘real time’, tracing the events of a single hour in one chaotic day, slowly building, in the style of a weekly Marshall-Cavendish part work, into one 24-hour, 24-episode whole. The sense of rising momentum and increasingly clammy claustrophobia has me hopelessly gripped, even though on reflection it all seems about as realistic as Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I’m already looking forward to the end of the series, at which point some enterprising cable channel can run the entire shebang in its full, improbable 24-hour glory.

  And Kiefer Sutherland: bloody hell, he’s good. His famously buttock-shaped cheeks have diminished in size, so it’s now possible to concentrate on what an assured performer he is without worrying whether his mouth is about to break wind. Mind you, I’m slightly worried about his character, a counter-terrorist troubleshooter who spends approximately 70 per cent of his screen time blabbing on his mobile to anyone who’ll listen.

  He’s so cellphone-dependent, he’ll have to have spent the whole of episode eight recharging the damn thing – assuming, of course, he hasn’t been finished off by a microwave-induced brain tumour by then.

  Casualty on a Cliffside [23 March]

  Quivering fool that I am, I’m petrified of heights – or, more specifically, tumbling off them. Perfectly rational really: if there’s one thing the human body wasn’t designed to do, it’s plummeting.

  Benevolently enough, my anxiety also extends to cover other people. I can’t bear to watch builders standing on rooftops or window cleaners sitting on window ledges (it’s only a smudged window for God’s sake – get back inside and stop risking your life in the name of transparency). Rock climbers are the worst. In the suicidal stakes, clambering up a mountainside is an activity on a par with licking plug sockets or goading Mike Tyson with a brightly coloured stick (now there’s an idea for a televised sporting event).

  All things considered, I was expecting to
sit through the BBC’s new mountain rescue drama Rockface (BBC1) with one hand over my eyes and the other unscrewing a bottle of tranquillisers. Imagine my dismay when in this week’s episode (the first I’ve seen), no one topples off anything resembling a perilous drop. There’s no yawning-chasm action whatsoever: just a couple of kids trapped on a small rock in the middle of a disappointingly placid river, who get rescued in the most laidback way imaginable. Boo to that.

  Presumably, Rockface is supposed to be ‘Casualty on a Cliffside’, but the setting seems a little too self-limiting. At least in Casualty there’s a certain random variety to the injuries – one minute you’re watching someone trying to prise the lid off a jam jar with a butter knife, and the next their arm’s dangling from a single tendon. Where, precisely, is the diversity going to spring from in Rockface? Once you’ve covered plunging rock climbers and mislaid hikers, what else can happen? Someone choking to death on a mint cake? After six weeks, it’s all going to seem as predictable as a programme called ‘Frisbee Retrieval Unit’ (‘OK, team, we’ve got a Frisbee lodged up a tree in the park – let’s be careful out there.’) Rockface’s answer seems to be to take the Holby City route and ramp up the soap opera element until the mountain-rescue element becomes almost incidental, so we get to see more of the team’s personal lives than is entirely healthy. Trouble is, not only are their personal lives altogether pedestrian (with nary a paedophile nor psychopath amongst them to spice things up), but since half the cast consists of vague celebrity lookalikes it’s easy to get confused. There’s one who looks like Robbie Williams, another who resembles Brad Pitt with dark hair, and a girl who could double for Sophie Ellis Bextor in a dimly lit nightclub. And the ones who couldn’t open supermarkets for a living just look weird: there’s a rugged bloke with fascinatingly tiny eyes (about the size of a bat’s), and a balding guy who looks a bit like a cheerful potato.

  Still, maybe I’m missing the point: perhaps the real appeal of Rockface is supposed to lie in the glorious scenery – although if that’s the case they should just broadcast a still shot of The Haywain instead and have done with it.

  The ‘What the Fuck?’ Factor [30 March]

  This week on BBC1: hardcore pornography! Hardcore BESTIAL pornography! And it’s all pre-watershed, where the kiddies can see it! Quelle horreur!

  But don’t panic. We’re not talking about a special edition of East-Enders where Phil falls off the wagon and violates a dog in the middle of the Square (although I’m lobbying hard for that storyline, ideally during this year’s Christmas Special). No. The raw sex in question occurs throughout Weird Nature (BBC1), which this week pokes a lens at the bizarre world of animal copulation.

  Fascinating stuff, of course, unless like me you’ve been recently singled, in which case it’ll only serve as a ghastly reminder that there are wart-encrusted toads out there in the world enjoying more fulfilling sex lives than you.

  It’s a cunning programme, Weird Nature. The producers have latched on to what viewers enjoy most about nature shows – namely, the ‘what the fuck?’ factor – and decided to provide nothing but. Consequently, there’s no breathy Attenborough commentary, lingering shots of majestic fjords or diagrammatic explanations of the way cormorants’ beaks work – just one juicy piece of oddness after another, accompanied by as little background information as possible. It’s the natural-history equivalent of binge snacking.

  Human sexuality may be a garbled mish-mash of perversions (and I once read about a man who could only achieve orgasm by swinging a live chicken around so its panicked wings brushed the tip of his penis, so I know what I’m talking about), but we’ve got nothing on the average beastie. Weird Nature brings us a tiny rodent that literally shags itself to death, a female fish that turns itself into a male and a downright disturbing sequence in which a male praying mantis continues thrusting despite being decapitated mid-coitus (a tiny brain in his rear end keeps him going – look for a similar sequence in the next series of Club Reps).

  Filthiest of all is the humble sea flare, which has a male front end and a female back end, thereby enabling unlimited orgies in which aroused passers-by latch on to whichever end is closest. They’re even shown forming a snug sexual daisy chain at the bottom of the sea, each simultaneously humping the other like a pornographic synchronised-swimming team. So be humbled, fetish club regulars: next time you’re congratulating yourself on your latest bacchanalian sexual encounter, bear in mind there are tiny slug-like monsters who can effortlessly outdo you – and they don’t have to spend a fortune on clockwork bum machines in order to reach nirvana.

  Anyway, back to the insanely addictive 24 (BBC2). Those of you who’ve missed it thus far have a chance to catch up tonight, when BBC2 screens the first four episodes back to back, prior to the fifth instalment on Sunday (helpful BBC scheduling for a quality US import – what the hell’s going on? Progress?).

  It’s now 4–5 a. m., and finally someone actually goes to sleep (a minor character, admittedly, but at least it’s a vague nod in the direction of realism). For some reason, the Noble Senator seems to think he’ll be able to function on the most important day of his political career without enjoying a moment’s shut-eye the night before. Didn’t he see Touch the Truck? Assassination will be the least of his worries once sleep deprivation kicks in and he starts swatting invisible demons in the middle of a pre-election press conference.

  Meanwhile Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) continues his ongoing quest to get himself sacked. In week one, he shot a superior in the leg with a tranquilliser gun, and then blackmailed him. In last Sunday’s episode, he thumped an FBI agent in the guts and got a police officer killed. Having thus torn up the rulebook, this week he proceeds to piss on the tattered remains by trying to organise a jailbreak.

  All this in the space of a few hours. By 7 p.m. he’ll be constructing a death ray and threatening to demolish what’s left of Manhattan.

  The Relentless Tick of the Clock [6 April]

  Assuming you bothered to read my jabberings last week, apologies for the déjà vu, but I’m still hopelessly fixated with 24 (BBC2), the ‘real-time’ assassination drama that’s single-handedly transformed Kiefer Sutherland from a Droopy-alike brat pack also-ran into a sturdy action hero, and is currently the best populist drama on television by a good six-metre stretch.

  Somehow, the relentless tick of the clock distracts you from pondering the show’s more ludicrous elements – at least while you’re watching it. After each episode I can’t help shaking my head in disbelief at what I’ve just witnessed, as though awakening from a distinctly implausible dream that seemed convincing at the time. Therefore, in a bid to retain my grip on reality, I’m compiling a list of the most absurd elements, which I present here as a public service.

  1) Jack Bauer’s Anti-Terrorist HQ

  What’s with this place? Frosted glass, chrome railings, tasteful lighting, glamorous employees draped in Armani – it looks more like the offices of a Hoxton-based fashion magazine than a top-secret quasi-military nerve centre. I keep checking the background, half-expecting to see Sophie Dahl eating a punnet of sushi, or someone in a pair of low-slung jeans slipping an imported DJ Shadow CD onto the office stereo. It doesn’t help that no one present, aside from Action Jack himself of course, appears to be doing any work whatsoever: look closely and you’ll see they’re simply wandering calmly hither and thither, occasionally stopping to shuffle bits of paper around or gawp at a monitor (doubtless in order to languidly check their Hotmail or log on to ‘Friends Reunited’). They’re supposed to be thwarting an assassination attempt, fer Chrissakes! They should be running around chain-smoking and barking orders at subordinates, or at the very least rolling their sleeves up and sweating like hillbillies.

  Actually, there is one exception to the no-sweat-in-the-workplace rule and that’s …

  2) Shifty Beppe Guy

  You know the one: the patently sinister computer expert who’s banging Jack’s ex-mistress, and has a miniscule hint of blac
k goatee beneath his bottom lip, like a Hitler moustache that’s accidentally slipped down his face. His job seems to consist solely of demanding to know ‘what’s going on’ every thirteen seconds, being outwardly confrontational with his boss (i.e. Jack), and peering suspiciously at anyone within a five-metre radius. He’s like a dark twenty-first-century ‘re-imagining’ of the McDonald’s Hamburglar, and as such it’s hard to comprehend why the hell they employed him in the first place.

  3) Bill and Ted’s bogus kidnapping

  Bill and Ted, who appear to have undergone a startling transformation of attitude during their years away from the limelight, have kidnapped Jack’s daughter at the behest of the terrorists. Quite why a ruthless cabal of ultra-organised killers would entrust such a hazardous scheme to a pair of loafing, nu-metal stoners has yet to be explained. Perhaps it’s a work-experience thing.

  4) Mandy the oversexed, overkilling plane bomber

  And while we’re on the subject of the terrorists, what the hell’s up with Mandy? Her task in episode one: to steal a photographer’s press pass. Does she break into his apartment and rifle through the drawers? Does she pick his pocket on the subway? No: she seduces him on a passenger jet, screws his brains out in the toilet, steals the pass, and then covers her tracks by blowing up the plane in mid-air and parachuting into the middle of the Mojave Desert. Perhaps I’m oversensitive, but to me that smacks of overkill. Never one to do anything by halves, she opened episode two by stripping naked in the desert and spices up episode three with a French kiss for her Alanis Morrisette girlfriend. By episode nine she’ll be doing that trick with the ping-pong balls. Probably as part of the assassination.

  5) Jack’s car

  Jack’s car is a thing of wonder. Not only is it capable of travelling to any location in under five minutes (pretty handy in a real-time show), it’s also positively laden with handy gizmos. This week he makes use of a fingerprint scanner which seems to have been installed specifically to identify thumbs he’s recently severed from dead assailants. It’s like the Innovations catalogue on wheels: next week, expect him to spend ten minutes operating a dashboard-mounted air de-ioniser before opening the boot to reveal a combination rotating tie rack/GPS satellite system.