Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  I could go on, but space won’t permit me. Send your own 24 implausibilites in and I’ll add them to the roster. But hurry: the clock’s ticking.

  Frowning with Added Vigour [13 April]

  He’s a toff. She’s a pleb. Together they’re a crime-fighting force to be reckoned with. I speak, of course, of Lynley and Havers, currently solving The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (BBC1).

  It’s all creaky bunkum of the highest order, but curiously entertaining nonetheless. I can’t put my finger on precisely where the appeal lies, but it’s got something to do with Inspector Lynley himself – the least congenial law enforcement officer since Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant.

  Not only is he an absolute crashing posho (fourteenth in line to the throne, raised on a diet of fox chunks in pauper’s tears, etc., etc.), he’s also devoid of humour and physically incapable of performing any facial expression more complex than his standard three: 1) annoyed, 2) annoyed and frowning, 3) very annoyed and really frowning.

  I’m not joking: his face never changes. Lynley seems to have taken the traditional British principle of maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’ and applied it to his entire head. You could spend an afternoon flicking rice in his eyes and he wouldn’t blink or flinch once. He doubtless maintains the same rigid appearance even at the point of orgasm, although it’s as hard to envisage Lynley reaching a climax as it is to picture, say, Peter Sissons in a similar situation.

  (Speaking of which, when are they going to give Peter Sissons his own detective series? Can you possibly imagine how great that would be? They could simply call it ‘Sissons’, cast Jenny Powell as his glamorous sidekick, and boom: instant ratings magic.)

  Anyway, back to the Lynley Show. Two episodes in, and a pattern has already developed. Despite the fact that he’s a Metropolitan police officer, and should really be spending his time picking incriminating fibres from heroin-soaked cadavers in the capital’s gutters, each week Lynley is summoned to an archetypal British location (last week a public school, this week a whopping-great mansion) deep in the glorious countryside. He must be part of the Met’s new Picturesque Murder Division. Having arrived in the middle of The Haywain to frown at a collection of absurdly shifty suspects (each with more skeletons in the cupboard than Ed Gein), he encounters an old friend who becomes enraged by his insistence on following basic procedure by questioning them. Meanwhile, common old Havers puffs along behind him, repeatedly bemoaning Lynley’s personal involvement in the case or making barbed comments about the class system, while failing to uncover the faintest shred of evidence herself. Midway through the investigation, a second victim buys the farm, right under the collective nose of the local police force. This annoys Lynley immensely, causing him to spend the rest of the episode frowning with added vigour. In fact it messes his face up completely – by the time the killer (easily identifiable as the character with the least amount of screen time) is unmasked, Lynley’s eyebrows are knitted together in a tangled snarl, like a man halfway through a werewolf transformation.

  In other words, you know what you’re getting with The Inspector Lynley Mysteries: the same story, week after week, with few troublesome facial expressions to interrupt your viewing pleasure. Its function is not to provide any genuine mystery, but something altogether familiar and comforting: the TV equivalent of a flask of warm cocoa and a big slice of Battenberg.

  Oops: little space to discuss 24 (BBC2). I’m swamped by your e-mails regarding the mounting implausibilities, from the glaringly obvious (Jack’s repeated cellphone use in the hospital, the terrorist’s preposterous hijacking of every CCTV system in the world, Kim’s astonishing grave-digging skills) to the insanely specific (‘Jack’s phone is a Nokia 7110e. After dialling a number, it takes around seven seconds to be connected, whereas Jack gets an instant connection,’ writes Drew Jagger). And five of you questioned the decision to cast Cherie Blair as Nina.

  As for me, I’m busy mourning poor Janet York, who in the space of seven hours got seduced, deceived, kidnapped, assaulted, injected with heroin, hunted, run over, revived, and finally murdered in her hospital bed. Still, at least she never learnt that her dad had been murdered, mutilated, stuffed in a trunk and replaced by a psychotic impostor.

  Every cloud, etc.

  Leaving South London [20 April]

  I’m going to kill myself. Don’t try to stop me. It’s all planned out. Just as Nicolas Cage drank himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas, I intend to commit slow-motion suicide by eating nothing but jumbo sausage rolls from Gregg’s the Bakers on Battersea Park Road. Leaving South London, if you like. Come July my arteries will be so clogged, my heart will start knocking on my chest and demand to be let out for some air.

  Still, I can expire safe in the knowledge that by stuffing my face with low-glamour lard I’m going against the grain. This week’s Food Junkies (BBC2) examines how supermarkets have altered our eating habits, replacing the traditional notion of buying what you want to eat with an altogether more aspirational purchasing strategy.

  The programme opens with a Waitrose honcho visiting Portugal to inspect some ‘horned melon’ – a bland fruit whose desirability is dictated by its out-of-this-world appearance: it looks like a triffid’s testicle. More a talking point than a taste experience, it’s doomed to nestle in the fruit bowls of smug colour-supplement Joneses, intent on expressing their sophistication by filling their po-faced homes with self-consciously refined crap. It’s the latest hateful twist in a revolution that’s seen traditional grocers (with their cheery overpricing and quaint rotting produce) usurped by out-of-town supermarket motherships (hawking snooty olive oil and frosty triffid bollocks).

  No shots were fired, but it’s still been a ruthless coup. Supermarkets have tried everything, from squeezing food producers until they snap, to engaging in demented price wars (the show covers the Baked Bean War, when rival supermarkets slashed prices to 3p a can – and kept going, in one case actually paying customers to take them away).

  The current tactic is to hire a celebrity chef. Sainsbury’s has Roy Hattersley Jr (Jamie Oliver), Waitrose plumped for Raymond Blanc. Just about the only TV pan-slinger without a deal is Antony Worrall Thompson, who claims he’s not really interested in that kind of thing (which is good news for the trade – who’d want to shop in a supermarket recommended by the warrior dwarf from Fellowship of the Ring?).

  Further entrepreneurial spirit in Cannabis Cafes UK (BBC2), which follows scouser Jimmy as he tries to open a Dutch-style ‘coffee house’ in Bournemouth – a plan only mildly hindered by the fact that it’s against the law.

  Stupid, really. All drugs should be legal, with the possible exception of Pro-Plus, and aside from the paranoia, memory loss, apathy, psychological dependency and disorientation, marijuana has few ill effects. Quite why any self-respecting stoner would bother venturing outside (as opposed to sitting at home in the dark playing ‘Super Magic Rhino Party’ on a Sony Wowbox 4) is beyond me, but, hey, if someone wants to pay good money to visit a New Age bongo shack and sit opposite some prick with a chillum, for God’s sake let them.

  Interesting stuff, but having sat through Food Junkies, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that in five years’ time Jimmy will be heading a national chain of out-of-town spliff bars, replete with designer hash and a saturation ad campaign starring celebrity toker Howard Marks.

  So You Think You Want a Hand the Size of a Cymbal? [27 April]

  It’s not often you discover the truth behind a myth, but it happened to me today. I’d heard of radio DJs receiving crateloads of freebies whenever they ‘inadvertently’ mutter a brandname, but always dismissed such tales as cynical fable. Until now. Last week, I wrote of my life-endangering addiction to the ‘jumbo’ sausage rolls available from a certain high-street baker’s, and lo and behold, four days later, an unsolicited assignment of piping-hot savouries arrives at my workplace, as though scattered by a benevolent god.

  Do I feel corrupted? No. Just ill. I’ve never eaten so much mashed pig i
n one sitting. I can already sense the ingested calories preparing to distort my body in new and exciting ways. Soon I’ll be the proud owner of a mighty set of man-tits: those wobbly little melted pyramids of flab that nestle above the planetoid guts of the nation’s masculine fatties.

  To prepare myself for the inevitable, I cocked an eye at So You Think You Want Bigger Boobs? (C4), an epoch-shattering ‘TV experiment’ charting the progress of a flat-chested Liverpudlian hairdresser (eerily enough, also named Charlie) as she dons a set of fake breasts for a week in order to ascertain whether top-heaviness will improve her life. In the opening half, Charlie is sent to Shep-perton Studios, where special-effects artists take a mould of her existing chest and set about creating a decoy bust to drape over the top. So far, so good – but as soon as the fruits of their labour are revealed, it’s clear the project will fail.

  What they have produced is perhaps the largest and most unconvincing pair of breasts you’ll see this side of a fairground hall of mirrors: two mammoth swellings lolling in opposite directions, each topped off with a nipple the size of a cork. The moment Charlie hauls them on, she looks like one of those inept Internet fakes purporting to depict a topless starlet – the porno equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, only slightly less arousing.

  Before long, Charlie’s complaining that they’re ‘heavy’, that they ‘get in the way’ and, least surprising of all, that people are ‘staring’ at them. Of course they are – you look like you’ve got a Ford Ka reversing out of your ribcage, for Christ’s sake.

  Consequently, the programme tells you nothing, save the obvious: being an aberration of nature ain’t exactly a barrel of laughs. Still, it’s inspired a range of follow-up programmes that I intend to start pitching tomorrow: ‘So You Think You Want a Hand the Size of a Cymbal?’, ‘So You Think You Want Moss for a Beard?’, and most promising of all, ‘So You Think You Want to Walk down Oxford Street with a Dick Grafted onto Your Forehead?’

  The big TV event of the week is the return of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (BBC1), something I’m unqualified to comment on with any degree of authority, having been too young to appreciate the original ITV series, which at the time seemed to consist entirely of slightly frightening men standing in a Portakabin, bellowing at one another in a dialect I didn’t understand. (Having just read that description back, I realise I’ve made it sound like the sort of thing avant-garde toffs pay £640 to see at the Royal Court Theatre, but never mind).

  What to make of this twenty-first-century respray? Well, it’s early days, but to this newbie it feels sturdy enough. For one thing, it’s refreshing to see a cast composed of unsightly, unglamorous blokes (or ‘blerks’). Jimmy Nail in particular looks like an identikit photo assembled by Picasso using nothing but close-ups of knuckles and spuds. You know you’re deep within a true jungle of ugliness when Kevin Whately’s the best-looking man on screen by a wide margin.

  As for the programme, it’s a slyly jumbled concoction: a cosily predictable cartoon about loveable rogues, interspersed with flashes of grit (one’s dead, one’s got a terminal illness, and another’s been reduced to driving a drug dealer around local schools to make ends meet). I suspect fans of the original may scream blue murder (that’s their job), but I’m sufficiently interested to turn up for episode two.

  Oh, and in case any other PR agencies fancy following the marvellous example set by Gregg’s the Bakers, I’d just like to mention Blaupunkt, Sony, Agent Provocateur, Virgin Atlantic, Budgens, Walkers French Fries (any flavour), Ikea and the Nintendo Gamecube.

  No one sent me a fucking thing.

  The Most Sour-Faced Person on Television [25 May]

  What an appalling time this is for non-voyeuristic, unpatriotic, football-hating Britons. First the screens get clogged up with the World Cup and Big Brother, and then the Queen’s Golden Jubilee comes along to really piss on your chips.

  Unless you’re Jennie Bond or a gee-whiz American tourist, it’s hard to understand why you should care less about old Mrs Monarch. Consider the evidence. Has she ever done anything even faintly amusing? No. Is she a wonderful orator? No. Can she fly or shoot lightning from the tips of her fingers? Don’t be ridiculous.

  The Queen doesn’t even look like she enjoys being queen – a state of affairs that might save the day by rendering her slightly pitiful and endearing, if it weren’t for the leaden sulkiness she tends to radiate as a result. Now that Victor Meldrew’s been killed off, Her Majesty is the most consistently sour-faced person on television, perpetually wearing an expression like someone’s just cracked open a packet of shitbiscuits directly under her nose.

  The annual Yuletide speech is a case in point – fifty years of practice, and she’s still bloody hopeless at addressing the nation. Steely gaze, stilted delivery, surly awkwardness … come on! You’re the Queen, for God’s sake! You spend the rest of the year flopping about in outrageous opulence, so if we ask you to turn up on TV for a ten-minute chinwag once a year, couldn’t you at least pretend to enjoy it? Honestly: the face she wears, you’d have thought she’d been asked to squat on a pine cone at gunpoint. Come to think of it, that would be a Christmas broadcast worth watching.

  Yet despite all this evidence to the contrary, some of Great Britain’s dimmest lightbulbs insist on behaving as though HRH Grumpybones is in some way special or interesting, and our TV stations are happy to accommodate their delusion – this week’s one-off special, The People’s Queen (BBC1), being a prime example.

  Tune in and here’s what you’ll find: acres of amateur footage of Liz Windsor turning up at public events to smile and wave at her minions, interspersed with interviews with the enthusiastic patriots holding the cameras, and a select few fortunate enough to shake hands with her.

  Their recollections aren’t especially illuminating. ‘She had such great skin and her teeth were gorgeous,’ recalls a woman who met the big Q at a Silver Jubilee bash in Bootle. Of course she had great skin, thicko – she’s spent a lifetime reclining in gold-plated baths dousing herself with the most expensive balms known to man, and at your bloody expense.

  Whenever the proles’ searing insight threatens to falter, the programme whisks the simpering interviewees back to the location of their epoch-shattering encounter, so they can relive the moment all over again – minus trifling ingredients such as crowds, bunting, fanfares, and the immediate presence of Her Majesty the Queen of England. Call me a cynic, but it’s hard to relate to the genuine excitement some participants must have felt at the time when you’re watching some old goon standing in a street circa 2002, muttering, ‘There was a flag over there,’ and ‘I was standing here,’ and ‘The Queen’s car slowed down round about there,’ ad nauseam, until you feel like slamming his head against the pavement.

  Absurdities aside, there are a few genuinely interesting clips on offer – footage of the Queen as a gurgling five-year-old, and a fascinating sequence in which Her 20-year-old Majesty runs around on the deck of a ship, flirting with sailors (remarkable for two reasons: 1) Hey, she’s quite foxy, actually, and 2) It’s just about the only time I’ve seen her smiling without looking forced).

  As a final aside, I’d recommend Spooks (BBC1), if only because any drama series that’s prepared to build Lisa Faulkner up as a major character, then shove her head first and screaming into a deep fat fryer … and then blow her brains out … and put all this unexpectedly in episode two – deserves brownie points for sheer balls-out nerve alone. What next? Introduce Charlotte Church, then toss her in a threshing machine? At least she’d scream more harmoniously than poor Ms Faulkner, which might limit the number of furious complaints a bit.

  Voice of an angel, you know.

  It’s not a ‘Beautiful Game’ [22 June]

  Think of something you don’t like. Not necessarily something you hate, but something you’re ambivalent about. For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re thinking about country-and-western music.

  Now, picture a world in which country-and-western has become inexpl
icably popular. It’s everywhere. It spills from every radio. When you buy a newspaper, a third of it is devoted to country-and-western (news, reviews, sales statistics, whopping great photographs of Garth Brooks picking his bum, etc.). Pubs overflow with people in ten-gallon hats watching country-and-western concerts on a big screen, jubilantly yee-hawing along with every flick of the steel guitar. Taxi drivers insist on discussing classic Johnny Cash albums with you, even after you’ve told them you’re not keen on the man. Television is filled with footage of cowboys and people eating ‘grits’ (whatever the heck they are), interspersed with professional analysis of their grit-eating technique and billion-dollar commercials for the latest tasselled shirts. And when Billy Ray Cyrus trips over a mike stand and sprains his ankle, fans riot through the centre of town, smashing up buildings with their fists and feet.

  How would you feel? Alienated? Resentful? Furious? Probably all three. You’d also have some measure of how I (and the thousands of football-averse citizens like me) feel during the World Bloody Cup (BBC1/ITV).

  It’s not a ‘beautiful game’, all right? It’s just ‘a game’.

  The matches themselves I could probably withstand were it not for the dull circle-jerk of punditry that surrounds and envelops them. It’s like being locked in the greyest room in Boredom Hell, the air thick with sweat and violent aftershave, while paunchy sales reps stand around monotonously discussing sales figures.