Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  I can’t understand the need for such exhaustive analysis. Oh, I’ve asked people about it. People who care about football. They love the analysis. ‘ITV’s the best,’ said one, ‘it’s like being in a pub, listening to some blokes talk about football, except they’re genuine experts.’

  Really? To me they’re just nerds (all football fans are nerds). And if there’s anything worse than personally encountering a football nerd, blathering on until you can practically sense your lifetime joy supply being permanently depleted, it’s watching an entire panel of them on television, day after day after mindbending day.

  IT’S A GAME INVOLVING CHANCE, YOU IMBECILES! IT’S GOT A BALL IN IT, AND BALLS BOUNCE! THERE’S A HUGE RANDOM ELEMENT RIGHT THERE! STOP BLOODY SCRUTINISING! SHUT UP!

  But no matter how hard I bellow, they simply don’t stop. On and on they blurt, boring for Britain: Bobby Robson, Ian Wright, Gary Neville, Martin O’Neill (the sourest man on television – he has the demeanour of a man who’s just spent the last hour being spoonfed earwax), Ray Winstone (Terry Venables) and, worst of all, Gazza.

  Ah, Gazza. Perpetually gurning like a Cabbage Patch Kid that’s just found a lollipop behind a mulberry bush, he slurs not just words but entire sentences, into one long incomprehensible gurgle. Analysis you can’t even hear: genius.

  Here’s a typical exchange:

  LYNAM: Well, the match ended five hours ago but there’s still plenty for us to dissect, and mark my words we will, at punishing length … Paul Gascoigne, what did you make of it?

  GASCOIGNE: Zwozzerbrilyntsnurtenfurten.

  VIEWER: What?

  GASCOIGNE: Izfluckederbelldunnersayedunnitsgonninnagull.

  VIEWER: WHAT???

  You’re watching the English dictionary melt before your very eyes.

  The players (and they are players, not ‘lions’ or ‘heroes’ or anything else – just men who are quite good at kicking balls around, like little children do in parks) aren’t much better. So little of interest spills from their mouths (aside from the odd spectacular salvo of phlegm) it’s hardly surprising there’s been so much attention paid to their haircuts. Beckham’s in particular is hideous. He looks like a damp osprey. It’s only marginally better than David Seaman’s ‘fairground worker’ abomination (at least that’s funny).

  Still, there is hope. I’m writing this prior to the England-Brazil match, which I sincerely hope we’ve lost by the time you read this. Maybe once we’re out we can get back to normal. The nauseating football-centric commercials will become less omnipresent (is there a single player who doesn’t routinely slurp corporate schlong?). Coverage will peter out. And best of all, it’ll be possible to switch the TV on again without getting bored to death by a pundit’s dribbling gob.

  Especially one you can’t even understand.

  Crapping in Outhouses and Strangling Chickens [6 July]

  Dontcha just love Americans? They’re so cute, with their pudgy faces and their pudgy brains, whooping, waving their flags, firing their guns, hauling their elephantine behinds into chain hamburger shacks to plug their hollerin’ mouths with grease and mashed-up cow flesh. Ain’t they the neatest?

  That’s mindless racism, of course. In my experience, Americans are among the nicest people on earth. It’s not their fault they’re governed by an eerie, apocalyptic dormouse – they didn’t even vote for him, after all. Yes, there are plenty of lunatics and dickheads in the States, but before chastising them for that, I suggest you try walking around Britain with your eyes and your ears open for a few minutes, to build a clearer sense of our own scum-to-genius ratio.

  Anti-Yank prejudice is often motivated by jealousy of course, because right now they’re the most pampered folk on earth. But it wasn’t always so, as this week’s The Frontier House (C4) demonstrates. A stateside spin off of The 1900 House (a surprise hit over there), Frontier House takes the same surviving-the-past principle and relocates it to the US. Three families have agreed to ditch their all-American dream homes in exchange for four months fending off the elements in Montana, playing the role of pioneers in the Wild West circa 1883. Cue much hilarity as they sit around eating tastebud-punishing combinations of flour and cornmeal, crapping in outhouses and strangling chickens.

  That’s the idea anyway. But historical authenticity isn’t the main draw – the fun lies with the almighty personality clash between the two main families, the Glenns and the Clunes. The Glenns are likeable, earthy, liberal types. The Clunes are a bunch of pricks. Heading up the Clune clan are husband Bordon and wife Adrienne. He’s president of a manufacturing company, she’s a pampered LA housewife. They live in a Californian mansion. Why participate? Gordon wants quality time with his kids. Ahhhh.

  But hang on: Gordon’s idea of ‘quality time’ consists of macho fantasies in which he and junior bond over firearms in the untamed West, and the moment he discovers that the programme’s dedication to historical authenticity doesn’t extend to overturning federal hunting laws – i.e. that he can’t simply run around blasting every creature in sight – he turns into Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

  ‘I’m very disappointed in how little this part of the West is going to be emphasised in this programme,’ he mutters bitterly. Presumably he was also looking forward to forming lynch mobs, raping slaves and getting scalped by Comanches.

  Even the provision of a genuine, loaded firearm (for shooting coyotes which might attack their livestock) fails to cheer him up. It’s been made in Russia, and that really sticks in Gordon’s craw, particularly since he’s bought his own antique shotgun along to give his kids, and can’t wait to show it to us.

  ‘This gun was made in 1886,’ he says, huffing with a scary combination of anger and excitement as he fingers his beloved weapon. ‘Look at this engraving: pictures of rabbits and squirrels. This is a kid’s gun. Kids in the West had guns. But what they’ve given us is something you’d better not do a close-up on, because it’s embarrassing.’

  Adrienne, meanwhile, is upset by a similarly outrageous infringement of her human rights – the ban on make-up, which quickly drives her into a flub of nigh-on suicidal tears. With any luck she’ll find Gordon’s shotgun and give herself a full cranial makeover before the series is over.

  Amazingly, all the self-centred griping occurs during the initial preparation stage, before they’ve even moved into their ‘frontier cabin’. As if to prove the existence of karma, the Clunes’ luck continues to falter as the families set out via wagon for their new homes.

  Some of the horses go nutzoid; Adrienne is almost trampled underfoot, while their eight-year-old son Conor gets thrown from the wagon, narrowly escaping death.

  God alone knows what kind of indemnity forms the producers made them sign up before taking part, but it’s clear that genuine risk of life and limb is seen as being all part of the fun – good news for the viewer, bad news for the luckless Conor, who is later mauled by a dog.

  Personally, I can’t wait for next week, by which time everyone’s shouting or in tears, and Gordon’s threatening to use his cherished shotgun for real. Oh, and Conor gets eaten by a buffalo. Probably.

  Like Tipping Your Hat to a Prostitute [13 July]

  Hello. My name is Charlie Brooker and I’m a hypocritical snob. Like millions of other hypocritical snobs, I like nothing better than settling down to a Sunday roast in the local pub, flipping through the papers with a mouthful of undercooked parsnip. Like millions of other hypocritical snobs, I buy two different papers – a broadsheet (in my case – the Observer), and a gaudy tabloid (the News of the World – the grubgasm of choice for any serious voyeur).

  The broadsheet provides serious news, profiles of unheard-of sculptors, reviews of books I’ll never read and jazz CD’s I’ll never buy, aspirational recipes and interminable think-pieces on male–female relations or parenting or a host of other things I really couldn’t give a sun-blushed shit about. The tabloid provides scandal and photographs of celebrities with their chests out, both of which I pretend not t
o be interested in.

  Why bother buying the broadsheet? Because it makes buying the tabloid feel somehow less shameful. It provides a veneer of civility, like tipping your hat to a prostitute. See: hypocritical snob. There are millions of us. Close down the Sunday tabloids and their broadsheet companions would collapse overnight – there’d be no point in buying them any more.

  I bring this up in the light of My Worst Week (BBC1), a new series looking at the ‘story behind the scandal’, which opens with an exhaustive raking-over of George Michael’s 1998 ‘toilet incident’, and which, by interviewing tabloid editors, paparazzi and fans, seeks to hover somewhere above the grubbiness of it all, while simultaneously taking its shoes off to wade thigh-deep into the bog.

  Let’s get one thing clear – when I refer to ‘grubbiness’, I don’t mean Mr Michael’s rather endendearing indiscretion. I’ve never committed a lewd act in front of a policeman (adjusting my crotch during an episode of The Bill notwithstanding), but it sounds quite fun, and certainly far less grubby than paying to ogle bum-shots of Britney spears taken by an overweight photographer hiding in a tree, before turning the page to tut-tut at the ‘sordid’ antics of somebody – anybody other than myself.

  Anyway, back to My Worst Week. Naturally, since there’s nothing to say about a teensy bit of rudeness that took place four years ago, the show takes half an hour to do so, padding the time with blurry, impossible-to-watch ‘reconstructions’ of the incident, interspersed with talking heads from paparazzi perverts (who, hilariously, don’t want their identities revealed) and assorted tabloid prickerati (Piers Morgan, editor of the newly principled Daily Mirror, chastises the ‘rank hypocrisy’ of the public, before saying his gut instinct was to ‘get as much salacious detail as you possibly can’ on his good pal George, whose rubbish ‘Shoot the Dog’ single Morgan’s paper recently touted as the pinnacle of genius).

  Does the programme pick him up on this? Does it say, ‘Hang on a sec – which is more perverted: waving your goolies around in a loo, or spending six days camped outside the home of a man who waved his goolies around in a loo?’ No. Come the end there’s no opinion, no conclusion – in short, no point.

  It’s just there, bunging a hole in the schedule, just one more tiny monument to celeb-obsessed needlessness. So why bother writing about it? Because I’m a hypocrite. And why slag it off? Because I’m a snob. But I told you that at the start so don’t act surprised.

  On to Believe Nothing (ITV1), Rik Mayall’s new vehicle (and I’ll leave a pause here for you to insert the quad-bike/vehicle joke of your choosing), which I rather enjoyed, even though (judging by episode one) it’s not particularly funny. It’s heartening to see a new, mainstream sitcom so completely hell-bent on being just plain silly.

  Mayall, who now closely resembles Sven Goran Eriksson (who in turn resembles Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss), plays an egotistical professor called Adonis Cnut (the most brazen ‘comedy’ name since Kenny Everett’s Cupid Stunt) entangled in a succession of absurd conspiracy theories. Utter pantomime, and nothing to do with real life whatsoever, but when it comes to sitcoms, I’d rather have Rik Mayall (a hero during my adolescence, even if his recent forays into anti-euro rhetoric have made him look like a genuine cnut) bellowing his way through surreal whimsy than a cast of interchangeable twenty-somethings with dating dilemmas.

  In short: it may be a poor man’s Blackadder, but at least it’s not a poor man’s Friends. And right now, that’s something.

  The Sleep-Deprived Mind of Jack Bauer [20 July]

  If you’ve ever had to stay up all night, then go into work the next day, you’ll know there comes a point around lunchtime when everything turns surreal, leaving you on the brink of nervous hysteria, prone to demented thought patterns. Before you know it, you’re assigning an individual name to every pixel on your monitor or finding the concept of staplers inexplicably hilarious. You’ve lost your mind.

  And this is what’s been happening in 24 (BBC Choice). My new theory: the entire show is an avant-garde experimental drama, representing events as filtered through the sleep-deprived mind of Jack Bauer. Or maybe it’s more Vanilla Sky than that: Jack has gone the whole hog and fallen asleep. Regular viewers may recall he nodded off for a few moments in a building-site Portakabin at around 11 a.m. I don’t think he ever woke up.

  Since that point it’s all been random and disjointed, yet you’re able to follow it, just like a dream. Characters appear and vanish without explanation, just like a dream. There are even recurring events – such as Senator Palmer’s noble chinwags with his son Keith, a scene that replays itself every 25 minutes, like something out of Groundhog Day.

  (Incidentally, while Palmer’s trust in his wife dwindles, how come he hasn’t asked her the most glaringly obvious question concerning their marriage – why his ‘son’ Keith is clearly of a different racial origin?)

  My ‘dream theory’ even accounts for the latest development in Jack Bauer’s world: the appearance of familiar faces. Previously, his dreamscape was invaded by pop-culture doppelgangers (witness Kimberley steadily morphing into Jen from Dawson’s Creek or the unexpected arrival of the late Michael Hutchence as a ruthless Serbian terrorist, who cheerfully emulated his lookalike by meeting an untimely end in a hotel room). Now, as Jack accelerates into REM sleep, in stroll a bunch of bona fide celebrities from Kiefer Sutherland’s undistinguished movie career, back to haunt him.

  Take this week’s episode: first, exploding onto your screens, it’s Lou Diamond Philips! Hooray! A chance for him and Kiefer to recreate the onscreen chemistry that made Young Guns one of the foremost cinematic achievements of the twentieth century. And then, before your excitement chips have finished processing this stunning development … look, it’s Dennis Hopper!

  Dennis Hopper: the rent-a-psycho with a face like a chunk of pumice stone the Incredible Hulk’s just used to remove the rough skin from his feet.

  Dennis Hopper: who starred alongside Kiefer in the 1990 movie Flashback, in which – get this – Hopper’s a prisoner and Kiefer’s an FBI agent named John Buckner.

  John Buckner, Jack Bauer, John Buckner, Jack Bauer. I think it’s part of the dream. Next week: the entire cast of The Lost Boys battle on the set of Flatliners. Most exciting of all, since it’s now a dream, literally anything can happen, and the finale will consist of Jack being chased round a funfair by a visibly erect Honey Monster.

  Anyway, there’s more fractured reality elsewhere in the schedules: take Headf**ck (Sci-Fi), a self-consciously ‘weird’ programme apparently aimed at heavily stoned twenty-somethings – a collage of horror-movie clips, surreal shots and the occasional close-up of a lizard or something else equally ‘mind-boggling’. The big draw here is meant to be David Icke, who pops in to babble about UFOs, although the most interesting thing this week is the woefully lame video for the latest Prodigy single: topless go-go dancers milking cows and being beaten with sticks while Keith bellows ‘We love Rohypnol! She love Rohypnol!’ for the benefit of Daily Mail readers who need their shocks spelt out.

  There’s also the unmissable unfolding nightmare of The Frontier House (C4). Having whinged about everything from razors to the quality of tealeaves, gun-lovin’ Gordon Clune has a new gripe: he ain’t gettin’ any.

  Wife Adrienne, it seems, just isn’t putting out. It’s now surely only a matter of time before Gordon strips naked, smears mud on his face and runs through the village, firing at invisible communists.

  Meanwhile, his luckless son Conor, who’s already survived dog maulings and high-speed wagon smashes, now has starvation to contend with. And boy, did I chuckle as the tears rolled down his gaunt little face. Biggest laugh of the week, in fact. Altogether now: ho, ho, Conor. Ho ho ho.

  Outrage for Dummies [27 July]

  Picture someone stupid. Really impossibly stupid. Like, literally going ‘durrrrr’ out loud, grinning, dribbling, clapping their hands together like a seal and wearing one of those little beanie caps with a propeller on top.


  Keep that image in your mind’s eye for the next 10 minutes, because unattractive though this notional moron is, he seems to be the kind of viewer ITV is courting shamelessly these days, as it sets off, USS Enterprise-fashion, to explore the furthest reaches of a strange new universe of dimwittery, beaming back transmissions which seek to provide an authoritative televisual definition of the word ‘brainless’ – out-and-out dunce-casts that don’t so much insult your intelligence as bypass it completely.

  First we had the ghastly Elimidate, in which Kerry Katona’s stunt knockers bobble around a beach or shopping centre encouraging dunderheads to feel each other up; now, hot on its heels, comes Wudja? Cudja?, the show that by its own admission seeks to ‘test the limits of taste, greed and self respect’ by offering the public wads of banknotes in exchange for performing humiliating challenges.

  Now, I’m all for watching people debase themselves, particularly if they’re younger and better-looking than myself (a demographic that grows by the nanosecond), but Wudja? Cudja?, transparently misanthropic though it is, entirely fails to capitalise on its premise by displaying a downright offensive lack of imagination. The ‘challenges’ are predictable Club 18–30 shenanigans – like snogging as many strangers as possible, or letting a mob of baying lads lick ice cream from your bosom, or, at its very worst, simply flashing your bum for five pence. It’s like flicking through a copy of ‘Outrage for Dummies’.

  Look, if you’re going to get people to demean both themselves and the whole of humanity, do it properly. Have some balls. Here, off the top of my head, is a list of five challenges that Wudja? Cudja? shoulda hadtha nervta feacha: