1) Cut the end of your nose off with scissors (£500)
2) Crush a live dormouse in your fist, and then eat it (£80)
3) Squat in the street, pooing into a big bowl of flour, while a bloke dances around playing the accordion (£50)
4) Penetrate a sea cow (£20)
5) Break your elbows with a mallet, then riverdance in a tray full of sick until you lose consciousness (£400).
There. Put those on air and I’ll tune in every week. In fact, sod that: I’ll turn up and spectate, provided I’m allowed to bring firearms and dispatch the contestants at the end of each stunt. Bang: one less moron. Bang: one less moron. Bang bang bang bang bang: wee hee! You’d need a bulldozer to tidy the corpses away.
Come to think of it, why bother handing out money? Why not simply scour the alleyways in search of heroin addicts, getting them to flash their privates on camera in exchange for vials of smack? After all, testing the limits of ‘taste, greed and self respect’ is our aim, right? Think I’m being harsh? Think again: I’m displaying no more contempt for the public than the ding-dongs who nodded this through. Difference is, I’ve got the decency to be honest about it.
Aaaaanyway, if Wudja? Cudja? doesn’t satiate your need for knuckle-dragging antics, there’s always Sex BC, an in-depth investigation into the mating habits of our cave-dwelling ancestors – who were, the programme claims, far more sophisticated than we give them credit for.
Rather than sitting about all day grunting and poking their prehistoric genitalia in the direction of anything vaguely hole-shaped, there’s evidence cave folk preferred to form loving relationships with one another. Women were afforded respect and played an active role in hunter-gatherer activities. In fact the main way they seem to differ from us present-day bozos is that infidelity was punished with a skewer through the penis of the offending cheater – which would liven up the Ricki Lake show no end.
Obviously, the makers of Sex BC have a slight problem regarding the lack of decent video footage shot during the Stone Age which might support their findings, but they’ve made up for it by getting modern-day actors to strip completely naked, then circle round filming them for ages and ages and ages. Which is clever of them. In fact, alongside Wudja? Cudja?, this makes two opportunities in a single week to watch cavemen getting their bums out.
Now that’s progress.
Sick and Wrong, or Wrong and Sick? [10 August]
Attention, Daily Mail headline writers: on no account should you miss Teenage Kicks: Drugs Are Us (C4), because it provides countless opportunities to flex those outrage muscles to the very limit. In fact your only dilemma will be which line to take: is the programme sick and wrong, or wrong and sick? Should you gnash with fury, or shake your head with world-weary dismay? Questions, questions. It’s a pity they couldn’t have thrown in a few asylum seekers for good measure – but you can probably work out a roundabout means of blaming them nevertheless, and I don’t want to tell you how to do your job because, let’s face it, you already know how everything in the world should be done anyway.
In case you hadn’t guessed, this is one of those scandalous documentaries in which something approaching everyday reality is portrayed in non-judgemental terms, thereby appalling Middle Englanders who’d prefer it if the world would just bloody well sit still and behave.
It focuses on three drug-guzzlin’ teenagers: Johnny, 16, who puffs his way through more cannabis than an entire hall of residence on a daily basis; 17-year-old Sam, who spends his weekends navigating an obstacle course of Ecstasy, speed and ketamine; and Ashleigh, also 17, a disarmingly nonchalant Geordie girl with a penchant for garish blue eyeshadow. Oh, and heroin.
None of them slots neatly into a pre-determined pigeonhole: Sam, for instance, is a fresh-faced and articulate public schoolboy who, when he’s not grinding his teeth to powder in a strobe-lit jiggle hut and using drugs as a chemical joystick to control his every mood, croons hits for Jesus in the local church choir; stoner Johnny’s a good-natured Scot who disapproves of heroin (it’s ‘stupid’) and cheerfully decides to temporarily curb his Cheech and Chong lifestyle to sit his exams.
They’ll both be fine, particularly once they realise the grim truth about drugs: that their main purpose is to provide you with something fun to grow out of, and that people who go on about them are really boring.
Ashleigh’s the one to worry about, because she’s entirely blasé about her heroin addiction, discussing it as though recounting events from a particularly dull episode of Holby City, unconcerned that it’s clearly going to blight her existence until she drops dead or kicks the habit.
And the parents? Irresponsible? Nope. They’re all admirably realistic about the situation, begrudgingly accepting that they’d rather know what their kids get up to than simply bellow disapproval and force them to do it in secret. Ashleigh’s mum Maureen is especially heartbreaking, balancing pragmatism with parental love as she deals with three teenage daughters who routinely steal from her to pay for their five-quid bags of smack.
Ashleigh, if you’re reading this – which you aren’t – for God’s sake, give yourself a kick up the arse and do something, anything, to wean yourself off that life-crushing muck, because your mum deserves a breather. Oh, and ditch the blue eyeshadow; it makes you look like a smackhead or something.
Further follies of youth are on display in Classmates (C4), which is basically nothing more than the ‘Friends Reunited’ website (the online nostalgia site where you get to discover precisely how many of your school friends now work in IT – i.e. all of them) transferred to television, but curiously life-affirming nonetheless. In this edition – the first – a group of pupils from a vaguely bohemian mixed-sex boarding school in Surrey meet up after 12 years apart to compare jowls and job descriptions, and it’s all rather sweet: teenage sweethearts are reunited, the school wallflower turns out to be a super-confident glamourpuss and the troubled wide-boy enjoys an amiable chinwag with the headmaster who expelled him.
The arrival of school heart-throb Adam Donald is especially gratifying, since in his youth he had the uncannily handsome looks of a Hollywood superstar, but now resembles a slightly cheeky potato (and is infinitely more likeable as a result).
By the end of the programme I was on the verge of boo-hooing like a baby, mind, simply on account of the soundtrack, which to my ears sounded almost contemporary until I realised it consisted of music from 12 years ago – Screamadelica-era Primal Scream et al. – thereby proving I’m officially old.
And if that isn’t a valid reason to start knocking your brains out with pills and spliffs and smack, then I don’t know what is.
Teenagers: they don’t know they’re born.
Ethically Right? [31 August]
In the good old days (you know, back when we all lived in fear of nuclear extinction and greed and bigotry were rife, utterly unlike the present era), there were only three or four channels, so it was easy to keep tabs on what was showing where. Kelly Monteith on BBC1, snooker on BBC2, Cannon and Ball’s ‘Madcap Snooker Chucklehouse’ on ITV, or subtitled ‘Disabled Lesbian Snooker with Extra Pubic Hair’ on Channel 4. Simple.
Today there are 1,500,000 channels, growing at an exponential rate, and you can’t flip open the Guide without noticing a new addition to their ranks: one minute there’s an Open University programme about hills on BBC2, and the next there’s the Discovery Hill Channel (documentaries about hills), Hill 24 (24-hour hill news), The Txt-a-Hill Network (teenagers communicating via text message captions superimposed over footage of hills), and Fantasy Hill X Super Hardcore Plus (fat men having sex with hills).
It’s bedlam out there. Hence the trend for ‘Ronseal’ programme titles – shows that explain exactly what they do right there on the tin, with names like ‘Britain’s Scariest’. The idea is that they stand out in the listings, so you’re more likely to tune in. Why name your programme A Touch of Frost (which could be mistaken for a documentary on winter mornings), if you can call it ‘The Shortarse
Detective’ instead?
ITV has honed this practice to such a fine art, you don’t even need to watch the programmes any more, just read the titles: Britain’s Sexiest Builders, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Game Show Host, To Kill and Kill Again, and now the latest example, I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here! (ITV1), in which a bunch of vaguely famous people have been dumped in the Australian outback in order to suffer for Ant and Dec’s amusement.
OK, so the use of the word ‘celebrity’ contravenes the Trades Descriptions Act, but the programme itself is a guilty pleasure, and everyone who’s wearily grumbled about the bile-scooping tackiness of it all is wasting their time: this is vastly entertaining stuff; no amount of hand-wringing is going to change that. And I can sum up the appeal in two words: Uri Geller.
See, the big surprise about I’m a Celebrity is that most of the ‘stars’ seem quite nice: Tony Blackburn, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Nell McAndrew, and Rhona Cameron. Heck, even Christine Hamilton’s grown on me. Nigel Benn you can keep, and Darren Day could annoy me just by breathing in and out, but Uri Geller … CHRIST.
Don’t know about you, but I always assumed that behind closed doors, once the cameras had been put away and he’d finished spoonbending for the day, Geller magically transformed himself into a normal person – but no. For him it’s a lifetime gig. I wouldn’t be able to stand in the same room as him for five minutes without feigning a fatal brain haemorrhage, just to make him stop banging on about spirituality and his psychic bloody powers, which he’s not going to use on this expedition because ‘it wouldn’t be ethically right’.
Ethically right? I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here! may be many things, but a noble contest of far-reaching import it is not. Sod ethics, Uri – prove your abilities. Go on. I dare you. Bend us a spoon. Float in the air or something.
I’ll even watch you squatting on the outdoor toilet, curling out a turd in a supernatural trance. That beats ethical restraint any day. And if you can’t do that, at least spill some Michael Jackson gossip. You must know loads, particularly since you can probably read his mind as well. But no. Uri’s content to simply weird everyone out. The sequence in which he slimed around the camp attempting to ingratiate himself with the women (by patronising them) has to rank as the creepiest thing I’ve seen all year. Spoons are one thing, but this man has an innate ability to bend minds, and not in a good way; I’m guessing – hoping, praying – that by the time you read this, the public will have revolted en masse, and voted him into a whirlpool of misery.
And with any luck, next year we’ll have a series called ‘I’m a Celebrity – Get This Out of Me!’ in which members of the public phone in to vote on which unwieldy object gets shoved up whose famous backside. I’m setting my telephone to speed-dial Uri’s number already.
Footballers’ Wives for Sociopaths [21 September]
Wahey! The trailers say it all: action is back on ITV! And it’s courtesy of Ultimate Force (ITV1) – The Sweeney with a hard-on.
Set in a parallel universe in which the SAS are called in to sort out problems at the drop of a hat, Ultimate Force is about guns and machismo and very little else. And we’re talking gallons of machismo – the smug kind, the kind that shoots first and doesn’t bother asking questions later, safe in the knowledge that anyone wringing their hands over the nastiness of it is simply Missing the Point.
In fact, describing this as an ‘action’ series is misleading. It’s pornography, plain and simple, pandering to the fantasies of tiresome British bloke creatures – that wretched breed of style-free thickos who drive too fast and spend the weekend starting fights outside dismal nightclubs. With any luck, one glimpse of the gunplay in Ultimate Force and they’ll all succumb to a Pavlovian urge to masturbate before bedtime, thereby reducing their risk of impregnating their girlfriends and spawning yet another generation of insolent heirs – and if in 20 years down the line that means one less bellowing imbecile in the Friday night minicab queue, it’ll all have been worth it. In fact, if ITV broadcast a new episode every night for a couple of decades, we might see the national average IQ treble in size by the year 2033.
So yes, it’s macho and daft, but when you’re dealing with a series starring Grant Mitchell, what else would you expect? Quaker Academy? Harpist Squad?
Of course not. We’re talking about Ross Kemp here – ITV’s stellar signing, who’s thrashed around in search of a decent vehicle for so long it was in danger of becoming embarrassing. The sigh of relief is almost audible over the gunfire: finally they’ve hit upon the ideal showcase for him – something in which his ability to act is secondary to his ability to stand around looking vicious.
Thing is, Kemp’s never been a convincing hard man – he’s more of a try-too-hard man. Bona fide toughnuts don’t need to pull such obviously menacing facial expressions, at least not all the time.
Honestly, what’s with all the furious glares? The moment Kemp walks onscreen he enters into a demented staring competition with everyone else in the room, including the viewers at home (if glowering ever becomes an Olympic sport, he’s a dead cert for the gold – he could out-stare a man with two glass eyes). Presumably, Kemp maintains this unique wide-eyed frown because when his face is at rest it’s actually rather baby-like and friendly, but the result is disturbing; he looks like a version of Nookie Bear that’s had its fur shaved off and isn’t happy about it.
Thankfully, there’s more to the Kemp repertoire than mere scowling. He’s mastered nodding as well, which is why every line is delivered with his trademark bob of the head, like a man auditioning for the part of a nodding dog in ‘Toy Story 3: Playthings of Fury’. Squint and he starts to resemble a testicle bobbing in a bathtub. And a particularly hairless one at that.
Apart from Staring Nodding Man, what else does Ultimate Force have to offer?
Bloodshed. Taking their cue from the recent trend for graphically violent combat in films like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, the special-effects team has raised the splatter quotient well above the televisual norm. Hence a shoot-out in a suburban bank ends up resembling something out of Dawn of the Dead, with shot-off bits of scalp dangling from the lampshades and flambéed kidneys squelching underfoot.
But while the aforementioned movies all used shocking gore to hammer home the sheer hideousness of violence, Ultimate Force simply uses it to titillate, in the manner of a 1980s video nasty.
Regular readers will know I’ve got nothing against that, but I do think if you’re going to dish up gore for gore’s sake, you might as well go the whole nine yards and make it absurdly, unrealistically gory. Since Ultimate Force doesn’t seem to convey any message besides ‘The SAS are hard’, let’s see them ripping the bad guys’ ribcages out with claw hammers, please.
Needless to say, despite all my griping, I rather enjoyed it. It’s got a camp appeal, like Footballers’ Wives for sociopaths. The trailers say it all: action is back on ITV! Wahey!
Reality Jokers [28 September]
Today, fame is power and everyone wants to be a celebrity. It’s become as ubiquitous a human requirement as the need for air, water and a decent pair of socks, which is why the world is full of bewildered people doing misguided and humiliating things in a bid for fame. Things that would make you or me curl up and wither to a desiccated husk of embarrassment, like singing Bodyform jingles, or having sex with geese on the Internet, or performing onstage with the Stereophonics.
Pathetic sights, the lot of them, but none is as truly heartrending as the sight of a Reality Joker basking in his moment of glory.
A what?
A Reality Joker – it’s a new phrase I’ve just coined, which refers to the type of person who turns up at the auditions for programmes like Model Behaviour (C4), knowing full well that a) they don’t stand a serious chance, and also b) the production team won’t be able to resist plastering their mugs all over the screen for a few moments, so we can all have a good laugh at their expense.
Hence the judges in Model Behaviour
– a programme designed to pick out tomorrow’s male and female supermodels – occasionally find themselves stifling smirks in front of some chubzoid clown (generally a fat moron named Barry, or something similarly Woolworths) who comically insists he’s got the making of a cover star.
Blimey! He’s bonkers! Barry is bonkers! Of course he won’t be chosen – he’s obese and disgusting! Har har har!
The judges are happy, because they look like good sports, the production team are happy because they’ve got a few more easy moments of sneersome air time under their belts, but most of all Barry’s happy because his mates will see him on the telly and roll around guffawing at how downright daffy BONKERS!!!! he is. Well, hooray hooray. Enjoy your 1.5 nanoseconds of fame, Barry – then shove off back to Doncaster so we can concentrate on the meat of the programme: encouraging teenagers nationwide to work on their eating disorders.
This second series of Model Behaviour has clearly been taking notes – or more accurately photocopying instructions – from Popstars (a show which has not one, but two Reality Jokers, in the form of the ‘touch my bum’ girls). As a result, it seeks to pressurise and degrade its participants at every turn – ’cos that’s good telly, innit? Jettisoned wannabes aren’t just gently informed that they’re no longer required – no. Despite already having been picked from the line-up and ordered to parade around in skimpy underwear for our titillation, they haven’t been puppeteered enough. So they’re separated into groups.
You, you and you – stand on the pink carpet. The rest of you, stand on the blue.
Drum roll, please. Let the maximum tension build – we want to see anguished looks on faces, please. OK. Now then. Pink carpet. Congratulations, you’re through to the next round. The rest of you: your dream is over. Go on, shoo. And try to cry into the lens on your way out.
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 21