Then there’s the awards ceremonies: Sports Personality of the Year (BBC1) – generally about as much fun as eating a handful of dried yeast; the truly loathsome Record of the Year 2002 (ITV1) in which Dr Fox congratulates whichever soulless bunch of Tupperware automata have appealed to the largest number of idiots this year; The Turner Prize (C4) – the pseudo-intellectual’s equivalent of the above; and FHM High Street Honeys: The Winners (Sky One) – essentially the TV equivalent of a dirty old man masturbating at a bus stop.
These celebrations of nothingness reach their peak with Kylie Entirely (C4), a 90-minute brown-tonguing of Britain’s ‘best-loved entertainer’ cluttering up the schedules of the UK’s number-one ‘alternative’ broadcaster: further proof that Channel 4 have long since abandoned an imaginative agenda and are now committed to pursuing the lowest common denominator with all the dignity of a man with his trousers round his ankles chasing a Thai prostitute round and round a sofa.
Still, Kylie Entirely would be just about justifiable had they managed to secure an interview with Ms Minogue herself, but no: instead it’s yet another mélange of archive clips and talking heads. Kylie Entirely reaches its nadir with a full 10-minute dissection of the Minogue arse, which unfortunately isn’t carried out by Dr Bodyworlds, but a gaggle of pundits including – AAAARRRGGHHHH – Paul Ross, the Ghost of Rubbish Past, who talks soundbites in his sleep and indeed does so here, in a series of unflattering shots which make him look like a melted Benny Hill. Any show desperate enough to resort to Ross soundbites really shouldn’t be on television at all – it should be out in the street, wearing an ‘UNCLEAN’ sign and ringing a bell. In fact I shouldn’t even be writing about it – but there’s nothing else on.
Still, everyone in the media will be out at their Yuletide parties, so what do they care? Come to think of it, I’ll be out too – getting into the festive spirit by sitting in a skip at the end of my road, drinking meths till I bleed. And since it’s Christmas, you’re all welcome to join me.
Slam it in a Filing Cabinet [14 December]
Last week I bemoaned the state of the schedules in the run-up to Christmas.
A week later, and guess what? Zero improvement. The main difference: instead of The World’s Greatest Oil Rigs, this week Channel Five (oh, all right, ‘five’) brings us The World’s Greatest Cranes – I confess I didn’t bother ordering a preview tape since I suspect even the mightiest industrial hoist in existence couldn’t raise my enthusiasm for the subject matter. Particularly when said programme is hosted by Tiff ‘Quick, Turn Over’ Needell.
So, barren viewing: what’s to do? Obviously, writing for an upstanding publication such as the Guardian means I would never encourage readers to flout international copyright law by scouring the Internet for downloadable episodes of the next series of 24 (which I also wouldn’t suggest are easily available, particularly if you hunt for them using a peer-to-peer file-sharing program like Kazaa or WinMX, and I certainly wouldn’t suggest they’re as nail-biting as the previous series and therefore well worth the lengthy download time – no siree).
Instead, I draw your attention to Vain Men (C4), a documentary examining the increasingly methodical preening regimes of the British male.
Speaking as a man whose idea of sophisticated grooming involves dipping a sock in the toilet to swab his armpits each morning, it all came as a bit of a shock.
For starters, according to the voice-over, ‘the average man now moisturises daily’. What, really? Where was that survey held? Pussy-land? The Kingdom of Nivea? Nope: right here on earth apparently – and to prove it, the researchers have rustled up a collection of image-conscious males who blow far too much time and money on manicures, spray-on tans, diets, masochistic work-out routines and even ‘pectoral implant surgery’ (that’s a tit-job to you and me) in a desperate bid to resemble the exalted male ideal. Look, I’m no expert on the rules of attraction, but I do know this: any man who spends half his life agonising in front of a mirror simply doesn’t deserve to get laid. Not by a human at any rate, although I’d queue round the block to watch them take it from an undemanding Dobermann. I mean honestly. Lighten up and weather-beat yourself like the rest of us, you idiots: we’re practically drowning in ladies here in Slobsville.
Still, Vain Men does provide the hands-down ‘water-cooler’ moment of the week: a cornea-warping close-up of a maniac having his bumcrack and testicles waxed with terrifying efficiency by a nonchalant beautician.
The scrotum is a sensitive area at the best of times. Tap it lightly with a pen and your eyes can water for an entire weekend; actively volunteering to have it stripped bare is demented. The accompanying noise would be excruciating enough (the sound of all those wispy hairs being uprooted en masse is like someone wearing Velcro gloves tearing a rice cake in half), but the aftermath is worse: the scrotum emerges crimson and raw, like a napalmed dormouse. If this is what it takes to be considered handsome these days, I hereby retire from the mating game. In fact, I can only think of five more painful things you could do with your scrotal sack, which I’ll list for the hell of it: 1) Slam it in a filing cabinet. 2) Catch it on a lathe. 3) Place it inside a George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine and repeatedly wallop the lid with your fists. 4) Tie one end of a tow cable round the Marble Arch monument, the other round your egg basket, leap onto a motorbike and see how close you can get to Hyde Park Corner before losing consciousness. 5) Declare it part of the ‘axis of evil’ and convince the Americans to wage a five-week bombing campaign against it (don’t wax it first – it’ll help your case if it’s already wearing a beard).
Anyway, enough of this balls. Next week, the Yuletide broadcasting onslaught begins in earnest. Which means yet more painful bollocks on the telly.
An Appalling but True Story [21 December]
Here’s an appalling but true story. I was in a taxi on the day the John Leslie story finally broke. The cabbie, who’d caught talk of ‘a mystery presenter’ on the radio, without actually hearing the golden name itself, spotted my copy of the Evening Standard, and asked me who the culprit was. ‘Says here it’s John Leslie,’ I replied.
‘John Leslie,’ he muttered, then ruminated for a moment before delivering his verdict: ‘The lucky sod.’ The Leslie debacle summed up our confusion over celebrity – the year’s overriding televisual theme. Exalted one minute, tortured the next – we simply don’t know what to do with our famous people. Watching Leslie blank-eye his way through a standard edition of This Morning, aware he was the subject of frenzied Popbitch speculation, but unaware The Wright Stuff had inadvertently fingered him hours earlier, was the year’s most haunting image.
Of course, Leslie wasn’t the only ‘lucky sod’ this year. So many TV careers were derailed by scandal you needed a metal umbrella to avoid being brained by falling stars, and when they hit the ground we tore into them like the confused, rage-fuelled zombies from 28 Days Later. Angus Deayton discovered no amount of nonchalant smirking would prevent the tabloids from crucifying him, while Barrymore’s career was as dead as the man in his swimming pool, even though he was cleared of any involvement: proof, if any were truly needed, that light entertainment and corpses don’t mix. (The exception to this rule is Professor Scaryhat Bodyworlds, the walking Hammer Horror character who performed an autopsy for Channel 4 – I’d have loved to see him turn up on the now mercifully cancelled Generation Game, giving grandmothers from Preston marks out of 10 for the way they sawed a ribcage open – especially if said ribcage belonged to Jim Davidson, and he was still alive, and his feet were kicking about and everything.) The torturing of famous people never let up. Hit of the year was I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here! in which we were treated to the sight of Uri Geller scoffing live grubs and Christine Hamilton falling down a waterfall and blacking her eye. No sooner had that finished (granting Tony Blackburn an additional 15 seconds of adulation before we all got bored of him again) than Celebrity Big Brother took up the gauntlet, affording viewers an opportunity to sneer at Anne Di
amond’s weight problem and publicly debate whether Les Dennis was going to commit suicide. And on BBC2, The Entertainers painted a sorry picture of Leo Sayer; oh how we cackled, even though his life to date has been 10,000 times more exciting than that of the average couch potato. Don’t forget, this man sold millions of records, travelled the world and performed live in front of thousands of screaming fans. And what have you done? You’ve sat there, inert on your sofa, laughing about what a joke you think he is. So who’s the tragic figure in this equation?
The end result is that celebrity has never seemed so second-rate. With all mystery removed, the cachet of fame is plunging so rapidly, by this time next year it’ll actually be cooler to work down your local newsagent than to appear on telly.
Perhaps that’s why, in a desperate bid to boost the dwindling ranks of the famous, TV companies pulled out all the stops attempting to transform regular Joes into megastars – Pop Idol, Popstars: The Rivals, Model Ambition, Fame Academy, all of them acting as gigantic blandness sieves, ruthlessly weeding out anyone of interest; art defined by committee. Even the very public implosion of Hear’Say – last year celebrated in an hour-long prime time special, this year spat at in the streets – didn’t hamper the process.
The Popstars panel of judges pre-defined just how bland the end product would be: Louis Walsh, a squashed omelette of a man who wouldn’t recognise soulful singing if it crooned at him from a deathbed; the curiously self-righteous Pete Waterman and gushing Geri Halliwell, a national joke who has to wear her heart on her sleeve because there’s no room left for it in her sunken Belsen-chic chest any more. The end result is that, what with the combined cast of Popstars and Fame Academy AND Will and Gareth all releasing watery-bollocked singles in the space of a few weeks, we’re left with the worst Christmas Top 10 since records began – a situation so dire, even the producer of Top of the Pops started publicly complaining. Which makes him my hero of the year: after all, he’s the poor bastard who has to try to make this shit look interesting. And where were all our proper pop stars while this was happening? Liam got his teeth kicked out and Jarvis spent the year doing Stars In Their Eyes and dangling off lamp posts in a BT commercial.
The tragedy of it all is that while we amused ourselves watching mallrat crooners burst into tears and Rhona Cameron inspecting Uri Geller’s pubic hair for lice, the Americans were creating some of the finest TV drama ever made – a veritable renaissance, in fact. In addition to the continued artistic successes of the West Wing, Oz, The Sopranos and Sex and the City, they brought us Six Feet Under, CSI, The Shield and my favourite show of the year, 24.
Ah, 24: preposterous, over-stylised and occasionally schmaltzy it may have been, but it was also the single most tense television drama series ever made, insanely addictive once you got caught up in its unstoppable march toward midnight. It even provided a gutsy, unconventional ending: Jack Bauer, our hero, cradling the body of his pregnant wife, shot through the stomach by his traitorous ex-lover. The second series, already running in the US, hits our screens in February: I’ve seen the first six and incredibly, it’s better.
The closest we’ve come to emulating the gritty new wave of American dramas is the BBC’s spy drama Spooks, which demonstrated astonishing nerve by signing Lisa Faulkner as a regular character, then killing her off in spectacularly grisly fashion in episode two. The moment her head was forced into the deep-fat fryer, viewers reared on the formulaic, it’ll-be-alright-in-the-end blandness of cookie-cutter populist dramas like Casualty and Merseybeat sat up and blinked in disbelief: here was a major BBC drama series that actually had the nerve to confound expectation. Perhaps the failure of ITV’s Doctor Zhivago and the BBC’s Daniel Deronda to set the world alight means my dream of a five-year moratorium on costume dramas will become reality – if we get more programmes like Spooks in their place, then heaven be praised.
So what else happened? Comedy rose in popularity, thanks to the likes of Black Books, Phoenix Nights, The Office and I’m Alan Partridge, all on their second series. The latter two suffered from ‘difficult second album’ syndrome, but were still head and shoulders above the likes of TLC (essentially the Chuckle Brothers for morons).
The funniest show of the year, however, was unscripted and American, although it starred a British family. I’m talking about The Osbournes, of course – a real one-off success that simply can’t be replicated (although God knows TV producers will try). A celebrity reality show that didn’t invite us to sneer, it provided more laugh-out-loud moments than it had any right to.
So. That’s the year in a nutshell. Now turn to the listings and plan your Yuletide viewing. Speaking of which, there’s just time for my prediction regarding next year’s Christmas TV – an Aardman animated version of Only Fools and Horses. Go on, picture it – I swear to God it’ll happen one day. Oh, and merry Christmas. Unless you’re a Pop Idol, in which case you can piss off. Quietly.
PART FOUR 2003
In which Chris Evans comes unstuck with Boys and Girls, interactive TV turns out to be rubbish, and the world’s first widescreen war is started.
Metal-and-Flesh Pâté [4 January]
I’ve always been deeply suspicious of people who are ‘into’ cars – you know, the sort of overgrown adolescent who slaps Ferrari posters on their walls and doesn’t contemplate suicide when they hear the Top Gear theme tune. Perhaps it’s because they tend to be the sort of person who’ll think nothing of driving to within two atoms of the car in front at 300 m.p.h. and, as the G-force starts shearing your face off, will attempt to quell your cries of fear and protest by repeatedly pointing out what a good driver they are, shortly before ploughing head-on into a container lorry and turning both of you into a bloodied streak of metal-and-flesh pâté smeared across ten straight miles of motorway. Perhaps it’s because I can’t drive and I’m jealous. Either way, I’m right and they’re wrong.
Anyway, said motorphiles are going to love Fastlane (Sky One), a frankly astonishing new US cop show which appears to be beamed live from the brain of an excitable 14-year-old boy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it – eight times as puerile as Gone in 60 Seconds, with a concept and script you could scribble down the edge of a beer coaster and still leave room for a dubious cartoon sketch of a pair of breasts.
The set-up is as follows: Tom Cruise/Ethan Hawke-hybrid Peter Facinelli is officer Van Ray Strummer (not so much a name, more a masturbatory euphemism). He’s ridiculous: the very first scene in this week’s pilot finds him hurling a sports car round a speedway track while a glamorous female thief fingers his crotch. Moments later, before the opening titles have had a chance to kick in, his partner is gunned down in cold blood. ‘Noooooo!’ bellows Van Ray, and spends the rest of the episode attempting to avenge his death by getting his shirt off a lot and penetrating the blonde thief on a bed covered in banknotes (in a daring move for mainstream US drama, there’s a slow-mo shot of him pulling down her knickers to reveal some cavernous bum-cleavage – Fastlane pushes the artistic envelope wherever possible).
Meanwhile, Bill Bellamy is Deaqon LaVelle Hayes, undercover NYPD cop, and the brother of Van Ray’s slaughtered partner. Deaqon is black and street and is therefore first encountered playing basketball with a bunch of toughs from the ’hood. He hot-foots it to LA to find out more about his brother’s death and subsequently teams up with Van Ray who, by this time, has been signed up by Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, who is Wilhelmina ‘Billie’ Chambers, a sultry lieutenant in charge of the ‘Candy Store’, a repository of impossibly expensive seized vehicles, weapons and clothing the LAPD has thoughtfully provided in order to aid high-gloss undercover operations.
The Candy Store is also decked out with gigantic plasma screens upon which the faces of suspects can spin about futuristically, thereby assisting the fight against crime.
And that’s about it: I couldn’t really tell you what else actually happens because it makes no sense whatsoever – although it does involve several high-speed car chases, a bit
where the bad guy beats up a girl on the beach, four explosions and a jaw-dropping sequence in which Deaqon wins the trust of a country-and-western-loving crime lord by performing a spontaneous line dance.
In case you hadn’t guessed, Fastlane is a shameless attempt to ‘do’ Miami Vice for the twenty-first century (at one point they even have the nerve to include Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’ on the soundtrack). Dementedly glossy throughout, with flash cuts and apparently random forays into slow motion, the overall effect is like watching a Sisqo video, drunk, on a helter-skelter. This really shouldn’t be on so soon after New Year’s Eve. Nevertheless, I urge you to tune in, if only so someone can e-mail the Guide and explain precisely what happened. Because I’m still not sure whether I actually saw this or dreamed it, and if that indicates the way TV’s going in 2003, I’m going to need all the help I can get.
Disasterporn [11 January]
It’s funny, the things that stick in the memory. Many years ago I recall reading an NME interview with affable slap-head techno duo Orbital in which one of the Orbitees claimed he never smoked cannabis because he had ‘an Alfred Hitchcock mind’ – i.e. he was perpetually expecting something nasty to happen, even in the most serene surroundings. ‘I can’t even walk past a park railing without thinking, “Urgh, you could slip and skewer your hand on that,”’ he said, and I practically leapt up and started pointing at the page shrieking, ‘Me too! ME TOO!’
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 24