Really, it feels rubbish being a man at the moment – assuming you base your self-perception on the images pouring from your TV set, that is. I know I do, and I’m beginning to feel like scum simply for owning my own testicles.
Take adverts. I don’t recall attending the meeting where it was decided that all male characters in adverts should be portrayed as pitiful figures of fun, but, nevertheless, that’s precisely what’s happened: every other commercial on television seems to feature a sassy female character rolling her eyes in dismay at the buffoonish antics of an imbecilic man. In advert-land, boyfriends and husbands are routinely ditched, cheated on or, in the most offensive example, literally traded in for a sleeker model at a dedicated showroom.
Of course the implicit message is as patronising to women as it is to men – it’s saying, ‘Hey, you’re a modern woman, yeah? You’re cleverer than most men, right? Brilliant! Now buy this. Go on, bitch – buy it.’
It’s odd, though – the insidious nature of this continual chap-dissing – because if I’m anything to go by, it works on men themselves. To let you in on my cynical way of thinking, I ordered a preview tape of Bald (C4) – a documentary about the desperate measures to which men with premature hair loss will go to disguise their cueball status – specifically because I thought it’d make a nice ‘light’ subject. My reasoning went thus: last week I got all miserable covering the war, so this week I’ll lighten things up with a savage attack on an easy target. Using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut never fails to cheer me up, y’see – that’s why I spend most weekends kickboxing children to death in a barbed-wire thunderdome in my back garden.
Anyway, a funny thing happened. I actually started feeling sorry for these people. Even though they’re bald! Slap-headed, shiny-bonced, skull-flaunting cueballs to a man, and yet I couldn’t help but empathise. Curses.
Little wonder, though, that so many baldies feel they’re perceived as a ‘joke’. Most say their discomfort stems from society’s obsession with youth and looks and vigour – a world in which naked noggins don’t cut it. It’s the TV-fuelled image-perception problem women have had to wrestle with for years, in other words – the sole difference being it’s currently de rigueur to mock men who don’t conform to the mythical hunky norm. There’s no reason why a man smearing hair-growth lotion on his scalp should be any ‘sadder’ than a woman rubbing anti-ageing moisturiser on her crow’s-feet, but he is.
Likewise, the sight of a toupee prompts chuckles galore, yet a prosthetic breast masking a mastectomy is about as funny as, well, as cancer. Ah, well. If you’re a bald man yourself, the advice from the programme is ‘For God’s sake just get a grade-one crew cut.’ The only interviewees who felt they’d ‘come to terms with their baldness’ were the ones with a set of clippers at home. And a quick checklist of celebrity slapheads – Vin Diesel, Bruce Willis, Ross Kemp, Pacman – bears this theory out. Oh, and there’s another famous baldie to add to the list – Peter ‘Go West’ Cox on Reborn in the USA (ITV1), a man clearly on his way to becoming the next Robson and Jerome (except there’s only one of him, and he can actually sing).
Follically challenged he may be, but when he lets that roaring voice out of its cage, you need a mop to clean the auditorium afterwards. I’d fancy him myself, but that weird face he pulls whenever he approaches peak volume – a sort of cross between Joe Cocker and a man trapping his testicles between the cogs of a gigantic machine – sorta puts me off. Well, that and the fact that he’s bald.
Modern Life Isn’t Rubbish [12 April]
Modern life is rubbish, right? Go on, flick through the newspaper. Nothing but depressing headlines: TEEN THUGS ROB AND EAT 84-YR-OLD MAISIE; BIONUCLEAR TERRORIST APOCALYPSE ‘INEVITABLE’ SHRIEKS MINISTER; CHILD MISSING ON INTERNET, etc., etc. – it’s enough to convince you the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.
Well it isn’t. Things are better than they used to be, and if you don’t believe me, try counting the number of dead babies littering the streets next time you go for a stroll. Unless you’re really unlucky, you won’t find any – which is a pretty good yardstick of how civilised we’ve become since ye olden tymes. Back in the Georgian era, it wasn’t uncommon to come across decomposing illegitimate offspring lying around the pavements like doggy doo, a situation that so upset a man called Captain Thomas Coram, he established Britain’s first Foundling Hospital to care for them. The big wuss.
Coram’s story comprises the first episode of Georgian Underworld (C4), a series hell-bent on convincing us that although the past may look more genteel from where we’re standing, it stinks to high heaven the moment you get too close.
We could do with more of this, because the past is steeply overrated, especially by bitter old goats who blame society – i.e. everyone else in the world – for their current dissatisfaction with life. Goats who think music and films aren’t as good as they used to be, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Who think video games are a mindless distraction for infants, but consider chess – essentially a very dull beat-’em-up running on an outdated wooden system – to be the pastime of gentlemen. Who think costume dramas are worth watching.
I’ve never liked costume dramas, largely because I’m not particularly interested in watching some spoilt doily-wearing bint sob down her harpsichord because the horse-riding Jeremy she’s had her eye on betrothes himself to another, while around her, her subservient handmaidens (whose combined annual wages wouldn’t buy two of their mistress’s pubes at auction) tug their forelocks in sympathy.
The BBC, of course, churns them out regardless, presumably because they’ve got a warehouse full of bodices that need a regular airing. Having failed to win me over with their countless Austen adaptations and Sunday evening boredom festivals, they’ve now changed tack, by inventing Servants (BBC1), a warts-and-all youth-oriented costume drama that purports to show life in an 1850s mansion house from the staff’s point of view. It’s This Life meets Upstairs Downstairs, in other words.
They’ve got off to a good start by hiring Joe Absolom – a likeable performer so weird he somehow manages to resemble 100 different things at once. One minute he looks like the lead singer in a meerkat version of Supergrass, the next he’s like a cross between Malcolm McDowell and the Cat in the Hat.
Trouble is, the programme he’s stuck in is as heavy-handed as a robot with lead fingers. Servants tries so hard to prove it’s a costume drama for YOUNG PEOPLE, it becomes a parody of itself – quite an achievement for an opening episode. Staff say things like ‘Fancy a shag?’; there’s nudity, drinking and swearing; the master of the house has a crafty wank over some nineteenth-century equivalent of Razzle; one of the footmen pulls some eye-popping flip kicks on the half-pipe in the courtyard (I made the last one up, but you get the idea). Once you get past the jarring clash of old and new school, the drama beneath is as predictable as a pub-style steak-and-ale pie.
Servants won’t please anyone except the most bovine viewers: it’ll scandalise the goats, who’ll see the inclusion of sex and swearing in a period piece as further proof of the decline of everything, while simultaneously disappointing anyone looking for something genuinely diverting. But that’s the true way of the world. Modern life isn’t rubbish. It’s just as shit now as it’s always been. Happy trails, gang!
The Lawn-Sprinkler of Doom [19 April]
Apologies if some hideous Columbine-style tragedy has occurred in-between the time I wrote this and the time you’re reading it, but hasn’t it been simply ages since the last mass slaying? I’m discounting the war, obviously: instead I’m talking about those grisly incidents when someone goes ‘postal’ – usually an under-achieving, under-endowed American mailman with a gun collection Ted Nugent would consider excessive, who wakes up one morning and thinks, ‘I feel like doing something out of the ordinary,’ and winds up stomping round a former workplace spraying bullets about like the lawn-sprinkler of doom.
Since no one gets a second shot at that kind of glory – after all, it’s tr
aditional to turn the weapon on yourself at the end – it’s best to achieve a higher body count than the last trigger-happy nutjob, or you’ll end up consigned to the footnotes next time Colin Wilson brings out one of those ‘Complete Histories of Murder with Big Colour Photos and Everything’.
You certainly want to end up claiming more than two victims, which these days is scarcely a minor misdemeanour, let alone a massacre. Unless of course, you’ve used a bandsaw to slice up the bodies afterwards, in which case you’ll get an entire hour-long documentary called The Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre (C4) devoted to your exploits.
I have a couple of problems with this programme – not with the story itself, which is fascinating in its own right – but with the title, which is clearly misleading, since the case in question doesn’t involve either a chainsaw or a ‘massacre’.
A bandsaw does seem to have come into play, but only when the victims were already dead. Admittedly, that’s pretty unpleasant by itself, since it was used to slice the corpses’ heads up like so much Battenberg cake, but it hardly competes with a man clad in a leathery mask of human skin swinging a chainsaw around his head and carving people up willy-nilly, which is what you get in the film.
Still, like I say, the story itself is undeniably interesting, particularly when the man responsible for the apparent atrocity moves to a sleepy English village, gets married and starts amassing a terrifying collection of firearms. Perhaps most discomfiting is the ease with which he obtained a gun licence, despite using his real name, and despite having recently arrived from Texas, where his premature release from Death Row made him the lead news item for an entire week.
It seems the authorities were blissfully unaware of all this, until a suspicious local looked up his name on the Internet and his gruesome history came to light. Another case solved by Inspector Google.
Then another astonishing thing happens: with his cover blown and his wife in hiding, our bandsaw maniac attempts to flee the country, and is arrested in the company of another woman set to become his fifth wife. Now this man is an elderly, overweight, wheelchair-bound ex-Death Row inmate accused of shooting two men and cutting up their heads with a bandsaw – yet he doesn’t seem to have any problem scoring with the ladies. What’s he using? Some kind of spray-on pheromone shit? I mean I can understand the appeal of a ‘bad guy’, but Christ, get a grip.
Anyway, having brought us a ‘Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ that isn’t, Channel 4 also offers The Real Winona Ryder (C4), who is. This is a look at the troubled star who is troubled and ran into troubles, but still engenders more than her fair share of sympathy because 1) she appeared in Heathers, which was really cool and 2) she’s got big watery eyes and porcelain skin. You know, a bit like Gollum.
As an even-handed celebrity portrait, you won’t learn anything astoundingly new – only that Winona's godfather was Timothy Leary, that she’s not happy and that her Hollywood nickname is ‘Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame’ because she keeps getting entered by famous musicians.
I made that last one up, by the way.
The New Robin Hood [26 April]
The pursuit of money makes gimps of us all. Some labour for years in jobs they despise, toiling for the benefit of faceless bigwigs, each day waving goodbye to yet another small portion of their precious unique lifespan, slowly degenerating into dispirited husks, devoid of hope, devoid of love, or pity, or the release of laughter; living cadavers with nothing but death to look forward to. And some attempt to defraud Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with an arse-witted coughing scheme.
Last week’s disappointing Tonight special on the throat-clearing caper failed to shed any light whatsoever on the mindset of the culprits, concentrating instead on second-by-second analysis of the unbroadcast episode, as though we were looking at a previously undiscovered reel of the Zapruder footage instead of a daft incident on a quiz show. Meanwhile the major and co. were painted as a pack of pathetic, sweating sneaks.
Was it really so wicked, this childish attempt to bamboozle the nation’s no.1 pub quiz? This is a television show we’re talking about here, not a hospital fund for the blind and footless. Lest we forget, the prize money itself is drawn from the proceeds of the show’s premium-rate phone lines – money drawn from wannabe contestants, the vast majority of whom earn considerably less than the average TV executive. Besides, TV tries to wring money out of you at every turn. In fact, you might as well instal a cash point and attendant beggar in the corner of your living room.
Think about it: you have to pay a licence fee to watch the BBC channels, while the commercial channels carry adverts, the cost of which is met by you whenever you go shopping. Then there’s all the optional expenses: satellite subscriptions, pay-per-view events and, yes, premium-rate phone lines – usually supporting a multiple-choice question so simple it’s clearly designed to be easily solved by any life form on the planet from the potato upwards.
Here’s a typical TV phone-in question:
Which of the following currently plays James Bond?
A: Pierce Brosnan.
B: Superman.
C: A sycamore tree.
Of course, everyone knows they only make the questions simple so more button-punching cow people will phone in. But there’s more to it than that.
Ever wondered why they bother setting a question at all, instead of simply running it as a lottery? Because that’s a breach of broadcast regulations. They’d have to supply a free alternative entry method if they were going to do that (which is why reality shows allow you to vote via the Internet as well). To run a premium-rate TV phone-in, you have to prove it’s supporting a contest requiring some degree of skill – even if said skill is as cursory as knowing the difference between James Bond and a tree. In other words, the nice TV folk are cheerfully doing the barest possible minimum in order to avoid a slap on the wrist, while simultaneously raking in as much money as they can. That’s how much they respect you. Make no mistake; to the TV brigade you really are just a number. It doesn’t matter how pretty you are, how many press-ups you can do, or how much your children love you – you’re naught but a potentially exploitable blob of matter in the dark.
Factor all this in and the major starts to look like the new Robin Hood – albeit a nervous, absurd and incompetent one. If there’s any justice in the world, he’ll rake in a fortune from personal appearances, reality TV shows and a long run in panto. And the Sars virus will explode across Britain, filling the Millionaire studio with so much background coughing, Tarrant’ll end up bellowing questions through a loudhailer. At a corpse with a runny nose.
Speaking of Sars, anyone noticed the striking similarity between the Stella Artois commercial with coughing paupers and the Sars outbreak? How long until they pull it, do you reckon? A: Three days. B: Four days. Or C: Five days. Calls cost £1,000,000 a minute. All proceeds to the major’s appeal campaign. Get dialling.
Ten Years of Awful Television [3 May]
‘Hell is other people,’ said Jean-Paul Sartre. But the egghead wuss never had to sit through ten years of awful television. There’s a problem with trying to recall the worst TV shows you’ve seen: your mind tends to blank them out, like some kind of repressed abuse memory. Initially, you have to strain to remember them, but once you’ve started, the floodgates open and the memories pour out like tears, or vomit, or some unholy combination of the two. Ever puked through your brain? It’s not pleasant.
Which brings me to my next problem: how to corral these recollections into some kind of coherent order. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to simply spew them onto the page in whatever order my reeling mind dictates. After all, we’re talking televisual dreck here. You can’t treat it respectfully. That’d be madness. So then, without further ado …
Hotel Babylon
Synopsis: Heineken-backed, late-night untertainment with additional
ethnic cleansing.
Comments: Lager-sponsored take on The Word, complete with Dani Behr, that caused a stink when a fax fr
om a Heineken representative
in Holland came to light, requesting more shots of their product and complaining about the ‘proportion of negroes’ in the
audience. The resulting furore almost masked the fact that the
show itself was as much fun as eating a bowlful of milk and mud. Almost.
Trisha
Synopsis: Daily bellowing festival in which a sorry collection of
confused and inarticulate commoners air their dirty laundry
before an audience of self-important, loudmouthed hags.
Comments: Trisha is the most depressing programme on earth,
regularly leaving me bereft of any hope for mankind. There are no
sympathetic participants, the audience is hateful and Trisha’s mannered
insincerity could be mistaken for mental illness if it wasn’t so
sinister. Furthermore, everyone in that studio is incredibly ugly: it’s
like staring at a cave full of trolls from The Dark Crystal. They
should brick up the exits and fill the room with killer bees.
Goodnight, Sweetheart
Synopsis: Novelty ‘time-travelling’ sitcom in which Nicholas Lyndhurst
discovers a side street that allows him to visit wartime London
and lay a bit of pipe supreme on a 1940s chick behind his wife’s
back.
Comments: In time-travel scenarios, it’s traditional to avoid meddling
with the past, but Lyndhurst’s character actively molests it.
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 27