Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  But the studio audience is worse. I’ve got nothing against fat, ugly women, until they stand up and bellow moronically on television, at which point I dream of kicking their teeth down their throats (a doomed fantasy – the gobblesome warthogs would immediately digest them and demand pudding). There’s a lot of pent-up rage in that studio, and it’s unswervingly directed at whichever man happens to be on stage. Granted, the men are arseholes, but the sight of one arsehole being shouted at by another arsehole – one whose arms are so blubbery they’re still undulating five minutes after she’s finished shaking her ham-sized fist – does not fulfilling television make.

  My advice? Lie in till 11, when the Terry and Gaby Show starts on Five. Clearly inspired by the USA’s Regis and Kathy Lee, it’s what the Des and Mel Show is trying to be but isn’t.

  Wogan – whose name sounds more like a Norse god each time I say it aloud – is a genuinely funny man, and the relaxed format gives him plenty of opportunity for cynical asides and amusingly dark mutterings. Yes, it’s just a cross between This Morning and TFI Friday, but I guarantee it won’t drive you to suicide. And, for morning TV, that’s high praise indeed.

  And Then You’re in France! Amazing! [12 July]

  Holidays! They’re fantastic. You get to travel the world, encounter unfamiliar cultures and experience chronic diarrhoea on outlandish toilets.

  Drink cocktails! Lie on the beach! Feel your skin blister beneath the punishing Mediterranean sun! Don sunglasses and pretend not to stare at topless 19-year-old Italian girls! Laugh at the stern faces on brightly coloured foreign banknotes! Marvel at the hardcore goat pornography openly on sale beside the kiddies’ inflatables in the mini-supermarket! Get your bag pinched! Holidays! Yaaaay!

  But holidays weren’t always this brilliant. Phone up someone from the 1950s and ask them to describe their average holiday and they’d paint a picture of crowded Margate beaches, warty-faced landladies who ruled their B&Bs like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, monochrome skies and bracing sea winds. So why did our habits change? Two reasons: 1) We realised that British holidays were inherently rubbish, and 2) Television started broadcasting foreign-holiday shows.

  The Way We Travelled (BBC2) is a fascinating trawl through the history of TV travel shows. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the general population viewed a foreign holiday as a deadly serious undertaking, as pioneering and dangerous as piloting a UFO through the rings of Saturn: consequently to modern eyes the shows appear to be aimed at imbeciles. Look! An aeroplane! It goes up in the sky! And then it lands! And then you’re in France! Amazing!

  Basic stuff, yes, but there’s a genuine charm to these antiquated holiday shows that’s sadly lacking from today’s gaudy travelogues. Perhaps it’s the sense of class, personified by Alan Whicker, whose dapper dress sense and smooth nasal delivery never faltered for a moment, whether he was ascending Mount Fuji, exploring Ayers Rock, or beating a monkey to death with a stick on the Great Wall of China (he never did the last one, obviously, but you get the point – this was one unruffled hepcat).

  So unchanging was Whicker’s look, in fact, he became an instantly recognisable ‘brand’ almost overnight: the stiff but personable Englishman abroad, utterly incongruous yet somehow right at home against an ever-changing background. (The one time he looked out of place came during a report from hippy-packed San Francisco – as he stands in Haight-Ashbury surrounded by moon-eyed junkies, it’s hard not to feel sorry for him.)

  The excitement in Whicker’s early reports is palpable: even a simple act such as boarding a foreign bus was a strange and fascinating adventure for most viewers, so God alone knows what they made of his more demented excesses – such as the time he flew through the Alps in a glamorous heiress’s jet, then joined her in a speedboat for some outrageous on-camera flirting which proved so efficient they ended up engaged to one another.

  But while slick Whicker lived the life of an international playboy, it was down to paunchy Cliff Michelmore to cover more attainable locales. The BBC’s Holiday series launched in 1969, just as cheap package deals started taking off. At the time, the whole notion of a fortnight in Majorca was such a mind-blowing prospect, the show was presented à la Crimewatch – with a panel of experts on hand to answer questions from curious callers. Is the sun the same colour in Portugal? Do they have bread in Greece? What is ‘Spain’?

  By contrast, we’re spoiled today. Holiday shows have lost their charm and are little more than a bland whizz through a world of cliché, replete with quasi-porno shots of female presenters enjoying naked back-rubs and pan-pipe music accompanying 50 per cent of the footage. And the viewers themselves demand more from a holiday, hence the rise of idiotic Holiday from Hell shows in which pale whingeing killjoys burst into tears at the memory of cockroaches on a Jamaican shower curtain. Where’s the excitement? Where’s the joy?

  Answer: it’s gone. The past really is a foreign country. And you can’t book a flight there.

  The Uzi of Folly [19 July]

  Television specialises in images that are easy on the eye: soothing set design, rolling landscapes, presenters with faces so Formica-bland they make the Stepford Wives look like Slipknot. After all, it keeps the populace docile, which is what the infernal thing was invented for in the first place.

  But every now and then, and apparently just for the heck of it, the box spews up something hard to watch. Televised operations, for instance. Lord knows how anyone can sit through them without puking into their lap. I once saw a gruesome hip replacement on Your Life in Their Hands that resembled someone rummaging through a bag full of mince in search of an ivory walking stick; I was dizzy for four days.

  But even the grisliest operation, even close-up eye surgery with a lemon squeezer – it simply can’t compare to the arrgh-no-God-make-it-stop horror of Victoria Aitken’s freestyle rap performance on this week’s Young, Posh and Loaded (ITV1), which is by far the most painful sight you’ll encounter this week, even if you spend the rest of the time walking round an anal trauma ward with a magnifying glass. Ms Aitken is intent on launching a career in hip-hop and nothing – including public opinion or common sense – is going to stop her. ‘People keep saying, “You can’t do that,” but why not?’ she asks, displaying the kind of self-awareness deficit normally associated with inanimate objects and root vegetables.

  Her logic dribbles thus: despite being raised as a blue-blooded posho, she’s down wit da rap world because Daddy was a jailbird, even though he ended up there for being a greedy arrogant liar rather than a crack dealer. Well get hip, Vic: Papa was no rolling stone; he was Jonathan Aitken MP, the slimy Tory gonk who famously vowed to clear his name with the Sword of Truth and ended up popping a cap in his own ass with the Uzi of Folly.

  Still, at least Victoria can rely on her firm grasp of black-American street culture. ‘I suppose instead of going to the theatre, people in the ghetto stand around rapping for hours,’ she explains, before setting out to take part in an open-mic freestyling contest during which she achieves the impossible by piling far more disgrace on the family name than Pater ever did.

  It’s all staged for the cameras, of course – this is one of those cut-’ n’-shut ITV sneer-u-mentaries whose sole purpose is to make you despise everyone onscreen – but that doesn’t detract from the overall nausea factor; if anything, it makes it even worse. Just how dim do you have to be to willingly take part in a programme called Young, Posh and Loaded anyway? Would it have made any difference if they’d called it ‘Hateful Shitheads’ instead?

  Judging by the programme’s other subjects, it wouldn’t: we’re also introduced to fat-arsed party organiser Jonny (specialist subject: guffawing at his own jokes) and wormy little princess Donatella (specialist subject: wanting to be famous).

  Naturally, none of these coin-sodden bozos are actually doing anything of merit: when not bragging about how much money he’s making, Jonny runs dull club nights for braying Mayfair swanmunchers, while Donatella is simply shown failing her driving test – not tha
t this little mishap dissuades Daddy from buying her a £45,000 customised Mini Cooper replete with an on-board DVD system and custom-dyed lambswool carpets, which with any luck she’ll plough headlong into a concrete wall before the end of the year (sole drawback: if only it were a people carrier, she could pack more of her friends inside prior to impact).

  All in all then, an unremarkably despicable half-hour of television. Short of not actually broadcasting this crap in the first place, I can only think of one improvement – tie it in with some kind of high-tech video-game light-gun technology, so incensed viewers can blow the heads off the onscreen participants. ‘Young, Posh and Shot in the Face’ – now there’s a concept. Are you listening, ITV?

  More White than Black [26 July]

  I’m not entirely sure why, but the term ‘aspirational’ really gets my goat.

  Take the ‘aspirational’ broadsheet Sunday supplements: are they aimed at human beings? Here’s the average content: a po-faced profile on some arse-bound artist you’ve never heard of, a 10-page photo splurge on limbless Angolan babies, a recipe for summer pudding, a page showcasing designer potato mashers costing £85 each and a column by some supercilious woman explaining What Men Think and Where They’re Going Wrong in joyless and punishing detail. If that’s what you aspire to – reclining in an Olaaf Dynstiblanq chair tutting sorrowfully over reports from Korean sweatshops while sipping a nice glass of Shiraz – I’d suggest you alter your mental trajectory now, before it develops into full-blown madness.

  Aspirational TV drama is equally laughable: from Thirtysomething to Attachments, tasteful lighting and pretty faces always leave me cold. This week, just to annoy me, BBC3 premières another slick-but-soulless example in the form of Platinum (BBC3), a US drama series revolving around a pair of brothers running a New York hip-hop label. Two things separate Platinum from previous aspirationfests. First, there’s the setting: starring a largely black cast, it follows the life of Jackson and Grady Rhames, owners of an ailing rap label called Sweetback Records. Then there’s the production: John ‘Undercover Brother’ Ridley and Sofia ‘Virgin Suicides’ Coppola have devised it; Francis Ford Coppola serves as executive producer.

  There’s no denying that initially, with its rap-speak dialogue and absurdly slick visuals, Platinum feels different: the problem is that it takes just 10 minutes for you realise it isn’t. In fact, the whole thing is little more than a conveyor belt of standard, formulaic blubber: the chalk and cheese siblings (Jackson’s sensible, Grady’s a wide boy), the childhood friends drifting apart, the noble suffering wife, the highs and lows of ‘living your dream’. You could plot the future story arc on graph paper with your eyes closed. Then there’s the script, which is 90 per cent rap cliché: pseudo profundities that occasionally rhyme. Hence there’s much empty yap about ‘taking it to the next level’ and ‘stepping up’ for your buddies, but precious little else.

  So far, so irritating. But your ears have it easy: it’s the constant visual masturbation that seriously grates. Absolutely every scene is rendered in the style of a Craig David video, with immaculate colour co-ordination, slow-mo pans across nothing much occurring and blurry cutaways. It’s like falling asleep inside Trevor Nelson’s head.

  All of the above might just be forgivable, but just as you’re coming to terms with the safety-scissor blandness of it all, Platinum delivers a fatal shot to its own skull by trying to make Sweetback Records’ financial performance the single most important aspect of the show. Well intentioned, maybe – drama serials about black-run businesses are pretty thin on the ground – but storylines about takeover bids and sales figures don’t exactly set the pulse racing and besides, no matter what colour your lead actor is, he becomes a dull amorphous blob the moment he double-clicks on an Excel spreadsheet.

  With any luck, future episodes will concentrate more on the absurdities of the hip-hop world rather than Sweetback Records’ shareholder concerns, and it’ll all pick up as a result (and, to be fair, episode one does contain a sequence in which a bit of intercompany rivalry is settled by a belt-wielding thug – although since even that scene is rendered in slow-mo Craig-David-O-Vision, it looks curiously serene, like the gangsta equivalent of Constable’s Haywain).

  A mainstream black drama with genuine crossover potential is long overdue. Sadly, Platinum ain’t it. By chasing the widest audience possible, it feels more white than black, more software than drama. And who can aspire to that?

  They’re Better than Us at Everything [2 August]

  Don’t like the Americans much, do we? We’re jealous, because they’re better than us at everything. They’ve got better cars, better food, better scenery, better shops, better serial killers, better manners, better teeth and better faith in their own inherent superiority. They take everything we do and then improve on it, from farming to empire-building. Thank God they currently rule the world with an iron fist, because they do a far better job than we would. Can you imagine how a modern global British empire would function? It’d be like Railtrack with stormtroopers. Brrrrr.

  For years we were better than the Yanks at making television, but they’ve recently overtaken us on that front, and I defy anyone to name a single TV genre in which the finest contemporary example is not of American origin. Drama? Six Feet Under. Comedy? Curb Your Enthusiasm. Reality TV? Big Brother USA (which contains more intrigue in five minutes than Cameron and co. could ever manage, even if they’d been goaded with cattle-prods – a tactic I’d recommend for the next series). And so on and so on. We currently lead the world in antiques shows and sheepdog trials, but that’s about it.

  Since Americans enjoy talking almost as much as they enjoy benign global oppression, they’ve always been masters of the chat show, although since their late-night yapathons were rarely screened over here, we Brits have been ignorant of the fact for years. Now, however, it being a glorious age of multi-channel digital cathode, we can finally catch up. Most of the major US talk shows are screened in some form or another: Late Night with Letterman turns up daily on ITV2 in the dead of night, and the Tonight Show with Jay Leno airs regularly on satellite.

  Of the two, Letterman’s show is by far the most watchable, although it takes a bit of getting used to: once you understand that the first guest won’t be called until Dave and co. have slooped their way through what feels like six months of enjoyably laidback shtick at the top of the show, you can settle down and relish the proceedings.

  Leno, on the other hand, is simply one of the most punchable men you’re ever likely to encounter – facially, a cross between Popeye the Sailor and a bloated throw pillow; vocally, a mosquito trapped inside a harmonica. But he’s worth catching now and then, if only to see just how many times a man can kiss arse within the space of 10 minutes without visibly bruising his lips.

  Both Leno and Letterman, however, feel altogether stale compared to the latest US import: The New Tom Green Show (C4). The spiritual successor to the Letterman show (which in turn succeeded the Tonight Show), it’s an utterly idiotic slice of joie de vivre that you’ll find yourself laughing at against your will. Channel 4 already has a homegrown Letterman pretender of course, in the guise of Graham Norton, but his one joke (shocking innuendo) outstayed its welcome several hundred centuries ago. And besides, Tom Green’s one joke – that he’s an obnoxious arsehole – is funnier.

  Annoyingly, C4 are only showing a heavily edited ‘Best of’ compilation, rather than screening each edition in its entirety, so what we’re left with is a dissatisfying, thumbnail sketch of the full Green experience. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of laugh-out-loud material here – witness the pig-headed stupidity of the sequence in which our host borrows a super-expensive Segway scooter and uses it to repeatedly crash into things against the owner’s express instruction.

  Until we can come up with something as relaxed and carefree as this ourselves – a situation that’ll probably only come about the moment TV stations stop plopping their collective pants over every half-percentage of a rating �
� we really shouldn’t bother. And in the meantime, let’s be big enough to just admit defeat: put Norton back to one show a week (on the basis that a single dose is just about palatable) and run Tom Green in the slot left behind. Please?

  Fame Rehab [16 August]

  Young adults: they’re everywhere. They’re a virus. And they turn everything they touch into dog dung. I know precisely how brainless young adults are because I used to be one myself. Throughout my 20s I was a selfish, clueless, clumsy, ignorant jerk. As were all my contemporaries. It’s safe to assume that subsequent generations of young adults are equally bone-headed: the sole difference is these days, their every squeak, squawk and belch is broadcast on television.

  In this torturous summer we’ve already endured Big Brother 4, which featured the youngest set of contestants yet and was therefore the most boring household to date. Tellingly, the oldest contestant won. Undeterred, the Stormtroopers of Youth return, courtesy of Fame Academy (BBC1) and Pop Idol (ITV1). Two talent shows separated by a gigantic class divide: Fame Academy is stiflingly middle-class, while Pop Idol is sheer Asda-economy-range plebbish. But weirdly, the musical output from both is identical: music with all the interesting nobbles and rough edges smoothed away. These are people who earnestly admire Robbie Williams, which in the mind of any sane observer is akin to earnestly admiring the My Lai massacre.

  Pop Idol’s big draw, of course, is Simon Cowell, a fool who knows everything about selling music and zilch about what makes it touch your soul. He’s a walking fart cloud of poor taste: poor taste in music, poor taste in clothes, poor taste in women … he probably thinks Chicken McNuggets are bursting with flavour. In fact his brain probably is a Chicken McNugget, held in place with two strands of tinned spaghetti, generating just enough power to keep his eyes blinking. He’s an idiot. And he’s an idiot who’s made a name for himself by being ‘nasty’ to the contestants. But, as with everything else about the programme, Cowell’s ‘scathing’ comments are bland and misguided. Why pour scorn on someone who clearly can’t sing? Just be nice to them. Reserve your insults for the more demented Robbie Williams wannabes, the ones who’ve studied his every move and honed their voice into a shiny plastic bum gasp.