In fact, sod insults: just get up from behind the desk and hit them. Get me on that show; I’ll do it myself. I’ll take a cricket bat to the bastards. Dash those talentless brains right up the wall. They could use a lingering shot of grey matter splattering across the Pop Idol logo for the break bumpers. A hundred security guards couldn’t hold me back. That’s genuine bile, Cowell, not your piss-weak excuse for venom. Get off my screen or I’ll sue. In fact, I hereby challenge you to a duel. Fought with shoes. Come round my house and I’ll kick you round the garden like the fey rag doll you are.
Fame Academy doesn’t have Cowell; its gimmick is round-the-clock live coverage of self-satisfied dullards, courtesy of digital television.
Hilariously, they’re all so boring, they were sitting around the other day holding laminated cards with topics of conversation printed on them, presumably handed out by the production team in order to spark some signs of life (this is also how Hollyoaks is made, fact fans). Just how much of a blank sheet do you have to be to require that kind of prompting? A quick check on the contestants’ biogs reveals the answer: among their ‘musical idols’ they list legends such as Celine Dion, Lenny Kravitz, George Michael and of course Robbie Williams. THESE PEOPLE BELONG IN HOSPITAL, FOR GOD’S SAKE, NOT IN A TALENT CONTEST. In fact, that’s a good idea: ‘Fame Rehab’, a show in which the academy is turned into a kind of psychological deprogramming unit, in which teams of psychiatrists and talented musicians work round the clock to knock some artistic sense into these simpering dumb-bells.
And Simon Cowell undergoes ten weeks of electric-shock therapy. Not to cure him of anything, mind. Just for a laugh.
Robot Wars with Ghosts [23 August]
Here’s a great idea for a TV show. You find an unsuspecting member of the public who’s about to have an operation, and secretly research their background. They go into hospital, have the op, and when they come round from the anaesthetic, they discover they’ve died and woken up in heaven, where they’re surrounded by dead relatives and angels playing harps. Except of course it isn’t really heaven – it’s a set-up, and you’re filming it with hidden cameras. And the dead relatives aren’t really spirits – they’re actors wearing painstakingly accurate prosthetic masks. Hilarious! And a bit cruel, perhaps, but you could hand out prizes for anyone who susses out what’s going on before the end of the day.
What really happens after death is a mystery of course. Lots of people believe we appear in the afterlife and sort of float around like wispy humanoid clouds, which is a charming image but not really very likely, if you sit down and think about it for more than nine seconds. I’m a cynic: I reckon if there really is an afterlife, chances are it’s a bit like a small, clean town in West Germany.
It also seems the afterlife has phone lines, given the number of patently dishonest psychic mediums doing the rounds. Communicating with the dead has never been so popular – in fact, next week Nokia are launching a new mobile phone that lets you exchange SMS messages with deceased relatives (this is a lie). C4 are reacting to the fad by hosting a dedicated Psychic Night.
First up, Living with the Dead, a fascinating, even-handed potted history of séances, spirits and mediums (albeit one that’s a tad too reliant on filmed ‘reconstructions’ and abstract imagery of cadavers to spice up the narrative, but since it’s impossible to send a camera crew into the afterlife and interview ghosts first-hand, we’ll let it go).
Chief among the highlights is a chunk of footage from The Spirit of Diana the infamous pay-per-view US TV special in which ‘professional mediums’ Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker attempted to contact Princess Di. They start by visiting Paris to retrace her final steps, in the belief that this will bring them closer to her spirit.
Once they’ve finished goosing Di and Dodi’s anguished spirits at the point of impact, it’s back to the studio for the séance itself. Or rather it isn’t, because the ITC have barred its transmission, presumably on the grounds that it might cause the opening of a portal to the spirit world, swamping the nation with asylum-seeking spectres.
The show also features a flatly ludicrous ‘medium’ called Derek Acorah, who tours the UK foisting his unique brand of supernatural bullshit onto grieving people in exchange for money. Naturally, he claims to be a serious spiritualist, in which case he really ought to hand out tickets for free and tell the audience they can settle up in the afterlife. Using ‘ghost coins’.
He also makes regular appearances on UK Living, the channel that’s rapidly becoming the deranged housewife’s network of choice, thanks to shows like Antiques Ghostshow, in which Our Derek handles heirlooms and gets possessed by the ancestors who once owned them – side-splittingly funny, until you remember he’s essentially exploiting someone’s fond memories of a loved one.
Living with the Dead is followed by the tacky Ultimate Psychic Challenge, in which GMTV presenter Kate Garraway (dressed, for some reason, like she’s auditioning for Chicago) invites psychics and sceptics to battle it out before a studio audience, who get to vote on whether they ‘believe’ or not.
It’s ‘Robot Wars with Ghosts’, in other words, but 200 times less interesting than that makes it sound.
Remarkably, despite a rigorous unveiling of many of the tricks so-called ‘psychics’ employ in their acts, by the end of the show, the number of people believing in séances actually goes up. Well, pah. I’m not convinced. But if any dead readers out there want to get in touch and put me right, be my guest.
A Poor Man’s Bargain Hunt [30 August]
It’s madness, the sheer amount of television there is out there. Hundreds of channels, filling hundreds of hours. No wonder the majority of programmes are churned out like sausage meat: unloved swathes of videotape whose sole purpose is to bung up the schedule. They used to call TV ‘chewing gum for the eyes’, but most of the time it isn’t even that good any more. Modern chewing gum has flavour; it’s constantly updated in new and exciting ways (like the new ‘melt in the mouth’ gum strips that turn your tongue blue and your breath fresh, then vanish like a benevolent menthol ghost). Most modern TV is uniformly nondescript, the equivalent of oxygen-flavoured gum.
Apologies if I sound despondent and cathode-weary, but I’ve just sat through an episode of Boot Sale Challenge (ITV1), and it’s left me violently disillusioned. Don’t get me wrong. I love television. I grew up licking screens with delight. Maybe I was young and impressionable. Maybe I never noticed how boring the majority of TV shows were back then. Or maybe these days I’m bitter … but when you’re confronted with meaningless ‘will-this-do?’ dregcasts like Boot Sale Challenge, it’s hard to shake the notion that things never used to be this clawingly, embarrassingly desperate.
Because unbelievably, Boot Sale Challenge is a poor man’s Bargain Hunt. Read that phrase again: ‘a poor man’s Bargain Hunt’. Let it sink in. Pop that notional gum strip on your brain and feel it dissolve. Got it? Understand the full horror we’re dealing with here? Good. Let’s continue.
As you’ve probably deduced from the title, it’s a show in which two teams of dull viewers dawdle round a car-boot sale seeking out bargains. At the end of the show two ‘experts’ evaluate their purchases: the team whose purchases are judged most likely to turn a profit win a prize (generally, a big hunk of chintz). And. That’s. It.
Ever been to a real-life boot sale? They’re like Dawn of the Dead, but bleaker. Row upon row of Kajagoogoo albums, board games with pieces missing, Franklin Mint atrocities and pieces of furniture so ugly they’d defile a skip, all of it covered in a fine layer of grit and dust and bubbling fly eggs, put up for sale by yellowing cadavers whose eyes point in different directions. The best you can say for Boot Sale Challenge is that it brings this experience kicking and screaming into your living room.
The air of desolation is hard to convey with words alone. These people are foraging through a swamp of refuse, paying 50p for a battered old tray, and then whooping for joy when the expert values it at £1.50. You could turn a bigger pro
fit sitting by a cashpoint offering blowjobs for pennies. The show’s sole atom of fun is provided by resident expert Paul Hetchin, and that’s only because he’s the spitting image of Ron Jeremy, the flabby porn star with a penis the length of a window cleaner’s ladder – a man who makes more money getting his dingle out in one afternoon than any of the Boot Sale Challenge participants would make in a million years of scavenging. Still, if bleak rummaging is ‘in’, let’s see a show called ‘Canal Dredge Challenge’, in which contestants don wetsuits and drag whatever old shit up to the surface to have it valued.
‘The blue team found an old Asda trolley, valued at £9 – but the red team have capped that with their discovery: the body of a missing schoolgirl, the reward for which could earn them as much as ten grand and an interview on GMTV.’
Or how about ‘Warzone Scavengers’, in which viewers crawl through recently ravaged Chechen villages hunting for valuable trinkets amongst the body parts and rubble?
Give it a year, and they’ll both be on. At which point you can blame me. Until then, blame Boot Sale Challenge.
D’You Remember Spangles? [6 September]
There’s a great deal of talk about the current generation of ‘kidults’; millions in their 20s and 30s who refuse to ‘grow up’, shunning traditional ‘adult’ pursuits such as theatre and bookkeeping in favour of listening to Justin Timberlake and completing ‘Twitty Bum Wars’ on the Xbox; ditching suits and floral dresses for a pair of low-slung Levi’s with 10 inches of thong-strung arse crack peeking over the rear. It’s a hideous prospect: if things carry on like this we’ll wind up a nation of Nicky Haslams; wizened cadavers playing Game Boy Advance on a stairlift.
Since we’re all simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the ageing process, it’s hardly surprising nostalgia has become such big business. The TV schedules heave with ‘D’you Remember Spangles?’ shows, the Renault Mégane now comes equipped with a School Disco compilation album in the glove box as standard, and Bungle from Rainbow is set to be immortalised on the new £50 note.
The king of nostalgia cash-ins is the ‘Friends Reunited’ website, which has enabled millions to systematically check up on each and every one of their old schoolfriends, only to discover that 98 per cent of them work in IT and want to kill themselves. Worse still, it soon becomes clear that absolutely everyone you ever fancied is now happily married with eighteen kids.
Still, according to The Curse of Friends Reunited (C5), a little thing like that needn’t dissuade you from attempting to rekindle the spark, the pubescent thrill that fizzed and popped back in the good old days when your skin still fitted and grey hair was an alien concept. A populist documentary cut from the same cloth as last week’s cannily positioned Curse of Blue Peter sniggerfest, it’s chock-a-block with shattered relationships, jilted grooms and ruined lives – all manner of human tragedy, ostensibly made possible by the ‘Friends Reunited’ website.
It’s all tongue-in-cheek because the central premise is nonsense, of course: when your wife runs off with an old flame 14 seconds after begrudgingly muttering her marriage vows, blaming the Internet for enabling the lovebirds to communicate is like blaming the sun for providing enough light for them to see one another in the first place. Demonising technology is more palatable than facing the ugly truth: that a large number of Britons are either fickle, or trapped in make-do relationships, or both, and consequently spend a sizeable portion of their time spooling through past romantic liaisons in their head, with particular emphasis on the ones which teased and tormented, yet never reached their full passionate conclusion.
More interesting than the tales of romantic woe is the story of the boneheaded coke dealer, who visited the site to brag to former classmates about the monstrous amount of ‘charlie’ he was shifting (much to the delight of the police force tracking his every move), and the sinister case of a man who described his job as ‘drop-dead exciting’ in a faintly sarcastic way in his profile, and got fired as a result (by a boss who presumably wouldn’t think twice about using a mind-control device to scan his workforce’s brains for signs of dissent, if only such a thing were available).
Gah. Fah. Pah. Anyway, speaking of teenage-related follies, this week sees the start of the BBC’s contemporary update of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (BBC1) … and the first episode (‘The Miller’s Tale’) stars none other than BILLIE PIPER!!! Hooray! And in a piece of nakedly appropriate casting, she plays a young chanteuse married to a boozy old duffer twice her age (Dennis Waterman). Sadly, that’s as far as the fun goes, because the programme as a whole is intensely annoying, not least because it largely consists of James Nesbitt reprising his cheeky Irishman role for the billionth time this year.
Fans of nightmarish imagery might be interested to know that he and Ms Piper can be glimpsed rutting feverishly on a sofa at one point. Bluuugh. I can still see it each time I close my eyes. My tip: turn the sound down and hang a tea towel over your screen during that bit. And keep it there till it’s finished.
Clashing Neighbours in a Bad Sitcom [13 September]
Nothing will drive you insane faster than a relationship with someone who blows hot and cold at random, flipping from love to indifference like a hyperactive imbecile playing with a light switch.
One minute they’re praying aloud for extra arms to hug you with, the next they’re pissing in your cornflakes while you sob at the breakfast table. Then it’s back to kisses and cuddles for a few days, followed by an inexplicable month-long sulk during which your every action provokes a 10-tonne scornful sigh. Saddle yourself to someone like that and you might as well ram a whisk in your ear and scramble your brains manually.
But when both parties are equally schizophrenic, equilibrium is achieved, and the relationship survives, despite constant detonations from within. It’s the same with international relations: an identical balancing act maintains the bond between Britain and France, two pig-headed countries with eminently slappable faces, clashing neighbours in a bad sitcom, and the subject of With Friends Like These (BBC2), a new series chronicling Britain’s postwar relations with key political allies.
Now before you yawn yourself unconscious, it’s worth pointing out that With Friends Like These is better than you think. For a dunce like me, whose knowledge of Anglo-French relations begins and ends with the EastEnders special in which Ricky ate a croissant on the Metro, it’s also downright educational, deftly explaining how personal clashes between leaders altered the course of history, typified by the battle of wills between Churchill and De Gaulle.
De Gaulle was a Frenchman so stereotypically arrogant he could have been invented specifically to annoy Richard Littlejohn. Following the Nazi invasion of France, he was whisked to our shores in a light aircraft, where Churchill installed him in a plush Westminster office, pledging full support. De Gaulle repaid our hospitality by sustaining a deep-seated resentment of the British to his dying day, refusing the UK entry to the common market on the grounds that our mindset was ‘insular’ – this from a nation that recently invented its own word for e-mail, just for the bloody-minded thrill of being surly and different.
But, as anyone in a stormy relationship knows, bitter rows lead to mind-blowing make-up sex: fast-forward a few decades and there’s the gruesome sight of Ted Heath and Georges Pompidou practically rimming one another at a press conference, announcing Britain’s entry into Europe like lovers at an engagement party. Following years of mutual animosity, Pompidou’s head had been turned by the fine selection of French wines on offer at the British Embassy; once he discovered Heath shared his passion for immense helpings of expensive food, romance blossomed. The two men consummated their lust by building Concorde together, a totemic phallus symbolising their subconscious desire to tickle each other’s winkies.
Right now, the Anglo-French relationship is going through a rocky patch: thanks to Blair’s insensitive flirting with that brainless slut from the White House, Chirac’s moved into the spare bedroom. Which is where you come in, dear reader. Bec
ause together, we can save this marriage. I have a bold suggestion which will a) improve international relations, b) provide us all with a holiday, and c) destroy David Blaine’s career. It’s simple: we all move to France for the next 44 days. There’s plenty of room; we can camp in the hills, especially since their forests burned down.
Next, we launch a charm offensive with the locals, providing Best of British festivals in which we sing Kinks songs and cook Sunday roasts for entire villages. Then we’ll get drunk on their wine and watch them hit on our women. Our nations will fall in love all over again.
Best of all, back in London, freshly deserted London, there’ll be no one to greet Blaine when he finally slithers from his Perspex cell. He’ll have to drag his skeletal remains into an abandoned Prêt A Manger and make himself a sandwich with his wizened, shaking hands.
And that, my fellow Europeans, will be truly magical.
A Film about Peace. Or Music. Or Both [20 September]
John Lennon – aintcha sick of him? More specifically, aintcha sick of the endless procession of dickwits who bang on and on about how bloody great he was and how if only the entire human race would sit down and listen to his lyrics there’d be no more war or suffering, and the rainforests would grow back, and all our children could grow up in a carefree world full of flutes and rainbows and tepees?
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 31