Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  Rolf himself is centre stage throughout: does that make him a tiresome egomaniac or a born entertainer? I don’t know. Why does Jon Culshaw turn up halfway through, wearing two false legs, doing an impression of Russell Crowe as a four-legged gladiator? I don’t know.

  There’s no doubt that Rolf is – as Prince Charles himself puts it in a VT mini-tribute – a ‘much-loved institution’. He’s certainly stuck his thumb into a wide variety of pies: art, cartoons, music, consumer electronics (well, the Stylophone anyway), silly sound effects and dying household pets. I’m referring to Animal Hospital there, incidentally. In no way am I suggesting Rolf has ever stuck his thumb into a dying household pet. Although that’s just about the only thing he hasn’t done in the name of entertainment.

  Look up the word ‘wacky’ in a dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of Rolf. Chances are he put it there himself. He’s not shy. In fact, he spends this entire show – a tribute to himself, don’t forget – wearing a shirt whose pattern consists of the words ‘ROLF HARRIS’ repeated over and over in block capitals. In the real world, that kind of egomania would be unforgivable, but since this is Rolf – zany uncle to several generations of British telly viewers – it’s somehow completely acceptable.

  See, it’s hard not to love Rolf. No, really – and it’s just as well, because he tests the goodwill of a nation to breaking point here. Among the surreal highlights: Rolf performing an excruciating rap with Big Brovaz (you can actually see their credibility imploding on stage); Rolf playing the Stylophone with John Humphrys and Sally Gunnell; Rolf performing a cover version of ‘Roll with It’ (renamed ‘Rolf with It’) alongside Jon Culshaw (who’s impersonating Rolf and Liam Gallagher at the same time); Rolf doing an eerie song about a dying sailor, accompanied by a tiny, dancing, wooden doll. Beloved entertainer? Maybe … but can you imagine being stuck in a lift for six months with this man? You’d end up dashing your own brains across the floor just to make it stop.

  At least that’s how you’ll feel until halfway through the show, when Rolf pulls off a flawless, engaging performance of ‘Jake the Peg’, and suddenly you’d forgive him anything.

  Why? I don’t know. But it must be a nightmare. Because dreams don’t come true.

  The Pudge-Faced Sea Monkey [13 December]

  You can hunt high, you can hunt low, you can sift through the gene pool … but I defy you to unearth a more instantly objectionable little berk than Sam Nixon, the pudge-faced sea monkey currently tipped to win Pop Idol (ITV1).

  Aside from a briefly dipped toe at the start of the season, I’d managed to completely avoid Cowell and company this time round. Or so I thought, until last week, when I unexpectedly stumbled across it in much the same way you might unexpectedly step barefoot on a dog turd.

  Once I’d got over the shock of discovering it’s still bloody going (the current series seems to have been running since 1913), I found myself reeling at the remaining four popettes: a 12-year-old advertising executive (Chris), a male Stepford Wife (Mark), Sonia from EastEnders scowling at a funhouse mirror (Michelle) and, most disturbing of all, one of the puppets from the 1970s children’s TV series Cloppa Castle (Sam). Of the four, Mark was worst, but at the end of the show it was Chris – the only one with a sense of humour – who got hoofed out, leaving a one-horse race in his wake. With only Alison Moyet junior and a piece of singing cardboard for competition, Sam simply cannot fail. And that’s a tragedy. Because he’s a tit.

  It’s wrong to judge people by appearance alone but in this case I’ll make an exception. Sam is a gnome. A troll. A claymation Photofit of Mo Mowlam. And he sports a semi-ironic mullet explosion on his head, like the bastard offspring of Limahl and Pat Sharp. That’s not a haircut – that’s a cast-iron guarantee of mediocrity.

  Well, look here, ITV. It’s getting cold, Christmas is coming, everyone’s stressed out and to be honest we could do without Sam’s hypnotically punchable mug soiling our screens, papers and record-shop windows for the next two years. Which is why I implore everyone reading to tune in tonight and turf him out. Oh, and if you’re out shopping this afternoon and you see someone buying the Pop Idol Christmas single – a soul-bummingly dreadful cover version of ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’ – kick them to death on the spot.

  Speaking of rubbish, have you SEEN You’ve Been Framed (ITV1) lately? It’s never been sophisticated – as entertainment, it’s always been on a par with sharing a tent with someone who thinks performance farting is hilarious – but now the bottom of the barrel has been scraped clean away and the programme is frenziedly digging its way toward the earth’s core.

  First, they’ve replaced Lisa Riley with Jonathan Wilkes, which is a bit like substituting a lump of sick for a lump of snot: equally bad yet somehow worse. Wilkes has hair like a brown wave of effluence and a dimple that makes him look like he’s been leaning chin-first on a pool cue for the last six days.

  Worse still, there’s a new string of palpably desperate ‘format points’ which help them repeat their dwindling selection of footage again and again. There’s a segment in which kids introduce their ‘favourite’ classic clips (i.e. whatever the production team has shown them that morning), a bit where Wilkes exposes a suspected ‘fake’ clip by rewinding it and showing it several times in a row (despite having cheerfully introduced countless obvious fakes moments earlier) and, most shameless of all, a finale in which he invites us to enjoy several of that episode’s highlights again (which in the case of the ‘fake’ clip was actually the third time we’d seen it).

  In summary then: both Pop Idol and New You’ve Been Framed are rubbish, particularly compared to this week’s low-profile, low-budgetedition of The Art Show – something called How to Watch Television (C4), which was written and narrated by me and is therefore great. Don’t miss it!

  Fight for a ticket!

  Look at Me! [20 December]

  Once upon a time, if you wanted to be famous, all you had to do was get your face on television – and bingo, that was that. There were only a handful of channels; no websites or Xboxes vying for the audience’s attention. It was just you and several million viewers at home. Getting on the box was like sticking your head through every window in the country simultaneously, grinning like crazy and shouting ‘Look at me!’ – yes, just like that, except it didn’t terrify the occupants. Instead they grew to love you as a ‘famous person’. They’d harass you in supermarkets; bug you for autographs at motorway service stations. Kiss you at the urinal. All you’d done was appear on their screens, but to them you were magic incarnate. Not any more. There are 15 billion channels out there. You’ll need to do more than smile and wave if you want to get noticed. In fact, in 2003, the only sure-fire way to command attention was to risk your own life, live, on camera.

  First came David Blaine: Above the Below, a sort of one-man Big Brother with a smaller catering bill. The moment Blaine’s perspex door slammed shut, the nation was divided. Was it a trick? Was it art? Was it a man doing tit-all in a box for ages? Whatever it was, lucky and/or demented Sky viewers could sit watching it 29 hours a day (OK, 24 hours – it just felt longer). Those without satellite dishes had to make do with popping along in person to hurl abuse and tomatoes.

  While the drawling, soporific Blaine committed slow-motion suicide over a 44-day period, the altogether twitchier Derren Brown threatened to achieve similar results in a nanosecond, by blasting his head apart on live television. Of course, had Brown’s stunt actually culminated in an onscreen bonce-burst, C4’s broadcasting licence would’ve been revoked before the first skull fragment hit the floor, and consequently the outcome was never in doubt. Nonetheless, the finale made supremely creepy viewing, largely because Brown himself is one of the canniest showmen to have emerged in years: the sight of him gulping, sweating and holding a gun to his head was the year’s third most frightening image.

  In second place: Linda Barker’s ‘snip snip’ mime from the Curry’s commercials, narrowly pipped to first place by ‘The All-New Shock
and Awe Show’, available round the clock on most channels throughout March and April.

  Never one to turn a blind eye to suffering, particularly when it’s accompanied by eye-popping explosions, Sky News welcomed the war with open arms, rapidly mutating into an exact copy of the fascist TV news network from Starship Troopers, replete with spinning 3D graphics (rippling flags, advancing tank columns, soaring jets; if they’d thrown a 200-foot flame-throwing penis into the mix no one would’ve batted an eyelid), white-knuckle shakycam reports from the field and a ticker tape filled with ‘breaking news’ cunningly disguised as hysterical conjecture.

  The BBC, meanwhile, found itself a sex symbol in the form of Rageh Omaar, dormouse of doom. ITN had to make do with John Suchet shouting over an endless procession of blurry green JPegs that apparently constituted ‘live footage’.

  Despite the surfeit of cameras, very little blood was shown on screen. A fusty ignoramus might sneer that the TV coverage treated the war like a video game, whereas the reality is actually worse: the average modern video game is more realistic and even-handed than the average TV news bulletin.

  Speaking of news, Tonight with Trevor McDonald secured the year’s biggest TV scoop: Martin Bashir’s remarkable interview with Michael Jackson, during which the unhinged superstar cheerfully confessed to sharing his bed with children. After some predictable mud-slinging, Jacko bounced back with a starring role in a Santa Monica police mugshot, in which his face looks disturbingly like a child’s drawing: as though they asked a four-year-old to create a likeness in crayon.

  With all this bizarre non-fiction pouring into our living rooms, it’s not surprising common-or-garden reality TV finally began to falter, the lacklustre Big Brother 4 a case in point: a household of identikit yoof-droids (eerily reminiscent of the hateful Doritos Friendchips gang) who consistently failed to screw, argue, or do anything of interest, and proved so wholly unmemorable that even Federico himself has forgotten who he is.

  The follow-ups to Pop Idol and Fame Academy also failed to generate much interest – indeed, the only reality show to really make a mark was C4’s Wife Swap, which brought middle-class milquetoasts and warty proles into direct contact, then invited us to enjoy the inevitable slanging match as though it were a sitcom; Penelope Keith and Kathy Bates playing neighbours at war. The formula spawned a surreal one-off ‘celebrity’ special featuring Jade from Big Brother 3 and Charles ‘Coughing Major’ Ingram – a programme so hazardously post-modern it was in danger of creating a wormhole into an alternate universe filled with dense ironic matter.

  Jade also featured briefly in an episode of Boys and Girls, a shameful, insulting, unwatchable bum-spill of a programme, and the most embarrassing mistake Channel 4 have made since the broadcast of Mini Pops. Still, every cloud has a silver lining – the show’s microscopic viewing figures finally proved once and for all that Chris Evans really isn’t the genius he assumed he was throughout the late 1990s.

  If Boys and Girls was the year’s worst programme, what was the best? It’s a toss-up between reliable, ongoing imports such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, CSI, etc., and the newcomers: State of Play, Buried, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Little Britain. The programme that kept me most firmly glued to the screen was 24, although on the evidence of the few episodes I’ve seen, the third series (airing here next year) is a crashing disappointment. And thank God for that, because I was starting to turn into one of those frightening ‘series disciples’ – the sort of person who walks around Buffy conventions with a cape and a hard-on, taking it all far too seriously.

  So that’s 2003 over, then. Coming next year: ‘Shock and Awe II: The Shockening’, on Sky’s all-new 3D news channel. Probably.

  He Who Safeguards Who [27 December]

  Knock, knock. Who’s there? Yes, he is. He’s there on your screens this week in The Story of Doctor Who (BBC1), a blob of festive nostalgia serving twin purposes: to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Doctor’s first outing, and to whet viewers’ appetites for the forthcoming remake.

  Thankfully, this is the first retrospective clip show in years that doesn’t consist of the most obvious archive footage interspersed with Paul Ross and company firing crap out of their mouths. Instead, it takes the daring step of actually interviewing the people involved, from the toppermost star to the bummermost Dalekoperator. As a result, you might actually learn new things about the Doctor, as opposed to being told how Kate Thornton used to watch from behind the sofa while Vernon Kay hums the theme tune over and over again until you feel like machine-gunning everyone in the world to death.

  For instance, we learn that many of the monsters were played by PC Tony Stamp from The Bill (aka actor Graham Cole), who admits that he got so into it he used to pull scary faces from inside the costume. We also learn that Jon Pertwee was so tickled by the line ‘I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow’ in one script, the writers subsequently included it at every opportunity (henceforth, whenever Dr Pertwee had to fix anything, he claimed to be ‘reversing the polarity of the neutron flow’ (a handy phrase I once heard a plumber use shortly before charging me £300). We learn about the preposterous ‘Whomobile’ – a risible ‘flying car’ complete with British licence plate (introduced at Pertwee’s suggestion) and the most terrifying monster in the show’s history (a toy troll that silently strangled people).

  In fact, just about the only thing we don’t learn about is the God-awful 1996 TV movie in which the Doctor, played by Paul McGann, was shown racing through the streets of LA on a motorbike and snogging his assistant. That seems to have been airbrushed from history completely, and quite right too – although it’s a shame we can’t go back and pretend Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy never happened either (because the one thing Doctor Who should never be is a fey wuss). Which brings us to the burning question of who’s Who next. Whoever’s in charge – he who safeguards Who – must choose an actor who can do Who justice.

  They’ve already made one great decision by bringing in Russell T. Davies to write the scripts; here’s hoping they don’t louse it all up by hiring Alan Davies to play the Doctor (as has been rumoured and, given the brainless casting on display in most mainstream BBC dramas, not entirely unlikely). The sight of that curly-haired, mumbling, joy-strangler shuffling his way around the galaxy would cause an epidemic of outraged vomiting among all but the most mentally stunted viewers. Result: a ratings malfunction, which no amount of polarity-reversing could save. They might as well cast Sylvester McCoy again and have done with it.

  In fact, I can only think of seven people who’d be worse than Alan Davies. And they are: Ross Kemp, Paul McCartney, Jamie Oliver, Neil Morrissey, Julian Lloyd Webber, Paul Simon and Peter Sutcliffe.

  The bookie’s second favourite is Richard E. Grant, and they could do far worse than him: he’s suitably British, he’s tall, unhinged-looking and Americans would recognise him. He’s also played the Doctor a couple of times on the radio. Yes, he’d be better. Basically, what I’m saying is: anyone but Alan Davies. Or Ralf Little. Or Vernon Kay. Or anyone from EastEnders, Holby City or Merseybeat (unless you’re also casting Leslie Ash as a Sea Devil). And no comedians either, apart from Jerry Sadowitz. Oh, and if you’re looking for someone to play Davros, would it be cruel and childish to suggest Glenda Jackson? Ah. Right. Thought so. Sorry.

  PART FIVE 2004

  In which Peter André achieves erection, Friends cease to be there for you, and television get s a village idiot of its very own.

  ‘Everyone drove drunk back then’ [17 January]

  Booze used to be the Brit’s greatest ally. Take Churchill: he practically sweated whisky. A taxi driver once described 1950s London to me in terms of everyone being permanently sodden – ‘everyone drove drunk back then – if you had a crash in the middle of the afternoon, chances were the bloke you ran into was drunk, the copper who nicked you was drunk, the witnesses, the ambulance driver, the doctor that patched you up – all of ‘em drunk’ – and it all sounded rather j
olly. In reality the capital’s pavements probably just stank even more of urine and sick then than they do now.

  But our relationship with alcohol has cooled over the years. Alcohol isn’t our friend any more, which is why any soap featuring a scene in which anyone so much as sniffs the cork from a wine bottle has to run a liver cirrhosis helpline number in the end credits. It’s also why we have programmes like Drunk and Dangerous (BBC1), a tut-tutting look at the havoc wrought by the nation’s glugging habits, and why booze ads have started urging you to ‘drink responsibly’ (thereby annihilating the whole point of drinking in the first place).

  The social stabilisers are firmly on, in other words – which is why it’s refreshing to run into shows like Shameless (C4) and Toughest Pubs in Britain (Sky One), both of which openly celebrate the joys of drinking, swearing, spitting and getting your head kicked in. One’s fact, the other’s fiction, and each is as cartoon-like as the other.