After all, given the current state of the world, with the news closely resembling a terrifying hi-tech ‘re-imagining’ of the Old Testament, it’s hard to get that worked up over a ‘nightmare scenario’ in which everyone looks a bit Johnny Vegas thanks to the doughnut industry. Anyway, by 2020 you’ll probably be able to lose weight by simply e-mailing all your excess fat to an undernourished Cambodian baby. That’s what I’m banking on anyway.
Now shut up and pass the lardy cake.
Sliced, Mashed, Carved and Sewn [10 April]
It’s pretty-boy week on Channel 4, what with The Truth About Take That and Battle of the Boy Bands, so let’s celebrate with a friend-of-a-friend story someone once told me, about a bloke who worked on CD: UK who complained the worst thing about it was the smell.
Once the lights go on, a TV studio becomes a hot, dank cavern, so you can imagine how bad it gets when you’re also dealing with an audience of several hundred pubescent girls getting physically aroused each time Charlie from Busted raises one of his massive eyebrows. Sweat pours down the walls and the air’s so thick with musk if you jumped in the air it’d take you half an hour to sink back down to the floor. What, exactly, are they getting so worked up about? Not the music, but the faces, the pretty boy-band faces – bland, non-threatening, impish little fizzogs, grinning and pouting and oohhing and aahhing their way through one safety-scissor melody after another. And as I accelerate into my 30s, the boy-band faces grow more youthful with each passing month. Take McFly. To my weary eyes, they look like a troupe of cub scouts trying for their Pop Proficiency badge. They should be advertising Wall’s Balls, not standing astride the Top 40. And the audiences are even younger. The other week T4 showed a Blue concert, and I swear the front row consisted entirely of squealing foetuses.
These aren’t musicians. They’re not even pop stars. Let’s be honest. Let’s call them what they are: children’s entertainers. In fact, let’s tattoo that phrase on their foreheads. And if they protest, let’s ship them off to Balamory and burn them to death inside a gigantic wicker Fimble.
Naturally, I’m just jealous because they’re pretty and I’m not. In fact, look up the word ‘pretty’ in the dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of my face – listed under ‘antonyms’. But at least I’m not as desperate as Mike and Matt Schlepp (I swear that’s their real surname), twin subjects of MTV’s new plastic-surgery horror show I Want a Famous Face (MTV).
At the start of the show, Mike and Matt are ugly. Very ugly. Greasy hair, beak-like noses, and dense constellations of pus peppering their faces. Squeeze their cheeks you’d get enough lemon curd to fill a bathtub. Naturally, the local girls shun them, but Mike and Matt have a plan: to undergo extensive plastic surgery that will leave them both looking like Brad Pitt. Holding up a pair of DVD covers, Mike explains he’s going for the Meet Joe Black look, while Matt favours Legends of the Fall. And then they’re off, under the knife: having their faces sawn open, sliced, mashed, carved and sewn.
In case the gruesome surgical footage isn’t enough to put impressionable viewers off, while Mike and Matt recover, the programme finds time for a sob story aside. A young man, aspiring to become an actor after seeing I Know What You Did Last Summer, who underwent surgery and ended up with a crooked nose that makes a squishing sound whenever he pinches it. ‘I think it’s full of blood or something,’ he moans.
Then it’s back to Mike and Matt, and some hilarious footage of them sitting around in bandages, clutching bags of frozen peas to their swollen faces and wondering aloud whether they look like Brad Pitt yet. When the bandages finally come off, we see the truth: no, they don’t. They look like slightly blander versions of themselves. The local bimbos now embrace them: good news for Mike and Matt, bad news for anyone who respects basic human values.
It’s great that Mike and Matt can afford $10,000 worth of surgery each in order to gain the respect of their peers, but I do wish they’d simply carried out a Columbine-style massacre instead. It would’ve been cheaper. And funnier. And somehow less depressing.
Unhinged, Cackling Carnival Clowns [17 April]
Saturday … Saturday … Saturday is Tiswas day. And in most people’s heads, it always will be. The gleefully anarchic weekend kid’s show lobbed its last custard pie way back in 1982, yet despite the number of paunchy media-industry blokes banging on endlessly about how fantastic Tiswas (‘Today is Saturday, Watch and Smile’) used to be, nothing’s surpassed it in the twenty-two years since the last edition.
Until now. Dick and Dom in da Bungalow, which has just finished its run on BBC1, has single-handedly atoned for the BBC’s unbroken quarter-century run of turgid, anaemic Saturday-morning fare, which started with Swap Shop and continued with dull children’s tea parties like Saturday Superstore, Going Live, and the desperately-titled The Saturday Show (which sadly returns today, replacing Dick and Dom until September). So what’s so good about Da Bungalow? It’s simple really: Dick and Dom spend most of their screen time sloshing gloop around, smashing things, cracking toilet gags and pulling goonish faces – and they do it with total conviction and obvious relish. There’s also – and this is important – there’s also a vague sense of menace surrounding it: a faint whiff of unhinged, cackling carnival clowns that makes the show feel genuinely subversive, genuinely alive.
The nation’s children should be forced to watch this show, preferably with their heads clamped in position so they can’t turn away. Because what’s the alternative? Answer: crap like Ministry of Mayhem (ITV1), ITV’s embarrassing answer to Dick and Dom. The title is fitting, because this feels like government-approved ‘mayhem’: anarchy with the jagged corners smoothed away. It’s a show that says, ‘Hey kids! Let’s have a wild, chaotic time! Within a set of closely monitored parameters, obviously!’ The hosts try hard, but there’s no disguising the black glint of death in their eyes. It’s half-hearted fun conducted at gunpoint. The most telling difference between this and Da Bungalow is the attitude toward celebrities.
Ministry of Mayhem makes the mistake of thinking every kid on the planet wants to see shiny, hairless presenters shoving their tongues so far up the arses of the boys from Busted they could lick their ribcages clean from the inside (actually, there is a sizeable audience, but it’s older, gayer, and frankly unlikely to be up so early on a Saturday morning). And of course, this being ITV, there’s a commercial break every three seconds, meaning the freewheelin’, devil-may-care, let-it-all-hang-out wackiness is regularly interrupted by high-pressure sales pitches designed to turn your child into a grasping, selfish idiot. It’s been ages since I last saw the Saturday morning kiddie ads, so naturally the products on offer horrify me. It’s all ‘Little Baby Bluetooth’ and ‘My First GM StrangleBot’. Most disturbing of all, Action Man has undergone a radical makeover: back in the 1970s he looked like the kind of man who’d knife you in the throat if you stepped on his toe, now he’s a cookie-cutter pretty boy who resembles Keanu Reeves on steroids and rides a gay ‘combat surfboard’ into action. Christ, what a loser. The choice is clear: if you want your offspring to become cretinous, sycophantic, fashion- obsessed pod people, let them watch Ministry of Mayhem. If you want to expose them to something that will make their brains skip around with glee, tune in to Dick and Dom.
Except sod it, you can’t until they return in September. Ah, well. Until then, fill the kids with sugar and sit them in front of ‘Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell’ on the Xbox. The graphics are great, it contains precisely no Girls Aloud videos, and best of all it’ll teach them how to kill a blameless security guard by lurking in the shadows for half an hour before sneaking up behind him and snapping his neck like a fucking breadstick.
Scoff all you like, but it might come in handy some day.
A Bum-Kissing Contest [8 May]
All things must pass. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Death comes to us all. The lights are going out all over Europe. The final edition of Parkinson (BBC1) goes out tonight and the world wipes a tear from its ey
e. It’s the end of an era. In fact it’s more than that. It’s the end of an era as viewed from the deck of an epoch crashing bow-first into the iceberg of time. A sign of the times, and a moment to pause for sober reflection. Let’s join hands, bow heads, and hold a fortnight’s silence to mourn its passing.
Actually no. Let’s not. Parkinson was off our screens for sixteen years from 1982 to 1998 and the world never once stopped turning on its axis, so why the forthcoming transition from BBC1 to ITV1 is being discussed as though it holds any significance whatsoever is beyond me. It’s a chat show. Who gives a toss? Besides, since its 1998 return, the Parkinson show’s been a nauseating load of old celebfellating claptrap anyway. Watching Robbie Williams burping on and pointlessly on about his struggle with the bottle and his own irrepressible brilliance is no compensation for a glaring lack of Muhammad Ali or Rod Hull and Emu.
By and large, present-day Parkinson guests fall into two camps: glassy-eyed Hollywood stars who treat the whole thing like just another junket, and smaller home-grown names so thrilled to be considered ‘big’ enough to grace the chat icon’s line-up they practically grin themselves to death right there onstage.
Then there’s ‘Parky’ himself, who seems to spend half his time revelling in his image as a curmudgeonly professional Yorkshire-man unafraid to call a spade a spade, and the other half fawning over his guests like an obsequious peasant granted an audience with a minor royal. When I watch Parkinson, I don’t see amiable rapport, fearless questioning, or stunning revelations: I see a bum-kissing contest between an inexplicably revered silver-haired tortoise and an entourage of chummy, twinkle-eyed chancers. The air’s so thick with bumptious self-celebration it makes your gut churn.
And the stars aren’t that big anyway. Take tonight’s line-up: Bruce Forsyth, Boris Becker and Patrick Kielty. I wouldn’t cross the street to watch them piss in a teacup. There’s also musical support from two perfect examples of the sort of painfully unchallenging pap-merchants routinely lauded as ‘proper music’ by idiots: the Corrs and Jamie Cullum.
Cullum deserves special mention, because he’s particularly odious – an oily, sickening worm-boy, presumably grown in a Petri dish specifically for appearances on middle-of-the-road chat shows like this. Swear to God, if I have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode ever again – rising from his seat to jazz-slap the top of his piano wearing a fake-groove expression on his puggish little face – if I have to witness that one more time, I’m going to rise up myself and kill absolutely everybody in the world. Starting with him and ending with me. Cullum should be sealed inside a barrel and kicked into the ocean, not hailed as a genius on Saturday-night TV. I hope they spend more time with Patrick Kielty than they do with him, which is saying something, because he’s a man who exudes likeability like a rock exudes blood.
So I won’t miss Parkinson. In fact for me, the sole note of remorse accompanying his evacuation to ITV is the reason behind it: he’s flounced out because the BBC wants to broadcast highlights from the Premiership in his prized 10 o’clock slot. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a disaster, since watching football is one of the very few things on earth I enjoy even less than watching Jamie Cullum slap his bloody piano. And, knowing my luck, he’ll be hosting it.
Give-Away Buffoonerisms [15 May]
You should always judge people by their actions, not their words. Obvious, really. You wouldn’t believe Peter Kurten, the ‘monster of Düsseldorf’, who murdered nine Germans in 1929, had your best interests at heart just because he told you he did. Especially if he was sticking a bread knife in your eye at the time.
‘Actions, not words’ is the mantra of Body Talk (C4), an absorbing two-parter in which Dr Peter Collett examines the body language of the rich and famous in a bid to prove what tossers they are. And succeeds. Programme one deals with the language of power, and concentrates on politicians. Collett identifies the characteristic movements (known as ‘tells’) that Blair, Bush and co. make whenever they’re feeling nervous, confident, aggressive, or sexually aroused. Actually, he doesn’t cover arousal. Thank Christ.
Take Gordon Brown, who can’t sit still when Blair is speaking. Collett observes him at a Labour Party conference, anxiously fidgeting his way through a well-received speech from Blair. On fast motion, he turns into Robert Lindsay in GBH.
Blair, meanwhile, has a habit of sliding his hands into his front pockets when he’s feeling awkward. He thinks it makes him look relaxed: in reality, it makes him look like an embarrassed shop-window dummy with some sort of bum disorder. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he often affects this stance when he’s required to pose alongside psychotic, lying drink-drivers. Called George Bush.
Bush is a body-language goldmine. He often looks more like a frightened boy than a president, albeit a frightened boy with 24-hour access to the most fearsome nuclear arsenal the world has ever seen. Whenever Bush feels scared and out of his depth, he chews the inside of his mouth. Alarmingly, he chews the inside of his mouth pretty much all the time. That’s probably how he choked on that pretzel.
There are other examples of Bush’s give-away buffoonerisms, including some fascinating games of physical one-upmanship between him and Bill Clinton. Ask the pair of them to walk side by side and it quickly degenerates into a hilarious dick-swinging contest, with each attempting to stride in a more commanding, statesmanlike manner than the other. The berks.
And this is just the stuff that’s been caught on camera. I’d love to see Bush’s private body language: the faces he pulls while trying to pass a particularly rigid stool for instance, or the delighted reeling jig he doubtless performs each time he bombs another town full of unarmed brown folk. Or when he was choking to death on that pretzel – I’d love to have seen the way his legs shook and popped around as he clawed at his throat, desperately gulping for air. Hoo, boy – if the White House has CCTV footage of that they should release it on DVD, backed with comic piano music and a voice-over track of Iraqi schoolkids laughing at his hateful, shuddering face.
Anyway. It’s a good programme and you should watch it. The same applies to I Am Not an Animal (BBC2), the new comedymation (someone bread-knife me for inventing that phrase) about a group of recently liberated talking animals coming to terms with the outside world.
If, like me, you spent the first half of last week’s episode bewildered by the sheer weirdness of the animation (which looks a bit like a colour supplement hallucinating into your eyes) and the number of characters, fear not. Consider that your learning curve: now it’s taken care of, you can get your teeth into the rest, which is funny, clever, demented, and, perhaps most importantly, the only TV show you’ll ever see in which a horse has to build himself a makeshift hand out of twigs in order to ring a doorbell. Well, until something called ‘Horse Twig Doorbell Challenge’ turns up on cable, that is. And according to Nostradamus that isn’t due for another fifteen years – a full twelve after Bush finally blows us all up. Get your kicks in while you can.
‘I’ll be there for you’ [22 May]
‘I’ll be there for you …’ Not any more you won’t. Wave goodbye to your Friends (C4) because they’re about to vanish for ever. Apart from Joey, who’s poised to enter the spin-off dimension, presumably in a show that consists entirely of him crying alone in an empty room.
In case you’re a rabid fan who’s spent the past fortnight trying to avoid finding out what happens in this final episode, don’t worry – I won’t blow any ‘surprises’ here, so relax. Breathe out. Unbutton yourself. Not that much.
Of course, you’d have to have poked your eyes out with a teaspoon to somehow dodge the finale-spoiling screengrabs and photos plastering the tabloids the day after its US broadcast, so you’ll be enjoying the show in sound only – but you can’t have everything.
(While we’re on the subject, the single worst spoiler in history is the front cover to the VHS edition of the original Planet of the Apes movie, which is largely taken up by an artist’s impression of Cha
rlton Heston slumped disconsolately in front of a half-buried Statue of Liberty. What next? A collector’s edition of Seven housed inside a full-scale replica of Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head?).
Anyway: Friends. Or more specifically, ‘The One I Warmed to Against My Will’. When it started a full decade ago, I was virtually pre-programmed to despise it. That clean-cut, anodyne cast. Those newspaper articles about the wonderful haircuts. The whooping audience. That bloody theme tune.
Unfortunately, my steel-clad cynicism was permanently undermined when I accidentally caught an episode and found myself laughing. Afterwards, shuddering, I vowed to avoid it at all costs in case it shattered my cosy misanthropic worldview.
But recently, given its ubiquity in the Channel 4 schedule, I realised I’d become a fan by osmosis. I think it’s the writing. No matter how many accusations you hurl at Friends, you can’t deny it’s funny. And engaging. And tightly plotted.
In fact, the way the plotting works is impressively shameless: most episodes open with a pre-credits sequence in which Character A bursts into Central Perk to nakedly deliver some crucial exposition – ‘I’ve got a job interview tomorrow!’, ‘I just met this really hot guy!’, ‘I found a magic whistle!’ and so on – to be met by a chorus of quickfire gags from Characters B to D that a) make you laugh and b) distract you from the sheer cheek of establishing the storyline in such an unabashed manner. What’s not to admire?
Then there’s the performances, which are absurdly cartoon-like, yet rarely seem quite irritating enough to make you want to kick the screen in and start machine-gunning the neighbours. Matt LeBlanc, in particular, is responsible for more violent mugging than all the crackheads in New York put together. It’s appropriate that he’s going on to star in a spin-off called simply Joey, because he spends most of his screen time pulling silly faces and going ‘durrrrr’, like the matinee-idol equivalent of a mid-1980s English schoolboy. They should shoot his new show through a horse collar and enter it into a gurning contest.
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 37