Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  Still, Joey’s the only cast member who hasn’t become a wizened old twig, as evidenced by the title sequence, which cuts jarringly between contemporary snippets of our diet-ravaged chums and the ancient original opening credits in which they cavort in a fountain like bloated Cabbage Patch kids. It seems the NBC canteen serves nothing but soil and tiny pebbles to keep its million-dollar superstars in trim; compare this to EastEnders, where every cast member blobs out after three weeks in the Square and, in between takes, there’s a guy shovelling battered pies down their necks in a desperate bid to ensure they’re too fat to fit the narrow aperture of the Internet wank-cams in their dressing rooms.

  What with this and Frasier evacuating our living rooms, it’s hard to see how our American cousins can ever make us laugh again. Unless they re-elect Bush. But that’d be very hollow laughter indeed.

  Fantasy DG [29 May]

  So, then: the BBC appoints a new director-general, and once again I’ve been inexplicably overlooked. Cowards, the lot of ’em. Still, just in case the government goes mad again and decides to scapegoat Mark Thompson out of office, I might as well lay out my wares for the first time in public with a quick game of ‘Fantasy DG’. Here, in no particular order, is a list of the changes I’d implement if I were suddenly placed in charge of the Beeb.

  1 Remove all trace of football from the schedules

  I firmly believe all sport should be tucked away on pay-to-view

  satellite channels, not smeared across the public-broadcast schedules

  like brown goo in a dirty protest. OK, this policy is founded on

  personal prejudice – I hate sport and football is the worst offender

  – but I’m in charge now, so we’re getting rid of it. Actually, no – we’ll

  still show it, but in a form that’ll deliberately enrage the fans – by

  superimposing an obtuse East European cartoon over the footage,

  accompanied by the sound of loud, atonal trumpets. Consider it

  retribution for the years of tedium and bellowing I’ve had to

  endure from the fans, every single one of whom is a despicable idiot.

  2 Revamp Casualty and Holby City

  The storylines are boring, the characters uninspired – so let’s distract

  attention from that by upping the gore quotient 2,000 per

  cent. Patients aren’t allowed in unless they’ve got an eye hanging

  out at the very least, and all operations will be carried out with

  crowbars and chainsaws. Charlie from Casualty will be put in

  charge of a new Anal Trauma wing for obese people with hideous

  gaping bum wounds, and it’ll all go out in surround sound, daily, at

  teatime.

  3 Poach Trisha from ITV and lock her in a windowless room full of

  clueless council-estate scumbags

  And broadcast the results 24 hours a day on a dedicated digital

  channel. I defy anyone to think of anything more entertaining.

  4 Ban EastEnders from attempting storylines involving gangsters

  Unless said storyline culminates in a gang of twenty hardened

  cockney thugs thrashing Little Mo to death with broomsticks, I’m

  simply not interested.

  5 Introduce late-night adult versions of tired stalwarts

  Examples: ‘Adult Countryfile’ (rutting in haystacks), ‘Nude Antiques

  Roadshow’ (pensioners’ unclothed bodies evaluated by experts),

  and ‘Bergerac Hardcore’ (repeats of Bergerac with brand new, digitally

  created pornographic interludes in which Charlie Hungerford

  ravishes the entire population of Jersey).

  6 Put a playable version of ‘Tetris’ on Ceefax

  Self-explanatory, that one.

  7 Outdo ITV with new, ultra-cruel reality shows

  Such as my oft-mentioned ‘Heaven Can’t Wait’, in which people

  coming round from operations wake up to find actors dressed as

  angels standing by their bedside, who inform them they’ve died

  and gone to heaven, before reuniting them with deceased relatives

  (actually junior researchers wearing convincing latex masks). Or

  perhaps ‘Celebrity D-Day’, in which the Omaha Beach landing is

  re-enacted by famous folk, using live ammunition. The list is endless;

  the only thing holding us back is basic human decency.

  8 Televised hangings for licence-fee dodgers

  Or stick their heads on poles and dot them about in the background

  of popular drama serials as a warning to others of their

  kind. In these difficult times, the BBC needs a DG who rules with

  an iron fist.

  9 Let Paxman actually hit people

  Another self-explanatory one, there.

  10 Broadcast the four-minute warning on April Fools’ Day

  Then wait until all the fuss had died down, and questions had been

  asked in the House, and an angry population had demanded my

  immediate resignation – and then do it again, because it’d be even

  funnier the second time round.

  So there you have it. Those are my initial suggestions – but why

  should I have all the fun? E-mail your own DG fantasy lists to me

  courtesy of the Guide, and I’ll pick the best and run them in a

  future column. During a quiet week, naturally.

  ‘Dis Negro’s attractive’ [5 June]

  Yes, it’s Big Brother time again and, as per tradition, I’m going to spend the remainder of the column slagging off the housemates and trying not to catch my own reflection in the monitor lest I gaze deeply into my own eyes and marvel at the sheer aching pointlessness of the task.

  Anyway, here’s a handy cut-out-and-lose guide to the twelve inmates – a cast of asylum seekers, bisexuals, transsexuals and left-wing anarchists apparently chosen specifically to infuriate Richard Littlejohn, who probably thinks he’s watching a live feed from the Labour Party conference.

  First up, Marco, a homosexual ghost-train skeleton so implausibly camp he makes Mr Humphries look like the Terminator.

  Marco’s a true multi-tasker: he distributes his time equally between squealing, squawking, shrieking, screaming, yelling, yelping and screeching. He’s the human equivalent of fingernails down a blackboard, and is therefore the quintessential Big Brother resident.

  Straight after Marco went in, Ahmed, a homophobic former asylum seeker, followed. The look of fake delight on his face as he first greeted Marco was a joy to behold. At 44, Ahmed simply doesn’t fit in with anyone else in the house. Therefore, another quintessential Big Brother resident.

  Then there’s Jason, resident bozo. A former Mr Best Buttocks, South Lanarkshire who moisturises his butt-cheeks to keep them looking happy, Jason is a slight but buffoonish presence, floating round the house getting his bum out every eight seconds. He’d have been great in The Poseidon Adventure, where he could’ve undercut the serious tone every few minutes with some well-timed mooning but, in this context he’s just, well, an arse.

  Dan is the second gay housemate and, apart from a stupid haircut, seems fairly normal, so we’ll bypass him – and dull pretty boy Stuart – and go straight on to Victor, an incredible prick and the worst black male role model since MC Hammer. Victor spouts self-aggrandising bullshit with the single-minded determination of an industrial self-aggrandising bullshit machine. With a straight face, he’s claimed that ‘My DNA stands for Dis Negro’s attractive’ and ‘When it comes to ladies, right, you can call me “The Plumber” ’cos I like to lay pipe.’ He’s also bragged loudly about the girth of his penis. ‘It’s like major girff, man – I can hardly get it in.’ Victor’s currently the most likely candidate for an onscreen shag, possibly with a piece of furniture.

  Next, Kitten, played by Jarvis Cocker, Tracey Thorn and Rick from The Young Ones. The kind of har
dcore, hard-left lesbian who previously only existed in Littlejohn’s imagination, Kitten’s the most sensitive of the housemates, yet hamstrung by one fatal flaw: a tendency to drone about politics in an unbroken and largely inarticulate stream, until her voice becomes an omnipresent low-frequency burble, like the sound of a particularly boring corpse damply mumbling itself to sleep in a coffin.

  Vanessa and Michelle are this year’s glamour girls; the former a South African blonde, the latter a bisexual wannabe Page 3 girl from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Neither has much to say, but that’s all right, since their job is to wear bikinis and bend over a lot. Both will be coming soon to a downblouse/upskirt celebrity screengrab website near you, where thousands of lonely males can masturbate over them at leisure.

  Who else? Ah, there’s Shell, a posh horsey blonde who gets squiffy and also gets her bum out (this year’s dominating theme), and Emma, this year’s token thickie, who has the added bonus of sounding like every episode of Creature Comforts you’ve ever seen. And finally, Nadia, the Portuguese transsexual, who at the time of writing hasn’t revealed her ‘big secret’ to the other inmates. I suspect that she’s actually Pedro Almodóvar in a shiny fat suit.

  So there you have ’em. Nigh on unwatchably hateful to the last. ’S what Big Brother’s all about, innit?

  Sport Sport Bloody Bloody Sport [12 June]

  All change yet again in the Big Brother (C4/E4) house, which is proving tricky to chronicle. I write to a Tuesday morning deadline, which means by the time Saturday morning rolls around half my words are obsolete. This wasn’t a problem last year, because nothing actually happened throughout the entire series (‘Day 65 in the Big Brother house – Cameron is asleep. Jon is staring at a wall and thinking about quarks’), but BB5’s already brought us fights, rooftop protests, nudity, heavy petting and a bit where Marco spewed up on a merry-go-round. What’s a guy to do?

  The housemates keep shifting character too. Last week I dismissed Jason as a pointless bum-flasher; suddenly he’s become so stern and serious he makes Peter Sissons look like Jim Carrey. Thank God for Victor, who continues to be an arsehole, as predicted.

  Still, what’s making this series so watchable is the 50/50 split between gurgling imbeciles and uptight tossers. With that in mind, and since it’s Tuesday morning, let me predict the events for the rest of the week: on Wednesday, dim robo-seductress Michelle bared her breasts, then her bottom, then her breasts again, in exchange for a 10 pence IOU from Victor. On Thursday, Vanessa got upset when stretched-out-gay-idiot-baby Marco done a whoopsie on the carpet. And last night, Emma dribbled chocolate down her front for a full hour while Dan mopped her face clean and tutted a lot.

  If, for some mad reason, watching the above for the next eight weeks doesn’t appeal, never fear, because throughout this period the TV schedules are full of exciting, exhilarating SPORT! for you to watch whether you want to or not.

  Don’t worry if you lose the listings and don’t know when it’s on: helpful TV schedulers routinely make it easy for you to stay abreast of all the latest SPORT! by shifting everything else clean out of the way in order to accommodate it. Yes, for months on end, you too can look on in dismay as an unseen sports fan assumes command of the remote, bullishly forcing you to watch SPORT! instead of, say, the latest episode of a beloved drama serial halfway through its run.

  This situation is nothing new of course, but it’s gone on far too long, and in the age of digital sister channels and hard-disk recorders, there’s simply no need for this madness to continue. I dream of the day a continuity announcer utters the words ‘… and if you want to keep watching the snooker, turn to BBC3 – meanwhile here on BBC2, we’ll continue as fucking scheduled.’

  SPORT! fans may moan that they can’t get BBC3, and boo hoo that’s not fair – tough, idiots. We non-SPORT! fans are becoming radicalised by years of abuse. Right now, with Euro 2004, you can’t avoid football, even if you don’t watch the so-called ‘matches’ themselves – it’s omnipresent.

  There it is, in the ad break – look, there’s Jamie Oliver having a matey kickaround in his garden, followed by fifteen soccer-themed beer commercials, capped off with a multi-million-pound blockbuster ad in which overpaid footballing megastars are deified on behalf of shoe companies whose products are sewn together by penniless Korean slaves getting amphetamines injected into their eyeballs every 10 minutes so they don’t fall asleep during their 87-hour shift. Hooray for football!

  Here’s praying England lose, and lose quickly. May the ‘beautiful game’ be damned. And the same goes for Wimbledon, and cricket, and rugby, and snooker and darts, and any and all future sports not covered in this polemic. Even if someone invents nude moon volleyball, I’m not interested.

  In fact, I’d actually rather watch Marco sicking up on the swings every day for the rest of my life than sit through yet another minute of SPORT SPORT BLOODY BLOODY SPORT.

  In summary, then: bollocks to sport and bollocks to everyone who likes it. For ever and ever. Amen.

  Get a Grip [26 June]

  Life would be unbearable if you didn’t have your vices. They come in all shapes and sizes – cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate biscuits, going mental with a cricket bat at bus stops – and they all provide a brief respite from the trudging monotony of everyday existence. Is that so bad? Of course not. Bad habits are fun.

  Yes, fun. Which is precisely why the world’s killjoys are continually circling above your head, harping on at you to stop. Case in point: You Are What You Eat (C4), a new ‘dietary makeover’ show in which a nutrition expert rifles through the shopping basket of a self-confessed blobbo, then tuts and frowns and whines in their face for half an hour.

  This week’s victim is Michelle, a bloated office-bound manatee who spends most evenings shovelling cake into her face in a desperate bid to make life fun again. Her constant diet of crisps, biscuits and microwaveable hermit slop has turned her into a flatulent human waterbed, but fortunately healthy-eating guru Dr Gillian McKeith is on hand to help her mend her ways with a crash diet of organic brown rice, lentils, steamed carrots, tofu, twigs, bracken, soil and mulch.

  Naturally, Michelle finds it hard to stomach at first, partly because anyone who says they actually like brown rice is a lying masochist, but mainly because Dr Gillian McKeith strikes her as a charmless, judgemental, hand-wringing harridan. Disgusting cake-wolfing glutton she may be, but in this respect at least, Michelle is absolutely right.

  A quick look at Dr Gillian’s official website reveals two interesting things. Firstly that she’s incapable of smiling naturally on camera (the rictus grin in her official photo makes her look like she’s trying to poo out a pine cone – which, given her diet, she probably is). And secondly that she has her own range of holier-than-thou Dr Gillian health-food snacks, including a ‘Living Food Love Bar’ which will ‘nourish libido energy and feed love organs’. Yes, feed love organs. I’m not sure you’re supposed to put it in your mouth.

  The love bar’s lip-smacking listed ingredients include potency-wood root, sprouted daikon seeds, ho shou wu leaves, wu wei zi berries and catuaba bark. And if that doesn’t whet your appetite, perhaps Dr Gillian’s accompanying ‘message of love’ will:

  ‘My primary reason for developing this Love Bar is that it serves as a platform, like a stage, to garner your attention, and then to be able to communicate my message of unconditional love … love your partners in life, your neighbours, and especially your enemy. When you can finally love your foe or even the faceless stranger yonder, then and only then will you elevate your physiology and your soul.’

  In other words, it’s Snickers for arseholes.

  Might I suggest a new makeover show called ‘Get a Grip’, in which I lock Dr Gillian in a windowless room for six weeks and shout at her to see sense? Because there’s something inherently hateful about the growing ranks of nannyish smuggos in the world – gym-loving, anti-smoking, free-range solipsists who actually brag about how much water they drink, and shake their heads with p
ity if you crack open a packet of Monster Munch. So you’ll live longer – so what? Look at the company you’ll be keeping and weep.

  Anyway, infuriatingly enough, after an initial bout of disobedience, Michelle follows Dr Gillian’s instructions and emerges two stone lighter and far better-looking. I watched these scenes through a haze of tears, shovelling takeaway pork down my gullet. The day I inevitably join the squat-thrusting, vegetable-steaming replicants draws inexorably closer.

  First piece of evidence: I’ve quit smoking – and voluntarily, unlike the inhabitants of Big Brother, whose violent bust-up occurred the day the fags ran out. If Channel 4 wants further fireworks, they should draft in Dr Gillian to cook the housemates’ meals each night. There’d be heads on poles within hours, guaranteed.

  Unnecessary Ordeals [3 July]

  ‘Sallum walked three paces to where Landau lay sprawled across the sofa. He rammed the pistol into his open mouth, fired, and stood back. Brain tissue was now spattered across the cream fabric. Sallum dipped a finger into the gooey mess and lifted it to his nose. The smell of infidel decadence.’