Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  That’s a gripping extract from Greed, the best-selling paperback from Chris Ryan – author, Ultimate Force co-creator, SAS poster-boy and frontman for Pushed to the Limit: Britain’s Toughest Family (BBC1), the BBC’s wholesome new reality show in which everyday families undergo a series of prolonged, gruelling and entirely unnecessary ordeals, partly to prove to themselves what good eggs they are, but mostly because they’re idiots.

  Yes, idiots. It’s week one and they’re up the mast of a tall sailing vessel, puking into a violent thunderstorm. Well, durrr. This is the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake. We’ve got beanbags and DVD players. There’s no need to hang around outside in the cold and the rain, having the palms of your hands ripped raw by a length of wet rope. Eighteenth-century sailors used to do that, but they had no choice in the matter, and hated every second. Do it through choice and you’re not being life-affirming, you’re being an idiot.

  Still, it’s fun to watch them suffer. For about five minutes. Unfortunately, this programme’s 55 minutes longer than that and it’s riven with faults. For starters, there are just too many participants: ten whole families, plus Chris ‘Infidel Decadence’ Ryan and the ship’s crew, leaving a grand total of forty-plus plucky dullards bobbing about and looking rather pleased with themselves. For an hour.

  Furthermore, this being a BBC production, the families in question are largely middle-class types with a faint whiff of the hockey field about them. Ruddy of cheek, sturdy of build, and stupid of surname: they’ve all got bloody weird family monikers like the Durkins, the Crebers, or best of all, the Gecks. On paper, the Gecks sound like an exciting new Greenwich Village rock band. In reality, they’re in charge of the tombola at your local village fête.

  Things liven up a tad towards the end when the ship returns to port, and two mums with vertigo are cruelly forced to abseil from the largest council block in London, but you can’t help thinking that Britain’s actual toughest family wouldn’t have time to appear on shows like this – they’d be far too busy earning a crust and dealing with life at the shit end of the wedge. And waking up every day inside the very tower block the mums are abseiling down.

  Speaking of tough families, the Krays provide obvious inspiration for The Long Firm (BBC2), a new four-part mini-series based on Jake Arnott’s crime thriller. As with House of Cards, it’s a prime example of a televised adaptation substantially improving on its (overrated) source material. Because this is superior, solidly entertaining stuff, which on the evidence of episode one could well go on to become a long-running series in its own right. And yes, it’s an East End gangster thriller, but one that somehow doesn’t feel like it’s treading over-familiar ground – thanks to assured direction, flashes of genuine wit (that’s genuine wit, as opposed to the Guy Ritchie variety), and an excellent cast (Mark Strong single-handedly makes Harry Starks feel like an enduring televisual icon by the end of the first instalment).

  In fact, the only thing wrong with it is that it’s on BBC2 and not BBC1. Although come to think of it, at the same time on the same day, BBC1 is providing some formidable competition in the form of an all-new series of Rail Cops, the white-knuckle fly-on-the-wall documentary about the British Transport Police, in which, thrillingly, ‘Jeff Nelson deals with missing luggage at Birmingham New Street.’

  And they say there’s a lack of drama on BBC1.

  Boo Hoo Hoo, It’s a Tragedy for Television [31 July]

  Oh boo hoo hoo, Saturday-night telly ain’t what it used to be. Once upon a time every family in the nation would tune in en masse to watch Forsyth and Tarbuck and Edmonds and Smith (Mike): an entire population huddled round its screens like suckling piglets round a sow’s tit. Now the Saturday-night schedules are the equivalent of a deserted alleyway full of bin bags and urine, and boo hoo hoo, it’s a tragedy for television.

  Well, yes, maybe, but it’s a good thing for people as a whole. To the best of my knowledge, Saturday-night television has always been gaudy and more than a little bit shit: perhaps the plummeting figures reflect an evolving populace that just can’t take it any more. Why should the average 12-year-old sit indoors watching rubbish with Granddad when they could spend the evening outdoors, knocking back alcopops, texting their friends and knifing each other instead?

  Besides, you don’t need to call in Poirot to solve the mystery of the falling ratings. Just look at what’s on. Take Johnny and Denise: Passport to Paradise (BBC1), an absolute car-and-plane crash of formats, tinsel, and post-modern irony – a nightmare fusion of Noel’s House Party and TFI Friday.

  It opens with Johnny and Denise singing the theme song, which might be a neat idea if it wasn’t for Johnny’s glaring inability to carry a tune. He might sashay like a Vegas showman, but he sounds like a cow trying to moo the Lord’s Prayer.

  And it’s downhill from there: the rest of the show is an aimless drizzle of apparently unconnected games and routines, interspersed with the duo’s grating jabber: Denise has a touch of the call centre about her, while Johnny deals in ceaseless flip irony, overemphasising words at random, and inserting camp dramatic pauses. Into every. Other sentence. It soon becomes infuriating – although it did give me an idea for an interesting televisual experiment in which Newsnight assigns Vaughan to report on Slobodan Milosevic’s war crimes trial at The Hague, just to see how well his hip tongue-in-cheek facade performs under the conditions.

  Over on ITV, Saturday-night telly means blaring crap like Celebrities Under Pressure (ITV1), which is now presented by Vernon Kay, TV’s village idiot.

  Kay is a one-man walking blight-on-our-culture, a dog-haired toby jug, a self-satisfied banality engine, a git, a twit, a twat and an oaf. He dribbles tedious, repeated references to down-home life back in Bolton, presumably to underline what a Phoenix Nights-style man of the people he is, although from where I’m sitting he looks and sounds more like an unjustly elevated simpleton than a likeable everyman. He shouldn’t be on television – he should be sitting on a country stile wearing a peasant’s smock and chewing on a hayseed, some time during the Dark Ages (and preferably at the height of the Black Death).

  I’m not a fan.

  Still, if you can withstand Kay, you might be able to stomach the programme itself, which is almost as shit as he is. The basic premise: a totally past-it or impossibly obscure ‘famous person’ must complete a task in order to win prizes for a not-particularly-likeable prole family unit. First, however, they have to live with said family for a week, producing a short video diary in which they wibble on about what a lovely welcome they’ve received from these simple scummy plebs, and how loveable their shitty, squawking, pointless kids are. If the task was to look down a lens and spit lies, they’d have won already.

  Then, immediately following this bumcast, ITV insults the nation still further by broadcasting Simply the Best (ITV1), which is It’s a Knockout without the funny costumes or Stuart Hall: the only two things that made it bearable in the first place.

  So then: Saturday night telly lies dead on its arse. Boo hoo and hoo. Move along now people, move along. There’s nothing to see here. Nothing to see.

  Just Plain Shit [7 August]

  Sick and tired of being talked down to? Of course you are, stupid. Everywhere you look, you’re being patronised, you poor little thing.

  You can’t even smoke a fag and slug a coffee without being told CONTENTS OF CUP MAY BE HOT and reminded that SMOKING KILLS.

  And what about computers? They’re bloody patronising. Look at all those little folders with names like My Computer or My Documents, My this and My that. Well duhhhh – who else’s stuff is it likely to be? Todd Carty’s?

  Obvious labels, everywhere you look. And that includes the TV listings: programme titles are getting increasingly insulting with each passing week.

  Last week, ITV brought you a sex-swap documentary called My Mum Is My Dad; this week Channel 4 brings you My Breasts Are Too Big (C4), a heart-rending look at women whose breasts are too big. Who knows, it might be the most symp
athetic documentary ever made, but that title reduces everyone in it to the level of a freak, clearly labelled for the benefit of passing masturbators.

  If Channel 4 were being honest, of course, they wouldn’t have bothered with the ‘documentary’ element, and instead simply paid some women to bare their chests in front of webcams, broadcast the results live on air, and called it ‘My Breasts Are Too Big, Or Too Small, Or Just Right, Or Whatever – Who Cares, Just Watch ’Em Jiggle – LIVE!!!’

  A name like that would hoover up even more idle perverts than My Breasts Are Too Big, and stands a better chance of providing the viewing figures they’re patently, nakedly, embarrassingly chasing. Who cares if your audience consists of clueless masturbators, as long as there are millions of ’em, eh?

  Speaking of honest titling, it’s about time they came up with a new name for the equally patronising Bo’ Selecta (C4) – something that better reflects the show’s contents. Something like ‘Witless Pipdribble’, perhaps, or ‘Astronomically Dismal’, or just plain ‘Shit’.

  Earlier this year, I sat on the Bafta jury for Best Comedy Programme. Bo’ Selecta didn’t win, but it was one of the four final nominees. Why? Because the rules stipulated there had to be four nominees. No one really wanted Bo’ Selecta to be there. That’s how bad it is.

  (For what it’s worth, I wanted Harry Hill’s TV Burp to get the recognition it deserves, but the rest of the panel considered it worse than Bo’Selecta – the philistines. They also outvoted me by nominating BBC2’s Double Take, perhaps the most dismally pompous ‘comedy’ series I’ve ever seen.)

  Anyway, what’s wrong with Bo’ Selecta? How long is a piece of string? It’s just amazingly, hideously, unacceptably, reason-defyingly awful: a 45-minute vomit of mirthless swearing and canned laughter, aimed squarely at the kind of cow-brained retard who spends 98 per cent of their waking life wondering which ringtone to download next. We should be rounding these people up and chemically neutering them, not broadcasting shows in their honour.

  Perhaps most frustrating of all, there are some genuinely funny ideas amidst all the crap. It was funny once (and precisely once) to see Craig David talking with an unlikely northern accent and caring for a pet kestrel. But that seems like a very long time ago, and now all we’re left with is a worthless, offensively feeble show that purports to mercilessly skewer the cult of celebrity, but actually crawls along behind it on hands and knees, begging to kiss its bumhole clean.

  Ooooh, pleeeease, Patsy Kensit – will you appear on our show? In a series of crashingly unfunny sketches? So you haven’t got a comic bone in your body – so what? You’re faaaamooousss, mmm, mmm, kissy kissy kiss kiss.

  Christ, it’s just plain embarrassing. If I worked on Bo’ Selecta, and my parents asked me what I did for a living, I’d lie and say I sat in a dustbin giving blowjobs for pennies. Just to retain some dignity.

  A Big Hand for the Letter ‘X’ [11 September]

  Ladies and gentlemen, a big hand for the letter ‘X’. It’s the most versatile letter in the alphabet. A singular ‘X’ can denote a kiss, the location of buried treasure, or a mistake in a schoolboy essay. Bunched together in a trio, it can spare your blushes when confronted with a fxxxing rude word, or denote red-hot bum action on the wipe-clean cover of a Ben Dover DVD. It’s easy to draw and it’s worth about 500 points in Scrabble; it brought us the X-Files, the X-Men, American History X, and now, most exciting of all, The X Factor (ITV).

  The ‘X’ in the title represents showbiz ‘je ne sais quoi’, although it might as well be a roman numeral since this feels like the tenth retread of ITV’s tried-and-tested talent-show format. Not that this is precisely the same as Popstars and Pop Idol, oh no. There are several key differences.

  Difference number one is the presence of Sharon ‘The Osbournes’ Osbourne on the judging panel. Crowbarred in between spud-faced Louis Walsh and fuck-faced Simon Cowell, she’s already the star of the show; a benevolent empress hen. Whereas Cowell’s trademark putdowns have become wearingly familiar (with every other hopeful being ‘the worst singer I’ve heard in my life’), Mrs Ozzy retains an ounce of humanity, alternating her slaggings with sympathetic advice, at one point breaking into tears when faced with a pleading contestant. She’s hard to dislike.

  Difference number two: Kate Thornton takes the place of Davina McCall, which means the show is no longer hosted in the style of a shrieking Harvester barmaid buying a round of drinks on her hen night; instead it’s overseen by the straight human equivalent of a scarcely detectable kitten’s fart. No progress there, then.

  Difference three: the producers have added a ‘reaction booth’ outside the audition room, in which rejected wannabes can (and do) sob their hearts out on camera – and judging by the level of nigh-on suicidal despair on display, it’s only a matter of time until someone slashes a wrist and sprays blood at the lens. If you love watching people wailing in despair, the blub booth is a great idea; next year, let’s give the entrants the option of leaving the audition room via a sixteenth-floor window. They could teeter on the ledge threatening to jump while a celebrity negotiator on the ground (Frankie Dettori, say) tries to talk them out of it using a loudhailer, winning £100 for charity each time he saves a life. Great human drama – and you could always show footage of the ones who jump regardless in some kind of X-Factor X-treme Uncut spin-off on ITV2, their pavement splatterings edited together in a poignant slow-mo montage backed with some Coldplay or something.

  The final difference between X Factor and Popstars is perhaps the most significant one: the addition of an entire category for anyone aged 25 and over. The 16–24s may be desperate, but at least they’ve got youth on their side: the elders are a morass of jowls, grey hair, sagging breasts and broken dreams, so theirs is the most disturbing group of all, consisting largely of feverish last-chancers, deluded ‘eccentrics’ (i.e. the mentally ill) and OAPs.

  In a fair world, Cowell and co. would be harder on a tone-deaf grandmother than a talentless teenager, on the grounds that old folk can take it (having been alive long enough to come to terms with an unfair world). In reality, when faced with a well-meaning old biddy whose voice warbled unsurely from one note to the next like a drunken moose trying to navigate a maze in the dark, the judges told her she was lovely and put her through to the next round. Cowards.

  Finally – quick, unrelated question: during X Factor, did I really see an advert for a sinister new kiddies’ health drink called ‘Munch Bunch Drinky Plus’?

  By God, I think I did.

  How Clean is Your Arse? [18 September]

  I once had an idea for a conceptual art exhibit. The idea was simple: I’d cut out one of those adverts for chintz that appear in tabloid Sunday magazines (you know: a collection of miniature ceramic Star Trek kettles; hand-painted plates commemorating ten years of A Touch of Frost – that kind of thing). I’d send off for it – closely obeying the ‘SEND NO MONEY NOW’ in the process – then blow the advert up as big as possible, and fix it to the first wall of the gallery.

  Once the goods arrived, I’d put them on a plinth in the centre of the room. And once I received a request for payment, I’d blow that up and hang it alongside the advert. But I wouldn’t pay a thing. Each time a demand arrived, I’d blow it up and hang it on the wall of the gallery, until eventually I’d be hanging up court summonses and bailiff threats.

  God knows what it would all ‘mean’ – I just thought it might be funny. But I never got round to doing it, on the grounds that it was a massive waste of time. And that’s the only difference between me and the performance artists showcased in The Art Show (C4) – they haven’t bothered making the distinction between worthwhile and time-wasting.

  Take the man who spends hours dangling from a tree, like a piece of fruit. ‘I think I’d do it whether it was art or not,’ he explains – which is just as well, because it isn’t. It’s just a berk hanging off a tree. Nonetheless, it bemuses a few passers-by, which tickles our man no end.

  ‘It’s
like being a witness to something,’ he says, which is a poncey way of saying ‘It’s something you look at,’ which in turn describes practically everything in the world. Watch a dog taking a shit in your garden and you’re ‘being a witness to something’. It also means the dog is a conceptual artist, and that’s not a turd curling out of its bum, it’s his latest work.

  The main difference is that the dog is probably more likeable and less conceited. ‘This is more important than Hollywood or politics,’ screeches a prick dressed as a cyborg; a girl whose work consists of being chased by a black box on wheels offers the stunning revelation that ‘in a way, what I’m doing is self-indulgent’.

  Their get-out clause, of course, is that you’re ‘allowed’ to find it laughable if you want – which is big of them. In fact, any reaction whatsoever validates their performance. Even suspecting they’re a bunch of show-offs who can’t act or perform comedy, and are using the ‘artist’ badge as a flimsy justification for wasting the world’s time – even that’s a valid reaction as far as these twats are concerned.

  More time-wasting in Too Posh to Wash (C4), the follow-up to How Clean is Your House? And it really should be called ‘How Clean is Your Arse?’, because having run out of mentally ill householders to ridicule, Kim and Aggie are now training their sights on people with poor personal hygiene.

  Their first victim is Barry, who smells. Barry rarely showers, doesn’t wash his hair, and spends his evenings picking his feet then eating with his hands, ingesting athlete’s foot fungus as he does so.

  Kim and Aggie’s advice ranges from the obvious (‘Have a wash’), to the absurd (‘Wash your hair with beer and vinegar’). Sadly Barry doesn’t make it to the end of the show, abruptly withdrawing his support after a lab report proves he doesn’t wash his hands properly after going to the bog.