Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  ‘I just can’t physically do it…I’m gonna pass out…oh God I’m gonna be sick,’ she whined, over and over again, until it became a theme tune. Her husband should sample it, loop it and use it on the next Prodigy album. Possibly as a recurring motif in a brand new mix of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.

  What else? Well, Vie Reeves’s big entry was a mistake: it’s never a good idea to arrive fashionably late and to great fanfare on a reality show, unless you subsequently do something—anything—to justify the hype. Ages ago, in The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, he did a terrifying and hilarious impersonation of Lloyd Grossman, hovering around with an outsized papier-maché forehead and bits of cutlery for fingers. He should’ve gone in like that and stayed in character till the bitter end.

  ITV2’s live feed once again ran a coin-operated text-message window along the bottom of the screen, in a shameless bid to rake in money from illiterate cretins nationwide prepared to pay for the privilege of making the words ‘I LOVE FRANN HE IS WEL FIT’ appear on their tellies. How long until they start superimposing that over everything, even the news? Six months from now, you’ll switch on the ITN news and there it’ll be, running along the bottom: ‘CONDOLEEZA U R SOOOO SEXY!!!’; TALLUJER IS A MESS PS MARTIN WIL U MARRY ME LUV KIRSTY’.

  Oddly enough, that sort of caper might actually outclass Channel 4’s new political offering, Morgan and Platell (C4). It’s not that the show itself doesn’t include at least some level of political debate, it’s just that it’s impossible to concentrate on the issues at hand when your brain’s busy trying to work out which of the hosts you’d like to smack in the cakehole first.

  Who’s the more repugnant? In the red corner, Piers ‘Fake Photos’ Morgan, a man who recently sparked panic amongst This Morning viewers by inadvertently blabbering about an impending al-Qaeda attack ‘in the next few days’, then spent last week’s Morgan and Platell haranguing Commons leader Peter Hain for ‘encouraging fear’.

  In the blue corner, Amanda ‘Antigay Malignity’ Platell, former spin doctor for William Hague, famous for penning an Evening Standard column so nakedly homophobic and misleading that the paper’s own theatre critic wrote to the letters page complaining it was ‘a piece of gutter-press journalism…I have never been so upset or angered by an article as Amanda Platell’s attempt to incite contempt.’

  Morgan spends the entire programme looking twice as smug as a man who’s just learnt to fellate himself—yet miraculously it’s moon-faced, putty-nosed Platell who ultimately snatches first position in the punchability stakes, because there’s something about her that suggests she thinks she’s gorgeous and pouting. It’s a bit like watching a drunken old spinster pinching the waiter’s arse at a wedding reception.

  Still, there’s one remarkable side effect to all this: it’s the only political show in living memory where the politicians are the most likeable people in the studio by far. Under these conditions, even Dick Cheney would come across as warm and approachable—if I were him, I’d book an appearance at the first opportunity.

  To quote Miss Appleton, I think I’m gonna throw up.

  Mr Logic on holiday

  [1 January 2005]

  Why are we here? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to witness it, will Alain de Botton write an entire book about it anyway?

  Probably. In case you don’t know who de Botton is, let me explain: he’s an absolute pair-of-aching-balls of a man—a slap-headed, ruby-lipped pop philosopher who’s forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books aimed at smug Sunday supplement pseuds looking for something clever-looking to read on the plane—yet if you pick up one of his books and read it cover to cover, you’ll come away with less insight into the human condition than if you’d worked your way through a copy of Mr Tickle instead.

  For some mad reason, his books keep getting made into TV shows. Last year, he rocked the world to its very foundations by revealing that human beings sometimes experience an emotion called ‘envy’, in his book and TV series Status Anxiety. Now he’s popped up again, to instruct us on The Art of Travel (C4 ), just in case we didn’t buy his book of the same name, which was the toast of the aspirational tosspot community back in 2003.

  And boy, has he struck the jackpot with the telly version, because rather than sitting at a desk typing about travel, he gets to roam the world stroking his chin in front of a camera crew.

  It opens with Alain drearily watching a holiday ad on TV, but don’t panic: within seconds he’s hit on a way to put the budget to good use. ‘I thought of going on a Mediterranean cruise,’ he says, bold as brass. ‘It seemed to offer everything I was looking for. Sunshine; the excitement of being on a glamorous ship; some destinations I’d always wanted to see.’

  Cut to Alain boarding the QE2, which is ‘even more beautiful than I imagined. There were chocolates on the pillow at night. There were artfully moulded toiletries in the bathroom. The ship was repainted every morning, and was resplendent in the Mediterranean sun.’

  As is Alain’s bald, shining head. Yet, despite his opulent surroundings, something’s eating away at him, so he has a little think, and before long, ‘a troubling realisation began to dawn on me…that I’d inadvertently brought myself along with me on my holiday…Wherever we choose to go, perhaps the underlying wish is for me to get away from ‘me’.’

  I’d only known him a few minutes, and I wanted to get away from him too. Later, he reveals that guide books are no substitute for exploring a place yourself, and that a hotel is an ‘anonymous’ place. Unless it’s an East German swingers’ hotel filled with naked people, that is—like the one Alain visits halfway through the show, ostensibly to illustrate a point about something or other, but probably because he was curious.

  With their orange, wrinkled skin, the swingers look pretty grim, but they’re not a patch on Alain, with his shiny dome, slit-like eyes and dark red lips. (They really are dark, like he’s been suckling cranberry juice from a teat for the last six months, and set against his paper-pale skin they make him look like Ronald McDonald’s serious older brother- or an inverted black-and-white minstrel, whichever is most insulting.)

  Main’s entire travel philosophy boils down to ‘wherever you go, there you are’. It’s the sort of thing that might be explained in a single page of The Little Book of Comforting Dribble, in other words—the only difference is that Alain has to circumnavigate the globe to make the same cock-obvious point.

  Still, never mind. At least you can point at him and laugh, and say, ‘Ha ha ha, it’s like Viz’s Mr Logic on Holiday’ for the entire duration of the show. And if you feel bad about slagging him off, don’t worry. He’d be philosophical about it.

  Enter the Dragons’ Den

  [ IB January 2005]

  Fool! You probably won’t bother tuning into Dragons’Den (BBC2), just because of its stupid title. And who could blame you? A TV show called Dragons’Den? Sounds like a cheapo Lord of The Rings knock-off, aimed at children who can’t tell how rubbish the special effects are.

  Fortunately, it’s not like that at all: instead it’s an entrepreneurial take on Pop Idol. The ‘dragons’ of the title are a panel of super-rich businessmen and women, every single one of whom you’ll want to smack in the face on sight, simply for making you feel like a medieval pauper by comparison. They’re all quite psychotically odious, although the prize swine has to be YO! Sushi founder Simon Woodroffe: an obscene combination of unimaginable personal wealth and pretentious facial hair.

  The premise: members of the public queue up to pitch their business ideas to the dragons. The prize: real money and real investment, from the dragons’ real pockets. Not piddling little amounts of money either: we’re talking hundreds of thousands, life-changing helpings of cold hard cash.

  The result makes for merciless viewing. The wannabes are already nervous as they enter the room, via a staircase apparently designed to leave them puffing for
breath. That they’re immediately confronted by a row of scowling dragons, with huge stacks of banknotes literally piled either side of them, scarcely helps matters. But the poor sods need that cash, so they mop their brows, swallow hard, and start pitching—which is where things really go to pieces. Because almost without exception, their schemes and plans and hopes and dreams are absolutely bloody ridiculous.

  This week’s episode, for example, finds a man requiring thousands of pounds to fund the launch of a world-changing invention: the ‘StableTable’, an adjustable plastic widget that stops tables wobbling (you know, just like a makeshift cardboard wedge does, but for more money). Then there’s a woman hawking a ‘flower quiver’—quite literally a quiver you wear on your back to keep flowers in (this, she claims, eradicates the ‘difficulty’ of holding them with your hands). Most heartbreaking of all are two petrified young scamps attempting to drum up support for an online music service: one of them is so intimidated by the mere sight of the dragons he immediately forgets his lines and starts sweating so profusely he might as well be pumping 15 gallons of lactic acid through a blowhole on the top of his head.

  Faced with this absurd parade, the dragons feel personally insulted. After all, it’s their cash these bozos are after. And once angered, they speedily pick apart each proposal with ruthless efficiency. Business plans are derided, personalities are shredded, dreams are openly laughed at. The hapless pitchers stagger away, reeling and blinking as though they’ve just had a bagful of shit thrown over them. Like I say, it’s fun.

  Still a bad title though. Anyway, dragons don’t have dens, they have lairs, dammit.

  Even if you hate kids so much you just threw up because you saw the word ‘kids’ at the start of this sentence, it’s worth catching this week’s Child of Our Time (BBC1), because it includes a startling investigation into how much of EastEnders the average toddler can comprehend.

  As part of an ‘experiment’ to see whether kids actually understand what they see on TV, a group of five-year-olds are shown the episode where Janine throws Barry off a cliff. They’re then asked to explain, in their own words, what happened. Using puppets to represent the cast.

  Naturally, their versions are a hundred times better than the original: according to one of the kids, Janine was upset with Barry because he wouldn’t give her any sweets.

  I hereby demand the BBC starts broadcasting live kid-puppet ‘re-imaginings’ of their entire output, 24 hours a day, accessible via the red button. Come on, BBC. I for one can’t wait to see their version of Crimewatch.

  The amazing John McCririck

  [15 January 2005]

  So, the BBC went ahead and broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera in its entirety last week, enraging a hardcore band of extremist humourless oafs who decided before they’d even seen it that it was blasphemous and despicable and hideous and ghastly and wrong, and therefore Must Not Be Shown because They Didn’t Like It.

  Let he who is without brains cast the first stone. And cast they did. Prior to broadcast, they jostled, they shouted, they published contact details and made threatening phone calls—all in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who, unless I’m grossly mistaken, was actually rather keen on tolerance and forgiveness and turning the other cheek.

  Before Jerry Springer was shown, the BBC received 47,000 complaints. Afterwards, it received just 900—plus around 500 calls of support. Which suggests that once people had seen it, it finally dawned on them that perhaps it wasn’t worth getting quite so steamed up over a comedy musical. Nevertheless, a crusading fringe group calling itself Christian Voice, who published private phone numbers of BBC staff on their website, and who probably speak for, oooh, 0.0005 per cent of all practising Christians, plan to prosecute the BBC for blasphemy. And if that doesn’t work, they could always throw Mark Thompson in a lake to prove he’s a witch.

  You’d have thought human beings had evolved beyond this kind of idiocy- but since Christian Voice probably don’t believe in evolution, I guess they’re exempt. And as for the many thousands who objected to the broadcast on the grounds that it represented a ‘misuse of their licence fee’, I suspect that if you counted all the people who’ve ever turned on their TV of a Sunday evening and said, ‘Oh shit, Songs of Praise is on’, you’d be looking at a majority of millions.

  What would Jesus make of it? He’d probably watch the opera, laugh his halo off, and then appear before the protesting hotheads and say something wise and charming, like ‘do not let your hearts be troubled’ or ‘love one another’. He certainly wouldn’t be standing there indignantly stamping his feet. Well, not with his stigmata.

  Anyway, onto more important matters, namely Celebrity Big Brother (C4 ), home of the Amazing John McCririck, who really ought to be imprisoned within a digital satellite channel for the rest of his days, where we can tune in and watch him skulking round a bear pit, rubbing his head against the walls and grumpily swinging on tyres—all of it backed up with some kind of interactive technology that goads him with a stick each time you press the red button.

  Is it just me, or does McCririck look a bit like a Womble? An angry, recently waxed Womble, but a Womble nevertheless. He even dresses like one: witness the Great Uncle Bulgaria costume he sometimes throws on, or his Bungo hat. If any movie execs out there are planning a twenty-first-century ‘re-imagining’ of Wambling Free, they could save themselves a lot of expensive CGI by simply covering McCririck in glue and rolling him in cotton wool. And asking him to provide his own clothing.

  Here’s hoping he’s still incarcerated by the time you read this. As I type, Germaine Greer’s just walked, which is a pity, because without her or Great Uncle Bulgaria there’s little reason to tune in. Bez just bobs around staring at everything, like a man trying to make out individual atoms in the air; Kenzie is basically Mike Skinner’s thick younger brother; forcing Brigitte and Jackie to square off on TV despite the child-custody issues involved strikes me as a sickening misjudgement; Caprice, Jeremy and Lisa are so bland they may as well be replaced with furniture.

  Still, if McCririck goes prematurely, at least you know you can look forward to six months of hilarious, life-affirming Diet Coke commercials in which the corner shop runs out of his favourite fizzy drink and he throws a strop and slaps someone. Christ, that would be something worth protesting about.

  Fear of vomiting

  [22 January 2005]

  Don’t you never say this column ain’t educational. Your new word of the week is ‘emetophobia’, which means ‘fear of vomiting’. There. You’ve learned something. Give yourself a big fat pat on the back, four-eyes.

  I’m familiar with the word because I’m an emetophobe myself. It’s an incredibly stupid phobia—for instance, the thing that scares me most about nuclear war isn’t the death and destruction, but the vomiting caused by radiation sickness—but it’s a phobia nonetheless, and I’ve got it. Sometimes it’s so annoying, I could puke. Except of course I can’t. It’s all very confusing.

  Anyway, fellow emetophobes beware, because this week’s edition of Tribe (BBC2) opens with the most spectacular on-screen vomit since The Exorcist. But worse, because it’s real.

  The spewing commences when masochist extraordinaire Bruce Parry decides to spend a month with the Babongos, an obscure African tribe whose initiation ceremony involves taking a powerful, sometimes lethal hallucinogen whose first side effect is to make you hurl the entire contents of your stomach up. And by Christ does Parry hurl with gusto. It all comes up: he practically coughs up his own kidneys.

  The drug then sends you on an unstoppable three-day trip during which you experience visions, float free of your own body, drift inside the minds of other people, and relive every bad moment in your life in blistering Technicolor close-up. And just in case that isn’t mind-mangling enough, the Babongos do their level best to exacerbate things by dressing up in vibrant costumes, dancing around with flaming sticks, dunking you in the river and making you pass through a symbolic gigantic vulva built out of stic
ks. At the end of which, you’re reborn. As Bez.

  Ah, Bez. The usual ‘at the time of writing’ caveats apply, but now Great Uncle Bulgaria’s left, it’s Bez and Bez alone who’s making Celebrity Big Brother (C4) watchable. Adrift in a world of spliffless clarity, it’s clear he finds sobriety as disorientating as most people would find the Babongo drug ritual. The housemates’ reaction? They nominated him. ‘I reckon yous lot are a bunch of tossers,’ he replied—the wisest, most coherent thing he’s said since he entered the house.

  If his brain ever adjusts to normality, perhaps he’ll muster yet more accurate insults, and hopefully aim them directly at Lisa I’Anson, who, at the time of writing, is still in there, apparently intent on single-handedly redefining the word ‘smug’. And the word ‘insincere’. And the phrase ‘high-handed, self-satisfied, nauseating she-bore’.

  Could Lisa I’Anson be the most patronising person on Earth? She swans around treating everyone as though they’re six years old—pretty close in Kenzie’s case, and Bez’s mental age can’t be far off, but even so, it’s hard for me to stomach. She talked down to Jackie (who’s funnier than Lisa). She talked down to John McCririck (who’s more honest than Lisa). She talked down to Germaine Greer (who’s…well, where do you start?).

  I don’t know if she’s a religious woman, and I haven’t seen her saying any bedtime prayers, but if she did, chances are she’d even talk down to God.

  Under any circumstances, it’s pretty bleedin’ rich for an ex-Radio 1 DJ, who’s currently reduced to picking her bum on CCTV, to believe she’s in a position to offer any sort of advice to anyone (unless it includes a few handy pointers on the most efficient way to sob all the fluid out of your body), but when the advice on offer consists of nothing but cod psychology, artificial sympathy and dreary, witless murmurings of’it’s all good, babe, it’s all good…’, it veers straight past ‘rich’ and hurdes toward ‘nauseating’ with alarming speed.