2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  All good babe? All good? No it isn’t: shut your cakehole. Our stomachs are rising, and speaking as an emetophobe, that horrifies me to the core.

  Celebrity bollockers

  [12 February 2005]

  In today’s cut-throat consumer marketplace, some names are synonymous with quality: Rolls-Royce. Bang & Olufsen. Alessi. Gucci. Smeg. And then there are other names. Names like Amstrad. Yes, Amstrad. My second-ever home computer was an Amstrad CPC6128, which came with its own built-in disk drive—as luridly futuristic back then as a computer with its own fully-functioning bladder would be now.

  Trouble is, after a few weeks, the sound chip went all wonky and started guffing out bum notes at random. Then the disk drive, which I’d been so dazzled by, developed its own personality—which might have been fun if it hadn’t proved to be a destructive personality that didn’t like disks very much. Little things like that can wear you down, and before long, playing games on the thing was less fun than glaring at it and wondering which window to hurl it through.

  The culprit responsible for my conked-out Amstrad CPC6128 was Alan Sugar, who today heads a Eyoom business empire, owns 13 per cent of Tottenham Hotspur, gets called ‘Sir’ by everybody including the Queen and is the star of BBC2’s surprisingly enjoyable back-stabbing reality show The Apprentice (BBC2). In the US, The Apprentice starred Donald Trump, a man so obscenely rich he could afford to buy all the oxygen in the world, then rent it back to us at a profit if he so chose. The show was a hit, and Trump’s hairstyle (which looks like a golf cap hurriedly assembled from rusting steel wool) became a major star. Sugar doubles for Trump in the UK version, which works like this: fourteen odious, overconfident wannabe entrepreneurs, every single one of whom you will learn to hate twice as much as Hitler, have given up their day jobs in order to dance to Sir Alan’s tune. He divides them into two teams (one team of boys, one of girls), and sets them a weekly task—at the end of which, one candidate from the losing team gets personally fired by Alan, in the grumpiest manner possible.

  While unsweetened Sugar can’t trump Trump in the preposterous haircut stakes, on the evidence of this first episode his name will soon be mentioned in the same breath as other famous celebrity bollockers like Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsay. Looking eerily similar to Jon Culshaw impersonating Russell Crowe, he enters wearing the face of a man who’s just stubbed his toe on the gravestone of a close relative, and continues to grumble and bark his way through the rest of the show. Even his introductory greeting is downbeat. There’s not so much as a handshake. Instead, he glares at the line of hopefuls like they’re a group of work experience kids who’ve just trodden dogshit into his boardroom carpet.

  ‘I don’t like liars, I don’t like cheats, I don’t like bullshitters, I don’t like schmoozers, I don’t like arse-lickers,’ he announces, unwittingly dismissing every single one of them in the process.

  Once Alan’s set the weekly task—flower-selling for the opener—the focus shifts to the candidates themselves, as we watch them bicker, argue, scheme, moan, boast, brag, grandstand, plot and spout marketing bollocks until you want to squat on their chests and punch their jaws through the floor. By the end of the show, you’ll want Alan to fire the lot of them. Preferably into the ocean.

  Speaking of the candidates, whatever the collective term for a bunch of turds is (I think it’s a ‘fistful’ of turds), it applies to both The Apprentice’s fourteen entrepreneurs and a scene in Michael Howard: No More Mr Nasty (BBC2) in which we’re treated to the sight of John Major, William Hague, Kenneth Clarke and lain Duncan Smith sitting round a table offering advice to Michael Howard.

  Warning: the programme also contains repeated, severe close-ups of Howard, who has more than a touch of 10 Rillington Place about him, plus a talking-head interview with Anne Robinson, whose face now appears so tight and Botoxed she seems to be pushing it through the taut skin of a tambourine toward the viewer. Beware. Beware. Beware.

  Mrs Spoon from Button Moon

  [26 February 2005]

  Sorry to ruin your morning, but you’re going to wither and die. There. I’ve said it. Forget all the aspirational stuff you’ll read in the magazine supplements—your destiny consists of yellow hair and liver spots. In fifteen years’ time you’ll have a face like an elephant’s kneecap and an arse like a chamois leather drying on a radiator. Your mirror’s going to vomit each time you walk past. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

  Unless, of course, you bump into Nicky Hambleton-Jones, presenter of Ten Years Younger (C4 ). Essentially an hour-long commercial for Botox, Ten Years Younger is one of the cruellest shows around. Each week a dowdy, wrinkled member of the public is subjected to a series of ritual humiliations. First, they’re paraded around the streets while members of the public guess how old they are (the answer is consistently upsetting). Then they’re set upon by a team of experts who pick them apart in finer detail—pointing out their jowls, their shabby hair, their rubbish taste in clothes and their ham-fisted excuses for make-up.

  Thus psychologically broken, they’re offered a lifeline: Nicky and Co. offer to shave a decade off their fizzogs courtesy of a haircut, a makeover and a faceload of plastic surgery. This week, it’s not a member of the public, but a celebrity-well, Sherrie Hewson from Emmerdale at any rate. Sherrie’s fifty-four years old but the average street-plodding schmuck reckons she looks fifty-seven. Hardly a disaster, but that doesn’t stop Nicky, who charges on regardless.

  I say ‘charges on’, but there’s nothing particularly charged about Nicky. She’s slightly synthetic and ethereal: the ghost of a listless graphic designer. Weirder still, for someone fronting a show about facelifts, her own face is almost entirely featureless. She looks like Mrs Spoon from Button Moon. She looks like a baby new potato in glasses. She looks like Michael Jackson’s mugshot snap. But most of all she looks like a Crayola sketch drawn by a very very stupid child. There’s a Ten Years Younger spin-off book in the shops right now: the front cover features a simple cartoon drawing of Nicky Hambleton-Jones, and curiously, it looks more like her than her actual photo does. She’s a freak. How dare she tell other people what to do with their faces when she hasn’t grown one of her own?

  By the end of this week’s edition, Sherrie looks and feels like a million dollars—but the surgical bill can’t have been far off. And you can’t help suspecting that any surgical procedure carried out on behalf of a TV show is going to be performed with far more care than the average snip—‘n’—slice facelift. If I had one done, knowing my luck I’d catch the surgeon on an off day and spend the rest of my life sneezing through my tear ducts and blinking through my arse.

  In summary: Ten Years Younger is an irresponsible piece-of-shit show that plays on universal fears and snidely offers corrective surgery as the only solution—as opposed to, say, NOT JUDGING PEOPLE BY THEIR LOOKS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

  And please, please don’t carp on about how great the participants feel at the end of the show, as though that’s some justification. There’s got to be something seriously wrong with a society that can’t let people age naturally without pointing at their saggy bits and laughing. If this programme had its way, we’d be walking around with identikit baubles for heads. What in God’s name happened to character?

  Jacko

  [5 March 2005]

  Someone’s probably told you already. They’ve emailed, texted, phoned, or simply run up to you in the street, flapping their arms around and shrieking ‘Jesus CHRIST—have you seen the Michael Jackson Trial Reconstructions on Sky News yet?’

  I urge you to tune in today at 7 PM for the weekly catch-up. Because holy mackerel: this is either brilliant, or the most ominous paradigm shift for humankind since the creation of the downloadable ringtone chart.

  No idea what I’m gabbling about? It’s simple: in the absence of dedicated camera coverage of the Jackson child molestation trial, Sky have decided to ditch the traditional charcoal court sketches of old (which have a tendency to turn judicial proceed
ings into a stark graphic novel), in favour of a full-colour day-by-day reconstruction of events using actors.

  The end result is a truly spine-chilling cross between a daytime soap, an episode of Judge Judy, and a Dead Ringers Christmas special. If there weren’t so many references to child molestation, they could run it with a laughter track and have an underground comedy hit on their hands.

  The cast, who are uniformly rubbish, are made up as lookalikes, with Jacko himself being particularly impressive. Where did they find the actor responsible? More to the point, is that his real nose? Did he undergo surgery to land the role? Was he born that way? Or maybe he lost his original nose in an accident, so the make-up artist seized the opportunity to plop a Jackson-like triangular conk in the middle of his face?

  His wig’s not bad either—a bit Planet of the Apes, maybe, but a good effort. His defence attorney’s hair is even better: a brilliant snow-white helmet that makes him look like Geppetto from Disney’s version of Pinocchio. I can’t wait for Liz Taylor to show up. Who’s going to play her? Matt Lucas?

  Sky are showing the reconstructions as stand-alone ‘specials’, but since they’re also interweaving them with their actual news coverage of the trial, you’re treated to the baffling spectacle of the real-life participants walking toward the courtroom (shot by the news crew), interspersed with the hammy lookalikes delivering lines inside the building. It’s a bit like watching Plan 9 from Outer Space, the Ed Wood movie in which Bela Lugosi died halfway through filming and was hastily replaced by a stand-in for half his scenes. At the time of writing, Sky are running a phone-in poll asking viewers whether Jackson can ever truly receive a fair trial. So far, the viewers reckon the answer is ‘no’, but I’m confused. Are they talking about the real Jackson, or the pretend one? What if one gets off and the other doesn’t? Can that happen? I reckon it might. And then he’ll probably moonwalk home.

  Still, having taken an exciting leap into the unknown, here’s hoping Sky go the whole hog. For week two, why don’t they resurrect the Spitting Image puppets and re-enact the trial with them? Or illustrate some of the grittier incidents with animated manga-style flashbacks, like in Kill BUR How about cutting away at random intervals to show Beavis and Butthead watching the trial at home, calling the prosecutor a ‘dork’ and sniggering?

  And why stop at recreating the Jackson trial? Perhaps next time Sky are doing a report on something Tony Blair’s said, the screen could go all wobbly and slowly fade into a claymation Numskulk-style sequence set inside his head, in which polarised elements of his conscience (played by boggle-eyed plasticine sheep) debate the consequences of his actions?

  They could liven up their Iraq coverage by dubbing Eye of the Tiger over the top and dropping in random sequences from Saving Private Ryan. Or use complex CGI technology to show the Pope having an out-of-body chinwag with God while laid up in hospital, with the words ‘IMPROBABLE RECONSTRUCTION’ flashing across the bottom in bright red letters.

  Fuck it, they might as well. Let’s face it, they’ve pissed their integrity up the wall already.

  —In retrospect, that’s a bit harsh. Sky News is gaudy and hysterical on occasion, but it’s a damn sight better than ITV News has become.

  Colours and shapes

  [12 March 2005]

  Brilliant. In case we haven’t all got enough to worry about what with bird flu, terrorism, global warming, food scares, neo-conservatives, corporate megalomania, MRSA, phone tumours, asteroids, nuclear stockpiles, crime, plane, train and car crashes, depression, madness, ageing, anguish, Aids and G4’s debut album going straight to number one…the BBC considerately toss another chunk of doom on the pile in the form of Supervolcano (BBC1), designed to strike terror into the hearts of everyone who watches it.

  We’re all going to die, apparently, because a huge glob of magma beneath Yellowstone Park could erupt at any moment. Sorry, ‘supererupt’—causing widespread death and destruction as the gases and ash turn the world into a freezing, desolate, scarcely inhabitable hellball. Imagine a worldwide version of Doncaster. Yes, the situation’s that bleak.

  If you watch the ‘drama’ version of the show, that is. There’s an accompanying documentary: Supervolcano: The Truth About Yellowstone (BBC2), which also does its best to scare you, but has to begrudgingly stick to the facts by pointing out, reluctantly, that although a supereruption will certainly happen ‘some time in the future’, it could occur ‘at any point in the next 100,000 years’. In other words, it’s just as likely to happen in the year 102005 as it is tomorrow. Phew.

  Not that this stops the ‘drama’ version of the show making merry with the concept, presenting it as a cross between an episode of 24 and The Day after Tomorrow.

  Why are they doing this? It’s not like we can campaign to have volcanoes outlawed. If the BBC just wants to scare everyone, they could simply broadcast a nightly show called ‘Boo!’, consisting of two hours of blank, silent blackness, punctuated at random, infrequent intervals by a scary ghost face shrieking at the top of its voice. It’d have a similar effect, and at least we wouldn’t think our lives were in danger.

  Anyway, breakfast TV now: and Five’s Milkshake!, a collection of shows aimed at toddlers, which I’ve just decided is the best option for anyone unlucky enough to be conscious at that time of day.

  First thing in the morning most people have a mental age of three, which is why pre-school programming makes so much sense. Colours and shapes accompanied by basic descriptions of the alphabet is pretty much all the human mind can take at that time of day.

  But that’s not the only reason to tune in: the shows on offer are the most imaginative, lovingly crafted pieces of television you’ll find at that time of day. Either that, or I’m easily impressed at 7 AM.

  This morning, for instance, I hugely enjoyed Hi-5, an Australian import which starts off looking like the single worst idea ever—essentially Play School hosted by a fresh-faced pop group in the Steps mould—but wins you over well before the end with a mixture of spirited performances and genuinely catchy tunes.

  And I might be going mad, but I reckon there’s a faint whiff of sex about Hi-5 themselves. Bet they all share a group shower at the end of each recording.

  Then there’s Elmo’s World, a Sesame Street spin-off in which a scarlet squawking abomination with googly eyes scampers round a house made entirely of crayon drawings which spring into life at random intervals. It’s what the world probably looks like when you get hit on the head with a croquet mallet and it’s fantastic.

  All in all, Milkshake! offers such a refreshing start to the day, it’s hard to see why anyone would choose to spend time in the company of Eamonn Holmes instead (he’s quitting GMTV of course—probably before he bloats to the point of actually exploding on-screen).

  Milkshake! could cheer practically anyone up. If Supervolcano plunges you into a trough of despair, tune in the next morning and learn to smile again before the world ends.

  Holding seances and going’Woooh’

  [19 March 2005]

  Hooray for me! Having lived for years in a house where the landlord forbade satellite dishes (although rat infestations were OK ), I’ve moved to a place where no such ban exists. Which is why I spent last Saturday pacing the floor, staring at my watch and chanting ‘When will the Sky Man come?’ like an awestruck Amazonian native awaiting the return of his rainforest messiah. ‘Soon the Sky Man shall arrive with his box of visions. It is written he will come from the south, from the Croydon installation centre, before the sun is at its peak, traffic permitting.’

  In accordance with the prophecy, he arrived, did his job, and bingo: the magic box lives. Plus I’ve got that fancy Sky Plus impos-sible-o-vision thing that lets you pause, rewind, record, weigh, violate, polish and season whatever it spews out, for no good reason whatsoever. Finally, I can enjoy livingTV’s full range of psychic-centric programming to the full—something I’d been looking forward to, not because I’m interested in the afterlife, but because I simply can
’t believe the sheer audacity of the people who claim to be in touch with it.

  Take Crossing Over with John Edward, a US import in which the host purports to receive messages from the dead relatives of vulnerable audience members. The show seems heavily edited, and Edward’s messages are either hopelessly vague or clearly whittled down through methodical ‘cold-reading’ (the guessing-game process of elimination via which so-called mediums often appear to arrive at accurate revelations).

  Nevertheless, his victims fall for it, possibly because they can’t quite believe a fellow human being would exploit the pain of their bereavement for financial gain. Anyway, forget channelling spirits—Edwards seems rather better at channelling the facial mannerisms of Sylvester Stallone. Either that or he’s recently been smacked in the jaw with a boat hook. Like he deserves.

  Then there’s Sixth Sense in which Colin Fry, who looks like a failed prototype Chuckle brother, pulls much the same shtick for a UK audience. Both shows feature heavy disclaimers in the credits—a wodge of text that shoots down any notion of plausibility, claiming the shows are not purporting to be taken as factual, and are simply ‘entertainment’.

  In other words, by their own admission, they’re making grief-stricken relatives cry for entertainment. On a scale of moral repre-hensibility, this isn’t too far away from child porn. It’s psychological rape: disgusting, dishonest and exploitative. Here’s how to solve the psychic problem: make it a jailable offence for any ‘medium’ to charge for their services without a licence. How do they get a licence? Simply by demonstrating their abilities under laboratory conditions (something not one has ever been able to do). That’d sort ‘em out.