2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  Lies, all lies

  [5 May 2006]

  According to statistics, the average person lies 7,500 times a day. Or something. I’m not sure of the actual figure, but when you’re writing a column it’s essential to sound authoritative in your opening sentence, so I lied about it. The important thing is this: people lie a lot. We can’t handle the truth.

  I’m no exception to the lying-human-scumbag rule; in fact I probably tell more lies than most. Usually they are bog-standard white lies—compliments, mainly, although pretty much any statement that implies I give a toss about anyone other than myself is almost certainly untrue. I’d also class the majority of my facial expressions as white lies: occasional looks of concern, fixed masks of rapt concentration, smiles, you name it—all absolute bloody lies. If it were socially acceptable to do so, I’d walk around looking as blank as a Cyberman. Fuck the lot of you. Fend for yourselves.

  My favourite kind of lie is the pointless but plausible lie: the odd nugget of needless fiction dropped into conversation just for the hell of it. For instance, whenever anyone I know returns from a holiday abroad and asks if anything interesting happened while they were gone, it amuses me to claim, for no reason whatsoever, that the actress Pauline Quirke died while performing a hang-gliding stunt on This Morning. In my experience, this is just conceivable enough for them to swallow it whole. They’ll only discover the truth months or maybe years later, the next time they see her on TV; and by then diey’ve forgotten who lied to them in the first place—the idiots.

  It’s a fun little game. Even though you rarely get to see the fruits of your labour first-hand (since you’re long gone before the penny drops), poindess fibbing fleetingly makes your life seem 4 per cent more interesting than it actually is, so I wholeheartedly recommend it. To get you started, here are four brief examples for you to sow as you see fit.

  Next time you go to the cinema with someone who knows nothing about the film, whisper, ‘I bet I can work out which one’s the android before you,’ just as it starts. They’ll spend the rest of the film studying the cast in completely the wrong way. I tried this out recently when watching the movie Crash with someone, and it improved it a thousandfold.

  Text a friend at random saying: ‘Wahey! I’m in a HELICOPTER!’ Someone did this to me once; it worked a treat. Try it now. Go on.

  When passing a cemetery, nonchalantly claim Sherlock Holmes is buried there. The number of people who fall for this is frankly astounding.

  You and a friend are listening to an unfamiliar song on the radio. Before it finishes, say, ‘I can’t believe this is Charles Dance—the man’s lost his mind’, then maintain that it is Charles Dance, it really bloody is, honestly, you read about it somewhere. Keep the pretence up as long as you can, despite their protestations, even if it’s a woman singing. Say he’s recorded it for a cow charity. Get angry if they don’t believe you. They will eventually. They always do.

  Anyway, there you go. Now get lying. It’s good for you.

  A face at the window

  [12 May 2006]

  It’s late at night, pitch black outside, and you’re in the house alone. You switch off the television. All is quiet. It’s bedtime. You walk to the window to draw the curtains. And there it is!

  Face at the window! Aaaaarrgh! A scraggy-haired lunatic with googly eyes! Maybe he’s glaring, maybe he’s grinning—whatever he’s doing, this isn’t good news. Because he’s either actually there, in which case he’s about to burst in, hack your face off and use it as a hanky, or you’re hallucinating, in which case you’ve lost your mind, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life wandering shirtless into traffic, screaming about Mis and geese and phantoms.

  It’s childish I know, but the terror of the face at the window plays on my mind whenever I draw the curtains at night. I even worry I’ve somehow jinxed myself by simply thinking about it in the first place: that since I’ve got the thought lodged in my head now, I might go crazy and imagine he’s there.

  How long does it take to go crazy anyway? Do you need a bit of a run-up, or is it possible to snap your mind in a nanosecond? And surely, once you’ve seen the face at the window, there’s no going back. You don’t just rub your eyes and forget about it.

  And then I think: hang on, the fact that you’re even having this debate in your head proves you’ve gone mad already. Seeing the face is simply the next logical phase. You’ll definitely see it now! Argh!

  So to safeguard myself, I end up drawing the curtains with my eyes shut. Which is the sort of thing a crazy person might do. I can’t win—the face wins, whether it’s there or not.

  I’m not the only one. The other day, I was telling someone about my face-at-the-window paranoia, and she squealed and confessed that she often felt precisely the same. And then she said, ‘You know what’s worse? Face in the mirror. The lurking suspicion that you’ll nonchalantly glance in the mirror one night, but it’s become haunted or something, and there’s a scary man there, staring back at you.’

  I wish she hadn’t said that. There’s a giant mirror lining one wall of my bathroom. Going for a piss in the middle of the night has become a heart-stopping trial of nerves. My life’s turning into an M. R. James story.

  But then, that’s the trouble with internal dialogue: it can send you round the twist. I once had an idea for a TV competition in which ordinary members of the public are hooked up to a futuristic computer, which reads their thoughts and displays them, in real time, on a monitor in front of them.

  The contestants have to read their own thoughts aloud as they appear. So initially they’d read something like, ‘I wonder if this is going to work?’, shortly followed by, ‘Bloody hell, it does!’, and before long they’d be locked into a sort of consciousness feedback loop, reading aloud their own thoughts about reading their own thoughts aloud. The last one to fall to the ground in a twitching, frothing heap is the winner.

  And the host? There’s only one candidate. A face at a window. Well, that or Chris Tarrant. Depends who’s available.

  Too annoyed to save the world

  [19 May 2006]

  Faced with a photo of a fly-encrusted child, the natural reaction should be to reach out and help. Instead, I start hearing Bono and Coldplay in my head. It’s the most mind-mangling act of branding in history. I agree with what they are saying—1 just wish they weren’t saying it. How can I open my wallet while my fists are curled with rage?

  Take Bono’s special edition of the Independent. It’s incredibly annoying. You’re trapped in a windowless room with the usual tedious sods who apparently represent British culture, except suddenly they’re wearing halos and pulling earnest expressions at you.

  The front cover is by Damien Hirst. He’s lobbed some clipart together in the shape of a cross. Across this runs a stark headline: ‘NO NEWS TODAY’. You jerk with astonishment. No news? How can this be? Help us, Bono! We don’t understand! Then you spot the footnote: ‘Just 6,500 Africans died today as a result of a preventable, treatable disease.’ You nod sadly. But before you can truly contemplate this harrowing injustice, you note that Damien Hirst’s name appears on the cover not once, but twice—and suddenly the footnote takes on an even more tragic dimension. Because all those people died, yet Hirst still walks the Earth. You turn the page, weeping.

  Inside lurk about 2,000 adverts for the new Motorola RED phone. If you buy one, an Aids charity receives an initial payment of £10, followed by 5 per cent of all further call revenues. This is clearly a good idea. But somehow, it’s also annoying. For starters, the phone costs £149, of which £139 goes toward helping Motorola. Second, it’s bright red and seems doomed to appeal to arseholes who want to add conspicuous compassion to their list of needless fashion accessories. I’m not just jabbering mindlessly on the phone in your train carriage—I’m saving fuckin’ lives, OK?

  Page 11: a piece of artwork by renegade graffiti artist Banksy, who has defaced a wall in Chalk Farm with a picture of a hotel maid. It’s called Sweeping
It under the Carpet and ‘can be seen as a metaphor for the West’s reluctance to tackle issues such as Aids in Africa’—or another example of Banksy’s tireless self-promotion; take your pick. Banksy says the maid in question ‘cleaned my room in a Los Angeles motel…she was quite a feisty lady’. Presumably his next portrait will depict some poor minimum-wage sod cleaning graffiti off a wall in Chalk Farm. Provided they’re ‘feisty’ enough to appeal to him.

  On it goes, with one Bonoriffic chum after another: noted philanthropist Condoleezza Rice picks her top ten tunes (including one by U2); Stella McCartney interviews Giorgio Armani, who has designed a pair of sunglasses for the RED charity range. These cost around £72 and will make you look like Bono: buy a ten-quid pair from Boots, bung the remaining £62 to an Aids charity and not only will you enjoy a warm philanthropic glow, no one’s going to shout ‘Wanker!’ at you when you walk down the high street.

  In summary: it’s a worthy cause, rendered annoying—and that’s annoying in itself. Bono genuinely cares, cares enough to risk ridicule, which is more than most people would do, myself included. It’s just that, well, it’s bloody Bono, isn’t it?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In which Noel Edmonds tests quantum theory, Doctor Who turns pornographic, and Adam Rickitt pays tribute to disaster victims by pretending to eat them.

  The dumbest story ever told

  [21 January 2006]

  Hooray! Hooray for Prison Break (Five), because it’s wholly bloody stupid and doesn’t care who knows it! In fact, it’s so ridiculous, it might just single-handedly usher in an all-new golden age of inanity, thereby confounding anyone who thought society had reached its ultimate idiocy threshold a few years ago with the invention of novelty ringtones.

  Prison Break is possibly the dumbest story ever told. It makes 24 look like cinema verite. It’s as realistic as a cotton-wool tiger riding a tractor through a teardrop. I’ve played abstract Japanese platform games with more convincing storylines. And the American public recently voted it Favourite New TV Drama at the People’s Choice Awards. Suddenly, the farcical tragedy of current world events makes perfect sense. I’m not saying the Americans are stupid. They’re not. All I’m saying is a substantial number of them may well have lost their minds. Centuries from now, historians will cite Prison Break as the quintessential artefact of a civilisation sliding into absolute babbling madness. It’s that good.

  The set-up is as follows. Justin Timberlake has a problem—he’s not called Justin Timberlake any more. He’s called Wentworth Miller and he’s a structural engineer. But that’s not the problem. His brother’s the problem. His brother’s a Clive Owen lookalike with jawbones so square he looks like he’s trying to hide a box in his mouth—and he’s on death row for murdering the vice president. Except he didn’t do it! He’s the victim of a shadowy conspiracy! And only Justin Timberlake knows the truth!

  Now, Justin loves his brother. Loves him with the kind of unquestioning intensity mere acting, dialogue and direction can’t possibly hope to convey. So he cooks up a plan. Step one: he robs a bank—and gets caught on purpose!

  Following the trial, Justin’s lawyer (and close personal friend) can’t work out why the previously intelligent, mild-mannered structural engineer would do such a thing. More perplexingly still, he seemed to actively welcome his prison sentence. ‘This just isn’t like him,’ she muses. ‘He just rolled over—he didn’t put up a fight.’ Two qualities that should prove handy in prison.

  But he hasn’t gone crazy. He’s simply entering step two of his plan—because he’s now in the same prison as his brother! And he’s going to help him escape! It all sounds like the sort of scheme Elmer Fudd might dream up while drunk. It isn’t. It’s far stupider than that. You’d need a supercomputer to work out all the drawbacks.

  But Justin has an ace up his sleeve—an ace that might, in our universe, be considered implausible: he designed the prison himself. Remember I said he was a structural engineer? For Whopping Contrivance, Inc? Well, he is. So prior to committing his armed robbery, he had the prison blueprints tattooed all over his body! Brilliant!

  Hilariously, Justin is so certain of success, he actually enters the prison with a smirk on his face. This immediately irritates a guard, who asks him whether he’s religious man. No, says Justin. ‘Good,’ replies the guard, ‘because the Ten Commandments don’t mean a box of piss in here.’ The dialogue continues in this vein for the rest of the programme and, I hope, the entire series.

  And so it begins—headlong we plunge, headlong into the very maw of folly. Gasp! as Justin has a fight with the tall scary bloke from Fargo. Coo! as Justin bonds with the absurdly cute female prison doctor! Cry! as the governor begs Justin to help him construct a matchstick model of the Taj Mahal for his fortieth wedding anniversary!

  I’m not making this up. All of this happens in the pilot episode. It’s like they took a two-year-old to see The Shawshank Redemption, asked him to recount the plot three weeks later, wrote down everything he said, and filmed it. It’s flabbergasting.

  Got the stomach for it? Then tuck in. But tread lightly. Because Prison Break is so astronomically dumb it could genuinely damage your brain.

  Noel’s red box party

  [28 January 2006]

  We’ve had gameshows based on card games. We’ve had gameshows based on pub quizzes. But never have we had a gameshow based on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Until now.

  I’m talking, of course, about Deal or No Deal (C4 ). In case you haven’t seen it, I’ll try to sum up the rules in a way that (a) makes sense and (b) isn’t so boring you fall asleep halfway through and start dreaming up surreal, sexually charged rules in which Noel shaves parts of his body at random while you shrink to the size of a bee and lick specks of milk off them.

  So. The game starts with twenty-two contestants, each guarding a sealed, numbered suitcase. Each suitcase contains a sum between ip and £200,000. One of the contestants is chosen to play: the object of the game is for them to open the other suitcases in whichever order they choose, continually evaluating the likely value of their own suitcase as they go. So, if I open box number five and it contains the ip, I know my own box doesn’t. It might contain the 200 grand. Every so often, Noel takes a phone call from ‘the Banker’, a shadowy offscreen figure who offers the contestant a sum of money to make them stop playing. So, if die banker offers me £3,000 to stop, but I reckon there’s still a chance my box contains the jackpot, I’ll reject his deal. Hence the title.

  In other words, my suitcase contains the financial equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat: a sum that exists in a theoretical super-position, being both substantial and meagre until I open and observe it, thereby assigning it a quantifiable value in the physical universe.

  Obviously, this raises complex philosophical issues about the nature of reality, which is why Deal or No Deal is hosted by Noel Edmonds. He’s well into this shit. Did you know Noel’s House Party was based on Hilary Whitehall Putnam’s twin Earth theory of semantic externalism? Well it was. Fact.

  Still, Noel’s central task isn’t to chinwag about collapsing wave functions or the viability of consistent histories. No. He’s there to distract you from one glaringly obvious fact, which is that the game is actually a massively pointless exercise in utter bloody guesswork.

  Because, hilariously, even though there’s no applicable strategy whatsoever, Noel spends the entire show pretending there is. He continually says things such as ‘What’s your game plan?’ and ‘What drew you to that box?’ and ‘Ah, I see where you’re going with this—I like your style’, as though it’s a game of 3D space chess between Einstein and a Venusian supercomputer.

  In other words, the game largely exists in Noel’s head. In fact, he’s the only person in the studio with any game plan whatsoever, since he has to employ various cunning strategies to maintain the viewer’s interest if the £200,000 prize is eliminated early on.

  I say ‘cunning strategies’. I mean ‘different fac
ial expressions and/or tones of voice’. Every afternoon, Noel’s basically taking part in an improvisational drama workshop in which he plays the hysterical id of a man arbitrarily flipping a series of coins.

  ‘Christ, I hope it comes up heads. If it doesn’t come up heads we’re in serious trouble. I do nor want to see heads now. Not heads. Please God no…IT’S TAILS! HOORAY! Well played! How skilful! OK, time to flip the next coin…’

  The weird thing is, it sort of works. Something about Noel’s ceaseless interest in unpredictable events draws you in. Best of all are the moments when he lifts a telephone receiver to discuss proceedings with the Banker, who I suspect exists solely in his mind. In fact, he might as well do away with the prop phone, and instead simply roll his eyes up and have pretend conversations with God. While dressed as Peter Sutcliffe.

  So there you go. It’s all a figment of Noel’s imagination. Maybe we all are. Maybe he’s dreaming us now. And he’s about to wake up and we’ll cease to exist.

  The average Nazi official

  [4 February 2006]

  You know what this country needs? More TV makeover gurus. There just aren’t enough of them—only a few hundred or so, and between them they’ve got an infinite quantity of airtime to fill. The numbers don’t add up, I’m afraid: unless we start teaching our schoolchildren the prerequisite skills (meddling with each other’s lives, tutting disdainfully, delivering acid putdowns, etc) and unless we start teaching them now, the planet will suffer a chronic shortage of TV makeover gurus within our lifetimes—and millions could die.

  Thank Christ then, for Anthea Turner, former GMTV presenter, confectionery promoter and unwitting star of a notorious health—and-safety instruction video almost everyone in telly has had to sit through (she appears in a touching sequence in which a motorbike backfires, setting her hair on fire). Now the gods have decided she’s been away from our screens for too long, and they’ve reincarnated her as—hooray—a TV makeover guru.