2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  Kurt Vonnegut once compared television to the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the ancient Romans insane. But then what does he know? He’s only some ugly old bastard, after all.

  Brian Conley: irritant or genius?

  [9 September 2006]

  Stealthily, by degrees, contemporary daytime TV has transformed itself into a bizarre cover version of 19805 primetime TV. There’s lightweight celebrity chat with Sharon Osbourne instead of Wogan; Noel Edmonds hosting conservative gameshows on Channel 4; and now, brilliantly, Let Me Entertain You (BBC2), an old-school talent and variety show that doesn’t just beggar belief but bugger it—with all the frenzied passion of Heath Ledger in Broke-back Mountain.

  It works like this: every day, a fresh bunch of excruciating amateur entertainers performs before a live studio audience. Each member of said audience has a button to push when they’ve had enough of the act: the moment 50 per cent of the audience are fed up, a klaxon sounds and the performance is halted. Simple. It’s The Gong Show minus the irony.

  You know you’re in for a treat the moment the host bounds on stage because it’s Brian Conley. Hosts don’t come more ‘showbiz’ than that. He’s a goddamn showbiz machine. For starters, he opens each edition with a song—a song!— punctuated with cheeky winks to the camera. Then he tells some thrillingly creaky Crackerjack jokes and engages in nudge-wink banter with the old dears in the front row. It’s cruise-ship hell all the way, which feels hugely refreshing for some mad reason.

  In fact, if you’re anything like me you’ll appreciate it on two opposing levels at once—the ironic, cynical part of your brain has a sneery guffaw, while the cuddly, human part simply enjoys a warm chortle. It’s confusing. I genuinely can’t decide if Brian Conley is an irritant or a genius.

  Psychologists have a term for this state of mind: ‘cognitive dissonance’—the act of trying to hold two contrasting viewpoints at once. Left unchecked, it can drive people crazy. Which is bad news, because the moment Conley makes way for the amateur entertainers themselves, a self-perpetuating cognitive dissonance feedback loop starts to build in my head.

  There are singers. There are dancers. There are people who balance saucepans on the end of their nose…you name it, they’re on it—and they’re bloody awful.

  Throughout each performance, a timer ticks away in the bottom left and a ‘disapproval rating’ percentage score builds in the bottom right, and it’s this that renders the show oddly hypnotic. If a contestant makes it to the three-minute mark, they’ve ‘won’ and automatically go through to that week’s final. But that rarely happens. Most performances are abruptly murdered somewhere round the two-minute mark: the klaxon sounds, the lights go out, and the bewildered, humiliated performer staggers away.

  Some acts barely get a chance to open their gobs before people start hammering their buttons. Even kids—and yes, Let Me Entertain You features loads of child performers—don’t always scrape by on a sympathy vote. Since the audience is voting anonymously, they’re remarkably unsentimental, particularly when faced with a creepy young performer (i.e. all of them).

  Ethnic minorities don’t seem to fare much better. This is unfounded speculation on my part, but I suspect if you were to compare booting-off times, you’d find white acts get a significantly easier ride, thanks to some degree of subconscious prejudice on the part of the (largely Caucasian) audience. Mind you, the quickest dunking I’ve seen thus far was dished out to a bald white guy who’d painted himself orange.

  And occasionally, an abysmal performance enjoys a mystifying degree of approval. Some don’t even qualify as a ‘performance’ in the first place: last Monday, a man made it through to the final by incoherently discussing his love of Only Fools and Horses. It’s unfathomable. You could piddle into a teacup and there’s a good chance you’d beat a pubescent dance troupe who’d sewn their own costumes and travelled 5,000 miles just to be there.

  In summary, then: It’s brilliant. It’s awful. It’s brawful. I don’t know what it is. But I know that somehow, it’s worth bloody watching.

  I hate you. We all hate you. God hates you

  [16 September 2006]

  Last time I checked, the Nazis didn’t win the Second World War—not that you’d sodding notice. After all, the Third Reich was pretty big on issuing orders and demanding cold, robotic obedience from the populace, and that’s pretty much what we’re saddled with today. But the way the orders are delivered has changed. Instead of being barked at in a German accent through a loudhailer, they’re disguised as concerned expert advice and floated under your nose every time you switch on the TV or flip open this newspaper.

  There’s a continual background hum, a middle-class message of self-improvement, whispered on the wind. ‘You eat too much. You eat the wrong things. You drink. You smoke. You don’t get enough exercise. You probably can’t even shit properly. You’ll die if you don’t change your ways. Your health will suffer. Have you got no self-respect? Look at you. You sicken me. I pity you. I hate you. We all hate you. God hates you. Don’t you get it? It’s so sad, what you’re doing to yourself. It’s just so bloody sad.’

  That’s the mantra. And it goes without saying that the people reciting it are routinely depicted as saints. Last year, the media dropped to its knees to give Jamie Oliver a collective blowjob over his School Dinners series, in which he campaigned to get healthier food put on school menus. Given the back-slapping reaction, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d personally rescued 5,000 children from the jaws of a slavering wolf.

  Anyway, the series was a huge success. In fact in telly terms there was only one real drawback: it wasn’t returnable. After all, when you’ve saved every child in the nation from certain death once, you can’t really do it a second time. The only solution is to find a new threat, which brings us to lan Wright’s Unfit Kids (C4), a weekly ‘issuetainment’ programme in which the former footballer and renowned enemy of grammar forces a bunch of overweight youngsters to take part in some extracurricular PE.

  It’s essentially a carbon copy of the Jamie Oliver show, with more sweating and fewer shots of pupils mashing fresh basil with a pestle: an uplifting fable in which Wrighty shapes his gang of misfits into a lean, mean, exercisiri machine—combating apathy and lethargy, confronting lazy parents, and attempting to turn the whole thing into a nationwide issue that’ll have Range-Rover mums everywhere dampening their knickers with sheer sanctimony in between trips to the Conran shop. Oh, isn’t it simply terrible, what these blobsome plebs do to themselves? Not our Josh, you understand: he eats nothing but organic spinach and attends lacrosse practice six hundred times a week.

  Bet he does, the little shit.

  It’s cleanly executed—we even get glimpses of lan’s temporarily bleak home life, just to ram home what a self-sacrificing saint he is—and yes, it is heartwarming to watch flabby, unconfident kids transforming themselves with a bit of simple activity…but there’s something about the underlying eat-your-greens message that really sticks in my craw, in case you hadn’t guessed.

  What happened to the concept of choice, you nickers? So a bit of jogging might increase your life expectancy—so what? That just equates to a few more years in the nursing home—whoopee-doo. And besides, I’d rather drop dead tomorrow than spend the rest of my life sharing a planet with a bunch of smug toss-ends trying to out-health one another.

  In episode two, video games and the internet are singled out as villains in the war on flab: they make kids too sedentary, you see. Oddly enough, TV, which is equally sedentary and, unlike those two activities, actively encourages you to let your mind atrophy along with your physique, escapes wimout a bollocking. Funny, that.

  Well listen here, Channel 4—instead of forcing kids to eat bracken or do squat-thrusts, how about teaching them to think more expansively, so they reject the sly, cajoling nature of programmes like this? Or would that be a campaign too far?

  Pin Sharp

  [23 September 2006]

  You’d thin
k, as a globally influential writer of unprecedented cultural import, I’d be offered freebies, perks and trinkets round the clock. Free DVDs. First-class flights. An all-expenses-paid stay at that sail-shaped hotel in Dubai where visitors wipe their bums on gold leaf and swan’s wings. VIP passes to the opening of Lindsay Lohan’s blouse. Yeah. That’s what you’d think.

  In practice, the only freebie I’ve ever received is a tray of sausage rolls from Gregg’s the bakers, delivered unexpectedly to my desk after I mentioned them in print. And I had to give most of those away. There’s only so much mashed pig you can eat in one sitting before your tear ducts start leaking yellow fat.

  Anyway, all that changed the other week, when an email arrived offering me a free top-of-the-range HD television and a Sky HD box. Should I accept it? Wouldn’t doing so make me a bought and sold whore, blackmailed into praising Murdoch’s empire by the promise of free gadgetry? I agonised over the ethical implications for three whole seconds before emailing them back with directions to my flat and a comprehensive list of times I’d be in.

  So now I’m an early HD adopter, albeit one who hasn’t had to shell out for it. And let me tell you, the picture’s so sharp you could cut your face on it. And the colours are so vibrant, your eyes overheat trying to process them all. Watch a documentary on coral reefs and it’s just like being there (in two dimensions and with far less moisture).

  Yes, the picture is far better, obviously, but there’s not really anything to watch yet. You get a couple of documentary channels, Artsworld, a HD version of Sky One (which means 24 and Dead-wood in HD, so that’s good), a few movies, some football (boo), and a BBC ‘preview’ channel that loops HD footage from Bleak House and Jools Holland and mil-length repeats of Planet Earth (the world’s most expensive Screensaver). If I’d paid for it, I’d be disappointed. It’d be like spending a fortune on a flying car, only to discover that under current regulations you’re only allowed to fly it to Gwent and back. On Sundays.

  In fact the main impact this fancy HD set-up has had on my life is to make anything that isn’t broadcast in HD—i.e. almost everything—look hopelessly shit by comparison. At the weekend, I tuned into The X-Factor on manky old lo-fi ITV1, and it was like staring through the holes in a wet Hessian sack: blurry, muddy, and seemingly out of focus. Louis Walsh became a chuckling smudge, Simon Cowell an arrogant cloud. You couldn’t even see the contestants cry properly.

  Select one of the bargain-basement satellite channels dedicated to old repeats and things get even worse. The combination of old video and huge compression rates transforms them into incoherent, jumbled collections of fuzzy multicoloured blocks. You might as well squint into a bowl of Lego soup.

  In short, my freeloading glimpse of the crystal-clear future has spoiled everything. It’s like trying to eat a Fray Bentos pie in a tin the day after dining in a Gordon Ramsay restaurant (not that I’m planning to visit one—unless his PR company send me a free invite).

  Worse still, common sense dictates that by the time every channel’s taken the leap into HD wow vision, some other new technology will be waiting in the wings to annoy you: perhaps some new broadcast system that enables you to feel a cool breeze whenever Inspector Lynley winds his car window down. And a hot one when Keith Miller blows off.

  It’s trad TV’s attempt to fend off the internet, of course; just like the cinematic gimmicks of the 19505 (such as 3D) which tried to stave off the threat of TV Except there’s nothing to stave off, really-it’s obvious we’re heading for some kind of YouTube-structured future in which channels no longer exist and individual programmes get emailed directly into your mind’s eye. By robots.

  Robots owned by the wonderful Murdoch family and their beautiful, talented colleagues.

  Rubbin’ the hooded man

  [ u4 October 2006]

  Life expectancy was poor in medieval times. There were wars all over the place—not nice clean modern wars, with laser-targeted superbullets that dock points from your Nectar account instead of killing you but sweaty, close-combat wars in which boggle-eyed beardos with hardly any teeth battered you with clubs or hacked bits of limb off you with swords, leaving you thrashing about in the hay squirting blood from your stumps like a shrieking Bayeux tapestry bitch.

  If you managed to avoid that, lack of hygiene would get you. All the food was germ-flavoured, and the plates were discs of dried cow shit, hammered flat and baked in the sun. You get the picture. Things weren’t nice.

  Anyway, this is the world Robin Hood (BBC1) doesn’t even try to bring to life. Instead, the BBC’s new interpretation plays like a cross between a low-budget Pirates of the Caribbean and an Arctic Monkeys video. And clearly this has offended a sizeable section of the viewing public, who are flooding message boards with complaints that the show is ‘too modern’, and ‘too crap’, but mostly ‘too unlike the ITV version’.

  Well, I was never a fan of the ITV version; I couldn’t abide the mystical Herne the Hunter guff, thought the Clannad theme tune sounded like they were singing about ‘rubbin’…the hooded man’ (far too rude for Saturday teatime), and hated the stupid hair. (Bizarrely, many of the people citing ITV’s Michael Praed as the definitive Hood find the haircuts in the new version outrageous—as though Praed’s flowing Timotei ladylocks represented the last word in hard-edged realism.)

  Anyway: Hood 2006 is a curate’s egg. On the one hand, it’s heartening to see another ambitious family drama in the family teatime slot. On the other…well, it’s all over the place, isn’t it? At its worst, it’s like watching someone else playing an RPG full of lengthy cut scenes, in which you trek between three different locations ad nauseum. (Incidentally, the way the location names pop up accompanied by a twanging arrow sound effect is so video-gamey; I keep trying to press the start button to find out where I am on the map.)

  Like many video games, it looks like it’s been rush-released with too many rough edges intact. The script often sounds like a first draft in need of a polish, and some of the editing is downright bizarre, with dialogue bleeding too far into the next scene, and repeated shots of so-so stunts from a variety of angles and at different speeds, which always feels like desperate shorthand for Look! We can afford stunts! Please be impressed!

  Tonight’s episode just seems to end at a weird, arbitrary junction, as though a final scene was cut at the last minute.

  And Robin’s archery skills are so superhuman, there’s no sense of peril; when he gets into a tight spot, you know he’ll simply do something impossible with his arrows, then smugly waggle his eyebrows around like Robbie Williams. And he’s too young. The repeated references to him spending ‘five years away’ fighting in the Holy Land are supposed to imbue him with gravitas, but instead make you think he must’ve still been a foetus when he set out.

  The remaining cast largely consists of people who look distract-ingly like other people: Marian looks like Rachel Weisz, Much resembles a cross between Paul Giamatti and Leigh Francis, and Alan-a-Dale could easily play Alun Armstrong’s son (largely because he is).

  Despite the avalanche of flaws, I can’t bring myself to entirely hate Hood ‘06: Grand Theft Sherwood because (a) I suspect it’ll improve, and (b) it does have intermittent flashes of thumping good Saturday-night fun about it, even if they are few and far between.

  Robin should be able to properly kill people though. I know it’s pre-watershed, but the bloodless A-Team panto-fighting is ridiculous. This is Ye Olden Days! Life was brutal! And if we don’t see an arrow puncturing an eyeball before the end of the series, I’ll be furious.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In which words are replaced by faces, psychics are thrown in jail, and Barclays Bank wants to be your friend

  The best a man can get

  [30 October 2006]

  Damn the news, damn it to hell and back. It used to be so exciting: sieges and streakers and balaclavas and Fred West and all that. There were good guys and bad guys. It was cute. And quite funny. Not any more. Now no one’s in the right a
nd we’re all going to die. It’s so depressing, the only sane course is to ignore it completely until it goes away.

  That’s why we’re so hooked on distraction, which is available in more forms than you can shake a stick at (stick-shaking being just one example). TV provides distraction, as do sport, fashion and coloured lists of Chantelle’s top ten favourite cuddles.

  The internet is an incredible distraction: the equivalent of one of those Pavlovian training machines that dispenses pine nuts to lab rats when they nudge the correct lever—except instead of nuts, the internet dispenses porn, chit-chat, 9/11 conspiracy theories and YouTube footage of kittens falling over.

  The greatest form of distraction, however, has to be the pursuit of swanky material goods. Nothing staves off that gnawing sense of dread quite like a spending spree. Maybe I won’t get my legs blown off by terrorists if I buy enough aspirational bullshit? That’s the spirit.

  This being space year 2006, you no longer need to visit Harrods to experience the kind of opulent extravagance usually associated with billionaires and sultan’s daughters. A trip to Asda will suffice. Almost every product you can think of is available in a toffee-nosed aristocratic version, all the better to mesmerise yourself with.

  Fancy some crisps? Don’t scoff bog-standard Walkers; indulge in some hand-cooked balsamic and sea salt Kettle Chips instead. You’ll still end up fat as a whale, but at least you’ll have taken the posh route.

  Clothes a bit mucky? Forget ordinary washing powder. Use new ‘Crushed Silk and Jasmine’ Bold 2-in-i. That’s right: crushed silk and jasmine. Make sure your butler programmes the spin cycle correctly when he’s using it.

  Need a shave? Toss out your Bics and grab the Gillette Fusion, which single-handedly represents Consumer Product Event Horizon by combining ‘the comfort of five blades’ (on the front) with ‘the precision of one’ (on the back). The main cutting surface is about the size of a sheet of M; so large you can’t get it under your nose without shearing off your top lip, which is why you need the blade on the back—it’s the only bit you can enjoy a reasonable shave with.