2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  There’s also a battery-operated ‘Power Handle’ option that makes the whole thing buzz like a wasp in an envelope—not to help you shave, but to offer yet more fleeting distraction from the unremitting misery of life.

  The Fusion Mk2, out next year, features 190 blades, a aoGB hard drive, a pine nut dispenser and a synthesised voice telling you everything’s OK, even though the mere existence of such a razor proves otherwise. I’ve pre-ordered mine already.

  The bank that likes to say any old shit

  [6 November 2006]

  So the other day I’m using an ATM, and while I’m tapping in my PIN number, trying to perform an obfuscating contemporary dance with my fingers so it looks like I’m typing different numbers to the ones I’m actually using, my eyes momentarily alight on the top of the cashpoint and I notice it isn’t a cashpoint at all. Not officially, anyway.

  It’s been renamed The Hole in the Wall. Right there on the machine itself. Barclays has taken the unofficial, slang name for the ATM and legitimised it. It is co-opting the language of the people. It is trying to pretend it is ‘one of us’. It can piss off.

  It gets worse. Next to the door, there’s a sign reading ‘Through these doors walk the nicest people in the world’—which strikes you as monumentally nauseating, until you realise it’s a little gag: beneath, in smaller lettering, it says something along the lines of ‘…as voted by their mums’. Tee hee, Barclays! Tee hee!

  When I get home, I do a bit of Googling and discover this japery has been going on for a while; I just hadn’t noticed until now. Apparently, it’s all part of a rebranding exercise.

  Barclays felt it was perceived as being too stuffy, too formal, so it decided to replace traditional banking jargon with chummy, colloquial language. The ATM became The Hole in the Wall, the customer-service desk has a sign saying Can I Help? over it, and the Bureau de Change has been rechristened Travel Money.

  Why leave it at that? If you’re hell-bent on making your bank look and sound like a simpleton, a desk labelled Travel Money is still a bit too formal. Why not call it Oooh! Look at the Funny Foreign Banknotes! instead? And accompany it with a doodle of a French onion-seller riding a bike, with a little black beret on his head and a baguette up his arse and a speech bubble saying, ‘Zut Alors! Here is where you gettez les Francs!’

  Actually, why still call yourself a bank at all? ‘Bank’ sounds boring. Call yourself ‘Barclays Money Circus’ instead.

  Don’t know about you, but I feel like vomiting myself inside out whenever big businesses try to cute themselves up this way—all lower-case brand names and twee little jokes and overuse of the words ‘you’ and ‘my’ and ‘we’ and ‘us’ as though we’re a bunch of cuddly-wuddly pals and hey, we’re all in this crazy world together, so let’s have some fun with it, right guys?

  It’s the modern equivalent of someone who uses multiple exclamation marks to denote how ZANY!!!!! they are. It’s desperate. Anyway, one solution is to come up with new colloquial terminology they can’t co-opt. Sod The Hole in the Wall. They’ve absorbed that one. Let’s start calling ATMs Coinshitters instead. See how long it takes Barclays to start using that. My guess is quite a while.

  World War II: the domestic version

  [20 November 2006]

  Video games are great. Vibrant, addictive and continually evolving, they beat TV hands-down on almost every count. Video games don’t pause for an ad break every 15 minutes. There has never been a video game hosted by Justin Lee Collins. You can’t press a button to make Phil Mitchell jump over a turtle and land on a cloud (unless you’ve recently ingested a load of military-grade hallucinogens, in which case you can also make him climb inside his own face and start whistling colours).

  Yes, games are great. Trouble is, they’ve become so sophisticated, some are no longer content to provide simple fun, and instead aim to immerse you in a world of their own devising—and not always in a good way.

  Earlier this year I played a game called Condemned, in which you had to trudge around a dingy underworld desperately fighting off psychotic tramps using virtually anything that came to hand: planks, crowbars, shovels, you name it. Between scuffles, you had to collect dead birds and bits of old tin. I soon gave up, not because the game was rubbish, but because I was too depressed to continue.

  And now there’s Call of Duty 3, a first-person shooter which takes the mournful contemplation and harrowing violence of Saving Private Ryan and applies it to a video game. ‘Brings you closer than ever to the fury of combat,’ screams the back cover, and it isn’t bloody kidding. Previously, the closest I’ve ever been to the fury of combat is wrestling with a tough-to-open ketchup sachet in a motorway service station. Now I’ve got the Second World War in my living room.

  Press ‘Start’ and you’re plunged headlong into a bedlam of gunfire and screaming, replicated in HD visuals and 5.1 surround-sound. You’re firing wildly in the vague direction of Nazis, out of your mind with terror, while battle explodes all around you. It’s enough to make Donald Rumsfeld as stiff as a flagpole.

  For extra immersion, the game simulates blurred vision and tinnitus whenever a blast goes off at close range. When you’re injured, the controller vibrates in your hand, imitating a faltering heartbeat. And when you inevitably drop dead, the screen pretentiously displays a sombre quote about war, such as ‘All wars are fought for money—Socrates’, presumably because a simple ‘Game Over’ might appear somehow disrespectful, what with the Second World War being a real event that killed millions and all that.

  But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it should be banned or put on a high shelf where humankind can’t reach it. I’m saying it’s a good thing. Because eventually I realised the experience of playing it was so relentlessly horrible, I’d rather go and do the washing up, just for some harmless escapism.

  That proved so relaxing, I wiped the oven clean too. Later I might do some paperwork I’ve been putting off. The war was too real for my liking. I’m a deserter now, and real life is paradise. Hooray for pixels.

  If I didn’t do it

  [27 November 2006]

  This week, I was originally going to write about If I Did It, OJ Simp-son’s notorious hypothetical ‘confession’ to the hideous murders he definitely didn’t commit with a knife that wasn’t his in a jealous rage he never experienced. Then my editor pointed out that since the OJ story had already been covered in exhaustive detail elsewhere in the paper, for days, the publication of yet another article on the matter might just smack of overkill—fitting, perhaps, given the subject at hand, but tiresome for anyone who had already had their fill of the story.

  So I reluctantly agreed not to write about it. And I haven’t.

  But if I had (which I haven’t), I’d have started by asking whether OJ (who is innocent) was the best choice of narrator in the first place. After all, once you remove the murders from his CV (murders which shouldn’t be on there in the first place, since he had nothing to do with them), he’s kind of boring.

  If you must get a famous person to explain how they’d have carried out a murder they didn’t commit, cast someone more surprising, someone less likely. I’d prefer to hear, say, Norman Wisdom speculating about how he’d have done it. Chances are he’d have made a hilarious bungling mess of things—accidentally ripping his trousers as he struggled to pull on that undersized glove, tumbling over a hedge on his way to the getaway car. It’d be a scream.

  Come to think of it, this could form the basis of a great Christmas novelty book—a soo-page compilation in which celebrities describe precisely how they’d have committed various appalling crimes throughout history, in blistering first-person detail.

  Shriek! as Tim Henman explains how he would have stalked London’s East End in the late nineteenth century, killing prostitutes. ‘I reckon I acted alone,’ he writes. ‘I’d possibly had some kind of surgical training and perhaps heard voices in my head urging me to kill.’

  Gasp! as Lorraine Kelly recalls the chilling moment
she stood in the Texas School Book Depository watching John F. Kennedy through her rifle sights. ‘As my finger tightened on the trigger,’ she explains, ‘I’d definitely have wished I was back on the sofa at GMTV introducing an item on rollerblading, or sandwiches, or shuttlecocks…anything really, instead of standing there, preparing to assassinate the world’s most powerful man.’

  Get confused! as Kelly Osbourne imagines how Tony Blair might have single-handedly carried out the Sharpeville massacre—in a series of crayon illustrations by Pete Doherty.

  If any celebrities are reading this now, email me your confessions and we’ll have it in the shops by Christmas. All proceeds go to charity. Or rather they would, if you’d read this request and I’d written it—which you haven’t and I didn’t.

  When it comes to psychics, my stance is hardcore: they must die alone in windowless cells

  [4 December 2006]

  If I walked into a single mother’s house and said I could read her baby’s mind, then started shouting four-letter words, claiming I was simply voicing her offspring’s thoughts, I would expect to be arrested the moment I stepped outside.

  And if, during my ‘psychic reading’, I also speculated about the mother’s sex life, and a potentially abusive relationship with a former boyfriend, claiming her toddler was concerned about ‘men who want to touch Mum’s privates’, and I went on and on in this vein until the mother burst into tears, there in the living room, in front of her child, I’d expect to be arrested, sectioned, and beaten in the back of the van.

  And if I allowed a TV crew to broadcast what I was doing, I’d expect to be attacked by a mob, who’d pull me apart and kick my remains around the street, pausing only to spit on any bits of my face that got stuck to their shoes.

  But no. In fact the outcry would be muted at best and Ofcom would turn a blind eye—as it did last week, while clearing Channel s’s unbelievably disgusting Baby Mind Reader of any wrongdoing.

  I’ve never fully understood the public’s docile acceptance of psychics, or why, when it comes to their supposed abilities, the burden of proof is assumed to lie with the sceptic, as opposed to the sort of shrieking idiot who claims to be able to contact the spirit world (or in Derek Ogilvie’s case, communicate telepathically with kids too young to talk).

  I’m quite hardcore on this. I think every psychic and medium in this country belongs in prison. Even the ones demented enough to believe in what they’re doing. In fact, especially them. Give them windowless cells and make them crap in buckets. They can spend the rest of their days sewing mailbags in the dark.

  The audiences that psychics prey on are equally infuriating, albeit less deserving of contempt. They’re just disappointing, like a friend who’s let you down. Often, they’re simply grieving and desperate.

  I mean, if you want to believe in psychics, fine. You’re a dangerous idiot and I wouldn’t trust you to operate a spoon without putting an eye out…but fine. Your choice. Delude yourself silly. Your world is probably more fun than the real one. There’s no death, just an afterlife filled with magic spirits who like to communicate with eerie, ugly, otherwise-unemployable bottom-of-the-barrel ‘showmen’ back on Earth.

  But don’t accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a ‘closed mind’ or being ‘blind to possibilities’. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.

  (If you want to feel your eyes pop rudely open, swot up on the ‘cold reading’ techniques fake psychics use—a combination of guesswork and sly conversational tics which give the impression that the ‘psychic’ is magically receiving accurate information from the ether. A fantastic (albeit pricey) step-by-step guide is available from ianrowland.com.

  Anyway, back to my psychic prison fantasies. The problem with trying to jail all the mediums in Britain is they’d see it coming and (a) escape overseas to somewhere even more gullible, like Narnia, before you’d passed the legislation, or (b) call on their ghostly friends in the spirit world to whisk them from harm’s reach.

  Except they couldn’t because ghosts—unlike scumbags and conmen—don’t exist. Pity. But that’s the real world for you. Often disappointing. But real. At least it’s always real.

  Faces not words

  [8 January 2007]

  I read a magazine yesterday and suddenly truly understood in my bones that human civilisation will die screaming in our lifetime.

  It happened on the toilet. I was reading a copy of the free magazine Sky send to all their subscribers. Visually inhaling crap at one end, rectally exhaling it at the other; my corporeal self a mere conduit for the elemental crapforce that binds the universe together. I have all the spirituality of a doorframe. This is as close as I get to a religious experience.

  Anyway. The Sky magazine is one of those /fear-a-like graphical holocausts where every millimetre of the page is plastered with rowdy colours and exclamation marks that crane their necks to squeal at you. I say I was ‘reading’ it, but in reality you don’t ‘read’ magazines like that. There is too much visual noise, so instead you simply ‘look at’ them, having first disengaged your temporal lobe so you don’t feel like you are being stabbed in the mind by an over-zealous Christmas lighting display. Even though that is precisely what is happening.

  And I was dumbly gazing at the bit that tells you which films are coming up on the movie channels, when I noticed that at the bottom of each synopsis sat a group of tiny faces. Celebrity faces. Nestling at the end of the paragraph, like part of the typography, as though the editors had done some research and discovered their readers had devolved to the point where their brains can no longer parse text unless it is broken up with miniature photos of their famous imaginary friends grinning back at them. I slapped myself awake and tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

  Slowly it dawned on me: this was a rating system. I flipped back a few pages, and sure enough, there was the key: a brightly-coloured box full of little celebrity faces, accompanied by a brief description of what they stood for. ‘It’s fast, easy, and practical,’ lied the subhead. This is what each face meant:

  Brad Pitt—‘Eye Candy’

  Peter Kay—‘Laugh Out Loud’

  Michael Jackson—‘Thriller’

  Sarah Jessica Parker—‘Get the Girls Round’

  Christopher Lee—‘Scary’

  Victoria Beckham—‘Star Spotting’

  Chico—‘Guilty Pleasure’

  Ant and Dec—‘Family Fun’

  Vicky Pollard—‘Real-Life Shocker’

  Sure, it would insult the intelligence of a cod. Under this system, Schindler’s List = Vicky Pollard.

  But I knew it was worse than that. I just didn’t know why, not yet. So I looked at it again. Somewhere in my head, a camel’s back splintered beneath a straw. And I understood: this is madness. Genuinely: this is madness. Concepts replaced by faces. Grinning faces. It is not evidence of’dumbing down’. It is the disjointed thought process of madness. That this is even vaguely acceptable is the most dizzying madness of all.

  I wanted to run into the street, without even pausing to wipe, and hurl myself, boggle-eyed, at passers-by, flapping the magazine around, screaming: ‘HELP! WE’VE LOST OUR MINDS! I HAVE PROOF! I HAVE PROOF.’

  But I didn’t. I stayed put; pooing and afraid.

  And I thought: Our leaders lie, and we know they have lied, and there is war in our name, and the world kicks and boils itself to death and we do nothing but stare into the tiny grinning faces of people we don’t even know; faces that are, apparently, more ‘fast, easy and practical’ than language itself. I give us six years, tops.

  On recognition

  [15 January 2007]

  There are four problems with having a byline photograph hovering over the top of a column, like the one you can see up there on the right (unless you’re reading this online or between the covers of a book, in which case you’re spared the misery).

 
Problem one: the average writer has a face like a bloodhound’s funeral. Problem two: in most byline shots, the writer is making eye contact with you, which automatically makes the column itself faindy unnerving to read, because you’re dimly aware someone’s staring at you—someone who wrote it, and is probably scanning your face for clues as to what you make of it, even though logically you know that can’t be true, because all they are is a photo and…Hang on—what was it they were writing about again? Oh, forget it.

  Problem three is that, as a writer, you’re stuck with whatever expression your face happened to be pulling when the photo was taken. That’s the face you’re making as you say all this stuff, no matter what ‘all this stuff’ happens to be. If you smile, you smile for ever. From now on, every word you write will be interpreted in the context of you enjoying a great big smile, so if you write about the twentieth anniversary of die Zeebrugge ferry disaster in which 187 people died, it’ll look as though you’re pretty chuffed about the whole thing and don’t care who knows it.

  Problem four is that you’re no longer anonymous, so if you call Geoff Capes an idiot and Geoff Capes reads it, and then two days later you bump into Geoff Capes in the street, there’s a good chance Geoff Capes will hit you, especially if, thanks to the byline photo, he thinks you were smiling while you slagged him off. Since Geoff Capes has fists the size of microwave ovens, this is bad news (or it would be, if he was an idiot, which I’m certain he isn’t—although I hear Richard Litdejohn believes otherwise).

  For years I was without a byline photo, and had no desire to get one, because I knew they were intrinsically wrong. But I never fully appreciated the luxury of anonymity until it was taken away from me. Thanks to a combination of the byline photo and a low-budget BBC4 show during which my face repeatedly pops up onscreen, I now get recognised about once a week. In terms of celebrity, that puts me 40,000 rungs below the bloke in the elephant.co.uk commercial, but nevertheless it’s weird.