2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  Ultimately, it was proof you can polish a turd. The finale consisted of a breakdance troupe, a faintly creepy Julie Andrews MiniPop (played by the girl from the ‘if you hit me at thirty, I’ll live’ ad), some juggling barmen, a man whose act consisted of a monkey waggling its arse, a foetus singing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’, and an opera singer with a face like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghost Busters reading a disappointing bank statement. Under normal circumstances, a line-up that wouldn’t fill a village hall; in the grip of collective madness, a nation-uniting clash of the titans.

  The astronomically smug and watery Piers Morgan (who—and this is a reference only three of you will ‘get’, but it’s true—looks precisely like a Chris Ware cartoon character) went on This Mom-ing to pipe a load of guff through his blowhole about how the Great British Public had rallied around the show like the World Cup or Wimbledon. Infuriatingly, he was right. They’ve already started trawling for next year’s contestants; expect ITV to expand the 2008 run to 2008 daily episodes. Plus a two-hour special showcasing all the contestants they had to eliminate for being on the sex offenders’ register: Monsters Got Talent.

  In official ratings parlance, ITV’s barnstorming end-of-the-pier show kicked the shit out of Big Brother (C4), which has now had so many housemates passing through it, it’s starting to resemble an over-designed airport lounge. I keep expecting to spot a duty-free Sunglass Hut in the background.

  Anyway, a fresh meat injection arrived in the form of four new dick-owners: Brian, an earnestly thick nineteen-year-old played by Grace Jones; Liam, a pudgy, ruddy-cheeked tree surgeon; Jonathan, a forty-nine-year-old millionaire media magnate who looks like he should be reading the news in a wizard’s hat for some mad reason, and Billi, a haircut from Middlesex. The latter has less personality than a cardboard ghost, but has at least put the wind up my least favourite housemate, the sanctimonious aftershave splash-post Ziggy, by having designs on Chanelle, Ziggy’s in-house squeeze, who appears to be having designs back.

  At the time of writing, one of my predictions from last week has just done the unlikely thing and come over all true, as Seany and Gerry ‘made Big Brother history’ by sharing an enthusiastic man-on-man snog. Something about Gerry has been bugging me for the last few weeks, and I think I’ve finally cracked it: if you ignore his hair and wispy goatee-beard-type-growth, he’s got exactly the same face as Gordon Ramsay.

  Speaking of look-alikes, casual channel-surfers could be forgiven for mistaking the first episode of season six of The Shield (Five) for an especially frantic episode of Ross Kemp on Gangs, since he and lead actor Michael Chiklis look eerily similar, although the arrival of Forest Whitaker should put paid to that delusion. Next to the solemn pace and meticulous attention to detail of greatest-show-on-television The Wire, The Shield feels like a hard-boiled Frank Miller cartoon, all banging doors and wise-ass dialogue, a hundred miles from reality, but it’s fearsomely addictive once you’re in. Like The Wire, despite arriving in big season-shaped chunks, it’s telling one long, winding tale. If you haven’t been on board from the start, you’re missing out- and annoyingly, the release of previous seasons on DVD here in the UK has fallen way behind the US pace. But sod it: order them from abroad. Or download them. Hours of thrilling goodness await, and it’s well worth catching up.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In which penises are measured, fashion and Facebook cause bewilderment, and the author is blackmailed into attending the Glastonbury Festival.

  On knife-in-the-eye shop signage

  [23 April 2007]

  I live in a town you may have heard of. It’s called London. In many ways, it’s a great place—excellent local amenities, a giant Ferris wheel, and more than a few famous faces (Toby Anstis lives here, as does that woman off Holby City—you know, the nursey one). But there is a downside, too. London—like many other places—has a cancer; an unwelcome phenomenon that has been gradually spreading over the past decade, and is now reaching saturation point. I am talking, of course, about modern laser-printed uPVC retail signage.

  Shop fronts have never been uglier. I’m not talking about the big chains here—they’ve spent millions designing their logos. Theirs look crisp and clean and occasionally even demure. I’ve got nothing against, say, Nando’s. Nando’s is awesome.

  No, I’m annoyed by the little guy—the pound shops, the cheapo grocers, the off-licences and the takeaways with their horrid, shrieking signs. Frankly, I couldn’t give a toss if Tesco bulldozed the lot of them and turned the entire nation into one huge supermarket. At least there’d be some typographic consistency.

  A few years ago, shopkeepers had three basic options: (1) paint the store front yourself; (2) hire a professional to paint it for you; (3) buy some metal or plastic lettering and screw it over the door. Now, there’s a fourth option: get a bunch of clueless, cut-price fuck-wipes to design a banner on a computer in six minutes flat, stretch it to fit and print it out using some hideous modern laser-jet device filled with fifteen thousand waterproof inks, each a virulent shade of sick.

  As a result, we live in a cluttered optical hell of carelessly stretched-and-squashed typefaces and colour schemes that clash so violently they give you vertigo. Stroll down the average high street and it’s like being assailed by gaudy pop-ups on the internet. It makes your eyes want to spin inward and puke down their own sockets.

  As if thoughtless font abuse isn’t enough, some signs even incorporate scanned photographs: a garish snap of sweating meat surrounded by a yellow Photoshop ‘haze’ effect, hovering over an electric blue background, flanked by the words KEBAB DUNGEON in bright red, foot-high Comic Sans crushed to 75 per cent its usual width. Jesus. Why not punch me in the face and have done with it?

  The overall effect is depressing and disorientating. One computer-assisted eyesore after another, jostling for position, kicking good taste in the nuts. Surely this is more than the human mind can process? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the local crime rate rises each time one of these poxy signs go up. It’s enough to put almost anyone in a knife-wielding frame of mind.

  And that’s not just idle speculation. Well, all right, it is. But there’s little doubt that environment affects mood. That’s why we tend to paint our bedroom walls soothing, neutral, off-white shades as opposed to frantic lime green with Day-Glo orange swastikas. When I walk the streets of the tiny Oxfordshire village in which I grew up, my mind feels clearer. I can concentrate in a way that simply isn’t possible in London, where my subconscious is too busy trying to filter out the billboards and the lettering and the POUNDLAND ANY ITEM £1 OR LESS.

  Laser-printed uPVC shop signs are an atrocity. A sanctioned act of vandalism. They should be outlawed or, at the very least, be put through some kind of approval process in which a panel of graphic designers inspects each proposed sign, rejecting those with squashed typography or obnoxious colour schemes.

  Something has got to be done because it’s only going to get worse. You know what’s coming: animated shop signs with moving ‘wallpaper’ backgrounds. Storefronts resembling god-awful home-pages from 1998. Row upon row of them. Visual bedlam wherever you turn. Two monuis of that and our cities are going to be overrun with screaming maniac gangs, hitherto law-abiding citizens driven insane without knowing why, like the jittering zombies from 28 Days Later.

  It’s your fault, shopkeepers. It’s your ugly font-abusing fault.

  Who are these people and what are they wearing?

  [30 April 2007]

  Who says Britons are apathetic? It’s all a question of priorities. We can hardly muster so much as a shrug as our leaders drag us toward Armageddon, but dangle something fashionable in front of us and we’ll gladly queue round the block and beat our own neighbours to death for a chance to momentarily brush against its hem. Last week, hardcore idiots across the nation stood in rows at dawn, desperate to get their hands on a cotton bag with ‘I’m not a plastic bag’ printed on it. Right now, a group of determined oafs is camping out
in preparation for tomorrow’s launch of the new Kate Moss clothing range at Topshop. If Grazia magazine printed an article declaring it fashionable to smack yourself in the forehead with a limited-edition ball-pein hammer designed exclusively by Coleen McLoughlin, a mob would form outside your local B&Q before the ink had dried on the page.

  It’s a mystery to me. If the whole point of fashion is to distinguish yourself from the herd, why queue up to be part of it? Am I missing something here? I suspect not. But then I don’t ‘get’ fashion. I once went out with a girl who was obsessed with dressing up; a real clothes nerd. While we were together, she developed a serious jeans habit. Each week, a new pair. She’d bring them home and show them to me, bubbling with excitement. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between one pair and the next, and I was staring pretty hard, in case there was a quiz at the end of the relationship. Doubtless a fellow jeans spod would’ve been thrilled by her purchases. To me, it was like trying to spot minute discrepancies between two marked playing cards. She virtually bankrupted herself buying items of clothing that looked identical to anyone other than an similarly obsessed expert. They were only jeans! Blue bloody trousers!

  As far as I can tell, fashion is nothing more than a handy visual system that gives people with no personality some palpable criteria to judge each other by. Anyone who regularly contemplates clothing for more than five minutes a week is wasting their life as surely as the most lethargic, do-nothing heroin addict imaginable. Yet despite this, interest in fashion seems to be spreading.

  Take men. Youngish men. Men in their late twenties and early thirties. What’s happened to them? They’ve had a collective makeover. Not so long ago they were content to slob around in vaguely ironic T-shirts. Suddenly they’ve lost nine stone. They wear trousers so thin you could mistake them for shoelaces. Cardigans and flat caps. Flat caps! Talk about trying far too hard to please. Every time I see some flat-capped little tit bobbing down the pavement towards me I have to fight the urge to rip that cloth disc off their head and toss it, Frisbee-style, way up onto the nearest roof. Just to see what their face does. They’d probably just stand there, blinking dumbly, like a robot awaiting instructions. These people are hopelessly lost.

  What exactly is the thought process that leads someone to buy a bloody cap anyway? Or any a-la-mode accoutrement, come to that? Is it motivated by fear? Do you see someone influential wearing something preposterous and find yourself irresistibly compelled to follow suit, like a cry-baby sheep? Or is there a secret fact-sheet being handed round—one that lists all the elements of the unofficial tosser’s uniform and commands you to buy them? Who’s issuing the orders here? And why does everyone seem so eager to obey?

  Youngish men have gone all wrong. But the younger ones are worse. They’ve got haircuts now. Quirky, angular, idiosyncratic haircuts; haircuts like elaborate designer lampshades; haircuts they’ve downloaded off the internet. Some of them wear eyeliner. Presumably they’re aiming somewhere between Russell Brand and Marc Bolan, but somehow end up resembling Muppet Baby incarnations of Danny the dealer from Withnail and I.

  Jesus Christ. That’s another popular look: Jesus Christ. I went to a gig the other day and saw at least eighteen Christs, none of them a day over twenty-five. At one point, three of them stood in a corner chatting to each other. I thought I’d stumbled across a religious triptych. God knows what they were talking about. Eyeliner tips, probably. Or parables.

  3i6

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for freedom of expression. I just don’t understand why people choose to flaunt their individuality by dressing alike. Maybe I’m just jealous. I’ve got less fashion sense than the average PC World sales assistant. I shop in the high street, and only then under duress. (Incidentally, is it just me, or would it be handy if clothes had ‘recommended age group’ labels, alongside the waist, chest, and leg measurements? It’d stop literally thousands of people from making fools of themselves each year.)

  I hate shopping for clothes so much, I wear things until they fall apart. Right now, the soles of my shoes have worn so thin I can stand on a penny and tell if it’s heads or tails. And I’ve only got the one pair, which means when they finally disintegrate I’m going to have to shamble into the nearest shoe shop looking like a tramp. I may not have dignity, but I’ve got my priorities right. And those caps wouldn’t suit me anyway. I’ve got a head like a loaf of wet bread.

  On a face on a book

  [7 May 2007]

  Modern life is hectic. So hectic you don’t have time to think, and instead have to rely on snap judgments to do your thinking for you. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about this in 2005. It was called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and became a bestseller when thousands bought it without thinking. I was one of them.

  It began as an entertaining treatise on why you should always trust your gut instincts. Mine told me this incredible book would change my life, so I read on. In the event, my gut was wrong. It was bullshit. The second half of the book argued that, hey, actually, you shouldn’t always trust your gut instincts. By the end I’d learned precisely nothing about ‘thinking without thinking’ except that in future I’d avoid making any impulse book-buying decisions. Particularly ones that benefit Malcolm Gladwell. Proof, if any were needed, that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

  It’s easier said than done. Book covers—like TV programme titles, magazine covers and newspaper headlines—are increasingly designed to draw in passers-by via any means necessary. Subtlety doesn’t get a look-in. Nor does common sense. I had first-hand experience of this several years ago when a book I’d written, a spoof version of the Innovations catalogue, was published. It was full of outrageous mock inventions, most of them electronic gadgets of some kind, apart from one: a ‘guilt-free’ Christmas turkey which lived its last days in the lap of luxury before being slaughtered (look, it seemed funny at the time). Anyway, the marketing department insisted said turkey should appear as the main image on the book’s front cover. Why? Because the book was coming out in the run-up to Christmas, and they figured that might help it sell. Never mind that it was the single most atypical item in the book, never mind that it made the front cover a confusing mess, and never mind that it instantly rendered the book redundant the moment Boxing Day arrived—some arrogant dunce had decreed the turkey might help sales, and that was that. At the time of writing, it’s ranked 239,952nd on the Amazon bestseller chart. Way to go, faceless marketing guy! You rock!

  Substantially higher up the sales list, currently at number 32, is a book that absolutely can be judged by its cover, largely because its cover features the words ‘Richard Littlejohn’. In fact, just for fun, let’s review it by its cover. That seems fair. So, the full title is Little-John’s Britain, which is spelled out in hideous red lettering with a thin white border, across two lines, spaced slightly too far apart, as though the designer were consciously emulating a cheap pizza delivery menu. It’s so ugly, it seems almost deliberate—as though they made this section of the cover as offensive and nasty as possible in a desperate last-minute bid to distract attention from the large photograph of Richard Littlejohn that hovers below it.

  A noble effort. But it doesn’t work. I can’t help noticing Little-John’s picture, even when my eyes are looking elsewhere, because his face smells—or at any rate, I think it does. I can smell it in my brain. Even when it’s just a photo. It smells like someone breaking wind in a pair of cheap nylon trousers while eating a Scotch egg in a hot car passing the Tilsworth Golf and Conference Centre on the As outside Dunstable. But worse.

  Fortunately, it’s not a facial close-up. Unfortunately, his whole body’s on there. Littlejohn is pictured standing astride the United Kingdom, like a colossus (or, more accurately, like Fred Talbot, the weatherman who used to do the forecasts on This Morning ). Surrounding him are three things presumably intended to sum up the very worst of’modern Britain’: a speed camera, a recycling bin, and the London Eye—a triumvirate so utterly despicab
le, Littlejohn can’t even muster the will to shake a fist in their direction. Instead he merely shrugs with exasperation: his arms are outstretched, palms up, and he stares down the lens, bemused, as though saying, ‘Cuh! Speed cameras, eh? It’s basic concern for human safety gone mad! Recycling bins? Typical! And if that bloody Ferris wheel doesn’t sum up Blair’s Britain, I don’t know what does. You couldn’t make it up!’

  Weirdly, they’ve chosen not to include any of Littlejohn’s other bugbears on the cover: there are no gays or asylum seekers here. Unless, perhaps, they’re crushed beneath Littlejohn’s feet. It’s hard to tell from the preview image on Amazon. I mean, I’d go into a bookshop and examine it in closer detail, but then I’d get Littlejohn on my hands, and my fingers would have that Scotch-egg-car-fart stink on them for the rest of the day.

  Speaking of Amazon, the site recommends Don’t You Know Who I Am?: Insider Diaries of Fame, Power and Naked Ambition, by Piers Morgan, as a ‘perfect partner’ to Littlejohn’s Britain— presumably on the basis that once you’ve desensitised yourself with Littlejohn, Piers Morgan’s going to be a doddle. On the cover, Morgan is standing on the wrong side of a velvet VIP rope, pulling a strikingly similar pose to Littlejohn—arms outstretched, palms up, like he’s measuring an imaginary fish or grossly overestimating the size of his penis. Clearly, this is a trend. It’s the stance du jour, the latest dance craze sweeping the nation.

  Anyway: covers. You can’t judge a book by them. But you can point at them and laugh.

  On Facebook

  [21 May 2007]

  IWo’s company. Three’s a crowd. And whoever they are, I don’t trust them. Yes, in the ever expanding list of things I don’t ‘get’—fashion, Apple Macs, David Cameron, etc—the most crippling entry has to be people. I don’t get people. What’s their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They’re awful.