The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Consider that a protracted warning about Scene Stealers, a new teenage ‘life swap’ show which as of this nanosecond forms part of the BBC’s yoof strand Switch. Essentially an amiable take on the Faking It format (or a shameless rip-off, depending on whether you own the rights to it or not), Scene Stealers is all about tribes. Teenage tribes.

  Of course being part of a tribe is easier when you’re young, although some types age quicker than others. Stay slim and you can convincingly pull off the Camden indie kid look into your early 30s. Goths spoil sooner. They start to look a bit tatty around the age of 25. Still, no matter which tribe you’ve chosen, there comes a point where you’ve just got to admit defeat. I dimly recall seeing men in their 50s still walking around dressed as teddy boys in the late-70s and early-80s. Even as a child I knew it was heartbreaking.

  So if you must experiment with tribery, the full bloom of youth is the only sensible time to do it. This week’s Scene Stealers takes two slightly posh kids and tries to transform them into south London rappers. Just to make things that bit more difficult, both kids are firm tribe members already. The first, Nikita, is a ‘plastic’. I’m pretty certain they’ve made this ‘tribe’ up especially for the programme: basically ‘plastics’ dress and act like they’re in Girls Aloud. The other is Josh, who looks like Howard Jones and describes himself as ‘an alternative 80s punk’. He’s got a synth in his bedroom and knows the chords to Gary Numan’s cars.

  Josh and Nikita are whisked to London to meet their mentors – two aspiring rappers called Fret-Deezy and Rampz, who have 48 hours to turn them into convincing Channel U types who spit rhymes and rep their endz and all dat. It’d be more interesting to see Fret-Deezy and co become punks, but that’s doubtless in store for week two.

  In the meantime, this episode inevitably builds to a climax where Josh and Nikita have to rap in front of a panel of hip-hop ‘experts’. Nikita’s not bad. Josh grew up on a farm. How good do you think he’s going to be?

  No successful rapper has ever hailed from a farm. It’s one of the immutable laws of creation. During his gruesome rap, you’ll pray for the DFS ad to appear, just for some light relief. But it won’t, because this is the BBC. You’re stuck watching him flounder.

  Overall: harmless fun, provided you’re 19 or under. Any older and it’ll make you feel like a wheezing cadaver. And that’s not a tribe, that’s your future, that is.

  Vice President MILF [13 September 2008]

  Pssst. You know the American election, yeah? That unfolding spectacle across the Atlantic; the one you’ve been a bit worried about of late? Well, the good news is you can stop fretting. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t real.

  But don’t take my word for it. I’m a cretin. Ask an egghead channel. As part of this week’s US election mini-season, President Hollywood takes a squint at the curious co-dependent relationship between fictional and real US presidents. Each has informed and influenced the other, it seems: Hollywood and the entertainment industry swap positions as regularly as enthusiastic rutters in an even-handed one-night-stand. One minute Kennedy’s giving the world of fiction a blowjob by providing a role model for noble decency that survives to this day, and the next, TV’s slurping straight back, preparing the ground for Obama courtesy of The West Wing’s Matt Santos.

  As a result, the lines between fiction and reality are almost hopelessly blurred. And probably a bit sticky. Voters would dearly love to elect some kind of mythic ‘innocent outsider’, the archetype for which was defined way back in 1939 by Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. That’s why both Obama and McCain attempt to portray themselves as warm-hearted agents of change.

  Bush pulled the same trick, of course, although his down-home aw-shucks act rings fairly hollow these days, what with the war and the waterboarding and all that. Nixon’s ignoble spell in the White House inspired a string of conspiracy thrillers and slippery, sinister commanders-in-chief. But Nixon impersonations are growing stale. If nothing else, Bush’s legacy should at least provide an exciting new template for movie presidents: the war-mongering pseudo-rube.

  Anyway, President Hollywood itself is a pretty interesting programme with one glaring flaw: it was made before anyone knew Sarah Palin existed. If, as the show suggests, every election campaign somehow resembles a movie plot, this was the moment a rough’n’ready Dolly Parton/Erin Brockovich character stepped in to dispense a little butt-kickin’ straight talk on behalf of everywoman. Or at least that’s how Team McCain is spinning it. As a way of distracting everyone from the perceived weaknesses of friendly-but-doddery McCain himself, it appears to have worked, and worked well.

  But their inspiration seems to have been drawn not from Hollywood at all, but the world of reality TV. The structure is markedly similar. Palin arrived as a complete unknown, which meant the news media had to spend hours explaining who she was in little VT packages; bung some gaudy pop and a few lens flare effects on top and you could’ve been watching a contestant biog on The X Factor. It helps that she’s hot. Hot for a politician, that is. In the street she’s a standard Milf. Stand her next to 500-year-old John McCain and she’s a Barely Legal covergirl. While half the electorate argue about her hardline stance on abortion, the other half is debating which hole they’d do her in first. Not out loud, you understand, but in their heads. Or online.

  Furthermore, as a moose-hunting former beauty queen, Palin is a kooky character – precisely the sort of person a producer would home in on at the auditions like a dog sniffing meat. Obama’s a stock character too, of course – the ‘likable try-hard’ – but although he ticks precisely the same reality boxes as Palin (unknown, good looking, etc), he’s not as obviously kooky. Given a choice between ‘kooky’ and ‘able’ in a talent contest, reality viewers reward ‘kooky’ every time. And why shouldn’t they? They’re watching a TV show, not picking the next government.

  Except they are in this case, obviously. It just doesn’t feel that way. The unreal whiff of reality TV has overwhelmed the senses, and now, if some booming voice-of-God suddenly announced the whole thing would be decided in a live election day sing-off, none could raise an eyebrow in wholly honest surprise.

  Another prick in the wall [20 September 2008]

  I’ve seen some dumb things in my time. Take Die Hard 4.0. That’s astronomically dumb; like being smacked in the face with a mallet made of super-compressed dumb.

  Merely watching it made me feel like a simpleton reading a Ladybird book on a dodgem. Then there’s Bad Boys 2, which I didn’t so much ‘watch’ as ‘catch glimpses of’ – it was showing on a plane while I kept intermittently nodding off: literally every time I opened my eyes a car was corkscrewing through the air in slow motion, surrounded by explosions, and I’d go back to sleep. It was dumb enough to sedate me.

  But these are Hollywood epics. It took millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of gruelling labour to create such monuments of transcendent stupidity, such overwhelming pyramids of thick. The BBC, brilliantly, has managed to bring us something equally (and shamelessly) dumb at a fraction of the cost. You’d glow with national pride, if only they hadn’t done it by merely adapting a Japanese format.

  I speak, dear reader, of Hole in the Wall, which is by far the stupidest gameshow I have ever seen. Just to be clear: in this context, ‘stupid’ isn’t necessarily an insult. It’s so openly, obviously and knowingly stupid, the whole thing is virtually immune to criticism. It’s the television equivalent of a gurgling jester repeatedly honking a horn.

  It’s been described as ‘human Tetris’, which it is. Each week, two teams of celebrity contestants go head to head. One by one, the players stand on a pad in front of a pool while a wall moves slowly toward them, ready to shovel them into the water. The wall has a hole in it. A person-shaped hole. The sort of hole Wile E. Coyote would leave in the side of a cliff when blasted through it by a cannon. The contestant has to contort themselves into the right position, like a key going through a lock, so the wall can pass them by without knoc
king them into the drink.

  Just to make things stupider, the contestants are required to wear figure-hugging silver Lycra jumpsuits designed to be as humiliating as possible. One of the Hairy Bikers takes part this week; scarcely a moment goes by without someone cracking a joke about how big and wobbly he looks. All of them sport visibly crushed goolies or spectacular cameltoes.

  If you’ve ever wanted to see former Blue Peter presenter Zoe Salmon lying on her back and hoisting her hips in the air, here’s your chance – although be warned: in a bid to ward off potential masturbators, Anton Du Beke’s standing in the background wearing a costume so tight his nuts are spread halfway across his pelvis, as though they’ve been buttered into position with an enormous pallet knife.

  Anyway, that’s it. The first time you see the wall appearing and get a sense of how it works, I guarantee you’ll laugh out loud. Then it happens again. And again. And again. And then you realise there’s little or no variation: that’s all that happens, for the full halfhour. You’re watching celebrities being knocked into a pool, over and over, while the audience shrieks and applauds, and it all starts to resemble not just a dumb gameshow, but an almost nightmarishly dumb gameshow, the sort of gameshow you’d find in a dystopian science fiction film about an insane futuristic society. And you have to hold your head to quell the giddiness.

  That’s how dumb it is.

  But really, so what? We’ve been here before. It’s basically a Nintendo version of It’s a Knockout. And, what’s more, once you factor in the knowledge that the contestants are competing for charity, it looks less like the death of civilisation and more like a daft game at a village fete, writ large.

  This is TV blowing off and giggling for 30 unrelenting minutes.

  My only complaint is the variety of contestants: before the end of the series here’s hoping that we’ll get to see Simon Schama, Brian Sewell and Prince Philip adopting the position. And the Lycra.

  The lost boy [15 November 2008]

  How many more series, do you reckon, before The X Factor ditches this whole ‘singing’ thing completely and just concentrates on the storylines? I ask in the wake of the shock decision last week to punt Laura White off the stage, which – according to a bunch of squeaking voices in the tabloids – was the most unexpected thing to happen on live television since 9/11, and only marginally less upsetting. Knockerbrains. They protest too much. It wasn’t that big a surprise. It wasn’t like a hatch suddenly opened in the middle of her forehead and a mouse rode out on a motorbike. The public merely exercised its right to vote for performers it felt sorry for and, unfortunately for Laura White, the same tabloids had sealed her fate by claiming she was seeing an ‘X Factor executive’ and banging on and on about the age difference between them.

  Incidentally, I’ve only just noticed I’m saying ‘Laura White’ instead of simply ‘Laura’. They’ve started using the contestants’ surnames this year, presumably because they’re in danger of running out of unique forenames. They must’ve had 28 Lauras by now, surely?

  Actually, I’ve just looked it up and they haven’t. So why they’ve done it remains a mystery. Still, at least it means we get to enjoy Eoghan’s preposterous moniker in full. It’s Eoghan Quigg. Eoghan Quigg. That’s not a name, that’s a Countdown Conundrum. It looks like what happens when you hastily type a URL with your fingers over the wrong keys. If they still allowed text voting, he’d have been out weeks ago.

  Or maybe not. Because the moment Eoghan bounds on stage, he triggers a dormant maternal instinct in millions of grandmas up and down the nation, enough to overcome any spelling barrier. Last week an elderly neighbour aahhed herself to death halfway through his performance of ‘Anytime You Need a Friend’. Because Eoghan’s got a baby face. And I mean that literally, as in someone’s grafted a baby’s face on to the front of his head. Tiny little eyes and a ruby-red mouth. He’s like a cross between the Test Card clown and a crayon portrait of Jamie Oliver. Weird. Eerie. Like the spectral figure of an infant chimney sweep that suddenly appears in an upstairs window, gazing sadly at your back as you walk the grounds of a remote country mansion on a silent Christmas afternoon; alerted by an indefinable chill, you turn and, for the briefest moment, his wet, sorry eyes meet yours … and then he’s gone.

  That’s Eoghan, the ghost of X Factor present. Even if he gets voted out, I’m frightened I’ll still spot him intermittently in the dead of night, popping up on screen during old black-and-white films, pleading through the glass like a kitten in a microwave. Swear to God, if he’s not gone by New Year’s Eve I’m having my television exorcised by a priest.

  Daniel Evans is this year’s comedy entry, because he looks like Ricky Gervais and injects 400 tonnes of cheese into every word he sings. Simon and Louis are rude to his face every week, which is a bit rich since what he’s doing sums up The X Factor as a whole better than 200 hours of the histrionic wibbly-wobbly showboating most of the other contestants offer. He’s tacky and he sounds insincere. So what? The only difference between him and the average X Factor boot-camp joinee is volume. He can’t belt it out like the others can. Surely that’s a bonus in this case? At least he’s not a fucking ghost.

  Anyway, either Alexandra or Diana (assuming she recovers) should win. The former because she’s got the best voice, the latter because she’s got the most interesting voice: sometimes she lets out curious little peeps and whistles when she sings, as though she’s accompanied by a baby bird randomly blowing air across the top of an empty milk bottle. Either that or there’s something seriously wrong with my television. We’ll know for sure when the priest gets here.

  OK, Robert … [22 November 2008]

  Must be nearly Christmas: I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! is back. How many times have we heard that wah-wah calypso atrocity of a theme tune now, looping as a music bed while Ant and Dec read out the voting details? They’ve added an extra little saxophone bit to it this year, which, as it turned out, provided just enough novelty to distract me from the noose I’d started tying. A rare humanitarian gesture from ITV there.

  I’m writing this on Tuesday morning. So far, Brian Paddick’s got his bum out and that’s about it. I don’t recall previous series being this light on incident, even at this early stage. They need more drink.

  We want the Page Three girl to flip out and start knocking pots over. We want Esther in a fist fight. We want Kilroy-Silk to drop his guard and say something so offensively terrible he has to live in the jungle for ever rather than risk the flight home.

  Still, what with reality show twists being what they are, let’s assume at least four of the celebrities will have killed and eaten each other by the time you read this, and another four will have been helicoptered in to take their place. I’m guessing Georgina Baillie, Ian Brown, Martin Daniels, and the plastinated body of Princess Margaret, on wheels.

  I get £10 per correct answer, payable by YOU. There’ll be a knock at the door in the next few minutes. That’s me. Collecting. Get your wallet.

  Aside from Kilroy, the rest of the camp is pretty nondescript. Carly Zucker freaks me out because her name sounds like a baby trying to say my name. Either Martina Navratilova or Joe Swash will win; the former because she’s strong-willed and funny, and the latter because he’s dopey and chuckly and looks like a half grown-up version of the sort of grinning freckled ginger boy you’d see painted on the front of a packet of cake mix circa 1978. He’s upholding what’s become a grand tradition for ex-Albert Square residents: I’m a Celebrity is now the official decompression chamber for anyone leaving EastEnders. There’s probably a door somewhere round the back of the Queen Vic that magically deposits them in the jungle.

  Being an emetophobe, I found the first of the signature ‘eating’ tasks difficult to watch, thanks to Swash’s wussy habit of violently retching each time he popped another insect in his mouth. It sounded like his stomach was repeatedly yanking his throat in the belief it was some kind of escape rope, and frankly it was uncalled for.

/>   The dishes served up were nowhere near as disgusting as the kangaroo anus chewed on by Matt Willis a few years ago. They still haven’t topped that, and on current form they’re unlikely to either. The tasks badly need an overhaul. They’re getting too complex and samey. Testicle-eating, ravine-crossing, swamp-dunking … we’ve seen it all before.

  What’s required is a fresh blast of brutal simplicity. Here are some cheap and effective Bushtucker Trials they could do tomorrow, offered free of charge in the hope that Robert Kilroy-Silk has to tackle them on live television:

  1. OK Robert, you have four minutes to jerk off five of our unit drivers. As you can see, they’re wearing blindfolds and earplugs; they think you’re Esther Rantzen. Try to imagine the sort of technique she’d apply, and mimic that.

  2. OK Robert, you have 30 seconds to blind this kangaroo with a tent peg.

  3. OK Robert, here’s a tab of breakdown-strength LSD. Put it on your tongue, and step into this cave full of glow-in-the-dark dolls’ heads. You’ve got six hours to find the one that looks like it’s crying.

  4. OK Robert, here’s a loaf of bread. You’ve got 10 minutes to stick the whole thing up your backside. Tear it, moisten it, roll it – whatever helps. But the entire loaf has to go or it’s no stars for the camp.

  Any of those would be a TV moment to cherish. Write them down, ITV. WRITE THEM DOWN.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In which deadly marketing strategies are brainstormed, conspiracy theorists grow upset for the 85th time, and Britney Spears is depicted naked