Dawn of the Dumb (2 page)

I could go on about
Watchdog
till the cows start texting to say they’re on their way home—I could discuss the confused researchers milling about in the background trying to look busy, or the tortuously contrived links in Paul Heiney’s VT reports—but really, the most important thing is to draw your attention to Nicky Campbell’s hilarious weekly performance, which I urge you to tune in and savour for yourselves. No, really, it’s funny.

Just don’t stare into his eyes for too long, or God knows what might happen.

Cannibal Holocaust

[27 November 2004]

O
h, good Lord! It’s unbelievable. It’s horrible. I can’t understand the reason for such cruelty!’

That’s a quote from
Cannibal Holocaust
(1980), the most sickening and notorious video nasty ever made. I haven’t checked the yuletide schedule yet, but the chances ITV are showing it at four o’clock on Christmas Day are pretty slim, to be honest.

I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!
(ITV1), on the other hand—that’s hearty primetime fare. Yet the similarities between this and
Cannibal Holocaust are
striking. In each, a group of naive media types ventures into the jungle in an attempt to raise their profiles, then rapidly descend into lunacy and infighting. Both groups must eat disgusting things to survive, both get tortured for entertainment, and both are ultimately gobbled up and flushed away.
Cannibal Holocaust
doesn’t cut away to a rubbish First Choice holidays blipvert every 19 seconds, but apart from that, they’re basically identical.

Anyway, who’s in the cast?
Of I’m a Celebrity
, that is. Well?

First up, former All Saint Natalie Appleton, who spent the first 48 hours snivelling and squealing. This is Natalie’s fourth stab at fame. First there was All Saints, then a role in a Dave Stewart movie (I’ve looked it up on the internet: apparently she played a pair of naked tits) and then, in 2003, a musical comeback successful enough to put her where she is today—in the outback, wiping her arse with leaves. Have you seen the size of this woman’s ears? Each time she ties her hair back, bingo—it’s Topo Gigio, the Italian puppet mouse (Google the name. See?).

Then there’s Joe Pasquale, better known across the land as Oh God Turn Over I Can’t Stand Him. Actually that’s unfair: he’s coming across as a genuinely likeable man, and is my favourite to win. Bear in mind I’m writing this on the morning of Tuesday 23 November—so if he’s started whistling Nazi anthems and kicking wombats in the face by the time you read this, ignore everything I just said.

The decision to recruit badger-haired nobody Fran Cosgrave was initially baffling, because it’s the first time they’ve included someone who’s less famous than, say, your local GP. But on reflection, I think it’s a bit of cunning philanthropy on ITV’s part. Anyone with more than three friends is better known than he is, which means, thanks to Fran Cosgrove, we’re all celebrities now—and we’ll remain celebrities long after he’s slunk back to obscurity (hey Fran, Obscurity would be a great name for a club).

For some reason, Antonio Fargas has to walk around with ‘Huggy Bear’ printed on his T-shirt, instead of his actual name. Presumably this is to help thick viewers remember who he is, but it’s a touch demeaning because the others don’t get the same treatment. It’d be far easier to identify Nancy Sorrell if she simply walked around with ‘Vie Reeves’s Wife’ on her back; Sophie Anderton could be labelled ‘Cokey Model’, Brian Harvey ‘El? Chav’, and Sheila Fergu-son ‘Forget It’. Then there’s Janet Street-Porter (‘Shagged Normski’), a cheery media tyrant famous for sounding like the cat from the old
Charley Says
public information cartoon.

Finally, national whipping-boy and former royal butler Paul Burrell (‘My Rock’)—facially, a cross between Jamie Oliver and a simpering broad bean.

Apparently the nation is on tenterhooks, eager for whatever regal gossip he’ll spill. The only question I’m interested in hearing him answer is: ‘Did you ever get to see Diana’s bum—perhaps just accidentally, and only for a second—but did you?’ Bet he did.

Anyway, them’s the inmates—at the time of writing they’re yet to undergo any real torture, just a bit of foreplay in which Fran was staked to the ground while bugs crawled round his privates. Doubtless the real horror’s to come. I’ll leave you with a quote from
Cannibal Ferox
, another video nasty with disturbing
I’m a Celebrity
overtones: ‘They castrated him with a machete and then they…they ate his genitals!’ And to think, he only won three bushtucker stars for the trouble.

I love Frann he is wel fit

[4 December 2004]

S
o another
I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!
(ITV) scuttles to a conclusion, and what have we learned, fourth time around? Absolutely nothing, except that Natalie Appleton should’ve been forced to complete her trials with a cattle prod. Is this the frailest woman in Britain? She’s like a heroine in a Victorian novel: a pale delicate flower, weakened by years of indulgence and pampering, who faints and dies of consumption if she so much as stubs a toe, or shakes hands with a beggar, or one of the footmen accidentally blows off in another wing of the mansion.

‘I just can’t physically do it…I’m gonna pass out…oh God I’m gonna be sick,’ she whined, over and over again, until it became a theme tune. Her husband should sample it, loop it and use it on the next Prodigy album. Possibly as a recurring motif in a brand new mix of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.

What else? Well, Vie Reeves’s big entry was a mistake: it’s never a good idea to arrive fashionably late and to great fanfare on a reality show, unless you subsequently do something—anything—to justify the hype. Ages ago, in
The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer
, he did a terrifying and hilarious impersonation of Lloyd Grossman, hovering around with an outsized papier-maché forehead and bits of cutlery for fingers. He should’ve gone in like that and stayed in character till the bitter end.

ITV2’s live feed once again ran a coin-operated text-message window along the bottom of the screen, in a shameless bid to rake in money from illiterate cretins nationwide prepared to pay for the privilege of making the words ‘I LOVE FRANN HE IS WEL FIT’ appear on their tellies. How long until they start superimposing that over everything, even the news? Six months from now, you’ll switch on the ITN news and there it’ll be, running along the bottom: ‘CONDOLEEZA U R SOOOO SEXY!!!’; TALLUJER IS A MESS PS MARTIN WIL U MARRY ME LUV KIRSTY’.

Oddly enough, that sort of caper might actually outclass Channel 4’s new political offering,
Morgan and Platell
(C4). It’s not that the show itself doesn’t include at least some level of political debate, it’s just that it’s impossible to concentrate on the issues at hand when your brain’s busy trying to work out which of the hosts you’d like to smack in the cakehole first.

Who’s the more repugnant? In the red corner, Piers ‘Fake Photos’ Morgan, a man who recently sparked panic amongst
This Morning
viewers by inadvertently blabbering about an impending al-Qaeda attack ‘in the next few days’, then spent last week’s
Morgan and Platell
haranguing Commons leader Peter Hain for ‘encouraging fear’.

In the blue corner, Amanda ‘Antigay Malignity’ Platell, former spin doctor for William Hague, famous for penning an
Evening Standard
column so nakedly homophobic and misleading that the paper’s own theatre critic wrote to the letters page complaining it was ‘a piece of gutter-press journalism…I have never been so upset or angered by an article as Amanda Platell’s attempt to incite contempt.’

Morgan spends the entire programme looking twice as smug as a man who’s just learnt to fellate himself—yet miraculously it’s moon-faced, putty-nosed Platell who ultimately snatches first position in the punchability stakes, because there’s something about her that suggests she thinks she’s gorgeous and pouting. It’s a bit like watching a drunken old spinster pinching the waiter’s arse at a wedding reception.

Still, there’s one remarkable side effect to all this: it’s the only political show in living memory where the politicians are the most likeable people in the studio by far. Under these conditions, even Dick Cheney would come across as warm and approachable—if I were him, I’d book an appearance at the first opportunity.

To quote Miss Appleton, I think I’m gonna throw up.

Mr Logic on holiday

[1 January 2005]

W
hy are we here? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to witness it, will Alain de Botton write an entire book about it anyway?

Probably. In case you don’t know who de Botton is, let me explain: he’s an absolute pair-of-aching-balls of a man—a slap-headed, ruby-lipped pop philosopher who’s forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books aimed at smug Sunday supplement pseuds looking for something clever-looking to read on the plane—yet if you pick up one of his books and read it cover to cover, you’ll come away with less insight into the human condition than if you’d worked your way through a copy
of Mr Tickle
instead.

For some mad reason, his books keep getting made into TV shows. Last year, he rocked the world to its very foundations by revealing that human beings sometimes experience an emotion called ‘envy’, in his book and TV series
Status Anxiety
. Now he’s popped up again, to instruct us on
The Art of Travel (C4
), just in case we didn’t buy his book of the same name, which was the toast of the aspirational tosspot community back in 2003.

And boy, has he struck the jackpot with the telly version, because rather than sitting at a desk typing about travel, he gets to roam the world stroking his chin in front of a camera crew.

It opens with Alain drearily watching a holiday ad on TV, but don’t panic: within seconds he’s hit on a way to put the budget to good use. ‘I thought of going on a Mediterranean cruise,’ he says, bold as brass. ‘It seemed to offer everything I was looking for. Sunshine; the excitement of being on a glamorous ship; some destinations I’d always wanted to see.’

Cut to Alain boarding the
QE2
, which is ‘even more beautiful than I imagined. There were chocolates on the pillow at night. There were artfully moulded toiletries in the bathroom. The ship was repainted every morning, and was resplendent in the Mediterranean sun.’

As is Alain’s bald, shining head. Yet, despite his opulent surroundings, something’s eating away at him, so he has a little think, and before long, ‘a troubling realisation began to dawn on me…that I’d inadvertently brought myself along with me on my holiday…Wherever we choose to go, perhaps the underlying wish is for me to get away from ‘me’.’

I’d only known him a few minutes, and I wanted to get away from him too. Later, he reveals that guide books are no substitute for exploring a place yourself, and that a hotel is an ‘anonymous’ place. Unless it’s an East German swingers’ hotel filled with naked people, that is—like the one Alain visits halfway through the show, ostensibly to illustrate a point about something or other, but probably because he was curious.

With their orange, wrinkled skin, the swingers look pretty grim, but they’re not a patch on Alain, with his shiny dome, slit-like eyes and dark red lips. (They really are dark, like he’s been suckling cranberry juice from a teat for the last six months, and set against his paper-pale skin they make him look like Ronald McDonald’s serious older brother- or an inverted black-and-white minstrel, whichever is most insulting.)

Main’s entire travel philosophy boils down to ‘wherever you go, there you are’. It’s the sort of thing that might be explained in a single page of
The Little Book of Comforting Dribble
, in other words—the only difference is that Alain has to circumnavigate the globe to make the same cock-obvious point.

Still, never mind. At least you can point at him and laugh, and say, ‘Ha ha ha, it’s like
Viz’s
Mr Logic on Holiday’ for the entire duration of the show. And if you feel bad about slagging him off, don’t worry. He’d be philosophical about it.

Enter the Dragons’ Den

[
IB
January 2005]

F
ool! You probably won’t bother tuning into
Dragons’Den
(BBC2), just because of its stupid title. And who could blame you? A TV show called
Dragons’Den?
Sounds like a cheapo
Lord of The Rings
knock-off, aimed at children who can’t tell how rubbish the special effects are.

Fortunately, it’s not like that at all: instead it’s an entrepreneurial take on
Pop Idol
. The ‘dragons’ of the title are a panel of super-rich businessmen and women, every single one of whom you’ll want to smack in the face on sight, simply for making you feel like a medieval pauper by comparison. They’re all quite psychotically odious, although the prize swine has to be YO! Sushi founder Simon Woodroffe: an obscene combination of unimaginable personal wealth and pretentious facial hair.

The premise: members of the public queue up to pitch their business ideas to the dragons. The prize: real money and real investment, from the dragons’ real pockets. Not piddling little amounts of money either: we’re talking hundreds of thousands, life-changing helpings of cold hard cash.

The result makes for merciless viewing. The wannabes are already nervous as they enter the room, via a staircase apparently designed to leave them puffing for breath. That they’re immediately confronted by a row of scowling dragons, with huge stacks of banknotes literally piled either side of them, scarcely helps matters. But the poor sods need that cash, so they mop their brows, swallow hard, and start pitching—which is where things really go to pieces. Because almost without exception, their schemes and plans and hopes and dreams are absolutely bloody ridiculous.