Dawn of the Dumb (3 page)

This week’s episode, for example, finds a man requiring thousands of pounds to fund the launch of a world-changing invention: the ‘StableTable’, an adjustable plastic widget that stops tables wobbling (you know, just like a makeshift cardboard wedge does, but for more money). Then there’s a woman hawking a ‘flower quiver’—quite literally a quiver you wear on your back to keep flowers in (this, she claims, eradicates the ‘difficulty’ of holding them with your hands). Most heartbreaking of all are two petrified young scamps attempting to drum up support for an online music service: one of them is so intimidated by the mere sight of the dragons he immediately forgets his lines and starts sweating so profusely he might as well be pumping 15 gallons of lactic acid through a blowhole on the top of his head.

Faced with this absurd parade, the dragons feel personally insulted. After all, it’s
their
cash these bozos are after. And once angered, they speedily pick apart each proposal with ruthless efficiency. Business plans are derided, personalities are shredded, dreams are openly laughed at. The hapless pitchers stagger away, reeling and blinking as though they’ve just had a bagful of shit thrown over them. Like I say, it’s fun.

Still a bad title though. Anyway, dragons don’t have dens, they have lairs, dammit.

Even if you hate kids so much you just threw up because you saw the word ‘kids’ at the start of this sentence, it’s worth catching this week’s
Child of Our Time
(BBC1), because it includes a startling investigation into how much of
EastEnders
the average toddler can comprehend.

As part of an ‘experiment’ to see whether kids actually understand what they see on TV, a group of five-year-olds are shown the episode where Janine throws Barry off a cliff. They’re then asked to explain, in their own words, what happened. Using puppets to represent the cast.

Naturally, their versions are a hundred times better than the original: according to one of the kids, Janine was upset with Barry because he wouldn’t give her any sweets.

I hereby demand the BBC starts broadcasting live kid-puppet ‘re-imaginings’ of their entire output, 24 hours a day, accessible via the red button. Come on, BBC. I for one can’t wait to see their version of
Crimewatch
.

The amazing John McCririck

[15 January 2005]

S
o, the BBC went ahead and broadcast
Jerry Springer: The Opera
in its entirety last week, enraging a hardcore band of extremist humourless oafs who decided before they’d even seen it that it was blasphemous and despicable and hideous and ghastly and wrong, and therefore Must Not Be Shown because They Didn’t Like It.

Let he who is without brains cast the first stone. And cast they did. Prior to broadcast, they jostled, they shouted, they published contact details and made threatening phone calls—all in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who, unless I’m grossly mistaken, was actually rather keen on tolerance and forgiveness and turning the other cheek.

Before
Jerry Springer was
shown, the BBC received 47,000 complaints. Afterwards, it received just 900—plus around 500 calls of support. Which suggests that once people had seen it, it finally dawned on them that perhaps it wasn’t worth getting quite so steamed up over a comedy musical. Nevertheless, a crusading fringe group calling itself Christian Voice, who published private phone numbers of BBC staff on their website, and who probably speak for, oooh, 0.0005 per cent of all practising Christians, plan to prosecute the BBC for blasphemy. And if that doesn’t work, they could always throw Mark Thompson in a lake to prove he’s a witch.

You’d have thought human beings had evolved beyond this kind of idiocy- but since Christian Voice probably don’t believe in evolution, I guess they’re exempt. And as for the many thousands who objected to the broadcast on the grounds that it represented a ‘misuse of their licence fee’, I suspect that if you counted all the people who’ve ever turned on their TV of a Sunday evening and said, ‘Oh shit, Songs
of Praise
is on’, you’d be looking at a majority of millions.

What would Jesus make of it? He’d probably watch the opera, laugh his halo off, and then appear before the protesting hotheads and say something wise and charming, like ‘do not let your hearts be troubled’ or ‘love one another’. He certainly wouldn’t be standing there indignantly stamping his feet. Well, not with his stigmata.

Anyway, onto more important matters, namely
Celebrity Big Brother (C4
), home of the Amazing John McCririck, who really ought to be imprisoned within a digital satellite channel for the rest of his days, where we can tune in and watch him skulking round a bear pit, rubbing his head against the walls and grumpily swinging on tyres—all of it backed up with some kind of interactive technology that goads him with a stick each time you press the red button.

Is it just me, or does McCririck look a bit like a Womble? An angry, recently waxed Womble, but a Womble nevertheless. He even dresses like one: witness the Great Uncle Bulgaria costume he sometimes throws on, or his Bungo hat. If any movie execs out there are planning a twenty-first-century ‘re-imagining’ of
Wambling Free
, they could save themselves a lot of expensive CGI by simply covering McCririck in glue and rolling him in cotton wool. And asking him to provide his own clothing.

Here’s hoping he’s still incarcerated by the time you read this. As I type, Germaine Greer’s just walked, which is a pity, because without her or Great Uncle Bulgaria there’s little reason to tune in. Bez just bobs around staring at everything, like a man trying to make out individual atoms in the air; Kenzie is basically Mike Skinner’s thick younger brother; forcing Brigitte and Jackie to square off on TV despite the child-custody issues involved strikes me as a sickening misjudgement; Caprice, Jeremy and Lisa are so bland they may as well be replaced with furniture.

Still, if McCririck goes prematurely, at least you know you can look forward to six months of hilarious, life-affirming Diet Coke commercials in which the corner shop runs out of his favourite fizzy drink and he throws a strop and slaps someone. Christ, that would be something worth protesting about.

Fear of vomiting

[22 January 2005]

D
on’t you never say this column ain’t educational. Your new word of the week is ‘emetophobia’, which means ‘fear of vomiting’. There. You’ve learned something. Give yourself a big fat pat on the back, four-eyes.

I’m familiar with the word because I’m an emetophobe myself. It’s an incredibly stupid phobia—for instance, the thing that scares me most about nuclear war isn’t the death and destruction, but the vomiting caused by radiation sickness—but it’s a phobia nonetheless, and I’ve got it. Sometimes it’s so annoying, I could puke. Except of course I can’t. It’s all very confusing.

Anyway, fellow emetophobes beware, because this week’s edition of
Tribe
(BBC2) opens with the most spectacular on-screen vomit since
The Exorcist
. But worse, because it’s real.

The spewing commences when masochist extraordinaire Bruce Parry decides to spend a month with the Babongos, an obscure African tribe whose initiation ceremony involves taking a powerful, sometimes lethal hallucinogen whose first side effect is to make you hurl the entire contents of your stomach up. And by Christ does Parry hurl with gusto. It all comes up: he practically coughs up his own kidneys.

The drug then sends you on an unstoppable three-day trip during which you experience visions, float free of your own body, drift inside the minds of other people, and relive every bad moment in your life in blistering Technicolor close-up. And just in case that isn’t mind-mangling enough, the Babongos do their level best to exacerbate things by dressing up in vibrant costumes, dancing around with flaming sticks, dunking you in the river and making you pass through a symbolic gigantic vulva built out of sticks. At the end of which, you’re reborn. As Bez.

Ah, Bez. The usual ‘at the time of writing’ caveats apply, but now Great Uncle Bulgaria’s left, it’s Bez and Bez alone who’s making
Celebrity Big Brother
(C4) watchable. Adrift in a world of spliffless clarity, it’s clear he finds sobriety as disorientating as most people would find the Babongo drug ritual. The housemates’ reaction? They nominated him. ‘I reckon yous lot are a bunch of tossers,’ he replied—the wisest, most coherent thing he’s said since he entered the house.

If his brain ever adjusts to normality, perhaps he’ll muster yet more accurate insults, and hopefully aim them directly at Lisa I’Anson, who, at the time of writing, is still in there, apparently intent on single-handedly redefining the word ‘smug’. And the word ‘insincere’. And the phrase ‘high-handed, self-satisfied, nauseating she-bore’.

Could Lisa I’Anson be the most patronising person on Earth? She swans around treating everyone as though they’re six years old—pretty close in Kenzie’s case, and Bez’s mental age can’t be far off, but even so, it’s hard for me to stomach. She talked down to Jackie (who’s funnier than Lisa). She talked down to John McCririck (who’s more honest than Lisa). She talked down to Germaine Greer (who’s…well, where do you start?).

I don’t know if she’s a religious woman, and I haven’t seen her saying any bedtime prayers, but if she did, chances are she’d even talk down to God.

Under any circumstances, it’s pretty bleedin’ rich for an ex-Radio 1 DJ, who’s currently reduced to picking her bum on CCTV, to believe she’s in a position to offer any sort of advice to anyone (unless it includes a few handy pointers on the most efficient way to sob all the fluid out of your body), but when the advice on offer consists of nothing but cod psychology, artificial sympathy and dreary, witless murmurings of’it’s all good, babe, it’s all good…’, it veers straight past ‘rich’ and hurdes toward ‘nauseating’ with alarming speed.

All good babe? All good? No it isn’t: shut your cakehole. Our stomachs are rising, and speaking as an emetophobe, that horrifies me to the core.

Celebrity bollockers

[12 February 2005]

I
n today’s cut-throat consumer marketplace, some names are synonymous with quality: Rolls-Royce. Bang & Olufsen. Alessi. Gucci. Smeg. And then there are other names. Names like Amstrad. Yes, Amstrad. My second-ever home computer was an Amstrad CPC6128, which came with its own built-in disk drive—as luridly futuristic back then as a computer with its own fully-functioning bladder would be now.

Trouble is, after a few weeks, the sound chip went all wonky and started guffing out bum notes at random. Then the disk drive, which I’d been so dazzled by, developed its own personality—which might have been fun if it hadn’t proved to be a destructive personality that didn’t like disks very much. Little things like that can wear you down, and before long, playing games on the thing was less fun than glaring at it and wondering which window to hurl it through.

The culprit responsible for my conked-out Amstrad CPC6128 was Alan Sugar, who today heads a Eyoom business empire, owns 13 per cent of Tottenham Hotspur, gets called ‘Sir’ by everybody including the Queen and is the star of BBC2’s surprisingly enjoyable back-stabbing reality show
The Apprentice
(BBC2). In the US,
The Apprentice
starred Donald Trump, a man so obscenely rich he could afford to buy all the oxygen in the world, then rent it back to us at a profit if he so chose. The show was a hit, and Trump’s hairstyle (which looks like a golf cap hurriedly assembled from rusting steel wool) became a major star. Sugar doubles for Trump in the UK version, which works like this: fourteen odious, overconfident wannabe entrepreneurs, every single one of whom you will learn to hate twice as much as Hitler, have given up their day jobs in order to dance to Sir Alan’s tune. He divides them into two teams (one team of boys, one of girls), and sets them a weekly task—at the end of which, one candidate from the losing team gets personally fired by Alan, in the grumpiest manner possible.

While unsweetened Sugar can’t trump Trump in the preposterous haircut stakes, on the evidence of this first episode his name will soon be mentioned in the same breath as other famous celebrity bollockers like Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsay. Looking eerily similar to Jon Culshaw impersonating Russell Crowe, he enters wearing the face of a man who’s just stubbed his toe on the gravestone of a close relative, and continues to grumble and bark his way through the rest of the show. Even his introductory greeting is downbeat. There’s not so much as a handshake. Instead, he glares at the line of hopefuls like they’re a group of work experience kids who’ve just trodden dogshit into his boardroom carpet.

‘I don’t like liars, I don’t like cheats, I don’t like bullshitters, I don’t like schmoozers, I don’t like arse-lickers,’ he announces, unwittingly dismissing every single one of them in the process.

Once Alan’s set the weekly task—flower-selling for the opener—the focus shifts to the candidates themselves, as we watch them bicker, argue, scheme, moan, boast, brag, grandstand, plot and spout marketing bollocks until you want to squat on their chests and punch their jaws through the floor. By the end of the show, you’ll want Alan to fire the lot of them. Preferably into the ocean.

Speaking of the candidates, whatever the collective term for a bunch of turds is (I think it’s a ‘fistful’ of turds), it applies to both
The Apprentice’s
fourteen entrepreneurs and a scene
in Michael Howard: No More Mr Nasty
(BBC2) in which we’re treated to the sight of John Major, William Hague, Kenneth Clarke and lain Duncan Smith sitting round a table offering advice to Michael Howard.

Warning: the programme also contains repeated, severe close-ups of Howard, who has more than a touch of 10 Rillington Place about him, plus a talking-head interview with Anne Robinson, whose face now appears so tight and Botoxed she seems to be pushing it through the taut skin of a tambourine toward the viewer. Beware. Beware. Beware.