Dawn of the Dumb (30 page)

It works like this: every day, a fresh bunch of excruciating amateur entertainers performs before a live studio audience. Each member of said audience has a button to push when they’ve had enough of the act: the moment 50 per cent of the audience are fed up, a klaxon sounds and the performance is halted. Simple. It’s
The Gong Show
minus the irony.

You know you’re in for a treat the moment the host bounds on stage because it’s Brian Conley. Hosts don’t come more ‘showbiz’ than that. He’s a goddamn showbiz machine. For starters, he opens each edition with a song—a
song!—
punctuated with cheeky winks to the camera. Then he tells some thrillingly creaky
Crackerjack
jokes and engages in nudge-wink banter with the old dears in the front row. It’s cruise-ship hell all the way, which feels hugely refreshing for some mad reason.

In fact, if you’re anything like me you’ll appreciate it on two opposing levels at once—the ironic, cynical part of your brain has a sneery guffaw, while the cuddly, human part simply enjoys a warm chortle. It’s confusing. I genuinely can’t decide if Brian Conley is an irritant or a genius.

Psychologists have a term for this state of mind: ‘cognitive dissonance’—the act of trying to hold two contrasting viewpoints at once. Left unchecked, it can drive people crazy. Which is bad news, because the moment Conley makes way for the amateur entertainers themselves, a self-perpetuating cognitive dissonance feedback loop starts to build in my head.

There are singers. There are dancers. There are people who balance saucepans on the end of their nose…you name it, they’re on it—and they’re bloody awful.

Throughout each performance, a timer ticks away in the bottom left and a ‘disapproval rating’ percentage score builds in the bottom right, and it’s this that renders the show oddly hypnotic. If a contestant makes it to the three-minute mark, they’ve ‘won’ and automatically go through to that week’s final. But that rarely happens. Most performances are abruptly murdered somewhere round the two-minute mark: the klaxon sounds, the lights go out, and the bewildered, humiliated performer staggers away.

Some acts barely get a chance to open their gobs before people start hammering their buttons. Even kids—and yes,
Let Me Entertain You
features
loads
of child performers—don’t always scrape by on a sympathy vote. Since the audience is voting anonymously, they’re remarkably unsentimental, particularly when faced with a creepy young performer (i.e. all of them).

Ethnic minorities don’t seem to fare much better. This is unfounded speculation on my part, but I suspect if you were to compare booting-off times, you’d find white acts get a significantly easier ride, thanks to some degree of subconscious prejudice on the part of the (largely Caucasian) audience. Mind you, the quickest dunking I’ve seen thus far was dished out to a bald white guy who’d painted himself orange.

And occasionally, an abysmal performance enjoys a mystifying degree of approval. Some don’t even qualify as a ‘performance’ in the first place: last Monday, a man made it through to the final by incoherently discussing his love of
Only Fools and Horses
. It’s unfathomable. You could piddle into a teacup and there’s a good chance you’d beat a pubescent dance troupe who’d sewn their own costumes and travelled 5,000 miles just to be there.

In summary, then: It’s brilliant. It’s awful. It’s brawful. I don’t know what it is. But I know that somehow, it’s worth bloody watching.

I hate you. We all hate you. God hates you

[16 September 2006]

L
ast time I checked, the Nazis didn’t win the Second World War—not that you’d sodding notice. After all, the Third Reich was pretty big on issuing orders and demanding cold, robotic obedience from the populace, and that’s pretty much what we’re saddled with today. But the way the orders are delivered has changed. Instead of being barked at in a German accent through a loudhailer, they’re disguised as concerned expert advice and floated under your nose every time you switch on the TV or flip open this newspaper.

There’s a continual background hum, a middle-class message of self-improvement, whispered on the wind. ‘You eat too much. You eat the wrong things. You drink. You smoke. You don’t get enough exercise. You probably can’t even shit properly. You’ll die if you don’t change your ways. Your health will suffer. Have you got no self-respect? Look at you. You sicken me. I pity you. I hate you. We all hate you. God hates you. Don’t you get it? It’s so sad, what you’re doing to yourself. It’s just so bloody sad.’

That’s the mantra. And it goes without saying that the people reciting it are routinely depicted as saints. Last year, the media dropped to its knees to give Jamie Oliver a collective blowjob over his
School Dinners
series, in which he campaigned to get healthier food put on school menus. Given the back-slapping reaction, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d personally rescued 5,000 children from the jaws of a slavering wolf.

Anyway, the series was a huge success. In fact in telly terms there was only one real drawback: it wasn’t returnable. After all, when you’ve saved every child in the nation from certain death once, you can’t really do it a second time. The only solution is to find a new threat, which brings us to
lan Wright’s Unfit Kids
(C4), a weekly ‘issuetainment’ programme in which the former footballer and renowned enemy of grammar forces a bunch of overweight youngsters to take part in some extracurricular PE.

It’s essentially a carbon copy of the Jamie Oliver show, with more sweating and fewer shots of pupils mashing fresh basil with a pestle: an uplifting fable in which Wrighty shapes his gang of misfits into a lean, mean, exercisiri machine—combating apathy and lethargy, confronting lazy parents, and attempting to turn the whole thing into a nationwide issue that’ll have Range-Rover mums everywhere dampening their knickers with sheer sanctimony in between trips to the Conran shop. Oh, isn’t it simply terrible, what these blobsome plebs do to themselves? Not our Josh, you understand: he eats nothing but organic spinach and attends lacrosse practice six hundred times a week.

Bet he does, the little shit.

It’s cleanly executed—we even get glimpses of lan’s temporarily bleak home life, just to ram home what a self-sacrificing saint he is—and yes, it is heartwarming to watch flabby, unconfident kids transforming themselves with a bit of simple activity…but there’s something about the underlying eat-your-greens message that really sticks in my craw, in case you hadn’t guessed.

What happened to the concept
of choice
, you nickers? So a bit of jogging might increase your life expectancy—so what? That just equates to a few more years in the nursing home—whoopee-doo. And besides, I’d rather drop dead tomorrow than spend the rest of my life sharing a planet with a bunch of smug toss-ends trying to out-health one another.

In episode two, video games and the internet are singled out as villains in the war on flab: they make kids too sedentary, you see. Oddly enough,
TV
, which is equally sedentary and, unlike those two activities, actively encourages you to let your mind atrophy along with your physique, escapes wimout a bollocking. Funny, that.

Well listen here, Channel 4—instead of forcing kids to eat bracken or do squat-thrusts, how about teaching them to think more expansively, so they reject the sly, cajoling nature of programmes like this? Or would that be a campaign too far?

Pin Sharp

[23 September 2006]

Y
ou’d think, as a globally influential writer of unprecedented cultural import, I’d be offered freebies, perks and trinkets round the clock. Free DVDs. First-class flights. An all-expenses-paid stay at that sail-shaped hotel in Dubai where visitors wipe their bums on gold leaf and swan’s wings. VIP passes to the opening of Lindsay Lohan’s blouse. Yeah. That’s what you’d think.

In practice, the only freebie I’ve ever received is a tray of sausage rolls from Gregg’s the bakers, delivered unexpectedly to my desk after I mentioned them in print. And I had to give most of those away. There’s only so much mashed pig you can eat in one sitting before your tear ducts start leaking yellow fat.

Anyway, all that changed the other week, when an email arrived offering me a free top-of-the-range HD television and a Sky HD box. Should I accept it? Wouldn’t doing so make me a bought and sold whore, blackmailed into praising Murdoch’s empire by the promise of free gadgetry? I agonised over the ethical implications for three whole seconds before emailing them back with directions to my flat and a comprehensive list of times I’d be in.

So now I’m an early HD adopter, albeit one who hasn’t had to shell out for it. And let me tell you, the picture’s so sharp you could cut your face on it. And the colours are so vibrant, your eyes overheat trying to process them all. Watch a documentary on coral reefs and it’s just like being there (in two dimensions and with far less moisture).

Yes, the picture is far better, obviously, but there’s not really anything to watch yet. You get a couple of documentary channels, Artsworld, a HD version of Sky One (which means
24
and
Dead-wood
in HD, so that’s good), a few movies, some football (boo), and a BBC ‘preview’ channel that loops HD footage from
Bleak House
and Jools Holland and mil-length repeats
of Planet Earth
(the world’s most expensive Screensaver). If I’d paid for it, I’d be disappointed. It’d be like spending a fortune on a flying car, only to discover that under current regulations you’re only allowed to fly it to Gwent and back. On Sundays.

In fact the main impact this fancy HD set-up has had on my life is to make anything that isn’t broadcast in HD—i.e. almost everything—look hopelessly shit by comparison. At the weekend, I tuned into
The X-Factor
on manky old lo-fi ITV1, and it was like staring through the holes in a wet Hessian sack: blurry, muddy, and seemingly out of focus. Louis Walsh became a chuckling smudge, Simon Cowell an arrogant cloud. You couldn’t even see the contestants cry properly.

Select one of the bargain-basement satellite channels dedicated to old repeats and things get even worse. The combination of old video and huge compression rates transforms them into incoherent, jumbled collections of fuzzy multicoloured blocks. You might as well squint into a bowl of Lego soup.

In short, my freeloading glimpse of the crystal-clear future has spoiled everything. It’s like trying to eat a Fray Bentos pie in a tin the day after dining in a Gordon Ramsay restaurant (not that I’m planning to visit one—unless his PR company send me a free invite).

Worse still, common sense dictates that by the time every channel’s taken the leap into HD wow vision, some other new technology will be waiting in the wings to annoy you: perhaps some new broadcast system that enables you to feel a cool breeze whenever Inspector Lynley winds his car window down. And a hot one when Keith Miller blows off.

It’s trad TV’s attempt to fend off the internet, of course; just like the cinematic gimmicks of the 19505 (such as 3D) which tried to stave off the threat of TV Except there’s nothing to stave off, really-it’s obvious we’re heading for some kind of YouTube-structured future in which channels no longer exist and individual programmes get emailed directly into your mind’s eye. By robots.

Robots owned by the wonderful Murdoch family and their beautiful, talented colleagues.

Rubbin’ the hooded man

[ u
₄
October 2006]

L
ife expectancy was poor in medieval times. There were wars all over the place—not nice clean modern wars, with laser-targeted superbullets that dock points from your Nectar account instead of killing you but sweaty, close-combat wars in which boggle-eyed beardos with hardly any teeth battered you with clubs or hacked bits of limb off you with swords, leaving you thrashing about in the hay squirting blood from your stumps like a shrieking Bayeux tapestry bitch.

If you managed to avoid that, lack of hygiene would get you. All the food was germ-flavoured, and the plates were discs of dried cow shit, hammered flat and baked in the sun. You get the picture. Things weren’t nice.

Anyway, this is the world
Robin Hood
(BBC1) doesn’t even try to bring to life. Instead, the BBC’s new interpretation plays like a cross between a low-budget
Pirates of the Caribbean
and an Arctic Monkeys video. And clearly this has offended a sizeable section of the viewing public, who are flooding message boards with complaints that the show is ‘too modern’, and ‘too crap’, but mostly ‘too unlike the ITV version’.

Well, I was never a fan of the ITV version; I couldn’t abide the mystical Herne the Hunter guff, thought the Clannad theme tune sounded like they were singing about ‘rubbin’…the hooded man’ (far too rude for Saturday teatime), and hated the stupid hair. (Bizarrely, many of the people citing ITV’s Michael Praed as the definitive Hood find the haircuts in the new version outrageous—as though Praed’s flowing Timotei ladylocks represented the last word in hard-edged realism.)

Anyway: Hood 2006 is a curate’s egg. On the one hand, it’s heartening to see another ambitious family drama in the family teatime slot. On the other…well, it’s all over the place, isn’t it? At its worst, it’s like watching someone else playing an RPG full of lengthy cut scenes, in which you trek between three different locations ad nauseum. (Incidentally, the way the location names pop up accompanied by a twanging arrow sound effect is so video-gamey; I keep trying to press the start button to find out where I am on the map.)

Like many video games, it looks like it’s been rush-released with too many rough edges intact. The script often sounds like a first draft in need of a polish, and some of the editing is downright bizarre, with dialogue bleeding too far into the next scene, and repeated shots of so-so stunts from a variety of angles and at different speeds, which always feels like desperate shorthand for
Look! We can afford stunts! Please be impressed!