Dawn of the Dumb (35 page)

Following Leo’s disgruntled exit, the remaining housemates decided to put on a brave face in the traditional fashion; i.e. forming two distinct groups and learning to loathe one another. At the time of writing, Jade, Jo and Danielle—collectively, the world’s thickest coven—are relentlessly haranguing blameless Hollywood star Shilpa Shetty over an endless series of imaginary crimes, thereby prompting over 200 viewers to complain to Ofcom about alleged racism in the show.

I don’t think they’re racist, just unbelievably dumb. They’re motivated by an intense, aching jealousy they’re simply too stupid to process. After all, Shilpa is twenty times more successful than any of them, not to mention 400 times more beautiful. When you’re a go-nowhere tit-flasher, a washed-up singer or a famous dunce, that’s bound to rankle, especially since Shetty’s also more intelligent, dignified, patient and likeable than you could ever, ever be.

There’s a certain grim amusement to be had, watching the angry trio stropping about with faces like thunder, steadily dismantling their own careers, but equally, there’s something profoundly embarrassing about having this lot representing Britain to a dis-armingly gracious group of overseas visitors—the aforementioned Shilpa, plus sweetly gentle Jermaine and dry, debonair Dirk. This is humiliation on a national scale.

Mind you, dense as Jade, Jo and Danielle clearly are, even they’re eclipsed by the staggeringly dim-witted Jack, a man so thick he’d have to study hard for six months just to make it to the level of ‘vegetable’. A potato could beat him at noughts and crosses—assuming he could work out how to hold a pencil and make marks on the paper in the first place, which is doubtful. He doesn’t contribute to the house, but slowly subtracts from it: moping, blinking, frowning at words of more than one letter, even frowning at noises that sound like they might be words (if the door to the diary room creaks when it opens, he gets a bit angry, thinking he’s just heard yet another word he doesn’t understand and vat ain’t fair innit). And on the rare occasions when he opens his mouth to speak, he sounds like a leaden ten-year-old reading lines off a card.

Exactly what is Jack’s purpose on Earth? There’s a grisly YouTube clip of him apparently masturbating to orgasm beneath his duvet and firing his mess up Jade’s leg. So maybe that’s it. Maybe he was put here just to spunk on people’s legs. Fucked if I can think of any other reason.

24
loses its mind

[27 January 2007]

S
igh. So I started last week’s column by pointing out how much things change between my Tuesday morning deadline and the printed copy appearing on Saturday morning, and wouldn’t you know it, ‘things’ changed so much, it’s probably safe to assume that by the time you read this,
Celebrity Big Brother
will have been ripped off air for inciting a full-blown race war with Jupiter.

In the unlikely event it hasn’t, I’d still recommend tuning into this week’s double-helping of
24
(Sky One) instead, since it’ll doubtiess provide happier viewing, even though it’s one of the most relentlessly unpleasant things I’ve ever seen.

Let’s be frank here:
24
has lost its mind. The hinges were always loose, but this sixth series is something else. It opened last week with Jack mute, scarred and bearded following months of torture in a secret Chinese prison. The man could scarcely walk. Two hours later he was cheerfully high-kicking a suicide bomber out the back of a train.

Nuts. But somehow it all seemed, to use a bit of internet parlance, a bit ‘meh’. Jack’s dealt with worse threats, right? Wrong. By the end of this week’s two-hour televisual brain rape, you’ll have trouble sleeping.

Aghast at the sheer swivel-eyed horror of the new episodes, several US commentators have condemned the show as a work of Neo-Con propaganda that promotes torture as a viable tool in the war against terrorism. It’s hard to disagree. When
24
first began, Jack used torture as a shocking last resort, dabbling only occasionally, like an ex-smoker treating himself to a cigar on his birthday. These days, if Jack needs a piss, he’ll torture anyone who might be able to tell him where the nearest bog is. Every other scene seems to run like this:

Jack (twisting screwdriver into waiter’s tear duct): ‘First on the left, or first on the right? TELL ME WHERE THE JOHN IS!’

Waiter: ‘AUUGHHH left! It’s on the left!’

Jack: About time’ (nonchalantly shears waiter’s face off with glass shard and nips off for a piss).

So far, so brutal. But the show has developed another, almost more disturbing signature move: the desperate ‘against-my-will-kill’ performed by an average Joe.

In season five, a grisly plot twist saw a young, quivering naval engineer being forced by circumstance to slit a terrorist’s throat while Jack whispered gruff encouragement over the phone. This time round, a blameless civilian dad is coerced into battering a man to death with his bare hands. At this rate, by season seven, there’ll be a convoluted storyline in which a weeping professor of ethics MUST bite the heads off ten babies IN THE NEXT TWO MINUTES or MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS WILL DIE.

Speaking of death, gleefully right-wing co-creator Joel Surnow calls the season-six terrorist threat ‘smaller and more real’ than before. He’s wrong on both counts. Instead, it seems to consist of endless Space Invader waves of sharp-suited suicide bombers, overseen by a furious Middle East maniac who closely resembles a bald Dean Gafmey (which goes some way to explaining his fury).

Jack, meanwhile, has teamed up with a preposterous buddy-movie version of Osama Bin Laden, a ruthless jihadist leader who’s suddenly decided to broker a peace deal—largely, it seems, so he and Jack can enjoy absurd getting-to-know-you banter as they drive from one bloodbath to the next.

Final absurdity: David Palmer’s younger brother Wayne is now president of the US. He’s about twenty-eight years old, sports a shaved head and a goatee, and looks like he’s just stepped off the set of an upmarket R&B video. His inauguration must’ve been awesome.

In short, 24 has become a spiralling, undisciplined caricature of itself:
The Naked Gun
with blood-curdling paranoia in place of jokes. This is no longer a knockabout drama serial. It’s mad crypto fascist horror. You can still laugh at it, of course. But only just.

Wanking for coins

[3 February 2007]

F
our thousand years ago I used to write a website called TV Go Home, which consisted of capsule descriptions of imaginary television programmes—most of them ghastly creations teetering on the brink of plausibility. One of the earliest entries was
Wanking for Coins
, which was described as ‘apocalyptic fun as Rowland Rivron tours the seedy backstreets of London’s West End persuading the homeless to commit acts of self-degradation in exchange for pennies’.

I liked the phrase ‘wanking for coins’ so much I went on to use it again and again. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to sum up an entire world of low-level employment. Stuck in a dead-end job? Wanking for coins. Obliged to smile at customers? Wanking for coins. Working extra shifts to pay the rent? Wanking for coins.

Imagine my surprise, then, all these years later, when I flipped on the box to discover the original
Wanking for Coins
is now broadcast in prime time on ITV1. A few things have changed, but the basic premise is essentially the same. The title’s different, though. They’re calling it
Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway
(ITV1).

The format is simple. Five slick entrepreneurs have a pot containing one million pounds of their own money (200,000 each, although it’s not clear whether they’re paid more or less than that to do the show in the first place). They sit in a row, a la
Dragons’ Den
, while members of the public come in and request some of the money. It’s televised begging.

On the panel are Duncan Bannatyne (who I quite like), Jeffrey Archer (who I don’t), two women who look the same, and Simon Jordan—who performs a mind-boggling miracle each week by coming across as a bigger, smugger arsehole than Archer. He looks like a cross between Ge’rard Depardieu and a thick waiter, and is one of those people you instinctively dislike the moment you clap eyes on them, presumably thanks to some weird, primordial twat-detector lurking in the evolutionary backwaters of the brain. Consequently, everything he says and does fills you with revulsion. Everything. Last week he raised an eyebrow and I vomited blood for an hour.

Archer, meanwhile, is clearly hell-bent on public rehabilitation, and exploits every opportunity to come across as ‘the nice one’ on the panel. He does this by pulling an expression so earnest it borders on insane, repeatedly straining forward and furrowing his brow so hard he looks like he’s trying to screw his face into a tiny, pea-sized ball, then balance it on the end of his nose. Each contortion is accompanied by a hilariously melodramatic proclamation, delivered in the style of the ‘once more unto the breach’ speech from
Henry V
.

Speaking of the contestants: oh dear. They fall into four categories: elderlies (‘lovable’ pensioners wheeled on just so the panel can coo over them like they’re four years old), do-gooders (people who need money for community centres and the like), tragics (‘I lost all my limbs in a car crash and need £10,000 to have brightly coloured plastic windmills installed on the stumps—it’s the only thing diat’ll cheer me up.’), and jokers (‘Zoinks! I want £900,000 to get my bum tattooed! I’m mad, me!’).

Basically, it’s an hour of people desperately pleading for cash, with a cheering audience lobbed in for good measure. Presumably, it’s supposed to be ‘feelgood TV’, but in reality, seeing people in wheelchairs beg Jeffrey Archer for money just doesn’t warm the cockles. He pays out, the audience applauds, and the contestants sob for joy. But somehow they’re all just wanking for coins in one sense or another, and Archer’s wanking faster and more furiously than anyone.

I’d like to go on the show myself. My pitch would be simple—I’d whip out a rusting penknife and threaten to slit my throat right there and then unless they gave me the money. And if they didn’t cough up, I’d do it—just to see Archer trying to work out what sort of face he should pull as my body hit the deck. What a way to go.

CHAPTER TEN

In which a wife is sought and not sought, Macs are slated, and David Cameron is criticised in the most childish manner possible.

Opinions R US

[22 January 2007]

I
f there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s opinions. Opinionated people are everywhere. There’s probably one standing beside you right now.

Look at them. There they stand, the great I-Am, eyes glinting with indignation, swinging their pompous little gobhole open and shut, spouting out one self-important proclamation after another. Have you actually heard what they’re saying? Probably not. You doubtless switched off. And little wonder: it all blurs into one great big river of blah: it’s all ‘If you ask me…’ and ‘Well, what I think is…’ and ‘I think you’ll find…’

They should all either shut up or be forced to shut up by stormtroopers. Or maybe we could seal them inside a Perspex chamber filled with angry bees swarming around with razor blades glued to their bellies. We could televise this. And encourage viewers to text in their opinions about what they’re seeing. And trace those viewers from their mobile numbers, round them up, and slap them in the chamber too. And so on and so on, until we’ve whittled the population down to one person. Me. Watching everyone perish in a chamber of bees. That’s my stock answer to everything.

Never in history have there been so many opportunities to put your opinion across. You can print it in papers, shout it on the radio, text it to the news channels or whack it on the internet. And it all happens so quickly, you don’t even have to think your opinions through; if you can’t be bothered doing the brainwork, you can simply repeat what someone else has said using slightly different words. And poorer spelling.

Most opinions, however, don’t really need to be written down at all. They can be replaced by a sound effect—the audible equivalent of an internet frowny face. Imagine a sort of world-weary harrumph accompanied by the faintest glimmer of a self-satisfied sneer. That’s 90 per cent of all human opinion on everything, right there. Internet debates would be far more efficient if everyone just sat at their keyboards hitting the ‘harrumph’ key over and over again. A herd of people mooing their heads off. Welcome to 2007.

25?

Mind you, even the most bone-headed online debate is infinitely more sophisticated than any kind of public discourse’ you’ll see on TV, particularly if you’re watching the news and they’ve just invited their viewers to call in for some kind of faux-democratic ‘Have Your Say’ segment, which inevitably functions in the same way as someone turning on a gigantic idiot magnet, given the sort of dribbling thicksicle it attracts.

In fact, that’s what they should call it. The Idiot Magnet. At the end of each item on Sky News, they should say ‘We’re switching on the idiot magnet now. Let’s see what we dredge up. Ah, Dick from Colchester, you’re on the air…’

Cue five minutes of Dick repeatedly tapping the ‘harrumph’ key on his phone.

What is it with all this patronising ‘Have Your Say’ bullshit anyway? They don’t call the rest of the programme ‘Have
Our
Say’. I can have my say now, can I? What, right here, in this two-minute slice of airtime which no one’s listening to anyway since they’re too busy trying to get through themselves, or texting their disapproval or going online to moo at a rival? Why, thank you, Lord Media, and harrumph to you, sir.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. Your turn.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I must be in want of a wife

[29 January 2007]