Dawn of the Dumb (40 page)

Same clothes. Same cars. Same sky

[17 March 2007]

I
used to pity Pac-Man. Not because he was relentlessly pursued by ghosts (what had he done—fucked their sisters?) but because he was a prisoner in that maze. There were exits either side, but they didn’t lead anywhere. They spat him back into the haunted labyrinth. No wonder he ate so many of those suspicious looking pills. Getting off his face was his only escape.

You don’t have to turn yellow and consist of pixels to experience a similar sense of deja vu. Just trot round contemporary Britain. Chain store after chain store. Ten billion supermarket doppel-gangers. Identikit architecture. Same clothes. Same cars. Same sky.

Same sameness. It’s like walking the wrong way on a travelator: hours of plodding, and you’ve gone nowhere.

It’s the same on TV. Not so long ago, not only were our towns and cities markedly different, the ITV regions were too. A small thrill, to switch on the box in your B&B and see unfamiliar announcers, exotic logos. Different programmes too. It was like being abroad.

As a youngster, I scanned the ‘regional variations’ in the listings and felt faintly jealous if I spotted something interesting which I couldn’t see on Central TV (my local). Gus Honeybun. Who or what was Gus Honeybun? He was always in the Westward listings, taunting me from afar.

I’ve just Googled him: he was a puppet rabbit. At last I know.

Anyway, since 2002 it’s generic ITV, all over (apart from the holdouts—STV in Scotland, UTV in Northern Ireland). Local identity hardly gets a look-in.

But hmmm. Glancing at the cascade of unnecessary nationwide channels available through my Sky box—UKTV
Canoe History +2
, anybody?—1 can’t help thinking local broadcasting is due to make a comeback.

In fact, it already is. There, nestling in the EPG: local stations for Manchester, Milton Keynes and, most exciting of all, SolentTV (Sky Channel 219)—an entire network devoted to the Isle of Wight.

Solent TV is strikingly confident. Brash, even. It’s just like an ITV region circa 1989. Its flagship show is a daily newscast called
Solent Tonight
, which looks and feels just like a ‘proper’ news programme, except the headlines consist of minor traffic incidents and council squabbling. To a Londoner, this isn’t boring, just comforting. Our news has a bodycount: it’s all stab this and arson that and guns and bombs and phonecam footage of babies hurled under tube trains. It’s nice to know that somewhere a hay bale blowing across a B-road is still big news. I watch it to relax.

The hosts are far younger than the national norm, yet work with absolute conviction (apart from one cub reporter, who the other day was conducting vox-pop interviews in a baseball cap). They’ve clearly got a minuscule budget, but they wear it well. The studio’s so small, when they interview a guest they have to sit so close their knees are almost touching. But I’d rather watch that than the absurd virtual aircraft hangar you see on ITV news.

Aside from the news, there are other homegrown programmes like the brilliantly titled
See It, Like It, Cook It
, which seems to star a fifteen-year-old chef, and a chat show called
Hannam’s Half Hour
, in which a kindly bloke called John Hannam converses with leading Isle of Wight figures. Thrillingly, last week the listings promised an interview with ‘local character Derek Sprake’, which I genuinely couldn’t wait to see—but this seemed to change at the last minute. Nevertheless, the edition I did watch was twice as cosy and reassuring as the local news—30 minutes of jovial chat between two likeable men in that familiar cramped studio.

Between shows, you can enjoy commercials for local shops, and occasional televised ‘notice boards’ promoting jumble sales or talks at Ventnor town hall (‘Entry fee £1: coffee and sandwiches included’). It’s a trip back in time to a more reassuring age—but also, it seems to me, a glimpse of a cosier future. It’s truly heartening. Tune in. See for yourself.

Lie upon lie upon lie upon lie

[31 March 2007]

D
id you see that Catherine Tate sketch on
Comic Relief
‘the other week? The one where Tony Blair played himself? He gave a fantastic performance. Genuinely- a fantastic performance. He actually made me laugh out loud. Admittedly, not as loud as I’ll laugh the day he and Bush are found guilty of war crimes following a six-month show trial at the Hague, but close.

When he unexpectedly delivered the ‘Am I bowered?’ catch-phrase, his timing was immaculate—for a second, I guffawed so loudly I almost forgot about the teetering stacks of skulls, the foaming geysers of blood, the phosphor burns, the pictures of young children with their arms blown off, and the constant metronomic background tick-tock of lie upon lie upon lie upon lie upon lie.

Obviously future generations will use Blair’s name as a swearword so offensive it currently has no equivalent in the English language (the closest possible translation at present being ‘idiot turd stuffed in dead horse vagina’—that’s your name, that is, Blair), and obviously he’s doomed to spend eternity shrieking in unimaginable agony as he’s boiled alive in a gigantic cauldron by a cackling, masturbating demon in the fieriest corner of Hell—but boy, he was funny in that sketch. Perhaps the custodians of Hades will cut him some slack for that. Give him a four-minute break from gargling molten lava once a millennium, something like that. Fingers crossed, eh, Tone?

I’m in a bad mood, in case you hadn’t noticed, but for the best of reasons. I’ve just watched
The Mark of Cain
, an intensely powerful drama about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of British soldiers, and it’s made me very angry indeed. That’s its job: it’s a protest film. A work of fiction, based heavily on fact, written by Tony Marchant, featuring taut direction and some superb central performances.

So far, so worthy. Because it’s on Channel 4, and because, on the face of it, it looks like a ‘difficult’ work, I suspect it’ll draw a respectable-but-not-astounding audience, as opposed to the five to six million it might find if it were on ITV or BBC1—a pity, because in addition to being angry and moving and extremely well made, it’s also hugely accessible. Place this slap-bang in the main-stream and it’d go down a storm. And then cause one. It opens feeling almost like a thriller—and an effective one at that—before sliding into gut-wrenching tragedy, including some truly shocking final scenes that should redefine the phrase ‘harrowing TV drama’ for some time to come. And despite the subject matter, it’s perhaps the most genuinely sympathetic examination of the pressures facing our troops I’ve seen in years.

It’s not perfect (it sags slightly in the middle, and one character feels like a stock TV nasty), and it’s not always subtle, but it’s the best thing on the box this week by a long chalk. People need to see this. And by people, I mean you.

A roomful of squealing Josephs

[14 Apni 2007]

M
usicals are not to be trusted. They’re not right. They’re creepy. If the performing arts are a family, musicals are the suspect uncle inviting the kids to sit on his knee and play horsey. Serial killers hear show tunes in their heads while slicing up their victims. Musicals aren’t right.

And right now, there’s no escaping them. Saturday night TV has become one big amateur chorus line, what with
Any Dream Will Do
on BBC1 and
Grease Is the Word
on ITV. You can’t move for grinning, twirling bastards bursting ineptly into song. It’s like being trapped in a Halifax commercial.

The BBC’s effort is a follow-up to last year’s
Sound of Music
search-a-thon, which posed the question ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ and successfully answered it with the words ‘Connie Fisher’. This time, they’re trying to fill the lead role in
Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—
a musical so uniquely irritating, even its title makes you grind your teeth.

The programme itself is the campest example of mainstream BBC entertainment since Larry Grayson took over the
Generation Game
in 1978: Graham Norton, John Barrowman and a roomful of squealing Josephs. Yes, Josephs. They call the aspiring stars ‘Josephs’, which somehow sounds like an insult, especially if you were a schoolkid circa 1981, when the word ‘Joey’ was regularly employed as a term of abuse on the hilarious basis that it was the name of a man with cerebral palsy who’d featured heavily on
Blue Peter
. It was a cruel and infantile way for kids to get an easy laugh.

Anyway, this bunch of Joeys are set to annoy the nation for weeks to come. Two stand out: Lewis, a blond-haired Gillette-advert-in-waiting who looks like he’s auditioning for a role in
Wilmott-Brown: The Early Years;
and sweet-natured Johndeep, pronounced ‘John Deep’—perhaps the greatest pornstar name in history.

The live studio shows start tonight, which is just as well, because last week’s ‘boot camp’ episode was so choppy and packaged it felt like an extended trailer, packed with obviously manufactured moments of drama, yet oddly devoid of substance even though emotions amongst the Joeys were clearly running high. I’ve never seen so many grown men crying. Either someone kept letting off spectacularly eggy guffs in the rehearsal room (I’m looking at you, Denise Van Outen) or they’re taking the whole thing far too seriously.

Or maybe they were simply scared of Andrew Lloyd-Webber, whose repeated arrivals were accompanied by a burst
of Phantom of the Opera
organ music on the soundtrack, which had the unfortunate effect of making him seem like a monster in a silent movie, which isn’t hard, given that he looks like the sort of thing that normally breathes through gills on its neck.

Actually, that’s unfair. He’s not scary-faced at all. He looks like Droopy. He does! Google it. See for yourself.

While the BBC’s Joey Hunt restricts itself to sifting through irritating men, ITV’s
Grease Quest
is also open to irksome women. They’re seeking a Danny and a Sandy to play the lead roles in a new production of the popular high school musical. ITV have two main advantages here: (1) thanks to the movie,
Grease
is more familiar to viewers
than Joseph;
(2) they’ve got David Gest on the panel, who’s always entertaining (even if he doesn’t speak, you can simply marvel at his face, which coincidentally looks like Lloyd-Webber impersonating Paul Simon).

As a programme, it’s all packaged together in precisely the same way as
The X Factor
, and I mean precisely: the main difference being that in addition to singing, the wannabes are also required to dance and act, thereby affording the producers three separate opportunities to humiliate them. It’s telling that so far, we’ve only been shown ‘acting’ from the terrible auditionees, where it’s used as an extra bucket of shit to throw over them. Just how brilliant at acting were your shiny happy chosen ones, then, eh? Eh?
Eft?

Further proof that edit suites, like musicals, are not to be trusted.

Steamy hand-on-Bible close-ups

[21 Apni 2007]

O
ne hundred per cent uncensored judicial procedure! Steamy hand-on-Bible close-ups! Hardcore gavel-banging action! Girls who love oaths and want to swallow YOUR testimony! Yes! It’s
Sex in Court
(4)—the show in which sexual intercourse and the British legal system are combined at last, to create the creepiest bit of broadcasting in quite some time.

It works like this. Find a couple with some kind of sexual dysfunction (she can’t climax without using a vibrator; he insists on shrieking ‘You can’t
handle
the truth!’ just before ejaculating, etc. etc). Invite them into a convincing replica courtroom. Find a real-life judge who doesn’t mind presiding over this sort of’case’, and twelve members of the public prepared to form a ‘jury’. Switch the cameras on. Done.

Prospective masturbators lured by the title are likely to be disappointed. The programme largely consists of close-ups of old women on the jury listening attentively to sexual problems being discussed using explicit terminology. The judge, who also features a lot, resembles a cross between the dead one out of
Two Fat Ladies
and the Queen of Hearts from Disney’s
Alice in Wonderland
. In a recent edition she discussed cunnilingus at length with an eighteen-year-old who wanted his girlfriend to let him perform oral sex because ‘Every woman would like to get her pussy licked—even you, your honour—you’d like to get your pussy licked, innit?’ Occasionally, they call an ‘expert witness’—often an old doctor who holds up medical diagrams of genitals and spends rather too long pointing out the sensitive bits.

In other words, it’s less erotic than choosing a door handle from a Dutch home-fittings catalogue. The only way they could make it less arousing would be to intermittently cut to footage of a squatting farmhand crapping into a pail—shot from the pail’s point of view, so it looks like a fat brown snake squeezing through a quoit. In fact it’s so powerfully unsexy, I suspect it’s part of some government initiative aimed at curbing procreation. Remember that scene in
A Clockwork Orange
where they feed Alex some kind of nausea drug and force him to watch footage of rapes and beatings until he can’t contemplate either without feeling ill? This is more effective, and doesn’t require drugs. After half an hour of
Sex in Court
, you won’t be able to have sex for weeks without haunting close-ups of jurors’ faces drifting through your mind’s eye. That must be what it’s designed to do, because it doesn’t seem to serve any other purpose. Weird.

Speaking of weird, a quick update on
24
(Sky One) seems in order, simply because the current season surely constitutes the most awesome example of wholesale shark-jumping in TV history. First they detonate a nuclear bomb in the Los Angeles outskirts in episode four, which initially caused a bit of panic and general running-around, but now, a few hours later, doesn’t seem to have affected the infrastructure or population one iota (in fact, round episode seven, there was a hilarious shot of the mushroom cloud on the horizon, which then panned down to a motel where a maid was blithely going about her minimum-wage job as usual).