Dawn of the Dumb (7 page)

Blub for the remaining islanders—blub as they loll about like dying sea-lions in a failing zoo, accompanied by the sound of gentle lapping as waves of public indifference break upon the shore.

Sniffle for Patrick Kielty and Kelly Brook—a man you wish would shut up before he even starts speaking, and a woman who can scarcely talk in the first place, marooned before an unimpressed nation. Curiously, Brook is listed in the credits as ‘Presenter & Consultant Producer’, which is a pretty impressive job title for someone apparently unable to read from an autocue. Cry for Kelly. Cry for her.

But mainly, cry for us all. If
Love Island has
left you entertaining dark notions, I understand. And I have a plan.

Here’s what we do. We charter a boat. We sail to Fiji. We drop anchor offshore and we light candles and sing songs. And as dawn breaks, we stand on the deck and slit our own throats and splash wordlessly into the ocean. For the next 48 hours our bodies wash up on the beach, one by one. Our lifeless cadavers knock gently against Michael Greco’s ankles as he goes for his morning paddle. Bloated, fish-pecked carcasses slap against the sand throughout the evening barbecue, souring the mood. Our non-violent suicidal protest turns the show into an unfolding Jonestown massacre for the twenty-first century, and ITV’s ongoing ratings crisis is averted.

Alternatively: switch off the box, walk into the garden and stare at the stars while tears shine in your eyes.
Celebrity Love Island:
wish hard enough, and God might make it stop.

Twenty-first-century stocks

[4 June 2005]

W
hen I first read about olde-worlde scoundrels being ‘put in the stocks’, it struck me as a quaint and toothless sort of punishment. Further reading proved me wrong. The locals didn’t just lob the odd rotten tomato at you—they hurled rocks. They urinated in your face. They pulled your trousers down and performed vile-but-darkly-hilarious experiments with your rear end. Spend 48 hours in the stocks, and there was a pretty good chance you’d die, with a face like a popped blister and a rolling pin blocking your exit.

Which brings me to
Big Brother
(C4). Anyone volunteering to take part is surely the present-day equivalent of a medieval lunatic willingly locking himself in the stocks and inviting the world to do its worst. The viewers represent ale-sodden sadists only too pleased to oblige, while the producers are canny tradesmen standing at the side, selling shit-encrusted rocks for them to throw. And since I’m about to pile more abuse on top, what does that make me? Worse than the village idiot. No one’s coming out of this well.

Anyway, if you sketched a diagram denoting the exponential growth of contestant idiocy levels throughout
Big Brother
history, you’d start low, run out of space at the top during series five, and scrawl demented swirls all over the page by the start of series six. Because this lot scarcely qualify as fully sentient humans—they’re people-shaped amoebas existing on raw narcissism.

Take Anthony, the present-day equivalent of the utilitarian android gigolo played by Jude Law in Spielberg’s
AI
, right down to the fibreglass eyebrows. Anthony achieved a
BB
first by turning the crowd against him before he’d even entered the house: he spent so long jigging, twirling, posing and preening during the brief car-to-door stroll, the crowd’s initial cheering rapidly evolved into a chant of’wanker, wanker’ held aloft on a carpet of boos. It was like watching Tony Blair’s eight-year fall from public favour distilled into 90 seconds.

Then there’s Lesley, who donned a PVC nurse’s outfit that afforded us a gruesome peek up her arse on her way into the house (another great
BB
first) shortly before baring her gargantuan breasts in the plunge pool. This delighted the witless Maxwell, a Norf Lahnden bozo best described as the human equivalent of a clipping from
Nuts
magazine bobbing in a fetid urinal.

At the time of writing, Maxwell has designs on Sam, a slightly less skeletal version of Calista Flockhart, who spent most of her audition tape outlining what a strong, independent, hot-pants-wearing sexbomb she is. In practice, however, she’s litde more than a slightly pretty, self-regarding plastic peg.

Worse still, she fancies Anthony: by the time you read this, they’ll probably be going at it hammer and tongs in the diary room, while viewers text in whoops of encouragement.

Other notable inmates include Makosi, a woman with the head and worldview of a plastic doll, and Roberto, an Italian with a face like a cartoon sketch of a foolish horse.

The most foolish horse of all, though, is Science. That’s not his real name. His real name’s Kieran. Science is his ‘street name’. His ‘screen name’ is Prick.

Science seems to spend 70 per cent of his time shouting at Kemal (cross-dressing Leo Sayer lookalike), and the remaining 30 per cent shouting at everyone else—shouting about how no one but him understands what it’s like ‘in the hood’ (which is rather unfair on Nookie Bear-eyed white witch Mary, who entered the house wearing a hood so huge she literally couldn’t see which way she was going).

Still, you can’t fault Science’s intentions. He’s not there to get his mug on the box—no. He’s there to ‘represent the ghetto’, which, if he’s genuinely representative, is full of pretentious hotheads throwing juvenile tantrums when they don’t get salad cream with their fish fingers.

Big Brother 6
, then: simultaneously more
and
less sophisticated than the brutal stocks of yore. Pass the mouldy turnips.

A ham-eyed poltroon

[11 June 2005]

I
s it just me, or is there something about young, over-confident male idiots that makes you want to smack the entire world in the mouth? I’m asking this because I’ve just discovered bookies are offering odds of 5-1 for Maxwell to win this year’s
Big Brother
(C4).

This depresses and baffles me in equal measure. The man’s a goon, a berk, a gurgling bore, a ham-eyed poltroon and a great big swaggering chump. There are only two things in life he passionately cares about: whether Arsenal win and whether Saskia (who could pass for Giant Haystacks’s sister on a dark night) wants to blow him. If I ran the country, people like that would be chemically neutered the moment they learned to rut.

Worse still, I’ve heard people describe him as ‘really funny’. That’s what they said about Joe Pasquale on
I’m a Celebrity
, and he’s hardly had the world shattering its ribcage with giggles since emerging from the jungle, has he? He may well seem ‘funny’, but only if you compare him to, say, Roberto, who just lopes around gruffly moaning about coffee. Maxwell’s the sort of person who openly breaks wind and then makes a trumpet noise with his mouth to underline how hilarious it was, for God’s sake.

Science—now he’s funny. I had a pop at Science last week; since then my attitude toward him has mellowed immeasurably. For one thing, he perpetually argues with Maxwell (who, as we’ve already established, deserves harsh treatment at the hands of the state). Better still, he intimidates Anthony, and anything that makes that tweeting Geordie ferret uncomfortable immediately rises in my estimations. For the record, if Anthony ever contracts pubic lice, I’d like to shake every single one of them individually by the hand (provided they’d washed them first, obviously).

Actually, the more I think about this year’s housemates, the more I start praying for an extinction-level meteorite to strike the Earth. I’ll tell you what just dropped into my head: Craig’s voice. His ceaseless, dull-month-in-Dorking of a voice. It’s surely the worst noise in the universe. Listening to him is like lying in your own coffin, hearing rainwater seep through the cracks.

Still, at least no one in there seems happy to be taking part. The housemates are all either under twenty-five or over thirty. With no angst-ridden late-twentysomethings to smooth things over, what you’re left with is a couple of set-in-their-ways curmudgeons being forced to cohabit with a bunch of squawking know-nothings. I’ll be astonished if it ends without open bloodshed.

All hands on deck

[18 June 2005]

Y
ears ago, a girlfriend of mine booked us on a make-or-break holiday cruise. It sounded great—we’d be sailing to Spain aboard a luxury liner complete with its own casino, a cinema, a cocktail bar and a selection of high-class restaurants. Best of all, she’d got it on the cheap by collecting tokens from a newspaper.

We were young, OK? Young and naive.

The ‘cruise liner’ was a car ferry. The ‘restaurants’ would’ve shamed a motorway service station. The ‘cinema’ consisted of a video projector beaming
Mortal Kombat: The Movie
onto a suspended rectangle which swung left and right along with the ship. The ‘casino’ was an enclave of fruit machines servicing a handful of wheezing alcoholics.

Our cabin was deep in the bowels of the ship. It didn’t even have a porthole. It had a painting of a porthole. Quite a shit painting at that. You couldn’t go on deck because the freezing gales would strip your carcass bare in seconds.

You couldn’t stay in the room because the violent rocking combined with the lack of visual reference points made you spew. All you could do was sit in the cocktail bar, downing whisky and watching the live cabaret—by far the cheesiest thing I’d ever seen, yet strangely uplifting under the circumstances.

All of which brings me to the point: the ship’s cabaret wasn’t a million miles from
The New Variety Show
on SoundTV—and it’s had a similar effect on me: uplifting for no discernible reason.

The New Variety Show
is a family-oriented extravaganza presented by Tucker, a ‘new comedy sensation’ and former Pontins Blue-coat. I sat transfixed through last Saturday’s edition: a two-hour cavalcade of ventriloquists, geezerish stand-ups in spangly jackets, a Sinatra impersonator with the face of a farmhand, and a star turn from Duncan Norvelle. It’s like stumbling across an old edition of
Summertime Special
on VHS. Which isn’t always a bad thing.

The high point came when chunky crooner Tony King sang an anti-war anthem so impossibly, hilariously crass it demanded three immediate repeat viewings. Funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks.

SoundTV itself is ‘the brainchild of established television entertainers Jethro, Richard Digance and Mike Osman…its team of executives includes Chris Tarrant [and] handyman Tommy Walsh’. Which explains why, alongside
The New Variety Show
, the channel broadcasts
Golden Moments
, in which a galaxy of stars including Jethro, Chris Tarrant, Brian Conley and Tommy Walsh discuss their fondest memories, and
In Conversation
, in which a galaxy of stars including Jethro, Chris Tarrant, Brian Conley and Tommy Walsh talk to Richard Digance. There’s also
Richard Digance and Friends, A Day in the Life of Status Quo, Status Quo in Concert, Chris Tarrant’s Golden Moments
and
A Day in the Life of Jethro
.

Who says variety’s dead?

Just when you think SoundTV can’t get any more Alan Partridge, along comes something to take your breath away: according to the website, we’ll soon be enjoying
Tommy’s Ark
, ‘an enchanting series of specials in which Tommy Walsh recreates the famous biblical vessel as a travelling playground for sick and underprivileged children…animals for the ark will be supplied by top celebrities, who’ll beg, steal or borrow the furry passengers to present to deserving children as the ark travels the country.’

Read that back again and picture it in your head. Go on.

Anyway, I suspect SoundTV might just succeed. It’s gaudy and cheap, but there’s something curiously endearing about the all-hands-on-deck nature of its schedule. Among the chintz you can also get genuine belly laughs from the likes of Mick Miller, and in satellite terms, it beats watching UK Lifestyle
Hollyoaks Plus
. More power to them.

Oh, and that ‘make or break’ cruise I mentioned? We only got 90 minutes in Spain at the end of it Then back on the ferry for the return trip, during which we finally ‘broke’.

Now that’s a holiday.

Pure bling in action

[25 June 2005]

T
his heatwave’s sending me crackers. Night-time’s the worst. Since I live in London, I can’t sleep with the window open in case someone crawls in and kills me with a bit of railing or something. So it’s humid. The air tastes like it’s been strained through a hot leotard. I lie sleepless, thrashing like a fallen horse, tortured by stuttering flashbacks from this week’s television, convinced the apocalypse is nigh.

Yes, I’m a hair’s breadth from becoming the sort of person who stands shirtless at the side of the road shouting into traffic about the forthcoming end of the world—and it’s somehow due to television, to shows like
Pimp My Ride UK
(MTV) which leave me seriously questioning the human race’s grip on existence.

The original
Pimp My Ride
is an American import in which a team of butch mechanics (under the aegis of rapper Xzibit) perform extreme makeovers on clapped-out automobiles. This British incarnation is exactly the same. Well, almost. Instead of Xzibit we’re lumbered with the preposterous Tim Westwood, a white forty-something son of a bishop whose interminable ‘wigga’ stance inspired Ali G. Watching him in action is like watching a sequence in a crap Hollywood comedy in which Leslie Nielsen has to black up and infiltrate a record label.

The British mechanics aren’t as convincing as their American counterparts either. In the US version, they look like a gang of death row inmates crossed with a group of surfers—all tattoos and cool attitude. The British mechanics look like…well, like British mechanics—apart from their hairstyles, which are suspiciously modern. I suspect they’ve been ‘pimped’ themselves by a team of stylists, although the end result leaves them resembling the cast of
EastEnders
circa 2019.