Dawn of the Dumb (8 page)

Anyway, above all else,
Pimp My Ride
is phenomenally and frighteningly shallow. Each edition tracks a single car as it’s resprayed, rebuilt, reformed and kitted out with a universe of unnecessary extras—spoilers, bumpers, giant stereos, in-car games consoles, singing windscreen wipers, passenger-seat bidets and so on. All of which happens for no discernible reason at all. It’s pure ‘bling’ in action—the celebration of gaudy, self-aggrandising, shallow, meaningless shit for its own barefaced sake.

At a time when extreme global poverty and environmental sus-tainability loom high on the international agenda, driving around in a car encrusted with golden baubles is just taking the piss, isn’t it? It’s like squatting in front of a beggar and wiping your bum on a banknote. If I see a
Pimp My Ride
motor humming past I’ll be tempted to leap in front of it. I might die, but on the bright side, the dent and the bloodstains might temporarily wipe the vapid grin off the face of the idiot driving.

Speaking of vapid grins, at the time of writing the
Big Brother (C4
) house is still hopelessly infected with Maxwell—a witless droopy-eyed thug and the most despicable housemate in the programme’s history. Despite single-handedly making the show impossible to sit through, in his own mind he’s guaranteed a career in broadcasting the moment he leaves. Lolling around in the loft the other day, he spent several minutes confidently discussing his future media-career options with Anthony the Formica Android.

As the words ‘I wouldn’t turn down a radio job’ farted through his pukesome little blowhole, I was suddenly confronted by a terrify-ingly plausible vision of the future in which Chris Moyles is suddenly only the second most gormless and insufferable prick on Radio i. Here’s a better idea: give Maxwell a job on
Pimp My Ride

UK
. He won’t take much convincing—it’s a show about selfish boasting. And he can perform a valuable service by testing the cars’ safety features. With Maxwell in the driving seat, I’d happily watch hour upon hour of blinged-out motors thundering headlong into ditches, walls, oncoming trains, the ocean…whatever. Provided it’s fatal, I’m there. Might even help me sleep nights.

Nigella. Nigella. Nigella. Nigella

[9 juiy 2005]

N
igella. Nigella, Nigella, Nigella. It sounds like a playground nickname for an effeminate boy. They might as well have called her ‘Malcolmina’. Or ‘Keithette’.

Nigella. Nigella. Nigella. Nigella.

Tell you what else it sounds like: a brand of antiseptic cream. Or an island off the Italian coastline. Or an incredibly pretentious kind of tiny ethnic hat. Or a cheap and horrible car (‘Police are on the lookout for a light blue Fiat Nigella’).

Here’s what it doesn’t sound like: an ITV daytime show. But that’s precisely what
Nigella
(ITV1) has become. She’s become a celebrity chat show, and a cookery show, and a human-interest debate show—all at once.

Confused? Try watching it. It opens with a kitsch credit sequence in which Nigella flutters her eyelashes and smiles a lot. Then she appears in person, looking far more ill at ease—like a minor royal who’s somehow been coerced into presenting a Christmas edition
of Blue Peter
. A minor royal who started regretting it the moment the lights went up.

After a spirited, doomed attempt to read naturally from the autocue, Princess Nigella meets her celebrity guest-of-the-day, then cooks a meal for them while simultaneously conducting an interview. Naturally, since she has to concentrate on making sure she doesn’t overcook the salmon or inadvertently hack her thumb off, she can’t absorb anything they’re saying, and the conversation flows like granite. It’s hardly fair: even a veteran presenter would struggle. Nigella’s clearly inexperienced, yet she’s literally expected to spin plates. What next? Make her do it on stilts?

It’s bewildering just watching it. In fact, it makes your brain hurt. Are you supposed to follow the recipe, or the discussion? Or both? Is it some kind of test? If so, perhaps next week they’d like to superimpose an animated pie chart over the screen at the same time.

Anyway, once the baffling cookery-interview is out of the way, it’s time for a REALLY horrible bit in which a dowdy, downtrodden member of the public is wheeled on to discuss a personal problem while HRH Ovenglove does her best to sympathise and give counsel, like Princess Diana getting dewy-eyed at a peasant’s hospital bedside. It’s toe-curlingly awkward, but at least Nigella’s not being asked to toss pancakes at the same time. Yet.

Just as you’ve got to grips with that, there’s another awkward gear-shift and the show suddenly turns into
Loose Women
, as Her Sacred Cookliness and a couple of guests loll around and discuss an ‘issue’, apparently just for the hell of it. On Tuesday’s edition, the ‘issue’ was ‘old folks’ homes’—not because they’re in the news, but because Nigella had just read a book about one. Come week three she’ll be reading the nutritional information panel off the side of a soup carton and asking her guests to guess the carbohydrate content. While deboning a herring. On stilts.

Then there’s an unbelievably condescending phone-in section (members of the public whine about their problems: Nigella and Co. offer sympathetic platitudes), a competition, and another bloody recipe. Then it’s all over and you’re out the other end, with an icky taste in your mouth. Never a good sign for a cookery show.

Hysterical blindness

[16 juiy 2005]

O
h, my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! I’m talking about Paul McKenna, obviously. Yes, Paul McKenna, formerly ITV’s favourite celebrity hypnotist, now repackaged in
Paul McKenna: I Can Change Your Life
(Sky One) as a kind of self-help cross between Derren Brown and Jesus.

From the off, the show is hell-bent on depicting the Archangel Paul as a bona-fide miracle worker. The opening credits even seem to show him floating in heaven, swooshing beams of celestial light around with his hands, knitting them into patterns and plugging them together as though they were Scart leads. He looks like a god. An impish little god who, facially speaking, is vaguely reminiscent of Brian the snail from
The Magic Roundabout—
but a god nonetheless. And the rest of the programme does little to dissuade you.

Using a curious blend of hypnotherapy and general psychological tomfoolery, McKenna sets about curing the ills of members of the general public. How does it work? The human mind is like a computer,’ he claims. ‘When someone has a problem, I can help them reprogram themselves.’ Great. That’s cleared that up.

Paul’s ‘reprogramming’ generally seems to consist of getting, say, an obsessive chocoholic to imagine eating a chocolate cake smothered in dogshit, over and over again, until they start looking like they’ll never eat anything again. It all looks pretty straightforward, and (unless his subjects are lying, which I doubt) it seems to work. The problem is Paul sometimes bites off a little more than he can chew. Such as when he attempts to cure the blind.

Yes, last week, Paul McKenna set about healing a blind man. Initially, this didn’t seem quite as absurd as it sounds, since Ray, the man in question, had been diagnosed with ‘hysterical blindness’, a condition in which the cause of sightlessness is entirely psychological. Following intensive hypnosis, Paul encouraged Ray some way down the road to full vision, to the point where, incredibly, he could make out light, shapes and perspective.

So far, so miraculous, but Paul was aiming higher still. To speed the treatment, he sent Ray to ‘a healer’, who, we were told, could help ‘clear the energy blocks’ around Ray’s eyes (simply by waggling her fingers around, by the looks of it). It was around this point I began to have my doubts about Paul.

And then the bad news arrived: a doctor (a real one) re-examined Ray’s case and decided the cause of blindness was physical after all. No amount of finger-waggling was going to let him see again. The relentlessly positive Paul took this in his stride.

‘I don’t think I would’ve taken this case on if I’d known it was a physiological problem, because I’d have thought that was out of the realm of what I could treat/ he said, modestly. ‘It just goes to show: when you don’t know something’s impossible—look what you can do!’

Er, yeah. So what exactly did he do? There seemed little doubt the subject himself felt his vision had improved—not returned, but improved. Had Paul helped him make more sense of the impaired images he’d always been seeing? Or had he literally worked a miracle and returned some of the man’s sight? The show was frustratingly ambiguous.

This is entertainment, not science, of course, but I can’t help finding it a little unsettling that a large part of the Sky One audience is walking around right now convinced that Paul McKenna can heal the blind (although I suppose we should just be grateful he’s using his hypnotic powers for good—ever seen
Omen IIP
. We don’t want him pulling that kind of stunt, thanks very much).

Speaking of science, before I go, can I just say:
Big Brother 6
(C4)—Science to win. I know I said he was a prick in week one but he’s also the most deserving winner by a long chalk. Even a blind man can see that. With or without the assistance of Our Lord McKenna Almighty.

The no-pity-for-toffs rule

[23 My 2005]

H
ard scientific fact: unless you’re a member of the gentry yourself, it’s neurologically impossible to feel in the slightest bit sorry for posh people under any circumstances whatsoever. It’s true. A team of researchers proved it in a laboratory. They took a random bunch of proles, wired them to some electro-magnificent brain-scanner widgets, and showed them footage of top-hatted aristocrats falling from buildings, tumbling into threshing machines and inadvertently poisoning their own children. No one exhibited the faintest glimmer of pity for any of them. I think it’s something to do with the accents.

Actually there is one exception to the no-pity-for-toffs rule, and that’s journalist James Delingpole, who pities them so much he’s made a documentary called
The British Upper Class
(C4)—a passionate defence of roaring snobs and everything they bally well stand for. Delingpole himself is middle class and sincerely wishes he wasn’t. ‘I’m no toff, and I never will be,’ he confesses. ‘But I’ve always been curious about the upper class—it all started when I was at Oxford back in the 8os.’

Having established his credentials, James (who went to Oxford) sets out on ‘a journey’ to discover just what it is about the gentry that gives him such a broom-handle. First port of call is a posh party thrown by historian Andrew Roberts, who reckons the upper classes are ‘impossibly romantic and splendid’. Rubbing shoulders with earls, viscounts, dames and princes, James (formerly of Oxford University) seems happy as a pig in shit. But alas! Not one of the toffs he approaches wants to take part in his documentary. Not even Earl Spencer. Not even when James walks right up to him and bellows, ‘I’m James Delingpole, I reviewed your book about Blenheim,’ byway of introduction.

The poshos, James reckons, are ‘terrified of being stitched up’, although I suspect their reticence has more to do with James himself, who looks like a cross between Mick Jones and Mr Logic, and is cursed with a floppy bottom lip which dangles so perilously low it’s a wonder he doesn’t trip over it. They’re probably just freaked out.

Never mind. James leaves the party and sets about persuading us the upper classes are inherently admirable because they’re jolly keen on rough-and-ready games. To prove it he visits St Moritz and has a crack at the Cresta Run (an extreme tobogganing event favoured by blue bloods). It’s dangerous and thrilling, sure—but a taste for perilous activities is hardly limited to the aristocracy. You don’t need a coat of arms to go skateboarding, just a benevolent attitude toward shattering your hip on a concrete step. Idiotic thrill-seekers exist in all classes. As do tossers called James.

Next, James mourns the passing of two other favourite posho sports—fox-hunting (‘a magnificent sight!’) and hare-coursing. The latter, he reckons, is under attack because it’s ‘a ritual that flies in the face of sanitised bourgeois morality…it’s too messy, too visceral—too real.’

‘Nowadays it’s the middle classes who are running the show. For many of them, traditions are all very well, so long as they’re cleaned up, packaged, and sold back to us as products in the National Trust gift shop. But [hare-coursing] isn’t ‘chocolate box’ heritage, it’s the real thing—and the chattering classes simply can’t hack it.’

Yeah, James—you tell ‘em! Screw the nanny state! Let’s see that rabbit blood fly! Let’s get naked and dance around in a big fat spray of it! And since you’re keen to preserve noble English customs that celebrate ‘the cycle of life and death’, let’s reintroduce some others—such as the tradition of sticking criminals’ heads on poles above the entrance to London Bridge, where they can be pecked at by crows until they go a bit mushy and topple off and burst on the cobblestones below! Like to see what those Islington pussies make of that! Ah well. At least Delingpole succeeds in improving the image of the upper classes. Whenever he opens his mouth to defend them, they magically become fifty times less irritating. Than him.

Drunk on the news

[30 juiy 2005]

I
appeared drunk on the news once—as a pundit. Beat that This happened way back in the mists of time. Well, six or seven years ago—although at the rate the world’s accelerating (right now we’re eating our way through a decade’s worth of history every week) that’s equivalent to six or seven millennia. Way back yonder, back when I was a video-games ‘journalist’, and I used to turn up around midnight on BBC News 24 to be quizzed about (a) the PlayStation games chart and (b) whichever vaguely technological stories were in the news (all of which I knew nothing about).