Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  Second, and more worryingly, some of the participants show signs of being genuinely likeable – such as Claire, the uncompromising chunky Scot with the powerful voice. In order to enjoy Popstars, the viewer should ignore any glimmer of congeniality emanating from a contestant at all costs. Concentrate on Darius, the slick-haired beanpole who manages to combine inarguably strong vocals with a nauseating overconfidence that makes you want to tattoo an indelible ‘kick me’ sign on his back, so that one day, years from now, a disaffected orderly in an old folks’ home will spot it during bath time and plant their foot so far up his arse it’ll get jammed between his vertebrae.

  Still, at least he can sing, unlike the 18 zillion no-hopers rejected last week by Nigel Lythgoe, talent scout extraordinaire.

  Ahh, Nigel. Glamour with its shirt tucked in. He looks like a man ordering gammon steak in a motorway service station. He looks like Eric Idle watching a dog drown. He’s got faintly sad eyes, the world’s least fashionable hair, and the complexion of a man who’s held his hair out the window of a speeding car for the past two days. Standing before the tide of wannabes, he exudes deflated insincerity with every glance, each gentle dismissal of a shivering tune-dodger followed up with a deadpan backstage barb regarding their overall worthlessness.

  And he’s right: most are rubbish. Of the instant losers, the boys in particular all appeared identical – each resembling an anxious Dixons trainee moving limply in for the kill on a damp Saturday afternoon. The girls at least displayed emotion by bursting into tears and shouting bleepwords at the moment of jettison.

  (How come winners and losers alike deem it necessary to adopt the same hideous homogenised transatlantic ‘singing voice’ when they perform? You know the one – Robbie Williams uses it permanently, and it knocks all the soul from a tune with the brutal efficiency of a carpet-beater.)

  Yes, Popstars is pretty mindless; yes, it’s yet another programme that insists on treating the canon of Ronan Keating/Robbie Williams/Celine Dion with wholly undeserved respect, and yes it’s exploitative, but hoo, boy – can’t you feel the SADISM?

  Despise the aforementioned megastars? Then tune in to this week’s instalment, as several hundred fame-chasers have their dreams bent, shattered, cracked and pissed on by Nigel and co. – then televised for the whole world to see? Yuk yuk!

  And when the final five are in place, we can settle down to some agony and in-fighting. Then slag off their records together.

  Right there’s where they start paying. In sweat.

  Out in the Digital Neverwhere [20 January]

  Anyone who enjoys watching sport on television is an imbecile; a dangle-mouthed, cud-chewing, salivating ding-dong with a brain full of dim piss, blobbing out in front of a box watching a grunting thicko knock a ball round a field while their own sad carcass gently coagulates into a wobbling mass of beer and fat and thick white heart-attack gravy.

  That’s my opinion anyway, which is why I wasn’t the slightest bit annoyed when Sky began gulping up all the major sporting events, whisking them away from the terrestrial networks to be sealed inside a trio of peek-a-boo pay channels I’d be perfectly happy to hurl at the moon. The less sport on mainstream TV the better – it leaves more room for truly entertaining stuff, like comedy.

  Except it doesn’t. To the terrestrial audience, comedy’s turned invisible. Oh, it’s still being made all right, but it’s lurking off the corner of your screen, out in the digital neverwhere with the sport and the pop and the documentaries about skirting boards. New comedy is getting banished to the wilderness of cable and satellite, where it’s forced to fight over scraps until it’s considered mighty and strong enough to be allowed back inside Terrestrial Kingdom.

  This is the age of the ‘feed channel’ – digital offshoots of major networks that nurture and develop new shows until they’re ready to be broadcast by the mothership. BBC Choice, ITV2 and the freshly minted E4 all function as feeders to some extent. A good idea? Well, yes and no.

  Case in point: Attention, Scum on BBC Choice; perhaps the finest title for any television programme ever, and a potentially brilliant show clearly handicapped by a restrictive budget. It stars Simon Munnery (as the League Against Tedium), using a relentless multimedia lecture to remorselessly bully laughs from your mouth in the manner of a SWAT team tossing tear gas through a window to force a suspect into the line of fire.

  And at first, it’s thrilling – stark captions declare the viewer to be a teeny speck of awful nothing, while Munnery loudly demands that you ‘pay attention’. Cut to Munnery atop a transit van, bemusing passers-by with salvo after salvo of smart aphorisms and cheap jokes, bellowed like the commands of a terrifying robot god. Cut to a weird sketch with Kevin Eldon. Cut to some rude opera. Cut to a piece of wilfully crude quasi-animation, accompanied by another bellowed lecture. Cut back to the transit van. And so on and so on. After half an hour of relentless shouting, you’ve just about had enough: it’s all too one-note, like being cornered on a stairwell by an entertaining madman while a Styrofoam cup of coffee burns the palm of your hand.

  But invention and ability aren’t the problem: time and money are. Sketch shows are phenomenally expensive, which is one reason why running gags using a single character and location feature so heavily: you can shoot loads of them at once, thereby freeing up time and money to lavish on your one-off set pieces.

  Attention, Scum seems to have a budget capable of sustaining a small collection of lo-fi running gags and little else: as a result there’s too much enforced repetition – leaving each half-hour edition feeling more like three 10-minute broadcasts crammed together.

  It doubtless cost twenty times as much as Munnery’s previous digital shows – FuturTV and Either/Or, both created for music and comedy channel PlayUK for about 16 pence. The cheaper the show, the harder everyone connected with it has to work: Munnery must be knackered. Someone give him the money to do it properly before the poor bugger keels over.

  In other news, Popstars (ITV) continues to amuse and appal, despite last week’s edition being practically identical to the first. From here on in it starts to get nasty. And there’s also the prospect of the finished band being named by a public vote – the Australians went for the dull-sounding Bardot when the series ran down-under, so we owe it to ourselves to pick a more suitable, memorable moniker.

  Your suggestions will be gratefully received – e-mail them in, and I’ll announce the finest. To get you started, my initial suggestions are as follows: 1) Synchronised Yelping Head Multiplex, 2) Songy-Wongy, 3) Funtrocity, 4) Sweatshop Jailbait, and 5) Misery Distraction Patrol. But you can do better. Get scribbling.

  Spiritual Liposuction [27 January]

  Kids today, eh? They’ve had all the innocence sucked out of them, like they’ve undergone some kind of spiritual liposuction operation. You know it’s true. You’ve heard them at the back of the bus, swapping Fight Club stories and the kind of filthy anecdotes that could get you thrown off an oil rig. You’ve seen them knocking each other insensible in the playgrounds, gleefully twirling nunchakas, biting and kicking like uniformed participants in a special dwarves edition of ‘Tekken’. They’re scary.

  As a 10-year-old, the mere mention of the word ‘fart’ was enough to make me giggle until milk came out of my nose, even when I wasn’t drinking any; a modern 10-year-old wouldn’t laugh unless they were carving it into a pensioner’s forehead with the lid of an old tin can. I was once so frightened by a midnight showing of King Kong on BBC2, I spent a largely sleepless night with my head tucked under the duvet, half-expecting to be attacked by an animated gorilla. These days the average primary-school child can sit through thirteen consecutive hours of 3D bestial porn on a WAP-enabled Internet bong without so much as blinking.

  Blame television. Go on. Never before have kids been presented with such an endless stream of glamorous images they don’t have a hope of living up to. When you realise, age nine, that you’re far too ugly and normal to be in S Club 7, you figure you might as
well spend the rest of your life flicking snot at the walls, shouting ‘Bollocks to everything’ every six seconds. And who can blame you?

  Here is hope. Grange Hill (BBC1) is still going. And it’s just as good as it used to be. Better, in fact. Of course, it’s changed a bit. Don’t worry, they haven’t replaced the famous ‘hurled-sausage-on-a-fork’ from the opening titles with a severed penis impaled on a syringe, although the iconic ‘comic strip’ sequence and twangy signature tune are long gone – replaced by a nondescript visual collage and a theme tune which, unless I’m mistaken, is a weedy plinky-plonk cover version of the theme from Cagney and Lacey.

  To these weary eyes, most of the kids look identical to one another but that’s probably got more to do with my age than their faces, which seem to blur into one creaseless, eyebag-free wash of young flesh after 10 minutes. Nevertheless, a few stand out, traditional Grange Hill archetypes: the evil one (who’s selling cigarettes to the little kids), the pair of scheming loveable chancers (this week trying their hand at busking), the ‘weird’ kid (apparently autistic), the male and female heart-throbs (you never get over your first Grange Hill crush), and the kids with the problems at home (a boy with a dad in prison, and two girls whose parents are splitting up).

  Some other traditions hold firm: the teachers are just quirky enough to appear eccentric without being sinister, and the sixth-form teens remain the most crashingly tedious, self-righteous shop-window dummies on earth.

  The changes, then – starting with the pace, which has been upped considerably (lots of short, snappy scenes), and the camerawork, which is more stylised and energetic than ever before. Almost every sequence seems to end with a visual punchline: a sudden jump to an overhead shot, or an arrangement of pupils so symmetrical you could be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled across an unreleased Peter Greenaway film (albeit one far less tedious and with at least 86 per cent less Philip Glass).

  It works. It draws you in and keeps you entertained. It’s nowhere near as patronising as, say, Casualty, and it treats its audience with 16 million times more respect than any ITV drama starring Ross Kemp (a man who always looks like he’s trying to win a staring competition with a couple of knotholes). Best of all, it simply doesn’t have time for any of the self-obsessed, navel-gazing designer angst of ‘youth’ favourites such as Dawson’s Creek. Long may it reign.

  Last week’s request for names for the final Popstars band drew an encouraging response. So far, printable highlights include: 1) Enter-painment, 2) Dry Dream, 3) Vacant Lot, 4) Orchestrated Plebian Wonder Machine, 5) Stairs, 6) The Flipchart Demographics, and my favorite to date: 7) Nigel.

  Faceless Dolls [2 February]

  Shipwrecked 2 (C4) marks a turning point for reality television: the point where outright boredom smothers any voyeuristic appeal.

  Here’s the premise: take seventeen youngsters, maroon them on a desert island for ten weeks, then stand well back and see what they do.

  And here’s what happens: they flirt and argue.

  The viewer is expected to find this mesmerising. Why? What’s the big deal? Strand seventeen youngsters at a bus stop for ten minutes and they’ll flirt and argue just as much. Why bother zipping them halfway round the world – especially when they’re essentially as bland as a bunch of bathmats?

  Answer: because it’s a good excuse to film them frolicking about in swimwear. Most of the castaways appear to have been chosen on the strength of their looks, giving the entire exercise the feel of a strange feral edition of Hollyoaks, albeit one with fewer sympathetic characters – on the whole the boys are the most irksome: a blend of bratty I’m-the-leader public-school types, and unapologetic lads whose idea of a civilised afternoon probably revolves around scrawling comedy dicks in the margins of ‘Bum Hair Monthly’.

  Still, they’re young; they’re allowed to be dumb. Perhaps it’s just a phase they’re going through. Shipwrecked may be irritating, but it isn’t their fault.

  So what’s the problem? Isn’t it interesting to see how they cope with the harsh realities of survivalism? Somehow, no. Well, surely you godda admit it’s kinda fascinating seeing the group dynamic crumble as island life gets tougher, right? Once again, the answer is no: they just come across as a group of bickering idiots – and the programme’s to blame. It’s deliberately structured like an argument factory – a situation contrived to provoke irritation and confrontation. You could achieve similar results by locking the castaways in a warehouse in Bristol, making them wear hessian sacks and flicking rice in their ears. It might kill off the flirting, but by God there’d be some cracking rows. Plus it would be funnier than watching someone in a grass skirt munching a coconut.

  So why did they make Shipwrecked 2 at all? Because too many people believe anything vaguely confrontational immediately equals ‘good television’. Yes, as any twinkle-eyed pop-culture spoonbrain will attest, it’s ‘good television’ to strand a bunch of wannabe loudmouths in the middle of nowhere and watch them squabble and bicker until your ears ring to bursting point with their bleatings. It doesn’t have to make you think, it doesn’t have to lift your spirits – it only has to keep you staring at the box in the corner of the room. Any old antagonistic crap will do, provided it’s nicely packaged and slung at your eyeballs.

  Thing is, it is entirely possible to make a youth-oriented reality show that entertains more than it infuriates, as proven by ongoing smash Popstars (ITV), which benefits heavily from skilful editing and a sprinkling of sympathetic participants, although ever since Darius got the shove any incentive to tune in has plummeted.

  Yes, Darius. Stop your protests: his fame is entirely deserved. He’d be the finest comic creation for ages, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s real. Last week’s interview in which he described his plan to dive headlong into the shallow world of fame and materialism ‘to see if I can change it (slow blink, loaded pause) and if I can’t … at least I’ll know I tried’ is unlikely to be topped as the laugh-outloud-moment of the year.

  It’s a crying shame he’s gone, but hooray: your suggestions for band names continue to flood in. Top ten from the mailbag this week: 10) Queens of the Stone Deaf, 9) Cliché and the Sunshine Brand, 8) Processed Cheese, 7) Ploy Division, 6) … And You Will Find Us In the Bargain Bin, 5) Boxfresh Gibbon Kidz, 4) Freebase Aspartame, 3) Dad Erector – but sitting pretty at the top of the pops, two suggestions culled from a genuine press release regarding official Popstars merchandise, which arrived alongside your fictional entries: ‘… Amongst the companies keen to exploit the band’s inevitable popularity is Character Options, who have been appointed exclusive distributors of the Popstars dolls. Faceless dolls will be unveiled at the largest toy trade show of the year … the dolls will appear in their official outfits but remain faceless until the final band line-up is revealed.’

  Can’t argue with that: so at number 2) it’s Character Options, and at number 1) – in with a bullet! – Faceless Dolls.

  Pick a favourite: vote now.

  ‘You’re watching Breakfast’ [10 February]

  Never trust a morning person. Anyone who leaps out of bed with a smile on their face and a spring in their step is deranged. And breakfast television is aimed at these lunatics. It must be: who the hell else has time to watch TV in the morning? Most of us are still in bed, pawing blearily at the snooze button until it’s too late to procrastinate further and we have to head bogwards for the first and darkest piddle of the day.

  Here’s the ideal breakfast TV show, one that would work brilliantly on that 14-inch portable at the base of your bed: an abstract collage of soothing shapes and colours undulating in time to some muffled ambient throb, suddenly interrupted half an hour later by a maniac with a foghorn shrieking ‘LATE FOR WORK!’ at the top of his voice.

  But that isn’t on, so what are your options? Well, BBC1 has a rolling new programme called Breakfast. Not ‘Breakfast News’, or ‘Breakfast Report’, or ‘Breakfast Briefing’: just Breakfast – which means the presenters sometimes
say, ‘Good morning, you’re watching Breakfast.’ Weird.

  It gets weirder: Breakfast is described as a ‘relaxed’ current-affairs show – which means you’re confronted with newsreaders sitting on a sofa. Newsreaders who smile and want to be your friend. They grin a parental grin as you stumble into the room, still dazed from dreamland, blinking, yawning, and scratching at your hair. Look! They’ve poured you a mug of coffee and fanned the day’s papers across the table. They’re watching you with the serene patience of cult members.

  ‘Hello. Hope you slept OK. You did? Hey, that’s great!’

  You notice the breezy colour scheme and the onscreen clock in the corner. The one that tells the time in that typeface, that impersonal font the brand-conscious Beeb use for everything these days. Your hosts pause and emit a loud cough.

  ‘Um. Now, look – we don’t want to worry you, but there was a bit of Armageddon while you were slumbering.’

  Armageddon? ARMAGEDDON?

  Reassuring smile.

  ‘Yes! Isn’t it exciting?’

  No – God, no! Don’t let this happen. We don’t want laid-back newsreaders flopping about on sofas, cutting us knobbly slices of rustic bread. It isn’t right. We want stern-faced Peter Sissons types sitting bolt upright and staring straight through our skulls, booming information like a 500-foot Tannoy of the Apocalypse. Unless there’s a major news event billowing, you’d have to be crazy to watch Breakfast voluntarily. It’s just too bloody creepy.