‘We’ll have to get you a proper bra’ [8 December]
Fashion terrifies me. It’s the fear of the unknown. Once it was so easy: a pair of slacks and a vaguely ironic T-shirt and I was perfectly acceptable.
Now I’ve crossed the divide: too young for cardigans; too old for anything vaguely attractive. There it goes: my sense of style, vanishing into the distance at 10,000 m.p.h., leaving me floundering in a sea of crap trousers. I’m stuck here. And unless the ‘oblivious buffoon’ look comes in, I’m screwed for life.
I dislike clothes, although the alternative is unthinkable. But, Christ, how I loathe fashionable young men, with their skinny frames and their streetwise attire and their understated self-confidence. I feel like taking a baseball bat to the lot of them, although even then I’d probably pick an unfashionable brand of bat, or somehow manage to knock their brains out in a cluelessly passé kind of way – using an underarm swing when the overarm swipe’s more ‘now’, perhaps – and everyone would sneer at me, including the arresting officer.
The rage is motivated by jealousy, of course, since I’m too homely to pull it off myself. I’ve got a face like a punctured beachball, like an arse that’s fallen downstairs, like a rucksack full of dented bells. The coolest shirt on earth becomes a nondescript rag the moment you add my Tolkienesque features to the equation. Put me in a suit and bingo: Gollum in his Sunday best.
Hence my sudden interest in turd-polishing exercise What Not To Wear (BBC2), the new ‘makeover show’ hosted by wilfully catty double act Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine. The format: find a frumpy prole with the fashion sense of Tony Martin, then send Trinny and Susannah in to point out the myriad faults in their attire. They don’t pull punches. If that skirt makes your backside resemble a bloated pumpkin, if your choice of collar turns your entire head into a gruesome accident, Trinny and Susannah will tell you, gleefully and on camera. Once all remaining dignity has been stripped clean away, said prole is suddenly given £2,000 and commanded to buy a new wardrobe, with two provisos: 1) they must follow a set of fashion ‘rules’ handed down by Trinny and Susannah, and 2) their shopping expedition takes place on camera.
It’s all just about entertaining enough, with the hosts walking a fine line between likeable and annoying. Trinny’s a rake; so thin she could crawl through an empty biro casing if the mood struck her, while Susannah’s plump and mumsy and obsessed with other women’s boobs, lurching at them like Sid James in Carry On up the Tribunal. ‘We’ll have to get you a proper bra,’ she says, eyes agleam, kneading the subject’s mammaries, sometimes heaving them apart and hoisting them aloft for good measure. Curiously, she dresses rather badly; a glaring flaw in a show like this.
Another flaw: both of them have posh accents – always off-putting. The upper classes really shouldn’t open their mouths on television. Whatever it is they’re saying, all your brain actually hears is ‘Tra la la, I live in a bubble, tra la la, murder a fox, tra la la, Conde Nast Traveller, tra la la, Kensington High Street, tra la la.’ They should know their place and keep quiet.
That aside, What Not To Wear does dispense useful advice during its half-hour duration, and the transformation of frump-to-flower is authentically heartwarming, more than can be said for anything in It’s a Girl Thing (C4), a misguided hybrid of catwalk and sitcom, clearly inspired by Sex and the City, but with fashion dilemmas in place of sexual ones. Trouble is, it’s Sex and the City minus the wit. And the budget. And the sex. And the city.
The result is a bit like finding yourself trapped inside one of those Z-grade Bridget Jones-like chick-lit novels that make you want to kill people; all kooky cover art and characters who say ‘Crumbs!’
I can’t remember much of the script, but it goes something like this:
GIRL #1: Durr, umm, durr, ugh durrr um durr.
GIRL #2: Durr? Durr umm durr!
GIRL #3: Does my brain look thick in this?
GIRL #4: Crumbs!
This week’s episode centres on a guide to buying swimwear: just what you need in December. And it doesn’t even offer concrete guidance: come the episode’s end, the girls conclude, ‘It doesn’t matter what you wear, so long as you feel comfortable.’
Novelty slippers all round, then. Cheers for the advice.
Opportunity Nots [22 December]
Finished? Good. You were awful. You stank like a drain full of skunk guts. Close the door on your way out. And thanks for nothing. I sincerely hope you kill yourself. Yes, 2001 was the year of the nasty talent show – programme after programme in which aspirants had their fragile dreams torn apart in front of a nation. ‘New Faces with Bollockings’. ‘Opportunity Nots’. First came Popstars, a desperate search for the kind of stellar talent that could redefine pop – or, at the very least, pad out Hear’Say. Of course, panel member ‘Nasty’ Nigel Lythgoe (played by Admiral Ackbar from Return of the Jedi) was the real star, oozing Partridge glamour as he poured cold piss on the flames of enthusiasm.
Not that most of them didn’t deserve a verbal kicking. Was there a more unpleasant spectacle this year than the sight of countless spoilt Britney wannabes tearfully brushing off their rejection with bratty blubs of ‘I will make it one day – somehow. I will, you’ll see. I’ll be famous. It’ll happen. It’s my destiny.’ Listen carefully: No it isn’t. Your destiny is to sit in multiplexes watching sequels to The Mummy Returns for the next 200 years, so forget fame and get on with it.
But Lythgoe was a breeze compared with what followed. By September, Soapstars had arrived, and with it came ‘Nasty’ Yvon (aka Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS), whose caustic put-downs generated a palpable chill, like a voice at a séance predicting imminent doom. All quite unnecessary when you contemplated the prize at stake: a three-month contract to appear on Emmerdale, the invisible soap. I’ve still never seen it, although according to the latest long-distance reports it’s got something to do with cows and there’s a McGann in the cast. More information as and when we get it.
No sooner had the Soapstars ‘winners’ been dispatched to the TV equivalent of a missing person’s helpline than Pop Idol sprang up to accelerate their removal from our minds. Suddenly, our hopefuls had Simon Cowell to contend with. A walking definition of arrogance, Cowell was the Osama bin Laden of talent shows (minus the dreamy eyes). He was the tightest man on television – tight muscle, tight T-shirts and tight trousers, haunched all the way up to his big tight tits – firing staccato proclamations that crossed the line between constructive criticism and malicious abuse, thereby achieving the impossible by making both Pete Waterman and Dr Fox look dignified. He can tuck into his turkey safe in the knowledge that he’s the king of breaking butterflies on wheels. Way to go, Simon, and goodwill to all mankind.
So what else happened on our screens? Avant-garde inactivity, that’s what, in the bewildering form of Touch the Truck. Tune in and you could gasp in astonishment as a bunch of bozos stood round a 4x4 in Thurrock, keeping a hand on the chassis and their eyelids open. The rules were simple: last one standing wins the vehicle. The world of chronic sleep deprivation has rarely felt so glamorous. Let’s just hope the winner didn’t immediately drive away with the prize, swerving snoozily past railway lines all the way back home.
And if the sight of ten people standing motionless round a stationary vehicle wasn’t mundane enough, you could always tune into the continuous live feed from the Big Brother house. Look! There’s Dean, scratching his nuts. And does Bubble have a spoon in his hand? Can’t quite tell from here. Hang on. Yes, it is. It’s definitely a spoon. Brilliant. Ah, Big Brother. Or more specifically – ah, Paul and Helen. What a love story – ‘When Knuckleheads Collide’. Half the nation on tenterhooks, wondering whether Dimbo #1 would get to nudge his tinker up Dimbo #2’s foo-foo before the cameras went away.
Germaine Greer denouncing the ghastliness of it all in the Observer, while Dominic Mohan encouraged Sun readers to ‘grab a beer and pull up a seat’ in the event of penetration. True obsessives could even sign up for text
-message updates of the latest developments. Middle of the night, and your mobile starts beeping: 3A.M. LATEST: HE’S STUCK IT IN. Thank God for the twenty-first century.
As Big Brother was drawing to a close, the Brass Eye Special on paedophilia appeared. Several viewers were upset by the broadcast, but thankfully the press was on hand to ensure their views received an effective airing in the form of unintelligible pandemonium. I had some involvement in the programme, and consequently found myself ‘named and shamed’ alongside other evil conspirators in the News of the World for the benefit of readers who’d just finished masturbating over paparazzi snaps of topless pop starlets and fancied a bit of orchestrated outrage. The Star covered the furore opposite a photo of 15-year-old Charlotte Church in a low-cut top (caption: ‘Charlotte’s looking chest swell’), while the Mail spent an entire week exploring the outer limits of fury, occasionally lightening the mood with delightful snaps of Fergie’s pubescent offspring frolicking in bikinis. No review of the year’s TV is complete without some discussion of 11 September, when raw horror bled from every screen. Like many others, I spent the day nauseous and shaking, wandering dizzily from one location to the next, suddenly aware of just how many TV sets there are in the world. For weeks, the news exerted a pornographic hold on my interest. A grimly bizarre sight sticks in my head: an American journalist reviewing the English tabloids on News 24, saying: ‘Real nice layout on this page, big headline here, great photo of a guy jumping from the building.’
Anyway. Where were we? Of course – 2001. There were good and bad programmes.
Among the good: Jon Ronson’s Secret Rulers of the World, Linda Green, The Office, The Blue Planet, Faking It, Sex and the City, Space, Extremes – and Cold Feet, which contained 50 per cent too many storylines, but redeemed itself by turning David, superbly played by Robert Bathurst, into its most sympathetic and dignified character. And the bad? LA Pool Party, One Night With Robbie Williams, the UK version of Temptation Island, Jim Davidson’s Generation Game,’ Orrible, It’s a Girl Thing and Metrosexuality.
That’s it. Happy viewing over the Yuletide period. Don’t OD on David Jason.
Alternative Christmas Day TV Listings [24 December]
6.00 a.m. Get Up and Scream Like a Demented Bloody Banshee Children’s Morning Fun. Three solid hours of uninterrupted hollering, impenetrable cartoons and Westlife videos designed to wind every child in the country into a state of uncontrollable arm-flapping rowdiness before anyone else in the house is even awake.
9.00 When Louis Met Wallace and Gromit
Cosy middle-class claymation dream come true.
10.30 Auntie’s 14:9 Unsafe Christmas Bloomers
Terry Wogan introduces a seasonal selection of incorrect aspect-ratio blunders from an assortment of popular programmes including Casualty, Holby City, Holby City, Casualty, Holby City and Holby City. Contains footage of Charlie from Casualty standing slightly too far to the left and rendering himself invisible to viewers without widescreen televisions.
11.00 Straw Dogs CGI
Cheerful Toy Story-style computer-animated remake of Sam Peckinpah’s notorious study of male violence.
12.30 p.m. Patrick Kielty’s Christmas Streets of Yuletide Fundom
Light-hearted silliness as Patrick Kielty rides a pantomime reindeer through the streets of Gloucester, pulling a cart full of orphaned children banging tambourines behind him. Music by DJ Otzi and Atomic Kitten.
1.00 Robbie Williams: Aloha from Hawaii Christmas Special
The nation’s favourite boggle-eyed yelper dons a white jumpsuit and floral garlands and sets about methodically erasing all traces of spirit from a selection of perennial favourites including ‘Burning Love’, ‘Suspicious Minds’, ‘An American Trilogy’, ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’, ‘See See Rider’ and ‘It’s Over’.
Ladies and gentlemen, ‘Robbie Williams Has Left the Building’ is available now on CD. An extended 8-disc DVD edition of this live broadcast, including out-takes and an ironic 30-minute documentary in which Cat Deeley dresses like a 60s housewife and pretends to be stalking ‘the new King’, will be available to buy from Monday from phone-booth-sized record shops that offer no diversity whatsoever and make you want to slash your wrists and spray blood in the assistants’ faces the moment you walk in the door.
1.50 Yuletide Sing-Song Hurtle-Bench Mayhem
Astonishing programme in which an untethered cast-iron park bench is fired with immense velocity into a group of unsuspecting carol singers.
2.00 EastEnders
Characteristically uplifting seasonal edition of the popular soap. Zoe downs a pint of bleach and falls beneath an underground train in full view of a group of horrified schoolchildren, while Steve accidentally backs his Mercedes over a pregnant cat, which bursts, spraying guts and dead kittens all over the windows of the Queen Vic in the middle of Christmas dinner.
3.00 The Queen’s Christmas Message
The world’s most uncharismatic figurehead peers eerily into the living rooms of a nation, monotonously reciting a dreary speech of absolutely no interest or relevance to anyone whatsoever, save the occasional loud-mouthed delusional racist nut.
3.10 Zulu: Named and Shamed Edition
New version of the spectacular epic dramatising the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879, in which the Zulus’ faces are digitally replaced with those of men on the sex offender’s register, thereby enabling viewers to enjoy a cinematic classic while simultaneously memorising the features of convicted child enthusiasts-perverts that may be living next door, within finger-poking distance.
Lt. Gonville Bromhead: Michael Caine
Zulu 1: That bloke from next door
Zulu 2: That man who’s always in the park
Zulu 3: Jonathan King
Zulu 4: Sidney Cooke
4.15 The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
Some bespectacled old Doctor Who wannabe introduces this year’s topic: ‘Why Does Anything Connected with Science Always Seem Interesting for Ten Minutes before Descending into Bottomless Tedium?’
4.40 Utterly Irrelevant Eight-Hour Ballet
Destined to be watched under duress by the disgruntled children of patronising Guardian readers on the basis that it’s somehow good for them.
5.15 The Snowman Redux
All-new director’s cut of the classic heartwarming cartoon with over 58 minutes of additional footage, all of it boring.
6.25 Before They Were Demonised
Angus Deayton takes an amusing look back at Osama bin Laden’s early appearances in daytime game shows and Slimcea commercials.
7.00 Countryfile Christmas Special
Unnecessary Yuletide edition of the overlooked rural-affairs show, including a report on six pine cones covered in snow and a shot of some bracken near a fence post.
7.35 Weakest Link – Offender’s Register
Special edition of the elimination quiz hosted by Anne Robinson. Nine of the nation’s most reviled men battle against each other to win money for a leading children’s charity – but who will be first to make the dreaded ‘Walk of Name and Shame’?
8.00 Big Brother Yuletide Special
Six hours of footage of Bubble nonchalantly picking his teeth near a Christmas tree.
9.30 I Love the Succession of Glittering Images Which Distract and Amuse Yet Ultimately Do Little to Quell the Boundless Sadness at My Core
Curiously despondent talking-head clip show in which desperate celebrities standing on ledges punctuate footage from vintage Christmas editions of Top of the Pops, Morecambe and Wise and Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game.
Is there a black dog in your head, pissing misery juice all over your brain, drowning the joy cells and stifling your ability to do anything other than stare at the walls and cry? Would you like to talk about it? To a man who nods without listening? A nodding puppet accompanied by a cameraman who’s eating sandwiches and concentrating on getting the focus right and can’t hear a word you’re saying? Our researchers would like to
talk to you: call now on 0207 946 0006, and for Christ’s sake try to stop sobbing long enough to keep your contact details intelligible.
10.25 Nathan Barley @ Christmas
Upper-middle-class London media scumbag Nathan Barley visits an overpriced Soho shitshack to waste £350 on a selection of ironic Christmas gifts including an A-Team nativity set, a clockwork Bin Laden, the 2002 Zapruder Footage calendar featuring a different still for each month, a set of furry dice with the heads of The Strokes replacing the dots, a bottle of Ron Jeremy Cream Shampoo (emulating the precise consistency of semen and manufactured in San Francisco by a company whose name is spelt out in a knowingly kitsch font), two packets of swastika-shaped corn snacks and a Japanese digital camera that prints photographs on marzipan-scented recycled toilet paper.
11.30 Planet Littlejohn
Computer simulation show in which Richard Littlejohn is given a virtual planet of his own to run as he sees fit. Day 34: Having seen all human life wiped out by six consecutive world wars, Richard starts trying to get the vegetation to fight among itself.
PART THREE 2002
In which Jonathan King takes umbrage, Jack Bauer watches the clock, and Uri Geller eats worms in the jungle.
A Choir of Coughing Rectums [19 January]
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Yes everybody, but everybody goes to the toilet now and again. Even the Queen does, although it’s hard to imagine her wooden expression ever changes, even if she’s constipated.
But, so the cliché goes, you rarely get to see people going to the toilet on television. You’d never witness, say, Phil from EastEnders, sitting resplendent on the throne (although that’s probably because when he needs to go he just gets down on all fours in the middle of the street and lets it drop casually out the back, like a horse).
Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Page 16
