Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn

by Charlie Brooker

  Everything about Britain’s Hardest is designed to ooze menace. The ringmaster is Extreme Fighting champion Ian ‘The Machine’ Freeman, an intimidating Geordie who looks like the kind of man who’d drive a wooden tent spike through your face if you accidentally broke wind in front of his kids. He spends most of the show standing in the centre of a barbed-wire cage situated inside an abandoned warehouse; the contestants (muscle-bound dunces to a man) are led in with sacks over their heads and ordered to sit down and listen to him.

  Then there’s the events themselves: aside from the aforementioned door-smashing, our frowning brutes have to smash blocks of concrete with sledgehammers, withstand being chained up and dunked headfirst into ice-cold water until they almost drown, and finally fight man-on-man atop an elevated concrete plinth. If I were in charge of the BBC, I’d pinch these rounds and liven up Call My Bluff.

  Between events, the competing tough nuts are forced to indulge in some painfully artificial WWF-style ‘trash talk’ for the cameras. Since most of them can barely string a vowel together, let alone a sentence, this is the funniest part of the show, as they face each other off with soaringly imaginative exchanges like this:

  THUG #1: You think you’re hard? You ain’t hard.

  THUG #2: I’m harder than you. You ain’t hard at all.

  THUG #1: You’re dreaming, mate. I’m the hardest.

  THUG #2: No, you’re dreaming. And having a laugh. I am hard and you are soft (etc., etc.).

  Steve McFadden’s links, growled from a patch of urban waste ground, provide further hoots. He doesn’t look hard, just unhealthy, rasping and wheezing like some lardy, red-faced flabbo who’s just carried a beer keg up the stairs and urgently needs a sit-down before his arteries rupture. Apocalyptic though it is, Britain’s Hardest doesn’t spark quite the same Oh-my-God-these-really-are-the-end-times thrill as Back to Reality (C5), TV’s latest experiment in auto-cannibalisation, and perhaps the most queasily unreal reality programme yet. I think it’s the location that does it: a full-scale house, complete with garden, constructed inside a cavernous TV studio. As the inmates sit yapping round the ‘outdoor’ picnic table, their voices reverberate off the studio walls, leaving the whole thing feeling like it’s happening ‘backstage’ somehow. It’s oddly watchable, but only in the way that watching a chute-less skydiver taking photographs of his own backside as he plunged to his death would be watchable. Because that’s what this is: the latest example of TV’s continued descent into babbling, solipsistic oblivion.

  Back to Reality represents nothing less than a gossamer-thin barrier separating the real everyday world from a swirling dimension of as-yet-unfathomable sewage and nonsense. We don’t know what we’re messing with here, but it sure ain’t natural.

  Just like There’s Something About Miriam (Sky One), the dating show with a twist, which also starts this week. Ha ha ha! They kissed a chick with a dick! Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ha! Genius! Ha! Ha! HA HA HA! Urgent request to God: please end world five seconds prior to broadcast.

  Thank you. Over and out.

  I’ve Made a Right Wilkes of This [6 March]

  Who – or what – is new dating horror Love on a Saturday Night (ITV1) aimed at? OK, so the average ITV viewer has a caper-sized IQ – but seriously, can anyone sit through rubbish of this magnitude without feeling sickened and cheap? Play the tape to half a rat’s brain floating in a saucer full of brine and it would feel it was being talked down to.

  I’m a bitter, alienated misanthrope who can’t sit on public transport without wanting to machine-gun everyone in sight – but clearly I’ve got nothing on the ITV network, because to broadcast this nationwide you’d have to seriously despise mankind.

  So what’s wrong with it?

  Problem 1: It’s a mess. It doesn’t know what it is. It’s like twenty-eight different also-ran dating shows mixed together and spat in the viewer’s face. One interminable segment after another, spilling onto your carpet like a tossed deck of cards. And every single one of those cards has the word ‘DURRR’ printed on it in squat black print, because the manufacturers hate you for being so stupid.

  Problem 2: Those masks. Part of the show revolves around a member of the public picking a potential date from three wannabe suitors, each of whom has their face obscured by a brightly coloured mask. The effect is eerie, with contestants left looking like balaclava-clad rapists (men) or recovering burns victims (women). Or Mexican wrestlers. Or gimps. And there’s something a bit Eyes Wide Shut about the whole thing. They should rename this section ‘Vague Sado-Masochistic Undertones on a Saturday Night’.

  Problem 3: Davina McCall. Why can’t this nasal, squawking witch of Eastwick just go away and leave us alone? Ever peered into her eyes? Go on, tune in tonight and take a big fat look. See them? Those onyx little beads in the middle of her head? They’re dark and cloudy and dead. Like a shark’s. And you know what that means? It means she knows it’s a terrible show. She’s lost in this wasteland and she can’t escape. Well listen here, McCall, we’ll forgive you eventually. But get off while the going is good – jump ship! JUMP OFF THE SINKING SHIP, DAVINA! Then take a break of, oooh, eight years or so. And then – and only then – will we consider allowing you back on our screens.

  Problem 4: Jonathan Wilkes. Fresh from his triumph on You’ve Been Framed (where he effortlessly achieved the impossible by being twice as grating as Lisa Riley), Mr J. Wilkes Esq. returns to our screens again, like a turd you can’t flush away. He’s the Cheggers to Davina’s Noel, out in the field with live reports and pointless grinning.

  Last week, a member of the public said ‘fuck’ as Wilkes pounced (thereby turning the show into ‘Fuck on a Saturday Night’) so there’ll probably be a delay in place tonight. Fuck’s quite a rude word, but if he encountered me live on air I’d turn the air so blue he’d have to swim home. Besides, as far as I’m concerned, the word ‘Wilkes’ is a swear word in its own right. I’ve started using it in everyday parlance, as in: ‘Jesus, I’ve made a right Wilkes of this,’ or, ‘Ergh! It stinks of Wilkes in here!’ Try it out. Pass it on.

  Problem 5: It’s ten years long. OK, so actually it’s just an hour, but somehow Love on a Saturday Night feels time-stretched way beyond that; it actually redefines all previous notions of time, which flies when you’re having fun and drags when you’re not, but actually stops and goes into reverse whenever Davina or Wilkes are onscreen. Watching this programme from beginning to end is like working all day in a job you can’t stand.

  Problem 6: It’s beneath us all. And that’s its biggest flaw. This isn’t light entertainment. It’s an insult, aimed at a notional plebeian mass that largely exists in the low-wattage brains of the show’s creators.

  Love on a Saturday Night? More like ‘Contempt on a Sickening Scale’.

  Young People are Idiots [20 March]

  This week, BBC2 shows us what might happen If … The Generations Fall Out: a bleak and frankly implausible vision of the year 2024 in which the nation’s youth rise up to terrorise the pampered, ageing generation by, er, vandalising their cars and smashing a few things up. Trouble is, the generations always fall out. They’ve been doing so for years. And it happens for a simple reason: adults are pompous and young people are idiots. We deserve each other.

  Still, once you’re an adult, few things in life are quite as enjoyable as watching someone younger throwing an epic tantrum and being flatly ignored, which is why Brat Camp (C4) is such good fun. The pitch: take six ‘problem teenagers’, ship them off to a new age ‘short sharp shock’ punishment/treatment camp in Utah where they’re forced to hike for miles in the desert every day and essentially live the life of medieval serfs – then sit back and watch as they sulk, moan, burst into tears and generally throw toys from prams non-stop for months.

  The twist: their parents have signed custody of the kids over to the camp, so there really is no escape – no matter how big a tantrum they throw (and these are Olympian tantrummers), the only way home is to break down and conform.


  Result: funniest show on Channel 4 so far this year. The ‘camp’ isn’t really a camp at all – it’s an unremitting wilderness in which they have to build their own shelters to survive. They’re not given so much as a Kendal Mint Cake to liven things up; in fact they don’t even have eating utensils, and have to eat breakfast using a stick, like monkeys. The scheme is called RedCliff Ascent, and it’s run by a group of Rambo hippies taking inspiration from ancient Native American life. They use names like Stone Bear and Rising Wolf: their regime is a curious blend of new age patience and hard-nosed fascism. Fancy haircuts and body piercings are banned (hard luck for Rachel, who arrived sporting so much metal you could’ve sharpened her head and made an iron railing of her) and anyone who utters a swear word has to pick up a rock and carry it round for hours: yet if you disobey the rules, instead of being shouted at and forced to do squat-thrusts until your knees bleed, you’re subjected to hours of calm insistence that it really would be easier for everyone if you just got on with it. It’s a set-up that would drive almost anyone insane. But the kids deserve everything they get. Some (notably Charlie and Dan) show early promise, but most are in dire need of a good, hard breaking, particularly James and Fran. James, the poshest in the camp and therefore the most instantly punchable, is already a towering monument to sour Little Lord Fauntleroy prickery – an arrogant, belligerent little turd who not only thinks the world revolves around him, but that the way it revolves just isn’t good enough. He’s clearly destined to grow up into a steel-hearted Chelsea estate agent unless RedCliff Ascent can knock some soul into him. Fran, meanwhile, is the ultimate example of a spoilt only child, displaying hitherto-unimaginable levels of self-pity – shrieking in the world’s face one minute, blubbering that no one likes her the next. Her entire vocabulary consists of whining sounds and petulant insults, and if the Utah desert doesn’t sort her out, I’d recommend tying her to a gigantic arse-kicking machine for the next 200 years.

  Halfway into the series, all of them are already showing signs of positive change, and I wish them well in their transformation. Furthermore, I can’t help thinking we could do with a RedCliff Ascent of our own in Britain, particularly if we want to avoid the nightmare vision of the future unveiled by BBC2’s If. Ideally, it would accept children as young as four and force them to walk 200 miles a day in the rain until they shut up and realise it’s never a good idea to run around pub gardens shrieking, dribbling and irritating people like me. Because so help me God I will hit them.

  ‘It just isn’t fair’ [27 March]

  Fran hasn’t improved much, then. And I suspect that for fellow followers of Brat Camp (C4) this is good news, because the inherent flaw in the programme is that as the kids’ behaviour improves, so the entertainment value of their antics diminishes. The situation was becoming so dire even Charlie, the breeze-block-headed thug who mere weeks ago seemed hell-bent on systematically punching the entire population of the world in the face, found himself penalised for being too helpful.

  So praise be for Fran and her incessant, self-centred whingeing. Never have I seen anyone so tirelessly dedicated to making their own life difficult and unpleasant. To label Fran ‘her own worst enemy’ would be an almighty understatement. She’s her own arch-nemesis. The commandant in her own death camp. Seeing her in action is like watching someone pissing on their own cornflakes, then bursting into tears because they taste funny.

  For God’s sake Channel 4, give her her own show once Brat Camp finishes. Put her on the news. She’d be the greatest war reporter in history: ‘I’m here in Kabul – someone’s just been shot, and OW, they’ve landed on my foot and IT JUST ISN’T FAIR.’

  Fran’s lack of progress seems hopelessly magnified because all the other brats have undergone seismic personality changes since arriving in the Utah wilderness. Take Dan, who’s blossomed from a brooding, nihilistic rain cloud of skunk-infused misery into someone who actually smiles now and then. OK, so he still looks like Mick Jones circa Big Audio Dynamite, but RedCliff Ascent can’t cure everything.

  Then there’s Tom, aka Mike Skinner from the Streets, who spent his first few weeks pretending to be mad before realising he wasn’t fooling anyone. Now he’s a transformed man, funny and likeable, as is the aforementioned Charlie.

  This week marks the final instalment of Brat Camp: here’s hoping the now-inevitable ‘catch-up’ Christmas special finds Fran fully cured of her self-flagellating mindset. If she can channel that energy into something useful, she could be the next female prime minister. Or she could just sit around crying in the desert. Time will tell.

  Speaking of female prime ministers, this week’s edition of the increasingly ludicrous If … (BBC2) tackles the thorny problem of what might happen if women ruled the world. Well, nearly: actually, in this nightmare vision of the year 2020, men still rule parliament but the chicks have everything else sewn up. The majority of businesses are owned and run by women, the American President is a bitch, and Walkers have announced a new range of oestrogen-flavoured crisps.

  Men are increasingly redundant – not just in the workplace, but the bedroom too, since scientific advances have rendered our testicles superfluous to requirement (so you might as well slam them in a car door for a laugh – go on, it’ll be funny). Most terrifying of all, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett are forced to wear dresses and escape the attention of Diana Dors’ sexy leather-clad death squad. Yes: this is just like The Worm That Turned, but with bigger, unintentional laughs.

  We men must fight back now before this nightmare comes to pass, so thank God shows like Zero to Hero (C4) are here to show us how to make sense of masculinity in the twenty-first century. Essentially Scrapheap Challenge meets Batman, it’s a show in which ‘comic-book fans’ construct ridiculous gadgets against the clock in order to complete a ‘superheroic’ task. This week they have to scale an eight-metre wall of metal. Contestant one decides to use magnets, while number two knocks up a wall-clinging suction device from a pair of old vacuum cleaners.

  Throughout their ascent, both are forced to wear humiliating ‘superhero’ costumes while a masked woman in a pink leotard dangles from a wire firing silver balls at them. X-Men it ain’t. But brothers, at least it’s a start.

  ‘Come drink from my brimming tankard of despair’ [3 April]

  ‘I saw six men kicking and punching the mother-in-law. My neighbour said, “Are you going to help?” I said, “No, six should be enough.”’

  ‘I went to my doctor and asked for something for persistent wind. He gave me a kite.’

  ‘Come drink from my brimming tankard of despair.’

  Three quotes from beloved entertainer Les Dawson there. And in case you’re looking for the joke in the last one: forget it. It’s taken from Les Dawson’s Lost Diaries (C4), a surprisingly moving portrait of a fantastic comedian and Britain’s finest bad pianist. Raised in a Manchester slum, he initially tried his hand at boxing, despite being a frustrated author at heart: he later visited Paris and tried to write a novel, before returning home to embark on his comedy career in grim northern working men’s clubs (which, according to programmes like this, were all subterranean ogres’ caverns with real ale dripping from the stalactites, populated by ruthless, grunting, brown-toothed bigots). Instead of being ‘toughened’ by these no-nonsense audiences, Dawson went down like a lead balloon night after night, never tasting success until he appeared on TV’s glitzy Opportunity Knocks, from which point on his career skyrocketed, while gnawing self-doubt festered in the background.

  Still, forget ‘tears of a clown’: Dawson was a professional miserablist, and it was this grim, permanently disappointed persona that made him so popular. That and the face. He had an amazing face, like Shrek opening a court summons; a toad with a stomach ulcer; a semi-inflated warthog on 60 Rothmans a day.

  This all makes for a diverting programme, my main bone of contention being the presence of Air’s latest album on the soundtrack. It’s only been out a few months and already it’s becoming a cliché
– if I hear ‘Alone in Kyoto’ accompanying one more montage sequence I’ll puke. This is supposed to be a TV show, not an advertising creative’s dinner party. Isn’t there an EU Air limit that we can apply?

  Speaking of limits, If … We Don’t Stop Eating (BBC2) this week examines what might happen if, well, if we don’t stop eating. Drawing on painstaking research, predictive theory and expert opinion, the programme soon uncovers the startling truth: we’ll get fat. By 2020, it seems, the average backside will be the size of a cottage, the inner cities will consist of ‘fat ghettoes’, and the obese will be forced to sit inside gleaming white pods by research scientists working on special pie-thwarting technology. Imagine Gattaca starring Giant Haystacks and you’re halfway there.

  But hang on – according to last week’s show, by 2020 women will be in charge, so it’s all their fault. Oh, and according to the editions before that, this’ll be taking place during an inter-generational war, while a black prime minister oversees the carnage. Except he can’t, because we’ve run out of electricity and the lights have gone out. That’s the problem with following the extrapolation highway: it leads directly to Nonsense Avenue. If … has provided reasonable entertainment and a fair few unintentional laughs, but perhaps instead of trying to scare us they should’ve examined even more arbitrary hypothetical scenarios – such as ‘If … They Don’t Ban Ringtones’, or ‘If … It Starts Raining Hammers’, or ‘If … Dogs Could Play the Guitar’, or ‘If … We All Suddenly Turned into Hairless Egg-Like Blobs and Made a Sort of Humming Sound Whenever We Went to the Toilet’.