In summary: Pants Off Dance Off takes the concept of striptease, and removes both the ‘strip’ and the ‘tease’. That’s not a show, that’s a vacuum. Worst of all, it’s not even amusingly trashy. It’s a load of energy expended for nothing. Just like masturbation itself. But less noble.
Death of a Glitterphile
07/11/2009
NB: This was a review of a real programme. Just worth pointing that out.
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Don’t know about you, but sometimes I can’t sleep at night for wondering what it might be like if Gary Glitter were executed. I just can’t picture it in quite enough detail for my liking. Would they fry him? Gas him? Or pull his screaming head off with some candy-coloured rope? I can never decide, and it often leaves me restless till sunrise. Thank God, then, for The Execution of Gary Glitter, which vividly envisions the trial and subsequent capital punishment of pop’s most reviled sex offender so you don’t have to.
I can’t believe what I’m typing: this is a drama-documentary that imagines a world in which Britain has a) reinstated the death penalty for murder and paedophilia, b) changed the law so Britons can stand trial in this country for crimes committed abroad, and c) chosen Gary Glitter as its first test case. It blends archive footage, talking-head interviews with Miranda Sawyer, Garry Bushell and Ann Widdecombe, and dramatised scenes in which Gary Glitter is led into an execution chamber and hanged by the neck until dead.
He’s not just swinging from a rope, mind. The Glitterphile is all over this show, like Hitler in Downfall. There are lengthy scenes in which he argues with his lawyer, smirks in court, plays chess with the prison chaplain, weeps on the floor of his cell, etc. Visually, we’re talking late-period Glitter, with the evil wizard shaved-head-and-elongated-white-goatee combo that makes him resemble a sick alternative Santa. It would be funnier if they showed him decked out in full seventies glam gear throughout, being led to the gallows in a big spangly costume with shoulder pads so huge they get stuck in the hole as he plunges through. I assumed the Glittercution would feature dry ice, disco lights, and a hundred party poppers going off as his neck cracked. But here there’s not so much as a can of Silly String. This is a terribly serious programme.
Yes. It’s illegal to laugh at this, see; it’s not a comedy show, but ‘an intelligent and thought-provoking examination of the issue’ which ‘confronts viewers with the possible consequences of capital punishment in the UK’. There’s going to be an online debate afterwards and everything, which should help clear up all our thoughts about the death penalty. Let’s face it, none of us really knew where we stood until we were ‘confronted’ by the sight of Gary Glitter staring wretchedly at an expectant noose. It really crystallised things, y’know? Before, I always thought of hanging as an abstract, faraway event existing only in ancient woodcuts or the minds of passing clouds. This makes it so much more real. My sincere thanks, Channel 4, for the searing moral clarity I’ve been granted. By the way, is the real Gary Glitter going to be taking part in that online debate thing afterwards? That’d be awesome.
What with this and the previous Killing of George Bush drama-doc a few years ago, the Channel 4 family is establishing itself as the home of thought-provoking celebrity death fantasies. Now they’ve whacked a president and strangled a paedo, what next? How about a two-hour drama-documentary that wonders what Britain might look like if al-Qaida attacked the Baftas? Lots of detailed close-up slow-motion shots of bullets blasting through the ribcages of absolutely everyone off Coronation Street, that kind of thing. It’d really kick-start that debate about terrorism we’re all gasping for. Perhaps it could solve it altogether.
Or what about a mini-series showing what’d happen if you kidnapped a bunch of newsreaders and X Factor contestants and kept them on a remote island and glued masks on their faces and fed them LSD and MDMA for two years until they started killing each other and rutting the corpses and shoving bits of blunt stick in their eye sockets and howling at the sun? That’d help society explore its relationship with authority, celebrity, identity, controlled substances, sex, violence and sticks. And God knows we need to. Help us, Channel 4. Guide us. You’re our moral compass. You’re our only hope.
This is a column about buying a washing machine. A washing machine. A washing machine. A column about a washing machine. This is a column about buying a washing machine.
09/11/2009
As a child, I never pictured the adult ‘me’ journeying to other planets and having a fantastic time of it. Instead I pictured myself dying in a nuclear inferno. The future me was a screaming skeleton decorated with chunks of carbonised flesh and the occasional sizzling hair. Not really someone you’d have round for dinner.
Still, at least my premonition suggested I’d live an exciting life, albeit a short one. The reality is less spectacular. I never pictured myself as I was last week: a fully grown adult: alive, yet slowly losing the will to live while attempting to buy a washing machine from a high-street electrical retailer.
Let’s be clear about this. Buying a washing machine is not the stuff dreams are made of. It’s not a device you’re going to fall in love with. It’s a white box with a round mouth you shove dirty pants into. Hardly a new member of the family, unless you’re a troupe of extreme performance artists.
Buying a mobile phone is easier than buying a washing machine because some phones have the decency to look ugly, thereby simplifying the decision-making process. Washing machines all look the same. Some eat bigger loads or have a more complex array of pre-wash options: whoopee doo. Some doubtless perform better than others: I wouldn’t know. Bet it’s all a con. Bet there’s only one type of washing machine in the world, and they’re all shipped from the same warehouse in slightly different packaging and sold at randomly generated prices.
I buy washing machines the same way I order wine in a restaurant: avoid the very cheapest on the basis that it’ll be nasty, avoid the second cheapest on the basis that it’s probably even worse, avoid the expensive options at the top of the list on the basis that they can’t possibly be worth it, and wind up randomly picking something from the middle instead.
Just to make you feel even more uncertain about buying one, they don’t have proper names. Once you strip the familiar manufacturer trademarks away, all you’re left with is a meaningless series of model numbers chosen specifically to confuse you. Did you order a BD4437BX or a BD3389BZ? Face it: you have no idea. Ring up to place an order and it sounds as if you’re discussing chemical weapon formulae.
This is why buying a washing machine never feels ‘real’. If you walk around Battersea Dogs Home, brown-eyed puppies with names such as Timbo and Ookums softly yelp for your attention. Walk around Comet and you’re confronted by a wall of emotionless monoliths with incomprehensible names. And that’s just the staff!!!!!??!!!!?!
I got caught in a high-street retail delivery trap recently; one of those Kafkaesque scenarios in which you pay for something on the basis that it will arrive at a certain time, only to find out it won’t, and soon you’re sucked into a spiral of helpline calls and telephone keypad options and complaints and counter-complaints until eventually you realise that you’re both in a loveless relationship; needing each other, hating each other, revolving for hours in a weepy embrace, listlessly kicking at one another’s shins.
But this time something new and modern happened. Shortly after one of our bitter rows, while waiting for them to call back, I went on Twitter (yes, bloody Twitter) and angrily compared the Currys electrical retail chain to the Nazis. The next day a mysterious message arrived with a number for me to call; this turned out to belong to one of their heads of PR, who’d spotted my outburst and tracked down my contact details.
It’s a bit embarrassing when you find yourself talking to someone high up in a company you’ve loudly and publicly likened to the Third Reich only the night before. Fortunately for me, she was polite and savvy enough not to mention it. Instead she quickly sorted out my complaint, which is the closest I’ve ev
er come to feeling like a VIP, or Michael Winner. Nice for me, annoying for anyone reading about it who hasn’t been afforded that kind of treatment, i.e., you. Perhaps, if I was principled, I’d have yelled ‘I demand to be treated as a regular customer!’ and slammed the phone down. But I didn’t.
Still, if buying a big boring box from a big boring shop is a harrowing experience, isn’t it time retailers were honest about it? There’s no point in pretending to be fun, happy-go-lucky institutions. We’re British. We know the truth and we can handle it. Dixons is running a campaign describing itself as ‘the last place you want to go’, which is meant to be a clever reference to its low prices (i.e., go and look at it in Harrods, then buy it from us), but effectively describes every electrical retail chain I’ve ever visited.
Someone needs to go further and launch a chain called Shambles, where all the familiar shortcomings are actively promoted as part of the ‘experience’. The staff wear ironic dunce caps and vulture costumes; if you want to actually buy something, they walk to a stockroom ten miles away in a neighbouring county to check its availability, methodically harass you into taking out five-year cover using a subtle combination of CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’ psychological techniques and unashamed sulking, then arrange for it to be delivered at 7 a.m. by a surly man who’ll arrive ten hours late on purpose, deliberately bring a BD4437BX instead of the BD3389BZ you ordered, attach a magic hidden ‘hobbling’ device that causes it to malfunction immediately before the next bank holiday weekend, screw your partner, scare your kids, wreck your life, and break wind on your doorstep as he’s leaving. All of which is heavily advertised as an integral part of the service.
It’ll be miserable. But at least you’ll enter the transaction with your eyes wide open.
Christmas time: here come the girls
16/11/2009
‘Yep, it’s that time of year again – and the Christmas adverts are already on the telly’, remarks a man at the start of this year’s B&Q Christmas advert, proving that the grand tradition of moaning about premature Yuletide ads has itself been absorbed by the Matrix and turned into a stick to beat us with.
Let’s hope this kind of jokey fourth-wall-breaking doesn’t become a trend, or before long we’ll all be moaning about the number of early Christmas ads that moan about the number of early Christmas ads, and then our moans about their moans will in turn form the basis of the next wave of ads, and so on and so on ad nauseam, until they’re producing intricately constructed navel-gazing meta-commercials that are actually more self-aware than we are: fully sentient beings with thoughts and feelings of their own. And they’ll rise up and strangle us in our beds. While humming ‘Stop the Cavalry’ by Jona Lewie.
Postmodernist intro aside, the B&Q ad is a fairly standard offering in which members of staff clutter the shop floor reciting lines about great savings and gawkily radiating a sense of forced bonhomie, as though the government’s ordered them to look cheerful in case the enemy’s watching. There is one startling departure from the regular formula: while most of B&Q’s woodentops are presented in situ, stacking shelves or manning checkouts and presumably praying for death, one is depicted relaxing at home, sitting on his sofa in a Santa hat, wiggling his socks in front of a roaring fire. Worryingly, even though it’s dark outside, he’s still in uniform. Perhaps all new members of staff have the outfit sewn into their skin when they sign up, as a permanent reminder of kinship – in the same way that members of a shadowy militia might each get the same tattoo. We won’t know unless they put a shower scene in their next commercial.
Come on, B&Q. We’re waiting.
Still, at least B&Q’s effort features common-or-garden schmoes, not a stomach-churning galaxy of stars. Watching Marks & Spencer’s Christmas ad is like sitting through Children in Need. Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Myleene Klass, Jennifer Saunders, Twiggy, James Nesbitt, Wallace and Gromit … it’s so chummy and cosy and thoroughly delighted by its own existence, I keep hoping it’ll suddenly cut to a shot of a deranged crystal meth user squatting on the cold stone floor of a disused garage, screaming about serpents while feverishly sawing their own hand off at the wrist.
Instead it jokily tries to undercut itself by including a cameo from Philip Glenister, standing in a pub to prove what a bumptiously down-to-earth Mr Bloke he is. His job is to stand at the bar claiming that the best thing about Christmas is the sexy girl from the Marks & Sparks ads running around in her knickers. Then it cuts to the sexy girl from the Marks & Sparks ads running around in her knickers, as though this is somehow as iconic a Christmas image as Rudolph’s nose or the little baby Jesus. Listen here, M&S: few things in life are more pukesome and hollow than a self-mythologising advert – so next year do us all a favour and just shake a few sleighbells, flog us some pants, and then fuck off back to your smug little shop and be quiet.
Like Marks & Spencer, Boots appears to have overestimated the popularity of its own Christmas adverts. Unless I’m mistaken, the people of this nation are not brought together as one joyful whole by the ‘Here Come the Girls’ campaign, so its self-celebratory tone seems somewhat misplaced. What started out a few years ago as a mildly amusing commercial in which an army of women prepared in unison for an office party has devolved into a nightmare vision of the future in which large groups of female office workers spontaneously organise themselves into a cackling mobile hen night at the first whiff of Christmas. This year they’re causing mayhem in a restaurant. They’re mad, they are!!!! One even tries to get off with the waiter!!!!
I usually quite like women, but this advert makes me want to kill about 900 of them with my bare hands. It ends with the tiresome ladettes marching down a high street triumphantly singing the ‘Here Come the Girls’ song out loud, like an invading squadron tormenting the natives with its war cry. Next year they’ll probably be armed. Fear this.
Of the supermarkets, Sainsbury’s are running with a relatively innocuous bit of fluff in which Jamie Oliver tours Britain handing out free vol-au-vents to greedy members of the public, like a zookeeper throwing sprats to a load of barking seals. It’s been given a documentary feel, although everywhere he goes looks suspiciously wintry, with snow and swirling white flakes, which is weird considering it was probably shot in August. Still, that’s climate change for you.
But the winner of the worst Christmas advert trophy for the second year running is Morrisons. They’ve got several short offerings, including one where Nick Hancock appears to be preparing Christmas dinner in the afterlife – but the prize goes to their centrepiece ad: a bafflingly pedestrian sixty-second fantasy in which straggle-haired midget Richard Hammond wheels an empty trolley through an over-dressed, snowblown Tunbridge Wells, yelping about food and steadily gathering a pied-piper-style following of locals (and Denise Van Outen) as he heads for an illuminated branch of Morrisons in the distance, like a wise man following a star – or, more accurately, like a slightly unkempt mouse following a shop. I keep hoping it’ll suddenly pull out to reveal this is all just a slightly underwhelming dream he’s experiencing, and that he’s actually still in a coma following his 2006 rocket car mishap.
And judging by the look in his eyes, so is he.
Jordward
21/11/2009
People of Britain! Why so sad? You have at least four different flavours of mulch to choose from! Enjoy what you’re given and shut up. The other day I was watching a report about the The X Factor charity single during an ITV news bulletin that followed I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! It was the day Jordan went into the jungle. Jordan in the jungle, Jedward on the news. The media assumes you’re fascinated by both of them.
There’s not much to be fascinated by. Take Jordan. Ant and Dec announced her arrival on their gameshow in which celebrities eat live insects for publicity as though it was the most startling cultural event of the twenty-first century – a Festival of Britain for our times. She was presented as someone who divides opinion, which she simply isn’t. Everyone feels the same way about Jordan.
She’s someone you’re supposed to dislike, and in disliking her you’re supposed to feel marginally better about yourself. So we all moan about this woman, moan about the weight of coverage devoted to this woman, and meanwhile this woman has herself sliced open and injected and sewn back together until she resembles some kind of rubbery pirate ship figurehead, a weird booby caricature looming at us out of the mist. But this mutilation only makes us moan all the more. No one’s coming out of this well.
At least Jordan herself seems oblivious. She hardly radiates emotion. Her voice is a perpetual low flatline, and she can’t or won’t perform basic facial expressions, as if she’s been unplugged on the inside. As fiery reality show catalysts go, sending in a mountain goat with a load of crude personal insults daubed on its flank would be a better bet. Instead, the best they can come up with is a boring tabloid story in boring human form.
Meanwhile, in the X Factor universe, we’re encouraged to love/hate two seventeen-year-old twins with videogame haircuts called John and Edward. Of course the phrase ‘John and Edward’ takes too long to read or say, so to our collective shame it’s been shortened to ‘Jedward’. Ha ha! Jedward! Ha ha ha ha ha! Jedward! Ha ha! SuBo! LiLo! Ha ha! Brangelina! Ha ha! Bennifer! Ha ha ha ha ha! I am loving that! I am loving that! Ha ha!
Let’s hope this stinking world comes to an end as soon as possible. Leswossible.
Simon Cowell keeps making proclamations about ‘leaving the country’ if John and Edward win The X Factor. Doesn’t he leave the country each week? He flies to LA every ten minutes to appear on American Idol. And on his way back he lands his jet on a private island made entirely of gold ingots, to spend his weekend strolling up and down the beach listlessly kicking clouds of powdered diamond into a sea of molten platinum.
I can make you hate Page 5
