Of course, Cowell’s yabberings are almost certainly a smart double bluff designed to ensure people continue to vote for the twins, because he knows they’re the most interesting performers in this year’s contest: while the others are merely boring, John and Edward are just a bit shit. This makes them the most interesting thing in the entire programme by default. We’re accustomed to Cheryl Cole, and the judges’ interpersonal bickering got stale some time ago, so the only other faintly diverting thing in the show is Cowell’s hair. Suspiciously jet-black, bristly and curiously flattened on top, as though he prepares for each episode by dipping his head in matt-black Dulux and painting his dressing room wall with it, Simon’s hair continues to mesmerise even after all these years.
Silly hair and shit singers: that’s X Factor, the nation’s sole mainstream conduit for popular music since the decline and fall of Top of the Pops. All the songs sound the same, all the singers are alike, and the only interesting acts are mediocre and officially sanctioned hate figures. One day we’ll emerge on the other side of this unprecedented cultural drought and wonder how the hell our imaginations survived.
Till then, enjoy what you’re given. And shut up.
Past Careying
23/11/2009
Last week Mariah Carey turned on the Christmas lights at the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherds Bush, west London. That might sound like a trivial event of interest only to cretins, but remember: hundreds of thousands of brave men and women died in combat so the current generation could enjoy such freedoms. The assembled masses weren’t simply taking mobile phone snapshots of a vastly overrated singer emptily promoting a commercially appropriated religious festival celebrating the birth of a man who would have doubtless vomited up his own ribcage in disgust at the mere sight of the hollow, anaesthetising capitalist moonbase that is the Westfield Centre. No. They were honouring the fallen. Sort of. Vaguely. OK: not at all.
Anyway, any story featuring Carey has to at some point dwell on a list of outlandish arch-diva requests, and this one didn’t disappoint. According to early press reports, she demanded to be driven along a long pink carpet in a vintage Rolls-Royce before arriving at the podium (also pink) at which point she’d activate the lights by waving a magic wand, accompanied by 20 white kittens and 100 white doves. Pink, butterfly-shaped confetti would shower all around her at the end of the ceremony.
In the event, that turned out to be bullshit. She arrived in a Merc, burbled a few inanities (‘Wow, I’ve never been to a mall in London before!’), shook hands with some charity kids, and sodded off out of there. In fact the most startling thing about Carey’s turn was her outfit: a pair of jeans so tight she was vaginally ingesting them. No kittens. No doves. Not even a pink podium. You could be forgiven for thinking the papers had just lazily printed a load of PR bibble cynically engineered to promote the event by playing on popular assumptions about Carey’s caprice, and had done so without bothering to check any of the facts.
Thing is, even if Carey had made a string of crazy demands, I wouldn’t blame her. I doubt many celebrities start out behaving like foot-stamping little Caligulas, but years of having their arses kissed left, right and centre – yes, even on that centre bit – steadily drives them insane.
I’ve seen it happen in my own life, in my own little way. About ten years ago I was co-presenting a technology show on a niche digital channel with an audience of about six. This was my first time in front of the cameras. I had less screen presence than the Invisible Man and the sex appeal of a fatal headwound. Since the show was shot in the ‘zoo’ format popular at the time, the camera often roved dangerously close to my face, which made the experience of watching me a bit like gazing through a security peephole to see John Merrick leering ominously on your doorstep. I was unfunny, uncomfortable and charmless.
Things have changed since then, obviously. I’m fatter.
Anyway, during the first week of making the show, the runner would come over between takes to check whether I needed anything. A chair, perhaps? A glass of water? At first, this was embarrassing. I didn’t want anyone making a fuss of me. But one of the primary rules of television is to keep ‘the talent’ happy, and consequently there was no let-up. So you accept the proffered chair, sup the glass of water. And after several weeks of pampering, something snaps in your brain.
You grow accustomed to the attention; like wireless broadband, it’s an everyday miracle you simply take for granted. Before long, the moment you get thirsty, your first thought is no longer ‘I’ll go and pour myself a drink’, but something along the lines of ‘Where’s that runner gone?’, ‘Why haven’t I been watered already?’, or ‘Isn’t this a disgusting breach of my human rights?’
And that’s the treatment given to an ugly bloke on a cheap satellite show. I can scarcely imagine the level of forelock-tugging servility Carey must have encountered during her lifetime. Her record company probably employs someone to walk ten paces in front of her, breathing on all the doorknobs in her mansion so they won’t feel cold to the touch. Not that she’ll have touched a doorknob in fifteen years. She must think every door in the world opens by magic at the first sign of her approach.
Under those circumstances, you’d rapidly lose all respect for ‘regular people’ and start issuing lunatic demands for them to follow, partly to keep yourself amused, and partly out of sheer disgust. After all, if you’re going to bow each time I enter the room, I might as well make you kiss my feet a few times while you’re down there.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it’s hard to detect much in the way of palpable feeling in Carey’s music. Her singing voice wavers up and down through the octaves, like someone slowly tuning a shortwave radio in search of an authentic emotion. It’s technically amazing, but almost impossible to relate to on a human level – possibly because she no longer experiences anything akin to regular human life. She might not even experience proper emotions these days. She might have people who do that for her. Aides who rush in and hitch up the corners of her mouth each time she starts to smile, and mop down her cheeks with tiny hand-knitted towels when she cries.
But is it Mariah’s fault if she’s over-indulged? No. It’s yours. You specifically are to blame.
Oh OK: it’s society’s fault. If society insists on treating celebrities like royalty, there’s little point lambasting them for behaving like princesses. It’s nurture, not nature. And besides, the press is probably making it up anyway.
Tales of the cosseted few whistling through an unreliable sphincter into the eyes and ears of the many: that’s entertainment news, that is.
Dubai dooby doo
30/11/2009
I am phenomenally stupid. Stupid in every conceivable way except one: I’m dimly aware that I’m stupid. This means I spend much of my time assuming the rest of the world knows better, that everyone else effortlessly comprehends things I struggle to understand. Things like long division, or which mobile phone tariff to go for. In many ways, this is a comforting thought, as it means there’s a limitless pool of people more intelligent than myself I can call on for advice.
But sometimes I find out my gut assumption was right all along, and it’s a deeply unsettling experience. Take Dubai. I’m no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai’s skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense offshore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn’t enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.
When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sou
nded real or even vaguely sustainable. I’d been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.
But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai’s The World archipelago hadn’t even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.
In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots twenty-four hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows like dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims. Ugly, but at least it made sense.
Where were the coin slots in Dubai? I had no idea. I just gawped at the photographs and was secretly impressed by the cleverness of the people who’d managed to generate so much money they could safely take leave of their senses and construct 300-foot buttplug skyscrapers and artificial floating cities shaped like doodles scribbled in the margins of sanity. To my dumb, uncomprehending eyes it looked like a collection of impossible follies. But what did I know? Clearly the people actually paying for all this stuff knew precisely what they were doing.
But ah and oh. It appears my uninformed gut reaction – that slightly worried vertigo shiver, the hazy sense of ‘but surely they can’t do that’ – may have been precisely the correct response. Now it’s in trouble, the world’s financial markets seem shocked and surprised, like Bagpuss being disappointed to learn that the mice from the mouse organ couldn’t really create an endless supply of chocolate biscuits from thin air. They should’ve phoned me for advice. If only I’d known. I could have charged a fortune. But then I’m so dumb I’d probably have blown it investing in an artificial Dubai archipelago shaped like Snoopy’s head or something.
In the cold light of 2009, Dubai resembles a mystical Oz that was somehow accidentally wished into existence during an insane decade-long drugs bender. Those psychedelic structures, pictured in a fever by the mad and privileged, physically constructed by the poor and exploited, now look downright embarrassing, like a Facebook photo of a drunken mistake, as though someone somewhere is going to wake up and groan, ‘Oh my head … what did I do last night? Huh? I bankrolled a $200bn hotel in the shape of a croissant? I shipped the workers in from India and paid them how little? Oh man! The shame. What was I thinking?’
The world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Dubai, is due to open in January. It looks like an almighty shard of misplaced enthusiasm, a lofty syringe injecting dementia directly into the skies, a short-lived spike on a printed readout, or a pin pricking a gigantic bubble. Not a shape you’d want to find yourself unexpectedly sitting on, in other words. Just ask the world’s financial markets, once they’ve finished screaming.
Fill your own bucket
05/12/2009
TV advertising used to work like this: you sat on your sofa while creatives were paid to throw a bucket of shit in your face. Today you’re expected to sit on the bucket, fill it with your own shit, and tip it over your head while filming yourself on your mobile. Then you upload the video to the creatives. You do the work; they still get paid.
Hail the rise of ‘loser-generated content’; commercials assembled from footage shot by members of the public coaxed into participating with the promise of TV glory. The advantages to the advertiser are obvious: it saves cash and makes your advert feel like part of some warm, communal celebration rather than the thirty-second helping of underlit YouTube dog piss it is.
Witness the current OXO campaign. According to the website: ‘Has your Family got the OXO Factor? It’s 2009. There’s no such thing as “the OXO Family” any more. We’re all OXO Families! That’s why we asked you to film your family performing the script for our new TV ad, for the chance to see yourselves on TV, alongside some of Britain’s other brilliant families.’ Or ‘other insufferable arseholes’, depending on your point of view.
End result: a bunch of wacky-doo show-offs titting around in their kitchens, each reciting the same script, which they’re not allowed to deviate from. They can perform it ‘ironically’, and indeed they all do, which somehow only makes it more horrible still: the OXO family of 2009 may display faint traces of corporate-approved subversion, provided they adhere to the corporate-approved screenplay. Lynda Bellingham’s fictional family of yore might’ve been insipid, but at least they weren’t willing participants in a macabre dystopian dumb-show.
Phone ads are worse. ‘Everybody’s brightdancing’, according to the X Factor break bumpers. ‘Brightdancing’ consists of shooting a video of yourself waving your mobile around while being filmed by a Talk Talk website gizmo which turns the glare from your mobile’s screen into a ribbon of light. It’s less creative than choosing which colour iPod you want for Christmas. ‘Brightdancing’. Fuck me.
Then there’s Josh, a simpering middle-class mop who’s apparently ‘forming a supergroup’ for T-Mobile. According to the official advert backstory, Josh was strolling down the street one day when a T-Mobile film crew asked him what he’d do if he had free texts for life. Rather than pointing out that ‘free texts for life’ means dick-all in a world containing the internet, Josh burbled something about forming a band. A few weeks later and gosh oh crikey that’s precisely what’s happening! And we’re all invited! Hey everyone! Join Josh’s band!
As well as TV spots recounting the irritating story of Josh and his ‘volunteers’ (Yikes! They’re busking in an open-top London bus! Bonkers!), there are YouTube videos of Josh’s utterly spontaneous and not-at-all-stage-managed musical quest. The group has its own song, which you’re encouraged to perform and upload yourself, hastening humankind’s slow cultural death in the process. The recurring melody sounds suspiciously like a seven-note ringtone, while the lyrics speak vaguely of inclusion and connectivity – y’know, the sort of thing they guff on about in mobile phone ads. The third line is ‘I call up all of my friends’. Why call anyone? You’ve got free texts for life, you fucking prick.
It’s so clumsily contrived it wouldn’t fool a hen, yet we’re meant to welcome this ‘supergroup’ as an authentic grassroots musical phenomenon. On MySpace, Josh (or whoever’s controlling him) claims, ‘It’s a shame so many cynics think this band is completely manufactured.’
So it’s a genuine people’s movement, then? And this band doesn’t contain any paid-for session musicians? And that song wasn’t written by professional tunesmiths-for-hire? And the lyrics weren’t penned by some dickshoe at Saatchi & Saatchi? Hmm. Go fuck yourselves, T-Mobile. Stop trying to ‘crowdsource’. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Scram. And empty that bucket on your way out.
Naughty or Nice
12/12/2009
Like a giant black velvet cat whose tusk-white incisors glint malevolently in the darkness as it slinks noiselessly towards its prey, the end of the year is almost upon us. Eager to get things over with, Christmas has faded in extra early this year. Everywhere you look it’s yuletide this and festive that. Each shop window sports a snowman; each street lamp a coil of winking fairylights. I had a piss the other day and tinsel came out. Yippee for Christmas.
Christmas, of course, has its very own ‘face of the channel’: Santa Claus, although he doesn’t appear in adverts as often as he used to. For the
past few years Coca-Cola has been aggressively pushing Santa as some kind of God of its own making, so it’s hardly surprising that in other ads, for other products, he’s been usurped by celebrity cameos, or in Iceland’s case, Jason Donovan and a Nolan.
He doesn’t show up in films so much these days, either. It’s been fifteen years since the last remake of Miracle on 34th Street, and almost a quarter of a century since Santa Claus: The Movie. Part of the problem is that you can’t really do much with Santa himself. He’s not a cop on the edge trying to outrun his own demons. He’s a chuckling fat man. In character terms, Santa is bollocks.
If you really want to see Santa on screen in the run-up to 25 December, your best bet is to tune in to Santavision (Sky Channel 200), where he’s preparing for the yuletide season by sitting in an unconvincing living room mercilessly wringing money from as many people as possible with an interactive text-to-TV dedication scheme. Merry Christmas!
The idea is simple: you text him the name of your kiddywink, accompanied by the words ‘NAUGHTY’ or ‘NICE’, and Santa duly enters them on to his ‘Naughty’ or ‘Nice’ list, scrolling up the right-hand side of the screen. He’ll also say their name aloud, usually as part of a sparkling ad-lib such as, ‘Ho, ho, ho! I see GREGORY has been a naughty boy! Naughty GREGORY.’ This bespoke improvisation costs £1.50 a pop and, as the website is keen to point out, you’re not allowed to include the names of more than one child per text, which seems a tad unsporting, since the largest families are often the ones most financially stretched at Christmas. It’s almost as if, contrary to everything we’ve been led to believe, Santa doesn’t give a shit about kids after all.
Perhaps that’s why he’s lost weight. Apparently these days Santa looks like a skinny bloke in his twenties in a cheap beard, sweating his way through what amounts to a televised prison sentence. Sometimes he switches his microphone off and holds lengthy mysterious conversations with someone on the end of a phone, live on air. Possibly his lawyer.
I can make you hate Page 6
