It was only during a cautionary pre-broadcast talk from the lawyer that it began to sink in. The lawyer’s job is to remind you not to say anything libellous or illegal while the camera’s pointing at you, because, y’know, it’s live. As he ran through an exhaustive list of things that could potentially go wrong, my mind began to cry.
Five minutes before the broadcast, I suddenly realised I couldn’t see properly. Or rather, I could see perfectly well – objects and surfaces and people and all that – but nothing I looked at made sense. At one point, I stared at my shoe and wondered if it was real. Just as a spider in a bathtub will repeatedly run up the sides yet inexorably slide back to the same spot, my brain pounced in all sorts of oblique directions but always returned to the same thought: you are about to die.
All of which means that, by the time you walk out in front of an audience, in front of a camera, you aren’t really ‘you’ any more, but a vaguely human-shaped cloud of screaming nerves. This is actually quite a useful state of mind: you essentially become someone else. And since whatever’s happening is no longer happening to you, an eerie calm descends.
Not for long, though. As the countdown begins, a comprehensive list of fears spools through your head. Your primary concerns, in order of repulsion: 1) you might vomit with sheer terror while everyone’s looking; 2) you might snap and start bellowing obscenities or gibberish or violent threats against named individuals until a cameraman has to physically wrestle you to the floor. Trust me, given the addled mindstate you work yourself into, this is not as unlikely as it appears on paper; 3) there might be a technical hitch that forces you to fill in, live, without a script. (Later, backstage, Armando Iannucci told me that halfway through the 1997 Election Night Armistice – which has to rank as one of the best live TV comedy events of all time – he looked at the camera to discover his autocue was completely blank. ‘The VT’s gone down,’ said a producer in his ear. ‘Just talk for two minutes.’ So he did. Because he had no choice. ‘It’s amazing what comes out,’ he told me.
In the event, I got through my first weeny link without a hitch. But moments before doing my second link, much later in the night, something completely unexpected happened. I did a piss.
Only a little one – a mere eighth of a teaspoon at most – but nevertheless: I did a piss. Not backstage either, but right there on the set, nanoseconds before I was due to start speaking. Fortunately, I was wearing black trousers and sitting down so I got away with it, but inside my head it was pure nuclear war. You see, by that point I’d largely managed to convince myself that the nervous energy I was experiencing was actually just excitement in disguise. The micropiddle was my body’s way of reminding me that, even if my head deluded itself, the rest of me was still petrified.
Do rookie news anchors piss their pants on day one? Did Phillip Schofield launch his career by shitting in the broom cupboard chair? If you’d asked me a week ago, I’d have said no. Now I’m not so sure.
It didn’t end there. Later, I had to take part in a brief roundtable discussion during which I realised my hands were now urinating.
Well, kind of: they were virtually pissing sweat. And although my vision had sorted itself out, my hearing was now proving troublesome (everything everyone said sounded like an incomprehensible jumble of vowels). It really is amazing how the human brain responds to high-stress situations. Specifically, it’s amazing how it conspires to mess you up.
What with all that self-indulgent terror coursing through my veins, I hardly had time to digest the outcome of the election itself, which started out depressing before turning deeply weird. So weird, in fact, that I’m becoming convinced I actually died of a heart attack during my first live piece to camera, and am dreaming all of this on my way to the afterlife.
Cameron suggesting a LibDem coalition? Naaah. That’s the Twilight Zone.
Workplace T&A
14/05/2010
A few weeks ago thousands of volunteers stripped off to pose for Spencer Tunick, for what must be his 500th photographic study of several thousand nudes. How many sets of genitals do you think he’s laid eyes on throughout his career? The man must’ve seen more shivering naked bodies than Caligula in his prime.
Whenever one of Tunick’s stunts makes it on to the news – i.e. each time he does one – the report is rounded out with a few soundbites from participants in which they explain how ‘empowered’ and privileged they felt to help form a work of art. Good for them, because I know for a fact that if I took part, I’d spend the whole time staring at tits and bums, thinking, ‘Look at all these tits and bums’, with one half of my brain, and answering, ‘I already am’, with the other. Art wouldn’t really come into it.
That’s why I’m suspicious of any attempt to ‘empower’ individuals by encouraging them to strip off, a psychological journey television is especially fond of, since human nature dictates that the viewer is going to want to stick around till the end just to see what the lead character’s pubic hair looks like. Millions of viewers would sit through a four-hour live discussion about quantitative easing if the participants promised to flash their arses at random intervals.
Gok Wan pioneered the ‘healing striptease’ format, and at least seemed to be doing it for reasons that were directly related to body image. Since then, we’ve been subjected to BBC3’s Naked, Sky’s The Real Full Monty, and now The Naked Office, in which office workers are gradually cajoled into coming into work with nothing on, because – hey! – it’ll make them a more cohesive team, right?
Overseeing the experiment is a ridiculous self-help guru called Seven Suphi (pronounced ‘Seh-venn Soopee’), who repeatedly claims her mission is to ‘help individuals unleash their full potential’. Her job consists of getting the volunteers to play various bollocksy team-building exercises and trying to pretend that turning up to work naked on Friday to have your genitals filmed and broadcast wouldn’t be a crazy thing to do. Seven doesn’t get naked herself, incidentally. She’s not stupid.
Several problems immediately present themselves. For one thing, the first episode doesn’t really take place in an office. Instead, we’re on the premises of an organic food delivery company, which means most of the action takes place in a chilly warehouse full of cauliflowers. Furthermore, after watching them walk around fully clothed, you don’t particularly want to see any of the workforce naked.
But perhaps the most damning indictment of the whole enterprise is this: most of them don’t actually get naked at all. OK, so one of them does – strides around bold as brass with his penis bobbing hither and thither like a giraffe with a broken neck in fact – but the majority of them cover up their raciest bits with underwear, stickers, or strategically positioned briefcases. One bloke doesn’t participate at all, presumably on the basis that it’s humiliating and pointless.
Nonetheless, the whole thing is packaged up as an inspirational journey that’s transformed the way they do business and blah blah blah. What’s worrying is the thought of office managers watching at home thinking, ‘Hey, that’s a good idea!’ and organising their own Naked Fridays. Most desk jobs are perfectly soul-destroying enough without the prospect of having to gaze up a co-worker’s anus each time they bend down to pick up a paperclip.
Besides, where does this ‘openness’ end? Once you’ve done Naked Friday, what other taboos are there to break? Masturbation Monday? Farty-Nosepick Tuesday? How about Bin-Shit Wednesday, where everyone has to use a makeshift toilet in the middle of the room? That’d be so empowering, it’d move you to tears – and could change the atmosphere in the office so profoundly they’d have to open the windows for a full ten minutes.
The possibilities, like human stupidity, are endless.
Never-ending Tories
16/05/2010
So: the weirdest election in history has produced the weirdest government imaginable. Well, almost. If Cameron had formed a coalition with the cast of Bergerac, that might be weirder – but only by about 7 per cent.
The worst par
t is working out who to hate, and why. I was eight when Thatcher got in, and didn’t really understand what was happening. Nonetheless, before long the Tories had replaced the Cybermen as my number one bogeymen. At first there was a simple, visceral reason for this: they seemed alarmingly gung-ho about nuclear war. They believed nuclear missiles were an effective deterrent, and furthermore, that a nuclear war might be winnable anyway.
I was opposed to all kinds of nuclear war – even little ones between neighbouring Welsh counties were simply not on, in my book. It was my understanding that these things tended to spiral out of control, and burning to death in a massive exploding fireball didn’t rank very high on my list of hopes and dreams for the future.
(My paranoia wasn’t that far off, as it happens. According to the book Rendez-Vous: The Psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand, at the height of the Falklands War, Thatcher threatened to nuke Argentina unless President Mitterrand handed over disabling codes for the French-built Exocet missiles which were pounding British ships. If that’s true, and if Thatcher had carried out her threat, you wouldn’t be reading this now – you’d be fighting a giant scorpion to impress the village elders.)
As if plotting to destroy the world wasn’t bad enough, the Conservatives went on to preside over the most wilfully obnoxious and polarising decade imaginable: braying yuppies at one extreme, penniless strikers at the other. The Tories weren’t just nasty – they seemed to actively enjoy being nasty.
And there was no getting rid of them, even when Thatcher got the boot. Consequently, an entire generation grew up regarding the Tory government as something like rain, or wasps, or stomach flu: an unavoidable, undying source of dismay.
Until 1997, when they were eradicated overnight. It was as if scientists had suddenly discovered a cure for the common cold. A permanent millstone – gone! The initial glow of jubilation never completely faded. For years afterwards, simply knowing the Conservatives weren’t in power left me mildly delighted on a daily basis.
Even when Blair and Co. turned out to be so disappointing, I could console myself with the thought that the Conservatives would have been even worse. OK, so Labour started an illegal war. The Tories would’ve started six – four of them nuclear. So what if the rich/poor divide grew bigger under Labour? The Tories would’ve reopened the mines just so they could enjoy closing them again, right? Then they’d fill them full of tramp corpses and raze the surrounding communities to the ground, yeah?
Yeah.
As this year’s election crept closer, and a Conservative government appeared ever more likely, the Tories became meaningful bogeymen once again. The fact that Cameron generally looks and sounds even less sincere than Blair ever managed to, meant that the more he professed to be caring, the more sinister he became.
Around a year ago, it seemed clear that Cameron would be PM and that, after six weeks in power, the mask would slip and he’d legalise the hunting of single mums. The BBC website would be deleted and replaced with a twenty-four-hour Sky News propaganda feed. Thatcher would be commemorated on banknotes. Drunk with power, Cameron would issue breathtakingly heartless decrees from his onyx throne, while Andy Coulson squatted at his feet, cackling like Gollum and drinking from a skull.
But instead we’ve got this coalition thing. This disorientating mash-up. Cameron and Clegg engaging in public foreplay. A sour Tory cookie with chunks of LibDem chocolate. Even the prospect of George Osborne as Chancellor seems less chilling in the knowledge that Vince Cable can pop his head round the door from time to time, if only to pull disapproving faces. If the Tories had won more seats, or slogged on as a minority government, at least we’d have a clear set of hate figures we could start despising immediately. Instead, we’ve got the Nazis forming an alliance with the Smurfs.
We couldn’t even hate the Tories for looking smug on the steps of Downing Street – partly because Downing Street doesn’t have steps, but mainly because the result forced a helping of humble pie down their necks, which they swallowed with infuriating good grace. Cameron appears to be making a sincere attempt to permanently drag his party towards more moderate ground, which is a crushing blow for those of us who were expecting outright malevolence from day one.
Then there’s the scrapping of ID cards and limits on the spread of CCTV, which are genuinely refreshing. What next? Harsh new punishments for anyone caught snooping on private voicemails? Chances are, Coulson’s typing up a cheery press release on that very subject right now.
As long-dreaded bogeymen, these twenty-first-century Tories are proving a damp squib, like the brightly coloured Daleks. No doubt they’ll do something horrific fairly soon, but so far they haven’t quite obliged, thereby depriving us all of a good cathartic hate-in. I always knew the Tories were selfish at heart, but this really takes the biscuit. Why can’t they just be massively and obviously unreasonable from the outset, like they’re supposed to? If all this pragmatism and inclusion they’re apparently demonstrating doesn’t turn out to be a cynical ruse, I’ll be sorely disappointed.
In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait for them to do something unequivocally shitty before we can say ‘I told you so’ – unless the whole ‘55 per cent majority’ thing turns out to be their equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act, which strikes me as unlikely at the time of writing, since even constitutional experts can’t agree whether it’s a disgraceful abuse of democracy or nothing to worry about.
But by all means remind me of my nonchalance on this subject in four years’ time, when we’re being issued uniforms and ushered down the bunkers. Unless it’s illegal for citizens to converse by then, in which case simply arch your eyebrows and shrug a bit, and I’ll know what you mean.
Sex and violence FTW
21/05/2010
If you’re a fifteen-year-old boy, chances are Spartacus: Blood and Sand will strike you as the finest TV show ever made. The only drawback is that you’re too young to watch it.
This is possibly the lustiest, goriest, most wilfully red-blooded drama series the law and human decency will allow. Roughly every thirty seconds someone gets an axe or sword in the face. Roughly every twenty seconds a woman bares her breasts. Roughly every ten seconds someone grunts a four-letter word starting with either ‘f’ or ‘c’. There’s more fruity language than a week-long Jam convention. Everyone swears like a foul-mouthed trooper stubbing his toe on a slang dictionary. It’s not so much I, Claudius as I Claudi-cuss. HA HA HA.
So: sex, violence, and hardcore swearing. Sometimes all three at once. This programme was not written and performed by pussies. They should’ve called it Spartacus: Blood and Fucking Tits instead.
The plot concerns a nameless Thracian warrior who spends half his life fighting barbarians on behalf of the Romans in unconvincing green-screen CGI landscapes, and the other half having slow-motion sex with his wife. This violent/sexual idyll is spoiled forever when the Romans betray him and his wife is kidnapped. Our nameless hero becomes a gladiator named Spartacus, which means his job now consists of weekly kill-or-be-killed hack-and-slash encounters in the Colosseum.
According to the head trainer, every time a true gladiator enters the ring he must ‘look death in the eye, embrace it and fuck it’. Which was a round sadly missing from the ITV version of Gladiators. But not here. Make no mistake: the gladiatorial scenes are pretty brutal. Limbs are hacked off with such nonchalant frequency, it sometimes feels more like an extreme whittling contest. During one match Spartacus manages to carve two legs off one adversary using a single, uninterrupted back-and-forth slicing action. But the guy’s still going – dragging himself away with his palms as his knee stumps piddle blood. Will Spartacus show mercy? What do you think?
By the end, he’s carved his opponents into such small pieces, it looks like he’s picked a fight with an animated lasagne.
Then there’s the sex. Apparently ancient Rome played host to more blowjobs than the internet. Rich couples nonchalantly screw slaves while discussing the weather. There’s a lot of nudity her
e, and not just female nudity either. It’s always dick o’clock in Spartacus land.
The first time our hero indulges in a little locker-room back-chat with his fellow gladiators, the main antagonist paces around him, penis swinging proudly in the breeze. Usually I find it impossible to hear what actors are saying during a nude scene – my brain’s too busy screaming ‘LOOK AT THEIR TITS LOOK LOOK LOOK’ to process anything as complex as dialogue – but here, for once, the nudity is so persistent, the mind quickly compensates for it. By episode four I was staring at orgy sequences and wondering who composed the background music.
But here’s the surprise – after a disappointingly slow (yes, slow – despite the constant sex and violence) pair of opening episodes, Spartacus starts to improve exponentially until somewhere round episode five, where you stop enjoying it ironically and start to enjoy it outright. Yes, it may be the kind of show in which a tattooed warrior gets his face hacked off by a man armed with a hook; it may feature lines like ‘your wife has been fucked to madness by a thousand vermin cocks’; it may toss in pointless cameos of one-armed topless transsexuals – and all three of these things genuinely happen in the early episodes – but it’s also not half bad. In fact I’d go as far as to say it actually gets quite good. There’s just a hell of a lot to desensitise yourself to first. Good luck. Give it a go.
Oh and that nice John Hannah’s in it, and very good he is too. Your mum likes John Hannah. So if she asks why you’re watching it, cite his involvement. Just don’t, under any circumstances, invite her to watch it.
How to remix humankind
23/05/2010
OK, time to revise those nightmare visions of the future. Rather than being laser-gunned in the lungs by robotic shock troopers, we’ll be absorbed by undulating blob monsters – all because a group of scientists in Maryland have created artificial life in a laboratory. What surprised me most about the news was that it was surprise news. I thought artificial life had been mastered years ago, when Sega created Sonic the Hedgehog. But apparently he didn’t count.
I can make you hate Page 13
