Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  Less sickening, though equally preposterous, is Most Haunted—an allegedly ‘factual’ cross between Scooby-Doo and the Blair Witch Project, hosted by Yvette Fielding and ‘Britain’s leading psychic’ Derek Acorah. It’s outrageous nonsense—nothing but a bunch of people lamely making stuff up, holding seances and going ‘woooh’, shot with night-vision cameras to make it look creepy. The only thing genuinely returning from the grave here is Yvette’s career.

  Still, Derek’s hilarious, particularly when he gets ‘possessed’ by spirits and screams the word ‘bitch’ right into Yvette’s face. If he believes in what he’s doing, he’s insane. If he doesn’t, he’s a laughable prat. Either way, Derek loses and we win. As a ‘paranormal investigation’, Most Haunted is about as scientifically rigorous as an episode of Bod, but the audience laps it up. I watched last weekend’s ‘live special’ and was dismayed by the avalanche of texts the show received.

  Mind you, many claimed to have experienced a strange sensation of’nausea’ and reported their sets ‘switching off’ during the show. Paranormal phenomena, or flickerings of sanity? You needn’t be psychic to work that one out.

  If a penis could choose its own wardrobe

  [26 March 2005]

  If a penis could choose its own wardrobe and hair stylist, chances are it’d end up looking like Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman, star of Dog the Bounty Hunter (Bravo). Essentially The Osbournes with pepper spray, it’s a light-hearted docusoap chronicling the life of a family of bounty hunters—Dog, his wife Beth, son Leland, brother Tim and nephew Justin.

  The Chapmans all dress like bombastic 19805 action movie heroes—particularly Dog himself, who stomps about wearing biker boots, leather trousers, open shirts and a haircut that makes him resemble the entire cast of The Lost Boys crossed with a gay lion.

  It’s worth tuning in for about five minutes simply for that haircut, but sadly Dog soon turns out to be about 10 per cent as interesting as he and the producers think he is.

  In fact, I only mention it because Dog spends most of his time hauling poverty-stricken heroin addicts out of shit-encrusted trailer homes, thus providing a perfect contrast to The Queen’s Castle (BBC1), also a docusoap, but set in one of the most expensive homes in the world: Windsor Castle. Unlike Dog the Bounty Hunter, no one gets kicked in the nuts or zapped with a Taser gun in this show and, for reasons which will now become clear, that’s a crying shame.

  As the programme begins, a great hoo-hah is made of the fact that the crew has been granted ‘unprecedented access’ to Windsor Castle, as though we should be somehow grateful for being granted a peep at the glittering opulence within—opulence we’ve paid for and which the royals take for granted. But before you come to terms with that, the programme hits you with something else: polishing.

  Lots of polishing. Hours of it. Too much in fact. I now understand how the Windsor Castie fire broke out: a member of staff had been ordered to polish the Queen’s teaspoons till they glowed white-hot.

  There’s also dusting, wiping, mopping, folding, ironing, arranging…you name it: priceless trinkets and pieces of furniture painstakingly manipulated by subservient staff on behalf of Her Grumpiness the Crone, who turns up hours later and doesn’t even say thank you.

  Naturally, the inmates of this slave-labour camp are filled with pride, mesmerised by the prestige of a lifetime spent in pointless backbreaking servitude. One woman almost blubs for joy, recounting how as a girl she dreamed of spending each day on her hands and knees, needlessly wiping any object the Queen might waft within 500 metres of. Now her wildest childhood fantasies have come true.

  It doesn’t stop with housework. Every imaginable convenience is taken care of by a crack squad of fawning serfs. Guests staying overnight don’t unpack their own cases: a team of maids does it for them. Diners tucking in to a helping of swan-and-unicorn terrine have it practically spoon-fed to them by grovelling footmen. Nip off for a crap and chances are there’s a cap-doffing peasant stationed by the bowl, punching himself in the face with pride as he wipes your bum, pulls the chain and holds a sprig of lavender under your nose till the stink fades away.

  Just when you think things can’t get any worse, you’re treated to the sight of Queen and Co. sitting down to enjoy some modest after-dinner entertainment—the musical Les Misfrables, transplanted in its entirety from the West End to one of Windsor Castle’s 8,000 drawing rooms. And what’s that the cast are singing? Why, it’s a song about the miserable lot of the underclass: ‘At the end of the day you’re another day older / And that’s all you can say for the life of the poor…Keep on grafting as long as you’re able/ Keep on grafting till you drop’—all of which plays out over footage of the staff frenziedly washing dishes and licking the bog floor clean with their tongues.

  Here’s hoping the series ends with the castle burning down a second time. While the staff get pissed and polish off the wine cellar.

  Show us your bum for ten pence

  [2 April 2005]

  Travelling at 7,000 MPH, 22,000 miles above our heads, a satellite orbits the Earth, beaming a signal to the dish on your roof. This signal then travels down a fibre-optic cable to a receiver which unscrambles the image and sends it to your TV set, which in turn paints it on the screen, line by line, 15,000 times a second, fast enough for your brain to register as a moving image.

  All this, just so you can watch girls waving their bums around on shows like Babestation (about a million different satellite stations, nightly).

  Have you seen Babestation? If you’ve got a satellite dish, that’s a stupid question—you can’t miss it. Go randomly channel-surfing any time after 10 PM and you’ll bump into more Babestation variants than you can shake a stick at. If you catch my drift.

  In case you don’t, here’s what I’m talking about: Babestation is a bit of night-time ‘adult fun’ (i.e. pornography) consisting of several inset windows. One houses live footage of thick girls in various states of undress. Below that lies another window full of texts from even thicker viewers, begging them to blow kisses and jiggle about a bit. Sending the texts cost a fortune, and that’s why Babestation is there. It’s a coin-operated wanking machine, in other words, and it’s just as glamorous as that sounds.

  Other stations house coundess spin-off variants on this theme: generally dingy webcam footage of girls in rooms as small as coffin interiors, chatting to viewers on premium-rate phone lines.

  Grimmest of these is the alarming Babestation Contacts, which displays phone-camera snaps of sagging viewers accompanied by voicemail messages encouraging you to get in touch, come round and muck about with them.

  This is almost enough to signal the end of civilisation as we know it, which is currently scheduled to occur the day a major network broadcasts a show I’ve recently invented called Show Us Your Bum for Ten Pence-a four-hour live broadcast in which viewers nationwide are encouraged to send in phone snaps of their backsides in exchange for a lop discount on their next mobile bill. Scoff all you like, but I guarantee it’ll be on air within a decade.

  Anyway: Babestation— it’s seedy and gooey and yucky and bluurgh, but even so, it’s nowhere near as puke-inducing as one of its daytime equivalents, the truly hideous Psychic Interactive. The name gives it away—yes, it’s another bit of coin-slot bummery, this time aimed at the desperate and gullible (as opposed to the desperate and masturbating).

  Psychic Interactive offers a range of services, from premium-rate one-to-one ‘sessions’ with on-air mystics to text-window Tarot readings courtesy of dowdy bags in the studio. People text in to discover whether their relationships will survive, or their job prospects will improve…even to find out whether they’re pregnant. It’s one of the most nauseating things you’ll ever see. Well, until Babestation Contacts turns up later on.

  And there’s an incongruously surreal twist: since Psychic Interactive is currently only broadcast during ‘dead time’ on a channel normally aimed at video-game fans, it’s interrupted every few minutes by an ‘ad break�
�� largely consisting of stills of Pac Man accompanied by captions in Italian, or Mortal Kombat characters backed with heavy metal music. This must irritate Psychic Interactive’s natural audience immensely, which is why I laugh out loud each time it comes on.

  Regular readers will know I don’t have much time for ‘psychics’ of any description, and a few weeks ago I fantasised aloud (well, in print) about a law aimed at shutting them down.

  I didn’t realise one already exists: the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act, aimed at people who purport to ‘act as spiritualistic mediums or to exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers’ in order to deceive people for financial gain. Clearly this law doesn’t apply to anyone appearing on Psychic Interactive, or they’d have all been booted off screen ages ago.

  Be not afraid

  [9 April 2005]

  Chunky, golden CGI lettering farts its way across your screen, accompanied by ominous music: ‘One man…One calling…One world…’ What is this, a trailer for the next Vin Diesel beat—‘em-up? Nope. The slogans vanish and are instandy replaced by a cut-out photo of the late Pope, accompanied by his name, spelled out in a medieval font presumably selected for its religious overtones, and a quote along the bottom: ‘BE NOT AFRAID.’

  It looks like a computer-generated version of a knowingly tacky Terry Gilliam animation, but it’s not supposed to be funny. It’s supposed to be solemn. It’s a break bumper on Fox News, which is bringing you up-to-the-minute coverage of the death of the Pope.

  Of course, Fox can confidently claim to run more coverage of this sad event than anyone else. After all, they got a head start by announcing his death a day early, on April Fool’s day.

  Again, uiis wasn’t supposed to be funny. It was a mistake. The only joke is Fox itself, and running the ‘BE NOT AFRAID’ bumper while simultaneously doing its utmost to keep viewers in a state of perpetual ill-informed terror is presumably the punchline. I may not know much about the Pope, but I’d put money on him feeling thoroughly sickened by everything Fox stands for—particularly their star turn Bill O’Reilly, notorious host of The O’Reilly Factor, who spent much of last Monday’s show lambasting the dead Pontiff for (a) criticising the Iraq war, and (b) not doing enough to halt the rise of’anti-Christian’ activity in the US.

  Bill himself, of course, does his best to promote Christian values. Why, he regularly preaches tolerance and forgiveness—virtues he drew on last year when he settled out of court with a woman who’d accused him of sexually harassing her over the phone. He accused her in return of extortion. In the Christian spirit of tolerance and forgiveness, they’ve agreed to end the battle—although if you fancy a laugh, you can still find the statements lurking on the internet.

  From one belligerent monster to another—namely Saira Khan, the most irritating woman in the world, still hanging on against all the odds in The Apprentice (BBC2). Saira is a self-professed business supremo who endlessly babbles about her brilliant vision, drive and interpersonal intuition. By her reckoning, these are three great business skills, although she may be doing herself a disservice, because judging by her progress she possesses four key business skills: ‘missing the point’, ‘bullshitting’, ‘hectoring’ and ‘backstabbing’. Above all, though, she’s patronising. If Saira spoke to an unborn foetus through a stethoscope for five minutes, it’d come away feeling somehow demeaned by the encounter.

  The Apprentice being what it is, the stage is set for an ultimate showdown between Saira and Sir Alan Sugar, who, as he reminds us in the opening titles each week, ‘can’t stand bullshitters’. It’s got to happen soon—Saira’s managed to cock things up more than anyone else, yet has miraculously escaped dismissal week after week. At this rate, she’ll win—thereby turning the show into one long hideous parable about the inexorable rise of obstinate morons everywhere.

  Horrifying it may be, but The Apprentice is also brilliant fun. And Sir Alan’s so good, he deserves a second knighthood. Sir Alan Sugar Squared has quite a ring to it, don’t you think?

  Before I go, a quick mention of Doctor Who (BBC1), despite the blanket coverage the series has received elsewhere. Thing is, I simply can’t stand by and let this week’s episode, The Unquiet Dead, pass by without comment, for the following reason: I think it may be the single best piece of family-oriented entertainment BBC has broadcast in its entire history. It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s exciting, it’s moving, it’s got shades of Nigel ‘Quatermass’ Kneale about it, it looks fantastic, and in places it’s genuinely frightening. TV really doesn’t get better than this, ever. Resistance is futile, as Davros or Saira or even Bill O’Reilly might say.

  Cargo of pebbleheads

  [16 April 2005]

  Europe! It’s got everything! Golden beaches! Snow-dappled mountains! Dingly dells! Cities! Cutting-edge modern buildings shaped like kitchen utensils! Culture! Moaning! Welcome to the horrid world of Coach Trip (C4), the bargain-bucket daily reality show, which thunders to a climax this week. I say ‘thunders’, I mean ‘trundles’. And I say ‘climax’, but I mean ‘sorry conclusion’.

  It works like this: get a coachload of idiots in pairs and drive them round Europe, stopping at tourist spots where they can potter around and disapprove of everything, including each other. At the end of each show, the couples vote to eject one pair from the group, thus souring an already fractious mood even further, before the coach shuttles its now diminished cargo of pebbleheads on to the next location.

  Unfortunately, each time a pair leaves, they’re replaced by an equally unpleasant couple. Recently we’ve suffered a pair of substantial hosepipes called Gavin and Nathan, self-regarding oily siblings who work on a ‘freelance basis’ in ‘the music industry’. Gavin doesn’t so much demonstrate an eye for the ladies as openly waggle a penis at them, thereby rendering himself the least agreeable member of the party. But only marginally. Most of the others are standard tutting, parochial Brits, apparently incapable of enjoying or appreciating anything.

  Overseeing the whingeing, whining lot of them is glamorous tour guide Brendan, whose faintly camp air of detachment ensures fun is never more than a six-hour air-conditioned coach journey away. As you’d expect, Brendan is also a seasoned diplomat. Last week he playfully chastised a 73-year-old passenger for wearing a miniskirt (to be fair, her exposed legs did have the textural appearance of Peperami sticks), before stoking the holiday-makers’ enthusiasm for the Spanish bullring they were about to visit by describing, in unflinching step-by-step detail, just how grisly the public slaughter of a large angry mammal can be.

  I hope they make a second series of Coach Trip. Set exclusively in the winding, perilous mountain roads of the French Alps. During a blizzard. With a bomb in the boot. And with each losing contestant being nailed to a cross and hurled into the crevasse below. Directed by Michael Winner.

  From one winner to another—yes, it’s The (BBC2), and Saira Khan’s still on the playing field, despite her stroppy, oblivious rudeness angering Tottenham Hotspur’s corporate division so badly they virtually withdrew cooperation from last week’s task. Another irritating trait I’ve noticed—She. Talks. In. Broken. Sentences. Very. Very. Slowly. Whenever. She’s. Trying. To. Negotiate. With. Someone. I think she mistakes this for ‘clear communication’, as opposed to patronising baby talk.

  If Saira doesn’t win, the BBC should snap her up and give her a role in Mind Your Own Business (BBC1), a daily corner-shop makeover show starring Duncan Dragons’Den Bannatyne and a mysterious Cruella De Vil type calling herself’Mrs S’. The show seems to work like this: Duncan and Mrs S visit a struggling small business, systematically knock all the joy out of it, and leave a ruthlessly efficient but character-free shark pit in their wake. In the case of a neglected village store, their prescribed changes included placing ‘impulse purchases’ by the counter, charging more for chocolate bars, and developing a ‘brand identity’ for the shop itself.

  As a team, Duncan and Mrs S work pretty well—he’s stiff and ungainly, she�
�s downright terrifying—but they could do with a little added pizzazz, and Saira’s the woman to provide it. While the others faff about installing laminate flooring and hypnotising customers into voting New Labour, Saira could lock herself in the back room with the owner and Talk. Very. Slowly. To. Them. Until. They. Agree. To. The. Programme’s. Every. Demand.

  Don’t have nightmares

  [14 May 2005]

  What do we want? Bleedin’ justice! When do we want it? Right bloody now! Pity, then, that the wheels of justice turn so slowly. I mean, the Michael Jackson trial reconstructions have been running on Sky News for ages now, and we’re only just getting to the bit where they bring in the celebrity witnesses (with any luck, we should get a Stevie Wonder impersonator this week—I’m not making this up).

  In our espresso-paced era, to spend months soberly weighing up the facts feels outrageously self-indulgent. Even Crimewatch UK (BBC1), once considered the last word in instant justice, takes too long to produce results. Oh, it’s all very well to end the show with a nod and a wink and a ‘we’ve had lots of interesting leads’, but in this day and age we need speedier results. Or we’ll have nightmares. Old-fashioned tip-offs from the criminal underworld take far too long to process, and besides, most of the viewers aren’t members of the criminal underworld anyway—they’re paranoid curtain-twitchers, and the programme should inject a littie mobile-phone interactivity into its format in order to empower them.

  How about encouraging viewers to stand by their living-room windows throughout the programme, taking phone-camera snaps of suspicious passers-by and texting them into the studio where we can all have a good look at them? Better yet, they could introduce a 2o-minute break in the middle, so anyone who lives near a canal or secluded area of woodland can nip out, take the dog for a walk, and send in pictures of any bodies they find lying about.