Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  Which leaves us with three genuinely excellent performers. There’s Nicholas (who last week managed to cover Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ without desecrating it in the slightest), Brenda (sassy Aretha Franklin type with a voice the size of Jupiter) and finally, forty-one-year-old Andy, who according to the official X Factor website ‘works as a Dustbin Man’—not a ‘binman’, you’ll note, but a ‘Dustbin Man’—which makes him sound like some kind of waste-disposing superhero. They keep banging on about him being a binman as though it makes him part of a different species, which is a touch patronising, and probably a little depressing for any binmen watching at home, hunched before the screen in their Dickensian hovel. Anyway, whatever he is, he can certainly bloody sing.

  In my book, those final three make equally deserving winners. Simon, Louis and Sharon might as well call the contest off now and manage one each. But sod it, like I said, it’s almost winter, and bird flu’s on the way. They should stay on air. Cooped in our hatches, we’re going to need all the telly we can get.

  …And it Smells good too

  [5 November 2005]

  So we return, initially, to The X-Factor (ITV1), since last week’s edition can’t pass without comment. Not because arse-voiced skittering marionette Chico Time’s still in the running, although that’s incredible in itself. No. What we’re interested in here is Sharon Osbourne, and her ever more disturbing preoccupation with contestant Shayne Ward.

  A fortnight ago she yelped that she wanted to grab hold of his ‘private parts’ while he sang a high note. Last Saturday she outdid even that. The twenty-one-year-old Justin Timber-like had just performed a yawnsome trudge through Bryan Adams’s ‘Summer Of ‘69’ when he found himself impaled on an outrageously flirtatious spike in chatter, courtesy of La Osbourne. ‘I’ve got something to give you/ she cooed, batting her eyelashes. ‘It’s warm and it feels good—and it smells good too.’

  It sounded like the set-up for a Carry On gag—ah, I get it, it’s a mug of cocoa!—but as it turned out, there wasn’t a punchline. She really was talking about her Jemima Puddleduck, and didn’t care who knew it. What’s she going to do for an encore this week? Draw him a picture? Vault the desk and wipe it down his leg?

  For all their faults, it’s hard to imagine Simon Cowell—and impossible to imagine Louis Walsh—spouting similar stuff at the female contestants. ‘Oh, Chenai! Chenai, Chenai, Chenai! I’ve got something to give you Chenai. It’s long and it’s straight and it’s twitching with joy. And what’s more—it stinks.’

  It’s all the more curious since the great British public recently decreed Sharon their ‘Most Popular TV Expert’ at the National Television Awards. An expert in what exactly? Behaving like a mad aunt at a wedding? Going into sexual meltdown? Gordon Ramsay was a runner-up—perhaps if he’d livened up Kitchen Nightmares by threatening to bugger the chefs, he’d have won (although he’d also have had to hand back all those hygiene awards).

  Currently, all Sharon does is ooh and ahh over the contestants as though they’re made of freshly-baked gingerbread. Still, perhaps it’s part of die build-up to the moment in die final few weeks when she finally snaps—just like last year when she launched into a bizarre personal attack on luckless Steve Brookstein. Here’s hoping.

  Anyway, on to Bleak House (BBC1), whose place in the weekday schedules is enough to make you take leave of your senses and get all dewy-eyed about the BBC’s contribution to our collective spiritual well-being. It’s the primetime soap equivalent of Deadwood, and I don’t mean that disparagingly.

  Unlike every other TV previewer on Earth, I’m a scarcely educated ignoramus who’s never read Bleak House, nor had it read aloud to me in sonorous tones by a mortar-boarded master. So I can’t tell you how faithful Andrew Davies’s adaptation is, or whether Johnny Vegas’s repellent, slobbering Krook is so stunningly accurate it’s like he’s stepped off the page and blown off in your living room. I can’t even tell you precisely what’s going on, because just like Deadwood, my brain seems to be several steps behind the actual storyline at any given moment—but in an enjoyable, wallowing sort of a way.

  In other words, I like it a lot. The one criticism I can muster is that it suffers slightly from cameo-overload syndrome. Occasionally the absurd number of well-known faces involved makes the process of watching it feel like lolling on a sofa, drunk, at Christmas, while a relative systematically fast-forwards their way through a comprehensive DVD box set containing every television drama serial ever made.

  Come to think of it, just about the only famous person who hasn’t shown up is Sharon Osbourne. Well, not yet. Perhaps the final episode revolves around a mad gothic aunt at a wedding, coming on to the best man, berating the groom and biting the head off a bat. Who knows? I haven’t read it. And don’t lie: neither have you.

  Slough of despond

  [12 November 2005]

  Everybody hurts. Everybody bonks their head against the hull of despair now and then. Everybody finds themselves drifting along the pavement, fuelled only by the gentle throb of sadness—their eyes fixed on a distant thundering nowhere, while the rest of the world babbles idiotically in the background. Everybody’s turned their smile upside down and felt it drip off their face. Yes, everybody hurts. Everybody’s got a headful of boo-hoo.

  Well, OK—not everybody. Just people who live in Slough. And can you blame them? It’s a concrete-and-brickwork heckhole; a broken diagram of a town, famous solely for being (a) the setting for The Office, and (b) the subject of a Betjeman poem that wished a blitz upon it. Slough looks like it was never actually built, merely crapped into position by a misanthropic, mediocre God. It’s not a town—it’s a misery engine.

  And that’s why the positive-thinking gurus faced with Making Slough Happy (BBC2) have their work cut out for them. Yes, it’s ‘social experiment’ time, folks—a new series in which a team of ‘happiness experts’ descend on Slough in a bid to stop the populace sobbing openly in the streets. Heading up the project is former journalist Richard Reeves, author of a book on happiness in the workplace and a man so eerily, robotically pleasant, you wouldn’t be surprised if his face suddenly fell off, revealing a set of circuit boards and flashing LEDs.

  But Reeves isn’t quite as frightening—or as happy- as Dr Richard Stevens, a hippyish, silver-haired ‘psychologist of well-being’ who we first encounter literally prancing about in a dingly dell, grinning so violently he’s in danger of splitting his face in two.

  Together, they’re unstoppable. Their first action is to draft a Happiness Manifesto for the Sloughsters—a ten-point personal improvement plan that includes simple advice like ‘take some exercise’, ‘count your blessings’ and ‘have a good laugh’.

  Reeves, bless him, walks around Slough handing this document to glum passers-by. The sequence in which he stands in a branch of Gregg’s, attempting to pass the happiness bug on to a line of people miserably queuing for pastries, is heartbreaking.

  Stevens, meanwhile, is leading a group of volunteers into a forest, where he encourages them to dance around and, yes, hug trees.

  On the face of it, all the experts’ advice sounds insipid and moronic—but you can bet your sweet bippy that if you stifled your cynical snorting and followed their suggestions, you’d end up feeling far better than when you started. That’s the trouble with jovial hippies. They’re often right—the happy bastards.

  Happily fertilised

  [19 November 2005]

  It’s a day much like any other. Bob and Mike are dangling from a mucus rope, slowly revolving, with their bodies intertwined…when quite without warning, translucent penises begin to emerge from the back of their heads. Said penises writhe and intertwine also: undulating, throbbing, swapping sperm between the pair of them. Finally, when they’re all pumped out, our loving couple let go of the rope, tumble to the ground and wriggle away- both happily fertilised.

  It sounds like the sort of sexually confusing dream you might have after eating six pounds of cheese and
falling asleep in a sleeper carriage, but amazingly, this whole psychedelic adult-fun encounter is(a) entirely real, and (b) broadcast in close-up, slap-bang in the middle of BBQ.

  Of course, I’ve made it sound more shocking than it actually is. When I say ‘Bob and Mike’, what I actually mean is ‘an anonymous pair of hermaphrodite slugs’. I don’t know what their real names are. Although the one on the left definitely looks like a ‘Bob’. But that bit about the penises growing out the back of their heads? I’m not making that up.

  But perhaps Sir David Attenborough is. Because Life in the Undergrowth (BBC1), Sir Dave’s latest natural history epic, contains so many jaw-dropping moments it’s hard to shake the suspicion he might be having us on. He might’ve had a bonk on the head and gone a bit crazy, and convinced the BBC to let him spend two years making a series about things that only exist in the darkest corners of his mind.

  The footage is the clincher—it’s far too clear, far too spectacular and hypnotic. It must be CGI. They’ve plugged a USB lead into his brain and asked him to dream really hard down the pipe.

  It’s the only explanation. At one point he introduces us to a ruddy great foot-long centipede that hangs from the roof of caves in order to catch and eat bats. Come on, pull the other one, Dave—it’s got a translucent penis sticking out of it.

  Lord knows what Freud would make of the sexual connotations of the centipede dream—not to mention the same-sex snot-rope slug-shag incident I mentioned in the first paragraph. In fact, sex is clearly one of Dave’s overriding obsessions, because he returns to it again and again.

  Take the segment with the arachnid ‘harvestman’ thingamajig, which attracts females by building a showroom full of eggs, then walking around methodically polishing them all day, like an eight-legged jewellery-store owner. Initially, it’s all rather charming, the sight of this chap impressing the ladies by setting out his stall and keeping it tidy. You almost expect him to pop on a bow tie and wax his moustache.

  But no. Before long, Dave wanders down a hot velvet alley in his head, and it’s bumpy-thrusty time. A shot of yet another translucent penis fills the screen—and it’s Lovers’ Guide time, Davey-style: ‘He has a rod with which he injects his sperm. He withdraws, and she’s been fertilised.’

  Yeah, yeah. So far, so human. Come on, Sir D—get sick on our ass.

  ‘Half an hour later, she lowers her white tubular ovipositor…she thrusts the egg into the floor of the nest and covers it with a thin blanket of mud.’

  Hoo boy. I tell you, this is some of the hottest white tubular ovipositor action I’ve ever seen. That egg-thrust? And the thin blanket of mud? That’s one heck of a money shot right there. I give it five stars. Bring a tissue.

  I’m being both flippant and a moron: Life in the Undergrowth is a fantastic programme—captivating, stunning, and occasionally downright poetic. And I’m not fit to wriggle under Sir David Atten-borough’s boots.

  Eye-brain mindwipe syndrome

  [26 November 2005]

  Why, it seems like only yesterday we were discussing the last series of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! (ITV1)—when we thrilled to the antics of, um…Janet Street-Porter. And. Er. Oh yes: Vie and Nancy. And all the other people who were in it. Those were great days, weren’t they? Vintage times. Ahhh. I’d get dewy-eyed just thinking about it, if I could just remember what happened.

  Unlike good drama or comedy, which can resonate somewhere round the back of your soul for years after the event, your memories of I’m a Celeb wither on the vine the moment the credits roll. The same is true of every other reality show ever: they exist in the moment, nowhere else. Nothing wrong with that, in moderation: that’s their job. They’re like a fun, throwaway version of the news.

  Trouble is, it’s getting to the point where I’m forgetting what’s happening while it occurs. It’s a medical condition known as Concurrent Eye-Brain Mindwipe Syndrome, and it makes writing a column like this very tricky. I have to record each episode and watch it six times over, taking extensive notes as I go. And even then, I still thrash about with astonishment each time the camera cuts to Jenny Frost. Try as I might, I simply can’t remember she’s there.

  Recalling the others is easier. David Dickinson’s a doddle, because he’s so audio-visually arresting. With his sagging 32A breasts, cow-length eyelashes and oaky complexion, he vaguely resembles a retired Thai ladyboy who’s jacked in the nightclub act and applied for a DJ position at Magic FM. Unforgettable.

  Then there’s Sid Owen, who’s easy to remember on account of his sole facial expression—a cross between a confused boy and a frightened pug. The moment he leaves the jungle someone should cast him as an adult Ron Weasley in a down-at-heel ‘re-imagining’ of the J. K. Howling books: Harry Potter and the Fight Down Wetherspoons, or something similar. No idea what happens in it, but with Sid in the cast, the job’s half done. Innit.

  Carol Thatcher’s also hard to miss, chiefly because every time she opens her gob, gruesome memories of her mother pump through the veins in my head, and I have to clench my fists so hard my knuckles pop out and shatter against the wall.

  Annalise from Neighbours is the first one I really have trouble with, because she looks identical to the Annalise from Neighbours I spent countless afternoons developing a pathetic stoner’s crush on ten years ago. Either she hasn’t aged, or I’m a Celeb’s become so ephemeral, it’s ceasing to exist before it occurs, thereby causing a loop in the space-time continuum that’s allowed her to step straight out of 1995, unscathed, into the present.

  The others drift in and out of my head like repressed abuse memories. There’s Antony Costa (who looks like a novelty inflatable condemned man), Jilly Goolden (plum-gobbed ghost-train skeleton), Jimmy Osmond (played by Teddy Ruxpin, the creepy 19805 bear), and Sheree Murphy (about whom—and this is a fact-it’s impossible to say anything funny or interesting).

  Of these, only Antony Costa has made me laugh so far—not because of anything he’s done on the show, but because of his docile expression in his worm-eating publicity shot.

  Still. Early days.

  Finally, what is there to say about OFI Sunday (ITV1) except: how many weeks, d’you reckon, until Chris Evans slows to a halt in mid-sentence, stares down the lens for a full minute, then silently produces a handgun and starts walking round the studio, firing wildly at the crew, the cameras, and the audience? How many weeks till that occurs? Not sure if William Hill are taking bets on it yet, but I say three weeks. A friend of mine reckons one.

  Who’s right? Doesn’t matter. Regardless of the timeframe, it’s clearly destined to happen.

  —It didn’t happen.

  Phil Mitchell fighting a reindeer

  [10 December 2005]

  When, in your head, does December stop being December and start being Christmas instead? For me, it’s nothing to do with the physical signs you see in the street—lamp posts swaddled in fairy lights, a drunk in a Santa hat throwing up in a doorway, shoppers kicking each other to death to get their hands on an Xbox 360…that’s part of the build-up, not the event itself. Because as far as I’m concerned, Christmas only truly arrives the moment BBC1 unveils its annual Christmas idents.

  Last year’s offering featured a group of kids on Christmas-pudding-shaped space-hoppers bouncing around a mock Arctic landscape. The idea for this was selected via a Blue Peter competition, which is about as warm and cuddly and all-round BBC as it gets. I’ve no idea what’s in store this year, although I’d love to see any of the following: (1) Phil Mitchell fighting a reindeer; (2) Some baby Daleks building a snowman while a kindly grandpa Dalek looks on, smoking a pipe; (3) a claymation baby Jesus playing Swingball with Pingu; (4) Charlie from Casualty pooing into a stocking (hey, it might happen).

  (I know what I don’t want to see: a special Christmas edition of that nightmarish CGI-heavy advert the BBC started running a few weeks back to promote their range of digital services—you know, the one where a swarm of babbling human heads flies over the moors,
forms itself into the shape of one giant face made up of hundreds of little ones, then squawks at you about how bloody brilliant the BBC is. Once seen, never forgotten, but not in a positive sense. Something about it makes me genuinely giddy: it’s the sort of thing I’d expect to see in my mind’s eye during brain surgery, or while fighting off a fever in a hot and airless room. Brrrr. I’d rather not even think about it.)

  Whichever yuletide option the BBC decides to go with, chances are it’ll be (a) as slick and sophisticated as being fellated by a butler, and (b) virtually omnipresent. Because that’s the way all such TV’furniture’ seems to be heading. Gone are the days of the simple, garish BBC1 ‘revolving globe’, or the Thames TV ‘London skyline rising from the waters’ ident—chunks of TV ephemera which look laughably amateurish compared to their modern equivalents, yet possess approximately seventy-eight times the charm. Where once a simple station logo would suffice, we’re now offered polished widescreen mini-movies, smug optical haikus and, worst of all, intrusive little pop-ups telling us what we’re currently watching, what’s coming next, what we should think about it, and what docile pricks we are for sitting there and withstanding it all.

  And in case mere visual spam isn’t enough, in recent years all continuity announcers have been trained to butt in and start bellowing over the end tides of your favourite programme within 0.5 picoseconds of the first end credit appearing.

  Not that it matters really—because the era of individual end-sequences is over anyway. Today, the precise length and layout of all closing credits is strictly controlled—Channel 4, for instance, specifies all dialogue or voiceovers must finish prior to the start of the credits (so their announcer can shout all over them), while text is kept to the left-hand side of the screen (so a big CGI bum can crap pictures of upcoming shows, spin-off books, holiday snaps, etc, all over the right-hand side).