Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  Thus the branded furniture bleeds ever further into the programmes themselves, until individual shows start to feel more like strands in a single evening-long programme—the BBC show, the ITV show, the Channel 4 show, and so on. Good news for networks craving strong customer awareness, bad news for anyone who just wants to watch something decent on telly without being shouted at, patronised, or congratulated on the supposed ‘lifestyle choice’ some marketing prinkle insists they’ve just made.

  If you want a vision of the future, imagine a C4 logo stamping on an end-credit sequence—for ever. Bah humbug.

  Burned into the memory

  [31 December 2005]

  Phew. Bang goes another thrill-packed year of sitting on the sofa staring at a box in the corner of the room. Usually, this Screen Bum awards ceremony round-up thing would explore some sort of overriding annual ‘theme’. A while back, when Simon Cowell first appeared on our screens, the defining theme was ‘cruelty’. The year John Leslie ran into difficulties, it was ‘celebrities in trouble’. This time round, I’m jiggered if I can spot a theme. Looking back through the past 365 days, the shows that stand out are a pretty disparate bunch—so maybe the significant trend of 2005 was ‘trend-less incongruence’. Yeah. Because that makes tons of sense.

  Enough quibbling. Let’s dish out the awards. First up, the brand new Most Undeservedly Pleased With Itself award, which goes to the David LaChapelle teaser trailer for Channel 4’s Lost, in which the cast danced around in slow motion while Beth from Portishead sang about feeling ‘ever so lo-o-st’—almost impossibly, this managed to be even more pretentious and annoying than the series itself. If, upon seeing it, you turned to an equally moronic companion and said, ‘Ooh, that looks interesting,’ feel free to spend 2006 punching some sense into your own stupid face.

  Lost also bags the Single Most Preposterous Episode award, for the edition portraying Charlie Junkie’s rise to Madchester glory. Years ago the Comic Strip made a film called Strike!, which depicted a hilariously inaccurate Hollywood version of the miner’s strike: Losfs Driveshaft episode did much the same for the Oasis story. If you missed it, it’s worth hunting down on DVD, just so you can point at it and laugh.

  The award for the show Most Impervious to Criticism goes to Jamie’s School Dinners in which Sir Flappy-Tongued Bumface himself saved the lives of millions of children—or so it seemed, given the orgy of self-fellating middle-class rapture that followed.

  This was campaigning television all right, and while it’s hard to disagree with the policy change it instigated, it’s worth remembering that as a TV show it was merely preaching to the converted—a piece of entertainment laser-targeted at snobby plasma-screen dickwits whose Smeg fridges were already bursting with organic produce in the first place. These nauseating twats aren’t trying to feed a family of five on a sink-estate budget: they wouldn’t dream of feeding their precious Jake anything that hadn’t come out of a Nigel Slater cookbook, and by Christ they’re proud of it. For them, Jamie’s School Dinners merely heralded another golden opportunity to sit around smugly tutting at everyone else in the world. Well, up theirs. I don’t want their kids to be healthy. I prefer them fat and wheezing. Large, slow targets are easier to hit.

  The award for Most Utterly Stomach-Churning Person Imaginable is always a hotly contested category, and this year is no exception. An early candidate, bossy-gobbed Saira from The Apprentice, was soon overtaken by Maxwell from Big Brother 6, the mesmeris-ingly awful and overconfident bully-boy who managed to single-handedly evoke memories of every witless belching thug you’ve ever met. At least he did while he was actually in the house—the moment he stepped outside the BB crucible it became impossible to remember quite why he’d seemed so horrid. In fact, he’s probably really nice—which means the winner, without a shadow of a doubt, is ITV’s Jeremy Kyle, possibly the most disturbing morning talkshow host the world has ever seen.

  Alternately bullying and then comforting his guests like a one-man Good Cop/Bad Cop routine, Kyle is one part Jerry Springer, two parts Nicky Campbell, and three parts Guantanamo Bay. I’m convinced he’s genuinely insane, and wouldn’t be at all surprised if I tuned in one morning to find him slapping a guest round the face with his dick. Well done Jeremy. You’re Beelzebub’s Man of the Year.

  The award for the Most Giddying Afternoon of Television goes to the 21 July news coverage when, a mere fortnight after four wankers blew themselves up on the tube, an apparent copycat incident sent the news networks into overdrive. Press briefings, anxious shots of buses, armed officers ordering a man near Downing Street to lie on the ground…several times there was simply too much news all happening at once, so they had to go split-screen. It all resembled a hideous real-life version of 24.

  24 itself, incidentally, wins the Most Disgusting Thinly-Veiled Propaganda award for the way it suddenly started shoe-horning in all manner of unhinged neo-con bullshit into its fourth series, peaking with a shameful episode in which a lawyer representing a civil rights group called ‘Amnesty Global’ was depicted as a loathsome, shifty ne’er-do-well hell-bent on aiding and abetting terrorists—largely because he tried to stop CTU torturing someone for the 10 billionth time that series.

  In the States, the series subsequently developed a cult following amongst dickless, tooth-gnashing Rush Limbaugh types. Co-creator Joel Surnow told the Washington Times that to label the show as conservative-leaning would be ‘a fair assessment’, adding that, ‘doing something with any sense of reality to it seems conservative’.

  Hello? Sense of reality? 24? The show that opened with a gorgeous, pouting lesbian terrorist-for-hire blowing up and parachuting from a passenger jet—and grew steadily less plausible as it went along? The show in which Jack’s wife got amnesia and his daughter got menaced by a mountain lion? In which Jack Bauer once literally came back from the dead? Someone’s talking out of their backside, aren’t they, Joel? Mind you, I still watched it from beginning to end, so what does that make me? (Answer: an idiot, obviously.)

  Some quick and final honours now. Breakthrough Star of the Year has to be Sir Alan Sugar from The Apprentice, whose relentless cur-mudgeonliness was a joy to behold; the Most Awesome Plunge in Dignity award goes to Big Brother’s Kinga (who thinks an ‘alcopop’ is the noise you hear when you pull the bottle out); Most Hideous Single Image goes to the BBC’s nightmarish ‘jabbering heads’ promo (eventually banned for being too damn weird); Daftest Postmodern Foray was Sky’s daily Michael Jackson trial reconstruction.

  Most Excellent Comedies Not Co-Written By Myself were The Thick of It and Peep Show; Best Dramas were Deadwood, Bleak House and The Shield; and the Best Overall Show of the Year was clearly, obviously and undeniably Doctor Bloody Brilliant Who.

  As for 2006, my early tips are weirdy time-travel cop drama Life on Mars and warm, pant-pissingly funny sitcom The IT Crowd.

  There. That’s your lot. Auld Lang Syne, etc.

  Reality itself has a hangover

  [14 January 2006]

  Blech. Following the boozy snack-food excesses of the festive season, it takes about a fortnight to reorientate yourself with the sober normality of everyday life, so the sudden reappearance of Celebrity Big Brother (C4 ) on our screens can’t possibly be a good thing. It’s like staring through a porthole into an alternate universe where reality itself has a hangover.

  So who’s in and who’s out? Here’s your very own cut-out-and-lose primer.

  First up, basketball star Dennis Rodman, a man about as famous in Britain as Bernard Matthews is in the States. Brooding silently like an Easter Island statue in a baseball cap, Dennis is so assured of his inherent coolness he scarcely speaks, communicating instead by running his hand over the nearest available female. Sexually speaking, he’s constantly ‘on amber’, and I’m assuming by the time you read this he’ll have shagged the arse off everyone in the house. Including, with any luck, George Galloway.

  Galloway himself comes across much as he does in the outside world, i.e. as the sort o
f squat, shifty-looking human pepperpot you might cast as the chief villain in a children’s programme about a dead-eyed maniac who secretly strangles cats in his bathroom. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him (although if I was throwing him over the side of a ferry, that might be a fair old distance).

  He’s far less likeable than Michael Barrymore, a man whose own passport documentation lists his occupation as ‘troubled comic’. His teary five-minute walk up to the house made for excruciating viewing, but once inside he struck me as refreshingly sane. Well, OK, not entirely—but a damn sight saner than the Daily Mirror’s hate-campaign coverage of his antics, that’s for sure. Just for the record, his impersonation of Hitler was absolutely bloody hilarious.

  My current favourite is Dead or Alive singer Pete Burns, who appears to have stepped straight from an episode of When Surgeons Go Mental. His face is astoundingly strange—neither ugly nor beautiful, yet endlessly riveting. If humans ever mate with cartoon characters, their offspring will look like this. Sometimes he resembles Lily Savage as reimagined by the Simpsons; other times Janice from The Muppet Show (Google ‘Janice Muppets’ and click on ‘images’ if you don’t believe me).

  Aside from all the work on his lips, cheeks and eyes, he’s also undergone a tongue-sharpening procedure; consequently he’s a fountain of caustic asides and inventive language, drawling gems like ‘I’ve had insults thrown over me like a bucket of cum’ without so much as blinking (come to think of it, he probably can’t blink, not without his scalp snapping in two). He should win.

  Finally, we’ll skip past Rula Lenska, Maggot, Preston, Faria and Traci—because they’re dull—and concentrate instead on the twin horror-show of Chantelle Houghton and Jodie Marsh. The former is a crashing nonentity suddenly afforded the chance to bask in the public eye; the latter doesn’t seem quite so talented.

  Chantelle, while thick, has enough sense not to strop around the place crying and bellowing, in the thickest manner possible, about how everyone says she’s thick. Whereas Jodie hasn’t quite worked out how the relationship between ‘things you do’ and ‘things people say about you’ works. Which explains why, if her time in the house is anything to go by, the poor girl’s doomed to spend 50 per cent of her life complaining that the tabloids have labelled her a ‘slag’, and the remaining 50 per cent shoving her tits in people’s faces and banging on about sex. It’s not making her happy. With any luck she’ll find love and snap out of it. She deserves some inner peace.

  That’s far too drippy a sentiment to end on, so I’ll leave you by pointing out the tip of her nose, which looks like it’s tried to grow in two different directions at once, and consequently resembles the business end of a chisel. She’ll have someone’s eye out with that. And catch it in her cleavage afterwards.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In which George Galloway is examined again at close range, a terrifying face appears at the window, and Bono proves too annoying to inspire global salvation.

  Galloway to go

  [27 January 2006]

  I was at the Big Brother house on Wednesday night. Not to hurl bags of shit at George Galloway, you understand—1 was there researching something I’m writing. And besides, security confiscated my bags of shit at the gate.

  Anyway, once in, I was given the full tour. I got to go in the camera runs and everything. I peered through a window while Chantelle fixed her make-up. I witnessed Barrymore making a cup of tea in blistering close-up detail. I saw Maggot adjusting his balls. This was history in the making.

  And it was also incredibly spooky: occasionally they shoot glances your way and you think they can see you—but all they’re looking at is their own reflection, which, being celebrities, they never tire of.

  Seeing Pete Burns’s face-shaped surgeon’s folly at close quarters sent a chill down my spine, but the most haunting sight was Galloway, pacing up and down in the kitchen, awaiting his inevitable eviction. It was like watching a polar bear losing its mind in the zoo, shuffling endlessly to and fro in a bid to silence the unhappy bellowing in its head.

  He looked like a man on death row: a brightly coloured, Scooby-Doo kind of death row, but one with real doom lurking at the end of it. Or maybe that was just me, projecting what I knew of his utter public humiliation on to him. Maybe he was simply concentrating: picturing the mountainous stack of adoring fan mail from young voters he assumed he’d receive.

  ‘Dear George—you is the best politician I has ever seen! I love the way you is so political with all your politics and that. Please can I have a signed photo because you is so sexy! Yours sincerely, a Nubile Fan Who Lives Within Driving Distance.’

  But alas. About an hour later, he was out the door, to be greeted by what sounded like an explosion in a boo factory. Some crowd members shouted so hard their lungs exploded. Bits of splintered ribcage flew through the air. If Galloway wanted to make an impression, he succeeded. And if he wanted the impression to be that of a seething, swaggering, self-important bully, he succeeded spectacularly.

  Because he could’ve ridden out all the cat stuff, all the dressing-up games. That’s easily defused: just chuckle about it in your eviction interview, and hey, it’s just a bit of fun. The humiliation would’ve been real, yet fleeting. What’ll stick in people’s minds, however, is his jaw-droppingly unpleasant behaviour in the days leading up to his eviction. Hounding on the nice-but-dim youngsters, taunting a recovering alcoholic, spluttering paranoid bile at every opportunity—1 mean really. What a tosser.

  In PR terms, it’s hard to think of anything worse he could’ve done during his stay in the house. But I’ll have a go. He could have (1) masturbated repeatedly on camera, staring the viewer straight in the eye; (2) pooed into a big bowl of flour in the middle of the kitchen; and (3) killed at least nine of his fellow housemates. But those are the only worse things I can think of. He’s screwed.

  Even so, you’ve got to hand it to him: when he shoots himself in the foot, he uses a cannon so big it takes his whole leg off.

  The world’s first satire war

  [10 February 2006]

  So, then. Twelve cartoons appear in a Danish newspaper, prompting worldwide demonstrations and the occasional deadly riot, an Iranian newspaper hits back with a Holocaust doodling contest, and before you know it billions die in the world’s first satire war.

  Years from now, as survivors bury their dead, another Danish newspaper prints a satirical cartoon about the funeral service, sparking another round of riots and wars and people calling for the destruction of everything. And it all carries on until there’s only one human left alive. Three hours of peace drift by, until he accidentally thinks about something satirical and offensive, and is so disgusted he burns himself.

  At which point it’s the turn of the cockroaches.

  Tell you who I feel sorry for: one of the twelve Danish cartoonists, who clearly considered the whole thing a pretty fatuous exercise and instead of depicting Muhammad drew a schoolboy writing ‘The editorial team of Jyllands-Posten is a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’ in Arabic on a blackboard. Right now he’s doubtless quivering with the rest, knackered by a prank he never supported anyway.

  He certainly won’t be having fun. And I speak with a pinch of experience here, because in October 20041 briefly considered going into hiding myself, when an extremely ill-advised joke I made at the end of a TV preview column in this newspaper’s Saturday listings magazine prompted a wave of protests and death threats from several hundred people who took it very seriously indeed. The joke itself was based on an old bit of graffiti about Mrs Thatcher: ‘Guy Fawkes, where are you now that we need you?’ My version was updated, referred to President Bush, and in retrospect, didn’t look as much like a joke as I originally thought it did, particularly when it got passed around the internet under the heading ‘UK Newspaper Calls for President’s Assassination’.

  The ensuing comments ranged from the comical (‘If it hadn’t been for the USA, your asshole would be speaking German right now’�
��what a party trick that would be) to the blood-curdling (such as the correspondent who advised me to stick close to buildings and walk in a zigzag fashion if I wanted to avoid having my head blown off by his incredibly efficient sniper rifle). And it wasn’t just me, no—almost everyone at the Guardian received similar missives, all thanks to me and my heeee-larious funny talk.

  I was once asked to leave a dinner party on account of a tasteless joke I’d just made. That was pretty uncomfortable. Being asked to leave the planet feels considerably worse. Stewart Lee, co-creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera, does a nice bit in his latest stand-up routine about receiving threats: he says everyone’s occasionally paranoid that other people don’t like them, so it’s jarring to discover more than 50,000 people genuinely want you dead.

  In this global media age, it’s disconcertingly easy to infuriate everyone on Earth. We’ll soon see the rise of a new field of counselling- dedicated support groups for people who’ve pissed off the world. Pariahs Anonymous.

  The Smoking gun

  [17 February 2006]

  I wholeheartedly support the notion of banning smoking everywhere, for one entirely selfish reason: I’ve recently quit and don’t want to be tempted to start again. If no one else lights up around me, I won’t follow suit. Which means I’ll live longer. And that’s all I care about. Sod freedom of choice for smokers. Sod their poxy so-called ‘human rights’. This is me we’re talking about here. Me.

  Mind you, I’m not convinced a simple ban is going to cut it. I’ve got a far better idea—one that’s firm, fair and pretty much final. It’s based on a scheme I originally conceived as an alternative to London’s congestion charge, and I offer it now, to the nation, free of charge.