Let’s be frank here: 24 has lost its mind. The hinges were always loose, but this sixth series is something else. It opened last week with Jack mute, scarred and bearded following months of torture in a secret Chinese prison. The man could scarcely walk. Two hours later he was cheerfully high-kicking a suicide bomber out the back of a train.
Nuts. But somehow it all seemed, to use a bit of internet parlance, a bit ‘meh’. Jack’s dealt with worse threats, right? Wrong. By the end of this week’s two-hour televisual brain rape, you’ll have trouble sleeping.
Aghast at the sheer swivel-eyed horror of the new episodes, several US commentators have condemned the show as a work of Neo-Con propaganda that promotes torture as a viable tool in the war against terrorism. It’s hard to disagree. When 24 first began, Jack used torture as a shocking last resort, dabbling only occasionally, like an ex-smoker treating himself to a cigar on his birthday. These days, if Jack needs a piss, he’ll torture anyone who might be able to tell him where the nearest bog is. Every other scene seems to run like this:
Jack (twisting screwdriver into waiter’s tear duct): ‘First on the left, or first on the right? TELL ME WHERE THE JOHN IS!’
Waiter: ‘AUUGHHH left! It’s on the left!’
Jack: About time’ (nonchalantly shears waiter’s face off with glass shard and nips off for a piss).
So far, so brutal. But the show has developed another, almost more disturbing signature move: the desperate ‘against-my-will-kill’ performed by an average Joe.
In season five, a grisly plot twist saw a young, quivering naval engineer being forced by circumstance to slit a terrorist’s throat while Jack whispered gruff encouragement over the phone. This time round, a blameless civilian dad is coerced into battering a man to death with his bare hands. At this rate, by season seven, there’ll be a convoluted storyline in which a weeping professor of ethics MUST bite the heads off ten babies IN THE NEXT TWO MINUTES or MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS WILL DIE.
Speaking of death, gleefully right-wing co-creator Joel Surnow calls the season-six terrorist threat ‘smaller and more real’ than before. He’s wrong on both counts. Instead, it seems to consist of endless Space Invader waves of sharp-suited suicide bombers, overseen by a furious Middle East maniac who closely resembles a bald Dean Gafmey (which goes some way to explaining his fury).
Jack, meanwhile, has teamed up with a preposterous buddy-movie version of Osama Bin Laden, a ruthless jihadist leader who’s suddenly decided to broker a peace deal—largely, it seems, so he and Jack can enjoy absurd getting-to-know-you banter as they drive from one bloodbath to the next.
Final absurdity: David Palmer’s younger brother Wayne is now president of the US. He’s about twenty-eight years old, sports a shaved head and a goatee, and looks like he’s just stepped off the set of an upmarket R&B video. His inauguration must’ve been awesome.
In short, 24 has become a spiralling, undisciplined caricature of itself: The Naked Gun with blood-curdling paranoia in place of jokes. This is no longer a knockabout drama serial. It’s mad crypto fascist horror. You can still laugh at it, of course. But only just.
Wanking for coins
[3 February 2007]
Four thousand years ago I used to write a website called TV Go Home, which consisted of capsule descriptions of imaginary television programmes—most of them ghastly creations teetering on the brink of plausibility. One of the earliest entries was Wanking for Coins, which was described as ‘apocalyptic fun as Rowland Rivron tours the seedy backstreets of London’s West End persuading the homeless to commit acts of self-degradation in exchange for pennies’.
I liked the phrase ‘wanking for coins’ so much I went on to use it again and again. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to sum up an entire world of low-level employment. Stuck in a dead-end job? Wanking for coins. Obliged to smile at customers? Wanking for coins. Working extra shifts to pay the rent? Wanking for coins.
Imagine my surprise, then, all these years later, when I flipped on the box to discover the original Wanking for Coins is now broadcast in prime time on ITV1. A few things have changed, but the basic premise is essentially the same. The title’s different, though. They’re calling it Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway (ITV1).
The format is simple. Five slick entrepreneurs have a pot containing one million pounds of their own money (200,000 each, although it’s not clear whether they’re paid more or less than that to do the show in the first place). They sit in a row, a la Dragons’ Den, while members of the public come in and request some of the money. It’s televised begging.
On the panel are Duncan Bannatyne (who I quite like), Jeffrey Archer (who I don’t), two women who look the same, and Simon Jordan—who performs a mind-boggling miracle each week by coming across as a bigger, smugger arsehole than Archer. He looks like a cross between Ge’rard Depardieu and a thick waiter, and is one of those people you instinctively dislike the moment you clap eyes on them, presumably thanks to some weird, primordial twat-detector lurking in the evolutionary backwaters of the brain. Consequently, everything he says and does fills you with revulsion. Everything. Last week he raised an eyebrow and I vomited blood for an hour.
Archer, meanwhile, is clearly hell-bent on public rehabilitation, and exploits every opportunity to come across as ‘the nice one’ on the panel. He does this by pulling an expression so earnest it borders on insane, repeatedly straining forward and furrowing his brow so hard he looks like he’s trying to screw his face into a tiny, pea-sized ball, then balance it on the end of his nose. Each contortion is accompanied by a hilariously melodramatic proclamation, delivered in the style of the ‘once more unto the breach’ speech from Henry V.
Speaking of the contestants: oh dear. They fall into four categories: elderlies (‘lovable’ pensioners wheeled on just so the panel can coo over them like they’re four years old), do-gooders (people who need money for community centres and the like), tragics (‘I lost all my limbs in a car crash and need £10,000 to have brightly coloured plastic windmills installed on the stumps—it’s the only thing diat’ll cheer me up.’), and jokers (‘Zoinks! I want £900,000 to get my bum tattooed! I’m mad, me!’).
Basically, it’s an hour of people desperately pleading for cash, with a cheering audience lobbed in for good measure. Presumably, it’s supposed to be ‘feelgood TV’, but in reality, seeing people in wheelchairs beg Jeffrey Archer for money just doesn’t warm the cockles. He pays out, the audience applauds, and the contestants sob for joy. But somehow they’re all just wanking for coins in one sense or another, and Archer’s wanking faster and more furiously than anyone.
I’d like to go on the show myself. My pitch would be simple—I’d whip out a rusting penknife and threaten to slit my throat right there and then unless they gave me the money. And if they didn’t cough up, I’d do it—just to see Archer trying to work out what sort of face he should pull as my body hit the deck. What a way to go.
CHAPTER TEN
In which a wife is sought and not sought, Macs are slated, and David Cameron is criticised in the most childish manner possible.
Opinions R US
[22 January 2007]
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s opinions. Opinionated people are everywhere. There’s probably one standing beside you right now.
Look at them. There they stand, the great I-Am, eyes glinting with indignation, swinging their pompous little gobhole open and shut, spouting out one self-important proclamation after another. Have you actually heard what they’re saying? Probably not. You doubtless switched off. And little wonder: it all blurs into one great big river of blah: it’s all ‘If you ask me…’ and ‘Well, what I think is…’ and ‘I think you’ll find…’
They should all either shut up or be forced to shut up by stormtroopers. Or maybe we could seal them inside a Perspex chamber filled with angry bees swarming around with razor blades glued to their bellies. We could televise this. And encourage viewers to text in their opinions about what
they’re seeing. And trace those viewers from their mobile numbers, round them up, and slap them in the chamber too. And so on and so on, until we’ve whittled the population down to one person. Me. Watching everyone perish in a chamber of bees. That’s my stock answer to everything.
Never in history have there been so many opportunities to put your opinion across. You can print it in papers, shout it on the radio, text it to the news channels or whack it on the internet. And it all happens so quickly, you don’t even have to think your opinions through; if you can’t be bothered doing the brainwork, you can simply repeat what someone else has said using slightly different words. And poorer spelling.
Most opinions, however, don’t really need to be written down at all. They can be replaced by a sound effect—the audible equivalent of an internet frowny face. Imagine a sort of world-weary harrumph accompanied by the faintest glimmer of a self-satisfied sneer. That’s 90 per cent of all human opinion on everything, right there. Internet debates would be far more efficient if everyone just sat at their keyboards hitting the ‘harrumph’ key over and over again. A herd of people mooing their heads off. Welcome to 2007.
25?
Mind you, even the most bone-headed online debate is infinitely more sophisticated than any kind of public discourse’ you’ll see on TV, particularly if you’re watching the news and they’ve just invited their viewers to call in for some kind of faux-democratic ‘Have Your Say’ segment, which inevitably functions in the same way as someone turning on a gigantic idiot magnet, given the sort of dribbling thicksicle it attracts.
In fact, that’s what they should call it. The Idiot Magnet. At the end of each item on Sky News, they should say ‘We’re switching on the idiot magnet now. Let’s see what we dredge up. Ah, Dick from Colchester, you’re on the air…’
Cue five minutes of Dick repeatedly tapping the ‘harrumph’ key on his phone.
What is it with all this patronising ‘Have Your Say’ bullshit anyway? They don’t call the rest of the programme ‘Have Our Say’. I can have my say now, can I? What, right here, in this two-minute slice of airtime which no one’s listening to anyway since they’re too busy trying to get through themselves, or texting their disapproval or going online to moo at a rival? Why, thank you, Lord Media, and harrumph to you, sir.
Anyway, that’s my two cents. Your turn.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that I must be in want of a wife
[29 January 2007]
I need a wife. Strangers keep advising me to get one. Three times in the past fortnight, women unfamiliar to me have broached the subject with a blend of amusement and pity.
Two weeks ago I was on the phone to the bank, absent-mindedly bemoaning my own uselessness at opening bills until it’s too late. ‘You need a wife,’ chuckled the woman at the other end.
A few days later I took a jacket to the dry-cleaners and asked the woman behind the counter if she could sew one of the buttons back on. She laughed and said she would, before explaining that what I really needed was a wife.
Today I was at a supermarket checkout, and when it was time to pay I delved in my pocket and pulled out a crumpled wedge of notes, receipts, distressed flecks of tissue, and a pen top. As I picked through the bird’s nest in my hand, hunting for change, the cashier sighed that a wife would sort me out. Another woman, in the queue behind me, agreed. Quite loudly.
It’s all quite warm and fuzzy really, this unsolicited maternal attention, but what’s troubling is that they instinctively knew that I’m not married. Clearly I’ve been shuffling around emanating tragic waves of wife-needing energy. It shows up on their internal radar as a flashing alert: clueless bachelor at ten o’clock. Launch sardonic advice. Target patronised. Mission accomplished.
Well stop it, all of you. I don’t want a wife. I can’t imagine proposing marriage. Never. Not to a human. We’re too unreliable.
Besides, marriage inevitably leads to kids, and that’s just weird. I don’t want to stand in a delivery room watching someone I’m supposed to love blasting a baby through her hips in an orgy of mucus, gore and screaming. My mind couldn’t stand the horror. I would probably grab a rake and start thrashing at it like a farmhand startled by a rat.
Speaking of farmhands, don’t assume that by ruling humans out of the marriage stakes I’m ruling animals in. Cows may have beautiful eyes, but no one wants to accompany their wife to a dinner party only to leave beneath a cloud of embarrassment because she spent the entire evening chewing with her mouth open and emptying her bum on the floor. On the drive home, the atmosphere would be poisonous. Silent opprobrium at your end, oblivious drooling at hers. What’s more, a cow belches out almost eight pounds of methane a day, so good luck on your honeymoon.
But we’re getting off the point here. If I must have a wife—and womankind has evidently decided I must—can’t I just be assigned one by the government? It would take all the guesswork out of things—the root cause of the chronic commitment-phobia I’ve suffered for the past few years. The moment I so much as shake someone’s hand I start assuming I will be sharing a cell with them for the rest of my life, and my subconscious ruthlessly scans them for character flaws that might grow annoying when experienced at close quarters for several decades. What’s that? A faint lisp? Oh, sure, it’s endearing now. But come the year 2029 you will want to smash yourself in the mind with a housebrick each time she opens her relentless, lisping gob. Better get out while you can. Run! Run for the horizon! And when you get there, keep running!
A government-arranged marriage would relieve all the pressure. Whenever my cellmate pissed me off, I would blame the powers that be instead of her. And it would work both ways: after six months of my shambolic company, she would want to punch the House of Commons into gravel-sized chunks. Our mutual loathing of the system that brought us together would keep us together. We would lie awake for hours, plotting our revenge against the bureaucrats who introduced us, sharing bitter jokes about how much we despised them. Just me and her against the world.
What could be more romantic? Mail me the forms. Show me where to sign. Finally, I’m up for it.
I hate MaCS
[5 February 2007]
Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark—unless you have been doing that, you surely can’t have failed to notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss of resistance. While I don’t have anything against shameless promotion per se (after all, within these very brackets I’m promoting my own BBC4 show, which starts tonight at 10 PM), there is something infuriating about this particular blitz. In the ads, Webb plays a Mac while Mitchell adopts the mantle of a PC. We know this because they say so right at the start of the ad.
‘Hello, I’m a Mac,’ says Webb.
And I’m a PC,’ adds Mitcheil.
They then perform a small comic vignette aimed at highlighting the differences between the two computers. So in one, the PC has a ‘nasty virus’ that makes him sneeze like a plague victim; in another, he keeps freezing up and having to reboot. This is a subtle way of saying PCs are unreliable. Mitchell, incidentally, is wearing a nerdy, conservative suit throughout, while Webb is dressed in laid-back contemporary casual wear. This is a subtle way of saying Macs are cool.
The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign—the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show- probably the best sitcom of the past five years—in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, ‘PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.’ In other words, it is a
devastatingly accurate campaign.
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, ‘I hate Macs’, and then I think, ‘Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?’ Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.
Cue ten years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because ‘they are just better’. Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul—that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn’t really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.
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