2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  And then the police can parade the suspects in front of us, and we can vote to identify the guilty one, press the red button to slam him in jail and the yellow one to throw away the key, or hold down both at once to bring back the rope and snap his neck like a bread-stick.

  Think I’m being flippant? Well I’m not. I’ve got ITV on my side: they’re showing us the way forward in the form of People’s Court UK (ITV1). Unfortunately, at the time of writing, it’s being used to settle petty disputes, not murders. But give it time, and that’ll change. This is progress.

  The televised small-claims format has been around for years, but People’s Court UK is unique because it lets the audience decide who wins, live, by texting in. They also send in comments, which scroll across the bottom of the screen throughout the ‘case’, affording a glimpse into the jury’s mindset: ‘Steves telling the truth and whats more hes cute!!!—Sally, Bracknell’; ‘I hate Dave he thinks hes so clever well Dave u arnt all that!!!—Amy, Lowestoft’.

  At a stroke, outmoded notions of impartiality’ have been replaced by a system in which disputes are settled on the basis of who looks most honest, or shouts loudest, or has the prettiest nose—in the opinion of several thousand irredeemably stupid button-pushers. Watching People’s Court, it’s easy to see why ITV’s audience has collapsed. Having spent years relentlessly pursuing the lowest common denominator, it’s inadvertently become a specialist channel for the very, very thick, while its traditional audience (the slightly thick) is now openly courted by Channel 4.

  Anyone who isn’t thick is probably feeling slightly lost and unloved, so I’d encourage them to turn to BBC4 and be spoiled rotten by (ironically) The Thick of It, a fantastic new comedy series. A semi-improvised sitcom set in the back rooms of Westminster’ might sound like the driest, most clever-clever, Bremner-ish bit of business imaginable, but that’s precisely what this isn’t: it’s laugh-out-loud funny—so good, in fact, I watched the second episode on video immediately after finishing the first, then phoned up the BBC to badger them for the third. Don’t let it be wasted on the cognoscenti alone: this sort of thing should be on all the channels, all the time. Tune in and get hooked.

  A horse that isn’t there

  [21 May 2005]

  Bleak but true: last winter, I was strolling down the local high street when I passed a casino. Now, this is south London I’m talking about, not Monte Carlo, so when I say ‘casino’, stop imagining dinner-jacketed high-rollers playing roulette to a Henry Mancini soundtrack, and start imagining Frank from Shameless shambling round a cramped, smoky fleapit filled with fruit machines and despair. You know the sort of thing: windows full of’prizes’ (carriage clocks and decanter sets), and a name like ‘Las Vegas’ that only serves to highlight the glamour-gulf between it and its namesake. A losers’ shithole, basically.

  Anyway, something about this particular ‘casino’ made me stop dead in my tracks: there, in the window, was a cardboard sign promising ‘FREE SOUP AND BREAD ROLL’ to its patrons. Yes! You can gamble your last pennies into oblivion, but at least you won’t go hungry! It’s a soup kitchen and casino in one! What next—free second-hand shoes?

  By ensuring its wrecked, reel-gawping clientele received at least one hot meal a day, was the casino being wildly irresponsible or just savvy? Was it being generous, or simply trying to keep them alive long enough to bleed a few more coins out of them? I don’t know. And I’m similarly conflicted when it comes to the rise of interactive gambling on satellite TV

  For starters, there’s poker. What’s going on there? Suddenly, everyone’s talking about it. Thousands of people are haemorrhag-ing money in online games, and poker-dedicated digital channels with names like Instant Poker Whirlpool 24 are sprouting like weeds. Some of the stations offer interactive play: jab the red button and you can experience the thrill of automated losing from your very own armchair. (Downside: you have to provide your own soup.)

  Then there’s the openly moronic puzzle channels, with names like Grab a Grand or Play 2 Win or Coins U Waste or similar. These consist of a simple puzzle (a faintly blurred photo of Sean Connery, say, accompanied by the question ‘Who is this famous actor? (CLUE: SCOTTISH BOND} ‘attached to a premium-rate phone-or-text service. And it’s all hosted by a presenter (usually a woman, occasionally in a bikini) cheerily encouraging you to roll your sleeves up and have a go, as though she’s running a coconut shy. It’s a cash-pisser’s paradise.

  Most heartbreaking of all, though, are the games that rob the player of whatever scraps of dignity they’ve got left. Take Virtual Horse Racing, for example. This crops up on the Avago channel during the day, and on Sky Vegas through die night, and it’s exactly what you think it is: a seemingly endless sequence of nonexistent race events, recreated whh PlayStation-quality visuals—which you can gamble on. Somewhere, right now, there’s a tearful addict blowing their last remaining pennies on a horse that isn’t there. It’s almost poetic.

  There’s Virtual Greyhound Racing as well—that’s a recent development. Personally, I’m holding out for Virtual Cock Fighting. Well, why not? It’s not like any real birds get hurt, and it’s surely more exciting than watching pixelated horses. What about a game in which a man runs round a small market town punching nine-year-old girls in the face, and the viewer has to bet on which ones will fall over? It’s OK! It’s not really happening!

  Back to reality, and as far as interactive TV gambling goes, the absolute biscuit-taking winner has to be Gerbil Roulette on the Avago channel. ‘When the wheel stops turning, it’s up to you to decide which house our talented little rodent will enter,’ claims the publicity. ‘It couldn’t be easier!’ Or any more demoralising. All we need now is a coin-slot that bolts onto the side of your television and a hose that pumps soup into your mouth while you play. Bet you a tenner it happens by Christmas.

  Shed a tear for Abi Titmuss

  [ [28 May 2005]

  Like a burned-out paramedic gazing tearfully at a blazing pile-up, it’s time for me to sigh, roll my sleeves up and lurch towards Celebrity Love Island— the show that makes the score from Requiem for a Dream start playing in your head.

  I was going to write something damning but I changed my mind because there’s little point getting angry. It’s just a rehash of I’m a Celebrity, minus the elements that made that show successful (i.e. the older participants, the bushtucker trials, and Ant and Dec). That’s all. It’s just depressing. So don’t get angry. Get sorrowful.

  Start by shedding a tear for Abi Titmuss. Although described on the show as a ‘tabloid babe’ (which is as low as a human being can sink short of gargling sewage for a living), she’s actually rather homely- a bit like a neighbourly dairymaid. This, apparently, is a crime: because she’s plumper than earlier Nuts photo-shoots had suggested, the programme openly sneers at her for being ‘fat’. Let’s hope she sees sense and develops a serious eating disorder at the earliest opportunity. Until then, weep for her.

  Weep too for Rebecca Loos, the woodpecker-faced Posh-botherer who was presumably hired on the understanding that anyone who’s previously masturbated a pig on television might be prepared to stoop slightly lower and perform the same act on ex-Hol-lyoaks actor Paul Danan.

  Sob for Danan, who is a bell-end of considerable magnitude, and the ugliest person on the island—ugly in a unique fashion, like a man whose face was heading toward ‘handsome’ but took a wrong turn at the last minute. He looks like Jude Law crossed with the Crazy Frog, and he’s an absolute aching backside. The only way the producers could possibly justify his presence would be to spike his cocktails till he goes mad and has sex with a melon or something. But that’s not going to happen, because that would be fun, and Love Island isn’t about fun. If it was about fun, they’d go the whole hog: call it Celebrity Fuck Hut and send paratroopers in to force them to form a grunting, humping human daisy-chain. It’s not about fun, it’s about despair, remember?

  Bawl for Fran Cosgrave, whose ‘celebrity’ status is so low he doesn’t a
ctually exist outside shows like this. This is his reality: when the last edition finishes, he ceases to be, like a character in a video game when it’s switched off.

  Blub for the remaining islanders—blub as they loll about like dying sea-lions in a failing zoo, accompanied by the sound of gentle lapping as waves of public indifference break upon the shore.

  Sniffle for Patrick Kielty and Kelly Brook—a man you wish would shut up before he even starts speaking, and a woman who can scarcely talk in the first place, marooned before an unimpressed nation. Curiously, Brook is listed in the credits as ‘Presenter & Consultant Producer’, which is a pretty impressive job title for someone apparently unable to read from an autocue. Cry for Kelly. Cry for her.

  But mainly, cry for us all. If Love Island has left you entertaining dark notions, I understand. And I have a plan.

  Here’s what we do. We charter a boat. We sail to Fiji. We drop anchor offshore and we light candles and sing songs. And as dawn breaks, we stand on the deck and slit our own throats and splash wordlessly into the ocean. For the next 48 hours our bodies wash up on the beach, one by one. Our lifeless cadavers knock gently against Michael Greco’s ankles as he goes for his morning paddle. Bloated, fish-pecked carcasses slap against the sand throughout the evening barbecue, souring the mood. Our non-violent suicidal protest turns the show into an unfolding Jonestown massacre for the twenty-first century, and ITV’s ongoing ratings crisis is averted.

  Alternatively: switch off the box, walk into the garden and stare at the stars while tears shine in your eyes. Celebrity Love Island: wish hard enough, and God might make it stop.

  Twenty-first-century stocks

  [4 June 2005]

  When I first read about olde-worlde scoundrels being ‘put in the stocks’, it struck me as a quaint and toothless sort of punishment. Further reading proved me wrong. The locals didn’t just lob the odd rotten tomato at you—they hurled rocks. They urinated in your face. They pulled your trousers down and performed vile-but-darkly-hilarious experiments with your rear end. Spend 48 hours in the stocks, and there was a pretty good chance you’d die, with a face like a popped blister and a rolling pin blocking your exit.

  Which brings me to Big Brother (C4). Anyone volunteering to take part is surely the present-day equivalent of a medieval lunatic willingly locking himself in the stocks and inviting the world to do its worst. The viewers represent ale-sodden sadists only too pleased to oblige, while the producers are canny tradesmen standing at the side, selling shit-encrusted rocks for them to throw. And since I’m about to pile more abuse on top, what does that make me? Worse than the village idiot. No one’s coming out of this well.

  Anyway, if you sketched a diagram denoting the exponential growth of contestant idiocy levels throughout Big Brother history, you’d start low, run out of space at the top during series five, and scrawl demented swirls all over the page by the start of series six. Because this lot scarcely qualify as fully sentient humans—they’re people-shaped amoebas existing on raw narcissism.

  Take Anthony, the present-day equivalent of the utilitarian android gigolo played by Jude Law in Spielberg’s AI, right down to the fibreglass eyebrows. Anthony achieved a BB first by turning the crowd against him before he’d even entered the house: he spent so long jigging, twirling, posing and preening during the brief car-to-door stroll, the crowd’s initial cheering rapidly evolved into a chant of’wanker, wanker’ held aloft on a carpet of boos. It was like watching Tony Blair’s eight-year fall from public favour distilled into 90 seconds.

  Then there’s Lesley, who donned a PVC nurse’s outfit that afforded us a gruesome peek up her arse on her way into the house (another great BB first) shortly before baring her gargantuan breasts in the plunge pool. This delighted the witless Maxwell, a Norf Lahnden bozo best described as the human equivalent of a clipping from Nuts magazine bobbing in a fetid urinal.

  At the time of writing, Maxwell has designs on Sam, a slightly less skeletal version of Calista Flockhart, who spent most of her audition tape outlining what a strong, independent, hot-pants-wearing sexbomb she is. In practice, however, she’s litde more than a slightly pretty, self-regarding plastic peg.

  Worse still, she fancies Anthony: by the time you read this, they’ll probably be going at it hammer and tongs in the diary room, while viewers text in whoops of encouragement.

  Other notable inmates include Makosi, a woman with the head and worldview of a plastic doll, and Roberto, an Italian with a face like a cartoon sketch of a foolish horse.

  The most foolish horse of all, though, is Science. That’s not his real name. His real name’s Kieran. Science is his ‘street name’. His ‘screen name’ is Prick.

  Science seems to spend 70 per cent of his time shouting at Kemal (cross-dressing Leo Sayer lookalike), and the remaining 30 per cent shouting at everyone else—shouting about how no one but him understands what it’s like ‘in the hood’ (which is rather unfair on Nookie Bear-eyed white witch Mary, who entered the house wearing a hood so huge she literally couldn’t see which way she was going).

  Still, you can’t fault Science’s intentions. He’s not there to get his mug on the box—no. He’s there to ‘represent the ghetto’, which, if he’s genuinely representative, is full of pretentious hotheads throwing juvenile tantrums when they don’t get salad cream with their fish fingers.

  Big Brother 6, then: simultaneously more and less sophisticated than the brutal stocks of yore. Pass the mouldy turnips.

  A ham-eyed poltroon

  [11 June 2005]

  Is it just me, or is there something about young, over-confident male idiots that makes you want to smack the entire world in the mouth? I’m asking this because I’ve just discovered bookies are offering odds of 5-1 for Maxwell to win this year’s Big Brother (C4).

  This depresses and baffles me in equal measure. The man’s a goon, a berk, a gurgling bore, a ham-eyed poltroon and a great big swaggering chump. There are only two things in life he passionately cares about: whether Arsenal win and whether Saskia (who could pass for Giant Haystacks’s sister on a dark night) wants to blow him. If I ran the country, people like that would be chemically neutered the moment they learned to rut.

  Worse still, I’ve heard people describe him as ‘really funny’. That’s what they said about Joe Pasquale on I’m a Celebrity, and he’s hardly had the world shattering its ribcage with giggles since emerging from the jungle, has he? He may well seem ‘funny’, but only if you compare him to, say, Roberto, who just lopes around gruffly moaning about coffee. Maxwell’s the sort of person who openly breaks wind and then makes a trumpet noise with his mouth to underline how hilarious it was, for God’s sake.

  Science—now he’s funny. I had a pop at Science last week; since then my attitude toward him has mellowed immeasurably. For one thing, he perpetually argues with Maxwell (who, as we’ve already established, deserves harsh treatment at the hands of the state). Better still, he intimidates Anthony, and anything that makes that tweeting Geordie ferret uncomfortable immediately rises in my estimations. For the record, if Anthony ever contracts pubic lice, I’d like to shake every single one of them individually by the hand (provided they’d washed them first, obviously).

  Actually, the more I think about this year’s housemates, the more I start praying for an extinction-level meteorite to strike the Earth. I’ll tell you what just dropped into my head: Craig’s voice. His ceaseless, dull-month-in-Dorking of a voice. It’s surely the worst noise in the universe. Listening to him is like lying in your own coffin, hearing rainwater seep through the cracks.

  Still, at least no one in there seems happy to be taking part. The housemates are all either under twenty-five or over thirty. With no angst-ridden late-twentysomethings to smooth things over, what you’re left with is a couple of set-in-their-ways curmudgeons being forced to cohabit with a bunch of squawking know-nothings. I’ll be astonished if it ends without open bloodshed.

  All hands on deck

  [18 June 2005]
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  Years ago, a girlfriend of mine booked us on a make-or-break holiday cruise. It sounded great—we’d be sailing to Spain aboard a luxury liner complete with its own casino, a cinema, a cocktail bar and a selection of high-class restaurants. Best of all, she’d got it on the cheap by collecting tokens from a newspaper.

  We were young, OK? Young and naive.

  The ‘cruise liner’ was a car ferry. The ‘restaurants’ would’ve shamed a motorway service station. The ‘cinema’ consisted of a video projector beaming Mortal Kombat: The Movie onto a suspended rectangle which swung left and right along with the ship. The ‘casino’ was an enclave of fruit machines servicing a handful of wheezing alcoholics.

  Our cabin was deep in the bowels of the ship. It didn’t even have a porthole. It had a painting of a porthole. Quite a shit painting at that. You couldn’t go on deck because the freezing gales would strip your carcass bare in seconds.

  You couldn’t stay in the room because the violent rocking combined with the lack of visual reference points made you spew. All you could do was sit in the cocktail bar, downing whisky and watching the live cabaret—by far the cheesiest thing I’d ever seen, yet strangely uplifting under the circumstances.

  All of which brings me to the point: the ship’s cabaret wasn’t a million miles from The New Variety Show on SoundTV—and it’s had a similar effect on me: uplifting for no discernible reason.

  The New Variety Show is a family-oriented extravaganza presented by Tucker, a ‘new comedy sensation’ and former Pontins Blue-coat. I sat transfixed through last Saturday’s edition: a two-hour cavalcade of ventriloquists, geezerish stand-ups in spangly jackets, a Sinatra impersonator with the face of a farmhand, and a star turn from Duncan Norvelle. It’s like stumbling across an old edition of Summertime Special on VHS. Which isn’t always a bad thing.