Half an hour of stab wounds
[1 October 2005]
If you live in a town, venturing outside at night is dangerous. Anything could happen to you. Here are just seven examples.
You could get stabbed in the chest.
You could get stabbed in the neck.
You could get stabbed in the knee, which would really hurt, because the blade would sort of glance off your kneecap without puncturing it, and—ugh, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?
You could stab yourself to death in an argument over which half of your brain hates prostitutes the most.
You could get stabbed in the neck again.
You could witness a stabbing so hideous, the images continue to haunt you for the rest of your life, so that even if ten years later you sat down to watch Finding Nemo on DVD, all you’d actually see is that blade going in again and again and again, which isn’t quite what Disney had in mind.
You could get stabbed in the neck some more.
Basically, what I’m saying is it’s a world of knives out there: knives, and hands holding the knives, repeatedly jabbing them in your direction. You’d best stay indoors and watch Maclntyre’s Toughest Towns (Five), the show that convinced me the outside world is one big knife-fight in the first place.
In case I haven’t made it clear yet, what I’m saying is this programme is chock-full of knives. If you don’t like sharp objects, don’t go near it. It basically consists of half an hour of stab wounds being described aloud by Donal Maclntyre. During the first 30 seconds there’s a hideous colour photograph of a man with a kitchen knife buried hilt-deep in his chest, and it just gets nastier from there.
OK, there’s more to it than knives. A bit more. Five are actually showing a double-bill of Maclntyre episodes: the first one, dealing with Glasgow’s criminal underclass, is the knifey one; the second episode, examining Liverpool’s drug gangs, focuses more on guns, crowbars and nail bombs—which by this point simply makes a nice change.
Disappointingly, Maclntyre himself doesn’t go ‘undercover’ at any point in either show—a crashing shame, as I wanted to hear him ask for heroin in a Scouse accent. Instead, he just pops by every now and then to shout at the camera, in a series of links shot against generic backdrops signifying ‘urban hell’ (i.e. graffiti, rubbish strewn about, cars with smashed windscreens, tattooed babies begging at cashpoints, etc). The show itself is cobbled together from interviews with local crime reporters, hospital staff and police, and footage of silhouetted youths bragging about the number of times they’ve seen people having their legs broken.
It’s all rather depressing. What with this and Ross Kemp on Gangs (Sky One), it’s a good week for hair-raising tales of urban violence and a bad week for songs about dandelions. The only question is why anyone would want to broadcast this kind of thing in the first place.
The answer? It’s the ‘Coast effect’, innit? Coast was a huge hit for BBC2, partly because each week, cuddly middle-class people who lived on or near the coast tuned in to see if their locale was going to be on the telly. Maclntyre’s Toughest Towns and Sky’s grisly Ross Kemp travelogue are doing the same thing for townies.
The major difference is that while people tuning into Coast were rewarded with glorious scenery and classical music, Maclntyre and Co. offer nothing but incidents in grimy stairwells. And since the people who have to live in this squalor won’t want to be reminded of it, its primary audience is middle-class urbanites seeking a vicarious thrill.
After all, if you’ve got no rolling scenery to speak of, you might as well brag about something else, such as how brave you are for living where you do—a stone’s throw from the local sink estate, where people eat smack for breakfast and chop each other’s arms off with sharpened bits of tin. You know: as seen on TV.
The Little Bo Peep Show
[ (& October 2005]
Kids rarely make me laugh, but a few months ago I saw a bunch of youngsters doing something hilarious. It was late afternoon—about 5 PM—and they were dancing in a West London street, belting out Eamon’s number one hit F**k It (I Don’t Want You Back’) at the top of their minuscule lungs. In case you’re unfamiliar with the lyrics, they’re as follows: ‘Fuck what I said, it don’t mean shit now / Fuck the presents, might as well throw ‘em out / Fuck all those kisses, they didn’t mean jack / Fuck you, you ho—1 don’t want you back!’
Lovely. Anyway, the kids were word-perfect, and their spirited performance was accompanied by an equally spirited dance routine. This was happening in the centre of a relatively busy pavement a stone’s throw from Olympia, so every few seconds the kids were passed by a disapproving adult—which just made them sing that little bit louder. The words were rude, but the innocent joy on their faces was a marvel to behold.
I was reminded of this while watching Whatever Happened to the Mini Pops? (4), a documentary examining the storm that erupted in 1983 when Channel 4 broadcast a series in which kids impersonated pop stars.
On its original outing, Mini Pops actually did pretty well in the ratings. I’d imagine the core audience consisted of doting grandmothers who smell faintly of biscuits—you know: the sort of person who actually buys those hand-painted porcelain figurines of Little Bo Peep that get advertised in the News of the World magazine. The sort of harmless old love who thinks kiddywinks are charming no matter what they’re doing—and who, if you showed them a gory reconstruction of the My Lai massacre re-enacted by toddlers, would simply point at the kids’ outsized shoes and gently chuckle themselves to sleep.
Yes, grandmas enjoyed Mini Pops. But children didn’t. Not normal ones, anyway. I was twelve, and can still recall recoiling in horror at the sight of it—but only because I thought they were a bunch of show-offs. The papers, however, were outraged—because unbeknown to the simpering grandmothers who loved it, it was a disgusting assault on the innocence of youth that bordered on child pornography.
Given the size and nature of the furore surrounding the show, you’d expect any archive copies to have been erased, impounded or picked up with tongs and tossed into a pot of molten steel by a man wearing a biohazard suit. But no. Consequently, this documentary features plenty of footage from the original Mini Pops series itself—which now doesn’t seem pornographic at all, just ill-advised and rather creepy.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s undeniably distressing to watch a heavily made-up pre-pubescent girl dancing in a nightdress while singing about ‘making love’. But there’s something funny about it too—funny because the poor bastards filming it had no idea anything was amiss in the first place. As far as they were concerned, she was just doing a cute Sheena Easton impersonation (which, in all fairness, she was).
The documentary contains interviews with the series creator, the choreographer and the commissioning editor, none of whom saw the criticism coming: a bit like a team of well-meaning bakers who’ve accidentally created a child’s birthday cake in the shape of a penis, and served it up at a party without noticing. It’s hard not to feel sorry for them.
And as for the Mini Pops themselves, now in their late twenties and early thirties? Well, judging by the interviews on offer here, they’ve got nothing but fond memories of the show itself, and some residual sourness about the arguments that surrounded it.
One thing’s for sure: they’re far less bitter than any past Pop Idol or X Factor contestant you care to mention. Especially Steve Brookstein—who, ironically enough, is probably impersonating Sheena Easton somewhere right now, just to make ends meet. But that’s showbiz.
Thank God for Harold Bishop
[15 October 2005]
You know that feeling when you unexpectedly bump into somebody you were at school with years ago, and they look far older than they used to, and you find yourself staring at the silvery streaks in their hair, and the way their face has puffed out and gone saggy, and their stoop, and their middle-aged clothing, and their yellowing, desperate eyes, and you think ‘I hope I don’t look as bad as that’, and the
n you realise it’s not an old schoolfriend at all but your own reflection in a shop window, and you come to understand, fully and permanently, that youth has deserted you forever, and that basically you might as well be dead? You know that feeling?
Well, that’s the feeling I got watching the twentieth anniversary episode of Neighbours, which is on this week.
I haven’t seen Neighbours in years, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. As it is, it starts like any other episode. The theme tune is as colon-twitchingly cheesy as ever. Less reassuring is the fact that most of the ‘young’ cast members look about nine years old.
OK, so Neighbours has traditionally had a lot of teenagers in its cast—but surely they never looked this young? During the title sequence, which, as per tradition, displays each Ramsay Street householder in turn like a lab specimen, the cast seemed to decrease in age before my very eyes, to the point where I actively expected it to end on a shot of a foetus in a crop top grinning down the lens.
Thank God, then, for Harold Bishop, who looks precisely the same as he always did—just slightly more so. His is probably the friendliest face on television—a cross between ten Toytown mayors and a baby. Furthermore, something about his mannerisms reminds me of a man pushing his cheeks between a tubby pair of breasts then spluttering side to side for comic effect. So thank God for him.
He’s not the only old face hanging round the street, mind: Stefan Dennis is back as Paul Robinson. I’ve got no idea how long that’s been going on, nor do I know how come he’s lost a leg, or why all the other Neighbours seem to hate him because he’s lost a leg. But to be honest I doubt it really matters.
So. You think you’re getting a contemporary episode starring Harold and Paul and a bunch of nine-year-olds—when suddenly a load of characters from yesteryear show up, thanks to an improbable storyline in which glamorous former resident Annalise, now a famous film-maker, returns to screen her documentary about Ramsay Street.
Next thing you know, blast-from-the-past Joe Mangel’s strolling around Erinsborough, rubbing shoulders with Phil, Lance, Doug and God knows who else, all of whom are greyer, fatter, or more knobbly and wizened than you recall—turning what’s intended as a cheery retrospective salute to a much-loved soap into a heartbreaking visual meditation on the ageing process.
And just as you’ve come to terms with that, the show goes into freefall: Annalise screens her film, and the entire episode turns into a bizarre clipshow in which former cast members reprise their old roles for a few seconds apiece. And again, they all look a bit old and puffy—even Holly Vallance, who only left about five minutes ago.
Scott and Charlene are notable by their absence—although Annalise has thoughtfully included footage of their Ramsay Street wedding, apparently by going back in time and hiring a four-man camera crew. Having tested our suspension of disbelief with that, it’s a shame they didn’t go the whole hog and include updates from those characters who left Erinsborough in a coffin. I’d have loved to see, say, Jim Robinson bellowing a few lines from heaven (never spoke without shouting, that man).
Anyway, by the end you’re left feeling monumentally blank: a bit like someone who’s just had 20 minutes of their life stolen by an idiot. In other words, it’s classic Neighbours. Here’s to another two decades of televised Valium.
The Jeremy Kyle Show
[22 October 2005]
Breaking a leg. Watching a burglar shoot your cat. Eating a punnet of vomit and faeces. Unpleasant experiences all—but none, surely, is quite as unpleasant as grimly chewing your way through an entire edition of The Jeremy Kyle Show (ITV1).
Officially, it’s described as a ‘confrontational talkshow in which guests thrash out their conflicts, dilemmas and relationship issues in front of a studio audience’, although that doesn’t come close to capturing the flavour of it. That just makes it sound like Trisha, the show it’s replaced. It isn’t like Trisha. It’s worse. It makes Trisha look like a dainty philanthropists’ tea dance.
The key word in that official description is ‘confrontational’, because Jeremy’s USP, you see, is that he’s unafraid to hurl abuse at his hapless idiot guests. So when some greasy bi-toothed, boss-eyed scumball is guffawing about how many times he shoved it up his girlfriend’s mother, Kyle shouts something like ‘You amoeba of a man!’ The audience applaud, the chav is humbled, and Jeremy seems secretly pleased.
In other words, everything about Thejeremy Kyle Show is completely and utterly horrid, starting with Jeremy Kyle himself. At first glance, he looks like a cross between Matthew Wright and a bored carpet salesman. Harmless, you think. But then something draws you back for a second look, and this time—ugh!
I mean, look at his eyes. There’s a spine-chilling glint to them—it reminds me of the ‘shimmering pupils’ effect used in Russell T. Davies’s The Second Coming to denote which characters were agents of Satan. Not that I’m saying Kyle himself is an agent of Satan, you understand. I’m just saying you could easily cast him as one. Especially if you wanted to save money on special effects.
You know that weird ‘thing’ about Nicky Campbell? That indefinable ‘thing’ that makes him ever so slightly creepy, like you wouldn’t want to get stuck in a lift with him, because you half suspect he might suddenly pull a Stanley knife from his sleeve and start wildly slashing at you with a terrifyingly blank expression on his face? Well Jeremy Kyle’s got that same ‘thing’ about him, but amplified by a factor of twelve.
Every time I see him, it’s like someone’s just walked over my grave. I’m starting to think it’s some kind of premonition. The spirit world is reaching out, trying to warn me that Jeremy Kyle is somehow destined to kill me. I’m not sensing the word ‘murder’—chances are it’ll be an accident. Yeah. That’s it: next week I’m crossing the road and bang—Kyle’s vehicle inadvertently mows me down as it carries him en route to his shit and awful show.
Brrr. Just typing this makes me shudder. Look, if I’m found dead in the next few weeks, can someone tear this out and hand it to the police?
I’m veering off-topic. Back to the programme itself, which is infected by a curious linguistic virus: everyone in the studio uses the phrase ‘on national television’ at least five times per minute, meaning the show consists entirely of exchanges like this:
Seacow: ‘Oh, so you’re admitting, on national television, that you cheated?’
Baboon: ‘Ha! I can’t believe you can sit there on national television, and accuse me of that- on national television!’
Satan: ‘Woah, you two—is this any way to behave on national television?’
Do they always talk like this? If an argument breaks out in their kitchen, do they say things like, ‘I can’t believe you’re telling me this now—in the kitchen.’Well?
Actually, perhaps they’re just trying to remind themselves where they are. After all, sitting there with Jeremy and his iridescent pupils glistening before them, confronted by a studio audience so ugly they’d make John Merrick spew down the inside of his face-bag, the poor sods could be forgiven for forgetting they were on national television and starting to believe they were somewhere in the bowels of hell instead.
As could the viewers at home.
Mariah Carey bullshit
[29 October 2005]
So winter’s virtually upon us. The nights are cold and dark. The skies are bruised and drippy. Bird-flu victims litter the pavements. It’s depressing. No wonder all you want to do is stay indoors swaddled in your duvet, drinking tea and watching The X Factor (ITV1). Who can blame you?
After all, some of this year’s contestants can genuinely sing—by which I mean they invest their performances with genuine passion and soul, instead of just doling out the usual technical wibbly-wobbly note-bending you see in contests like this (you know—the sort of hark-at-me Mariah Carey bullshit that only the very thickest breed of moron could possibly enjoy).
Yes, some of this year’s contestants are the best yet. And some very very much aren’t.
Ta
ke Chico—or to give him his full name, Chico Time. Chico can’t really sing at all—not even the wibbly-wobbly way. All he can do is yelp like a dog getting its prostate examined by a vet with sandpaper hands. That’s a drawback in a competition like this, and Chico knows it. Fortunately, he’s hit on a way to compensate for his lack of vocal expertise: leaping about like a ninny. He also grins, flashes his pecs and shrieks ‘It’s Chico time!’ quite a lot.
Chico’s performances are so rubbish, they quickly plunge beyond ‘crap’, ‘rotten’ or ‘abysmal’, drop off the bottom of the chart, and reappear at the top, next to ‘brilliant’, ‘visionary’ and ‘epoch-making’. He inadvertently borders on greatness. As such, he thoroughly deserves his place in the contest.
Unlike Journey South, a pair of excruciatingly earnest male Gillette models who specialise in shouting and looking slightly pained. I say ‘slightly’ pained—1 mean ‘extremely’. Each time they hit a particularly sincere section of the lyric, they go all red-faced and funny-looking, like they’ve been stuck in a lift for three hours and need to go to the toilet, but can’t because there are ladies present. They creep me out.
And as for their name—they’re not fooling anyone with this ‘we’re two northern lads who got in a caravan and headed down to London to seek our fortune, hence Journey South’ bullshit. It’s a euphemism for cunnilingus. I know it, you know it…hell, even Kate Thornton knows it, and she probably doesn’t even have a vagina-just a smooth Barbie-style bump. Journey South. For God’s sake. I mean, come on.
Who else is in it? Well, there’s Shayne (good voice, pleading eyes, looks like every male Hollyoaks cast member ever rolled into one), Phillip (so off-key last week he seemed to be showcasing a new avant-garde vocal style which takes utter disregard for melody as its starting point), Maria (top-heavy Mariah Carey type), the Con-way Sisters (a Poundstretcher version of the Corrs), and Chenai (so blub-prone she’s in danger of crying all the fluid out of her body).
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