2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  I’m still geared toward assuming that anyone who unexpectedly introduces themself to me in a pub or nods at me in the street is either someone I’ve met before but failed to recognise, or a kindly stranger who’s about to warn me I’ve left my flies undone. Instead, now, they’re occasionally people who know who I am but first have to ask me to confirm that I am who I am, before going on to explain that they thought I was who I am, but they weren’t sure. By which point, neither am I.

  It’s not always pleasant attention, either. One man stomped over in a newsagent’s to call me a ‘telly cunt’, which struck me as hilarious two days later when I finally stopped shaking.

  Still, it could be worse. While I was going out with my ex-girlfriend, she landed a part in ITV1’s erstwhile women-in-prison schlockfest Bad Girls, playing a lesbian murderer—which meant van drivers wound down their windows to shout ‘lesbian!’ or ‘murderer!’ at her when we walked down the street. Generally, this was done with affection, but that’s hard to explain to passers-by who by now are regarding the two of you with open suspicion.

  Burqas for all. Only way forward.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In which the MacDonald Brothers provoke war an Anglo-Scottish war, Jeffrey Archer hurls pennies at beggars, and Shilpa Shetty meets some new friends

  Up the Eton Road

  [21 October 2006]

  If you’re looking for proof that there’s a large number of knee-jerk racists lurking among the Great British Public, surely the outcome of last week’s X Factor (ITV) vote is it.

  Maybe you didn’t see it because, like many a caring, sharing Guardian reader, you prefer the unbearably cruel early audition shows in which one no-hoper after another gets a big bum wiped all over their dreams. The tacky live studio finals, which are essentially more about celebration than denigration, leave you cold. And who can blame you? Most of the acts are mediocre at best, and some of them are downright rubbish.

  Louis Walsh’s selection is especially poor. He’s already lost The Unconventionals, a sort of doo-wop amateur dramatic society known round these parts as A Cappella Irritant Squad, who last week delivered a performance of’Dancing in the Street’ which sounded like six clumsy cover versions playing at once. The audience couldn’t wait to ignore them.

  And they were his most likeable act. The rest are saddled with absolutely unforgivable band names; names so shitbone awful, you hate them before they’ve even opened their mouths. There’s a flavourless quartet called 4Sure (4FuckSake would be more appropriate), and an ethereally skinny boy band called Eton Road (which sounds like a euphemism for an illegal underage sex act to me—as in ‘the police arrived just as he was taking one of the prefects up the Eton Road’). But worst of all, there’s the MacDonald Brothers.

  And this brings me to my point. The MacDonald Brothers are a pair of characterless twins whose startlingly dreadful performance somehow managed to veer from cheesy to flat to eerie to nauseating and all the way back to cheesy again before finally settling on outright rubbish. There’s something indefinably creepy about them—they’re the kind of act a child killer might listen to in his car. And yet somehow, they were spared elimination by the viewers at home.

  Meanwhile, a twenty-six-year-old called Dionne, whose voice is so good it could advertise heaven, was left at the bottom of the pile alongside The Unconventionals. Why? Well, it can’t be her singing. Perhaps it’s the gap between her front teeth, but I doubt it. That’s sort of endearing.

  No, the only reason I can think of is that she’s black, and there’s still a sizeable section of the audience that’s either threatened or dissuaded by that. There’s no way a rational person could choose the MacDonald Brothers over her. It’s like choosing a kick in the balls instead of a cuddle. The programme’s not at fault here. The viewers are.

  Anyway, what I’m getting round to is this: if you watch The X-Factor, it’s time to stop doing so in a detached, ironic, I’m-above-this-shit kind of way. It’s time to muck in and get voting. Yes it is. Stop arguing. So what if it’s a rip-off? You want the MacDonald Brothers to win? You sicken me. Vote Dionne.

  Anyway. The X-Factor isn’t the only live, over-long reality spectacular. Last week, Sky unveiled Cirque de Celebris (Sky One), which…well, you can guess what it is from the tide. Yes, in an apparent bid to strip the word ‘celebrity’ of its last remaining atoms of glamour, the famous are now desperately performing circus tricks for your amusement, like starving dogs at a medieval banquet.

  Sadly, it’s not as much fun as you think. Yes, you get to see Syed from The Apprentice dangling from a trapeze, and Zammo dancing on a large, brightly-coloured ball, like a bear in a bad cartoon, but the show lasts 90 minutes—approximately 60 minutes longer than its novelty value. Still, at least it’s given Grace from Big Brother a chance to rehabilitate herself (she came first last week). More importandy, if the look of concentrated terror on Syed’s face is anything to go by, it’s only a matter of time before he shits himself live on air—and in those tight spandex tights, that’s going to look absolutely hilarious. It’s surely worth recording just for that.

  TOUCH WOOD

  [28 October 2006]

  Lots of things designed to be used by children end up appealing to adults too. Harry Potter. Jelly babies. Kids’ bums. The list is endless.

  TV’s Doctor Who is a good example. Originally conceived as an educational drama for ig6os kiddywinks, it attracted a devoted adult audience from the very beginning. They knew they were watching something that wasn’t, strictly speaking, ‘for them’ but they loved it anyway.

  The trouble with Who’s freshly-minted anagrammatic ‘sister’ serial Torchwood (BBC2) is that it’s not really clear who it’s aimed at. It contains swearing, blood and sex, yet still somehow feels like a children’s programme. Thirteen-year-olds should love it; anyone else is likely to be more than a little confused. Which isn’t to say Torchwood is bad. Just bewildering. And very, very silly.

  The central presence of Captain Jack Harkness, one of the most pantomime characters ever to appear in Doctor Who, doesn’t exactly help. He’s like Buzz Lightyear, but less realistic. The moment you see him running around being all larger than life, you think ‘aha—so Torchwood’s a camp space opera? Fair enough.’

  But then the storyline goes all dark and unpleasant and people are getting their throats torn open and shooting themselves in the head, and suddenly you don’t know where you are. Not in Kansas any more, maybe—but where?

  Cute and dark, sweet and sour, up and down. It’s like tuning in to watch Deadwood, only to discover they’ve replaced Al Swearengen with the Honey Monster. Or sitting through a ‘re-imagining’ of the Captain Birds Eye commercials, in which the white-haired skipper traverses the oceans in a raging thunderstorm, ruling his child-crew with an iron fist, tossing dissenters overboard into the rolling, foaming waves—but dances the hornpipe with a big cartoon haddock while the credits roll. Or stumbling across an episode of Scooby-Doo in which Shaggy skins up on camera.

  In fact Scooby-Doo (more than, say, The X-Files or Buffy ) is probably the show most analogous to Torchwood, in that both series revolve around a fresh-faced team of meddling kids tackling an ever-shifting carnival of monsters in a world of childlike simplicity. The Torchwood gang even have their own version of the Mystery Machine, although theirs is a spectacularly ugly SUV with two daft strips of throbbing LED lights either side of the windscreen whose sole purpose is to make the entire vehicle look outrageously silly—they might as well have stuck a big inflatable dick on the bonnet, to be honest.

  The inside’s not much belter—LCD screens embedded in every available flat surface, each urgently displaying a wibbly-wobbly screensaver…it must be like driving around in a flagship branch of PC World.

  There are other glaringly daft touches: the countless overhead helicopter shots of Cardiff (what is this, Google Earth?); the ridiculous severed hand-in-a-jar (straight from the Addams Family); the protracted sequence from episode one in which Captain
Jack stood atop a tall building surveying the cityscape like Batman for no reason whatsoever. Oh, and the team’s insistence on using the silly invisible elevator that slowly, slowly ascends through a sort of ‘magic hole’ in the pavement—even though there’s a perfectly reasonable back door through which they can enter and leave the Batcave at will.

  And on top of all that, there’s a bizarre emphasis on bisexual tension thrown in for good measure. You half expect the Torchwood gang to drop their slacks and form a humping great daisy chain any moment. It’s Shortbus meets Goober and the Ghost Chasers meets X-Men meets Angel meets The Tomorrow People meets Spooks meets Oh God I Give Up.

  Still, the act of jotting down some of Torchwood’s thundering absurdities has put a big dumb smile on my face. Whatever the hell it’s supposed to be, there’s nothing else like Torchwood on TV at the moment, and that’s got to be worth something. I just don’t have a clue how much.

  Haunted porcelain dolls

  [4 November 2006]

  Told you so. Last week Dionne got the boot from The X-Factor (ITV1), despite having far and away one of the best voices in the contest. Originally, I put this down to racism on the part of the voting audience, but maybe I’m doing them a disservice. Perhaps the average ITV1 viewer isn’t that shallow. Perhaps they voted her out because of the gap in her front teeth.

  They also ousted Kerry, the sexy wheelchair-user (who the tabloids would’ve dubbed ‘Hot Wheels’ if they had any balls), which is just as well because she wasn’t the greatest singer.

  Anyway, all the remaining acts deserve their place on the stage, with three notable exceptions—the first being Ray, an unsettling cross between Harry Connick, Jr, Chucky from Child’s Play, and a boy raised by wolves. Ray needs to stop grinning. Whenever he smiles it’s like watching Jack Nicholson leering through that shattered door in The Shining. And he’s got a weird cold-yet-needy look in his eye, which screams ‘STAGE SCHOOL!’ so loudly it almost drowns out his actual singing voice.

  I say ‘almost’, because in practice his be-bop transatlantic slur is too infuriating to ignore. (Why do some people think it necessary to sing Rat Pack numbers with a voice so slack it mushes all the consonants and vowels, so a simple lyric like ‘She gets too hungry/ For dinner at eight’ becomes ‘a-she gess a-too hunnnryyfoh/ a-zzinner-a-eighh’? Sinatra’s diction was crisp as a bell, you morons.)

  Exception number two: the MacDonald Brothers, whose continued presence in the competition is proof that a large proportion of the British public have no idea what they’re doing. Seriously, no sane mind could possibly enjoy their performances, which combine piss-weak crooning with an indefinable sense of creeping dread. They’re sinister and horrible, like a pair of haunted porcelain dolls who’ve suddenly come alive on the sideboard. Each time one of them gets close to the camera, I imagine he’s going to slither out of the screen and calmly strangle me in my living room. Please make it stop, Lord.

  The third and final notable exception is Eton Road, the emaciated boy band who look like they’ve staggered on stage to beg for basic rations. I keep expecting the UN to start dropping food parcels in the middle of their act. One of them’s so thin he sometimes stands between the individual pixels on my LCD television and completely disappears from view.

  Anyway, those are the three acts that need to be sent home first. Oh, and the producers really need to cut down on the amount of unnecessary lighting in The X Factor studio before George Monbiot shows up to kick their arses. There must be 10 million bulbs in there: it’s like the whole of Las Vegas crammed into one hangar. That show’s costing us an iceberg a week.

  Perhaps they should follow the lead set by Unanimous, Channel 4’s new who-gets-the-money reality show, which leans in the other direction, being so gloomy and underlit it’s like venturing into the underground realm of Fungus the Bogeyman.

  Curious show, this: nine contestants are locked in a bunker until they can unanimously decide which of them deserves to win the jackpot (which starts at a million, and drops by a pound a second). The whole thing’s harsh and downbeat, with oppressive walls and no natural light, and it revolves around a group of people who grow more ruthless and greedy by the minute.

  It’s not a barrel of laughs. In fact, it’s a bit like the aftermath of a nuclear war. Bet they’re catching and eating rats by week five. Hungrily wolfing them down while they squat in the corner. Biting ratty’s head off while his paws kick and scratch at their chinny-chins! Rat blood and rat fur; gobble it, gobble it! Tee hee hee hee!

  Sorry. Been watching too much of Ray and the MacDonald Brothers. It gets in your head and it changes you, badly.

  Not Buck Rogers

  [11 November 2006]

  The future is a foreign country. They do things differently there. They wear tinfoil and fly around in hovercars, for starters. You wouldn’t get that in the Dark Ages. Their most advanced piece of technology was the pointy stick, used for jabbing peasants in the eye or throwing at jabberwockies. Compared to the future, the past is rubbish, which is why TV science fiction is always a billion times better than costume drama. I don’t want to watch people dressed in doilies curtseying to each other until everyone dies of consumption. I prefer lasers and dry ice. Give me the camp nonsense of Buck Rogers over the painful earnestness of Jane Eyre every time.

  Actually, no. Not Buck Rogers. It’s far too gee-whizz. Give me something British. Something depressing and dystopian. Something angry and idealistic and imaginative and scary and…well, give me half the things discussed at length in The Martians and Us (BBC4), an unmissable, timely documentary series examining the history of UK sci-fi.

  I say ‘timely’ because it arrives a few weeks after the death of Nigel Kneale, who, in creating the BBC serial Quatermass back in the 19508, single-handedly set the tone for all British TV sci-fi to follow. Kneale’s work, which pops up repeatedly throughout this series, is well worth seeking out (and there’s no excuse for not doing so, since it’s largely available on DVD)—as a TV writer, he’s up there with yer Dennis Potters and yer Jack Rosenthals, and with any luck the BBC will see his passing as a great excuse to screen everything he wrote all over again. In order. And ideally in 3D, even though that’s not possible.

  Anyway, back to The Martians and Us, which rather than being a dry chronological trawl through the past, tackles a different theme with each edition and sees how it evolved. Fittingly, episode one is about ‘evolution’; specifically, the way Darwin’s theories influenced H. G. Wells, who in turn influenced just about everyone else. Future episodes examine dystopian societies (2984 et al) and Armageddon; they’re all superbly researched and clearly sewn together with an almost unhealthy love for the subject matter (with an obvious bias in favour of television, but in this case that’s no bad thing).

  TV sci-fi is subjected to more than its fair share of derisive snorts, but as this series (misleading tide aside) makes clear, it’s always been about more than starships and rayguns. The best sci-fi explores ideas—often deeply uncomfortable, challenging ideas about human society—in the most imaginative way possible. You may think ‘dark’ crime serials like Cracker or Prime Suspect tell you a lot about the sinister side of the human psyche, but they’re nothing compared to the likes of Quatermass or Threads.

  As a bonus, and in an apparent bid to make my last point sound like babbling nonsense, BBC4 is also repeating The Day of the Triffids, their early Bos adaptation of John Wyndham’s biopocalypse pot-boiler. Yes, the one where a bunch of giant walking daffodils rise up and take over the Earth.

  It’s undeniably silly, with inadvertently funny FX, some dialogue so clumsily expositional it might as well be replaced with a diagram explaining who’s who and what’s what, and some alarmingly stiff performances (which serve as a jarring reminder that just a few decades ago, most TV actors sounded twice as posh as the royal family and spoke VERY CRISPLY AND LOUDLY as though appearing on stage before an audience of bewildered half-deaf paupers).

  But get beyond all that, and you�
�ll discover that at its core lurks a tale of startling bleakness, the likes of which rarely make it on screen in this mollycoddled day and age, when broadcasters think we prefer our entertainment with all the sharp edges sanded down, all the unpleasantness reduced to black and white shades or cuddled away completely. Stupid wobbling plant monsters aside, our TV used to have some bite—and our sci-fi often provided it. Laugh if you like, but cherish it too.

  Might as well be dead

  [ us November 2006]

  As winter rolls in and the days shrink to the length of a depressive sigh, so a man’s thoughts gradually acquire a melancholic timbre. Especially when said man is staring at I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV1) and sadly contemplating his symbiotic relationship with the people onscreen.

  They bicker and preen; I write about it. They scrabble on their knees eating maggots; I mock them for it. They blow off in a hammock; I describe the smell. I am pathetic. My life is pathetic.

  I truly, genuinely, might as well be dead.

  Still, as I sit here, typing these words with one hand and clutching a kitchen knife to my neck with the other, I suppose I might as well run through the traditional abusive Who’s Who list, to which the usual caveats apply, since the insane nature of newspaper-supplement lead times means I’m typing this on Tuesday morning—so if Toby Anstis hangs himself with a makeshift vine noose on Wednesday afternoon, not only will you find no mention of it here, but any abuse I pour on his head will seem particularly callous.