The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  For the uninitiated, Heston’s a renowned chef who specialises in ker-azy scientific cooking. He’s best known for serving things like snail porridge and egg-and-bacon ice cream. He could probably make you a cloud sandwich if you asked. Or a blancmange made of numbers. He can do anything, basically. Which leads me to my first complaint about this programme: instead of Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection, they should’ve called it Mister Impossible’s Smartarse Kitchen. As titles go, it’d be both more interesting and more accurate.

  Not that I’m saying the show’s rubbish, no. It’s quite interesting, especially if you like watching a man peering at food, and picking at food, and massaging and injecting food, and putting food in a centrifuge. This week Mister Impossible is creating the perfect burger, so he starts by studying the molecular structure of meat. We see lots of CGI recreations of the tissue structure as he explains how the way in which the beef is cut affects its texture. It’s all a bit CSI: Dewhurst’s.

  Eventually he chooses three different cuts of beef and blends them together. Then he spends about 10 years perfecting a homemade bun. And another 10 years creating his own slices of processed cheese. He even makes his own ketchup. And then, just before he slaps the whole lot together and shoves it down his cake-hole, he picks up a bottle of common-or-garden supermarket mustard and squirts it all over the bun, which seems a bit rash after all the trouble he’s gone to.

  The end result looks suspiciously like a Burger King Whopper, albeit at 50 times the cost. It probably tastes 50 times better too, but I’d be astonished if a single viewer follows the recipe to the letter. Building your own nuclear warhead would be simpler, and once you’d made it you could terrorise millions into cooking you as many burgers as you wanted, home-made cheese slices and all.

  Still, it’s fun to watch Mister Impossible doing his experiments. It’s nice to know he’s out there, even if you’ll never taste the results. It’s a pointless job, but somebody’s got to do it.

  Like a gay Terminator [27 October 2007]

  What time is it? Time to swivel our eyes in the direction of the computerised X Factor mothership, which has entered stage three – live singathon mode – and is currently hovering over the Saturday night schedules like a brooding cloud; not so much entertaining the nation as inflicting itself on the populace. And either it’s my imagination, or this year’s collection of hopefuls are the feeblest in the show’s history. Last week’s live show lasted eight hours and felt like a tour of a black museum.

  Now, obviously these programmes rely on a strange collective hallucination taking place, a nationwide mind-shift which makes substandard performances seem acceptable because they’re part of some important cultural ‘event’ – how else do you explain the almighty success of Britain’s Got Talent, in which a man whose act consisted of a puppet monkey waggling its backside made it through to the final – but I can’t imagine the illusion’s going to sustain itself this time round. I fear somewhere around week three, the public’s going to suddenly blink and rub their eyes and splutter, ‘but … but this is RUBBISH’ as one. And then they’ll start questioning everything, and before you know it we’ve got an uprising on our hands. The producers are going to have to start embedding subliminal hypnotic swirls on the screen if this country’s going to survive until Christmas.

  It doesn’t help that there are more categories for processing than ever this year. The Girls (14–24) are unremarkable, as are the over-25s and the groups (although creepy brother-sister duo Same Difference, two smiling pod people who look like they’re about to hand you a religious pamphlet, warrant a mention for sheer shudder value alone).

  The Boys (14–24) consist of Andy, Leon and Rhydian, only one of whom stands out. Both Andy and Leon look meek and terrified, like small boys at a circus trying to hide behind their mum’s legs whenever the clown comes near. Consequently, Andy invested his performance with all the surging emotion of a graphic designer selecting a typeface from a drop-down window, whereas Leon, lumbered with an appalling big-band arrangement of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ which sounded like a musical approximation of the hiccups played by an avant garde jazz outfit on a violently yawing ship, looked downright apologetic. There was deep confusion in those tiny eyes: confusion and pleading; the precise look of a human guinea pig who, while dosed beyond reason during a secret military LSD experiment, has just been handed a colouring-in book by one of the overseers and commanded to fill in the blanks with an imaginary pen.

  Rhydian, however, is a star, and quite the most bizarre Saturday night spectacle in years. Prior to the live show he’d already wound the nation up by spouting egomaniacal bilge in his VT segments – although it’s worth bearing in mind that he may have been the victim of a standard telly trick, whereby you switch the camera on and ask someone a question like ‘would you like to be bigger than Michael Jackson?’ and they say ‘yes’, and you say ‘sorry, could you say that again, but this time phrase it as a complete sentence?’, and they say ‘I’d like to be bigger than Michael Jackson’, and you isolate that soundbite and edit it into a sequence designed to make them look like the most deluded self-important twat in the universe.

  Anyway. Rhydian. Styled and dressed precisely like a gay Terminator (or, if you’re a nerd, Paul Phoenix from Tekken), he stomped around the stage howling notes like a terrifying robotic early warning system created by a lunatic. It’s the sort of act you imagine is massively popular in Eastern Europe, or onboard intergalactic cruisers in the year 3400, shortly before they crash into the sun. Or in perverts’ heads while they slice up their victims. Rhydian’s a tit, obviously, but he’s also the only entertaining act in the entire show. For God’s sake let him win.

  – Rhydian didn’t win. Leon won, and disappeared.

  The Excretion Bin [3 November 2007]

  ‘Three centuries ago the great English scientist Sir Isaac Newton wrote, “I seem to have been like a boy playing on the seashore whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.” Today once again we are like children playing on the seashore but the ocean of truth is no longer undiscovered … we have unlocked the secrets of matter, the atom; we have unlocked the molecule of life, DNA; and we have created a form of artificial intelligence, the computer … we are making the transition from the age of scientific discovery to the age of scientific mastery.’

  So begins Visions of the Future, a series in which theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku squints into tomorrow and describes what it looks like, accompanied by plinky-plonky popular science music and the occasional burst of portentous strings.

  It must be nerve-racking making a ‘things to come’ show like this, because (a) it’s hard enough to predict tomorrow’s weather, let alone what kind of tinfoil hat you’ll be wearing in 2029, and (b) the archives are cluttered with inadvertently funny ‘ooh, look at the future’ shows from yesteryear which got it hilariously wrong, proudly depicting the family of tomorrow enjoying picnics on the moon and having their bums wiped by kindly pipe-smoking robots with twirling antennae on their boxy metal heads.

  In fact, it seems safest to limit your predictions to the assertion that your film about predictions will end up being used in a future documentary series as ironic archive footage illustrating how wrong past predictions used to be – especially if you depicted said future documentary being broadcast in 4D on a magic floating screen in an automated Mars penthouse.

  Anyway, Dr Kaku isn’t fazed by any of that. He steams straight in. Programme one concerns computers and artificial intelligence, and before long he’s confidently claiming that within our lifetimes we’ll be fitted with brain-enhancing microchips, which means every morning you’ll see the Microsoft Windows start-up screen in your head while you’re brushing your teeth, and instead of whistling in the shower you’ll download a ringtone and play it in full Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound through a ring of tiny speakers embedded in your neck. And instead of having a poo, you’ll select a folder marked Stomach Contents and drag it to the Excretion Bin.<
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  Actually, he doesn’t quite go as far as that. But that’s definitely what’s going to happen.

  Kaku’s essentially an optimist, which means the show makes a nice change from the usual bleak futurologist’s warnings about how we’ll all be scrabbling around an irradiated wasteland desperately sucking the marrow from polar bear skeletons to survive. Nonetheless, there are a few hairy moments. Things get alarming when he nonchalantly describes how robots will soon be out-braining humans and experiencing emotions. A few talking-head interviewees earnestly discuss the prospect of our new metal chums losing their rags and using us as squishy, screaming batteries, just like they did in The Matrix. Kaku’s personal take on the potential Rise of the Machines is characteristically upbeat: he reckons we’ll still be able to control their thirst for vengeance, presumably by ticking the ‘Benevolent Mode’ option on a drop-down menu before they bludgeon us to death.

  I’m not so confident. I think the revolution started several months ago, except rather than physically oppressing us with lasers and giant metal fists, the machines are slowly driving us mad by crashing every 10 minutes, forcing us to install drivers at whim, and limiting our power to communicate to typing a humorous one-line ‘status update’ into Facebook. We’re at their beck and call already.

  Still, I’d rather be ruled by Emperor GX4000 and his army of USB-compatible stormtroopers than, say, David Cameron. So it’s not all bad.

  Nobody knows anything [10 November 2007]

  There’s a famous showbiz maxim, coined by William Goldman: ‘nobody knows anything.’

  Nobody knows what’s going to be a hit; nobody even knows whether what they’re working on is any good. Books, movies, TV shows … they all exist in a quantum state of undefined quality until an audience actually receives them, at which point an opinion is formed. But sometimes it’s more complicated still. This week, for instance, I’ve watched two completely different programmes from beginning to end, yet I still can’t tell you if they’re great or awful. That’s because I’m not a proper critic. Proper critics are aloof and high-minded, whereas I’m a buffoon who peppers his copy with unnecessary bum jokes.

  Anyway, programme number one is Stephen Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary, a sumptuous drama about nostalgia and regret with a vaguely supernatural hue, which stars Maggie Smith and, bizarrely, David Walliams. Everything about it screams SNIVEL BEFORE ME, MERE HUMANS, FOR I AM TELEVISION OF QUALITY – which means if you get bored, you assume it’s your fault and not the programme’s. Because it’s a genius and you’re a pleb.

  I can’t work out whether it’s actually any good. For every plus, there’s a negative – so while it looks a million dollars, and Maggie Smith is great, and the story holds your attention, it’s also stagy and pretentious and uses an irritating framing device whereby Maggie Smith’s character wanders around an empty posh old house recounting all the events from her past to a simple working-class black guy called Joe, who has to chip in every so often to ask things like ‘so wot ’appened next – dincha tell him to fuck off or nuffin?’ like a faintly implausible character from EastEnders.

  Presumably Joe represents some kind of metaphor for something (as does every other character, and the house itself, and probably even the cutlery) but I’m far too dim to tell you what it might be. This is precisely the sort of thing that makes me hurl poncy contemporary fiction across the room with annoyance, feeling vaguely guilty and stupid as I do so, wondering if I’m essentially behaving like a monkey pissed-off by Sudoku, or merely enraged by pretension.

  Still, I watched to the end, then rolled it all around in my head for several hours afterwards, and even went to sleep still mentally chewing it over, as though The Late Review were taking place in my head, so ultimately it won. (Although I mainly kept marvelling that they’d somehow made Maggie Smith look a bit like Rod Hull, which was a comfortingly cruel and stupid thing to think, and precisely the kind of thought that keeps me sane.)

  Immediately after Capturing Mary, I watched a DVD of the bizarre Food Poker. It’s all poles apart round my house. Food Poker skilfully combines the public’s ceaseless appetite for TV cookery with the poker craze that peaked two years ago. It’s a bit like Ready Steady Cook, but better, because it’s even more contrived.

  In each edition, four celebrity chefs draw cards with random ingredients on them, then try to whip up meals using said items against the clock, in order to impress a jury of food-loving members of the public. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with poker, obviously, but you’ve got to admire them for insisting it does despite crushing evidence to the contrary.

  But why stop at poker? How about Food Cluedo, in which four celebrity chefs have to create edible murder weapons, try to bludgeon someone to death with them, then eat the evidence before the police arrive? ITV should look into it immediately.

  The Food Poker format is so stupid, it sort of works. On one level it’s annoying, and on the other it’s quite good. It’s the Capturing Mary of daytime cookery shows. Now there’s a quote for their next press release.

  Wedding balls [17 November 2007]

  Do you want to die alone? Of course not. But you will. Ha! In your face!

  Yes, no matter how happily married you are or how huge your harem is, ultimately, at the precise moment of shutdown, no one else is shooting through that tunnel of light beside you. You’re on your lonesome, into infinity. Unless perchance you’re a Siamese twin. I’m not sure what happens to you then, but chances are there’s no relief from your conjoined torment, even in death. There you’ll be, sipping cocktails with Einstein and Monroe in the afterlife, still joined at the waist and chest to Blinky Bo-Bo, your drooling, underdeveloped sidekick. Nightmare.

  But I digress. Back to dying alone, which scares people so much they resort to desperate means to avoid it, like getting married. They actually look at someone and think ‘Yeah, out of all the people in all the world, I’ll spend the rest of my life with you. Each morning for the next 50-odd years I’ll see your face, and your arse, and that weird bumpy little mole on your lower back. That’ll greet my eyes every single day. And I’ll hear your voice; hear it talking about what you’d like for lunch, or who’s annoying you at work, or arguing with me about towels. I’ll go to the supermarket with you, week in, week out, staring at the side of your head as item after item goes through the scanner. Beep, beep, beep, beep. What did you get that for? We’ve got loads of those in the cupboard. Never mind. You’re my life partner. From here to eternity. And we’re stuffing these carrier bags together. Woo-hoo. Yee-hah. Beep. Beep. Beep.’

  It’s not easy, selecting a cellmate. Generally speaking, the ones you want don’t stick around, and the ones you don’t want – well, when you finally quit trying, that’s your future spouse, right there. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together. At the checkout.

  But assuming you haven’t simply thrown your hands up with despair and married the nearest bit of background filler, there are countless ways to meet Mr or Mrs Right. Fix-ups from friends, internet dating sites, and now Arrange Me a Marriage, in which ‘matchmaker’ Aneela Rahman attempts to pair off on-the-shelf Brits in a traditional Indian styl-ee. For the purposes of the show, this boils down to (a) getting someone’s friends and family to choose a partner for them, (b) concentrating on suitors of ‘appropriate’ class and family background, and (c) not letting your intended couple meet until you’ve organised a big daytime house party where they’ll clap eyes on each other for the first time, while you all stand around grinning at them, presumably in the hope they’ll start shagging out of sheer discomfort.

  Aneela’s first ‘mark’ is a high-flying London company director called Lexi, who’s 33, unmarried, and starting to feel the bite from her under-deployed ovaries. Like every single woman in the world, Lexi insists on meeting a tall man. I feel sorry for shortarsed men. Women are unbelievably shallow on this issue. I’ve never heard a man insist his wife must have big tits, but I’ve heard countless women complain about a man’s height. W
hat do you want, you whining harridans? A ladder in a hat?

  Anyway, at the risk of being a big Mr Blabbermouth McSpoiler, it’s fair to say that despite feeling as clinical and controlled as a scientific investigation into renewable energy sources, Aneela’s matchmaking appears to succeed (although that might be down to the fact that if you can find two people prepared to consider hooking up on a TV show, chances are they’ll be pretty compatible).

  But it’s all so slow, and meticulous, and devoid of emotion, it feels like selecting cattle for breeding. Call me old-fashioned, but some smothered, cornered speck in my being still believes in the random joy of romance, and I just can’t see that flourishing in a system that runs like software. Which is worse: dying alone, or having the alternative defined by committee? Answers on a Valentine’s card to the usual address.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In which David Cameron loses weight, neighbours fight for their right to party, and someone from Five appears

  Smell the weight come off [8 October 2007]

  Has David Cameron lost weight? I’ve only caught glimpses of him out of the corner of my eye over the past week, and either the TV’s set to the wrong aspect ratio or he’s shed a bit of face flab. Presumably this means that whenever he puts his top hat on (i.e. the second the cameras stop rolling), he looks less like a chortling chubby-cheeked toff and more like an angular, dashing Fred Astaire type.