The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Pages 32–37: a piece on the Keralan coastline, accompanied by exotic photos of natives (and coffee pods). Page 38: upmarket ski destinations (and a coffee pod).

  Page 40: a profile of the mastermind behind Swiss watchmakers Chopard. ‘A true epicurean, Karl-Friedrich Scheufele’s passion drives him to pursue excellence in all aspects of life,’ reads a caption beside a photo of Karl, his hot wife Christine, and three more coffee pods.

  Page 42: a feature on milk. Real milk, you understand, not that powdered formula gunk people in the developing world mix with unclean water and bottlefeed to babies, causing diarrhoea and vomiting. For some mad reason, that’s not mentioned at all. No pods, either: a double oversight.

  Pages 46–51: Indian recipes inspired ‘by the flavours of the Nespresso Grand Crus’. Coffee pods next to the food and, in one case, balanced on the edge of a plate. Brilliant.

  Pages 54–59: fashion spread starring a man who looks about 50 and a sexy woman who looks about 25. Cups, machines and Nespresso logos are visible. But boo: no coffee pods.

  The unexpected pod drought continues throughout a feature on ghastly overpriced crud to put on your coffee table, a guffy peep about yachting, an advert for Chopard watches, and a self-celebratory piece on sustainable farming practices in Costa Rica, the last page of which is suddenly improved immensely – at last – by a minuscule photo of a coffee pod in the lower right-hand corner, serving as a full stop at the end of the article. Finally, the home straight: several pages of chinaware from the Nespresso range, a deluge of coffee pods and an order form. And that’s it.

  I went back and counted. In total, there were 281 visible coffee pods – 281 tiny bullet-shaped reminders of the bizarre, anxious banality of marketing. On the one hand, it’s a pointless free mag. On the other, it’s the by-product of an entire industry peopled exclusively by desperate, snivelling lunatics. And most damning of all, it’s put me off my coffee.

  Everyone’s talking about … [3 December 2007]

  Heat magazine – the tittering idiot’s lunchbreak-pamphlet-ofchoice – has caused a bad stink by printing a collection of comedy stickers in its latest issue. Said stickers are clearly designed to be stuck round the fringes of computer monitors by the magazine’s bovine readership in a desperate bid to transform their veal-fattening workstation pen into a miniature Chuckle Kingdom and thereby momentarily distract them from the bleak futility of their wasted, Heat-reading lives.

  Most of the stickers are baffling to anyone who isn’t a regular reader – there’s one of Will Young sporting a digitally extended chin, a shot of a man’s head on a crab’s body accompanied by the words ‘Roy Gave Me Crabs’, and a photo of the editor looking a bit like a monk. So far, so hilarious.

  But one consists of a shot of Jordan’s disabled five-year-old son Harvey, with the words ‘Harvey wants to eat me!’ printed next to his mouth. In other words, we’re supposed to find Harvey’s face intrinsically mirthful and/or frightening. Ha ha, Heat! Ha ha!

  Jordan herself is on the cover of the same issue, as part of a montage depicting Stars Who Hate Their Bodies (‘Jordan: SAGGY BOOBS’), so chances are she wasn’t in an especially upbeat frame of mind when she later stumbled across the snickering point-and-chortle demolition of her blameless disabled son nestling in the centre pages. She immediately lodged a complaint with the PCC. Personally, I’d have caught a cab to their offices, kicked the editor firmly in the balls, taken a photo of his stunned, wheezing, watering face and blown it up and hung it on my wall, to be contemplated every morning over breakfast.

  Of course, Heat’s always had a psychotically confused relationship with celebrities. On the one hand, it elevates them to the status of minor deities, and on the other, it prints clinical close-ups of their thighs with a big red ring circling any visible atoms of cellulite beside a caption reading ‘Ugh! Sickening!’ This is what the misanthropic serial killer in Se7en would’ve done if he’d been running a magazine instead of keeping a diary.

  This might seem a bit rich coming from someone (i.e. me) who regularly says cruel things about public figures for comic effect. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I scrawled some fairly abusive things about Jordan myself in a recent Screen Burn column in the Guide, for instance. Isn’t Heat effectively doing the same thing, only with more gusto, not to mention photos?

  Good question. Thanks for asking. My defence, in as much as I’ve worked it out, runs like this: people on TV aren’t real people. They’re flickering, two-dimensional representations of people, behaving unnaturally and often edited to the point of caricature. They’re fictional characters and it’s easy to hate them. Everybody hates someone on TV. But you never really hate them the way you’d hate, say, a rapist. Because they’re not really there, and with one or two exceptions (TV psychics, say), they’re ultimately harmless. Put Vernon Kay on my screen and I’ll gleefully spit venom at him. Sit me next to him at a dinner party and I’ll probably find him quite charming, unless he does something appalling. That’s not hypocritical, it’s rational.

  In fact, in my limited experience, the more unpalatable you find someone’s TV persona, the nicer they turn out to be in real life. Recently I was walking down the street when someone I’d written something nasty about suddenly darted across the road and introduced himself. Almost immediately, I started apologising for the article, explaining (as above) that people on TV aren’t real people and so on. At which point he looked faintly crestfallen. He hadn’t read the piece at all, but he’d seen a TV thing I’d done and just wanted to say how much he enjoyed it. Then he asked what it was I’d said that was so bad, so I found myself sheepishly repeating it while staring at the ground. There was an uncomfortable pause. And then he laughed and said it was all fair game and not to worry. And I thought, who’s the dickhead in this scenario? Because it sure as hell wasn’t him. I’m the dickhead. I’m always the dickhead: always have been, always will be.

  Even so, and speaking as a dickhead, there’s surely a world of difference between tipping cartoon buckets of shit over someone’s TV persona, and paying a paparazzo to hide behind a bush to take photos of their arse as they stroll down the beach in real life, so you can make your readers feel momentarily better about themselves because ha-ha her bumcheeks are flabby and ho-ho he’s bald and tee-hee she’s sobbing. And even if you accept that degree of intrusion, on the basis that these people rely on the media and yadda yadda yadda, how insanely superior and removed from reality do you have to be to invite your readers to laugh at a photograph of a small disabled boy whose only ‘crime’ is (a) being disabled and (b) having a famous mum with ‘SAGGY BOOBS’?

  Each week, Heat opens with a featurette called ‘Everyone’s Talking About …’ detailing the latest showbiz scandal. Last week, it was ‘Everyone’s Talking About … Marc Bannerman’. This week it ought to read ‘Everyone’s Talking About … What Total Cunts We Are’. And maybe it will. We shall see.

  The Axis of Real Stuff [10 December 2007]

  So let’s get this straight. A US intelligence report decides that Iran isn’t as big a threat as once feared, and Bush decides this proves that, actually guys, I think you’ll find it is. You’ve got to admire his steadfast refusal to acknowledge anything that doesn’t complement his monochromatic world view. He’s a true tunnel visionary. Awkward facts simply ricochet off him, like peashooter pellets bouncing harmlessly from an elephant’s hide. He knows what he wants to believe, and he’ll carry on believing it until it kills him. Or us. Preferably us. He can always recant and say, ‘Oops, I was wrong’ in his bunker. We’ll be long gone by then, so what does he care?

  Very little, in all probability. Bush is a bit like an unhinged iconoclast who has arbitrarily decided he doesn’t believe in cows, and loudly and repeatedly denies their existence until you get so annoyed you drive him to a farm and show him a cow, and he shakes his head and continues to insist there’s no such thing. At which point it moos indignantly, but he claims not to hear it, so in exasperation you drag him into the
field and force him to touch the cow, and milk the cow, and ride around on the cow’s back. And, finally, he dismounts and says, ‘That was fun’n’all, but dagnammit, I still don’t believe in no cow.’ And then he shoots it in the head regardless, just to be on the safe side. Just so it isn’t a threat.

  Come to think of it, Bush is so vehemently fact-phobic, he might as well expand the war on terror into an outright war on reality, in which anything palpably authentic is the enemy. There’ll be an ‘Axis of Real Stuff’, encompassing everyone and everything from hairbands to dustmen, all of which Must Be Eliminated. ‘If it’s provable, we can kill it.’ That’s our new motto. God’s on our side, because he can’t be proved or disproved. He’s one of our most valuable allies – the others being Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, ghosts, the bogeyman, and Bigfoot. Not to mention a vast fleet of UFOs, which the enemy won’t have a chance of defeating because it never existed in the first place. Our armies won’t be constrained by the laws of physics, and even if we lose, we’ll simply say we won, even if we have to say it from an afterlife which doesn’t exist either. That’s the power of unwavering denial. It makes deities of us all.

  Of course, by rejecting anything he doesn’t want to hear, Bush is simply proving he’s human. Humans hate the truth. Once someone’s made up their mind, they rarely change it, no matter how much evidence to the contrary you show them. Changing your mind or admitting you were wrong is seen as weak, as though life itself were an almighty pub quiz where incorrect answers are penalised. The only option left is to interpret the facts in a new and interesting way that supports your overall position. This is what Bush has done. He says that since the report indicates that Iran halted its weapons programme in 2003, there’s a clear possibility it could start it up again. The very fact that the Iranians don’t have a nuclear bomb proves they might still develop one. Therefore, Iran is dangerous.

  That’s a clever thing to say, because (a) the future is unknowable, so it’s impossible to tell him he’s wrong, and (b) the more he says it, the more likely it is to come true. Since Bush has shown that he’ll view Iran as a nuclear threat regardless of whether it’s got the bomb or not, the Iranians might as well build one. What have they got to lose?

  Also, the report doesn’t say whether the Iranians are developing a giant laser beam capable of sawing the sun in two, but that’s no reason to assume they won’t be starting work on it next week. Picture a world in which Ahmadinejad holds us to ransom by threatening to plunge one sawn-off half of the sun into the Atlantic, sending 900-foot waves of boiling water rushing toward our shores. We can’t let that happen. We’ve got to get in first: drive a space shuttle into the sun and blow the damn thing up before the enemy get their hands on it. It might solve global warming too. Let’s hope the Pentagon is across this. Don’t let us down, guys. Knock that baby out.

  Another benefit of ignoring the report and piling in regardless is that at least this time round we’ll know for sure that the invasion and subsequent war is based on a false premise in advance, which beats finding out later and feeling a bit disgusted with ourselves. Forewarned is forearmed. It’s a narrative tweak which keeps things fresh and interesting. The TV series Columbo used a similar device: instead of being served a common-or-garden whodunnit, you’d see the murderer committing the crime at the start, so the fun came from watching his plan slowly unravel. There’s no danger of that happening to Bush though, because he doesn’t believe in plans either. So nothing unravels. It’s a win-win situation. He should unleash the hounds tomorrow. Go ahead, George. We’ll be fine, out here, outside the bunker. Don’t you worry about us.

  Lulu’s Christmas Dream [17 December 2007]

  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Well, on TV it is anyway. At this time of year, every ad break turns into an extended brainwashing exercise as one campaign after another hammers its way into your head by dint of sheer repetition alone.

  ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’ is, of course, the theme song of this year’s offering from Argos, which affects solidarity with the average hard-shopping prole by depicting the high street as a hellish dog-eat-dog war zone straight out of Saving Private Ryan, the only thing missing being the occasional eye-popping shot of a young soldier getting his leg blown off – which, to be fair, wouldn’t really be in keeping with the Yuletide spirit.

  Stephen Fry’s voiceover complains that Christmas should be ‘more … well, Christmassy’, at which point it cuts to a shot of an Argos delivery van pulling up outside a suburban home, as though that’s the very essence of all things ‘Christmassy’, which it isn’t. The birth of Christ, a crowded train, a party-hatted boss drunkenly molesting a co-worker – that’s Christmassy, you idiots.

  Apart from Boots, whose ‘Here Come the Girls’ celebration-of-vapidity is at least entertaining, all the high street stores seem to have got it a bit wrong this year. Iceland’s ads are the most lurid, as they continue to hawk an increasingly terrifying range of oven-readyvol-au-vents (Loaded Prawns, Filo Parcels, Squirrel-and-Onion Swastikas and so on) using the dream-team combo of Kerry Katona and a Nolan sister. These ads precisely evoke the queasy sensation of drifting off in front of a bloated 90-minute festive edition of Birds of a Feather following an over-rich pudding and three Baileys too many. And maybe that’s the point.

  Celebrities feature heavily in supermarket ads. Asda continues its intensely patronising ‘stars in the aisles’ campaign, in which well-loved faces slum it among the downtrodden workforce. Sainsbury’s dumps Jamie Oliver into a sort of Dickensian pop-up book filled with miniature slaves. Morrisons has really dropped the ball, with an excruciating advert called ‘Lulu’s Christmas Dream’, in which Lulu wanders through a cosy, snow-caked market town peopled exclusively by a baffling combination of minor celebrities. There’s Gabby Logan carving her turkey, Nick Hancock having a snowball fight, Denise van Outen giggling on a balcony, Diarmuid Gavin winking at Lulu as though recalling a particularly grubby one-night stand, and Alan Hansen filling his trolley with 500 tins of Miniature Heroes, all of it backed by Take That’s ‘Shine’. It’s like a low-rent Ocean’s Thirteen. If it had used Alan Partridge instead of Lulu, and (‘I Believe in Miracles’) ‘You Sexy Thing’ by Hot Chocolate instead of Take That, it could have been the best Christmas commercial ever. As it is, it’s just embarrassing.

  Speaking of embarrassments, the Spice Girls have managed to imbue their long-awaited comeback with all the glamour and class of a hurried crap in a service station toilet by whoring themselves out to Tesco. The first instalment, in which the Girl Power quartet try to hide from each other while shopping for presents, represents a important landmark for the performing arts: Posh Spice becomes the first human being in history to be out-acted by a shopping trolley.

  Marks & Sparks win a nerd rosette from me for managing to authentically replicate the style and tone of late-50s/early-60s movie trailers, although the undertone of its commercial is a tad suspect: it took me three or four viewings to realise it, but Twiggy and co are desperately showing off in a bid to impress Antonio Banderas, who looks a bit like a CEO in a brothel trying to decide which prostitute he fancies using. I keep expecting him to point out two of them at the end, and for the advert to cut suddenly to a grotesque scene where both of them pleasure him at once in a velvet boudoir, filmed in the same style as the slow-mo food porn it uses for its other commercials. All of which isn’t very Christmassy either. But maybe that’s just me.

  Said ad is accompanied by yet another vintage song: ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’. Presumably the ad agencies hold some sort of summit each year in the run-up to Christmas, where they negotiate who has the right to use each track, just so there’s no duplication. ‘You can have Winter Wonderland provided we get to keep Wizzard.’ That kind of thing. Old-fashioned crooning is in vogue this year. I’m expecting the Bing Crosby/David Bowie take on ‘Little Drummer Boy’ to make an appearance next time round – in a Currys ad, accompanying a shot of a wireless i
nkjet printer or something. You know. In keeping with the original sentiment of the song.

  A Right New York State [7 January 2008]

  As I type these words, I’m sitting in New York, failing to enjoy myself. Not because I’m a miserable curmudgeon (I’m not – I’m a sparkling sunbeam) but because I neglected to tell the Halifax that I was going abroad, and it has punished me by putting a security block on my card. It’s like a parent-child relationship. I went out to play without asking permission and subsequently I’ve been grounded. Sorry mummy. Sorry daddy.

  I was trying to buy a coat and some earmuffs – it’s minus 10 million degrees out here and like an idiot I arrived woefully unprepared – when the block kicked in. It’s pretty embarrassing when a shop assistant hands your card back, smiles weakly and says it’s been rejected. If you’re like me, you ask them to try again, and they reluctantly do so while a queue builds up behind you. And if you’re really like me, the card’s rejected again, this time in front of an impatient crowd, so to save face you apologetically huff something about ‘calling your bank to bollock them’ and demonstratively whip out your mobile, only to discover you can’t get a signal until you walk all the way out of the shop, which makes you look precisely like you’re trying to sneak away.

  Standing on the pavement, with the phone almost fused to my ear with the cold, I’m told I won’t be able to withdraw any money until tomorrow, because it’s night-time in England and the Halifax security team have all gone home. Still, it’s thoughtful of them to employ someone to sit at the end of the phone 24 hours a day just to empathise.

  Since I have only $22 on me, my options for New York fun are suddenly extremely limited: specifically, they’re limited to returning to the hotel to sit indoors ordering room service. I’m under house arrest.