The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Anyhow, the point I’m failing to make is that there’s so much stuff out there, you can’t possibly remember it all at once. Which isn’t to say you delete it. Most of it you simply file away, somewhere at the back of your mind, by the bins. And there it stays for weeks, months, years, until something jolts you into retrieving it, at which point: bam! Instant recall.

  I fear I’m not making sense, so let me explain. While watching the new David Attenborough series, Life in Cold Blood, I suddenly realised I’d completely forgotten about tortoises. I can’t have thought about a tortoise in any shape or form for at least a year. They’ve been dead to me. Obviously, stuff like this happens all the time inside the human brain, usually zipping past unnoticed, but since I’m currently training myself to pay attention to every thought I experience, like a ninja, I caught myself being surprised by the realisation. I actually thought, ‘oh yeah, tortoises, I remember them.’

  But the beauty of a programme like Life in Cold Blood is that having reintroduced me to the concept of tortoises, it then astonishes me by depicting them doing something I’ve never seen them do before, namely fighting. Yes, tortoises fight. Did you know that? I bloody didn’t. They’ve even got little jousting staves built into their shells, all the better for flipping one another on to their backs with.

  Even the things you think you’ve seen before have a new and exciting twist. We see a python dislocating its own jaw in order to swallow a small deer. It starts with the head and slowly engulfs the whole body until it’s coating the thing like a living condom. Familiar territory? Maybe so. But then Attenborough points out that the deer’s head is so huge the snake can’t breathe, so it sicks up its own windpipe and pokes it out the side of its mouth, like a floppy pink snorkel, puckering for air. Truly revolting. And new. And clever: it’s the sort of thing Jack Bauer would do, if he had several million years to evolve his way out of a crisis.

  Attenborough is routinely praised to the point where future historians might mistake him for a minor god, and quite right too. Few TV shows in any genre make you feel anything whatsoever, apart from a vague awareness that you’re wasting your life, whereas his programmes, with their signature blend of understated commentary and magnificent footage, induce awe every five minutes. And not a sentimental, dewy-eyed kind of awe either, but a sobering one. In their own way, these are among the most nihilistic programmes on television. If your mind wanders at all during the tortoise fight, for example, it’s likely to contemplate war, or terrorism, specifically dwelling on the extent to which conflict is an inbuilt human trait, just as it’s an inbuilt trait in tortoises, which you’d previously thought of as a race of comically benign Cornish pasties, good for sleeping in boxes or appearing in the One Foot in the Grave title sequence, and not much else.

  This is likely to be Attenborough’s last major series: the final chapter in an extraordinary legacy. To change the way millions of people see the world is no mean feat, and he’s done it with quiet assurance, humour, and respect.

  TV can be many things. Nowt wrong with a bit of mindless entertainment now and then. But when someone with purpose seizes and commands it, it can also do this. Incredible.

  Tony, don’t be a hero [9 February 2008]

  It’s a basic psychological truth that the more someone appears not to want you, the more you’ll go out of your way to win their attention. That’s why nice girls fall for bastards, and nice boys end up following said nice girls around like lovelorn puppies, doomed to be a best friend, not a lover, until they cotton on and start acting like bastards themselves. It’s the way of the world. You want what you can’t have.

  Teenagers don’t seem to care about television, which is why television’s all in a froth about them. As the internet, videogames and mobiles chew their way through the ratings, tempting back the young has become an obsession, giving rise to all manner of dumb theories about what ‘they’ – them, that ‘youthy’ lot – actually want, as though they’re a different species.

  Most TV types with authority are over 30, which isn’t that old, but clearly old enough for them to forget that most people’s teenage years consist of agonised introspection and enthused curiosity, not jumping up and down and going ‘Wooo!’

  Consequently, ‘Wooo!’ is the first port of call: gaudy colour schemes, strobe-paced edits, thumping beats, pretty faces, celebrity guests and sneery, aspirational horseshit. And it works, up to a point. But only for a narrow slice of the youth demographic. Only for the idiotic ones, or the smart ones slumming it because hey, there’s nothing else on. TV’s great at harnessing idiots. It’s the rest of us it tends to ignore.

  When I saw the initial trails for the first series of Skins last year, I harrumphed like a 400-year-old man. It looked like Hollyoaks getting off with Trainspotting on the set of Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty video. The advert showed Tony, one of the main characters, romping in a shower with two girls at the same time, which looked about as far away from my teenage years as it was possible to get. And when episode one rolled by, my harrumphing appeared justified. The minute I saw Tony in action, I thought ‘oh, so he’s the hero, is he? Supposed to think he’s cool, am I? Well I don’t. I think he’s an arsehole. Ha! Take THAT, Skins.’

  But the series had wrong-footed me. It thought Tony was an arsehole too, and spent episode after episode showing his friends slowly coming to the same conclusion. He was shallow and cruel, and the final episode ended with him getting hit by a bus. If I was a teenager, that’s precisely what I’d want to see.

  In between now and then, Tony’s been in a coma, emerging just in time for the start of the second series. The cocksure grin has been replaced by a hundred-yard stare. His brain’s taken such a kick to the nuts, other people have to cut his food up for him. He can’t write his own name or unbutton his flies. And the memories of most of his sexual conquests have been wiped, unlike his backside, which he has to clean using an automated spout on a special toilet.

  In short, Tony’s eating humble pie by the fistload. So having spent series one setting him up as a hideous bell-end, the programme now invites you to pity him. It’s a great start. A confident one, too: in fact, the show oozes confidence from the off, opening with a wordless dance routine in a church, just to confuse you.

  And as it goes on, it becomes clear Skins isn’t a youth show at all, but a proper drama, far closer to Jimmy McGovern’s The Street than Hollyoaks.

  Instead of attempting to pander to an imaginary audience of whooping teenage cretins, it merely seeks to entertain regular people. Yes, regular people. Remember them? They used to watch television in their millions, back in the days before it got obsessed with targeting niche groups.

  In an age when the bulk of contemporary television is drearily defined by who it’s aimed at, anyone of any age could tune in to Skins and draw something from it. Which makes it weird. And somewhat wonderful.

  Imaginary young males [16 February 2008]

  Is there a single worse force in the universe than swaggering, cocksure, stupid young men? Because I’m struggling to think of one.

  You see them everywhere: lurching around in messy haircuts and idiot trousers, thinking about cars, or babes, or babes in cars, laughing too loudly and blaring things like ‘classic!’ or ‘quality!’ or ‘genius!’ or ‘mental!’ and every one of them, without exception, is a cee to the yoo to the enn to the tee of towering, awful proportions.

  And the thing is, the real ones aren’t even real, so to speak. The archetypal swaggering, cocksure young man is an insulting media construct, designed to star in beer commercials. Some 90% of their real-life equivalents are merely emulating these idealised buffoons in the tragic belief that this is what the world requires of them; that the first step on the path to acceptance consists of adopting a mockney accent and shouting ‘get in!’ when your team scores a goal. The remaining 10% are authentic wankers who’d do that anyway, of course – but there are probably some decent people lost among the ill-advised majority: trapped inside their shall
ow, posturing cocoons, yearning to break out but too scared to try. We should pity them. And when that fails, attack them with hammers.

  Nuts TV is a station aimed at imaginary young males. It’s not despicable or even particularly offensive to women (except, perhaps, the whiniest, most humourless ones). No. It’s just shit. Utterly, astronomically shit. It might even be made out of shit: the sets, the cameras, the lighting rigs – all actual, genuine chunks of crap, carved into shape by the unseen hand of some insanely misguided God. And powered by piss instead of electricity. This is in no way an exaggeration.

  It doesn’t have tits, incidentally. Lingerie and hot pants, but not really tits. Although it does have presenters. Chief amongst them are the two men from Big Cook, Little Cook, who present a regular live strand from the studio, ironically chatting about boozers and sex and ninjas and so on. Stringing your programmes together with live in-studio links instead of pre-recorded continuity is a good idea for a digital channel: it gives it a sense of identity. But it’s a drawback in this case. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone anywhere looking more pleased with themselves than the ginger one (formerly Little Cook) does here. He literally never stops smirking at his own casual brilliance. At one point I found myself smirking back – not because he’d said or done anything funny, but because of some cowardly inbuilt ape-like response. I actually felt pressure to join in, as though I was stuck in a train carriage with two overbearingly ironic lads and had decided to agree with everything they said or did, simply because the alternative – a crushing, awkward, echoing silence – would be too gruesome to bear.

  It has programmes. It has Fit and Fearless, a sort of Most Haunted knock-off in which three ‘babes’ strip to their underwear and run around spooky old buildings, squealing with fright. It largely consists of night-vision camera footage, and looks like a bit like a Carry On film shot from the point of view of the Predator. Presumably you’re meant to masturbate while watching, although actually doing so would make you a terrifying psychopath.

  Here’s what should be on Nuts TV: live footage of a swaggering, cocksure young man trapped within a revolving metal drum, the inner surface studded with nails. A different specimen each night. At the start of the evening, he falls in, screaming. He dies within five minutes, but the broadcast continues for another four hours, so we see nothing but his mute, punctured body tumbling around in the drum, accompanied by a soundtrack consisting of nothing but Oasis and Razorlight.

  Yeah. That might cure things. If you want a vision of the perfect future, picture a boot stamping on a gurgling blokey face – forever.

  A Toad of Toad Hall lookalike contest [23 February 2008]

  This week! Comin’ atcha with all the passion and glitz of an oversexed circus troupe freewheelin’ its way down Las Vegas Boulevard, it’s … The Conservative Party! Yeah! Portillo on Thatcher: The Lady’s Not for Spurning is a 90-minute journey into the crazy world of the Tory party, and mark my words, it’s the most arousing programme you’ll see this decade. If you’re the sort of person who screws frogs, that is.

  And assuming you are, then prepare to spoo yourself inside-out, because everyone in this show looks like a frog. Nigel Lawson’s in it. So’s Norman Lamont. And David Mellor. It’s like a Toad of Toad Hall lookalike contest. Or a Spitting Image reunion. But mainly the former.

  Just about the only interviewee who doesn’t look like a frog is David Cameron, and he looks like Brian the Snail. Cameron pops up from time to time to peep away in his peepy little voice, playing a tune on his Fauntleroy git-whistle: otherwise it’s old school Tory warthogs all the way, with Michael Portillo leading the charge as chief inquisitor. More on him later.

  The show itself is largely concerned with the legacy of Maggie Thatcher (who appears in archive footage, haunting proceedings throughout). The trouble with Maggie, reckon Portillo and co, is that she was so hugely successful at redefining the Tories, they lost all sense of purpose the moment she left. I say ‘left’. They hoofed her out, and the bitterness caused by her abrupt removal poisoned the party for years, causing them to pick one no-hoper leader after another: John Major (ineffective comedy nerd), William Hague (cheery dot-eyed cueball), Iain Duncan Smith (solemn dot-eyed cueball), Michael Howard (schoolmaster)…

  Ah, Michael Howard: now there’s a prick. Even here, interviewed by a former colleague, he can’t answer the simplest of questions without pausing for two minutes first, with an anxious grin fritzing round his chops like an android going wrong. Either he’s choosing his words carefully or there’s a live anchovy stuck up his arse that keeps tickling his G-spot. Unlikely. He’s choosing his words. Why? Because he’s the sort of politician who’s programmed to avoid straight answers by default. Each time his brain approaches a straight answer, it’s instantly repelled, as if by an opposing magnetic field.

  If Michael Howard was in a restaurant, and the waiter asked whether he wanted still or sparkling water, he’d sit there fritzing a grin for 10 minutes before replying ‘neither’. No wonder we didn’t vote for him.

  Portillo, meanwhile, is pretty likable, if only because he’s disarmingly frank about how vastly unpopular he became. When he lost his seat in the 1997 election, the entire nation cheered so hard the French got earache. Everyone hated him, myself included. In fact I even called him a cee-yoo-enn-tee to his face once, around 1999. I say ‘called’ – actually I shouted it. And it wasn’t ‘to his face’, more the side of his head. I was sitting in a cab, quite drunk, and he was on the pavement, so I pulled down the window and bellowed it at him while zooming past. He looked a bit upset and I felt immediate remorse.

  All things considered, he took his nationwide humiliation rather well; vowed to learn from it politically, and when that didn’t pan out, jumped ship and went into broadcasting, where he’s subsequently carved a niche as a pundit (This Week), occasional stunt journalist (getting CS-gassed for Horizon) and political historian.

  Fair enough – although this particular show is rather meandering, unfocused and not nearly revelatory enough to justify the running time. Oddly – and here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write – there’s not enough Margaret Thatcher. Still, if you want to gawp at a parade of wobbling old Tory faces and remember how much you despised them, here’s your chance. Throw spitballs. Knock yourself out.

  The wheel of hate [1 March 2008]

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  Hello? It’s me. Yes. I was going to talk about this week’s Cutting Edge. A journey into the dark heart of the call centre that somehow manages to sum up everything that’s wrong with our world. It starts by introducing us to three hideously ugly average schmoes, each of whom has been driven insane by call centres. They whinge to camera for a bit, then we see them in action: being held in a queue, arguing with the poor sod on the other end, sighing with despair, and so on. It’s a joyless existence, made all the more depressing because it’s so easy to relate to.

  One of them sorrowfully describes how he sometimes finds himself venting his anger by shouting at the hapless lackey at the other end, even though he knows it’s pointless, and that by doing so he’s simply contributing to what he calls ‘the cyclical wheel of hate’.

  Then the cameras venture inside a call centre – for Powergen – and we discover the staff are so used to being shouted at, they scarcely even notice any more. Half their job
seems to consist of simply letting the customer scream for a bit to blow off steam. You roar yourself purple; they sit and soak it up, like an anger sponge. The cyclical wheel of hate is revolving in a vacuum.

  Then we visit a different kind of call centre: a smiley one belonging to First Direct. The thinking here is that the happier the staff, the happier the customer. So the staff are forced to be happy.

  They hold sumo wrestling tournaments in paddling pools full of foam balls. They have to form teams with wacky names (like pub quiz teams) and attach kerrrazy photos of themselves to the ‘team wall’. The boss says things like ‘Hey, who wants to win a Creme Egg? First one to get the phrase “that’s tremendous” into their next call…’

  And they’re coached in ‘Above the Line Language’, so they only ever say things like ‘I’d love to’ or ‘I’d be happy to’ instead of ‘I must’.

  It’s the most terrifying, awful place I’ve ever seen, and it’s the size of the National Exhibition Centre, for Christ’s sake. It’s madness. Any sane person working there would pray daily for a massacre. As the gunmen burst in, firing indiscriminately, the first genuine smile in six months would spread wide across your face, and you’d leap, giggling, into the line of fire.

  And just when you think things can’t get any more tear-jerking, we’re introduced to Mandisa, a black single mum in South Africa, who hopes her new call centre job should make ends meet. Thing is, it’s for a UK firm, so first she has to attend an ‘Accent Reduction’ course, which knocks all the fun out of her voice, so she won’t frighten the horses.

  Then she’s given a crash course in British culture, which involves watching The Full Monty on DVD. Then she sits an exam. She passes! She’s excited! She goes to work, smiling broadly! And the British phone up. Yeah, us. And we sigh and we whine and we hang up and shout at her. Her smile shrivels into oblivion. The cyclical wheel of hate turns again. And somehow you know it won’t ever, ever stop.