The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Ireland’s industry [8 March 2008]

  Of all the music in all the world, easy-listening pop is the very best kind there is. That’s why minicab drivers listen to nothing else. I’ve debated this with imbeciles who think the drivers are only listening to Heart or Magic or Smooth or whatever FM in the first place because they think that’s what their customers want to hear. Rubbish. It’s what the cabbies want. They’ve had hours on the road. They’ve tried all the other stations. This is the music that makes them happiest. Every single minicab driver in existence, regardless of age, background and position on the sex offenders’ register, winds up tuned to easy listening. All roads lead to Rome. Like I said, it’s the best music there is.

  Now, a lot of this music is sneered at by rock aficionados, who’d rather we brushed our teeth to the uncompromising sound of British Sea Power and emptied our bums while listening to Devo on our iPod shuffles. We secretly want to hear Dolly Parton and Lionel Richie. But we can’t. They’re guilty pleasures.

  That’s the idea behind sing-along special Guilty Pleasures. It’s a real curio. On the one hand, it features plenty of acts you don’t often see on ITV1, like the Magic Numbers. On the other, it feels precisely like any number of bog-standard karaoke talent contests of the sort we’ve been bombarded with for the past five years. Except it isn’t a talent contest: they’re just doing it for fun (and exposure of course, but fun definitely comes into it).

  Of course, this being mainstream ITV, they’ve also felt the need to rub an extra bit of shit all over it by interrupting proceedings with talking-head contributions in which a galaxy of ITV stars, such as GMTV presenter Andrew Castle, babble about how we all had big hair and shoulderpads back in the 80s ha ha ha ha ha ha yes we did didn’t we ha ha HA HA HA. Guilty Pleasures deviser Sean Rowley also pops up in these segments, disguised as an Edwardian postman for some mad reason.

  Just to underline its mainstream credentials, it’s presented by Fearne Cotton – a genetic splicing of the twins from last year’s Big Brother and Beaker from the Muppet Show. I always feel vaguely sorry for her without ever knowing why.

  Still, if you can mentally edit those sections out as you go, the show itself represents a chance for several non-ITV acts to showcase themselves on ITV, and that’s surely a Good Thing For ITV To Be Doing … like Top of the Pops with an old setlist. Except the moment it starts, confusion enters the building. The Feeling kick things off with a decent cover of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, a song approximately 200 times better than anything The Feeling have written themselves, and whose pleasure doesn’t strike me as particularly guilty.

  It soon transpires that for the purposes of this programme, ‘guilty pleasure’ sometimes simply means ‘old song’. For instance, two-thirds of Supergrass close the show by covering Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ – again, there’s nothing ‘guilty’ about that particular track, unless you’re spectacularly uptight.

  Worse, the acts themselves have roughly a 75% failure rate. KT Tunstall farts out an awful version of ‘The Voice’ by John Farnham. Craig David (looking a tad burly) has a feeble, watery take on Terence Trent D’Arby’s ‘If You Let Me Stay’. The aforementioned Magic Numbers utterly slaughter Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ ‘Islands in the Stream’ (a song I used to think was about ‘Ireland’s Industry’, incidentally). And Amy Macdonald sings ‘Sweet Caroline’ in a weird, low register that doesn’t suit her, the song, or anybody’s ears or mind.

  Sophie Ellis-Bextor pulls off a reasonable ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, and that Supergrass closer isn’t bad, but overall, you’re left wishing that instead of watching these guilty pleasures performed live on the telly, you were enjoying them in their natural habitat: sitting in the back seat of a minicab at 3 a. m., listening to ‘Say You, Say Me’ by Lionel Richie dribbling through the stereo, as the driver skims you home.

  The war that isn’t there [15 March 2008]

  Is it just me or is everything a sham? The real world doesn’t feel real any more, as though we’re separated from it by a thick layer of Perspex: we can see it, but can’t sense it. Perhaps it isn’t there.

  Take the war. Not the Afghan war, not the ‘war on terror’, but the other one: Iraq. I call it a war, but really it’s a TV show – a long-running and depressing one that squats somewhere in the background, humming away to itself; a dark smear in the Technicolor entertainment mural. We know it’s happening – we catch glimpses of it happening – but we don’t feel it any more. It’s like a soap we don’t watch, but keep vaguely up to speed with by osmosis.

  Even as it unfolds, we have to strain to remember it’s there. News stories about suicide bombers bringing death to Baghdad markets are as familiar as adverts for dog food. Our bored brains filter them out. Novelty and sensation – that’s what our minds crave. Iraq just offers more of the same: death after death after death after death, until each death becomes nothing more than a dull pulse on a soundtrack; the throb of a neighbour’s washing machine we learned to filter out months ago; the invisible ticking of a household clock. We’ll notice if it stops, but not before. The average response to the rash of programmes marking five years since the start of the war is likely to be: ‘Hey, is that still happening? Bummer.’

  ITV1 are doing their bit with Rageh Omaar: Iraq by Numbers, which, should you even detect its existence, is a violently dispiriting ground-level look at the life of the average Iraqi civilian. Rageh Omaar, of course, is the ‘Scud Stud’ who became a minor celebrity back during the war’s earlier, more exciting episodes. Because he’s a celebrity, his name comes before that of the war in the programme’s title: someone’s decided you’re more likely to tune in if you see the words ‘Rageh Omaar’ in the EPG. Certainly worked on me.

  In some ways, this feels like a comeback special: he left the BBC in 2006 to join Al-Jazeera’s English-language service, and the majority of viewers won’t have seen him since. So when he walks onscreen it’s all, Ooh, it’s him – the bloke from that thing. Used to stand on the balcony with all the bombs going off behind him and all sorts. Shock and awe or whatever it was. I used to like him. Think I’ll watch this.

  Which isn’t Omaar’s fault, of course. If he’s ‘using’ what celeb status he has, then he’s doing so simply to encourage us to pay fresh attention to an ongoing tragedy that’s grown too stale and too sad for us to even notice. To ease the viewer in gently, he pitches the show to us as a personal journey, not a stone-faced journalistic investigation. He meets one of the civilians who tore down Saddam’s statue. He revisits a hotel where one of his cameramen was killed. He tours the Green Zone with some US troops. And he goes in search of his old friends.

  Trouble is, seeking out old friends requires him to travel abroad, because so many of them have fled the country in fear of their lives. In Syria, he’s reunited with one (his former driver), who was kidnapped and threatened. As his friend recounts his story, Omaar weeps on camera. Normally such a reaction would seem cynical and contrived: here, it feels justified and honest.

  Interspersing each encounter are the numbers of the title: bald statistics served up as chilling graphics. Particularly striking is the figure regarding the total number of Iraqi dead – striking because it’s so huge, and so vague. It lies somewhere between 150,000 and 1 million.

  Between 150,000 and a million. That leaves 850,000 people who may be dead or alive. We simply don’t know. They currently exist, or do not exist, within a cavernous margin of error. Our minds can’t process this degree of horror. No wonder we change the channel. No wonder nothing feels real.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In which celebrities perish, Valentine’s Day fails to raise hopes, and smokers are threatened with paperwork

  The so-called ‘Stock Market’ [28 January 2008]

  Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: an out-of-control French Cityboy has accidentally lost the Société Générale bank the grand sum of £3.7bn – a large amount by anyone’s standards. And how did he do it? By betting the wrong way
, then trying to dig himself out of the hole by continuing to bet the wrong way, covering up the mess he made along the way using some cunning ninja-style inside knowledge of how the system’s ‘warning lights’ worked, which meant he was pissing money away undetected until the losses grew so huge they were visible from space.

  Some analysts say the actions of this one poor panicking sod may have helped cause the stock market hoo-hah that kicked off last week: nice to know that even in today’s world of faceless global corporations, the little guy can still make a difference.

  If it’s hard to imagine what £3.7bn looks like, it’s even harder to picture an absence of £3.7bn. Presumably it resembles a dark, swirling vortex, like a portal to another dimension in a supernatural thriller. All the money got sucked into it, and emerged … um … where? Where’s it gone? Is it lodged away somewhere to the side of the stock market, slightly to the left of the screen, where computers can’t get to it?

  As you may have gathered, I don’t understand the stock market, because it’s so boring my brain refuses to get to grips with it. Say the word ‘economics’ and I reach for my pillow. But even I know enough to realise it’s largely an imaginary construct: abstract numbers given shape by wishful thinking. If the traders suddenly stop believing it’s healthy, millions of people lose their jobs. Maybe one day they’ll stop believing in it altogether; they’ll collectively blink and rub their eyes, and the entire global economy will vanish, like a monster under the bed that turns out never to have existed in the first place, or an optical illusion you’ve suddenly seen through. And on News at Ten that night they’ll say, ‘Business news now … and, er, there is no business news. It’s gone.’ At which point we’d better come up with some kind of replacement barter system, pronto. Let’s hope it’s not based on sexual favours, or a simple trip to the supermarket’s going to be downright harrowing.

  In order to maintain their mad conviction that the economy is real, City traders adopt all manner of belief-bolstering strategies, such as awarding themselves vast bonuses when they ‘do well’ in the ‘stock market’. This reinforces the notion that it’s possible to play the market with a modicum of skill, which it isn’t, because (a) it isn’t there in the first place and (b) it’s random. They’re like pub gamblers convincing themselves they’ve developed a ‘system’ for beating the fruit machine, except they get paid in Ferraris rather than tokens.

  In his excellent book Irrationality, the late Stuart Sutherland cited several surveys in which the advice of financial experts has consistently been proven to be markedly less reliable than random guesswork. Professor of psychology Richard Wiseman went one further in his book Quirkology, conducting an experiment in which a professional investment analyst, a financial astrologist and a four-year-old girl all chose stocks to invest in. The four-year-old couldn’t even read, so her choices were made by writing the names of 100 stocks on pieces of paper, throwing them in the air and grabbing a few off the floor. No prizes for guessing who consistently came out on top, by an impressive margin, even when the value of the stocks was tracked for a full year.

  In other words, the French rogue trader is only really guilty of dreaming that little bit harder than everyone else. Rather than punish him, perhaps they should simply wish him out of existence.

  After all, it’s been done before: a Chinese metals trader called Liu Qibing racked up immense losses in 2005 by betting the wrong way on the price of copper at the London Metal Exchange. In the immediate aftermath, despite fellow traders claiming to know him as China’s main copper trader, the Chinese State Reserve Bureau simply denied he’d ever existed in the first place.

  A vintage year for celebrity deaths [4 February 2008]

  This is already shaping up to be a vintage year for celebrity deaths. First Heath Ledger, then Jeremy Beadle. In both cases I first heard of the sad demise through the miracle of text messaging. Friends clearly felt compelled to be the first to break the bad news: in Ledger’s case this was probably because his death came as a shock (an especially tragic one, given his age), and in Beadle’s … well, my theory is that everyone in the country secretly loved Jeremy Beadle, but kept it quiet because the general consensus seemed to be that he was ‘hated’. And when he died, we all felt slightly guilty that we hadn’t piped up sooner. There was a palpable sense of ‘aww’, because whatever your views on his TV shows, there was little doubt we’d lost a real character – and that somehow we’d failed him.

  Anyway, having my mobile beep twice in a fortnight, like a coroner’s pager, made me feel as though I’d unwittingly subscribed to some kind of instant deathwatch service. Which isn’t a bad idea, actually. Let’s brainstorm!

  OK. It’s called ‘eVulture’. You sign up for free on a website, and choose the category of celebrity you’re interested in. This being an age of dazzling consumer choice in which the customer is routinely indulged like a spoilt medieval prince, the whole thing is super-configurable. You can decide to ignore everyone but the biggest Hollywood star, for instance, or specialise in minor characters from half-remembered TV shows, the sort of person whose passing probably wouldn’t be mentioned in a mainstream news bulletin. So if you want to be contacted the moment one of Blake’s 7 shuffles off this mortal coil, or the Milk Tray man winds up in a box of his own, this is the service for you.

  Meanwhile, back at eVulture HQ, a team of dedicated researchers monitors the news feeds, scans the death notices in local papers and, if necessary, phones around to ask if anyone’s seen that bloke who was in that thing lately. GPs are bribed to report any celebrity who dies on their watch (at the end of the year, they receive a hamper full of cakes and wine – the quality and quantity depending on the number of tips they passed on).

  As soon as a death is confirmed, the relevant subscribers receive a text alert, which arrives with a discreet little advert attached (that’s how the money rolls in). Anyone receiving a deathtext is likely to feel slightly depressed for a few minutes: an ideal condition for advertisers, because you’re talking about people with their guard down here. Research suggests that messages for comfort products such as chocolate or alcohol should perform particularly well under these circumstances. There’s also scope for some revenue-generating user interaction, too, such as an option to send flowers, sign a virtual book of condolence, or order a rush-released DVD box set containing the deceased’s greatest performances.

  Future plans include a scheme in which celebrities are voluntarily fitted with microchips that monitor their current health status, and automatically transmit a personalised farewell message to fans the moment their heart stops beating. At present, we can only offer raw text messaging, but soon hope to provide a full range of MMS-epitaph features such as animated icons, background music, and CGI video clips of the star in question waving goodbye and ascending to heaven.

  That’s the business plan in a nutshell. I’ve copyrighted the idea, but if someone else wants to set it up, I’m more than happy to let them. You work out all the complicated stuff; I’ll take 25% of the profits. Actually, scratch that. Under that setup, I’d soon find myself looking forward to celebrity deaths – willing the cast of Hollyoaks to die so I could buy some new gold fittings for my yacht or something – which probably isn’t good for the soul. Plus it’d make good business sense to go around actively bumping people off. No. I can’t do it. Plough my share into wind farms or something. That should help eVulture subscribers assuage their guilt, while simultaneously providing a fitting tribute to the deceased. Perfect.

  Incidentally, in case you’re appalled by the idea (on the flimsy grounds that it’s monstrous), it’s worth noting that despite its name, eVulture only steps in once death has occurred. Not before. The tabloids already have the ghoulish-rubbernecker market sewn up, as evidenced by the hand-rubbing coverage of Britney Spears’ increasingly tragic predicament, or the extended hounding of Amy Winehouse, all of which strikes them as a tremendous paper-shifting wheeze.

  If Britney Spears appeared on a window ledge t
omorrow, a fight would break out below. Half of the assembled hacks and paps would scream at her to jump, and the rest would urge her to go back inside, but remain as tormented as possible. One or two might offer professional help, provided that it resulted in an exclusive.

  And in the resultant coverage, the mob itself wouldn’t even be mentioned, none of their shouts or cackles recorded, as though they had exerted no influence at all. At best, a few detached smartarses might mutter something boneheaded about publicity-courting celebs bringing it on themselves. And then the lot of them would vanish into smoke, only to reappear at the scene of the next ‘inexplicable meltdown’.

  Under the circumstances, eVulture looks positively acceptable.

  Unvalentine’s Day [11 February 2008]

  This week, millions of people across the country will celebrate the crippling delusion known as ‘love’ by sending flowers, booking restaurants and placing stomach-churning small ads in newspapers. Valentine’s Day – the only national occasion dedicated to mental illness – is a stressful ordeal at the best of times.

  If you’ve just started seeing someone, the day is fraught with peril. Say your current dalliance only began less than a month ago: is sending a card a bit full-on? What if you ignore it, only to discover they’ve bought you a 5kg Cupid-shaped diamond in a presentation box made of compressed rose petals?

  Few things are worse than receiving a heartfelt Valentine’s gift from someone you’re still not sure about. It’s a crystallising moment: chances are you’ll suddenly know, deep in your bones, that they’re not the one for you. And while your gut contemplates that sad reality, your brain repeatedly screams at your face not to give the game away, and you have to gaze at them with a fake smile and a fake dewy expression, until the pressure and shame involved in maintaining the facade makes you start to hate them for pointless reasons, like the stupid way they sit, or the stupid way they breathe, or the stupid way their pupils dilate when they look at you, planning your life together.