The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Regular viewers, meanwhile, will be pleased to know that as season four opens, it’s business as usual, i.e. moody and complicated. All your favourite characters are present and correct. The deeply conflicted Colonel Tigh stands on the deck hammily swivelling his one good eye around like a tortoise impersonating a pirate, while pineapple-faced Admiral Adama stands alongside emanating one gruff, depressive sigh after another. And my favourite character – sweaty, panicking, Withnail-look-and-sound-alike Dr Gaius Baltar – is still getting space-pussy thrown at him by the bucketload for no apparent reason: now a reluctant guru, he’s been whisked off and hidden away in a sort of Temple of Quim, full of lithe young women worshipping his every pube.

  Overall, it seems just as preposterous, glum and strangely compelling as ever, so hooray. This being the last season, they’re presumably going to reach Earth in the final episode and live unhappily ever after, squinting suspiciously at each other until the end of time.

  Possessed by the spirit of nothing at all [19 April 2008]

  No, I don’t get it either. Why fire Simon? Why? Why? Why, Sir Alan, why? You could carve the reasons directly on to my mind’s eye and I still wouldn’t understand. Why? Why? Why?

  By some measure the most likable, competent candidate in The Apprentice, Simon was inexplicably hoofed out this week, in perhaps the most dispiriting miscarriage of justice since the trial of the Birmingham Six. I’m writing this on Tuesday, the morning before the broadcast, and can only imagine the nationwide outpouring of indignant fury that accompanied his sacking. The rest of Europe probably stopped what it was doing and looked round to see where all the yelling was coming from. Bet you could hear the shouts on the moon.

  It was the final proof that the show is a SHOW first and foremost, not a test of business acumen. Even so, it may prove too audacious a narrative twist for the audience to bear. Killing the hero in week three? Jesus.

  The Apprentice traditionally engages in a little sleight of hand during its opening weeks, hiding the eventual winner somewhere at the back, letting them slip past unnoticed until somewhere around the final three episodes where they suddenly transform into a serious contender. That’s what’s happened with the previous three winners, all of whom were ‘the quiet one’ in their respective packs. Since the victors are essentially boring, the show instead concentrates on villains and clowns – yer Katie Hopkinses and Syed Ahmeds.

  But this year, there seems to be a surfeit of shitbags – not one central baddie, but three: Jenny, Claire and Alex. All three employ the same basic tactic: blame and belittle your opponent at every turn.

  Jenny was the first to emerge from the undergrowth, pummelling the hapless Lucinda into a blubbering heap with her monotone cosh of a voice. There’s a terrifying lack of emotion to Jenny at the best of times, but it really comes to the fore when she’s dishing out a bollocking. She becomes possessed by the spirit of nothing at all. The light in her eyes goes out. Her elocution flat-lines. It’s like being nagged by a Sat Nav. If you ever wondered what it’ll be like when the machines rise up and take over, look no further. Forget images of robot warriors thrashing us with electric whips; it’ll be an army of Jennys slowly talking us to death.

  Claire, for her part, is essentially Ruth Badger gone wrong. Apparently convinced she’s a bastion of straight-talking common sense, she instead comes across as a huffing, eye-rolling bully. It’s easy to picture her standing up to give her two cents’ worth in the audience of The Jeremy Kyle Show, which is surely reason enough not to employ her.

  And rounding out the bastard pack, my least favourite of all: Alex, who I’ve disliked intensely since week one. If the final edits are anything to go by, Alex is an objectionable, buck-passing, jumped-up, passive-aggressive, know-it-all streak of piss with a short fuse, a sour mouth, and a petty, needling, finger-pointing demeanour. Unless you’re a woman, of course, in which case he’s a blameless dreamboat. Every girl I know swoons like all the oxygen’s vanished the moment he dribbles onscreen, which only serves to make him even more irritating. I want to run in front of them clapping my hands and clicking my fingers, like a man trying to prevent the invasion of the bodysnatchers. Can’t you see, girls? Can’t you see? He’s tricking you with his beauty! Wake up! See through the matrix! He’s a bastard! Stop batting your eyelashes like that! That’s how he feeds! Stop feeding him! Stop it!

  Anyway, the sheer amount of bad feeling from these three threatens to unbalance the show as a whole. Who are we supposed to like, exactly? My current favourites are posho Raef and weepo Lucinda; the former because he’s an affable arse, and the latter because the girls keep kicking her around like a rag doll and I’m a sucker for underdogs.

  They’ll do. But Simon was my first choice. Why? Why Sir Alan? Why?

  Smashed in the face with a mobile disco [26 April 2008]

  I haven’t been stabbed in the eyes recently, but I’ve got a fair idea how it might feel thanks to some of the weekend’s early evening entertainment. There’s been a spate of programmes of late which seek to disguise their inherent ordinariness by distracting you with set designs apparently based on the climactic scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Neon strips, sweeping floodlights, brightly coloured bulbs – it’s like being smashed in the face with a mobile disco.

  Take The Kids Are All Right, a gameshow which has absolutely nothing in common with Sky’s Are You Smarter than a 10-Year-Old? aside from a near-identical premise. At heart it’s a cutesy-poo bit of fluff, in which fully grown adults pit their wits against a team of cleverclogs kiddywinks. Twenty years ago it would’ve been a daytime show hosted by Michael Aspel, with a beige set and a title sequence backed by simpering acoustic guitar music. This being the cold, hard 21st century however, it looks and feels like a nighttime SWAT raid on a robot factory.

  The host is Torchwood and I’d Do Anything star John Barrowman, a man so insanely ubiquitous he’s rapidly becoming the TV equivalent of desktop wallpaper. To ensure you notice him, Barrowman spends most of The Kids Are All Right bellowing at the top of his voice. And he’s the quietest thing on the show. Thumping great sound effects punctuate every onscreen decision. The camera swings in and out. Gaudy graphics whizz past at dizzying speed. You can only broadcast this sort of thing on a Saturday evening. Put it out in the morning and you’d kill people.

  There’s even a round where John Barrowman shouts, ‘It’s time for INFORMAAAATION OVERLOOOOAAAAAADDDD!!!!!’ and we’re treated to a nonsensical three-minute montage of archive footage, unrelated bursts of dialogue, flashing words, and cut-out photographs of ice-cream cones spinning around the screen. Ostensibly it’s part of a memory test, but that’s clearly a cover story. I’ve seen The Ipcress File. I know a psychedelic brainwashing technique when I see one.

  Apart from the visuals, the funniest thing about Kids … is that the format requires Barrowman to make repeated reference to adults beating children. At one point he said something like, ‘OK, remember: beat all six kids and you win pounds 20,000.’ Blind viewers who aren’t paying attention must think civilised society has collapsed completely.

  Speaking of beatings, the following night ITV treats us to the clunkily titled Beat the Star, which dares to couple an even noisier set with an even more mundane set of activities. The premise: each week a member of the public has to conquer a famous sports-person in a series of games. Woo hoo. Last week, it was a policeman versus Amir Khan. Round one: who can hammer nails into a plank the quickest? Remember: if they bend, it doesn’t count! This proved so exhilarating, the audience screamed and shouted throughout, just like the terrified passengers from Snakes on a Plane. Later on, Khan and the copper went head-to-head in a cow-milking contest. There was also a round where they had to look at a scrambled photo and guess which famous person it represented. Photo number two was Alistair Darling. This was exciting. And in between each round, the set exploded in a cornea-skewering frenzy of searchlights, neon, and Vernon Kay’s nuclear-white teeth.

  Beat the Star is about 75 minu
tes long, incidentally.

  Just to reiterate: 75 minutes.

  Are you clear about that? Good. Tomorrow night it’s a fireman versus Darren Gough. With any luck there’ll be a round where they have to see who can hang a dessert spoon off the end of their nose the longest. Or just a quick game of pass the parcel. Either way, it’s sure to be an unforgettable thrill ride, or at least resemble one thanks to the near-death-experience whirlwind of flashing lights that’s bound to accompany it. Buy a glow stick, neck a few pills, and you can join in at home – provided you’re not brainwashed into vegetative oblivion first.

  Bring back twerping [3 May 2008]

  Is it just me, or should the current series of The Apprentice come packaged with its own laughter track? Last week’s edition in which we bade farewell to Kevin, the bizarrely self-assured Frank Spencer/Daffyd hybrid, was the funniest, most sustained work of comedy I’ve seen in months. I’m still not quite convinced it was real. The whole thing felt like pure mockumentary.

  Poor Kevin. Poor boy-faced Kevin and his daft bloody gob. I watched the episode with a friend of mine and each time he appeared onscreen she guffawed and said ‘he really is a twerp’. And sadly she was right. A twerp. Judging by the heavily edited, skilfully packaged evidence, there’s no better word to describe him. And it’s a term of abuse that deserves a revival. It’s fun to say. Try it. Twerp. Twerp twerp twerp. Bring back twerping, say I.

  Anyway. Charged with the task of inventing a new ‘special occasion’ designed to shift their own range of greetings cards, Kevin’s team plumped for National Send A Sanctimonious, Hectoring And Ultimately Wasteful Card To Show How Concerned You’re Pretending To Be About The Environment Day – a notion as dumb as it was oxymoronic, as it was dumb again as it was rubbish. Why not launch a range of diet books encased in a three-inch chocolate shell, you dum-dums? Every single member of his team deserves firing for not pointing out the obvious contradiction at its heart (with the exception of Sara, who was picked on throughout the task, partly for being much smarter than the others but mainly because the regular whipping boy, Lucinda, happened to be on the other team this week).

  The environmental greetings card ‘concept’ sprang from the addled mind of the increasingly nightmarish Jenny, a woman so pig-headed she’s probably got a curly tail at the back of her skull. Jenny has managed to achieve the impossible by making Katie Hopkins (last year’s villain) seem warm-hearted and gregarious, albeit only in retrospect. You could imagine having a drunken laugh on a boating holiday with Katie Hopkins, chuckling as you negotiate a lock in the dark. Whereas, after 28 minutes on a barge with Jenny, you’d leap ashore and dash your own brains out against the nearest tree, just to be rid of that droning self-assured station announcer’s voice, offering nothing but relentless criticism disguised as mission statements. There just doesn’t seem to be any humanity there, goddammit. Did you see her attempt at a welcoming smile? It was like watching a horse climb a ladder. It wasn’t natural. It didn’t go.

  My pet hate, the dreamboat tosspot Alex, was disappointingly quiet for the duration of the episode. His input largely consisted of repeatedly practising his nervous lip-pursing tic, which he’s developing into quite a piece of performance art. Whenever he spots something bad looming, he anxiously sucks and clenches his lips until his mouth starts to resemble a cat’s arse.

  Before long, project leader Kevin was in the boardroom, swallowing and gulping like Churchill the nodding dog trying to bluff his way through a police interview as Sir Alan dished out the kind of obligatory monstering he can probably now do in his sleep, while Nick Hewer sat beside him, peering so hard you could almost hear his scalp straining under the pressure. Sir Alan, incidentally, is looking pretty dapper this year. I’m not making it up: go and find a repeat of one of the earlier series and see the change for yourself. He used to look like a water buffalo straining to shit in a lake. Now he’s Russell Crowe. He’s clearly lost weight and may well be working out (perhaps by lugging box after box of unsold Em@iler phones into an almighty skip). Perhaps he’s been on Ten Years Younger. However he’s done it, for the first time in Apprentice history, he’s now better-looking than most of the contestants.

  OK, perhaps ‘better-looking’ is a stretch. ‘Less weird-looking’ is closer. But admit it. You fancy him. You fancy Sir Alan Sugar. Just a bit. Don’t deny it. Yeah you do.

  Now I’m livin’ in Exeter [10 May 2008]

  Sometimes I think the whole of humankind can be separated into two types: those who pay attention to song lyrics, and those who don’t. And those who don’t should be rounded up and throttled to death. By robots. With merciless strangling hands.

  I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. I love lyrics. If you don’t listen to the words, you’re no friend of mine. The words are where 50 per cent of a song’s meaning resides, and it’s shocking how many people just don’t seem to hear them, even when they’re startlingly clear. I once had to explain to someone what ‘Common People’ by Pulp was about, even though they’d listened to it a billion times. How wilfully dumb can you get?

  Perhaps I find it frustrating because I’ve been cursed with an almost autistic ability to memorise song lyrics after one or two listens. But rather than recall them accurately, I tinker about and replace them with new words for my own amusement; and it’s these re-written versions which ultimately remain lodged in my mind.

  I can’t hear ‘Thinking of You’ by Sister Sledge, for instance, without assuming the chorus goes: ‘I’m thinking of you/ And the things you do to me/ That make me love you/ Now I’m livin’ in Exeter’.

  My current favourite internalised mental replacement lyric is a disarmingly basic one in which I simply substitute the name Eleanor Rigby with ‘Robert Mugabe’, because it scans. Every time I watch the news and something about Zimbabwe comes on, I hear Paul McCartney lament that Robert Mugabe died in the church and was buried along with his name. Nobody came. This is why I’d be hopeless on Don’t Forget The Lyrics!, a new Shane Richie gameshow whose primary game mechanic is explained in its title.

  And it’s quite bossy, that title. It sounds like the sort of thing an insane Nazi commandant forcing a yard full of PoWs to perform a musical at gunpoint might bark at the top of his voice just before shooting someone for fumbling the chorus of ‘Frosty the Snowman’. They should’ve called it ‘Nicht Forgetten Das Lyrics!’, or ‘Schtumbleword Verboten!’.

  Or ‘Don’t Forget the Lyrics, Mofo!’, which isn’t very German, but accurately conveys the urgency of the situation.

  Anyway, the show is just like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire only with karaoke instead of questions. Each week, an annoying member of the public comes on and jumps up and down and says how excited they are until you want to punch them all the way to Barbados and back.

  Then Shane asks them to pick a category of song: pop, say, or glam rock, or TV theme tunes; we’re talking crowd-pleasers, OK, so there’s no Joy Division or anything. Then the in-house band starts playing, the lyrics come up on a big screen, and the contestant wails the song as cacophonously as possible while maintaining the beatific grin of the thuddingly stupid.

  And then! Suddenly! The on-screen lyrics are whisked away! And the singer has to finish the next line FROM MEMORY! If they get every single word right, the pot increases and they proceed to the next round, eventually hitting a jackpot of £250,000.

  If a contstant gets it wrong, Shane leads them to a desolate, snowblown corner of the stage, commands them to get down on their knees and unloads a single bullet into the back of their head. The body is left in plain sight for the remainder of the programme as a warning to others of its kind: DON’T FORGET THE LYRICS!

  Yet another superb episode of The Apprentice last Wednesday, although for some reason no matter how many people Sir Alan ejects, it feels as though their overall number fails to dwindle. Two got the chop last week, and there’s still eight of the bastards in there. Still, at least this means you can pick more than one favourite: for me, it’s got to be Rae
f, Sara or Lucinda.

  Them to win. Go them. Go them.

  Return of the Gladiators [17 May 2008]

  An end to war? Environmentally friendly alternatives to oil? The second coming? No. What the world has been crying out for, apparently, is the return of Gladiators, which vanished from our screens eight years ago.

  I don’t recall much protest at the time. No one established an emergency helpline or threw themselves under the controller of ITV’s car. Not a single leading newspaper ran a wounded editorial lamenting its demise and pleading with God for a revival. There were no dazed crowds of jonesing Gladiators fans wandering the street in a sorrowful funk, dumbly bumping into shop windows without even noticing, quivering in a puddle of tears in the cold and distant grief dimension. Its passing went largely unnoticed. A gentle nationwide shrug rolled across the country like an underfed Mexican wave. Gladiators had passed away, and we, as a nation, moved on.

  But, like the song says, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. A year after Gladiators disappeared, 9/11 shook Planet Earth’s axis to its core, creating a new landmark paradigm in watershed epochs. The world was left stunned, reeling. ‘Where are our Gladiators now?’ it wailed with its mouth, ‘Because we need something to take our minds off this shit.’ And in the years following, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, widespread economic meltdown, and the growing awareness of impending environmental disaster, the clamour for the return of the soothing balm of Gladiators grew ever more cacophonous.

  Now the dark ages are at an end: Gladiators is back, and it’s better than ever. And by ‘better’, I mean ‘the same’: an hour of people in leotards running, tumbling, wrestling, jumping, and hitting each other over the head with padded sticks, inside a cavernous crashmat-and-searchlight repository.

  Gladiators has never felt very British. The audience shriek and hoot throughout, and they’re all waving outsized foam hands with pointy fingers, which must make it nigh-on impossible to see. Perhaps they’re not baying for blood at all, but just shouting at the person in front to get that stupid foam hand out of the way.