The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  And the worst thing about it? Like I said, it’s a youth show. That really isn’t on. Listen here, BBC, if you MUST broadcast an almighty, air-kissing celebration of upper middle-class dilettantes, for God’s sake don’t do it in front of the children. Faced with this level of posing, pretension and self-congratulation – effortlessly funded by God knows who – 99 per cent of the (young, impressionable) audience are going to come away feeling inadequate or disadvantaged or angry or miserable. What was it Matthew said? ‘I feel so terribly sad after watching it.’

  Is that what you want, BBC? To make us feel terribly sad? Well, is it? And if so, why? Do you hate us? Is that it?

  Still, there is one up side. Sometimes I get depressed about the way the world’s heading. I’m scared by the prospect of widespread food or oil or water riots. Late at night I lie awake and I wonder: what if civilisation collapses completely? If the seas rise and the oil runs dry and we all end up fighting each other with spiked cudgels on a tiny circle of gore-sodden wasteland? I visualise it happening, and I despair.

  But now I have an escape hatch. I think about Class of 2008 and cheer up again. Because if we’re all going to suffer come the apocalypse, they will too. Only their faces’ll be an absolute picture.

  – After this article appeared, one of the Class of 2008 – the one going out with Daisy Lowe, I think — emailed me to say that while he could understand why him and his friends probably came across as over-privileged twats on TV, they (a) weren’t actually very rich and (b) were all nice people really. His email was reasonable and pleasant and modest, and rather left me feeling like I’d been a bit of a bastard I’m afraid.

  Minds wide shut [2 August 2008]

  Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind – and what thanks do you get? People call you ‘egghead’ or ‘boffin’ or ‘heretic’, and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness.

  Not literally – not in this day and age – but you get the idea. Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who’ve actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out. The wariness stems from three popular misconceptions:

  (1) Scientists want to fill our world with chemicals and killer robots; (2) They don’t appreciate the raw beauty of nature, maaan; and (3) They’re always spoiling our fun, pointing out homeopathy doesn’t work or ghosts don’t exist EVEN THOUGH they KNOW we REALLY, REALLY want to believe in them. That last delusion is the most insidious. Science is like a good friend: sometimes it tells you things you don’t want to hear. It tells you the truth. And we all know how much that can hurt, don’t we, fatso?

  Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality. The more contrary evidence mounts up, the harder they’ll ignore it. And even the greatest, most widelyadmired scientists can provoke this reaction. Take Darwin. Or rather, take The Genius of Darwin, the latest documentary from professional God-hatin’ Professor Yaffle impersonator Richard Dawkins, which sets out to calmly and lucidly explain (a) why Darwin was so ace, and (b) just how much evidence there is to support his findings.

  Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.

  Since Darwin’s death, Dawkins points out, the evidence confirming his discovery has piled up and up and up, many thousand feet above the point of dispute. And yet heroically, many still dispute it. They’re like couch potatoes watching Finding Nemo on DVD who’ve suffered some kind of brain haemorrhage which has led them to believe the story they’re watching is real, that their screen is filled with water and talking fish, and that that’s all there is to reality – just them and that screen and Nemo – and when you run into the room and point out the DVD player and the cables connecting it to the screen, and you open the windows and point outside and describe how overwhelming the real world is – when you do all that, it only spooks them. So they go on believing in Nemo, with gritted teeth if necessary.

  What was it that spooked them so? Probably natural selection’s lack of reassuring narrative. It lays the ruthless, godless world pretty bloody bare. As Dawkins says: ‘The total amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to say these words, thousands of animals are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, feeling teeth sink into their throats. Thousands are dying from starvation or disease or feeling a parasite rasping away from within. There is no central authority; no safety net. For most animals the reality of life is struggling, suffering and death.’

  Woo-hoo! Compare and contrast with the plot of Finding Nemo and it’s easy to understand why people would rather believe in the purdy singing clown fish. But this is our reality, people. Like the man says, there’s no safety net – so since we’re all in this together, we’ll have to make our own. And we can’t do that with our eyes and minds wide shut.

  It’s a sin [9 August 2008]

  You know what organised religion needs? More power and influence. Thank God, then, that Channel 4 are on hand to give it the helping hand it so desperately requires in the form of Make Me a Christian, a spiritual makeover show in which four hardcore Goddites attempt to convert a rag-tag band of sinners into full-blown Jesus freaks in just three weeks.

  In true oversimplified TV-conflict tradition, it’s a clash of absurd extremities. The Christians, for instance, consist of an evangelical preacher, a lady vicar, a Catholic priest and – very much heading up the pack – the Reverend George Hargreaves, founder of Operation Christian Vote, and the Christian Party, and the Scottish Christian Party, and the Welsh Christian Party. If it’s Christian and a Party, chances are George is its figurehead. He scatters Christian joy like a muckspreader flings shit: indiscriminately and everywhere.

  Said Christians are pitted against a group of volunteers containing the following widely representative social types: a lesbian schoolteacher, a tattooed militant atheist biker, a white Muslim convert, a boozing fannyhound who claims to have slept with over 150 women, and a lapdancing witch. Nice work, C4. I’m sure we can all learn from this. Let battle commence.

  Following a trip to York Minster, George hands each of the volunteers a Bible. The word ‘Bible’, he tells them, stands for ‘Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth’. He instructs them to read it every day. This makes the atheist biker kick off, so George graciously talks over him until he walks out.

  The group seems pleased to see biker boy go. After all, what’s the point of participating if you’re not prepared to learn? As William (the Muslim convert) says, ‘Step one to learning is silence, and step two is listening.’ Step three, presumably, is absolute cocksucking obedience – or it would be if cocksucking wasn’t a sin.

  Almost any form of sex is a sin. Take Fay, the occult lapdancer. George takes one look at her lifestyle (spangly bras and tarot cards) and announces she’s ‘on a trajectory to hell’. Sobbing, Fay slinks away to her boyfriend’s house for a few days of comforting. When she emerges later, George bollocks her for having sex outside marriage. ‘While the world might call it “making love”,’ he says, ‘the Bible calls it fornication.’

  Fay’s clearly unhappy and wracked with issues about her appearance, but you can’t help wondering if introducing her to Gok Wan might’ve been a tad kinder.

  Not that George and co would approve of Gok. After all, we get to see what they make of exuberant gayness when Pastor Wally (the evangeli
cal preacher) commands Laura (the lesbian teacher) to remove all evidence of same-sex activity from her home. Her saucy party snaps, her books of Sapphic erotica – they have to go.

  George agrees. His Christian Party takes a notably dim view on homosexuality. He says things like, ‘The ancient city of Sodom could have been saved, if only righteous people could be found,’ in its election broadcasts. And in 2006 he personally pledged £50,000 to assist the nine Scottish firefighters disciplined for refusing to hand out fire-safety leaflets at a gay parade.

  Given that George also wrote and co-produced Sinitta’s 1986 gay disco anthem ‘So Macho’ (sample lyric: ‘I’m after a hunk of a guy, an experienced man of the world … He’s got to be so macho/ He’s got to be big and strong, enough to turn me on’), this is surprising. Still, he’s a surprising guy. In 2007 he campaigned to have the iconic red dragon removed from the Welsh flag as it was ‘nothing less than the sign of Satan’.

  With his polarising views and divisive political campaigning, George is just the man to be fronting a makeover show, and the broadcast will doubtless be accompanied by the percussive sound of thousands of Christians enthusiastically smashing their foreheads against the wall with delight at the way they’re represented. Still, let’s not blame Channel 4. Let’s forgive them. Just like Jesus n’ shit, yeah?

  Fun with brains [16 August 2008]

  The human brain is a wonderful thing, but you wouldn’t want to kiss it. It’s an ugly, quivering, corrugated blancmange. If it wasn’t permanently shrouded from view by that opaque bone helmet you call a skull, you’d never get laid.

  Just as well, because if the top of your skull was missing, and you accidentally banged your naked brain against the headboard during a one-night-stand, you’d probably start jerking around and going ‘buhhhhh’ and pulling a face like Robert Mitchum having a stroke. And that’s completely different to what you normally do during sex, right?

  Anyway, if you don’t fancy gazing into a bucketful of peeled minds, avoid Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery, which explores the evolution of brain surgery in unflinching detail. I say ‘unflinching’: the show didn’t flinch once. I, however, flinched like a man with his glans in a sandwich toaster.

  Make no mistake, this is graphic stuff. Shot after shot of heads being sawn or jimmied open, and exposed, pulsating brains being prodded with sticks. But if you manage to stay conscious (by pinching the back of your hand and breathing slowly through your nose), it offers some incredible sights.

  For instance, early on we see a woman undergoing surgery to remove an errant bit of cranial yuck that’s been causing epileptic fits. They whizz the top of her skull off and peel away a gossamerthin coating to reveal her bloody, gelatinous brain, which they repeatedly squirt with a spray bottle, to wash away the claret and expose the pale pink jelly beneath. We see blood vessels throbbing in her mind, and then – cue the incredible bit – we spin round to the other side only to discover she’s STILL AWAKE and enjoying a chinwag with one of the nurses.

  She has to remain conscious, see, because the surgeon needs to know if he’s about to cut out anything important, and the best way of ascertaining that is to zap individual sections of her brain with an electrode, then ask her how it feels. One bit makes her hand twitch about. Another makes her eyes roll back. Gradually he builds a rough ‘map’ of her brain, and adjusts his scalpel swipes accordingly. It helps to avoid unpleasant surgical side-effects, such as spending the rest of your life bumping into furniture and mooing.

  Truth be told, watching this woman calmly lie back and natter while the surgeon probed her brain sent me a bit giddy. I’d be useless on either side of the equation. If I were the patient, I’d suddenly freak out, leap to my feet and run screaming down the corridors, sloshing brain goo up the walls as I went, getting stupider with each spillage, and eventually collapsing, drooling, by the lifts. And as the surgeon, I wouldn’t be able to resist going mad with the electrode, making her jump like a puppet, or seeing if I could fritz her mind in such a way that she’d start seeing noises, or hearing colours, or thinking the air in the room had the texture of biscuits or something.

  Speaking of mad surgeons, there’s a fair few of them on display here, such as Walter Freeman, inventor of the transorbital lobotomy, which involved hammering an icepick through the eye socket and into the brain, then wiggling it around until the nerve fibres connecting the frontal lobes to the thalamus were severed. Freeman thought that it cured mental illness, which is a bit like thinking you can fix your computer by jamming a knitting needle through the hard drive.

  There’s also an interview with a Spanish surgeon who planted electrodes in a bull’s brain, then jumped in the ring with it, and stopped it goring him to death by pushing a button on a remote which made it spin around in confusion. The footage of that is pretty funny, if you despise animals.

  Anyway, great show. Make a note of it now. On your brain. With a sharp stick. And try not to poke the bit that switches your bum on and off while you’re up there.

  So macho [23 August 2008]

  No apologies, you absolute bastards, for this column returning once again to the horror of crass religious makeover show Make Me a Christian, which draws to a close this week having prompted much wailing and gnashing of teeth – 98% of it in my living room, where each episode has been accompanied by a storm of cries, squawks, and outraged splutters. The bellows came so regularly and automatically (as an instinctive physiological response to what I was seeing and hearing) that after a while I actually forgot it was me making them. They’d become part of my flat’s natural ambient soundtrack, like the ticking of the clock or the sound of mould growing in the fridge. Yell, yell, yell. It was like living on top of a yell mine.

  If you were to measure the volume of my shouts and plot them on a graph, you’d discover that the number of sonic peaks corresponded precisely to the number of close-ups of head Christian mentor Reverend George Hargreaves’ simpering tortoisey face. A few weeks ago, after watching episode one, I was so incensed by his self-satisfied air of stubborn intolerance I Googled him as soon as the credits ran. Before long I’d uncovered his astonishing back story: that in the distant past he’d been a DJ and songwriter (responsible for Sinitta’s ‘So Macho’ and ‘Cruising’) before becoming the head of the insanely right-wing Christian Party, which wants to denounce homosexuality, teach creationism in schools, reintroduce the death penalty, ban abortions, remove the ‘satanic’ red dragon from the Welsh flag, and basically make a bollocks of everything. (Fortunately, they’re not very successful, what with the general populace being aware it isn’t AD1500 any more. In the recent Haltemprice and Howden by-election, George received 76 votes. But, hey, perhaps this TV exposure will build his profile.)

  Anyway, George’s background is so juicy and mad, I fully expected the show to make the most of it. You know: wait till he’s admonishing Laura (one of the show’s volunteers; a lesbian) for her sinful gayness, then have the voiceover say, ‘But George hasn’t always been so opposed to homosexuality …’ and BAM! – cut to Sinitta performing ‘So Macho’ on Top of the Pops in 1983 with a caption explaining who wrote it. And move from there into a cute VT package detailing his loopy political ambitions. Didn’t happen in show one. Or show two. Aha, I figured. They’re saving it for the finale: a classic ‘reveal’. Look! He’s been a vaguely sinister weirdo all along! Gotcha!

  But no. His past and his party never warrant a mention. Instead we get the standard makeover show ending: a few participants scratching around for reasons why they feel a bit better about themselves having gone through the sausage machine. Ignore the faintly upbeat veneer and it’s all pretty feeble: none of them appear to have undergone any spiritual transformation whatsoever. They may have enjoyed several of the ‘tasks’, such as helping the elderly or throwing a barbecue for the neighbours, but that’s because doing good deeds is fun. You don’t need Christ whispering in your ear to appreciate the value of loving thy neighbour.

  In fact, the bigge
st hurdle each of them has had to overcome throughout the series is George himself: his robotic intolerance; his haughty judgements; his stomach-churning opinions stated as fact. Choosing him as its ‘star’ has created a bizarre tension at the heart of the programme: the volunteers have been repeatedly told that Christianity is all about love and acceptance by a man who insists the world must adhere to his dementedly fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. And by giving George a mainstream televisual platform without once pointing out what a marginal and extremist figure he is, the show is hugely unfair on yer average non-lunatic churchgoer, the majority of whom are far more likely to offer you a pot of homemade elderberry jam than hysterically denounce you as a fornicating sinner.

  Yeah, that’s right. I’m an atheist defending moderate Christians. Wanna make something of it?

  White people rapping [6 September 2008]

  Empathy lives! If you’ve ever doubted your ability to feel compassion for your fellow man, try sitting through the recent DFS commercial in which various out-of-work actors have to mime along to the shit Nickelback song ‘Rockstar’ without squirming yourself half to death with embarrassment-by-proxy. The sorrow and humiliation is overpowering. I can barely stand to watch. Which bit’s the worst? The bit where the porky thirty-something bloke does air guitar, or the bit where the old woman in sunglasses mouths the chorus? Bet they had to repeatedly halt the shoot because people were completely breaking down on camera – collapsing into helpless shuddering fits. Having sex with a dying goose in exchange for basic rations on some apocalyptic porn site would be less demeaning.

  The only thing in the universe more shameful than old people miming rock songs is the sight of white people rapping. Not all white people, you understand – about 15% are good at it. The rest come across like Leslie Nielsen in an unseen and unfilmed Naked Gun sequence in which Lieutenant Frank Drebin has to black up and infiltrate a hip-hop video shoot. (In the 1980s, it was the law that every family movie or sitcom had to include a bit where the ‘Dad’ character performed a rap, replete with lots of hand gestures and the word ‘yo’, although the practice was eventually abandoned when audiences began committing suicide en masse.)