The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Actually, until recently, the life of Brian Paddick would’ve looked like a good basis for a self-consciously noble ‘issues drama’ about a high-profile gay policeman who runs for mayor of London. Now, hilariously, any scriptwriter currently adapting his biography with one eye on a Bafta is going to have to include a scene in which he beats Timmy Mallett in a competition to see who can down a pint of liquidised crocodile penis the fastest. Whichever way you cut it, Paddick’s had a weird 2008: appearing on Newsnight opposite Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone in April; listening to Joe Swash blow off in the jungle in November.

  Speaking of Swash, I’m assuming he’s won by the time you read this. Certainly at the time of writing it looks inevitable, what with him being the only one left who’s wholeheartedly nice. George Takei doesn’t count because he’s been almost completely invisible. I think he’s using the Predator’s shimmery see-through stealth armour; quite fitting in the jungle. He popped up now and then like an unseen narrator, reading out a fresh chapter heading in his synthesised baritone voice, but that’s about all he did.

  In fact most of the campmates turned out to be underachievers. Paddick got his bum out and wandered around like a passive-aggressive cross between C3PO and John Major. Nicola McThing spent hours grumbling on her back in a bikini, which made her fake tits resemble two giant wax testicles resting on her ribcage like immovable paperweights. David Van Day was predictably deranged and ridiculous. Simon from Blue said five words, six of them dull, and Martina Navratilova spent the whole time pulling a face like she was working in an Eastern European shoe factory and was neither upset nor uplifted by the experience.

  Joe Swash, on the other hand, was unrelentingly funny. Partly because he looks almost exactly like Alfred E. Neuman, the eerie Mad magazine mascot, but mainly because he quickly revealed himself as an exasperated human rights campaigner, becoming outraged by the smallest injustice. Every three minutes the show cut to a shot of him leaping off a log to scream about the unfair treatment of Timmy Mallett in the style of an eight-year-old throwing a tantrum. If it fancies a few ticks for its public service record, ITV should get him to front a six-week series on human rights abuses around the world, called That’s Bang Out Of Order, That Is. With Shami Chakrabarti as co-host, please.

  When Bagpuss goes to sleep [13 December 2008]

  Another week, another column diverted from its planned trajectory at the last minute.

  I was supposed to write about Horizon: Where’s My Robot?, an affable lightweight documentary about the world of science’s ongoing attempts to create proper walking, talking mechanical men. The most unusual and affecting sequence in the programme involves a Japanese professor’s efforts to create a lifelike android, and the difficulties that involves. He’s built several eerie likenesses, of himself, his daughter, and an attractive young woman – only to discover that they freak people out. The trouble is they look almost human, but also markedly lifeless, with cold eyes and uncreased skin. Visitors react with revulsion at the very sight of the things because there’s no soul.

  Anyway, I sit down to write about that, check the internet for a bit of last-minute procrastination and … oh no. Oliver Postgate’s just died. There it is on the BBC News website. I can’t write about anything else now. I have to type this off the top of my head. And the first thought that strikes me is that, in stark contrast to the creepy Japanese android guy, here was a man capable of effortlessly breathing gallons of soul into even the most basic of artificial lifeforms. A saggy old cloth cat. A steam engine made of paper, puffing cotton wool balls for steam. A tribe of miniature pink aliens on the moon.

  Together, the team of Postgate and Peter Firmin were apparently incapable of creating anything less than timelessly wonderful whenever they sat down to work. Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Bagpuss, The Clangers … each of them would instantly hypnotise and charm the viewer. And each was infused with a uniquely British sense of genteel eccentricity; they became a key element in countless individual childhoods, informing the dreams and imaginations of millions of people. All of it forged in a former cowshed in Kent, sewn into being like an enchanted tapestry made of 16mm film.

  The stories were simple, the animation basic, the puppets and drawings polite yet charismatic, but together they were far more than the sum of their parts. Close your eyes and picture them and you can’t help but feel genuine warmth; these films were made with love. It glowed from the screen.

  Postgate himself was a committed pacifist, and forgive me if I sound like a wuss, but I swear you could hear it in his voice, which never shrieked or gurgled or patronised, but maintained a steady, dreamlike pace on each soundtrack. It was recorded quite basically, so it often sounded like he was speaking from a cupboard in the corner of the room, but that merely added to the charm. Stuff your bird or whale song, forget about breezes in cornfields or lapping waves and waterfalls: there is no more calming sound in the world than the voice of Oliver Postgate. With him narrating your life, you’d feel cosy and safe even during a gas explosion. It floated above all these stories, that voice; wound its way through them. It was the kindest, wisest voice you ever heard, and now it’s gone.

  As have all the other sounds, which you’ll now hear in your mind’s ear as I mention them in turn: Ivor’s pshht-a-coo engine mechanics; the Clangers’ whistles; Bagpuss yawning; Gabriel the toad swallowing; professor Yaffle climbing down from his bookend to inspect some new artefact; the squealing mice. All gone now, too.

  The character design, the writing, the narration, the sound effects, the music: each individual element of every Smallfilms creation was absolutely pitch-perfect. That’s not just rare, it’s almost unprecedented. That it all appeared effortless is a testament to their genius: it’s a level of craft that’s impossible to achieve by anyone aiming for it on a conscious level. It’s either in you or it isn’t. It was in Oliver Postgate, and that’s why he was – for my money, and without the slightest whiff of hyperbole – the greatest children’s storyteller of the last 100 years.

  Rest in peace, sir. You earned it.

  My close friend Coolio [10 January 2009]

  Having failed to destroy the world in 2007, Celebrity Big Brother returns with a surprisingly high-profile line-up: considering the nuclear fallout generated last time, you could be forgiven for expecting a cast list comprising the bloke from the Admiral Insurance ads, John Noakes’s PA, three random Guatemalans and a photograph of Cheryl Baker glued to a broom. Instead, there are at least three or four people you’ve at least heard of, even if the last time you heard about them was six or seven years ago. I’ve even met one of them, albeit briefly. I’m talking, of course, about Coolio.

  OK, so I didn’t so much ‘meet’ Coolio as serve him in a shop, but it still counts. It was some time in the early 90s when I was working in a video game emporium just off Oxford Street. We prided ourselves on being a countercultural sort of place. Staff chain-smoked behind the desk while the stereo blasted Aphex Twin into customers’ faces. We stocked obscure Japanese grey imports on holier-than-thou formats, Jamma boards and secondhand British titles. Kids hung around playing beat-’em-ups and swearing. One day Coolio bounded in, bellowing at the top of his voice without even trying. I think he bought a copy of Samurai Shodown II on the Neo-Geo. He knew his games, did Coolio.

  Anyway, apart from MY VERY CLOSE FRIEND COOLIO, there are a few other recognisable faces – and Ulrika Jonsson, whose face isn’t as recognisable as it used to be. It’s changed, yet stayed roughly the same, as though it’s made from different material. Material from space. It makes her look like someone else wearing special effects makeup to make them look like Ulrika Jonsson. Maybe that’s the twist. Maybe it’s actually Bob Mortimer underneath all that. The truth will out.

  Then there’s Verne Troyer, aka Mini-Me. He’s simply too small; the size of a baby. Watching him walk up the red carpet on launch night made me feel giddy and feverish, like I was teetering on the verge of an uncontrollable psychotic episode,
one where the dam in my head finally bursts and vision itself ceases to make sense and the walls start shouting and demons and witches and melting Nazi elephants crawl from the carpet to drag me away to Mad Land. He takes up four pixels on the average LCD television. For the first time in Screen Burn history, the photo accompanying this column will be (a) a full-body shot, and (b) actual size.

  LaToya Jackson: there’s another recognisable one, although it’s Michael and Janet you’re recognising when you look at her. She’s essentially Betty from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em with a US accent. Terry Christian, for his part, is transmogrifying into Jack Palance and coming across quite well in the process.

  Of the rest, Mutya, Michelle and Ben are flavourless sandwich filling, so until Tommy Sheridan reveals himself to be a massive preening bighead – a moment I keep anticipating but which, irritatingly, hasn’t yet arrived – the ones annoying me most are Tina Malone and Lucy Pinder.

  Malone because she’s got a habit of dragging the conversation round to herself: even when LaToya Jackson was describing some harrowing domestic abuse, Malone managed to deftly convert it into an appraisal of her own uncompromising no-nonsense scouse attitude. Pinder, meanwhile, went from ‘sexy’ to ‘plain’ in a nanosecond: as soon as she mentioned her Tory outlook in her introductory VT, you could hear intelligent penises shrivelling across the nation.

  I’ve got nothing against curvy, booby glamour girls, but the moment they start banging on about the Conservative party they turn into ugly, soulless dolls. As a result, she could don lingerie and spend the rest of the week doing rude aerobics, and it still wouldn’t help. Now you know what’s in her head, the exterior’s been rendered so unattractive she might as well be excreting dog food through her (presumably) shaved and talcum-powdered orifices. Seriously, only a psychopath could find that attractive. And when you’re supposed to be sexy for a living, that’s a major problem.

  Question everything [24 January 2009]

  Ask anyone with a Sky box: the problem with the multi-channel universe is how samey it all is. Hundreds of stations pumping out the same palliative mulch. But every so often a new start-up channel emerges with a left-field agenda. It’s always worth tuning in once, just for the surprise value. There was Isle of Wight TV, which seems to have vanished now. And SoundTV, which consisted of old-school variety and interviews with Richard Digance. That’s gone too. These rogue stations don’t tend to last long.

  Well here’s a new one: Edge Media TV, ‘a platform for alternative and suppressed viewpoints’. In other words, it’s chock-full of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists need to believe their viewpoints are being suppressed, rather than, say, assessed and dismissed as ropey and ludicrous. Which makes a channel devoted to spreading these viewpoints a bit of a paradox. If ‘the system’ was even 1% as efficient and sinister as they believe, their station wouldn’t exist.

  But it does, broadcasting programmes with titles like Question Everything and Hidden Agenda, and a talkshow called Esoteria, which according to the host is ‘a SHOW, not a PROGRAMME – we aim to SHOW you alternative viewpoints rather than PROGRAM you to accept a particular point of view’. He must be proud of that bit of mind-expanding wordplay because he repeats it quite a lot. A bit like he’s programming you, actually.

  And herein lies the tragedy. The other day I tuned in to Eerie Investigations, in which the host, a strangely simpering woman with Eerie Investigations printed on her T-shirt, conducted vox-pop interviews with people at an anti-ID card rally. There are a thousand valid reasons for opposing ID cards and questioning everything the government does, but instead both the host and her interviewees spent most of their time talking about how we’re all going to have microchips planted in our heads as part of the New World Order (which, naturally, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks), intermittently breaking from this theme to dismiss the general public as idiotic, docile sheep with such towering self-assurance it made you actively wonder whether labouring under a fascist police state in which government computers monitored your dreams and doled out electric shocks each time you had a subversive thought would be preferable to living in freedom alongside these massive wankers.

  Maybe ‘wankers’ is a bit harsh. These are essentially clever people gone wrong. Having learned to mistrust the powers that be, they take a giant leap, mistaking bossiness and incompetence for ultra-organised and sinister plotting – and then compound the error by mistaking themselves for journalists or scientists. The result is a depressing descent into fairytales backed with risible ‘evidence’; fairytales told with the defensive assertion that anyone who doesn’t believe them is a shill or a sheep.

  Consider Ludicrous Diversion, an Edge Media documentary which implies the 7/7 bombers weren’t really bombers at all, but patsies framed by ‘the system’. Rather than offering any hard evidence for this startling claim, it highlights minor anomalies in the official version of events, the police’s reluctance to release CCTV footage, and references to past miscarriages of justice such as the Guildford Four, then expects the viewer to add two and two to make 25. It’s like a lazy and badly made Power of Nightmares, convincing only to the eagerly paranoid.

  In between the programmes, there are adverts for Cillit Bang (whose exact role in the New World Order has yet to be established) and a seven-hour – yes, SEVEN-HOUR – ‘DVD presentation’ from David Icke, in which he tells the viewer how the world really works. And presumably apologises for not employing an editor. In summary: it’s bunkum. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’m a mainstream media shill. They’ve got to me already. And now they’re coming for YOU.

  Here goes nothing [31 January 2009]

  The landmark sitcom Seinfeld was famously described by its own makers as ‘a show about nothing’. But it wasn’t really. It was a show about minutiae and neurosis and social transgression. And jokes. In fact it was a show about everything, brilliantly disguised as a show about nothing with a breezy, relaxed, sardonic style. That’s why it’s still such a great show, once you adjust your filter to disregard the infuriating slapped bass peppering each episode like a squelching fart cannon.

  Seinfeld appeared in 1989, which means we’ve been waiting 20 years for an authentic ‘show about nothing’. Now we’ve got one. And in a neat reversal, it’s a show about nothing disguised as a show about something. On the surface, The Celebrity Agency is a modern docusoap. But that surface is tissue-thin. Beneath it: nothing.

  Once you strip away the adverts and titles, the premiere episode is a mere 20 minutes long – edging on nothing, although it feels longer because there’s so much nothing crammed into it. It details the day-today workings of Jonathan Lipman Ltd, a talent agency without the talent. It’s a company which ‘represents celebrities’: arranging PAs with WAGs, photoshoots with Big Brother contestants, and promotional events in which Kenzie from Blazin’ Squad eats a Pot Noodle on an open-top bus … that kind of thing. Incredibly, they manage to facilitate this without ever once staring into the middle distance while hacking at their wrists with a penknife in a desperate bid to leave this meaningless universe behind. Instead they seem to enjoy it.

  The first episode features two photoshoots. One involves Bianca Gascoigne looking sultry at a Manchester carwash for a lads’ mag. The other is an OK Magazine ‘look at my lovely home’ puff-piece starring Imogen from Big Brother in a house that isn’t even hers. Absolutely nothing occurs at either location, but even these nilch-vacuums are overshadowed by a staggering detonation of nothing taking place in London.

  The agency’s biggest signing, Paris Hilton, is in town for a personal appearance at the Mahiki nightclub. And here’s what happens: Paris Hilton has a spray tan (off-screen); Paris Hilton receives suitcases full of promotional freebies (on-screen); Paris Hilton eats a meal (off-screen); Paris Hilton stands in a nightclub for about an hour (on-screen); Paris Hilton gets paid an estimated 30,000 for her trouble (off-screen).

  As you may have noticed, half of what Paris Hilton does takes place off-screen, which
means – yes! – LESS THAN NOTHING is happening. It’s the first successful transmission of televisual antimatter. That’s because the show isn’t actually about her, but the staff of the agency, starting with Jonathan Lipman himself, who seems to be the kind of super-self-confident cock-of-the-walk that makes you actively pray for Armageddon the nanosecond he swaggers into view. He sports one of those half-spiky, half-swipey haircuts that only exist courtesy of about 28 pots of a futuristic micro-fibre styling clay with a name like ‘Punk Mud’ or something. He is, to put it mildly, an aching great dick of the highest order.

  Which isn’t to say he spends his time beating his chest and loudly proclaiming his own brilliance. Far from it. He’s actually rather low-key and casual and is probably quite a nice guy. Somehow, that only makes it worse. He’s cheerfully promoting the adulation and elevation of nothing, like a man selling vague sections of air for a living, and he hasn’t even got the decency to seem bitter and frightened about it. Instead he stands at the very centre of this whirling vortex of shitstink with his hands in his pockets, tapping his toe to ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna, waiting for the paparazzi to arrive. And photograph nothing.

  You’ll choke on it but only momentarily. The nightmare tide of nothing quickly overwhelms you. It kills all thought and meaning and replaces them with nothing. Submit, human. Submit. There’s nothing you can do to stop the nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In which Barack Obama is elected, Santa dies, and Tatler prints an exhaustive list of the biggest cunts in Britain

  A quick bit of good news [10 November 2008]

  President Barack Obama. President Barack Obama. Nope, still can’t get used to it. It’s literally too good to be true. I must’ve died in my sleep and am now having an insane fantasy pumped into my head by the Matrix. Any minute now Salma Hayek is going to float through the door with a tray of biscuits and I’ll know the game’s up. Or perhaps I’ve just come round from a coma. The election took place 10 years ago, and what I’ve just sat through was actually a Hollywood movie loosely based on real events. And in a bid to appeal to the multiplex crowd, they decided to jettison all semblance of subtlety.