The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  OK, so they’re not common-or-garden things. He listens to people’s thoughts. He’s telepathic, just like the chubby Keanu Reeves-lookalike policeman in Heroes. That’s actually a fairly interesting premise, so why pick the most boring title imaginable? It’s like creating a Superman series and calling it The Flyer.

  Anyway, the Listener himself is a paramedic called Toby. And this is the next disappointment; he’s a massive puss. He looks like a cross between Frodo Baggins and the mono-browed teenage pie-full-of-twat who used to star in the 1989 Yellow Pages commercial about the kid who needed a French polisher to fix a scratch on a coffee table following an early example of a Skins party in his parents’ house. Apparently Toby’s been a telepath since birth, which is odd, because each time he hears a thought dribbling out of someone’s skull he pulls a confused face, as though it’s never happened before. I call it a ‘confused face’: actually he just looks gormless, as if he’s about to start going ‘buhhhhh’ and bumping into the scenery. It’s like he’s trying to impersonate a stupid dog being amazed by its own bowel movements.

  His powers aren’t even particularly impressive. For one thing, he can’t hear everything, only just enough stuff for the writers to be able to move the plot along a few notches. In the first episode, he’s trying to find out where a bad guy has hidden a kidnapped woman and her kiddywink, yet despite standing RIGHT NEXT TO HIM several times, he doesn’t pick up anything, thereby forcing him to break into said bad guy’s house later to look for clues. For all the good his powers do him, he might as well be pulling fortune cookie predictions from his arse and following their instructions to the letter. That would pull in 20 times more viewers, even if they stuck to their literal-titling policy and called it The Adventures of Magic Bum Man.

  Anyway, 99% of the stuff he does manage to hear (when the screenwriters let him) consists of useless trivia. At one point he hears his boss thinking, ‘Man, I’m grumpy when I don’t get to watch the wrestling’, so he decides to cheer him up by offering to lend him a WWF video. It really is that exciting.

  And wait! It gets even worse than that. The writers can’t even decide exactly how his powers work, because sometimes he sees thoughts as well as hearing them. For instance, he ‘sees’ the bad kidnappy guy in a vision at one point, which is why he recognises him when they cross paths later. That’s not listening! That’s looking! Why didn’t they call it The Looker-and-Listener? These people are idiots.

  I could go on, because the questions keep mounting up. Why, in the dull romantic subplot, doesn’t the Listener just immediately know whether his girlfriend wants to continue their relationship or not? Why is the version of Toronto the Listener lives in so incredibly underpopulated that a whopping great 4x4 vehicle can crash in the middle of a central city street, and end up on its roof, on fire, without a single bystander looking on? Why does the whole thing feel like a bad cut-scene from a late-90s ‘interactive movie’ CD-ROM game? Why? Why? Why?

  I doubt the Listener himself knows. The thought processes involved in creating this series must’ve been so horrendously unfocused that no matter how hard he strained, they’d just sound like a low fuzzy hum. Or, more accurately, an uninterrupted 55-minute raspberry.

  A pillock of Apprentii [28 March 2009]

  The Apprentice throws up many questions. Such as: what’s the plural of apprentice? Apprentii? Apprenticeese? Let’s go with the former. And now we’ve established that, what’s the correct collective noun for a group of Apprentii? A pillock of Apprentii? A wankel? A swagger?

  Swagger it is. Right. Now we can proceed.

  As this year’s swagger of Apprentii marched into view over the Millennium Bridge, I was struck by two things. Firstly by the way that during the initial stages when there are far too many of them to really focus on, they all fall into one of two categories: interchangeables and aliens. The interchangeables are nondescript, hovering around in the background as though auditioning for Nick and Margaret’s job, a bit like visual filler. Sometimes you’ll spot one in the boardroom and scratch your head trying to remember their name. But don’t be fooled: the series is always, always won by an interchangeable. They start developing names and personalities somewhere around week five. Think of them as hatchlings.

  The aliens, meanwhile, draw the eye. I was once told that the mark of a well-designed cartoon character is that they remain recognisable even in silhouette – think of Bart Simpson or Mickey Mouse. Some of this year’s Apprentii already fall into that category: there’s one physical characteristic or affected visual quirk that makes them stand out. Mona, for instance, has fascinating eyes: beautiful, but exactly the same as Nookie Bear’s (Google it if you don’t believe me). Howard is a genetic cross between previous winners Simon and Lee, albeit one with the downward gaping mouth of a depressed coelacanth moaning about all the damp weather they’ve been having underwater. Ben looks exactly like hitherto-undiscovered footage of Aidan Gillen (AKA Tommy Carcetti in The Wire) playing a local businessman in an imaginary episode of Emmerdale from 1999. Even so, as I mention their names, chances are you won’t quite be able to recall who I’m talking about yet. There are just too many of them. It’s still just a swagger of Apprentii.

  A youthful swagger at that. The cliché that you know you’re getting old when policemen start looking young applies even more strongly to Apprentii. Half of them dribble. One is seven years old. I keep expecting them to pull out a set of toy cars during the boardroom scenes and start making brrmm brrmm noises while Sir Alan’s trying to bollock them.

  Speaking of Sir Alan, it’s heartening to see that these stormy financial times haven’t beaten an ounce of humility into him. Despite an ongoing makeover which sees him becoming physically leaner and slicker each year, his character remains constant: the level of unwarranted, snarling belligerence hasn’t dropped a single share point. Even though last week’s inaugural task was a fairly pedestrian car-washing challenge, he conducted the final showdown like a murder trial – not any old murder trial, but a gangland, kangaroo court, Long Good Friday sort of trial, the sort that takes place in an abandoned warehouse and ends with one of the defendants being hung upside down and having their knees sliced off with an angle grinder.

  If he’s this angry during week one, with any luck by week six he’ll be throwing furniture around in a rage and grabbing candidates by their ties. And instead of sending the fired loser out of the room to meekly collect their suitcase, he’ll nod a small gesture in Nick’s direction and leave the room.

  At this point Nick quietly taps a button under the desk (locking the doors), silently pulls on some tight leather gloves and advances slowly towards the victim, brandishing a syringe filled with a sinister clear liquid. The victim beats their fists against the exit to no avail, as Nick moves in, smirking coldly, moving ever closer, relentless as a Terminator. Close up on the glistening tip of the needle as it draws near. Cut to black. Tortured scream. Roll credits in silence.

  This, my friends, is precisely the kind of entertainment we need during a recession.

  Against Philip [25 April 2009]

  Sorry for being away for weeks. I’ve had a pain in the neck, literally. Not just the neck, but the shoulder, elbow, fingers … you name it, it’s screwed. I’m told it’s probably a herniated C7 disc, and it’s a constant source of joy. Numbness, tingling, a ceaseless sharpening ache … it’s not agonising, more accumulatively infuriating; like sitting in a cinema with someone continually kicking the back of your seat. And you can’t get out of your chair.

  Each day brings a revolving carousel of dispiriting symptoms, all of them apparently set on ‘shuffle’. On Monday the tingly numbness in my fingers might be a main concern. Tuesday may feature unrelenting shoulder pain. Enfeebling tricep weakness on Wednesday. And so on.

  I bring this up not because I want your pity (well, maybe slightly), but because it’s the perfect metaphor for the current series of The Apprentice, in which the primary source of discomfort shifts with each episode.

&nbs
p; A fortnight ago, for example, I decided Ben was the villain of the piece. Everything about him irritated me as much as someone tossing a handful of staples in my face. For starters, he displayed an almost satirical level of self-confidence, claiming to the best at this and the champ at that and the King of the Galaxy and so on. He seemed to earnestly believe he had the ability to cleave entire universes in two using his mind alone, like Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen but markedly less blue and without a big pubeless dick swinging around like a loose sleeve, threatening to slap the entire front row in the face.

  And if Ben’s manner alone wasn’t enough to earn him a poke in the mind’s eye, his silly head was there to take up the slack. What’s with the surprised eyebrows and the trim cartoon eyelashes? He looks like Top Cat with stubble. Or a He-Man figurine with the head of a six-year-old girl. Where’s his neck? Has he got a neck? His head seems to be growing straight out of his chest cavity, like an emergent conjoined twin suddenly gasping for your attention. Perhaps he’s got a second head sprouting from his arse, dribbling business-speak between each greasy fart and turd.

  Anyway, that’s what I’d have said if you’d asked me about Ben a fortnight ago. But it seems a bit cruel and unnecessary now. He’s calmed down a tad, and besides, he’s only 22. Who isn’t a prick at 22? I certainly was.

  No. The real enemy is clearly Philip, the 29-year-old former estate agent with the Durham accent. He was actually my favourite for a while. Not any more. He’s flared up. He’s gone horrible.

  Philip seems to spend 98% of his screen time shouting his own opinions over anything anyone says. And if they’re a woman, he’ll shout twice as loud, for twice as long, like some previously unseen character from Life on Mars, only less amusing because he’s wearing a smart suit and some hair gel instead of a zany kipper tie. And boy does he love himself.

  He looks like he throws himself roughly on to the bed each night, hungrily moving his hands all over his own body, trying to kiss himself deep in the mouth. If it were legal or even possible to do so, he’d probably marry himself, then conduct a long-term affair with himself behind himself’s back, eventually fathering nine children with himself, all of whom would walk and talk like him. And then he’d lock those mini-hims in a secret underground dungeon to have his sick way with his selves, undetected, for decades.

  If you asked Philip if he thought the world revolved around him, he’d blink and ask you what exactly a ‘world’ was, then go back to staring in the mirror, drooling and smiling and pointing and saying ‘Philllllippp, Philllllipppp’ over and over again like a mantra.

  Next week, I’ll probably dislike another candidate more. But right now? It’s Philip, Philip, Philip all the way to the Shit Shop and back.

  Male physical splendour [2 May 2009]

  Extreme Male Beauty is the title it says here on the preview DVD, so naturally I assumed it was a documentary about me. I am terrifyingly beautiful. People often scream and hurl themselves under passing trucks the moment they spot my physical splendour gliding towards them. Embittered naysayers may claim my face resembles a damp curtain billowing in the squall of a bison fart, but these people have neither eyes nor souls. Let’s be honest. I make David Beckham look like a sockful of piss.

  But some men, it seems, don’t share my obvious psychological confidence. Men like radio DJ Tim Shaw, who presents this show. He spends half the intro detailing what an average schmoe he is – indolent, a bit flabby, probably flatulent – and generally projects such a familiar everyday air you’ll probably think you’ve met him at some point or another, as though he’s thingummy’s boyfriend you met a few years back at that barbecue thing for Sarah’s birthday. Any sense of mutual acquaintance is dashed, however, when it gets to the bit of the show where he shows you his pale, gingery penis. Especially because his penis isn’t just hanging there like a crippled finger, but being stretched by some kind of metallic device, like it’s had a fight with an articulated corkscrew and lost. And you never saw that at the barbecue, did you?

  The point of the programme, apparently, is to ‘explore’ the increasingly demented body-image issues afflicting British men. Men have completely lost their minds in recent years, buying hair straighteners and eyeliner and stupid bloody clothes in their millions in a concerted bid to craft themselves into a cross between a Manga character and a Big Brother contestant. Walk down any high street these days and it’s like passing through the Valley of the Preening Wusses. While women have an impressive variety of ‘looks’, from Girls Aloud to 1940s vamp, fashionable men only seem to have one: vain prick. Why would anyone want to dress like these see-yoo-enn-tees? This is life, not an audition for Hollyoaks.

  Anyway, for a show investigating insecurity, this seems ironically insecure itself, throwing about 10 million familiar ‘format points’ at it in the hope one will stick. So as well as an ‘authored documentary’ strand in which Shaw hits the gym to see if he can get rid of his ‘man boobs’, we also get a makeover section in which a bloke from Doncaster is transformed by three ‘professionals’ – a surgeon, a dentist and a stylist – who’ve allowed themselves to be filmed in a wanky, swaggering manner guaranteed to make 99% of the audience despise them. On their watch, Mr Doncaster gets sliced up, drilled and tailored until he emerges looking like the sort of man who might host a late-night shopping show demonstrating portable MP3 speakers. And apparently that’s a victory.

  On top of that, we’re given a ‘talent show’ in which prospective male models compete for the chance to be an anonymous torso on the cover of Men’s Health (a magazine which might as well call itself Abdominal Grail). This section provides the perfect excuse to whip out yet another essential TV staple: the judging panel. But disappointingly for all concerned there’s very little to judge. Just buff blokes taking their shirts off. No crazy blobbos turn up demanding to be seen, waddling into the room with their bellies jiggling around while the producers dub comedy trombone music over it or anything like that.

  Then we get some earnest chat about steroid abuse, some footage of Tim Shaw puffing away with a chest expander, a recap on Doncaster Boy, a glimpse of Shaw’s dick, and that’s it. It’s like 10 slightly different shows on the same subject jostling for space in a waiting room. Oh, and male viewers? Unless you’re sitting on an exercise bike at the time, do bear in mind that while you’re slumped on the sofa watching this, you’ll grow slightly fatter, slightly older, and slightly less attractive than you already aren’t. Take my advice: give up.

  Go Faster Tripe [9 May 2009]

  In 1983, if you wanted to play a videogame, you had to wait five minutes while your Sinclair ZX Spectrum loaded it from a tape. The game would consist of you guiding a crudely animated car mechanic across three screens of irritating peril, collecting magenta spanners and listening to beepy sound effects. You’d die every four seconds, couldn’t save your position, and when you got to the end your reward was a stark caption reading ‘Well Done’, followed by the game starting all over again, except slightly faster.

  Eighties games weren’t fun at all. But TV wasn’t much better. In 1983 the original series of Knight Rider hit British TV screens. It was a show about a coiffured berk in a talking car, and it was awful. David Hasselhoff was the berk; the talking car was a Trans Am called ‘KITT’. It’s fondly remembered today thanks to its cool theme tune and amusingly portentous title sequence, in which a bowel-straining voiceover told us we were about to witness ‘a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist’ (presumably because being honest and saying, ‘Here’s a load of made-up shit about a tit in a car which might help you pass another hour before death,’ didn’t play as well with the focus groups).

  Knight Rider was cancelled in 1986, but TV execs just couldn’t let that brilliant berk-in-a-car concept die. In 1991, it returned as a TV movie called Knight Rider 2000, which was basically Knight Rider in the future (or rather the past, given our current vantage point), in which KITT came equipped with a built-in fax machine. In 1994, they t
ried again with Knight Rider 2010, a sort of Mad Max debacle: it didn’t feature KITT or David Hasselhoff at all. 1997 saw the arrival of Team Knight Rider: basically Power Rangers on wheels. Died after one season.

  For years, things were quiet on the Knight Rider front. Now it’s back, in a vanilla ‘reboot’ – i.e. no ‘future’ nonsense, just the adventures of a new berk (Michael’s son) and his talking car. Of course while the show was off-air, thanks to the invention of Sat-Nav, everyone got talking cars in real life, so the 2009 incarnation of KITT has to try extra-hard to impress. It’s solar-powered, it can morph into different types of car to confuse the baddies, and it’s got an internet connection.

  I’d call the new KITT an iPhone with an exhaust pipe, except if it really was like an iPhone then instead of fighting crime, its owner would spend the entire duration of each episode endlessly droning on and on about how brilliant KITT was, and how he can’t believe you haven’t bought one yourself yet, and every time he passed another KITT driver, they’d feel compelled to pull over and sit there Twittering each other about the latest astounding downloadable KITT ‘apps’, like the one that makes a shoe appear on the screen, then you tilt it and the shoe rocks around a bit and plays the Star Wars theme, and it’s amazing really, the things it can do. Actually, you know what I’d watch? A series about a maniac who drives around singling out iPhone owners, slapping their stupid toys out of their hands and stamping on them. That’s the first three minutes of each episode; the remaining 57 consist of an unflinching closeup of said iPhone owner’s sorrowful face as they scoop all the bits of shattered iPhone off the pavement, clutch it to their bosom, and stagger down the pavement, weeping and lost and alone, unsure whether to carry the remains to the nearest A&E department or drop them in a bin and buy a new one.

  Anyway: the new Knight Rider is mindless but almost watchable, just like the old Knight Rider. Games are infinitely more rewarding than they were in 1983, however. Therefore this series will fail. Its target demographic is busy elsewhere: on Xbox Live, watching blockbusters on their PSPs, playing lightsabers with their iPhones etc.