The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Knight Rider 2009 could’ve been a fantastic driving/RPG hybrid videogame. Instead it’s a televised quack-fart. Let’s use progress properly, people.

  Yes, Sir Alan [16 May 2009]

  Something’s niggling me about the current run of The Apprentice, and it’s this: what with this being the fifth series, my notion of what constitutes unacceptable humiliation for the candidates has become skewed beyond measure. The tasks, ostensibly designed to be a measure of their business skills, are really just exercises in making them look stupid – given a day to create a complete rebranding of the seaside resort of Margate, for instance, anyone without prior twatty marketing experience is going to flounder spectacularly. So it made them look like tits. But I scarcely noticed, because they look like tits every week.

  Similarly, each episode culminates in Sir Alan hurling insults at all and sundry in the boardroom whether they deserve it or not, like a grouchy stand-up pre-emptively heckling his crowd. And I’ve developed an alarming immunity to that too. In fact my ‘bollocking tolerance’ has shot through the roof, to the point where I’ve started to believe that’s how regular conversation between normal human beings should work. Only the other day I told a shopkeeper that the way he’d put the items in my carrier bag was a mess, a shambles, a cock-up so big you could see it from bladdy SPACE, son, and that I was starting to wonder if he was just like one of them balloons with a face drawn on it, an impressive face, yeah, but scratch the surface and there’s nothing behind it, just a leaky inflatable full of blummin’ arse gas, so he’d better watch his step if he wanted to keep my custom.

  This situation will never do. If repeated exposure has left me impervious to The Apprentice, then The Apprentice has to change – to develop new, meaner twists. More humiliating send-offs. In short, it sorely and surely needs to adopt one of the following three brilliant gimmicks.

  1. Uniforms for the candidates. At the moment, they’ve adopted a uniform of their own – sharp suits for the gents, power bitchwear for the ladies, with the dominant colours being black and charcoal grey. I’m assuming the production team stipulate this (although they made a notable exception for Lucinda last year, who dressed like a mad art teacher with a vision deficiency). Why not force them to wear gaudy bright orange ‘fast-food worker’ overalls, complete with a name badge and a number of stars? Better yet, if you’re one of the final three called into the boardroom, you have to do it next week in your pants.

  2. Reject all pretence at testing business skills. The tasks have zilch to do with actual business acumen; we all worked that out ages ago. So why not just see who’s best at performing some entirely arbitrary chore? Who’s best at writing a children’s bedtime story on a laptop computer while sitting in the tiger enclosure at Chester Zoo? Which candidate can permanently cripple themselves the fastest using only one hand and a dowelling rod? The possibilities are endless, and appalling.

  3. Make the boardroom a revolting ordeal. The boardroom showdowns are tense, but they’re not stomach-churning. I’m a Celebrity powers ahead in the ratings each year precisely because it regularly becomes almost too disgusting to watch. The Apprentice has to better this. So each week, when the final trio return for the firing ceremony, Sir Alan should suddenly and flatly demand all three of them rim him.

  Yes, rim him. And before they rim him, just to make it more humiliating, they each have to describe, in punishing detail, precisely how they’re going to tackle it, and just how good they’ll be at doing it. The one with the worst technique gets fired. After five minutes of stunned silence, I guarantee they’d set about the task with grim desperation, like poisoned jailbirds frantically licking antidote from a rusted keyhole.

  Anyway, there you have it: three sure-fire pathways to ratings gold. If the show doesn’t adopt all three of these measures IMME-DIATELY, then absolutely everyone involved in its production – right down to the lowliest runners – is a whimpering pussy. And that’s the TRUTH, yeah? Yeah!

  Hello Dolly [23 May 2009]

  I’ve never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not a single episode. Buffy fans are appalled by my negligence. ‘You MUST watch it!’ they scream. ‘It takes about two seasons to get going, but then … my God, it’s the best show ever made’.

  Two seasons to get going? That’s a commitment of 34 episodes before even its fans think it becomes worthwhile. And there’s a further five seasons after that. Given the fans’ sparkly-eyed evangelism, I don’t doubt for a moment that there’s something of worth there. But I’m not a young man any more. I’m greying. My bones ache. It’s too late for me to embark on a quest of that magnitude. Consequently, Buffy’s been consigned to the growing list of things I’ll never try, like bungee jumping and crystal meth.

  Yet I have found time to sit through the first two episodes of Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s latest creation, Dollhouse (Sci-Fi). And it’s bloody awful. Perhaps it’ll turn into a work of genius in its third season. I won’t know, because I’ll have either given up or died by then.

  The premise is interesting: it’s about a young person who has their mind wiped each week and imprinted with the personalities, memories and expertise of a bunch of other people, before being sent on a mission. In other words, it’s like Joe 90, except you’re supposed to want to screw the lead character, because the lead character is the improbably gorgeous Eliza Dushku, not a nine-year-old schoolboy marionette.

  In week one, Echo (that’s her name) was transformed into an expert in Latin American kidnap negotiations, which meant she donned glasses and wore her hair up in a bun. In week two, she’s an outdoor-sports-enthusiast-and-fuck-buddy, which means she gets to dress a bit like Lara Croft and have sex in a tent. Typing this out, I’ve realised it isn’t Joe 90 at all. It’s Mr Benn, except you’re supposed to want to screw the lead character, because the lead character is the improbably gorgeous Eliza Dushku, not a two-dimensional paper cutout of a middle-aged businessman.

  It’s not just Quantum Leap week after week, mind. No. There’s a whole bunch of other characters walking around overseeing the ‘Dollhouse’ which Echo gets returned to each week. For instance, there’s a black ex-cop who has to oversee her missions by hiding round the corner in a van and tediously getting his cover blown. There’s also an irritating nerd who performs the mind-wipe-andbrain-filling ceremonies – one of those implausible, punchable little tits who only exists in TV or movies. Apparently he’s a scientific genius, although he looks about 12 years old and everything he says has to pass through about 500 pop culture irony filters before it leaves his smackable wise-cracking mouth. The minute he first popped up on screen, I instinctively knew me and Dollhouse would never be friends, in the same way that finding a Scouting for Girls album on someone’s iPod would stop you wanting to have sex with them.

  The improbably gorgeous Olivia Williams plays an icy boss-type woman who speaks in cool aloof ‘mission operative’ military codespeak the whole fucking time, and Tahmoh Penikett from Battlestar Galactica shows up as Agent Jawbone Hunk, an improbably gorgeous FBI bloke determined to uncover the truth about this ‘Dollhouse’ thing he’s heard about which his colleagues insist is just a wild rumour but he’s got this hunch there’s more to it than that and blah blah BLAH BLAH OH WHO CARES?

  It’s just nonsense. And nonsense is fine when it consists of a small kernel of nonsense surrounded by something either plausible or interesting. Dollhouse has neither and, crucially, there’s too much emphasis on empty prettiness, from the set design to the faces of all involved. Everyone’s so improbably gorgeous you won’t give a shit whether they live or die. Unless, perhaps, you’ve had your mind wiped and replaced with the brain of an orange – probably the premise for next week’s episode, which I won’t tune in for. Someone let me know if this bullshit gets going somewhere round season three, yeah?

  Greeks Got Talent [30 May 2009]

  Unless the weather’s majestically terrible or some new 9/11 magnitude event takes place, there’s absolutely no excuse for watching TV on holiday. If yo
u’re somewhere sunny, chances are you won’t watch anything at all, unless you’re such a dull football-liking git you think you’ll lose the ability to breathe if you can’t see the latest match via satellite in a horrific bar specialising in full English breakfasts and sugary cocktails surrounded by fellow pink-shouldered, cow-brained, hooting, awful wankers.

  By the time you read this I’ll be back, but right now I’m in Crete, staying in a place whose satellite TV system offers about 10 billion channels, approximately 100% of which aren’t in English. OK, so you can pick up the BBC World TV news channel, but no one’s ever willingly watched that for longer than nine minutes. It’s a channel whose viewer demographic consists exclusively of men sitting on the edge of a hotel bed impatiently waiting for their girlfriend to finish in the shower so they can go and have a shit.

  Part of the fun of having so many incomprehensible foreign channels is flicking through them and trying to guess what country they’re from. If you’re as ignorant as me, this is usually completely impossible. Lots of them look like news broadcasts from the Star Wars universe (specifically, the Clone Wars era). The basic visual grammar of news is always the same – host, desk, spinny CGI graphics and so on – but they’re often accompanied by national dress codes and entire alphabets I’ve never seen before. I swear one channel featured a newsreader with a designer lampshade on his head and a headline ticker comprising nothing but triangles and spirals scrolling right to left across the screen. I couldn’t tell you precisely what story he was reporting on, but I think it concerned a trade dispute in another dimension.

  News aside, there are hundreds of channels promoting phonewank services, usually with an Indian or Middle Eastern flavour. One consisted of a photo of a lady’s bum, a phone number, and nothing else. It didn’t change once during the six or seven hours I watched it.

  Still, every so often you stumble across something that authentically draws you in. The other night it got too windy to venture outside, and I wound up watching an Arabic TV movie (helpfully subtitled in English) about a guy called Majid who kidnapped an Iraqi general who’d killed his parents, and then agonised for ages (and ages and ages) over whether to shoot him or not. There were scenes shot in real bombed-out villages – incredibly disconcerting to my Western eyes – and despite being shot on pretty harsh video, the overall level of visual artistry seemed higher than the average British TV drama. Majid didn’t shoot him in the end, incidentally: the general escaped, only to be killed moments later by a landmine. God moves in predictable ways.

  But perhaps the most mesmerising thing I’ve seen was a few moments of the Greek incarnation of Britain’s Got Talent. It was instantly recognisable – same format, same logo, same visual grammar and similar acts. This only served to highlight the differences. Instead of young, slim Ant and Dec, there was one middle-aged paunchy bloke standing just off stage giggling to the cameras. The judges, meanwhile, were spectacular. Impossibly, they look even weirder than the British Morgan/Holden/Cowell line-up.

  There was a pretty woman, a bloke who resembled a bleached-blond pimp from the year 2049, and a terrifying man who appeared to have undergone extensive plastic surgery at the hands of a demented satirical artist – who’d decided to make him look precisely like David Hasselhoff morphing into Michael Jackson. I didn’t see him indoors. I was standing in the night air, watching him for several minutes on a silent plasma TV through the window of a shut hair salon, before snapping out of the trance and getting on with the holiday. Wherever you go, TV ultimately tastes the same. And there’s more than enough of it at home.

  Attack of the invisible pirates [6 June 2009]

  Ross Kemp sits talking to a group of British sailors in the bowels of a Royal Navy ship patrolling off the Somalian coast. ‘When you first signed up to the navy, did any of you expect to end up fighting pirates?’ he asks. ‘I did,’ says a guy at the back. ‘But then I joined in 1640.’ Everyone laughs.

  With the possible exception of those who’ve recently been machine-gunned in the face and tossed overboard by one, everyone loves modern pirates. They’ve brightened up the news considerably by making it sound more like a swashbuckling adventure movie than a tuneless paean to mankind’s perpetual failure.

  It’s the name. Our brains are hard-wired to find the word ‘pirates’ thrilling and slightly camp, although modern pirates don’t do any of the cool stuff the old, fictional ones used to do, like burying treasure, or making people walk the plank, or hobbling around on one leg with a parrot on their shoulder which keeps butting in to finish their sentences with a squawked rejoinder. Modern pirates are all T-shirts and mobile phones. Not to mention rocket launchers. They’re not really much fun at all, but because they’re still called ‘pirates’ we secretly think they’re great.

  That’s evocative brand names for you. If George Bush had called the US military ‘The Cowboys’, and the Elite Republican Guard ‘The Indians’, we’d probably have thought the invasion of Iraq was totally justified and brilliant.

  Anyway, Ross Kemp. There’s another brand name. He’s become shorthand for ‘macho documentary on the kind of subject Alan Partridge used to fantasise about’. Having tackled gangs and the Taliban, he’s moved on to international piracy, in Ross Kemp: In Search of Pirates. But do tell your dick not to grow turgid just yet. There’s a clue to the amount of actual piracy he encounters hidden in that title. In particular, note how they didn’t call it Ross Kemp: Fighting to the Death with Actual Bloodthirsty Pirates on the Listing Deck of a Sinking Ship in a Biblical Thunderstorm.

  I could do a documentary called Charlie Brooker: In Search Of Pirates in which I walked around Balham knocking on doors and asking if there’s anyone called Bluebeard in, and while it might not rate too well in the Audience Appreciation Index, no one could reasonably complain about the accuracy of the title.

  Anyway, Kemp’s much harder and tougher than me, so he does actually get reasonably close to some proper pirates, even though most of the first episode consists of him hovering over the ocean in a helicopter as the navy investigates one false alarm after another. What with all the publicity pirates have been getting of late, there are quite a few jittery boats off the African coast, see, and they’re likely to report suspicious activity at the merest sight of a fishing boat.

  When an act of piracy does occur, the navy finds out too late and consequently doesn’t really get to intervene. The helicopter with Ross in it flies quite close but has to keep its distance in case it gets brought down by an RPG (this is the point at which I’d be screaming to go home: like I said, Kemp’s harder and tougher than me). Shortly afterwards they find an abandoned skiff that’s been used by some pirates, with some weaponry and some petrol on it. Out of sheer frustration the navy crank up a giant machine-gun and spray it with bullets until it explodes, just like it would in a film. This means Ross gets to do a link with a big burning boat in the background. Everyone must have been delighted.

  Later in the series Kemp meets a genuine pirate face-to-face, although from what I can gather, instead of standing atop a mainsail, desperately fighting him off with a sword, he’s more interested in asking about the political and social problems that have created the phenomenon of modern piracy in the first place. Not fair. Far too sensible. But then Ross Kemp: Calmly Exploring the Topic of Pirates wouldn’t have looked so hot on the EPG, I suppose.

  Big Brother Q [13 June 2009]

  So then, Big Brother 9. I mean Big Brother 10. Or Big Brother Q. When I watched the launch night, I swear I could tell the housemates apart. Then I caught a bit of it a few days later and suddenly they’d all changed … except they absolutely hadn’t.

  It’s like that David Lynch movie where all the actors are recast halfway through yet their characters remain the same. Except in this case there aren’t any definable characters. Or a plot. Just some people wandering around muttering.

  To make things difficult for the casual viewer, two of the housemates quickly changed their names by deed poll as part of a ta
sk. Freddie, for instance – a slightly fey posho who always seems to be hesitantly smiling with his mouth open, like someone who’s arrived at the end of a joke and suddenly forgotten the punchline – had his name legally changed to ‘Halfwit’.

  This means Marcus Bentley now has to say ‘Halfwit is in the Diary Room’ on the voiceover every few minutes. Harmless chuckles, maybe, although I wonder what they’ll do if he has some terrible accident while he’s in there, a real Casualty episode-opener, such as tripping near a kitchen surface and puncturing an eye on a bread knife. How funny would the subsequent news reports sound then? (OK, quite funny, but that’s not the point.)

  The house also contains two identical booby blondes, one of whom is now called ‘Dogface’. This should confuse readers of Nuts magazine in a few months’ time, when they’re trying to masturbate to pictures of her with nothing on. So it’s not an entirely futile exercise. It would’ve been braver to simply rename all of them ‘Housemate One’, ‘Housemate Two’, and so on. Or – and here’s a far better idea – they could’ve named them all after characters from Coronation Street, then dressed the interior to closely resemble the Rover’s Return.

  Anyway, apart from Halfwit and Dogface, I’m not really sure who any of the other housemates actually are, even when I look at still photographs of them with their names written down underneath. Having watched and written about reality shows for years, the section of my brain that stores information about new contestants has finally been filled to capacity. It’s like trying to pour a quart into a pint jug. It just won’t go.

  If I squint really hard with my mind’s eye I can just about make out Sophia, the tiny shouty one who looks like a June Sarpong action figure. But even there I have doubts, because there’s also one called Saffia.