Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (3 page)

Still, out of many millions of viewers, only four actually complained, while the rest gawped on in pleasure, drowsily spooning mouthfuls of congealing Bolognese into their glistening chops while Quigley eventually sputtered his last, courtesy of a broken rib poking through his lung. With any luck the success of this unusually bleak
Street
story line will encourage Granada to crank up the show’s violence quota considerably, turning it into something akin to an Alan Bennett adaptation of
Fight Club
.

Even the sponsorship stings could join in the fray: whose heart could fail to be lightened by a sequence in which one of those cheery Cadbury’s chocolate proles unexpectedly plunges a shortbread screwdriver into a co-worker’s forehead, then jigs with delight as the caramel brains ooze out and slap messily against the marshmallow cobblestones? Well?

If the
Street
fails to capitalise on its gore-spattered lead, the remaining soaps should seize the initiative and usher back in a golden age of needless violence. Remember
Dynasty
’s machine-gun massacre?
Brookside
’s Jordache stabbing? We deserve to see their like again.

EastEnders
should try harder. For starters, they can forget about supposed arch-baddie Nick Cotton. The man simply isn’t menacing; he’s half as terrifying as an Argos catalogue. Whereas Jez Quigley looked as though he’d enjoy riding an onyx stallion through a field full of groaning, recently impaled victims before galloping home to bathe in the blood of the fallen, Nick Cotton merely looks like he might, at a push, dispute the price of a dented tin of custard with a supermarket checkout girl while you wait behind him, wondering when he last washed his hair.

Here’s what they should do: with a nod to the recent box-office success of
Gladiator
, they should dig up that drab little garden in the centre of Albert Square and replace it with an immense coliseum 
in which Walford residents settle their differences. Phil Mitchell is no Russell Crowe, but what a thrill it would be to watch him mercilessly pursuing Sonia around a sand-filled arena, frantically twirling a mace. They could take bets on the BBC website, and donate the proceeds to Children In Need: I’ll have a tenner on Barry Evans (trident, net) versus Beppe (twin daggers, shield). And Roy could make an excellent thumbs-up/thumbs-down Caesar figure, although you’d have to shield your eyes if he turned round suddenly and his toga rode up.

Speaking of togas, our soaps could do with more naked flesh too.

Sex-crazed
Hollyoaks
(aka ‘S Club 7 Street’) is currently the market leader – it’s like watching a group of aroused, anatomically correct Chapman Brothers dummies jostling in a tube carriage. It recently featured an entirely implausible naturist swimming club, and now both
Brookside
and
EastEnders
are to follow, showcasing special ‘nudity’ subplots. Albert Square is set to be rocked by plans for a nude calendar shoot of Queen Vic regulars. If you’re reading this while eating, you’ll be delighted to learn the April page features a blistering close-up of a full-frontal Ian Beale sprawling open-legged on a leather sofa.

Not really. Still, thank your lucky stars Ethel’s dead, or they might have crowned her Miss July. Then again, they still might.

PART ONE 2000

 

 

In which
Casualty
is slated, Sadowitz is praised, and a man 
called Craig wins the first
Big Brother.

 

Hate your job? Weep yourself awake each Monday morning? Spend the working day toying with your desktop icons while nonchalantly contemplating suicide? Ever considered doing something – anything – else? Then whatever you do, don’t look to the coming week’s television for inspiration. Tucked away in the schedules are four glaring examples of the very worst careers imaginable this side of ‘oil-rig bitch’.

First up servile pandering, or ‘being a butler’, as it’s commonly known.
Country
House
(BBC2) charts life at Woburn Abbey. We watch as newbie butler Grant, a fresh-faced cross between Tintin and Rick Astley, is inaugurated into the laugh-a-decade world of the stately-home servant.

He receives a lesson in pointlessly polishing silverware from a man who’s spent 30 years pointlessly polishing silverware himself, and doesn’t care who knows it. Grant learns it takes over half an hour to ‘do’ a single tiny lid, scrubbing away while the great smell of ammonia slowly chews his face off. Later, he has to polish the entire contents of an immense cabinet full of ornate heirlooms. Presumably his predecessor bashed his own brains out with a pewter kettle during some kind of despair-fuelled epiphany.

Crap job number two: the drudge-a-rific life of the secretary. Not that
The Lipstick Years: Sec’s Appeal
(BBC2) could give two hoots about anything as mundane as that. Instead Lowri Turner, adopting the presentational style of an actor in a DFS commercial, takes a scattergun look at wildly unrepresentative examples of the ‘personal assistant’. We’re treated to soundbites from current and former aides of Mohamed Al Fayed, Max Clifford, Ian Fleming and Andy Peters, coupled with worthless observations from Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny) and Anneka Rice (on the grounds that she used to be a secretary), punctuated by clips from old films and comedy shows. The few interesting revelations are so hopelessly lost behind the mass of knuckleheaded showbiz static that by the end you’ll have formed absolutely no opinions at all, except one: Lowri Turner is extremely annoying.

Job number three is easily the worst: sitting in a laboratory with a hood over your head while a scientist pumps the stench of rotten meat and shit up your nose until your stomach starts convulsing.

This takes place in the wonderful
Anatomy of Disgust
(C4), a new series pondering the ‘forgotten emotion’. Even when offered financial incentives, we’re told no one can withstand the hooded nasal ordeal for more than five minutes. The idea is to come up with a ‘stink bomb’ alternative to tear gas that can aid crowd dispersal. ‘We prefer to end the experiment before the subjects actually vomit into the hood,’ chuckles the maniac responsible.

The programme is packed with interesting theories (apparently we find excrement disgusting because it’s an ‘ambiguous substance’ – not because it stinks, then) and several truly arresting sights. Professor Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania attempts to cajole children into taking bites from a dog turd sculpted from chocolate (toddlers will, eight-year-olds won’t). Later, in a truly bizarre demonstration of our capacity for disgust, he taps a nasty-looking Ritz cracker on a Nazi officer’s cap, and then offers it to a woman, who suddenly decides she’d rather not eat it, thanks. (Attention, Brit Art wannabes: tape the show, isolate and slow down this sequence, loop it, dub ‘You Win Again’ by Hot Chocolate over the top, and bingo: a video art installation.)

Job number four is similarly strange: quantifying the beliefs of the woefully mistaken.

In
Jackpot
(BBC2) William Hill employee Graham Sharpe calculates the odds for unusual bets, a task which involves dealing with countless UFO / Loch Ness Monster buffs, and people like Peter Boniface.

In 1994 Boniface put £25 on each of his three children having a number one hit single by the age of 21, even though they sound like a dog getting its scrotum caught between the spokes of a passing motorcycle.

‘I don’t believe people are born with talent … a passion for what you’re doing, that’s what makes a champion,’ he announces cheerfully, sitting in front of a bookshelf closely resembling the self-improvement section of Waterstones (you know: titles like
‘Conquering Reality: Enjoy Imaginary Success Through the Miracle of Delusion’).

Charitably, Sharpe gave odds of 250 to 1. Boniface gets £27,500 if his children succeed; enough to keep him in upbeat go-getter manuals until the apocalypse. Magic.

Is Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek real? A faultless cross between David Attenborough and a Stepford wife, she makes it through the whole of
Cousins – The Monkeys
(BBC1) without once losing her saccharine poise, even when clambering up a tree or wading knee-deep through a murky river in search of a camera-friendly primate to fawn over. She seems to have been programmed to address the camera with a non-threatening smile every 15 seconds, and to be honest, it’s a little bit frightening.

Maybe she isn’t actually there at all. Maybe she’s some kind of sinister virtual avatar, digitally inserted into every scene by a fat Californian in an air-conditioned Santa Monican FX lab, silently licking Dorito salt from his lips as he subtly adjusts the camber of her left eyebrow. This pixel-perfect grace, combined with her movie-star looks and jolly-hockey-sticks-up-the-jungle attire, makes her practically identical to ‘Tomb Raider’ heroine Lara Croft – although, unlike Croft, whenever Uhlenbroek encounters a wild animal she doesn’t blast it repeatedly in the face with a shotgun while performing random somersaults through the air.

Pity – a spot of acrobatic violence would improve things immensely. The overall tone is so unrelentingly, chokingly benign they may as well have ditched the title
Cousins
and called it ‘I Wuv Monkey-Wunkies’ instead. We see almost as much of Smiling Uhlenbroek as we do of the simians themselves, and in each shot she’s beaming like a Persil mum, gooning and cooing over the wretched things until you feel like snatching one from her hands and kicking it into the sky. Kids will love it, but kids are fundamentally stupid, really, aren’t they?

Fundamental stupidity of a different kind abounds in
I Dare You
(C5), a gaudy look at the world of daredevils. This week, a Roberto Benigni lookalike calling himself ‘Super Joe Reed’ performs a bungee jump from a helicopter hovering 200 feet above the whirling blades of a second helicopter situated on the ground.

If helicopter number one dips too low, or the elastic rope snaps, Super Joe will be instantly carved into a thousand gruesome slices – so it’s nice to know his wife and two young children are on the ground, recording Dad’s potential death plunge on the family camcorder.

‘I do get concerned sometimes, but Joe is very safety-conscious,’ says wife Jennifer, as her husband prepares to yo-yo above a twirling razor-sharp rotor for the sake of low-brow entertainment.

‘I’m going to come what they call “dangerously close” to those blades,’ announces the man himself, authoritatively.

Before the leap, we’re treated to a soft-focus flip through Joe’s biography. A Fed Ex deliveryman during the week, his obsessive drive to indulge in derring-do grew from a need to impress his Vietnam vet father. ‘I was trying to get Dad’s attention every time I jumped off a ramp on a motorcycle,’ he confesses, over moving slomo footage of himself sustaining a serious injury. He seems genuinely unfazed by the potential dangers of the helicopter-bungee stunt. ‘If I’m going to go out, I’m going to go out in a blaze of glory,’ he says – although ‘in a hideous accident’ would surely be more accurate.

Disappointingly, come the jump itself, he doesn’t lose so much as a fingertip – and despite the presence of cameras on the ground, we’re only shown the crucial moments from an overhead angle, making it impossible to judge how close Super Joe actually came to the blades.

Still, watching him dangle above the churning rotor prompts an intriguing question: if the stunt went wrong, what kind of exotic, disjointed thoughts would pulse through Super Joe’s fevered consciousness at the precise moment the top of his head was lopped off and his brain got sliced into a tumbling flock of slippery grey mind-steaks?

I have absolutely no idea, but the accompanying visions probably 
wouldn’t be a million miles away from the luridly hallucinogenic look of
The Powerpuff Girls
(Cartoon Network), a demented Hanna-Barbera cartoon series that plays like a cross between Japanese anime, Roger Ramjet, and the sort of thing you might see while suffering an unexpected blow to the back of the head.

Endlessly inventive, subversive and surreal – in a sane world this would be broadcast each night in place of the news. One of the recurring characters is a monkey: Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek could tune in especially to smile at him. For ages.

They may be plastic, they may be dull, they may even be managed by Pete Waterman, but ho ho ho, we all love Steps really, don’t we?

No. And nor will you if you’re reckless enough to watch
Steps into
Summer
(BBC1), a Bank Holiday extravaganza which is less fun than falling over and breaking your jaw on a door frame.

The show maintains an air of market-town mundanity from beginning to end, and contains several scenes some viewers may find distressing, such as an excruciating montage in which Michael Buerk, John Craven, Handy Andy, Titchmarsh, Dimmock, and countless other dignity-phobic nano-celebs are seen capering about awkwardly in time to Steps’ cover of ‘Tragedy’. Does anyone else find these ‘amusingly’ edited musical interludes almost impossible to withstand? Earlier this year, the obscene sight of Anthony Worrall Thompson miming to ‘Ooh La La’ by the Wiseguys in a
Food and Drink
trailer made me want to sew my eyes shut with fishing wire; this new Steps poptrocity makes me want to saw my own head open and scrape the memories out with a spoon.