Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (14 page)

Which is why only flirts and dunces use them. Oh, and teenagers, who fall into both categories by default.

Nevertheless, for some unhinged reason, BBC1 considers text messaging remarkable enough to devote this evening to
The Joy of
Text
(BBC1), a broadcast that promises to be jam-packed with all the thrills and spills you’ve come to associate with the ASCII-based SMS mobile communications system.

They might as well broadcast nothing but a caption reading ‘WE HAVE GIVEN UP’. Or simply tour the nation door to door, asking viewers to watch ITV instead. In fact, they’re doing something only marginally less humiliating: bunging on a documentary that’s simply one of the most desperate, worthless non-programmes ever to cross the airwaves.

How desperate? Well, for starters, it relies heavily on talking-head contributions from Vanessa Feltz, Steps, John McCririck, Ian Wright and Hannah Waterman.

Q: Hannah Waterman?

A: Yes, you know – Ian’s wife in
EastEnders
. Dennis Waterman’s daughter.

Q: Ah. So what’s she got to do with text messaging?

A: Ummmm …

Despite clearly having been selected solely on the basis of their availability rather than any particular interest in text-based mobile communications, the nano-celebs in question gamely chirrup away about this astonishingly TV-friendly phenomenon.

‘You know the rude ones where you get pictures on the screen? I can’t get them on my phone for some reason, which is really disappointing,’ reveals Waterman.

‘When I’m angry, I write things like “What the bloody hell are you talking about?”’ confesses Ian Wright.

On and on they go, occasionally pointing at their phones and smiling when there simply isn’t anything to add. Worst of all, it’s hard to shake the nagging suspicion that these pointless pieces-to-camera are being stored in a vault somewhere, to be resurrected in nine years when ‘I Love 2001’ hits the screens.

Perhaps the lowest point is when they’re asked to input the
words ‘I have discovered the joy of text’ into their mobiles, against the clock, while the Formula One theme tune plays in the background.

Q: Why?

A: To see who’s fastest at inputting text messages.

Q: Yeah, but
why
?

A: I DON’T KNOW.

Still, it isn’t all celebrity typing. There’s also a selection of true-life SMS stories (a man who met his future wife by sending a random text message, a woman who sent details of her sex life to the wrong number, blah-boring-blah) reconstructed in such plodding detail, chances are you’ll begin to wonder what’s making your chest wet, then realise you’ve been weeping for the last 10 minutes.

Perhaps the evening’s live elements will cheer you up: we’re promised an opportunity to ‘interact’ with Ulrika Jonsson via text message. And it’s just possible they could make this bit interesting. Perhaps you’ll be able to make obscenities appear on her forehead. Or rewrite her autocue so she ends up imploring the audience to hurl their first-born out of the window. I once had an idea for a live TV show called ‘Text Message Theatre’ where actors holding mobiles read dialogue supplied off the cuff by viewers at home: if they go anywhere near that, I’m suing. But don’t hold your breath. According to the preview blurb, viewers will be encouraged to send in their own anecdotes and jokes, the best of which will be collected in a book.

Q: If SMS messaging is such an amazing means of communicating, how come these contributions have to be collected in a book – a centuries-old form of communication?

A: Because text messages are rubbish, and anyone vaguely interested in them should have their brain impounded.

The Joy of Text
smacks of desperation; of taking an idea that might fill a passable 15 minutes on BBC Choice and stretching it right across the Saturday night schedules like a grubby tarpaulin. To tune in for 20 minutes, you’d have to be stupid. But to sit through two and a half hours? U’D HAV 2 B A RT CNT.

Remember when it became legal for betting shops to have proper, clear windows you could see through? Made a huge difference to their image. For years they’d been secretive male hidey-holes with a whiff of sleazy mystique – and suddenly casual bystanders were afforded a glimpse within.

And what did we see? Invariably, a roomful of chain-smoking, ruddy-faced drunks chewing the ends of their stunted biros, staring grim-faced at a bank of winking televisions upon which their dreams got strangled on a daily basis. Failed betting slips and fag butts littering the floor around them like the dandruff of despair. In other words, a scene about as far removed from the glamour of
Casino
Royale
as it’s possible to get without lying in a skip lapping rainwater.

But gambling fought back. First came the Lottery, which turned widespread financial disappointment into a popular phenomenon. Then the white-trash aesthetic became hip, and twenty-somethings started flocking to Las Vegas to blend in alongside genuine US mullet-wearers, ironically pump coins into fruit machines and snap up authentically tacky $5 T-shirts that would set you back £85 in a Covent Garden prick boutique.

Now here comes the third and final stage of the Great Gambling Makeover –
Banzai
(C4), a pseudo-Japanese game show which gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘odds’ by shamelessly encouraging viewers to bet on the outcome of a relentless stream of absurd situations. Two geriatrics race towards each other in motorised wheelchairs – which will chicken out first? When a one-legged footballer takes on a one-armed goalkeeper, who will be the victor? How many helium-filled balloons does it take to lift a kitten into the sky? You could say
Banzai
prompts you to ask questions you’d never normally contemplate. You’d be right.

It’s a con trick really –
Banzai
feels fresh and different, despite the fact that it’s actually a compendium of the kind of self-consciously off-beat comedy stunts Chris Evans used to pull on
TFI Friday
week after week (‘How many hotdogs can Anna Friel poke down her cleavage?’ – that kind of thing), but given a late-
night adult twist (i.e. it contains penises).

Three things make
Banzai
work. First, it’s blessed with some of the finest TV graphics in years: hyper-kinetic idents which emulate the sensation of drinking too much wine, being smacked in the temples with a cricket bat, and left to wander through a Japanese typography exhibition searching for the exit. It’s exceptionally close to the look and feel of ‘Bishi Bashi Special’, an obscure PlayStation game that could probably sue if it grew feet and walked to a lawyer.

Next, they’ve managed to talk a squadron of minor celebrities into participating in some spectacularly degrading games. In the first programme, we’re treated to Harold Bishop knocking on doors and running away, Peter Davison voting on which other Doctor Who he’d most like to sodomise and erstwhile Channel Five chef Nancy Lam having her left breast hoisted in the air to find out how much it weighs. Good sports – but the true hero is surely the researcher who had to explain the idea to them on the phone.

Finally: the gambling. Originally on E4, the show came with an interactive option that kept track of your guesses and provided a final score – in effect turning it into a primitive computer game and making it infinitely more compelling as a result. Sadly, C4 either can’t or won’t retain that bit of high-tech hoo-hah for this mother-ship channel re-run, thereby forcing viewers to revert to old-fashioned interactivity – watching with a friend and holding discussions out loud. Damn them. And there is a slight aftertaste. Like so many other programmes these days,
Banzai
is tainted by a vague, sneering misanthropy directed toward anyone who isn’t a middle-class twenty-something media git; it uses fat, old and disabled people as participants precisely because of their ‘freak’ value and prompts us to laugh at faded celebrities as though a lack of media exposure renders human beings worthless.

A quick recommendation: watch
Alt TV: The Lift
(C4), in which film-maker Mark Isaacs stands in a council block elevator for days, starting brief conversations with everyone who gets in. Unless someone lends you a copy of
Kes
or you get a job beating newborn kittens to death with a hammer, odds are it’s the most heartbreaking thing you’ll see all week.

Being neurotic has plenty of drawbacks, but on the positive side you never get bored. I, for example, am completely paranoid about accidents. As far as I’m concerned they’re lurking everywhere, waiting to strike – and this constant sense of impending doom imbues every second of my life with exciting nervous tension. Sit me on a train and I anticipate a crash. Stand me on a balcony and I imagine a freak gale gusting me over the edge. Leave me in a meadow and I picture myself being licked to death by cows. In its own way, my everyday existence is just as thrilling as the climactic scenes of
Die
Hard
. Even now, sitting here typing, I’m acutely aware of danger: you never know, the ‘M’ key could fly off and lodge in my eye. It could. It could.

You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. There must be similarly morbid cowards all over the country – hence the widespread appeal of real-life It-Could-Be-You horrorthons such as 999 (BBC1) – now in its tenth series.

Tenth. That’s a lot of broken bones and sudden impalements. It shouldn’t be called
999
at all, of course. No. It should be called ‘Fuck!’ because: 1) that’s precisely what you’d shout if any of the things detailed in the programme actually happened to you; 2) such a title would complement the dimly pornographic nature of the reconstructions, which share plenty in common with the average video skinflick – voyeur-friendly activity, a cast of unknowns, seasick camerawork, gasps, grunts, and the occasional slow-motion shot of bodily fluid arcing through the heavens.

The best accidents, of course, are the ones you can easily imagine happening to you – which makes this week’s show a slight disappointment, featuring as it does an unusual yachting boo-boo, a freak electrocution involving farming machinery, an earthquake, and an arresting sequence in which a charity skydiver dressed as Santa Claus shatters his bones against the roof of a football stadium before landing comatose on the pitch, thereby earning himself a place in the
Guinness Book of Records
as the man who disturbed the greatest number of spectating children in the shortest period of time.

The calamities are ushered into position, as ever, by Michael Buerk, a man whose head looks like its been whittled from a particularly gnarled tree stump by a demented midget armed with a sharpened spoon.

And what’s up with his eyes? He permanently squints at the camera as though it’s a small sun. Squint back and he starts to vaguely resemble Clint Eastwood – until he opens his mouth and starts pouring out his links with the same kind of mock-sympathetic timbre Simon Bates used to employ during
Our Tune
, albeit with the additional gravitas that goes with a) being a widely respected television journalist and b) knowing he doesn’t have to play ‘Too Many Broken Hearts’ by Jason Donovan immediately afterwards.

George Best’s Body
(C4) tells the familiar tale of the footballer’s slow-motion plunge from grace, but does so in an innovative way – by charting the toll his lifestyle has taken on various parts of his body, from his legs (relentlessly hammered by brutal tackles – the only chance the opposing side had of stopping the light-footed genius) to his liver (which probably resembles a screaming walnut by now). Taking a historical tour around your subject’s body is an interesting way of presenting a biography – there’s scope for a series of these, surely. They might even be able to explain the origins of Michael Buerk’s squint. Should they bother, the results would probably be more entertaining than
American Vampires
(C4), an isn’t-this-nasty shockumentary about ‘real-life blood drinkers’, which contains footage of people in eyeliner standing around drinking small amounts of one another’s gorejuice.

Amidst the yuks we’re offered mind-boggling statements such as ‘Teens are attracted to the vampire scene because it offers stability’ in an apparent attempt to convince us vampirism is a burgeoning social phenomenon, instead of being precisely what it looks like: a tiny subset of goths trying to be scary. If they dressed up as ghost-train skeletons and ran around going ‘whoooo’ I’d have far more respect for them.

‘Personal ads on the Internet suggest there are blood drinkers all over the world,’ concludes the narration. And with reliable sources like that, who can argue?

Not me. I’m far too busy prising this ‘M’ key from my eye socket. Can you injure yourself dialling 999? Bet you can.

The dot.com crash has had unforeseen consequences. First, and most importantly, the price of novelty mousemats has plummeted. Then there’s the effect it’s had on our advertisers, who have lost their minds.

Eighteen months ago they were sitting pretty, handling huge accounts from huge online clients. It was ‘branding’ and ‘identity’ and ‘massive fourth-quarter spends’ all round. Huge sums were blown creating high-production TV commercials that only served to make already baffling online ventures appear twenty-six times more baffling. Take the epic ad for breathe.com in which a miserablelooking couple stood on the beach making the tide go in and out with their breath. Cost a fortune. Explained nothing. Looked great on a showreel.

Now the dot. coms have limped offstage, taking their marketing budgets with them, and the only ‘massive fourth-quarter spends’ most agency creatives are going to encounter this year will be in the form of psychoanalysis fees. Like the cast of
Alive
, they’re turning to cannibalism to survive. TV commercials are eating themselves.

Take Budweiser. First came the Budweiser frogs. Then came the Budweiser lizards, discussing the Budweiser frogs. Then came ‘whassup’. Now the lizards are back, discussing ‘whassup’. It’s enough to turn you to drink. Which is presumably the idea.