Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (17 page)

Like
Derren Brown: Mind Control 2
(C4). Derren Brown, who looks like a man playing the Master in ‘Doctor Who: The Soho Years’, is a psychological street magician who wanders around bending minds: a kind of David Blaine for the brain.

Brown pulls astonishing tricks, such as guessing a PIN number by staring into the cardholder’s eyes, and talking a group of girls into suffering collective hallucinations. Clearly the greatest dinner party guest in history, he’s either a balls-out con artist or the scariest man in Britain.

Writing television listings – it’s a bit like writing poetry, isn’t it?

Well, no, obviously it absolutely isn’t, in any way, shape or form, but bear with me because I’m trying to go somewhere with this, and if you’re not prepared to suspend your disbelief (and your critical judgement) for 10 minutes this is going to be embarrassing for both of us.

So then. Surely there’s no doubt that writing accurate listings is something of an art form. Squeezing a precise description of a potentially complex programme into a single sentence is a rigorous test of anyone’s prose skills, and the end result is often more functional than emotive – a mere explanation of events rather than a flavoursome portrayal. How, for instance, could anyone hope to convey the unique tear-jerking magic of
This Is My Moment
(ITV) in just twelve words, without hand signals?

The answer is this: television listings writers really ought to turn to poetry. Or, to be more specific, they should write their listings in the form of haiku. Yes, haiku – the wistful, 17-syllable Japanese art form that’s as delicate as a bone-china teacup and almost twice as beautiful. What better device to evoke the mood of a broadcast than a five-seven-five-formation stanza?

And so, with this in mind, and in the spirit of wild experimentation, this week, in place of the usual guttersnipe sneering, I bring you art. I bring you poetry. Ladies and gentlemen – I bring you the week’s television highlights, as viewed through the winsome lens of haiku.

Don’t snigger. They’ll be doing this next week in the
Radio Times
. Just you wait and see.

So there you go. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, but most of all we’ve come away with a far better sense of how it feels to sit down and watch these shows, haven’t we? Try writing some of your own. Right now. Send them to me and I’ll print the finest examples in a forthcoming column. Together, we can change the face of TV listings.

Do you trust fish? I don’t. It’s the tiny bones. I can’t taste fish without simultaneously picturing myself choking to death, hands clawing desperately at my throat, wheezing purple-faced into the afterlife. No amount of tartar sauce can disguise that. I know. I’ve tried.

Fish apologists like to point out that they’re only full of tiny bones because they’re intrinsically tiny creatures. I disagree. I think the fish are just being bloody-minded. But then I’ve had it in for them ever since a friend told me I had the face of a bloated, disconsolate cod. Now each time I look in the mirror I feel like a man staring at a doomed aquarium. Bitter? Of course I’m bitter.

Still, if you think cod are ugly, you clearly haven’t seen some of the deep-sea yuksters dredged up in
Blue Planet
(BBC1). There are things down there that would make Captain Birdseye shit his beard through his arse: living, wobbling hallucinations, with big bug-eyes and gleaming tentacles, quivering around in the darkness like the inmates of some ghastly biological ghost train.

Fortunately, the programme also contains enough magnificent beauty to render the more unattractive moments palatable.

If you thought the computer-generated majesty of
Space
was impressive, you’ll be astonished by the quality of the graphics Mother Nature has thoughtfully provided for this series. Swirling tornadoes of fish, colossal blue whales with hearts the size of automobiles, incoming squadrons of eerie hammerhead sharks – it’s all here, and there isn’t a pixel out of place. There’s even the unsettling sight of an entire coastline engulfed by a mile-wide slick of discarded herring semen; the by-product of a mass underwater love-in. Delightful.

Far less impressive creatures shoal their way through a different kind of Bluewater in
Shopology
(BBC2), which sets out to disclose the devious means by which shopping mall architects and snivelling brand-management succubi induce the entire population of the world into blowing its wages on superfluous pap, but instead spends so much time flitting around the globe gathering soundbites that you wind up none the wiser.

It also contains the gruesome spectacle of Trevor Beattie (hair by Michael Hutchence; facially, a cross between Jim Broadbent and notorious pornographer Ben Dover) blathering on about his deeply tedious French Connection ‘fcuk’ campaign, which convinced idiots nationwide to spend their Saturday afternoons trotting up and down the high street decked out in grubby slogans, when they really ought to have stayed home doing something constructive, like plunging screwdrivers into their own thighs.

And once Trevor’s finished Explaining His Art, it’s over to Joe Public for the people’s say. ‘I love all this fcuk stuff; it’s crazy,’ gurgles an impressed imbecile, instantly condemning himself to three hours of vividly imagined blowtorch torture in a corner of my head.

If I were king, anyone who’d ever so much as smirked at an fcuk billboard would be drowned in a giant bucket during a live Christmas broadcast.

Seriously: what does someone that dim actually
do
when they’re not out consuming or trying to mate with other dunces? My guess is this: they lie slobbering on their backs, clapping their hands together and barking like seals. Throw them a fish, someone. We’ll gather round, watch them choke on tiny bones.

Last week’s Stilgoe-style request for TV-listings-as-haiku prompted an unexpected deluge, which I shall trawl through at leisure, selecting the primest examples for your future enjoyment. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with my two favourite entries thus far.

Keep them coming – with any luck I’ll eventually receive enough to compile one of those hateful ‘Little Book of …’ things, the profits of which will go towards some pioneering plastic surgery.

I’m having a set of gills installed. The way I figure it, if you already look like a cod, you might as well go the whole hog. Wish me luck.

Six things you shouldn’t do on a date: 1) pick your teeth; 2) pick your companion’s teeth; 3) cry and smash plates over your head; 4) confess to murder (of course it’s been eating away at your conscience all these years, but for God’s sake save it for later); 5) dab a finger in your armpit and ask if they think your sweat smells like
fried onion; 6) bring a camera crew and a team of ‘dating experts’ to dissect your every move in minute detail.

The latter, of course, is precisely what happens in
Would Like to
Meet
(BBC2) and
Perfect Match
(C4), two programmes this week aimed at curing singletons of their isolated status through the miracle of outside interference.

Both shows are abysmally watchable, of course, because they relentlessly tickle the throbbing voyeur tonsil that dangles somewhere in the centre of your brain. Or maybe that’s just
my
brain I’m referring to – I’ve been told I’m the nosiest person in Britain (I don’t like the term ‘nosey’ – I prefer ‘aggressively observant’).

The two shows have opposed points of view.
Perfect Match
operates on the assumption that, hey, people should just be themselves, then it sets about finding them an ideal partner in a bid to create a couple so compatible they’ll quickly osmose into a single two-headed creature.
Would Like To Meet
, on the other hand, simply encourages its subjects to lie in a desperate bid to make themselves seem more attractive. OK, I’m exaggerating: it doesn’t actually encourage them to lie but it does fling them at the mercy of three irritatingly confident ‘gurus’ – a ‘body-language guru’ (top tip: don’t spend the entire date sitting on your thumb and squealing), a ‘conversation guru’ (top tip: never try to slip the word ‘infanticide’ into casual conversation), and a ‘style guru’, who, somewhat bizarrely, dresses more like a pharmaceutical rep than a fashion editor (top tip: don’t turn up with glue in your hair and a crude biro swastika on your forehead).

Together they aim to turn dowdy sadsacks into dynamic sexbags, through the simple method of relentlessly picking apart their subject’s unattractive qualities (slumping, self-deprecating, gargling phlegm in mid-conversation, etc.) and demanding change within six weeks. Overseeing this somewhat bullish transformation process is the aggressively mumsy Lowri Turner, bubbling about like a cross between Bridget Jones and a boxing coach, practically turning pink at the life-affirming niceness of it all.

Irritatingly, their combined advice seems to work, apparently having a positive effect on their quarry’s confidence level – and
therefore their attractiveness – by the end of the programme. Of course, it’s possible that as soon as the cameras leave they will make a clumsy bid to harm themselves with a teaspoon before slumping to the floor in a shuddering heap.

Perfect Match
is altogether creepier, except this time there’s only one professional guru on the panel (in this case an orange, vaguely Beppe-like ‘relationship guru’ sporting a micro-beard). The other two instant experts are friends of the singleton in question (a 25-year- old Essex-born subeditor for the
Sun
, no less, who alarmingly peppers his conversation with grammatical errors). Together the trio audition potential partners on his behalf, à la
Popstars
, whittling an initial flurry of fifty girls down to one, who then ‘wins’ the opportunity to move into the
Sun
sub’s house for three weeks to see if the pair hit it off (i. e., have sexual intercourse). It all goes wrong before it goes right, of course, and therein the voyeurtainment value lies.

So, two more programmes that feed Ordinary Joes through the public scrutiniser. A good thing? No, but anything that distracts nosey parkers like me from peering at the neighbours for an hour shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. At least these saps signed release forms first.

Finally, on a totally different note, two last examples of the TV listings haiku you’ve been sending me: