Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (21 page)

Now I’ve crossed the divide: too young for cardigans; too old for anything vaguely attractive. There it goes: my sense of style, vanishing into the distance at 10,000 m.p.h., leaving me floundering in a sea of crap trousers. I’m stuck here. And unless the ‘oblivious buffoon’ look comes in, I’m screwed for life.

I dislike clothes, although the alternative is unthinkable. But, Christ, how I loathe fashionable young men, with their skinny frames and their streetwise attire and their understated self-confidence. I feel like taking a baseball bat to the lot of them, although even then I’d probably pick an unfashionable brand of bat, or
somehow manage to knock their brains out in a cluelessly passé kind of way – using an underarm swing when the overarm swipe’s more ‘now’, perhaps – and everyone would sneer at me, including the arresting officer.

The rage is motivated by jealousy, of course, since I’m too homely to pull it off myself. I’ve got a face like a punctured beachball, like an arse that’s fallen downstairs, like a rucksack full of dented bells. The coolest shirt on earth becomes a nondescript rag the moment you add my Tolkienesque features to the equation. Put me in a suit and bingo: Gollum in his Sunday best.

Hence my sudden interest in turd-polishing exercise
What Not
To Wear
(BBC2), the new ‘makeover show’ hosted by wilfully catty double act Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine. The format: find a frumpy prole with the fashion sense of Tony Martin, then send Trinny and Susannah in to point out the myriad faults in their attire. They don’t pull punches. If that skirt makes your backside resemble a bloated pumpkin, if your choice of collar turns your entire head into a gruesome accident, Trinny and Susannah will tell you, gleefully and on camera. Once all remaining dignity has been stripped clean away, said prole is suddenly given £2,000 and commanded to buy a new wardrobe, with two provisos: 1) they must follow a set of fashion ‘rules’ handed down by Trinny and Susannah, and 2) their shopping expedition takes place on camera.

It’s all just about entertaining enough, with the hosts walking a fine line between likeable and annoying. Trinny’s a rake; so thin she could crawl through an empty biro casing if the mood struck her, while Susannah’s plump and mumsy and obsessed with other women’s boobs, lurching at them like Sid James in
Carry On up the
Tribunal
. ‘We’ll have to get you a proper bra,’ she says, eyes agleam, kneading the subject’s mammaries, sometimes heaving them apart and hoisting them aloft for good measure. Curiously, she dresses rather badly; a glaring flaw in a show like this.

Another flaw: both of them have posh accents – always off-putting. The upper classes really shouldn’t open their mouths on television. Whatever it is they’re saying, all your brain actually hears is ‘Tra la la, I live in a bubble, tra la la, murder a fox, tra la la,
Conde Nast Traveller, tra la la, Kensington High Street, tra la la.’ They should know their place and keep quiet.

That aside,
What Not To Wear
does dispense useful advice during its half-hour duration, and the transformation of frump-to-flower is authentically heartwarming, more than can be said for anything in
It’s a Girl Thing
(C4), a misguided hybrid of catwalk and sitcom, clearly inspired by
Sex and the City
, but with fashion dilemmas in place of sexual ones. Trouble is, it’s
Sex and the City
minus the wit. And the budget. And the sex. And the city.

The result is a bit like finding yourself trapped inside one of those Z-grade Bridget Jones-like chick-lit novels that make you want to kill people; all kooky cover art and characters who say ‘Crumbs!’

I can’t remember much of the script, but it goes something like this: 

GIRL
#1: Durr, umm, durr, ugh durrr um durr.

GIRL
#2: Durr? Durr umm durr!

GIRL
#3: Does my brain look thick in this?

GIRL
#4: Crumbs!

This week’s episode centres on a guide to buying swimwear: just what you need in December. And it doesn’t even offer concrete guidance: come the episode’s end, the girls conclude, ‘It doesn’t matter what you wear, so long as you feel comfortable.’

Novelty slippers all round, then. Cheers for the advice.

Finished? Good. You were awful. You stank like a drain full of skunk guts. Close the door on your way out. And thanks for nothing. I sincerely hope you kill yourself. Yes, 2001 was the year of the nasty talent show – programme after programme in which aspirants had their fragile dreams torn apart in front of a nation. ‘New Faces with Bollockings’. ‘Opportunity Nots’. First came
Popstars
, a desperate search for the kind of stellar talent that could redefine pop – or, at the very least, pad out Hear’Say. Of course, panel member ‘Nasty’ Nigel Lythgoe (played by Admiral Ackbar from
Return of the Jedi
)
was the real star, oozing Partridge glamour as he poured cold piss on the flames of enthusiasm.

Not that most of them didn’t deserve a verbal kicking. Was there a more unpleasant spectacle this year than the sight of countless spoilt Britney wannabes tearfully brushing off their rejection with bratty blubs of ‘I
will
make it one day – somehow. I will, you’ll see. I’ll be famous. It’ll happen. It’s my destiny.’ Listen carefully: No it isn’t. Your destiny is to sit in multiplexes watching sequels to
The
Mummy Returns
for the next 200 years, so forget fame and get on with it.

But Lythgoe was a breeze compared with what followed. By September,
Soapstars
had arrived, and with it came ‘Nasty’ Yvon (aka Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS), whose caustic put-downs generated a palpable chill, like a voice at a séance predicting imminent doom. All quite unnecessary when you contemplated the prize at stake: a three-month contract to appear on
Emmerdale
, the invisible soap. I’ve still never seen it, although according to the latest long-distance reports it’s got something to do with cows and there’s a McGann in the cast. More information as and when we get it.

No sooner had the
Soapstars
‘winners’ been dispatched to the TV equivalent of a missing person’s helpline than
Pop Idol
sprang up to accelerate their removal from our minds. Suddenly, our hopefuls had Simon Cowell to contend with. A walking definition of arrogance, Cowell was the Osama bin Laden of talent shows (minus the dreamy eyes). He was the tightest man on television – tight muscle, tight T-shirts and tight trousers, haunched all the way up to his big tight tits – firing staccato proclamations that crossed the line between constructive criticism and malicious abuse, thereby achieving the impossible by making both Pete Waterman
and
Dr Fox look dignified. He can tuck into his turkey safe in the knowledge that he’s the king of breaking butterflies on wheels. Way to go, Simon, and goodwill to all mankind.

So what else happened on our screens? Avant-garde inactivity, that’s what, in the bewildering form of
Touch the Truck
. Tune in and you could gasp in astonishment as a bunch of bozos stood round a 4x4 in Thurrock, keeping a hand on the chassis and their
eyelids open. The rules were simple: last one standing wins the vehicle. The world of chronic sleep deprivation has rarely felt so glamorous. Let’s just hope the winner didn’t immediately drive away with the prize, swerving snoozily past railway lines all the way back home.

And if the sight of ten people standing motionless round a stationary vehicle wasn’t mundane enough, you could always tune into the continuous live feed from the
Big Brother
house. Look! There’s Dean, scratching his nuts. And does Bubble have a spoon in his hand? Can’t quite tell from here. Hang on. Yes, it is. It’s definitely a spoon. Brilliant. Ah,
Big Brother
. Or more specifically – ah, Paul and Helen. What a love story – ‘When Knuckleheads Collide’. Half the nation on tenterhooks, wondering whether Dimbo #1 would get to nudge his tinker up Dimbo #2’s foo-foo before the cameras went away.

Germaine Greer denouncing the ghastliness of it all in the
Observer
, while Dominic Mohan encouraged
Sun
readers to ‘grab a beer and pull up a seat’ in the event of penetration. True obsessives could even sign up for text-message updates of the latest developments. Middle of the night, and your mobile starts beeping: 3A.M. LATEST: HE’S STUCK IT IN. Thank God for the twenty-first century.

As
Big Brother
was drawing to a close, the
Brass Eye Special
on paedophilia appeared. Several viewers were upset by the broadcast, but thankfully the press was on hand to ensure their views received an effective airing in the form of unintelligible pandemonium. I had some involvement in the programme, and consequently found myself ‘named and shamed’ alongside other evil conspirators in the
News of the World
for the benefit of readers who’d just finished masturbating over paparazzi snaps of topless pop starlets and fancied a bit of orchestrated outrage. The
Star
covered the furore opposite a photo of 15-year-old Charlotte Church in a low-cut top (caption: ‘Charlotte’s looking chest swell’), while the
Mail
spent an entire week exploring the outer limits of fury, occasionally lightening the mood with delightful snaps of Fergie’s pubescent offspring frolicking in bikinis. No review of the year’s TV is complete without some discussion of 11 September, when raw
horror bled from every screen. Like many others, I spent the day nauseous and shaking, wandering dizzily from one location to the next, suddenly aware of just how many TV sets there are in the world. For weeks, the news exerted a pornographic hold on my interest. A grimly bizarre sight sticks in my head: an American journalist reviewing the English tabloids on News 24, saying: ‘Real nice layout on this page, big headline here, great photo of a guy jumping from the building.’

Anyway. Where were we? Of course – 2001. There were good and bad programmes.

Among the good: Jon Ronson’s
Secret Rulers of the World, Linda
Green, The Office, The Blue Planet, Faking It, Sex and the City
,
Space, Extremes
– and
Cold
Feet
, which contained 50 per cent too many storylines, but redeemed itself by turning David, superbly played by Robert Bathurst, into its most sympathetic and dignified character. And the bad?
LA Pool Party, One Night With Robbie
Williams
, the UK version of
Temptation Island, Jim Davidson’s
Generation
Game,’ Orrible, It’s a Girl Thing
and
Metrosexuality
.

That’s it. Happy viewing over the Yuletide period. Don’t OD on David Jason.