Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (27 page)

My ‘dream theory’ even accounts for the latest development in
Jack Bauer’s world: the appearance of familiar faces. Previously, his dreamscape was invaded by pop-culture doppelgangers (witness Kimberley steadily morphing into Jen from
Dawson’s
Creek
or the unexpected arrival of the late Michael Hutchence as a ruthless Serbian terrorist, who cheerfully emulated his lookalike by meeting an untimely end in a hotel room). Now, as Jack accelerates into REM sleep, in stroll a bunch of bona fide celebrities from Kiefer Sutherland’s undistinguished movie career, back to haunt him.

Take this week’s episode: first, exploding onto your screens, it’s Lou Diamond Philips! Hooray! A chance for him and Kiefer to recreate the onscreen chemistry that made
Young Guns
one of the foremost cinematic achievements of the twentieth century. And then, before your excitement chips have finished processing this stunning development … look, it’s Dennis Hopper!

Dennis Hopper: the rent-a-psycho with a face like a chunk of pumice stone the Incredible Hulk’s just used to remove the rough skin from his feet.

Dennis Hopper: who starred alongside Kiefer in the 1990 movie
Flashback
, in which – get this – Hopper’s a prisoner and Kiefer’s an FBI agent named John Buckner.

John Buckner, Jack Bauer, John Buckner, Jack Bauer. I think it’s part of the dream. Next week: the entire cast of
The Lost Boys
battle on the set of
Flatliners
. Most exciting of all, since it’s now a dream, literally anything can happen, and the finale will consist of Jack being chased round a funfair by a visibly erect Honey Monster.

Anyway, there’s more fractured reality elsewhere in the schedules: take
Headf**ck
(Sci-Fi), a self-consciously ‘weird’ programme apparently aimed at heavily stoned twenty-somethings – a collage of horror-movie clips, surreal shots and the occasional close-up of a lizard or something else equally ‘mind-boggling’. The big draw here is meant to be David Icke, who pops in to babble about UFOs, although the most interesting thing this week is the woefully lame video for the latest Prodigy single: topless go-go dancers milking cows and being beaten with sticks while Keith bellows ‘We love Rohypnol! She love Rohypnol!’ for the benefit of
Daily Mail
readers who need their shocks spelt out.

There’s also the unmissable unfolding nightmare of
The Frontier
House
(C4). Having whinged about everything from razors to the quality of tealeaves, gun-lovin’ Gordon Clune has a new gripe: he ain’t gettin’ any.

Wife Adrienne, it seems, just isn’t putting out. It’s now surely only a matter of time before Gordon strips naked, smears mud on his face and runs through the village, firing at invisible communists.

Meanwhile, his luckless son Conor, who’s already survived dog maulings and high-speed wagon smashes, now has starvation to contend with. And boy, did I chuckle as the tears rolled down his gaunt little face. Biggest laugh of the week, in fact. Altogether now: ho, ho, Conor. Ho ho ho.

Picture someone stupid. Really impossibly stupid. Like, literally going ‘durrrrr’ out loud, grinning, dribbling, clapping their hands together like a seal and wearing one of those little beanie caps with a propeller on top.

Keep that image in your mind’s eye for the next 10 minutes, because unattractive though this notional moron is, he seems to be the kind of viewer ITV is courting shamelessly these days, as it sets off, USS
Enterprise
-fashion, to explore the furthest reaches of a strange new universe of dimwittery, beaming back transmissions which seek to provide an authoritative televisual definition of the word ‘brainless’ – out-and-out dunce-casts that don’t so much insult your intelligence as bypass it completely.

First we had the ghastly
Elimidate
, in which Kerry Katona’s stunt knockers bobble around a beach or shopping centre encouraging dunderheads to feel each other up; now, hot on its heels, comes
Wudja? Cudja
?, the show that by its own admission seeks to ‘test the limits of taste, greed and self respect’ by offering the public wads of banknotes in exchange for performing humiliating challenges.

Now, I’m all for watching people debase themselves, particularly if they’re younger and better-looking than myself (a demographic
that grows by the nanosecond), but
Wudja
?
Cudja
?, transparently misanthropic though it is, entirely fails to capitalise on its premise by displaying a downright offensive lack of imagination. The ‘challenges’ are predictable Club 18–30 shenanigans – like snogging as many strangers as possible, or letting a mob of baying lads lick ice cream from your bosom, or, at its very worst, simply flashing your bum for five pence. It’s like flicking through a copy of ‘Outrage for Dummies’.

Look, if you’re going to get people to demean both themselves and the whole of humanity, do it properly. Have some balls. Here, off the top of my head, is a list of five challenges that
Wudja
?
Cudja
? shoulda hadtha nervta feacha:

1) Cut the end of your nose off with scissors (£500)

2) Crush a live dormouse in your fist, and then eat it (£80)

3) Squat in the street, pooing into a big bowl of flour, while a bloke dances around playing the accordion (£50)

4) Penetrate a sea cow (£20)

5) Break your elbows with a mallet, then riverdance in a tray full of sick until you lose consciousness (£400).

There. Put those on air and I’ll tune in every week. In fact, sod that: I’ll turn up and spectate, provided I’m allowed to bring firearms and dispatch the contestants at the end of each stunt. Bang: one less moron. Bang: one less moron. Bang bang bang bang bang: wee hee! You’d need a bulldozer to tidy the corpses away.

Come to think of it, why bother handing out money? Why not simply scour the alleyways in search of heroin addicts, getting them to flash their privates on camera in exchange for vials of smack? After all, testing the limits of ‘taste, greed and self respect’ is our aim, right? Think I’m being harsh? Think again: I’m displaying no more contempt for the public than the ding-dongs who nodded this through. Difference is, I’ve got the decency to be honest about it.

Aaaaanyway, if
Wudja? Cudja?
doesn’t satiate your need for knuckle-dragging antics, there’s always
Sex BC
, an in-depth investigation into the mating habits of our cave-dwelling ancestors – who were, the programme claims, far more sophisticated than we give them credit for.

Rather than sitting about all day grunting and poking their prehistoric genitalia in the direction of anything vaguely hole-shaped, there’s evidence cave folk preferred to form loving relationships with one another. Women were afforded respect and played an active role in hunter-gatherer activities. In fact the main way they seem to differ from us present-day bozos is that infidelity was punished with a skewer through the penis of the offending cheater – which would liven up the Ricki Lake show no end.

Obviously, the makers of
Sex BC
have a slight problem regarding the lack of decent video footage shot during the Stone Age which might support their findings, but they’ve made up for it by getting modern-day actors to strip completely naked, then circle round filming them for ages and ages and ages. Which is clever of them. In fact, alongside
Wudja? Cudja?
, this makes two opportunities in a single week to watch cavemen getting their bums out.

Now that’s progress.

Attention,
Daily Mail
headline writers: on no account should you miss
Teenage Kicks: Drugs Are Us
(C4), because it provides countless opportunities to flex those outrage muscles to the very limit. In fact your only dilemma will be which line to take: is the programme sick and wrong, or wrong and sick? Should you gnash with fury, or shake your head with world-weary dismay? Questions, questions. It’s a pity they couldn’t have thrown in a few asylum seekers for good measure – but you can probably work out a roundabout means of blaming them nevertheless, and I don’t want to tell you how to do your job because, let’s face it, you already know how everything in the world should be done anyway.

In case you hadn’t guessed, this is one of those scandalous documentaries in which something approaching everyday reality is portrayed in non-judgemental terms, thereby appalling Middle Englanders who’d prefer it if the world would just bloody well sit still and behave.

It focuses on three drug-guzzlin’ teenagers: Johnny, 16, who puffs
his way through more cannabis than an entire hall of residence on a daily basis; 17-year-old Sam, who spends his weekends navigating an obstacle course of Ecstasy, speed and ketamine; and Ashleigh, also 17, a disarmingly nonchalant Geordie girl with a penchant for garish blue eyeshadow. Oh, and heroin.

None of them slots neatly into a pre-determined pigeonhole: Sam, for instance, is a fresh-faced and articulate public schoolboy who, when he’s not grinding his teeth to powder in a strobe-lit jiggle hut and using drugs as a chemical joystick to control his every mood, croons hits for Jesus in the local church choir; stoner Johnny’s a good-natured Scot who disapproves of heroin (it’s ‘stupid’) and cheerfully decides to temporarily curb his Cheech and Chong lifestyle to sit his exams.

They’ll both be fine, particularly once they realise the grim truth about drugs: that their main purpose is to provide you with something fun to grow out of, and that people who go on about them are really boring.

Ashleigh’s the one to worry about, because she’s entirely blasé about her heroin addiction, discussing it as though recounting events from a particularly dull episode of
Holby City
, unconcerned that it’s clearly going to blight her existence until she drops dead or kicks the habit.

And the parents? Irresponsible? Nope. They’re all admirably realistic about the situation, begrudgingly accepting that they’d rather know what their kids get up to than simply bellow disapproval and force them to do it in secret. Ashleigh’s mum Maureen is especially heartbreaking, balancing pragmatism with parental love as she deals with three teenage daughters who routinely steal from her to pay for their five-quid bags of smack.

Ashleigh, if you’re reading this – which you aren’t – for God’s sake, give yourself a kick up the arse and do something, anything, to wean yourself off that life-crushing muck, because your mum deserves a breather. Oh, and ditch the blue eyeshadow; it makes you look like a smackhead or something.

Further follies of youth are on display in
Classmates
(C4), which is basically nothing more than the ‘Friends Reunited’ website (the online nostalgia site where you get to discover precisely how many of your school friends now work in IT – i.e. all of them) transferred to television, but curiously life-affirming nonetheless. In this edition – the first – a group of pupils from a vaguely bohemian mixed-sex boarding school in Surrey meet up after 12 years apart to compare jowls and job descriptions, and it’s all rather sweet: teenage sweethearts are reunited, the school wallflower turns out to be a super-confident glamourpuss and the troubled wide-boy enjoys an amiable chinwag with the headmaster who expelled him.

The arrival of school heart-throb Adam Donald is especially gratifying, since in his youth he had the uncannily handsome looks of a Hollywood superstar, but now resembles a slightly cheeky potato (and is infinitely more likeable as a result).

By the end of the programme I was on the verge of boo-hooing like a baby, mind, simply on account of the soundtrack, which to my ears sounded almost contemporary until I realised it consisted of music from 12 years ago – Screamadelica-era Primal Scream et al. – thereby proving I’m officially old.

And if that isn’t a
valid
reason to start knocking your brains out with pills and spliffs and smack, then I don’t know what is.

Teenagers: they don’t know they’re born.

In the good old days (you know, back when we all lived in fear of nuclear extinction and greed and bigotry were rife, utterly unlike the present era), there were only three or four channels, so it was easy to keep tabs on what was showing where. Kelly Monteith on BBC1, snooker on BBC2, Cannon and Ball’s ‘Madcap Snooker Chucklehouse’ on ITV, or subtitled ‘Disabled Lesbian Snooker with Extra Pubic Hair’ on Channel 4. Simple.

Today there are 1,500,000 channels, growing at an exponential rate, and you can’t flip open the
Guide
without noticing a new addition to their ranks: one minute there’s an Open University programme about hills on BBC2, and the next there’s the Discovery
Hill Channel (documentaries about hills), Hill 24 (24-hour hill news), The Txt-a-Hill Network (teenagers communicating via text message captions superimposed over footage of hills), and Fantasy Hill X Super Hardcore Plus (fat men having sex with hills).

It’s bedlam out there. Hence the trend for ‘Ronseal’ programme titles – shows that explain exactly what they do right there on the tin, with names like ‘Britain’s Scariest’. The idea is that they stand out in the listings, so you’re more likely to tune in. Why name your programme
A Touch of Frost
(which could be mistaken for a documentary on winter mornings), if you can call it ‘The Shortarse Detective’ instead?

ITV has honed this practice to such a fine art, you don’t even need to watch the programmes any more, just read the titles:
Britain’s Sexiest Builders, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Game Show Host
,
To Kill and Kill Again
, and now the latest example,
I’m a Celebrity
–
Get Me Out of Here!
(ITV1), in which a bunch of vaguely famous people have been dumped in the Australian outback in order to suffer for Ant and Dec’s amusement.

OK, so the use of the word ‘celebrity’ contravenes the Trades Descriptions Act, but the programme itself is a guilty pleasure, and everyone who’s wearily grumbled about the bile-scooping tackiness of it all is wasting their time: this
is
vastly entertaining stuff; no amount of hand-wringing is going to change that. And I can sum up the appeal in two words: Uri Geller.