Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (28 page)

See, the big surprise about
I’m a Celebrity
is that most of the ‘stars’ seem quite nice: Tony Blackburn, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Nell McAndrew, and Rhona Cameron. Heck, even Christine Hamilton’s grown on me. Nigel Benn you can keep, and Darren Day could annoy me just by breathing in and out, but Uri Geller … CHRIST.

Don’t know about you, but I always assumed that behind closed doors, once the cameras had been put away and he’d finished spoonbending for the day, Geller magically transformed himself into a normal person – but no. For him it’s a lifetime gig. I wouldn’t be able to stand in the same room as him for five minutes without feigning a fatal brain haemorrhage, just to make him stop banging
on about spirituality and his psychic bloody powers, which he’s not going to use on this expedition because ‘it wouldn’t be ethically right’.

Ethically right?
I’m a Celebrity
–
Get Me Out of Here!
may be many things, but a noble contest of far-reaching import it is not. Sod ethics, Uri – prove your abilities. Go on. I dare you. Bend us a spoon. Float in the air or something.

I’ll even watch you squatting on the outdoor toilet, curling out a turd in a supernatural trance. That beats ethical restraint any day. And if you can’t do that, at least spill some Michael Jackson gossip. You must know loads, particularly since you can probably read his mind as well. But no. Uri’s content to simply weird everyone out. The sequence in which he slimed around the camp attempting to ingratiate himself with the women (by patronising them) has to rank as the creepiest thing I’ve seen all year. Spoons are one thing, but this man has an innate ability to bend minds, and not in a good way; I’m guessing – hoping, praying – that by the time you read this, the public will have revolted en masse, and voted him into a whirlpool of misery.

And with any luck, next year we’ll have a series called ‘I’m a Celebrity – Get This Out of Me!’ in which members of the public phone in to vote on which unwieldy object gets shoved up whose famous backside. I’m setting my telephone to speed-dial Uri’s number already.

Wahey! The trailers say it all: action is back on ITV! And it’s courtesy of
Ultimate Force
(ITV1) –
The Sweeney
with a hard-on.

Set in a parallel universe in which the SAS are called in to sort out problems at the drop of a hat,
Ultimate
Force is about guns and machismo and very little else. And we’re talking gallons of machismo – the smug kind, the kind that shoots first and doesn’t bother asking questions later, safe in the knowledge that anyone wringing their hands over the nastiness of it is simply Missing the Point.

In fact, describing this as an ‘action’ series is misleading. It’s
pornography, plain and simple, pandering to the fantasies of tiresome British bloke creatures – that wretched breed of style-free thickos who drive too fast and spend the weekend starting fights outside dismal nightclubs. With any luck, one glimpse of the gunplay in
Ultimate
Force
and they’ll all succumb to a Pavlovian urge to masturbate before bedtime, thereby reducing their risk of impregnating their girlfriends and spawning yet another generation of insolent heirs – and if in 20 years down the line that means one less bellowing imbecile in the Friday night minicab queue, it’ll all have been worth it. In fact, if ITV broadcast a new episode every night for a couple of decades, we might see the national average IQ treble in size by the year 2033.

So yes, it’s macho and daft, but when you’re dealing with a series starring Grant Mitchell, what else would you expect? Quaker Academy? Harpist Squad?

Of course not. We’re talking about Ross Kemp here – ITV’s stellar signing, who’s thrashed around in search of a decent vehicle for so long it was in danger of becoming embarrassing. The sigh of relief is almost audible over the gunfire: finally they’ve hit upon the ideal showcase for him – something in which his ability to act is secondary to his ability to stand around looking vicious.

Thing is, Kemp’s never been a convincing hard man – he’s more of a try-too-hard man. Bona fide toughnuts don’t need to pull such obviously menacing facial expressions, at least not all the time.

Honestly, what’s with all the furious glares? The moment Kemp walks onscreen he enters into a demented staring competition with everyone else in the room, including the viewers at home (if glowering ever becomes an Olympic sport, he’s a dead cert for the gold – he could out-stare a man with two glass eyes). Presumably, Kemp maintains this unique wide-eyed frown because when his face is at rest it’s actually rather baby-like and friendly, but the result is disturbing; he looks like a version of Nookie Bear that’s had its fur shaved off and isn’t happy about it.

Thankfully, there’s more to the Kemp repertoire than mere scowling. He’s mastered nodding as well, which is why every line is delivered with his trademark bob of the head, like a man auditioning for the part of a nodding dog in ‘Toy Story 3: Playthings of Fury’. Squint and he starts to resemble a testicle bobbing in a bathtub. And a particularly hairless one at that.

Apart from Staring Nodding Man, what else does
Ultimate Force
have to offer?

Bloodshed. Taking their cue from the recent trend for graphically violent combat in films like
Saving Private Ryan
and
Black Hawk
Down
, the special-effects team has raised the splatter quotient well above the televisual norm. Hence a shoot-out in a suburban bank ends up resembling something out of
Dawn of the Dead
, with shot-off bits of scalp dangling from the lampshades and flambéed kidneys squelching underfoot.

But while the aforementioned movies all used shocking gore to hammer home the sheer hideousness of violence,
Ultimate Force
simply uses it to titillate, in the manner of a 1980s video nasty.

Regular readers will know I’ve got nothing against that, but I do think if you’re going to dish up gore for gore’s sake, you might as well go the whole nine yards and make it absurdly, unrealistically gory. Since
Ultimate Force
doesn’t seem to convey any message besides ‘The SAS are hard’, let’s see them ripping the bad guys’ ribcages out with claw hammers, please.

Needless to say, despite all my griping, I rather enjoyed it. It’s got a camp appeal, like Footballers’ Wives for sociopaths. The trailers say it all: action is back on ITV! Wahey!

Today, fame is power and everyone wants to be a celebrity. It’s become as ubiquitous a human requirement as the need for air, water and a decent pair of socks, which is why the world is full of bewildered people doing misguided and humiliating things in a bid for fame. Things that would make you or me curl up and wither to a desiccated husk of embarrassment, like singing Bodyform jingles, or having sex with geese on the Internet, or performing onstage with the Stereophonics.

Pathetic sights, the lot of them, but none is as truly heartrending as the sight of a Reality Joker basking in his moment of glory.

A what?

A Reality Joker – it’s a new phrase I’ve just coined, which refers to the type of person who turns up at the auditions for programmes like
Model Behaviour
(C4), knowing full well that a) they don’t stand a serious chance, and also b) the production team won’t be able to resist plastering their mugs all over the screen for a few moments, so we can all have a good laugh at their expense.

Hence the judges in
Model Behaviour
– a programme designed to pick out tomorrow’s male and female supermodels – occasionally find themselves stifling smirks in front of some chubzoid clown (generally a fat moron named Barry, or something similarly Woolworths) who comically insists he’s got the making of a cover star.

Blimey! He’s bonkers! Barry is bonkers! Of course he won’t be chosen – he’s obese and disgusting! Har har har!

The judges are happy, because they look like good sports, the production team are happy because they’ve got a few more easy moments of sneersome air time under their belts, but most of all Barry’s happy because his mates will see him on the telly and roll around guffawing at how downright daffy BONKERS!!!! he is. Well, hooray hooray. Enjoy your 1.5 nanoseconds of fame, Barry – then shove off back to Doncaster so we can concentrate on the meat of the programme: encouraging teenagers nationwide to work on their eating disorders.

This second series of
Model Behaviour
has clearly been taking notes – or more accurately photocopying instructions – from
Pop
stars
(a show which has not one, but
two
Reality Jokers, in the form of the ‘touch my bum’ girls). As a result, it seeks to pressurise and degrade its participants at every turn – ’cos that’s good telly, innit? Jettisoned wannabes aren’t just gently informed that they’re no longer required – no. Despite already having been picked from the line-up and ordered to parade around in skimpy underwear for our titillation, they haven’t been puppeteered enough. So they’re separated into groups.

You, you and you – stand on the pink carpet. The rest of you, stand on the blue.

Drum roll, please. Let the maximum tension build – we want to see anguished looks on faces, please. OK. Now then. Pink carpet. Congratulations, you’re through to the next round. The rest of you: your dream is over. Go on, shoo. And try to cry into the lens on your way out.

Still, there’s a case for arguing that the spoilt little yelpers who turn up to undergo this sort of humiliation deserve everything they get. Particularly when you compare them to the dashing breed of old-school celebrities profiled in the engrossing
Showbiz Set
(C4); bona-fide stars who secured lasting fame the old-fashioned way: by actually being good at something.

Oh, except Simon Dee – the here-today, gone-tomorrow 1960s chat-show host whose sudden disappearance from the nation’s screens is often referred to as a complete and utter mystery, although interviewee Jimmy Tarbuck’s explanation of the reason for his downfall – ‘Well, he was crap wasn’t he?’ – sounds plausible enough to me.

Good programme this, although in some ways it’s enough to make you weep, outlining as it does an age when Britain’s TV stations were unafraid to court controversy for a reason other than empty controversy itself. In its own way, the 1960s BBC was a veritable punkfest, unapologetically delivering shock after shock – the establishment-baiting of
That Was the Week That Was
, black comedy in
Steptoe and Son
, outrageous social satire in
Till Death Us Do
Part
.

Where are their counterparts now? Answer: nowhere. Unless the imminent
Fame Academy
(BBC1) turns out to be a piece of coruscating satire in disguise.

Which it won’t, of course. Pass the napalm.

Before the tragic death of England’s Rose (and that’s Princess Diana I’m talking about, not Roy Kinnear), I’d had an idea for a short
story, which went something like this: two demented pranksters kidnap the Princess of Hearts, then contact Scotland Yard and announce their ‘ransom’. She will be released unharmed, provided Terry Wogan goes on live television and has full sexual intercourse with a sow. The act must be broadcast in blistering close-up on all five terrestrial channels, uninterrupted and entirely unexpurgated. Cue plenty of soul-searching for Wogan as the deadline draws ever nearer. Finally, after much pressure from the tabloids, he gives in. The horrendous act is broadcast live, the Princess is released, and the nation’s television is never quite the same again: the bar for what’s acceptable onscreen has been raised to unthinkable levels; Wogan’s career has been revitalised – the ratings were so good, he repeats his performance on a weekly basis. At teatime. And everyone’s happy.

See, I’ve often thought that if something like that were to actually happen, no one could ever complain about programmes like
Tipping
the Velvet
(BBC2) again. You’ve probably heard about it already – according to the tabloids, it’s set to ‘shock’ viewers with ‘steamy’ scenes of lesbian ‘romps’. ‘The most explicit sex sequences ever broadcast!’ they screamed. Graphic! X-rated! Adults only!

Is it bollocks. Speaking as someone who recently watched a video entitled ‘Strap-On Sally: Face Dildo Frenzy’ (not mine, I hasten to add, and it belonged to a lady, so that absolves me of all blame twice over, OK?) I can quite confidently state that the sex scenes in
Tipping the Velvet
are not ‘explicit’.

Good-natured and charming maybe, but not explicit, and if they involved a heterosexual couple no one would raise an eyebrow. Instead,
Tipping the Velvet
is a light, fluffy and fairly disposable romance; stylised in the
Moulin Rouge
mould with a vaguely Christmassy air (the scenes backstage at the music hall have the feel of one of those trailers promising ‘a feast of entertainment’ over the Yuletide season). The lesbian imagery is laid on in a coy, tongue in (cough) cheek manner; the very first shot is of a young girl slowly prising open an oyster, and the filthiest exchange goes like this: ‘You smell.’ ‘I know! Like a herring!’ Although I’ve quoted that out of context.

That’s this week’s sex quotient out of the way, so for violence we have to flip channels and locate
The Shield
(C5), an excellent US import starring Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey: a cop who doesn’t play by the rules of basic human decency.

Yes, he’s corrupt, but it doesn’t end there: he’s merely the rotten-est apple in a whole barrel of bad ’uns – a sort of Bad Lieutenant Squad. The show delights in confounding the audience with a tangled maze of moral dilemmas: the pilot showed Mackey beating a confession from an arrogant paedophile (ah, so he’s bad but he gets results), passing bribe money to a hooker so she can buy her son some toys (he’s bad but he’s got a heart), then coldly shooting dead one of his own officers (oh – he’s just bad). It’s relentlessly brutal throughout – the sort of programme where everyone greets each other by saying ‘Hey, asshole’ instead of ‘Hello’, and even the ‘nice’ cop (a nerdy homicide detective) is shown commenting favourably on the breasts of a murder victim – with violent action sequences (of which there are plenty) cut in time to an angry nu-metal soundtrack for added hard-on value.