Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (35 page)

I’m writing this on Tuesday morning, so apologies if things have
changed: I know it’s a war, and I’ve been as horrified by the ‘Shock and Awe’ bombardments as anyone (well, less than the average Iraqi, but you get my point), but the fact is our modern news channels are so obsessed with bringing us live images they’ve failed to notice there often isn’t anything to show: all have broadcast hours of an unchanging skyline, while the newsreader apologetically explains that you probably can’t see the explosions from this angle because it’s a fixed roof-top camera and blah blah blah, but the moment we get a shot of someone’s leg coming off we’ll let you know.

With my Freeview box I can pick up three dedicated news channels, each carrying 24-hour war coverage. You’d think one was enough, but no. Before long, you develop a distinct channel-hopping routine. Here’s mine: I keep it on Sky News most of the time, because its absurdly over-excited ‘BREAKING NEWS!’ ticker tape tends to break the most sensational (i.e. inaccurate) stories first. If something particularly juicy comes up, I hop to ITV News to see if they’ve picked up on it, before alighting on BBC News 24 to see if they’ll confirm it (like most British viewers, I don’t believe anything until the BBC says it’s true).

Apparently, they’re aware that viewers are flipping about like maniacs, which is why they keep trying to cram as much onto the screen as possible. Ticker tapes, banners, constant split-screens and replays – it’s like a cross between an episode of
24
and the impenetrably busy Bloomberg channel.

But since they’re constantly claiming something’s
about
to happen, it’s hard to switch the mess off: you know whatever occurs, you’ll see it unfold live on air. They’re willing you to think like a ghoul.

This obsession with live coverage reached a ridiculous nadir last week on the ITV News Channel: Alistair Stewart breathlessly announces incoming live footage of behind-enemy-lines conflict; cut to an indistinct green blur with the odd dark blob wobbling around, like a plate of mushy peas behind a layer of gauze. But the viewers’ bafflement was nothing compared to Alistair’s – because he’s got to explain what’s happening. ‘And there you can see … uhhh … well, it’s hard for me to make out because my monitor is
situated quite far away, but I’m sure at home you can see more.’ Nice try, but all I could see was my own bemused reflection. Sod the Second World War in Colour – this is the Third World War in Low-Res JPEGs.

Still, the fuzzy pictures are nothing compared to the fuzzy language. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard military pundits ending a discussion with the phrase ‘but this is all mere speculation’. In which case, why talk about it at all? You might as well speculate over what would happen if Saddam suddenly turned into a shoebox, and Charles Dance arrived on the back of a clockwork dog and kicked him into the ocean.

But they keep yapping because there’s air time to fill. Hence the constant repetition of custom ‘war’ idents. Sky’s ident takes the piss, frankly: a pompous barrage of CGI tanks, fighter jets and fireballs, with the Sky News logo emerging victorious at the end. Of course, if they wanted to accurately reflect what’s happening, they could superimpose their logo over a long tracking shot of an overflowing graveyard, or that footage of an Iraqi boy screaming in hospital – hey, they could even make the logo spin out of his mouth!

But that won’t happen, because viewers might start to think war is horrific. And not just another TV show.

Hooray! We’ve achieved equality! For years it was rubbish being a woman. Now it’s equally rubbish being a man! Hey, gals – let’s join hands and celebrate the erosion of the gender gap together! What’s that? You don’t want to hold hands? You’re calling the police? Oh. Sorry.

Really, it feels rubbish being a man at the moment – assuming you base your self-perception on the images pouring from your TV set, that is. I know I do, and I’m beginning to feel like scum simply for owning my own testicles.

Take adverts. I don’t recall attending the meeting where it was decided that all male characters in adverts should be portrayed as pitiful figures of fun, but, nevertheless, that’s precisely what’s happened: 
every other commercial on television seems to feature a sassy female character rolling her eyes in dismay at the buffoonish antics of an imbecilic man. In advert-land, boyfriends and husbands are routinely ditched, cheated on or, in the most offensive example, literally traded in for a sleeker model at a dedicated showroom.

Of course the implicit message is as patronising to women as it is to men – it’s saying, ‘Hey, you’re a modern woman, yeah? You’re cleverer than most men, right? Brilliant! Now buy this. Go on, bitch – buy it.’

It’s odd, though – the insidious nature of this continual chap-dissing – because if I’m anything to go by, it works on men themselves. To let you in on my cynical way of thinking, I ordered a preview tape of
Bald
(C4) – a documentary about the desperate measures to which men with premature hair loss will go to disguise their cueball status – specifically because I thought it’d make a nice ‘light’ subject. My reasoning went thus: last week I got all miserable covering the war, so this week I’ll lighten things up with a savage attack on an easy target. Using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut never fails to cheer me up, y’see – that’s why I spend most weekends kickboxing children to death in a barbed-wire thunderdome in my back garden.

Anyway, a funny thing happened. I actually started feeling sorry for these people. Even though they’re bald! Slap-headed, shiny-bonced, skull-flaunting cueballs to a man, and yet I couldn’t help but empathise. Curses.

Little wonder, though, that so many baldies feel they’re perceived as a ‘joke’. Most say their discomfort stems from society’s obsession with youth and looks and vigour – a world in which naked noggins don’t cut it. It’s the TV-fuelled image-perception problem women have had to wrestle with for years, in other words – the sole difference being it’s currently de rigueur to mock men who don’t conform to the mythical hunky norm. There’s no reason why a man smearing hair-growth lotion on his scalp should be any ‘sadder’ than a woman rubbing anti-ageing moisturiser on her crow’s-feet, but he is.

Likewise, the sight of a toupee prompts chuckles galore, yet a prosthetic breast masking a mastectomy is about as funny as, well, as cancer. Ah, well. If you’re a bald man yourself, the advice from the programme is ‘For God’s sake just get a grade-one crew cut.’ The only interviewees who felt they’d ‘come to terms with their baldness’ were the ones with a set of clippers at home. And a quick checklist of celebrity slapheads – Vin Diesel, Bruce Willis, Ross Kemp, Pacman – bears this theory out. Oh, and there’s another famous baldie to add to the list – Peter ‘Go West’ Cox on
Reborn in
the USA
(ITV1), a man clearly on his way to becoming the next Robson and Jerome (except there’s only one of him, and he can actually sing).

Follically challenged he may be, but when he lets that roaring voice out of its cage, you need a mop to clean the auditorium afterwards. I’d fancy him myself, but that weird face he pulls whenever he approaches peak volume – a sort of cross between Joe Cocker and a man trapping his testicles between the cogs of a gigantic machine – sorta puts me off. Well, that and the fact that he’s bald.

Modern life is rubbish, right? Go on, flick through the newspaper. Nothing but depressing headlines: TEEN THUGS ROB AND EAT 84-YR-OLD MAISIE; BIONUCLEAR TERRORIST APOCALYPSE ‘INEVITABLE’ SHRIEKS MINISTER; CHILD MISSING ON INTERNET, etc., etc. – it’s enough to convince you the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.

Well it isn’t. Things are better than they used to be, and if you don’t believe me, try counting the number of dead babies littering the streets next time you go for a stroll. Unless you’re really unlucky, you won’t find any – which is a pretty good yardstick of how civilised we’ve become since ye olden tymes. Back in the Georgian era, it wasn’t uncommon to come across decomposing illegitimate offspring lying around the pavements like doggy doo, a situation that so upset a man called Captain Thomas Coram, he
established Britain’s first Foundling Hospital to care for them. The big wuss.

Coram’s story comprises the first episode of
Georgian Underworld
(C4), a series hell-bent on convincing us that although the past may look more genteel from where we’re standing, it stinks to high heaven the moment you get too close.

We could do with more of this, because the past is steeply overrated, especially by bitter old goats who blame society – i.e. everyone else in the world – for their current dissatisfaction with life. Goats who think music and films aren’t as good as they used to be, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Who think video games are a mindless distraction for infants, but consider chess – essentially a very dull beat-’em-up running on an outdated wooden system – to be the pastime of gentlemen. Who think costume dramas are worth watching.

I’ve never liked costume dramas, largely because I’m not particularly interested in watching some spoilt doily-wearing bint sob down her harpsichord because the horse-riding Jeremy she’s had her eye on betrothes himself to another, while around her, her subservient handmaidens (whose combined annual wages wouldn’t buy two of their mistress’s pubes at auction) tug their forelocks in sympathy.

The BBC, of course, churns them out regardless, presumably because they’ve got a warehouse full of bodices that need a regular airing. Having failed to win me over with their countless Austen adaptations and Sunday evening boredom festivals, they’ve now changed tack, by inventing
Servants
(BBC1), a warts-and-all youth-oriented costume drama that purports to show life in an 1850s mansion house from the staff’s point of view. It’s
This Life
meets
Upstairs Downstairs
, in other words.

They’ve got off to a good start by hiring Joe Absolom – a likeable performer so weird he somehow manages to resemble 100 different things at once. One minute he looks like the lead singer in a meerkat version of Supergrass, the next he’s like a cross between Malcolm McDowell and the Cat in the Hat.

Trouble is, the programme he’s stuck in is as heavy-handed as a
robot with lead fingers.
Servants
tries so hard to prove it’s a costume drama for YOUNG PEOPLE, it becomes a parody of itself – quite an achievement for an opening episode. Staff say things like ‘Fancy a shag?’; there’s nudity, drinking and swearing; the master of the house has a crafty wank over some nineteenth-century equivalent of
Razzle
; one of the footmen pulls some eye-popping flip kicks on the half-pipe in the courtyard (I made the last one up, but you get the idea). Once you get past the jarring clash of old and new school, the drama beneath is as predictable as a pub-style steak-and-ale pie.

Servants
won’t please anyone except the most bovine viewers: it’ll scandalise the goats, who’ll see the inclusion of sex and swearing in a period piece as further proof of the decline of everything, while simultaneously disappointing anyone looking for something genuinely diverting. But that’s the true way of the world. Modern life isn’t rubbish. It’s just as shit now as it’s always been. Happy trails, gang!

Apologies if some hideous Columbine-style tragedy has occurred in-between the time I wrote this and the time you’re reading it, but hasn’t it been simply
ages
since the last mass slaying? I’m discounting the war, obviously: instead I’m talking about those grisly incidents when someone goes ‘postal’ – usually an under-achieving, under-endowed American mailman with a gun collection Ted Nugent would consider excessive, who wakes up one morning and thinks, ‘I feel like doing something out of the ordinary,’ and winds up stomping round a former workplace spraying bullets about like the lawn-sprinkler of doom.

Since no one gets a second shot at that kind of glory – after all, it’s traditional to turn the weapon on yourself at the end – it’s best to achieve a higher body count than the last trigger-happy nutjob, or you’ll end up consigned to the footnotes next time Colin Wilson brings out one of those ‘Complete Histories of Murder with Big Colour Photos and Everything’.

You certainly want to end up claiming more than two victims, which these days is scarcely a minor misdemeanour, let alone a massacre. Unless of course, you’ve used a bandsaw to slice up the bodies afterwards, in which case you’ll get an entire hour-long documentary called
The Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(C4) devoted to your exploits.

I have a couple of problems with this programme – not with the story itself, which is fascinating in its own right – but with the title, which is clearly misleading, since the case in question doesn’t involve either a chainsaw or a ‘massacre’.

A bandsaw does seem to have come into play, but only when the victims were already dead. Admittedly, that’s pretty unpleasant by itself, since it was used to slice the corpses’ heads up like so much Battenberg cake, but it hardly competes with a man clad in a leathery mask of human skin swinging a chainsaw around his head and carving people up willy-nilly, which is what you get in the film.

Still, like I say, the story itself is undeniably interesting, particularly when the man responsible for the apparent atrocity moves to a sleepy English village, gets married and starts amassing a terrifying collection of firearms. Perhaps most discomfiting is the ease with which he obtained a gun licence, despite using his real name, and despite having recently arrived from Texas, where his premature release from Death Row made him the lead news item for an entire week.

It seems the authorities were blissfully unaware of all this, until a suspicious local looked up his name on the Internet and his gruesome history came to light. Another case solved by Inspector Google.

Then another astonishing thing happens: with his cover blown and his wife in hiding, our bandsaw maniac attempts to flee the country, and is arrested in the company of another woman set to become his fifth wife. Now this man is an elderly, overweight, wheelchair-bound ex-Death Row inmate accused of shooting two men and cutting up their heads with a bandsaw – yet he doesn’t seem to have any problem scoring with the ladies. What’s he using? Some kind of spray-on pheromone shit? I mean I can understand the appeal of a ‘bad guy’, but Christ, get a grip.