Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (38 page)

Next there’s Jon and Ray, two dullard Roland Gift lookalikes, one of whom (I can’t recall which) has long, revolting hairs sprouting from his back, like a foul animal. It’s enough to put you off your Friendchips.

Cameron, the eldest at 32, is a gentle Scot straight out of
Two
Thousand Acres of Sky
. Doomed to be described on his own headstone as ‘nice’ and by anyone else as ‘who?’ Cameron’s so bland he probably shits papier-mâché.

Then there’s token lardarse Gos, who thanks to his bulk commands more screen space than anyone else, yet selfishly does nothing to justify it.

The women are an amorphous mass of low-slung denim and hair gel, somehow high-street and vaguely upmarket at the same
time, like Girls Aloud drinking white wine in a gastropub. The terrifyingly self-absorbed Anouska (played by Jenny Powell) seems destined to be this year’s chief gobby irritant
and
tabloid dream since she’s happy to walk around with her bum hanging out. She’ll be chief pin-up on a thousand one-handed websites.

Justine, Steph, Nush and Sissy seem – tragically enough – just about bearable.

But Tania – isn’t she actually, genuinely, one of the Friendchips posse? I’m sure I’ve seen her gobbling snacks and working out her porn-star name round that lanky blond prick’s kitchen table. Or am I just confusing mundane fantasy with mundane reality? I just can’t tell any more.

Anyway, that’s the new, improved
BB4
housemates – now 50 per cent more hateful than ever. Let’s follow their progress together. Pass the salsa.

‘A man of logic trapped in a world of emotion’ – to whom is psychologist Dr Gareth Smith referring? Abraham Lincoln? Sir Clive Sinclair? Professor Yaffle from
Bagpuss
?

Nope: Jon Tickle – the hilariously named ‘household pet’ from
Big Brother 4
(C4/E4), and quite possibly the most boring man in the universe. At first glance, with his shaven head and exotic good looks, he could easily be mistaken for an up-and-coming DJ, lifestyle journalist or TV presenter. But beneath the chill-out-zone exterior beats the pale damp heart of a monotone nerd; a man whose conversation is so violently dreary, military scientists could harness its joy-withering energy and create some kind of ennui- based death-ray.

Whenever Jon opens his mouth, out rolls a 200-foot granite ball of tedium that crushes everything in its path. And there’s no escape. His high point so far: sitting on the pedalo listing all the words in the realm of physics that begin with the letter ‘p’, while a horrified Cameron struggled to retain consciousness beside him. ‘Photon, proton, particle …’ On and on he went, turning the air grey in the process.

The
other
famous Mr Tickle (the one invented by Roger Hargreaves) was renowned for having two long orange arms that reached round corners and made people laugh:
Big Brother
’s Mr Tickle comes equipped with infinite invisible tendrils that reach across a nation and make people yawn. Is that progress?

No. It’s not.

Still, it’s fun watching him bore the other housemates into the ground, banging on about how much money he earns or tirelessly recounting the entire plot of whichever breeze-block-sized sci-fi novel he read last. At the time of writing, the inmates have yet to make their nominations, so I’m hoping the King of Snoozeland won’t have been evicted by the time you read this.

The same goes for Federico, the biggest arsehole this side of a guide to anal fissures. Last week I was fantasising about killing him, but by now I’ve gone beyond even that – in my head I’m already chasing him through the afterlife, wielding a sabre, a club and a bloody big hook. Just as Jon had a high point, Federico had a low: the excruciating Avid Merrion impersonation he inflicted on an offscreen female ‘voice of
Big Brother
’ from the confines of the diary-room chair. ‘What are you wearing? Can I watch you do a shit?’ he asked repeatedly and, according to him, hilariously.

Federico failed to consider two salient facts: 1) Even in its original form, Avid Merrion’s ‘funny foreigner’ shtick is about as funny as shattering your teeth on a kerbstone, and 2) When someone doesn’t  laugh at a ‘jokey’ come-on, repeating it again and again until the producers castigate you for harassment isn’t the wisest course of action. Still, it was one of the few diary-room encounters when Federico didn’t employ vocabulary he doesn’t understand in a doomed bid to look clever. A glance at his misspelled entry on ‘Friends Reunited’ reveals him as a dim pseud of the highest order.

‘In all it’s entirety an overview of my own experiences since my insertion into the civilian landscape would not only render any reader unfairly incomparable, moreover the banality in which you contrive to exist in your futile landscape implicates to one’s own
that indeed I must strive to march forth with my own avant garde approach to life,’ he dribbles, thesaurus in hand. ‘I wish for you all the justification of your own endeavour.’

Almost as impenetrable and meaningless as the
Matrix Reloaded
script. Almost.

The other house-dicks are less despicable than last week. Scott (played by Damon from
Brookside
or the leprechaun-sized prison psychologist from
Buried
, depending on the angle) now seems quite a decent chap; Cameron, Nush, Steph, Sissy, Justine and Flabbo are equally inoffensive. Ray and Tania, on the other hand, have all the impact of a margarine hammer. It might help if they’d
do
something. Like walk away from the cameras. And never ever ever come back.

A series of posters promoting CCTV on public transport recently appeared across London. Resembling old Soviet propaganda, they depicted a fleet of buses trundling through the capital underneath a galaxy of hovering eyeballs, accompanied by the slogan ‘SAFE BENEATH THE WATCHFUL EYES’. The overtly Orwellian tone was alarming; for a campaign designed to provoke reassurance, it’s quite breathtakingly sinister. But it’s nothing compared to the current anti-benefit-fraud TV commercials, in which cheaters are pursued by glowing rings of light. Sod CCTV – the government’s just unleashed the Mysterons to hunt you down, and they don’t care who knows it.

‘We can track your every move,’ booms the voice-over. ‘We’re on to you.’ Pardon me, but since when was it acceptable for ‘The Man’ to openly brag about his omnipotence? At this rate, I give it two years before we get a licence-fee campaign in which a single mum is raked with machine-gun fire by armoured stormtroopers.

No wonder mass paranoia is in – and the BBC is right at the forefront of it. We’ve already got
Spooks
with its surveillance and terrorism,
State of Play
and
24
, which – bless it – had the nerve to actually detonate its nuclear bomb mid-series. Now the terror continues with
the cheerily titled
Death
by Home
(BBC1) in which ‘Handy Andy’ from
Changing Rooms
does his level best to convince you that if you even
think
about leaving your sofa, you’re dicing with death.

Billed as a ‘light-hearted guide to household accidents’, it’s a full hour of scalding, electrocution and bloody big shards of glass slashing arteries open, intercut with rib-tickling clips from
Some
Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
in which loveable imbecile Frank Spencer fractures his spine on a banister. Highlights include celebrity chef Kevin Woodford recounting how he severed a finger while excitedly chopping herbs before an Elton John concert (just a finger, unfortunately; he didn’t lop off his head with a spade, more’s the pity) and an uplifting reconstruction in which three women almost succumb to fatal carbon-monoxide poisoning (while sitting on a sofa, no less – so even
that
isn’t safe, folks).

Having taken all this on board, I simply don’t know what to do: I can’t go outside because the Mysterons and stormtroopers will get me, and I can’t stay indoors because some awful fate might befall me – like ripping my neck open on a tin lid or accidentally catching sight of
V Graham Norton
(C4).

It’s clearly time to put Norton to bed now. Sure, he’d be a great dinner-party guest – but would you want him in your house every sodding night of the week?

Here’s tonight’s guest – the late Judy Garland. First of all, Judy, tell me about your latest film. Mmm. Really? Out on Friday you say? Gosh. Hey, look at this – it’s a website run by a 48-year-old American pervert who likes to dress up as you and poo on the floor. And he’s on the phone now! Crazy! I wonder, has anyone in our studio audience ever done a poo? Hands up! Yes, you, the bloated, cackling sea cow. What’s that? You once pooed on a willy?!? Outrageous! Look, Judy, I’ve got a Polaroid of a willy here! Hold it up! Ha ha, look everyone, Judy Garland’s holding a willy! Tee hee! Chuckle! Snort! (Repeat to fade).

It’s not as though there aren’t enough penises on Channel 4 anyway. After all, they’re currently showcasing the nation’s biggest dick on a nightly basis – Federico from
Big Brother
.

I know I keep banging on about him, but ‘Fed’ really is abnormally 
twattish: a freak occurrence, like one of those giant squid that occasionally get hauled from the deep by a crew of Spanish fishermen and held in a cage while villagers gather round excitedly taking photographs to send to Ananova.

Yep, that’s precisely what he is: a harnessed idiot, held in captivity for our study and amusement. A unique zoological specimen – safe beneath the watchful eyes.

Perhaps CCTV isn’t so bad after all.

There’s somebody at the door! And in Rod Hull’s case, it turned out to be the Grim Reaper of Death, calling unexpectedly early to whisk him off to deadland. Adjusting his roof aerial during a football match, Hull slipped – ending a life of ups, downs, and countless feathered assaults in a thrice. And when the master died, Emu died too: no Sooty-style persistence of dynasty for him. Yet another creature rendered extinct by the follies of man.

A Bird in the Hand
(C4) tells the story of Hull’s bizarre career, starting with his early days in Australia’s fledgling television industry, where he enjoyed modest success before hitting on his winning formula: playing the bumbling straight man to a demented, punch-drunk bird. Before long, he’d returned to his native Britain and found fame by simply beating the shit out of Parkinson with a glove puppet. Roy Hudd (whose name sounds like an anagram of Rod Hull but isn’t) pops up to explain how Emu ‘put the violence back into comedy’ and watching the vintage maulings it’s hard to disagree. For a one-joke act, it was bloody amusing: sociopathic aggression rendered weirdly acceptable via the use of a cartoon fabric bird. Perhaps if Fred West had offed his victims while dressed as the Honey Monster we’d view him more fondly.

The show is rammed with fascinating Hull tidbits, chief among which is the revelation that he had an almighty johnson. The very words ‘Rod Hull’ imply a cross between a pole-shaped object and the prow of a tanker, and by all accounts that’s precisely what was swinging between his legs. Yep, Hull was packing serious meat. And
the ladies knew it: that puppeteer tore through more women than Jason Voorhees. Veteran producer Michael Hurll claims Rod was often serviced by ‘starfuckers’; even plump green witch Grotbags asserts that ‘It was always on offer, and Rod was a man.’ In other words, a bird on the hand bagged him loads in the bush. Whether he ever employed his feathered sidekick in the bedroom is left to our imagination, although it certainly conjures up some deliciously appalling imagery, particularly if you use Photoshop, an old
Look-In
, and a collection of porn shots to build a visual reconstruction, which is precisely what I’m going to do the moment I’ve finished typing this.

Hull’s moment in the sun didn’t last, however, and having made his fortune prancing round a pink windmill, he blew it all on an overpriced mansion. Unable to get work, he grew to loathe Emu, who represented both the pinnacle of his success and its limitations. With pathetic naivety, he tried appearing in public sans bird only to encounter disappointment: an uncomfortable clip from around this time shows a birdless Hull reacting with a face like thunder to a ‘hasn’t-had-much-work-of-late’ crack by Jonathan Ross during a comedy awards show.

This is a peculiarly touching documentary that doesn’t attempt to hide its subject’s weak points (it seems Emu wasn’t his idea in the first place), yet still paints a sympathetic picture of an eccentric, unique performer who brightened the lives of millions.

That he looks hilariously similar to Camilla Parker-Bowles throughout is an unexpected bonus.

Morning has broken? Good. I hate morning. You wake, soaked in your own filth, your face raw from last night’s tears, shards of shattered shot-glass peppering the bedspread, and you ask yourself what difference it would make if instead of going to work you spent the day banging your head against the kitchen table and howling till your skull bursts open and the pain flops out. Or is that just me?

Whatever. TV doesn’t help. Breakfast shows are one thing –
they’re so insipid I often catch myself wondering if I’ve died in the night and come round during a particularly bland coffee morning in heaven – but what follows is worse.

Take
Kilroy
(BBC1). Why start the day with an interminable wallow in the worst life could possibly throw at you? Death, disease, abuse, betrayal, Robert Kilroy-Silk. It’s all there, and it’s all about as life-affirming as a handful of shit for Christmas. The show’s single laugh comes during the pre-credits intro, when Kilroy (played by Judge Death from the old Dredd strips) floats toward the camera like an undersea monster looming at a porthole, and sums up the day’s agenda with a single rhetorical question, inevitably broken in two by a camp dramatic pause in the middle.