Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (39 page)

‘Your son was a choirboy. Now he’s wanted for murder?’ ‘Your husband left you for a blow-up doll. And it’s male?’

The all-time classic Kilroy opener is: ‘It’s 9 o’clock in the morning. And you’ve already got a bottle in your hand?’ I know people who use that as a catchphrase.

Once that’s out of the way, we’re treated to a short title sequence of Kilroy grimacing like a man with his scrotum caught on the business end of a coathanger – and then the real fun begins: the crying, the shouting, the constant interruptions.

I once awoke blearily on a sofa to hear the Kilroy audience bawling each other into submission and I swear to God I thought there was a real-life fight going on in my living room: imagine my disappointment when I discovered the truth.

And it isn’t just the content that’s disheartening: the finest synopsis of
Kilroy
I’ve ever heard came from Peter ‘Look Around You’ Serafinowicz, who described the studio as looking ‘really cold … it’s like waiting for a bus’.

Awful though
Kilroy
is, it’s got nothing on
Trisha
(ITV1), which bypasses ‘objectionable’ and hammers towards ‘despicable’ with metronomic regularity. Sneering ratboys, wizened harpies, gum-chewing spitbags of every description – that’s the subject matter. And ‘Who stuck it in who?’ is the daily question; a conundrum that’s often settled with the help of on-air DNA and lie-detector tests. Cheers for that, world of science.

But the studio audience is worse. I’ve got nothing against fat, ugly women, until they stand up and bellow moronically on television, at which point I dream of kicking their teeth down their throats (a doomed fantasy – the gobblesome warthogs would immediately digest them and demand pudding). There’s a lot of pent-up rage in that studio, and it’s unswervingly directed at whichever man happens to be on stage. Granted, the men are arseholes, but the sight of one arsehole being shouted at by another arsehole – one whose arms are so blubbery they’re still undulating five minutes after she’s finished shaking her ham-sized fist – does not fulfilling television make.

My advice? Lie in till 11, when the
Terry and Gaby Show
starts on Five. Clearly inspired by the USA’s
Regis and Kathy Lee
, it’s what the
Des and Mel Show
is trying to be but isn’t.

Wogan – whose name sounds more like a Norse god each time I say it aloud – is a genuinely funny man, and the relaxed format gives him plenty of opportunity for cynical asides and amusingly dark mutterings. Yes, it’s just a cross between
This Morning
and
TFI
Friday
, but I guarantee it won’t drive you to suicide. And, for morning TV, that’s high praise indeed.

Holidays! They’re fantastic. You get to travel the world, encounter unfamiliar cultures and experience chronic diarrhoea on outlandish toilets.

Drink cocktails! Lie on the beach! Feel your skin blister beneath the punishing Mediterranean sun! Don sunglasses and pretend not to stare at topless 19-year-old Italian girls! Laugh at the stern faces on brightly coloured foreign banknotes! Marvel at the hardcore goat pornography openly on sale beside the kiddies’ inflatables in the mini-supermarket! Get your bag pinched! Holidays! Yaaaay!

But holidays weren’t always this brilliant. Phone up someone from the 1950s and ask them to describe their average holiday and they’d paint a picture of crowded Margate beaches, warty-faced landladies who ruled their B&Bs like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,
monochrome skies and bracing sea winds. So why did our habits change? Two reasons: 1) We realised that British holidays were inherently rubbish, and 2) Television started broadcasting foreign-holiday shows.

The Way We Travelled
(BBC2) is a fascinating trawl through the history of TV travel shows. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the general population viewed a foreign holiday as a deadly serious undertaking, as pioneering and dangerous as piloting a UFO through the rings of Saturn: consequently to modern eyes the shows appear to be aimed at imbeciles. Look! An aeroplane! It goes up in the sky! And then it lands! And then you’re in France! Amazing!

Basic stuff, yes, but there’s a genuine charm to these antiquated holiday shows that’s sadly lacking from today’s gaudy travelogues. Perhaps it’s the sense of class, personified by Alan Whicker, whose dapper dress sense and smooth nasal delivery never faltered for a moment, whether he was ascending Mount Fuji, exploring Ayers Rock, or beating a monkey to death with a stick on the Great Wall of China (he never did the last one, obviously, but you get the point – this was one unruffled hepcat).

So unchanging was Whicker’s look, in fact, he became an instantly recognisable ‘brand’ almost overnight: the stiff but personable Englishman abroad, utterly incongruous yet somehow right at home against an ever-changing background. (The one time he looked out of place came during a report from hippy-packed San Francisco – as he stands in Haight-Ashbury surrounded by moon-eyed junkies, it’s hard not to feel sorry for him.)

The excitement in Whicker’s early reports is palpable: even a simple act such as boarding a foreign bus was a strange and fascinating adventure for most viewers, so God alone knows what they made of his more demented excesses – such as the time he flew through the Alps in a glamorous heiress’s jet, then joined her in a speedboat for some outrageous on-camera flirting which proved so efficient they ended up engaged to one another.

But while slick Whicker lived the life of an international playboy, it was down to paunchy Cliff Michelmore to cover more attainable locales. The BBC’s
Holiday
series launched in 1969, just as cheap
package deals started taking off. At the time, the whole notion of a fortnight in Majorca was such a mind-blowing prospect, the show was presented à la
Crimewatch
– with a panel of experts on hand to answer questions from curious callers. Is the sun the same colour in Portugal? Do they have bread in Greece? What is ‘Spain’?

By contrast, we’re spoiled today. Holiday shows have lost their charm and are little more than a bland whizz through a world of cliché, replete with quasi-porno shots of female presenters enjoying naked back-rubs and pan-pipe music accompanying 50 per cent of the footage. And the viewers themselves demand more from a holiday, hence the rise of idiotic Holiday from Hell shows in which pale whingeing killjoys burst into tears at the memory of cockroaches on a Jamaican shower curtain. Where’s the excitement? Where’s the joy?

Answer: it’s gone. The past really
is
a foreign country. And you can’t book a flight there.

Television specialises in images that are easy on the eye: soothing set design, rolling landscapes, presenters with faces so Formica-bland they make the Stepford Wives look like Slipknot. After all, it keeps the populace docile, which is what the infernal thing was invented for in the first place.

But every now and then, and apparently just for the heck of it, the box spews up something hard to watch. Televised operations, for instance. Lord knows how anyone can sit through them without puking into their lap. I once saw a gruesome hip replacement on
Your Life in Their Hands
that resembled someone rummaging through a bag full of mince in search of an ivory walking stick; I was dizzy for four days.

But even the grisliest operation, even close-up eye surgery with a lemon squeezer – it simply can’t compare to the arrgh-no-God-make-it-stop horror of Victoria Aitken’s freestyle rap performance on this week’s
Young, Posh and Loaded
(ITV1), which is by far the most painful sight you’ll encounter this week, even if you spend
the rest of the time walking round an anal trauma ward with a magnifying glass. Ms Aitken is intent on launching a career in hip-hop and nothing – including public opinion or common sense – is going to stop her. ‘People keep saying, “You can’t do that,” but why not?’ she asks, displaying the kind of self-awareness deficit normally associated with inanimate objects and root vegetables.

Her logic dribbles thus: despite being raised as a blue-blooded posho, she’s down wit da rap world because Daddy was a jailbird, even though he ended up there for being a greedy arrogant liar rather than a crack dealer. Well get hip, Vic: Papa was no rolling stone; he was Jonathan Aitken MP, the slimy Tory gonk who famously vowed to clear his name with the Sword of Truth and ended up popping a cap in his own ass with the Uzi of Folly.

Still, at least Victoria can rely on her firm grasp of black-American street culture. ‘I suppose instead of going to the theatre, people in the ghetto stand around rapping for hours,’ she explains, before setting out to take part in an open-mic freestyling contest during which she achieves the impossible by piling far more disgrace on the family name than Pater ever did.

It’s all staged for the cameras, of course – this is one of those cut-’ n’-shut ITV sneer-u-mentaries whose sole purpose is to make you despise everyone onscreen – but that doesn’t detract from the overall nausea factor; if anything, it makes it even worse. Just how dim do you have to be to willingly take part in a programme called
Young, Posh and Loaded
anyway? Would it have made any difference if they’d called it ‘Hateful Shitheads’ instead?

Judging by the programme’s other subjects, it wouldn’t: we’re also introduced to fat-arsed party organiser Jonny (specialist subject: guffawing at his own jokes) and wormy little princess Donatella (specialist subject: wanting to be famous).

Naturally, none of these coin-sodden bozos are actually doing anything of merit: when not bragging about how much money he’s making, Jonny runs dull club nights for braying Mayfair swanmunchers, while Donatella is simply shown failing her driving test – not that this little mishap dissuades Daddy from buying her a £45,000 customised Mini Cooper replete with an on-board DVD
system and custom-dyed lambswool carpets, which with any luck she’ll plough headlong into a concrete wall before the end of the year (sole drawback: if only it were a people carrier, she could pack more of her friends inside prior to impact).

All in all then, an unremarkably despicable half-hour of television. Short of not actually broadcasting this crap in the first place, I can only think of one improvement – tie it in with some kind of high-tech video-game light-gun technology, so incensed viewers can blow the heads off the onscreen participants. ‘Young, Posh and Shot in the Face’ – now there’s a concept. Are you listening, ITV?

I’m not entirely sure why, but the term ‘aspirational’ really gets my goat.

Take the ‘aspirational’ broadsheet Sunday supplements: are they aimed at human beings? Here’s the average content: a po-faced profile on some arse-bound artist you’ve never heard of, a 10-page photo splurge on limbless Angolan babies, a recipe for summer pudding, a page showcasing designer potato mashers costing £85 each and a column by some supercilious woman explaining What Men Think and Where They’re Going Wrong in joyless and punishing detail. If that’s what you aspire to – reclining in an Olaaf Dynstiblanq chair tutting sorrowfully over reports from Korean sweatshops while sipping a nice glass of Shiraz – I’d suggest you alter your mental trajectory now, before it develops into full-blown madness.

Aspirational TV drama is equally laughable: from
Thirtysomething
to
Attachments
, tasteful lighting and pretty faces always leave me cold. This week, just to annoy me, BBC3 premières another slick-but-soulless example in the form of
Platinum
(BBC3), a US drama series revolving around a pair of brothers running a New York hip-hop label. Two things separate
Platinum
from previous aspirationfests. First, there’s the setting: starring a largely black cast, it follows the life of Jackson and Grady Rhames, owners of an ailing rap label called Sweetback Records. Then there’s the production:  John ‘Undercover Brother’ Ridley and Sofia ‘Virgin Suicides’ Coppola have devised it; Francis Ford Coppola serves as executive producer.

There’s no denying that initially, with its rap-speak dialogue and absurdly slick visuals,
Platinum
feels different: the problem is that it takes just 10 minutes for you realise it isn’t. In fact, the whole thing is little more than a conveyor belt of standard, formulaic blubber: the chalk and cheese siblings (Jackson’s sensible, Grady’s a wide boy), the childhood friends drifting apart, the noble suffering wife, the highs and lows of ‘living your dream’. You could plot the future story arc on graph paper with your eyes closed. Then there’s the script, which is 90 per cent rap cliché: pseudo profundities that occasionally rhyme. Hence there’s much empty yap about ‘taking it to the next level’ and ‘stepping up’ for your buddies, but precious little else.

So far, so irritating. But your ears have it easy: it’s the constant visual masturbation that seriously grates. Absolutely every scene is rendered in the style of a Craig David video, with immaculate colour co-ordination, slow-mo pans across nothing much occurring and blurry cutaways. It’s like falling asleep inside Trevor Nelson’s head.

All of the above might just be forgivable, but just as you’re coming to terms with the safety-scissor blandness of it all,
Platinum
delivers a fatal shot to its own skull by trying to make Sweetback Records’ financial performance the single most important aspect of the show. Well intentioned, maybe – drama serials about black-run businesses are pretty thin on the ground – but storylines about takeover bids and sales figures don’t exactly set the pulse racing and besides, no matter what colour your lead actor is, he becomes a dull amorphous blob the moment he double-clicks on an Excel spreadsheet.

With any luck, future episodes will concentrate more on the absurdities of the hip-hop world rather than Sweetback Records’ shareholder concerns, and it’ll all pick up as a result (and, to be fair, episode one does contain a sequence in which a bit of intercompany rivalry is settled by a belt-wielding thug – although since
even that scene is rendered in slow-mo Craig-David-O-Vision, it looks curiously serene, like the gangsta equivalent of Constable’s
Haywain
).