Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (50 page)

4 Ban
EastEnders
from attempting storylines involving gangsters
Unless said storyline culminates in a gang of twenty hardened
cockney thugs thrashing Little Mo to death with broomsticks, I’m
simply not interested.

5 Introduce late-night adult versions of tired stalwarts
Examples: ‘Adult Countryfile’ (rutting in haystacks), ‘Nude Antiques
Roadshow’ (pensioners’ unclothed bodies evaluated by experts),
and ‘Bergerac Hardcore’ (repeats of
Bergerac
with brand new, digitally
created pornographic interludes in which Charlie Hungerford
ravishes the entire population of Jersey). 

6 Put a playable version of ‘Tetris’ on Ceefax
Self-explanatory, that one.

7 Outdo ITV with new, ultra-cruel reality shows
Such as my oft-mentioned ‘Heaven Can’t Wait’, in which people
coming round from operations wake up to find actors dressed as
angels standing by their bedside, who inform them they’ve died
and gone to heaven, before reuniting them with deceased relatives
(actually junior researchers wearing convincing latex masks). Or
perhaps ‘Celebrity D-Day’, in which the Omaha Beach landing is
re-enacted by famous folk, using live ammunition. The list is endless;
the only thing holding us back is basic human decency. 

8 Televised hangings for licence-fee dodgers
Or stick their heads on poles and dot them about in the background
of popular drama serials as a warning to others of their
kind. In these difficult times, the BBC needs a DG who rules with
an iron fist. 

9 Let Paxman actually hit people
Another self-explanatory one, there. 

10 Broadcast the four-minute warning on April Fools’ Day
Then wait until all the fuss had died down, and questions had been
asked in the House, and an angry population had demanded my
immediate resignation – and then do it again, because it’d be even 
funnier the second time round.

So there you have it. Those are my initial suggestions – but why
should I have all the fun? E-mail your own DG fantasy lists to me
courtesy of the
Guide
, and I’ll pick the best and run them in a
future column. During a quiet week, naturally.

Yes, it’s
Big Brother
time again and, as per tradition, I’m going to spend the remainder of the column slagging off the housemates and trying not to catch my own reflection in the monitor lest I gaze deeply into my own eyes and marvel at the sheer aching pointlessness of the task.

Anyway, here’s a handy cut-out-and-lose guide to the twelve inmates – a cast of asylum seekers, bisexuals, transsexuals and left-wing anarchists apparently chosen specifically to infuriate Richard Littlejohn, who probably thinks he’s watching a live feed from the Labour Party conference.

First up, Marco, a homosexual ghost-train skeleton so implausibly camp he makes Mr Humphries look like the Terminator.

Marco’s a true multi-tasker: he distributes his time equally between squealing, squawking, shrieking, screaming, yelling, yelping and screeching. He’s the human equivalent of fingernails down a blackboard, and is therefore the quintessential
Big Brother
resident.

Straight after Marco went in, Ahmed, a homophobic former asylum seeker, followed. The look of fake delight on his face as he first greeted Marco was a joy to behold. At 44, Ahmed simply doesn’t fit in with anyone else in the house. Therefore, another quintessential
Big Brother
resident.

Then there’s Jason, resident bozo. A former Mr Best Buttocks, South Lanarkshire who moisturises his butt-cheeks to keep them looking happy, Jason is a slight but buffoonish presence, floating round the house getting his bum out every eight seconds. He’d have been great in
The Poseidon Adventure
, where he could’ve undercut the serious tone every few minutes with some well-timed mooning but, in this context he’s just, well, an arse.

Dan is the second gay housemate and, apart from a stupid haircut, seems fairly normal, so we’ll bypass him – and dull pretty boy Stuart – and go straight on to Victor, an incredible prick and the worst black male role model since MC Hammer. Victor spouts self-aggrandising bullshit with the single-minded determination of an industrial self-aggrandising bullshit machine. With a straight face, he’s claimed that ‘My DNA stands for Dis Negro’s attractive’ and ‘When it comes to ladies, right, you can call me “The Plumber” ’cos I like to lay pipe.’ He’s also bragged loudly about the girth of his penis. ‘It’s like major girff, man – I can hardly get it in.’ Victor’s currently the most likely candidate for an onscreen shag, possibly with a piece of furniture.

Next, Kitten, played by Jarvis Cocker, Tracey Thorn and Rick from
The Young Ones
. The kind of hardcore, hard-left lesbian who previously only existed in Littlejohn’s imagination, Kitten’s the most sensitive of the housemates, yet hamstrung by one fatal flaw: a tendency to drone about politics in an unbroken and largely inarticulate stream, until her voice becomes an omnipresent low-frequency burble, like the sound of a particularly boring corpse damply mumbling itself to sleep in a coffin.

Vanessa and Michelle are this year’s glamour girls; the former a South African blonde, the latter a bisexual wannabe Page 3 girl from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Neither has much to say, but that’s all right, since their job is to wear bikinis and bend over a lot. Both will be coming soon to a downblouse/upskirt celebrity screengrab website near you, where thousands of lonely males can masturbate over them at leisure.

Who else? Ah, there’s Shell, a posh horsey blonde who gets squiffy and also gets her bum out (this year’s dominating theme), and Emma, this year’s token thickie, who has the added bonus of sounding like every episode of
Creature Comforts
you’ve ever seen. And finally, Nadia, the Portuguese transsexual, who at the time of writing hasn’t revealed her ‘big secret’ to the other inmates. I suspect that she’s actually Pedro Almodóvar in a shiny fat suit.

So there you have ’em. Nigh on unwatchably hateful to the last. ’S what
Big Brother
’s all about, innit?

All change yet again in the
Big Brother
(C4/E4) house, which is proving tricky to chronicle. I write to a Tuesday morning deadline, which means by the time Saturday morning rolls around half my words are obsolete. This wasn’t a problem last year, because nothing actually happened throughout the entire series (‘Day 65 in the Big Brother house – Cameron is asleep. Jon is staring at a wall and thinking about quarks’), but
BB5’
s already brought us fights, rooftop protests, nudity, heavy petting and a bit where Marco spewed up on a merry-go-round. What’s a guy to do?

The housemates keep shifting character too. Last week I dismissed Jason as a pointless bum-flasher; suddenly he’s become so stern and serious he makes Peter Sissons look like Jim Carrey. Thank God for Victor, who continues to be an arsehole, as predicted.

Still, what’s making this series so watchable is the 50/50 split between gurgling imbeciles and uptight tossers. With that in mind, and since it’s Tuesday morning, let me predict the events for the rest of the week: on Wednesday, dim robo-seductress Michelle
bared her breasts, then her bottom, then her breasts again, in exchange for a 10 pence IOU from Victor. On Thursday, Vanessa got upset when stretched-out-gay-idiot-baby Marco done a whoopsie on the carpet. And last night, Emma dribbled chocolate down her front for a full hour while Dan mopped her face clean and tutted a lot.

If, for some mad reason, watching the above for the next eight weeks doesn’t appeal, never fear, because throughout this period the TV schedules are full of exciting, exhilarating SPORT! for you to watch whether you want to or not.

Don’t worry if you lose the listings and don’t know when it’s on: helpful TV schedulers routinely make it easy for you to stay abreast of all the latest SPORT! by shifting everything else clean out of the way in order to accommodate it. Yes, for months on end, you too can look on in dismay as an unseen sports fan assumes command of the remote, bullishly forcing you to watch SPORT! instead of, say, the latest episode of a beloved drama serial halfway through its run.

This situation is nothing new of course, but it’s gone on far too long, and in the age of digital sister channels and hard-disk recorders, there’s simply no need for this madness to continue. I dream of the day a continuity announcer utters the words ‘… and if you want to keep watching the snooker, turn to BBC3 – meanwhile here on BBC2, we’ll continue
as fucking scheduled
.’

SPORT! fans may moan that they can’t get BBC3, and boo hoo that’s not fair – tough, idiots. We non-SPORT! fans are becoming radicalised by years of abuse. Right now, with Euro 2004, you can’t avoid football, even if you don’t watch the so-called ‘matches’ themselves – it’s omnipresent.

There it is, in the ad break – look, there’s Jamie Oliver having a matey kickaround in his garden, followed by fifteen soccer-themed beer commercials, capped off with a multi-million-pound blockbuster ad in which overpaid footballing megastars are deified on behalf of shoe companies whose products are sewn together by penniless Korean slaves getting amphetamines injected into their eyeballs every 10 minutes so they don’t fall asleep during their 87-hour shift. Hooray for football!

Here’s praying England lose, and lose quickly. May the ‘beautiful game’ be damned. And the same goes for Wimbledon, and cricket, and rugby, and snooker and darts, and any and all future sports not covered in this polemic. Even if someone invents nude moon volleyball, I’m not interested.

In fact, I’d actually rather watch Marco sicking up on the swings
every day for the rest of my life
than sit through yet another minute of SPORT SPORT BLOODY BLOODY SPORT.

In summary, then: bollocks to sport and bollocks to everyone who likes it. For ever and ever. Amen.

Life would be unbearable if you didn’t have your vices. They come in all shapes and sizes – cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate biscuits, going mental with a cricket bat at bus stops – and they all provide a brief respite from the trudging monotony of everyday existence. Is that so bad? Of course not. Bad habits are fun.

Yes, fun. Which is precisely why the world’s killjoys are continually circling above your head, harping on at you to stop. Case in point:
You Are What You Eat
(C4), a new ‘dietary makeover’ show in which a nutrition expert rifles through the shopping basket of a self-confessed blobbo, then tuts and frowns and whines in their face for half an hour.

This week’s victim is Michelle, a bloated office-bound manatee who spends most evenings shovelling cake into her face in a desperate bid to make life fun again. Her constant diet of crisps, biscuits and microwaveable hermit slop has turned her into a flatulent human waterbed, but fortunately healthy-eating guru Dr Gillian McKeith is on hand to help her mend her ways with a crash diet of organic brown rice, lentils, steamed carrots, tofu, twigs, bracken, soil and mulch.

Naturally, Michelle finds it hard to stomach at first, partly because anyone who says they actually like brown rice is a lying masochist, but mainly because Dr Gillian McKeith strikes her as a charmless, judgemental, hand-wringing harridan. Disgusting cake-
wolfing glutton she may be, but in this respect at least, Michelle is absolutely right.

A quick look at Dr Gillian’s official website reveals two interesting things. Firstly that she’s incapable of smiling naturally on camera (the rictus grin in her official photo makes her look like she’s trying to poo out a pine cone – which, given her diet, she probably is). And secondly that she has her own range of holier-than-thou Dr Gillian health-food snacks, including a ‘Living Food Love Bar’ which will ‘nourish libido energy and feed love organs’. Yes, feed love organs. I’m not sure you’re supposed to put it in your mouth.

The love bar’s lip-smacking listed ingredients include potency-wood root, sprouted daikon seeds, ho shou wu leaves, wu wei zi berries and catuaba bark. And if that doesn’t whet your appetite, perhaps Dr Gillian’s accompanying ‘message of love’ will:

‘My primary reason for developing this Love Bar is that it serves as a platform, like a stage, to garner your attention, and then to be able to communicate my message of unconditional love … love your partners in life, your neighbours, and especially your enemy. When you can finally love your foe or even the faceless stranger yonder, then and only then will you elevate your physiology and your soul.’

In other words, it’s Snickers for arseholes.

Might I suggest a new makeover show called ‘Get a Grip’, in which I lock Dr Gillian in a windowless room for six weeks and shout at her to see sense? Because there’s something inherently hateful about the growing ranks of nannyish smuggos in the world – gym-loving, anti-smoking, free-range solipsists who actually brag about how much water they drink, and shake their heads with pity if you crack open a packet of Monster Munch. So you’ll live longer – so what? Look at the company you’ll be keeping and weep.

Anyway, infuriatingly enough, after an initial bout of disobedience, Michelle follows Dr Gillian’s instructions and emerges two stone lighter and far better-looking. I watched these scenes through a haze of tears, shovelling takeaway pork down my gullet. The day I inevitably join the squat-thrusting, vegetable-steaming replicants draws inexorably closer.

First piece of evidence: I’ve quit smoking – and voluntarily, unlike the inhabitants of
Big Brother
, whose violent bust-up occurred the day the fags ran out. If Channel 4 wants further fireworks, they should draft in Dr Gillian to cook the housemates’ meals each night. There’d be heads on poles within hours, guaranteed.