Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (9 page)

Can’t argue with that: so at number 2) it’s Character Options, and at number 1) – in with a bullet! – Faceless Dolls.

Pick a favourite: vote now.

Never trust a morning person. Anyone who leaps out of bed with a smile on their face and a spring in their step is deranged. And breakfast television is aimed at these lunatics. It must be: who the hell else has time to watch TV in the morning? Most of us are still in bed, pawing blearily at the snooze button until it’s too late to procrastinate further and we have to head bogwards for the first and darkest piddle of the day.

Here’s the ideal breakfast TV show, one that would work brilliantly on that 14-inch portable at the base of your bed: an abstract collage of soothing shapes and colours undulating in time to some muffled ambient throb, suddenly interrupted half an hour later by a maniac with a foghorn shrieking ‘LATE FOR WORK!’ at the top of his voice.

But that isn’t on, so what are your options? Well, BBC1 has a rolling new programme called
Breakfast
. Not ‘Breakfast News’, or ‘Breakfast Report’, or ‘Breakfast Briefing’: just
Breakfast
– which means the presenters sometimes say, ‘Good morning, you’re watching
Breakfast
.’ Weird.

It gets weirder:
Breakfast
is described as a ‘relaxed’ current-affairs show – which means you’re confronted with newsreaders sitting on a sofa. Newsreaders who smile and want to be your friend. They grin a parental grin as you stumble into the room, still dazed from dreamland, blinking, yawning, and scratching at your hair. Look! They’ve poured you a mug of coffee and fanned the day’s papers across the table. They’re watching you with the serene patience of cult members.

‘Hello. Hope you slept OK. You did? Hey, that’s great!’

You notice the breezy colour scheme and the onscreen clock in the corner. The one that tells the time in
that
typeface, that impersonal font the brand-conscious Beeb use for everything these days. Your hosts pause and emit a loud cough.

‘Um. Now, look – we don’t want to worry you, but there was a bit of Armageddon while you were slumbering.’

Armageddon? ARMAGEDDON?

Reassuring smile.

‘Yes! Isn’t it exciting?’

No – God, no! Don’t let this happen. We don’t want laid-back newsreaders flopping about on sofas, cutting us knobbly slices of rustic bread. It isn’t right. We want stern-faced Peter Sissons types sitting bolt upright and staring straight through our skulls, booming information like a 500-foot Tannoy of the Apocalypse. Unless there’s a major news event billowing, you’d have to be crazy to watch
Breakfast
voluntarily. It’s just too bloody creepy.

On ITV,
GMTV
decants its standard blend of celebutainment, human-interest stories and garish background fauna; just behind the sofa, peeping o’er the presenters’ shoulders, lurk the sort of floral arrangements usually depicted on canisters of Shake ’n’ Vac. Fitting, since if
GMTV
had a smell, it would be lavender – the antiseptic, chemical lavender that wafts from cheap plastic air-fresheners and vaguely reminds you of hospitals and death. Good morning, Britain!

In the absence of scent-broadcast technology, they have to make do with undemanding interviews with celebrity guests, who generally look about as comfortable as someone trying to rectally ingest an entire garden rake. And who can blame them: woken at the crack of dawn, perched on the edge of a sofa in a brightly lit set apparently modelled on a Travelodge lobby, answering questions too bland to pass muster in a
Marketing Now
readership survey, half the interviewees seem too oddballed out to know what’s happening. It’s useless until Lorraine Kelly comes on, useless.

Then there’s Channel 4 and the revamped
Big Breakfast
, whose set now resembles a cross between a Hanna-Barbera space station
and one of those trendy London bars that looks more like a diagram than a watering hole.

New frontman Paul Tonkinson is good, being both funny and reassuringly ugly. His face is at rest most of the time, but every so often it springs into ‘gurn’ mode and looks as though it’s about to leap off his head and go beat up some daffodils; in full grimace he starts to resemble one of the melting Nazis from the end of the
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

One glaring problem: the programme is rendered nigh-on unwatchable by the relentless offscreen bellowing of the crew, who accompany every utterance with gibbonoid barking and laughs so forced they’ve probably been dislodged with a broom. Shut up: you sound like witless old drunks at a megaphone convention on the Planet of the Apes, and some of us are trying to listen.

There you have it: breakfast television. I vote for oversleeping every time. Prise off that snooze button: you may wind up unemployed, but you’ll never see Eamon Holmes again.

I’m a dimwit. I’m a dufus. I am not a Clever Man. Sometimes I’ll be sitting round a table with people cleverer than I, and as their conversation wanders into the realms of
Roget’s Thesaurus
, I find myself struggling to keep up, so instead I nod and smile and stare at the fruit machine and pray they’ll find their way back to discussing a topic I can relate to, like ‘Battle of the Planets’ or things that would hurt if you sat on them accidentally.

Many, many things go clean over my head. But
Jim Davidson’s
Generation Game
(BBC1) is the first thing that’s ever gone under it. As a child, I watched Larry Grayson’s tenure, and found the programme dull but easy to follow. Now it’s transformed into something I simply don’t understand. In trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the entire show has managed to drop off the low end of the stupidity spectrum, to a point where the human brain is incapable of interpreting its signal.

Once the cacophonous signature tune has died down, cheeky
Jim scampers onstage, winking and twitching like a man with a fishhook in his glans, and immediately launches into a fractured comic pantomime of such awkward, ill-conceived clunkiness, you can’t help but wonder whether it’s been scripted by a human with a laptop or a dog with a Fisher-Price Activity Centre.

Assisting him are gaudy assistant Melanie Stace (the pair crackle with the kind of instant chemistry you’d more readily associate with a meeting between Peter Sissons and Roland Rat) and loveable pratfall king Mister Blobby (swear to God, stick your ear out the window the moment he bounds into view and you can hear the faint, descending murmur of a nationwide moan of dismay).

Of course it doesn’t help that the frontman brings so much baggage with him. Even forgetting the hateful, hackneyed nature of the opening comic skits for a moment, it’s hard to warm to this widely demonised comic – unless of course you’re an imbecile, in which case you’re probably too busy gurgling at Blobby, and the show could just as well be hosted by a bit of rag on a stick for all you care.

Actually, that’s not a bad idea, for three reasons: 1) A bit of rag on a stick would be 100 per cent less likely to saunter around the set casually patronising women (last week, virtually the only occasion he resisted the urge to call a female contestant ‘love’ or ‘darling’ it was to call her a ‘stupid woman’ instead). 2) It would also be easier on the eye. If you ask me, Davidson’s got a creepy head, all tight and desiccated, like a length of vinyl ‘woodgrain effect’ wall covering, topped with a haircut that seems to have taken place by accident. 3) A bit of rag on a stick would be funny.

But enough about Davidson himself. The whole concept of the
Generation Game
feels spiteful and cold. Skits and challenges exist as an excuse for Z-grade celebrities and grubby salespersons to plug themselves; presumably the reason they agreed to stand next to Jim in the first place, although it’s hard to believe anyone could consider this effective advertising – it’s like glimpsing a commercial flyer bobbing in a cesspool. The hapless contestants are rarely asked to speak – they’re just jostled and humiliated, grinning like
dunces, their dignity round their knees, all for the chance to sit in front of a conveyor belt watching the contents of the Argos catalogue scroll by. This junk doesn’t belong on TV a moment longer: it should be stuffed down a hole and destroyed.

On the other side,
Popstars
(ITV) is eating itself, as it charts the effect its own success is having on the five dullards that maketh the band. But all the suspense has vanished. They’re even trailing it with the words ‘
Popstars
– it’s far from over’, when it quite clearly is. Doesn’t look like they’ll be using any of your suggested band names, either: I’ve chosen the final winner: Dad Erector. Congratulations to Mellors Karloff, who suggested it, although I suspect that isn’t your real name. This correspondence is now closed.

Oh, before I go: just realised that Nigel Lythgoe is the absolute spit of Admiral Ackbar from
Return of the Jedi
– you know, the lobster-headed one in the Rebel control room during the battle at the end. It’s true. Tell your friends.

There’s this theory that television is depressing us all. By pumping images of successful, beautiful, witty people into your home around the clock, it forces you to compare your humdrum existence with the knockabout lives of the onscreen funsters, even the fictional ones. Since real life can’t compare to fantasy life, you wind up feeling inadequate and miserable – and the more inadequate and miserable you feel, the more television you watch, and the more boring your life becomes. Plus, you’re inert, so you start to get fat. Before you know it, your fingers are too chubby to successfully stab the ‘off’ button on the remote control, and you’re doomed to spend the rest of your days slumped in front of the box like a semi-deflated hot-air balloon, occasionally breaking into a sweat as you struggle to open the day’s thirtieth packet of bourbon creams.

If this is the case, our ongoing obsession with handsome celebrities starts to look downright masochistic. It also explains why over the last two years I’ve become a) averse to watching slim, good-
looking people, b) pudgier, and c) sick to the tits of bourbon creams. It’s self-defence.

One unexpected side effect is that I’ve started actively warming to any unconventional-looking humanoid who makes it on TV. With more and more presenters being chosen on the basis of their looks alone (the only logical explanation for Donna Air), the homely ones are getting rarer, and therefore easier to spot. You can also guarantee they’re going to be good at their job; after all, with a face like that, they’d have to be.

Take Alan Titchmarsh; he may look like something looming unexpectedly at a porthole in a Captain Nemo movie, but he’s friendly, engaging, and he knows his subject matter inside out. But you won’t be seeing his photograph on the cover of
Heat
magazine – partly because it’d curdle the milk in the newsagent’s tea, and partly because customers might mistake it for ‘Hobbit Monthly’, but mainly because he isn’t young and attractive enough. Oh, and because they don’t cover gardening either. That might have something to do with it. But I digress.

As I say, for the last few years I’ve avoided watching anything peopled with pretty faces, on the grounds it might make me weep down my gut. One show I swerved away from in particular was
Dawson’s Creek
(C4), but recently I’ve found myself ‘getting into’ it, seemingly by osmosis.

First it just happened to be on in the same room as me. Someone else was watching, while I pottered around, grumpily hunting for an Ab Roller Plus, pausing every so often to snort disdainfully whenever someone said something heartfelt. Then I discovered I’d accidentally learnt the names of several key characters. Then one day, somehow, I realised with a start that I’d sat down and watched the entire programme from start to finish, without an ironic sneer cracking across my head for a second. Now it’s a guilty pleasure. And you know what? I don’t care. Naturally, I still despise Dawson himself, for the following reasons:

1) He looks precisely – precisely – like the featureless lead in any bland Disney cartoon you care to mention. In fact, I suspect he’s actually a piece of incredibly sophisticated computer animation developed to play the lead in ‘Toy Story 3’. He’s probably got a hidden ‘cheat mode’ where his head spins round and breathes fire. Still, he’s obviously a work-in-progress; with any luck once they’ve finished beta-testing he’ll actually be capable of pulling facial expressions.

2) His character is boring. So boring in fact, they could replace him with a damp oven glove, and call it ‘Oven Glove’s Creek’, and it would probably liven things up a bit. Thankfully, even the other characters have noticed how boring he is, and started deserting him for his best friend. Well, one did, anyway, and that was his girlfriend, so ha ha ha, Dawson! Take that, dullo!

3) Everyone else who watches
Dawson’s Creek
dislikes Dawson as well, and I’m trying to fit in here, OK?

Still, I think the programme is helping me overcome my aversion to anything popular that features a good-looking cast. Emboldened, I’ve recently started re-appraising
Shipwrecked
(C4), which I laid into a few weeks ago in these very pages.

I say ‘re-appraising’. What I actually mean is ‘unironically watching’. Yes: that’s sucked me in as well, and I can only hold my hands up and apologise to all concerned.

So now I’m not just developing the viewing habits of a teenager, I’m an appalling hypocrite to boot. And that’s depressing me. You can’t win. Where are the bourbon creams?

Glance through the TV schedules and you might mistake present-day TV producers for a pack of coked-up jackals happy to sling any old hoo-hah at the screen so long as their cheque arrives on time and they’re still in with a shot at that good-looking 22-year-old runner they’ve had their eye on for the past six weeks.