Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (10 page)

You couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, TV people care too much about their output. They fret over the tiniest details: Is that word too long? Is this subject too dry? Have we got a higher-quality close-up of the blood leaking out? Why has the runner brought me regular Lilt, instead of the Diet Lilt I asked for? How quickly can I
sack her? Will she still sleep with me afterwards? And so on.

In fact, they worry so much about the minutiae of the content, they often lose sight of the bigger picture. Instead of asking themselves, ‘Is this new?’, ‘Is this ground-breaking?’, they think, ‘Is this suitable for our viewing demographic?’, and creativity flounders and the world’s joy supply trickles further down the drain.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are still those willing to take a risk, to chance their arm on a show so original, so utterly innovative, it shatters the epoch, pushes the envelope, and heralds the dawn of a new era all at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen:
Touch the Truck
(C5) is almost upon us, and it will change the face of broadcasting for ever.

Finally, someone somewhere has twigged that it’s entirely possible to transmit simply anything – absolutely anything – and boom! you’ve made a prime-time television programme. By default.

The concept couldn’t be simpler. Gather twenty contestants. Drive them to the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Thurrock. Get them to gather round a brand new truck worth over £30,000. Then ask them each to place one hand on it. Tell them the last contestant to take their hand away wins the vehicle.

Oh, they’re not allowed to sleep, of course, so by day three they might well be sobbing, collapsing or hallucinating. But that’s all part of the fun. At this point, I’d like to interrupt this sentence to remind you that this programme is entirely real. And wait, it gets better: one of the contestants is a 42-year-old homeless man called Jimmy who plans to stay awake by ‘singing Elvis songs in his head’. Woo-hoo. Other contestants include a zany vicar, a Kosovan refugee, a tattooed Cockney and a ‘flirty clubber’. In other words, all human life is here. And it’s standing round a truck.

The show is scheduled to run live over six days, starting tomorrow. There’s a 40-minute update broadcast every evening, or you can witness the inaction unfolding live on the web, 24 hours. Why not keep a window open permanently on your computer desktop? Hopefully there’ll be a live audio feed too, so you’ll be able to hear them weeping softly in the background while you toy with Microsoft Excel.

Disappointingly, there are a few minor concessions to basic human dignity, presumably included to appease the United Nations. Contestants are allowed one 10-minute toilet break every two hours (we’re in for a treat if someone gets diarrhoea), and one 15-minute food break every six hours. They also have a ‘co-pilot’: a friend who’s on hand to offer encouragement and back-rubs. Thankfully, they’re also allowed to try and put each other off by saying sarcastic things and generally annoying one another, which shouldn’t be too hard, since chronic sleep deprivation tends to make people a bit irritable.

Our host is Dale Winton, who, according to producer Glenn Barden, ‘brings an air of credibility’ to proceedings. Dale reckons
Touch the Truck
is ‘an exciting journey into the unknown’. He’ll be chatting to sleep experts and interviewing the contestants, who, incidentally, should become increasingly incoherent as their minds attempt to cling on to consciousness, like a drowning man clutching at pieces of driftwood after five days at sea. Apparently we can expect the participants to start dreaming while awake – a feeling the audience at home should be able to closely empathise with, as they struggle to remind themselves that what they’re looking at is real.

So there you have it. Don’t know about you, but I’ve been rubbing my hands together with anticipation so hard I’ve taken the skin off my palms. After
Touch the Truck
, British television can go anywhere, do anything. Dale’s right. This truly is ‘an exciting journey into the unknown’. And you should be glad you’re alive to witness it.

I’ve never tried to stab someone through the skull with a knife, but I imagine it requires a great deal of skill. Without a steady hand, the aim of an Olympic marksman and, above all, an immensely powerful swing, it’d be all too easy for the blade to ricochet off a knobbly bit of skull, sending the dagger spinning out of your hand and leaving
you looking like the biggest prick in the room come the next murderers’ convention; worse even than that bloke in the corner who tried to batter his own brother to death with a handful of breadcrumbs.

Why am I thinking about knives in the head? Because it’s hard not to after watching
Ouch!
(C5), a documentary that gleefully examines some of the most excruciatingly painful things that can happen to a human body. The knife-in-the-skull incident occurs early on, with the tale of Atlantan Michael Hill, whose life changed for ever the day a next-door neighbour decided to settle a dispute by turning up at the front door to plunge an eight-inch hunting knife into the top of Michael’s head, burying it hilt-deep in his mind. Inevitably, a camera crew were waiting down at ER, so we’re assailed by garish footage of him lolling about with the knife jutting out of his head, like a man going to a fancy-dress party as the sword in the stone.

The X-rays are remarkable, with the full length of the knife picked out with ghoulish clarity, looking as absurdly incongruous against its surroundings as a battleship in a cheese sandwich. Astonishingly, the blade somehow slid between vital arteries in the brain and Hill made a full recovery, although in his memory all numbers are divided in two and his friends have the top of their heads sliced off like poorly framed family snaps.

Now, people have different ways of dealing with gore and, provided it’s fictional, I’ll lap it up, from a bowl if necessary. I love video nasties: name any household implement, and the chances are at some point I’ve watched someone plunging it into a zombie’s eye. I’ve sat through films so bloody, you could actually see scabs forming on the lens.

But put me in the real world, and squeamishness rules. I get giddy looking through the transparent pane on a packet of mince. I simply can’t recall ever flinching so much at a single programme as I did watching
Ouch!
– especially since the tale of Michael Hill and the bloody big knife is only the tip of an undulating iceberg of blood-spattered sinew. Over the course of an hour, you’ll meet a man who tangled his genitals in the whirring spindle of a cement
mixer, a girl who fell from a bedroom window and impaled herself on the leg of an upturned table in the back garden, a man who got a door hook caught under his upper eyelid, and a woman who accidentally fired a 12-inch length of metal up her nose with an industrial rivet gun. The end result is almost impossible to sit through, but if you do, rest assured you’ll have accumulated more than enough to appal co-workers with come Monday morning. Commit enough grisly details to memory and I guarantee you’ll be able to make someone vomit. Right there. Right on their own shoes.

Elsewhere, on the evidence of episode one alone, it’s hard to know what to make of
Happiness
(BBC2), Paul Whitehouse’s midlife-crisis comedy-drama. There’s precious little happiness, and only brief smatterings of (genuinely funny) comedy in it, but there is plenty of angst. Whitehouse’s character spends most of his time looking miserable and staring mutely into the middle distance; an entirely visual catchphrase that on the face of it seems unlikely to prove as popular with Joe Public as saying ‘Brilliant!’ or ‘I’ll get me coat!’ although if you look out the window you’ll see it’s already caught on and simply everybody’s doing it. Brilliant!

I’m not afraid of flying. I’m afraid of unflying. I’m afraid of that rare moment when an aeroplane malfunctions and is instantly transformed into a mode of transport approximately 200 times less secure than a Disprin canoe; a chillingly efficient air-to-ground death missile intent on delivering you and your fellow travellers straight to the heart of splatsville, no matter how loudly you scream into one anothers’ ears.

Praise be, then, for the back-of-the-seat in-flight entertainment system. What better to distract a nervous passenger from the manifest impossibility of air travel than a nine-inch LCD display screen blasting a non-stop carousel of gurglesome blockbusters and over-lit sitcoms into the eyes?

Granted, it isn’t perfect – last year I was subjected to the thrill-a-
minute submarine actioner
U-571
(plot: men find themselves trapped within claustrophobic metal tube; many die) at 30,000 feet, and there are also regular interruptions when the captain comes over the intercom to say we’re passing over Nova Scotia at a rate beyond reason and the starboard engine’s just gone up like a bonfire – but on the whole that screen is a godsend. It shuts out real life until you’re safely on the ground.

In other words, TV has the same properties as Valium. And if you watch
Counterblast: Switch Off Now
(BBC2), you could become convinced it also exhibits characteristics of heroin, nicotine, cocaine, alcohol and crack, blended together to form the single most addictive, destructive drug the Western world has ever seen, one that’s painlessly administered through the eyeball, leaves no visible scars and is killing society dead.

TV-as-drug metaphors are nothing new, but anti-TV crusader David Burke, presenter of this persuasive ‘televisual essay’ (a phrase that would make him puke bullets) prefers to adopt Kurt Vonnegut’s position: that our beloved gogglebox holds much in common with the lead pipes that poisoned the ancient Romans, sending them slowly round the twist. In the course of this single half-hour programme he aims to convince you to switch off your TV set and go out and do something less boring instead for the rest of your life.

He does this in a manner familiar to anyone who’s read Allen Carr’s
Easy Way to Stop Smoking
– by systematically debunking commonly recited myths about television: that it’s educational, relaxing, a friend to the lonely, that it binds the nation together while providing a window on a wider world, that it entertains our kids and makes our daily lives more interesting, that it’s ‘just another medium’ and finally that, yeah, sure, most shows are rubbish but since I only watch quality programming, I’m all right, yeah?

Not according to Burke you’re not. With a combination of statistics, persuasion and simple logical reasoning, he puts a convincing case for the outright elimination of television; I won’t reveal his methods here – you’ll have to tune in, or scour around for a copy of
his excellent book
Get a Life
, from which the bulk of this broadcast is lifted verbatim. Besides, you might agree with him, thereby putting me out of a job. In fact, ignore the guy. He’s a liar.

Concise, compelling and refreshingly opinionated,
Switch Off
Now
further benefits from the hilarious use of archive clips displaying TV at its most goonish and moronic; presented out of context, alongside facts about homicide, depression and alienation, they start to look very sinister indeed. He even makes the Teletubbies feel like something out of
Brave New World
(Junior Edition).

By the end you’re likely to have agreed with at least 70 per cent of what Burke says. But you probably won’t switch off (and you definitely won’t follow his recommendations to the letter and crack your box in the face with a sledgehammer the moment the credits start to roll).

Why? Well, the unfortunate irony is that Burke sets about attacking the mere existence of television in such a vastly entertaining manner your initial reaction is simply to sit there and wish shows like this were broadcast more often – programmes that actually reaffirm TV’s ability to inform (not educate) and entertain, as opposed to sedate and oppress. In fact, I could quite happily watch David Burke telling me to switch off the box for the rest of my life.

The single hole in his argument is this: maybe some of the audience, who aren’t all staring at their boxes from within pits of lonely isolation, enjoy their addiction – particularly when there’s opinionated, thought-provoking stuff like this on. They should give him his own series.

They didn’t
.

Outrage! This week’s
Top Ten
(C4) deals in banned records, and is linked, wonderfully enough, by veteran pantomime dame John Lydon, who’s been stuck on ‘sneer’ since 1977 and isn’t about to snap out of it now. Before introducing the first entry, he treats us to
a mini-lecture on censorship, which naturally he’s opposed to. ‘Don’t let someone else make decisions for you,’ he commands us, thereby causing logical short circuits nationwide.

Wafting towards old age, Lydon still has the most weirdly affected delivery since Frankie Howerd – he overemphasises every word, sometimes using audible italics; it’s like listening to a man sarcastically reading aloud from a poorly translated instruction manual. As usual, that now-familiar range of accusatory facial expressions, ping-ponging between camp Kenneth Williams outrage and the boggle-eyed mesmerisms of a cheap stage hypnotist accompany his vocal performance. Whenever he tires of looking askance with an eyebrow aloft, he simply leans forward to peer through the lens as if trying to read an insult scratched on your forehead in letters one millimetre high.

The countdown itself contains few surprises – Frankie Goes to Hollywood turn up, as do Gainsbourg and Birkin, the Sex Pistols (naturally), Madonna, NWA and the witless 2 Live Crew. The recent surfeit of clip shows lends a slightly overfamiliar air to proceedings – the ‘Relax’ ‘legend’ was covered in
I Love the Eighties
a few weeks ago, for instance – but this is still immensely watchable, not least because most of the contributors have something of interest to say, for once.