Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (15 page)

Weirdest of all is the current ad for some male-oriented skincare glop, in which two men are shown sitting at home scowling at a TV commercial for Nivea. ‘It’s ads like this that irritate me,’ mutters a Johnny Bravo lookalike with gigantic floppy hair, apparently oblivious to the fact he’s appearing in an advert himself.

The overall effect is unsettling, like watching scientists tamper with the natural order of things. If they bring out a follow-up in which a further two men take the piss out of the first pair, it might
cause a rip in the time-space continuum. And with Doctor Who out of action, who’s going to save mankind?

Not BBC 1, which intensifies an already frenzied air of cannibalism by summoning up
A Question of TV
(BBC1), a new television-themed spin-off from
A Question of Pop
(BBC1), which in turn is a spin-off from the original
A Question of Sport
. Ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching critical mass.

Let’s not beat about the bush here –
A Question of TV
makes for excruciating viewing, thanks largely to the unmistakable stench of desperation hanging round the entire affair. Stranded in a set apparently modelled on a particularly cut-price motorway service station cafeteria, Gaby Roslin appears haunted and ill at ease from the outset – rigidly sporting the kind of forced grin usually adopted for those moments when a friend’s baby burps a gutful of puke down your shoulder. The team captains are Lorraine Kelly and Rowland Rivron (testing his innate likeability to the limit), while the guests are massive prime-time draws to a man – Bradley Walsh, Max from
Brookside
, Angela Rippon and, ridiculously, Trude Mostue, who, having been born and raised in a fjord, displays little knowledge of classic British TV.

It gets worse. One question is simply an excuse to give the antiquated footage of Lulu the elephant crapping on the
Blue Peter
studio floor, yet another unwelcome airing. They’ve even got the gall to acknowledge that it’s been shown ‘hundreds of times before’ – as if admitting you’re hopeless makes hopelessness less of a crime.

And for a light-hearted quiz this is astonishingly dreary. The contestants seize on the meagre laughs with the same mindless desperation of the flesh-eating zombies in a George Romero flick, and the results are equally gruesome – stumbling gags stretched way beyond breaking point, strangled, swallowed, regurgitated. It’s the very definition of strained joviality – like watching people pull crackers on a crashing plane. Lord alone knows what’s up with the guffawing studio audience – perhaps a sound engineer fed their reaction through a digital filter capable of replacing loud sighs of dismay with shrieks of enjoyment.

But it’s the overwhelming pointlessness of it all that really grates.
What’s next? ‘A Question of Themes’? ‘A Question of Questions’? ‘A Question of Diddle-Dum-Doo’? After all, there’s already one TV-related quiz on BBC1 (
It’s Only TV but I Like It
) – why inflict another? Perhaps they think we don’t care any more. And as long as they carry on like this, they’ll have a point.

Terror! It springs from nowhere. Sometimes triggered by something tiny, like an unexplained whispering that wakes you in the dead of night, sometimes by something altogether more palpable, like a bearded stranger chasing you round the garden with a grin and a dildo and a big sharpened spoon.
Fear Factor
(Sky One) is all about terror. And greed. Oh, and ratings. It’s a truly remarkable US game show in which six contestants undertake a series of ‘extreme stunts’ in a bid to lay their hands on a prize of $50,000.

The challenges range from the scary (get dragged through the mud by a pack of wild horses) to the gross (lie in a box filled with 300,000 writhing maggots), and the whole thing is overseen by a sleazy, leering host called Joe Rogan, who’d look equally at home slowly breaking someone’s fingers in an alleyway, and indeed probably did precisely that on his audition tape.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Sounds like a new high in lows. But it’s boring. For one thing, the participants are made out of plastic. The six droids on offer in this week’s edition seem to have wandered from the set of ‘A Fascist Chorus Line’. One has a face so impossibly bland, shop windows probably forget to reflect it when he strolls past. Another somehow manages to resemble the entire cast of
Friends
all at once. In any sane world this would qualify as a disability. In America, it’s a TV requirement.

Not only is it impossible to care whether these synthetic dicks live or die, there’s the tedious rigmarole of watching them all perform the same stunt, one after the other. Once you’ve seen one Tupperware cretin jump a crevasse, you’ve seen ’em all – and it certainly doesn’t get any more exciting by the tenth slow-motion replay.

Of course, genuine terror springs from unexpected sources, so forget
Fear Factor
, and instead tune into
Animal Park
(BBC1). On the surface, there’s little promise of dread – it’s a daily post-Kilroy blandcast in which Kate Humble and Prince William (played by Ben Fogle from
Castaway
) wander around Longleat pointing at lions and smiling: the kind of transmission that could be replaced one morning by a static photo of a kitten emerging from a flowerpot without anyone really noticing. But hang on in there and the horror surfaces, in the form of gruesome artworks and murals produced by King Longleat himself, the Marquess of Bath, showcased in a report with its tongue so deep in its cheek it could lick the man next door.

First, the Marquess leads us through a nursery he’s transformed from agreeable playroom to fearsome hellbox by the simple act of daubing garish demonic-looking figures all over the walls and ceiling. He says his intention was to ‘trigger [the children’s] imaginations in a fantasy vein’ – presumably a fantasy involving hunting down and murdering the bastard who invented paint.

It’s nothing compared to the portraits. The Marquess mixes sawdust with oil-paint to create textured, slightly three-dimensional paintings: the sort of thing you might win during a visit to the worst fairground in the world. Imagine the ugliest painting you’ve ever seen. Then punch it. Puke on it. You’re still nowhere close.

Seventy-three of these lumpy monstrosities hang on the walls of an otherwise agreeable stairwell, each depicting a past romantic conquest. And if they’re accurate likenesses, the man must have slept with the entire cast of the
Muppet Show
.

‘Some people have notches on the bedpost, but I think this is much more flattering,’ he claims, standing in front of a particularly horrid example with the number 34 beneath it, placed flatteringly between paintings 33 and 35 in the stairwell of love.

Finally, a quick but enthusiastic nod in the direction of
The Office
(BBC2) – it might be another spoof documentary series, but it’s a spoof documentary series distinguished by superb performances and regular belly-laughs, and is not to be missed. Even if a bearded
stranger really is chasing you round the garden with a grin and a dildo and a big sharpened spoon: set the video beforehand.

Busy? Of course you’re not. It’s a Saturday. You’re probably still lolling around in your pants. I wrote this several days ago, so technically speaking I’ve been up for hours. Slobs like you make me puke.

Still, it’s a different matter during the week, when you’re an absolute flapping pterodactyl of activity. Monday through Friday, your life’s a whirlwind of phone calls and appointments, e-mails and car alarms, spooling through the calendar at a thousand miles an hour. Can’t keep up, can you?

Fortunately, the nice people at BBC Choice know how busy you are. This week, they’re introducing ultra-fast news bulletins aimed at people who don’t have time to read papers and are feeling vaguely guilty because they only discovered Neil Kinnock was no longer leader of the Labour Party two weeks ago.

60seconds
(BBC Choice) aims to ‘quench modern viewers’ thirst for news in an instant’. It’s so efficient, even the title’s been compressed for easy consumption: there’s no space between the ‘
60
’ and the ‘
seconds
’ because that might waste valuable nanoseconds of your time.

Quite how it’s going to pack ‘the main national, international, sports and entertainment news headlines’ into less than a minute isn’t yet clear, but with any luck, it’ll consist of a series of flashcards upon which the day’s main stories are represented by simple geometric shapes and colours (a red hexagon means there’s been another train crash; a green rhombus indicates controversy at the UEFA Cup). That or Peter Sissons bellowing single-word summaries of the top six stories at gunpoint.

It’s a sign that broadcasters have realised viewers don’t have much time to invest, which is why the BBC’s new cop drama
Mersey Beat
(BBC1) collapses the period it takes an audience to familiarise itself with a range of new characters by making the officers
of Newton Park incredibly simple to understand and hiring a gallery of recognisable faces to play them. Thus the station is populated by a veritable Déjà Vu Patrol, including That Nice Bloke from
Casualty
, That Nasty Girl from
The Lakes
, Thingybob from
Brook-
side
, and God He’s Been in Loads of Things from, well, from loads of things. Within five minutes,
Mersey Beat
automatically feels like a series that’s been running for five years – thereby saving you years of repeated viewing at a stroke.

In the lead is Superintendent Susan Blake, played by Haydn Gwynne (aka Oh It’s Her from
Peak Practice
). Blake never takes her coat off, and rarely sits down. In fact, she seems to spend her entire day on foot, walking in and out of corridors, frowning, issuing instructions and generally looking pained and knackered. And why? Because she’s not just a hard-working cop, she’s a mother of two; something the script strives to point out with metronomic regularity, as though the notion of a police superintendent with a functioning womb is an epoch-shattering concept. According to the producer, ‘Blake knows the score: if she has to leave her daughter’s birthday party because there is a murder inquiry – she does.’ Way to go, Superintendent Blake: that’s just the kind of steely, selfless dedication we viewers admire.

The plot follows the time-honoured
Casualty
formula – it lifts emotive storylines from the tabloids and gives them a gentle twist in a faintly patronising bid to point out that, hey, there’s more to these things than meets the eye.

So, for this opening episode, a schoolboy appears to be playing truant, but there’s more to it than meets the eye: he’s been abducted. For a while a suspected local paedophile is in the frame, but there’s more to him than meets the eye too: he’s not a paedophile. ‘I was named and shamed by a newspaper,’ he complains, as a brick flies through his living-room window courtesy of a hastily assembled mob (who doubtless heard about him in a
60second
news bulletin, but haven’t yet learned that there’s more to these things than meets the eye because the newsreader didn’t have time to explain that bit).

Thus, we are sternly instructed that believing in crudely
demonised stereotypes can lead to hysterical knee-jerk behaviour – although in order to make this point, the anti-paedo mob leader is portrayed as a one-dimensional cartoon thug who gets excited at the prospect of beating up a female officer.

Still, never mind, eh? You’re too busy for subtleties: at least it gets the point across quickly. Besides, who’s got time to complain? Or listen to me moan about it? Not you: you’re still in your pants. Put some clothes on.

Got a lava lamp? Then pick it up, unplug it, and hurl it into the nearest bin immediately, because
Space
(BBC1) has just rendered it pathetically obsolete. If you enjoy sitting in the corner of your living room dribbling and staring, this is for you.

Space
, you see, is an all-new BBC spectacular in the
Walking
with Dinosaurs
mould, permeated with magnificent computer-generated visuals from beginning to end. Almost too magnificent, in fact. Despite being clearly aimed at ‘all the family’, there really ought to be a parental advisory warning at the beginning. This is going to make children’s tiny minds pop like cherry tomatoes on an overheated griddle.

Why? Because it’s possibly the most hallucinatory programme ever broadcast.

Sam Neill is our host, standing in front of a ‘Virtual Space Zone’ – a sort of notional cubic viewing portal in which computer-generated images of the universe appear. With it he can conjure up brain-bending images of black holes and billowing nebulae, or reach inside to pluck entire suns from the heavens and toss asteroids around like pebbles, all in a bid to educate us in the ways of the cosmos. Jon Snow would kill to use one on election night.

It’s all genuinely impressive stuff, with one potentially negative side effect: an entire generation of kids is going to grow up convinced that Sam Neill is a colossal soothsaying deity with the power to manipulate all universal matter, so if they ever catch him in a late-night showing of
Attack Force Z
(1981), it’s really going to mess with their heads. Still, the content itself should do enough damage anyway. This first episode deals with the origins of the universe, and is impressively information-heavy. Plus there are more extravagant CGI simulations of interstellar phenomena than you can shake a joss stick at. At one point I got up to go for a piss and missed the entire creation of the Earth.

The programme does a fine job of sprinkling awe-inspiring croutons of information throughout the soup of intergalactic visuals, courtesy of a few interjections from real astronomers based in the real world. (You know they’re proper astronomers because, like all astronomers in all space documentaries ever, they’re introduced with a brief clip which shows them staring into the sky. Because that’s what astronomers do, see? Thank God they’re not proctologists or there’d be some tough calls to make in the edit suite.)