Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (2 page)

Constant failure has battered his face into an amalgam of glum dejection and astonished distress. Despite the bruiser’s physique, the sour mouth, the flattened nose, there’s something childlike about his permanent state of upset: Ricky has the sorrowful eyes of a small boy watching a clown die in a grotesque circus accident. He also does a very good line in tireless devotion. Compared to, say, Phil, he’s quite a catch.

Nevertheless, he always lucks out. First he fell for Sam Mitchell (Daniella Westbrook), younger sister to Phil and Grant, who soon twigged she’d got herself hitched to the human equivalent of a Little Chef gammon steak, eventually deserting him on the grounds that he was simply too dull to actually matter. Then he met Bianca (Patsy Palmer). She spent years tirelessly henpecking him into teary-eyed bewilderment, before launching into a pointless and doomed affair with her mother’s surly boyfriend.

Finally, in the most glamorous moment of Ricky’s life, their marriage came to a tearful halt on a grimy Euston concourse.

Leaving Walford is clearly a good move, even if he has to do it in a box.

You’ll have to tune in this evening to find out what happens, but here’s an alternative ending, which, while admittedly outlandish, is
at least in keeping with Ricky’s luck thus far. But be warned: the following paragraph contains scenes not suitable for viewers of a nervous disposition …

So, then. Seeking a new life, Ricky Butcher boards a coach bound for Amsterdam, carrying all his worldly possessions with him, three sets of overalls and an old teaspoon. But 20 miles out of London, a baby lamb runs into the road and the vehicle overturns. The other passengers die horribly, but Ricky miraculously survives. Dazed and bleeding, yet largely unharmed, he is slowly counting his lucky stars on the fingers of one hand when the wreckage catches fire. Trapped in his seat, he gapes in horror as the flames rage towards him. Unable to face the prospect of a fiery death, he grabs the teaspoon from his knapsack and rams it into his eye in a desperate attempt to pierce his brain and finish himself off. But alas! Seconds later a rescue team arrives to douse the blaze. Surgeons at the nearby hospital are unable to remove the spoon, leaving Ricky to walk around with the handle jutting from his head like a miniature diving board.

Monumentally depressed, he returns to Walford to continue his job as a mechanic, with the protruding spoon repeatedly pranging the underside of every vehicle he tries to fix. Finally, after five months of unbearable clattering, Ricky dies of a violent headache. OK, so that’s absurdly grim and unfair. But, hey, it’s also very Ricky Butcher.

Sid Owen had left the soap to pursue a recording career, kicking off with a cover of Sugar Minott’s ‘Good Thing Going’. Two years after this article appeared, Ricky Butcher returned to Albert Square, and hung around pointlessly while the scriptwriters failed to come up with anything for him to do. He left for a second time soon afterwards.

Tonight sees the start of the thirteenth series of
Eurotrash
. Yes, the thirteenth. Channel 4’s high-camp helping of sleaze, sex and undulating
silicone returns once more, providing queasy chuckles for an audience of boggle-eyed stoners, simultaneously saving the nation’s most desperate bachelors the bother of having to use their own imaginations (although the show is an onanist’s minefield – one minute the screen’s full of trampolining supermodels, the next there’s a Scandinavian Chuckle Brother lookalike unblocking a sink in the nude).

For tonight’s curtain-raiser, it’s a case of same old, same old: there’s a look at the world of erotic lingerie, an artist who paints with his own semen, a magician placing his penis in a guillotine and a lengthy report on a female wrestler whose breasts are covered with oil. As ever, it’s linked – at considerable length – by the ever-likeable Antoine De Caunes (minus the late Lolo Ferrari), and enlivened with appealingly garish graphics and sarcastic voice-overs.

But there’s a problem.
Eurotrash
simply doesn’t outrage any more, and not just because it has reached season 13. No. The trouble is that in the years since the programme first spurted onto our screens, everything else on television has steadily degenerated into a slew of dead-eyed, opportunistic, utterly heartless quasi-porn, which leaves
Eurotrash
’s recipe of cheerful, cheesy smut looking positively archaic. On any commercial station you care to mention, unashamedly lecherous programming piles up in the schedule like sour-smelling refuse sacks in a midnight alleyway. ITV brings us documentaries on sex, swinging and strippers (well, they look like strippers – and since they were renamed ‘lap dancers’, it’s apparently OK to show them on TV every 67 seconds). Channel 4 parades
Caribbean Uncovered, Something for
the Weekend
, and
Naked Elvis
. The whole of Channel Five feels like nothing but a single nightmarish, drawn-out edition of
Eurotrash
, complete with unconvincing voices (
Sunset Beach
), harrowing male nudity (Keith Chegwin’s
Naked Jungle
) and profoundly dispiriting ‘erotica’ (courtesy of about a zillion assorted pornographic schedule-pluggers with titles like ‘Nude Saxophone Cops’ and ‘When Checkout Girls Bend Over’). Digital and cable viewers, meanwhile, can wallow in the nightly shock-o-
rama of
Bravo
or the joyless
Granada Men and Motors
(demographic: underachieving loners interested in motoring, glamour photography and self-abuse).

These days, watching television is like sitting in Travis Bickle’s taxicab, staring through the window at a world of relentless, churning shod. Some day a real rain’s going to come and wash the scum off the screens. Until then, sit back and gawp in slack-jawed indifference as television slowly disappears up a lap dancer’s bottom. In close-up. To the echoing strains of ‘Roll With It’.

The upshot is we’ve become hopelessly desensitised – but it’s not just the box that’s to blame. Consider the impact of technology. The past five years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people with Internet connections in the workplace, enabling office-bound tragi-bores to access and distribute stomach-churning muck with tiresome ease and gusto. Once you’ve got accustomed to having your attention regularly drawn to the kind of extreme imagery previously reserved for the racier shop windows of Amsterdam, all pornography rapidly becomes a crashing bore, no matter how bizarre. Hey, look – an MPEG clip of a circus clown sodomising a wolf on the deck of a Mississippi steamboat. Yawwwwn. Seen it before. Seen it twice. Rather watch a bit more Microsoft Excel, thanks.

So, faced with competition from a bottomless technological smutweb on one hand, and a range of post-ironic pornorific TV programming on the other, what chance does
Eurotrash
have? Not much. To compete in the current climate it needs to grow harsher, less affectionate, more ruthless. Scrap the ‘Euro’ prefix; have the show re-christened just ‘Trash’. Ditch the wacky German fetish bars and Dutch pot-smoking contests; shoot each edition in the seediest quarter of Bangkok. Throw out the irony and humour; exchange it for eerie, misplaced fascination. Replace Antoine with a naked amputee who sits on a barbed-wire toilet seat repeatedly threatening to murder members of the audience, reading their addresses out on air and nonchalantly toying with a bloodied switchblade. Broadcast the entire show in 3D, pumping each and every image directly into the viewer’s cerebellum via a length of magic
spacewire connected to the Internet. Sorry, Rapido, but that’s it. That’s the only way to restore the outrage.

That’s how low we’ve all sunk. It’s either that or you have to kill the whole thing off. Who’d have thought it? Sleazy, scampish little
Eurotrash
– slowly rendered far too innocent to survive. These are dark days, readers. Dark days.

Now wash your hands.

Heard of screen burn? It used to affect computer monitors. If you used a particular program a lot, some of its prevailing visual features – the menu bar, for instance – would, over time, become permanently etched onto the screen, remaining faintly visible for evermore. Screensavers were invented to prevent this kind of damage, hence their name.

Fascinating stuff. The point is this: if a similar phenomenon afflicted regular TV screens, you could be forgiven for expecting to find your set indelibly stained with Carol Vorderman. Not that you’d notice the change: it feels like she’s permanently onscreen anyway. But she isn’t the worst offender. In fact, in a list of the most-seen presenters on television in the latest edition of industry magazine
Broadcast
, Vorderman finishes fourth. You’re far more likely to wind up with Richard Madeley’s face burnt across your Trinitron, like some nightmarish twenty-first-century Turin Shroud: he and wife Judy Finnegan squat proudly at the top of the league. The charts were calculated according to ‘exposure factor’: the time in minutes they are seen by an ‘average’ viewer in one week. Richard and Judy win with 14.06 minutes for
This Morning
.

The rest of the list contains several surprises, such as the news that the
Antiques Roadshow
’s Hugh Scully (number 19 on the overall list) enjoys more exposure than Johnny Vaughan and Lisa Tarbuck (languishing at number 24, thanks largely to the state of
The
Big Breakfast
’s ratings, currently at art-house cinema levels). There’s also the non-appearance of Jamie Theakston or Dale Winton in the top 25, and the shocking revelation that Gloria Hunniford 
is still working – although only on Channel Five, which means she might as well be reading Ladybird books to a bunch of worms in a skip. Oh, and one truly terrifying fact: the average viewer watches Jim Davidson for a full 6.49 minutes every week. Coincidentally, this is also the precise amount of time it takes to grind your own teeth to powder in an impotent rage.

But the list also shatters several key TV presentation myths – such as the assumption that to enjoy success you have to be young and attractive. This simply isn’t true.

Take the ‘attractive’ bit. Consider Michael Parkinson (number 25), a man with a face like a corpse’s shoe – or the downright Tolkeinesque Alan Titchmarsh, who could wander through a forest scaring knotholes from the trees simply by smiling at them. Think: did you really splash out on that top-of-the-range brushed-aluminium Panasonic set just so you could experience Titchmarsh’s inadvertent gurning in digital widescreen? So you could hear your kids screaming about the scary man with his face pressed against the glass? Well? Maybe it’s just me, but whenever Titchmarsh turns to camera I always imagine he’s about to lean out of the screen and try to lick my neck. It’s frightening. But there he is regardless, sitting unpretty at number 9. Then there’s Davidson, Whiteley, Scully … all of them about as easy on the eye as a handful of shattered monkey-nut husks unexpectedly flung in your face by a passing drunk.

Still, it’s unfair to judge people on appearance. There’s age to consider as well. And the nation’s top telly faces are old, man. The average age of the top five BBC1 presenters is 47.8, while their ITV equivalents are even older, at an average of 50.8 years of age. Even the painfully hip Channel 4, which arrives at work riding a pavement scooter and clutching a punnet of takeaway sushi, can only manage 45.6. The unseen, ghostlike Channel Five has by far the perkiest presenters – their top five come in at around 38.3 years old, despite the handicap of a sixty-year-old Hunniford dragging their average age coffinward.

So if duff looks and senility aren’t handicaps, what will hold you back? The answer, it would appear, is a personality, since the
majority of names on the list are about as inspiring as a scratch on a Formica desktop. Lineker (2), Lynam (3), Aspel (20), Kilroy (23) … they may be professional, but they sure as heck ain’t interesting. Perhaps the blandest of the lot is Steve Rider, described as ‘TV’s Mister Charisma’ for the first and only time in his life in this very sentence, straight in at number 14, thanks to his
Grandstand
appearances (doing a regular sports gig is a good way of gatecrashing the list, which explains the appearance of David Vine, six places ahead of Carol Smillie at number 10).

There are bright spots. Ant and Dec (6) are chirpy and likeable, and even if you can’t bear Barrymore (18), or Tarrant (5), they’re at least vaguely anarchic in spirit. Otherwise, it seems we like our TV presenters to encompass everything we wouldn’t look for in a potential sexual partner: aged, ugly, and utterly personality-free. And considering the amount of time we’re going to end up spending with them, that’s downright sick.

Last week,
Coronation
Street
was accused of sadism. Not because of that aggravating theme tune (the aural equivalent of having half-chewed, week-old Battenberg cake dribbled into your ear canal by a senile grandparent), but because of the bothersome antics of Weatherfield’s number one bad guy, Jez Quigley – a seriously unpleasant cross between John ‘Cold Feet’ Thomson and the head Blue Meanie from
Yellow Submarine
. The majority of complaints were provoked by a scene in which Quigley attempted to smother
Street
wideboy Steve McDonald as he lay injured in hospital. Having been confronted with some genuine menace for once, as opposed to the
Street
’s usual pantomime whimsy, a bunch of easily rattled simpletons phoned the ITC in protest. The regulator agreed that, yes, it was all a bit unpleasant, wasn’t it? Foul Mr Quigley had appeared to ‘enjoy’ inflicting pain, and that simply wouldn’t do. Well, look, he was hurting Steve McDonald for God’s sake – an oily, opportunistic skunk so astoundingly unsympathetic that an arthritic priest would can-can for joy at the news of his violent
death. The main thrust of the ITC’s condemnation was that Quigley’s lurid display of sadistic nastiness might have upset the show’s younger viewers – presumably they’ll go on to declare that in future, all fictional drug-dealing villains should be played by one of the Chuckle Brothers, in order to lessen any potential trauma.