Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (29 page)

The main distraction is that Chiklis resembles both Mitchell brothers crossed with Bruce Willis; often he manages to look precisely like all three of them at the same time (no wonder he won an Emmy).

What with this and
CSI
, Five is rapidly becoming a plausible competitor to Channel 4, at least in the populist stakes. Consider the similarities: quality US drama, quirky home-made products, a daily
TFI Friday
clone and a selection of mainstream-baiting movies (they’ve broadcast
Natural Born Killers, Boogie Nights
and last week they even showed Harmony Korine’s rubbish and unwatchable
Gummo
, fer Chrissakes, and films don’t get much more Channel 4 than that).

All Five needs to do now is commission several hundred documentaries on the ‘history’ of porn and they’ll be as indistinguishable from Channel 4 as Michael Chiklis is from Willis and the Mitchells.

Or how about a look at the ‘history’ of lesbianism? ‘The Real Tipping the Velvet’, anyone? I give it three months.

He’s orange. She’s Mancunian. Together they’re a force to be reckoned with.

I speak, of course, of Des O’Connor and Melanie Sykes, united at last in
Today with Des and Mel
(ITV1) – either the best new daytime TV show since
This Morning
or a nightmare of ghoulish obscenity, depending on your point of view.

Like its obvious inspiration, the successful US daytime show
Regis and Kathy Lee, Today with Des and Mel
is a blend of aimless waffle and obsequious celebrity chat (so obsequious, it should really be called ‘Toady with Des and Mel’). But while their American counterparts have genuine chemistry, Des and Mel go together like strawberries and bream – and the resulting awkwardness feels a bit like the forced, polite bonhomie between a parent and their offspring’s latest sexual partner during a Christmas dinner.

Nevertheless the sheer banality of it all is quite appealing – it’s akin to eavesdropping on the thoughts racing through the mind of a doily, particularly during the pre-guest banter when Des babbles away like a man in a fever (the other day he actually referred to his backside as his ‘bimbo bumbo’). His anecdotes never reach a conclusion, but simply wander around looking lost and confused for a while before mutating into an anecdote on an unrelated subject.

Mel’s even better. While Des uses his anecdotes as a platform for endearingly corny gags, Mel butts in with conversational cul-de-sacs; observations so crashingly pedestrian, they’re either intended as a sly satire on the mundanity of daytime television or part of an ominous one-woman quest to redefine insipidness.

It certainly stops Des in his tracks. Here’s a genuine, typical Mel interjection, during a jovial discussion about cars: ‘My husband always shouts at me when I take the car to the car wash, because apparently they can get scratched. He always says, “You should go and get it done properly.” [Pause.] So I do.’ That’s it: no point, no punchline. Just a short, awkward silence, until Des changes the subject and starts prattling away again.

Today with Des and Mel
is so trite, it feels genuinely cutting-edge; it’ll be a cult student hit by the end of the year, guaranteed – as will
The Psychic Show
(ITV1), which directly follows it.
The Psychic
Show
is, to put it bluntly, aimed at idiotic women (and before anyone writes in to complain, consider this: we men might be arrogant, war-mongering rapists-in-waiting, but you’d never catch us dialling a premium-rate astrology phone line).

The opening sequence depicts a gigantic rotating healing crystal – enough to ward off all but the most gullible dunderheads, which is just as well since things go downhill from there, as we enter a rationality-free zone of horoscopes, dream analysis, palm reading and all the preposterous bummery that goes with it. It’s ideal subject matter for a cut-price daytime show, of course, since anyone who believes in astrology is a fool by default, so the producers don’t have to try too hard to keep the audience happy.

The best part is a segment in which the resident ‘psychic’ fondles an object belonging to an unseen member of the audience and makes a few vague predictions about them. They then bound onstage and shake their head in amazement at his remarkable supernatural powers. Me, I’m amazed by the shamelessly generic nature of his proclamations – favourites include ‘This is someone who lacks self-confidence’ (obviously, or why else would they bother asking a prick like you for advice?), ‘I’m tempted to say this is a man’ (while handling a large, manly piece of jewellery), and ‘If I burble enough hazy generalisations about this person, some of them should stick’ (of course he didn’t actually say that last one – I just read his mind). You see, I’ve got incredible powers of my own – and I’ll demonstrate them now.

If you’re a regular viewer of
The Psychic Show
, simply place your palm firmly on the opposite page, and I’ll give you a personality reading
and
predict your future into the bargain. Ready? Here I go.

Right, I’m getting something. I can tell this is a gullible person, a scared and stupid individual, terrified by the notion of a random, godless universe – someone who desperately wants to believe there’s more to this life than daytime TV and celebrity gossip magazines, although sadly in their case, there isn’t.

And the future? That’s easy. They’re going to spend the next five minutes rubbing ink off their palm. Magic.

Our basic human instincts get a terrible press. They stand accused of causing everything that’s wrong with the world: pollution, corruption, obesity, sexually transmitted diseases, football hooliganism, racism, war and Dunstable. Mention the words ‘human instinct’ and even the world’s biggest optimist weeps bittersweet tears (you can prove this in a laboratory, especially if you squirt lemon juice in their eyes as you say it).

Captain Kirk was regularly sentenced to death by egghead aliens who’d studied footage of the Second World War and decided human nature was inherently rotten (thank God their space transmitters never picked up
Jim Davidson’s Generation Game
, or they’d have come down and kicked us all to death). Earthbound thinkers agree that our very humanity is our downfall.

Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre deals with little else, and after decades of research no less an authority than Gary Clail and the On-U Sound System concurred that there was indeed ‘something wrong with human nature’. Thus it was I slid my review copy of Dr Robert Winston’s high-profile investigation into
Human Instinct
(BBC1) inside my VCR with a sense of clammy trepidation. And almost immediately, I breathed a sigh of relief: this isn’t a despair-inducing trawl through the inescapable cruddiness that lurks within us all – it’s cheery knockabout edutainment, plain and simple. Fashioned in the achingly slick style of a megabudget commercial for a global corporation,
Human Instinct
is a snack-science programme that, unlike 90 per cent of the TV schedules, provides something to think about.

This week’s instalment deals with our survival instincts – the set of hard-wired subconscious responses that lead us to recoil from the smell of something potentially hazardous, cause lifelong cowards to heroically toss the infirm behind them when running from charging tigers, and can provide an 8-stone mother with the
strength to lift a 10-tonne truck off her baby’s head, once she’s finished laughing.

Speaking of finding joy in the misfortunes of children, there’s an immensely entertaining section in which Dr Winston demonstrates our inbuilt aversion to unpleasant tastes by spoon-feeding globs of offensive mush to a baby until it cries itself insensible. Elsewhere, we’re informed that a baby’s incessant wailing can equal the din created by a pneumatic drill penetrating concrete – although the programme inexplicably fails to mention that if you place the baby beneath the drill, the noise from both is diminished.

Of particular interest to me was the segment on spiders and snakes. As an unashamed arachnophobe I’ve had to endure years of spider apologists informing me that: 1) Spiders won’t hurt you; 2) Spiders are more frightened of me than I am of them; and 3) You’re only scared of spiders because you learned to fear them during childhood.

Now, thanks to kindly Dr Winston, that all-round good guy with the face of an approachable Stalin; Dr Winston, the cuddlesome uncle who could play the lead in ‘Santa Claus: The Early Years’, I now have televisual proof of what I’ve always suspected: we arachnophobes are simply slaves to an obsolete, uncontrollable primal instinct to run like funk whenever something creepy crawls near. Now, next time some gurglesome joker cups a spider in their hands and chases me round a table with it, I can gouge their stupid eyes out safe in the knowledge that no jury could reasonably convict me – I was only acting on instinct. People who are afraid of snakes, though, they’re just wussy.

There’s a hilarious archive clip in
Fame, Set and Match
–
Breakfast
TV
(BBC2), in which Jeremy Beadle attempts to brighten the morning of several million
TV-am
viewers with his ‘Today’s the Day’ slot. ‘America’s worst nightclub fire erupted in Boston on this day in 1942,’ he chirps. ‘People were literally beaten to death in the fight for the exits.’

Ah, those wacky survival instincts.

Blind Date
(ITV1) has been running for ages, if not longer. In fact, it’s been on our screens for so long, the original contestants have long since withered and died, leaving grieving offspring in their wake. ‘So romantic, how they met,’ sniff the children at their parents’ graveside. ‘Mother asked Father how he’d break the ice on their first date, and Father said “Darling, I’m so hot the ice’ll melt the moment you see me.” Then he did a Bobby Ball impression and pulled a moonie. The audience loved him. And so, after several drinks, did Mother.’ With that, our imaginary mourners hold hands and walk sombrely through the churchyard gates, brittle autumn leaves swirling at their feet.

So much for the sepia-tinted days of yore. Now
Blind Date
’s been given a twenty-first-century makeover. Its previous format, for years considered the height of lows, simply wasn’t shabby or cruel enough to keep a modern audience’s attention.

Hence the changes: OUT goes ‘Our Graham’ (the announcer who always referred to Cilla as ‘Cilla Blaaaaaaaah’), IN comes ‘Ditch or Date’, a new gimmick which allows contestants to change their mind once the partition goes back, thereby making a mockery of the title and robbing the show of whatever tension it once had. Brilliant.

One thing that hasn’t changed, of course, is Cilla. Oh, the audience adores her and she’s the Queen Mum of telly and blah blah blah. Ahem: pardon me for spitting in the punchbowl, but she’s always annoyed the cogs off me, and the situation isn’t improving as we both get older. For one thing, she’s synonymous with barrel-scraping gaudiness:
Surprise Surprise, Moment of Truth, Blind Date
… For God’s sake, the woman would
have
to be ‘well-loved’ or she’d have been lynched years ago.

Not that even the most demented angry mob would want to meet her in the flesh: either there’s something wrong with my reception or she’s starting to resemble the result of a unholy union between Ronald McDonald and a blow-dried guinea pig.

And that voice: Christ. The singing was bad enough – she sounded 
like an angry wasp trapped in a shoebox, butchering melodies with the ghoulish efficiency of Jeffrey Dahmer – but even though she no longer bursts into song, her incessant piercing squawk is still enough to make me want to slice my ears off and hurl them into another dimension.

Then we have the contestants.
Blind Date
has always attracted the very worst scrapings from mankind’s petri dish – it works in the same way as one of those sticky-floored cockroach traps – but for the new series they’ve gone one better by inviting ‘celebrities’ to take part in the dates. Not proper celebs you understand (you won’t see Ralph Fiennes riding a jet ski round Ibiza with Karen from Bracknell, more’s the pity), but the boy band Blue – a group whose core audience consists almost exclusively of easily impressed foetuses.

At the risk of sounding like a wizened old prude, when I was a whippersnapper, the only musical act aimed exclusively at children was the Wombles, and I can’t imagine
them
singing ‘Baby when we’re grinding, I get so excited / You’re making it hard for me’, like the Blue boys did a full three hours before the watershed last Saturday. Ironically, I suspect any one of the Wombles would actually prove a far better shag. Those protruding orange snouts could perform sexual tricks Blue can only sing about.

Still, at least compared with the sort of gurning farmhands the show usually features, Blue are good-looking – well, all except one, who’s got a face like a kneecap soaked in vinegar. He didn’t get chosen: that honour went to the sexily named Duncan, who’s a bit like Brad Pitt minus the talent and charm.

Tonight we’ll get to see how the date went: £10,000 says the wuss doesn’t utter a single disapproving word. In summary, then: the new
Blind Date
– you’ll need Rohypnol to get through it. How very twenty-first-century.

Loathed. Reviled. Pilloried. Ridiculed. And for what? For being a dopey-faced, fat-tongued TV chef. Say what you like about Jamie
Oliver, in the light of recent allegations regarding other TV personalities, there’s no denying he’s ultimately harmless. His idea of a ‘coke-fuelled threesome’ is a glass of cola followed by a bacon, brie and avocado sandwich, and the only time you hear him growling ‘You know you want it’ is when he’s holding a hunk of steaming roast lamb up to camera.

Yet huge swathes of the population despise him. Well, it’s time for me to ’fess up: I don’t. Oh, I grind my teeth at the supermarket commercials just like everyone else, but I can’t get furious with him personally for the same reason I can’t wholeheartedly despise Alan Titchmarsh. Commercial whoredom and irritating tics aside both possess genuine skill and are capable of communicating it. Titchmarsh and Oliver are responsible for inspiring thousands of people to actually get up and do something that improves their lives. It’s all very well to sit there and sneer, but when was the last time
you
inspired anyone, huh? Well? Oliver’s clearly been stung by the sheer volume of animosity he generates, which is probably why his new series
Jamie’s Kitchen
(C4) feels almost like an apology, an attempt to make the public at large reassess their hatred for the Roy Hattersley lookalike-in-waiting. It’s a reality show in which he sets about establishing a non-profit restaurant staffed by underprivileged youngsters, largely funded with Oliver’s own cash. They should’ve called it ‘Jamie’s Penance’.