Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (32 page)

Ah,
24:
preposterous, over-stylised and occasionally schmaltzy it may have been, but it was also the single most tense television drama series ever made, insanely addictive once you got caught up in its unstoppable march toward midnight. It even provided a gutsy, unconventional ending: Jack Bauer, our hero, cradling the body of his pregnant wife, shot through the stomach by his traitorous ex-lover. The second series, already running in the US, hits our screens in February: I’ve seen the first six and incredibly, it’s better.

The closest we’ve come to emulating the gritty new wave of American dramas is the BBC’s spy drama
Spooks
, which demonstrated astonishing nerve by signing Lisa Faulkner as a regular character, then killing her off in spectacularly grisly fashion in episode two. The moment her head was forced into the deep-fat fryer, viewers reared on the formulaic, it’ll-be-alright-in-the-end blandness of cookie-cutter populist dramas like
Casualty
and
Merseybeat
sat up and blinked in disbelief: here was a major BBC drama series that actually had the nerve to confound expectation. Perhaps the failure of ITV’s
Doctor Zhivago
and the BBC’s
Daniel Deronda
to set the world alight means my dream of a five-year moratorium on costume dramas will become reality – if we get more programmes like Spooks in their place, then heaven be praised.

So what else happened? Comedy rose in popularity, thanks to the likes of
Black Books, Phoenix Nights, The Office
and
I’m Alan
Partridge,
all on their second series. The latter two suffered from ‘difficult second album’ syndrome, but were still head and shoulders above the likes of
TLC
(essentially the Chuckle Brothers for morons).

The funniest show of the year, however, was unscripted and American, although it starred a British family. I’m talking about
The
Osbournes,
of course – a real one-off success that simply can’t be replicated (although God knows TV producers will try). A celebrity reality show that didn’t invite us to sneer, it provided more laugh-out-loud moments than it had any right to.

So. That’s the year in a nutshell. Now turn to the listings and plan your Yuletide viewing. Speaking of which, there’s just time for my prediction regarding next year’s Christmas TV – an Aardman animated version of
Only Fools and Horses
. Go on, picture it – I swear to God it’ll happen one day. Oh, and merry Christmas. Unless you’re a Pop Idol, in which case you can piss off. Quietly.

PART FOUR 2003

 

 

In which Chris Evans comes unstuck with
Boys and Girls,
interactive TV turns out to be rubbish, and the world’s first
widescreen war is started
.

 

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of people who are ‘into’ cars – you know, the sort of overgrown adolescent who slaps Ferrari posters on their walls and doesn’t contemplate suicide when they hear the
Top Gear
theme tune. Perhaps it’s because they tend to be the sort of person who’ll think nothing of driving to within two atoms of the car in front at 300 m.p.h. and, as the G-force starts shearing your face off, will attempt to quell your cries of fear and protest by repeatedly pointing out what a good driver they are, shortly before ploughing head-on into a container lorry and turning both of you into a bloodied streak of metal-and-flesh pâté smeared across ten straight miles of motorway. Perhaps it’s because I can’t drive and I’m jealous. Either way, I’m right and they’re wrong.

Anyway, said motorphiles are going to love
Fastlane
(Sky One), a frankly astonishing new US cop show which appears to be beamed live from the brain of an excitable 14-year-old boy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it – eight times as puerile as
Gone in
60 Seconds
, with a concept and script you could scribble down the edge of a beer coaster and
still
leave room for a dubious cartoon sketch of a pair of breasts.

The set-up is as follows: Tom Cruise/Ethan Hawke-hybrid Peter Facinelli is officer Van Ray Strummer (not so much a name, more a masturbatory euphemism). He’s ridiculous: the very first scene in this week’s pilot finds him hurling a sports car round a speedway track while a glamorous female thief fingers his crotch. Moments later, before the opening titles have had a chance to kick in, his partner is gunned down in cold blood. ‘Noooooo!’ bellows Van Ray, and spends the rest of the episode attempting to avenge his death by getting his shirt off a lot and penetrating the blonde thief on a bed covered in banknotes (in a daring move for mainstream US drama, there’s a slow-mo shot of him pulling down her knickers to reveal some cavernous bum-cleavage –
Fastlane
pushes the artistic envelope wherever possible).

Meanwhile, Bill Bellamy
is
Deaqon LaVelle Hayes, undercover NYPD cop, and the brother of Van Ray’s slaughtered partner. Deaqon is black and street and is therefore first encountered playing basketball with a bunch of toughs from the ’hood. He hot-foots it to LA to find out more about his brother’s death and subsequently teams up with Van Ray who, by this time, has been signed up by Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, who
is
Wilhelmina ‘Billie’ Chambers, a sultry lieutenant in charge of the ‘Candy Store’, a repository of impossibly expensive seized vehicles, weapons and clothing the LAPD has thoughtfully provided in order to aid high-gloss undercover operations.

The Candy Store is also decked out with gigantic plasma screens upon which the faces of suspects can spin about futuristically, thereby assisting the fight against crime.

And that’s about it: I couldn’t really tell you what else actually happens because it makes no sense whatsoever – although it does involve several high-speed car chases, a bit where the bad guy beats up a girl on the beach, four explosions and a jaw-dropping sequence in which Deaqon wins the trust of a country-and-western-loving crime lord by performing a spontaneous line dance.

In case you hadn’t guessed,
Fastlane
is a shameless attempt to ‘do’
Miami Vice
for the twenty-first century (at one point they even have the nerve to include Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’ on the soundtrack). Dementedly glossy throughout, with flash cuts and apparently random forays into slow motion, the overall effect is like watching a Sisqo video, drunk, on a helter-skelter. This really shouldn’t be on so soon after New Year’s Eve. Nevertheless, I urge you to tune in, if only so someone can e-mail the
Guide
and explain precisely what happened. Because I’m still not sure whether I actually saw this or dreamed it, and if that indicates the way TV’s going in 2003, I’m going to need all the help I can get.

It’s funny, the things that stick in the memory. Many years ago I recall reading an NME interview with affable slap-head techno duo Orbital in which one of the Orbitees claimed he never smoked
cannabis because he had ‘an Alfred Hitchcock mind’ – i.e. he was perpetually expecting something nasty to happen, even in the most serene surroundings. ‘I can’t even walk past a park railing without thinking, “Urgh, you could slip and skewer your hand on that,”’ he said, and I practically leapt up and started pointing at the page shrieking, ‘Me too! ME TOO!’

Well, I hope he’s not been watching
Collision Course
(BBC2) of late, because it’s a programme apparently designed to nurture your existing paranoid fantasies and generate countless new ones in the process.

Officially, it’s described as a series ‘on the science and psychology of fatal transport accidents, revealing the decisions made seconds or decades before that will determine who will live or die’, but I reckon you could sum it up more accurately as ‘extreme rubber-necking’, ‘untertainment’, or perhaps simply ‘disasterporn’.

Last week’s edition examining the Southall rail crash is a case in point. Using a combination of survivor interviews, expert opinion (from rail-safety advisors through to psychologists) and – most upsetting of all – haunting computer-generated reconstructions of the accident itself, it picked apart the collision atom-by-atom, stretching an incident which lasted roughly eight and a half seconds into an hour of unrelenting terror.

In fact, the end effect is a bit like
The Matrix
for neurotic vultures: plenty of slow-mo ‘bullet time’ enactments of precisely the sort of calamity both myself and that bloke from Orbital spend so much time worrying about.

We learned how one woman’s life was saved because she decided to move to a different carriage when a group of noisy people boarded the train. We learned how a doctor was spared one of the grisliest fates imaginable when the carriage fell on its side – he broke six ribs landing sideways on a table which prevented him from plummeting through a smashed window at the bottom and getting smeared across the tracks (other passengers weren’t so lucky). And we learned that in moments of extreme terror, it’s not unusual for victims to see in black-and-white – because the brain decides that the processing power required to replicate colour
would be better employed doing something else, such as locating the nearest exit or kissing your arse goodbye. But mostly we learned this: There Is No God.

You see, for all its gory details and eye-popping computer simulations, the single most disturbing thing about
Collision Course
is the way it lays bare the random cruelty of fate – in fact, it positively revels in it. The Southall edition ended by explaining that many victims of rail accidents often choose to travel exclusively by car afterwards, then gloomily pointed out this is an even more unpredictably dangerous mode of transport. ‘The decisions you make tonight could mean you die on the roads tomorrow,’ boomed the voice-over (Charles Dance, who seems to have gargled with some kind of special ‘doom pill’ prior to recording). Cue lots of meticulous reconstructions of shattered windscreens and twisted gearsticks  for this Tuesday’s edition – a pile-up special. Thank Christ it’s only a three-part series or we’d all be too scared to leave the house by week nine (when they’d probably be calculating the likelihood of a hot-air balloon crashing into your face, recreating just such an incident in photo-realistic pixelvision).

All in all, nasty but compelling – my only question is this: why don’t they use all this moment-by-moment jiggery-pokery to create reconstructions of
nice
things for once? Like maybe an exhaustive hour-long recreation of a child being delighted by a jack-in-the-box? OK, so it wouldn’t have quite the same voyeuristic pull as a spine-splintering motorway pile-up, but if it helps a troubled nation sleep at night, who’s complaining?

Heavens to Betsy, where did that come from? Just a few weeks ago I was bemoaning the embarrassing efficiency with which American TV drama was kicking our collective national arse: they make
The
Sopranos
and
24
, we spew out identichangeable star vehicles for Ross and Martin Kemp (how long before they team up for a show called ‘Shop Window Dummy Squad’?).

Then suddenly – bam! Channel 4 wheels out a fantastic new
series called
Buried
(C4). Set in the cheery confines of the British prison system, and hailing from Tony Garnett’s ever-reliable World Productions (
This Life, The Cops,
um,
Attachments
), it’s the polar opposite of the sort of bland-o-matic mush we’re usually spoonfed.

Had it appeared on BBC1, chances are it would’ve been called ‘Holby Prison’ and starred Leslie ‘Sofa-Mouth’ Ash and a cast of
Hollyoaks
deserters. The average storyline would involve a kindly old lag befriending a frightened young whippersnapper, interspersed with scenes of comic relief in which the prison pig goes missing and Officer Alan Davies has to track it down.

As it is, it’s late-night Channel 4, and it’s packed to the roof tiles with anger, violence, sexual assault and more casual usage of the f-word than the average south London school playground. Scathing and espresso-strong, then – but what’s interesting about it is that it’s very, very good: an intelligent script that constantly surprises and illuminates, coupled with uniformly excellent, entirely convincing performances from every single cast member.

It’d be a crying shame if
Buried
were overlooked by its native audience, so I urge you all to do your civic duty by tuning in and watching the damn thing. That’s an order. Don’t worry if you missed last week’s opener – there’s a quick recap at the start and once you’re in, you’re in (rather like prison itself, actually). It’s a measure of how good
Buried
is that, despite being relentlessly grim, frightening and, yes, profoundly depressing, you won’t want it to end. And if for some mad reason you feel the show itself fails to live up to my histrionic praise, I apologise – it’s not often I find myself utterly blown away by a preview tape and it’s nice to get carried away in a positive way for a change.