Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (41 page)

Ever been to a real-life boot sale? They’re like
Dawn of the Dead
, but bleaker. Row upon row of Kajagoogoo albums, board games with pieces missing, Franklin Mint atrocities and pieces of furniture so ugly they’d defile a skip, all of it covered in a fine layer of grit and dust and bubbling fly eggs, put up for sale by yellowing cadavers whose eyes point in different directions. The best you can say for
Boot Sale Challenge
is that it brings this experience kicking and screaming into your living room.

The air of desolation is hard to convey with words alone. These people are foraging through a swamp of refuse, paying 50p for a battered old tray, and then whooping for joy when the expert values it at £1.50. You could turn a bigger profit sitting by a cashpoint offering blowjobs for pennies. The show’s sole atom of fun is provided 
by resident expert Paul Hetchin, and that’s only because he’s the spitting image of Ron Jeremy, the flabby porn star with a penis the length of a window cleaner’s ladder – a man who makes more money getting his dingle out in one afternoon than any of the
Boot
Sale Challenge
participants would make in a million years of scavenging. Still, if bleak rummaging is ‘in’, let’s see a show called ‘Canal Dredge Challenge’, in which contestants don wetsuits and drag whatever old shit up to the surface to have it valued.

‘The blue team found an old Asda trolley, valued at £9 – but the red team have capped that with their discovery: the body of a missing schoolgirl, the reward for which could earn them as much as ten grand and an interview on GMTV.’

Or how about ‘Warzone Scavengers’, in which viewers crawl through recently ravaged Chechen villages hunting for valuable trinkets amongst the body parts and rubble?

Give it a year, and they’ll both be on. At which point you can blame me. Until then, blame
Boot Sale
Challenge
.

There’s a great deal of talk about the current generation of ‘kidults’; millions in their 20s and 30s who refuse to ‘grow up’, shunning traditional ‘adult’ pursuits such as theatre and bookkeeping in favour of listening to Justin Timberlake and completing ‘Twitty Bum Wars’ on the Xbox; ditching suits and floral dresses for a pair of low-slung Levi’s with 10 inches of thong-strung arse crack peeking over the rear. It’s a hideous prospect: if things carry on like this we’ll wind up a nation of Nicky Haslams; wizened cadavers playing Game Boy Advance on a stairlift.

Since we’re all simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the ageing process, it’s hardly surprising nostalgia has become such big business. The TV schedules heave with ‘D’you Remember Spangles?’ shows, the Renault Mégane now comes equipped with a School Disco compilation album in the glove box as standard, and Bungle from
Rainbow
is set to be immortalised on the new £50 note.

The king of nostalgia cash-ins is the ‘Friends Reunited’ website, which has enabled millions to systematically check up on each and every one of their old schoolfriends, only to discover that 98 per cent of them work in IT and want to kill themselves. Worse still, it soon becomes clear that absolutely everyone you ever fancied is now happily married with eighteen kids.

Still, according to
The Curse of Friends Reunited
(C5), a little thing like that needn’t dissuade you from attempting to rekindle the spark, the pubescent thrill that fizzed and popped back in the good old days when your skin still fitted and grey hair was an alien concept. A populist documentary cut from the same cloth as last week’s cannily positioned
Curse of Blue Peter
sniggerfest, it’s chock-a-block with shattered relationships, jilted grooms and ruined lives – all manner of human tragedy, ostensibly made possible by the ‘Friends Reunited’ website.

It’s all tongue-in-cheek because the central premise is nonsense, of course: when your wife runs off with an old flame 14 seconds after begrudgingly muttering her marriage vows, blaming the Internet for enabling the lovebirds to communicate is like blaming the sun for providing enough light for them to see one another in the first place. Demonising technology is more palatable than facing the ugly truth: that a large number of Britons are either fickle, or trapped in make-do relationships, or both, and consequently spend a sizeable portion of their time spooling through past romantic liaisons in their head, with particular emphasis on the ones which teased and tormented, yet never reached their full passionate conclusion.

More interesting than the tales of romantic woe is the story of the boneheaded coke dealer, who visited the site to brag to former classmates about the monstrous amount of ‘charlie’ he was shifting (much to the delight of the police force tracking his every move), and the sinister case of a man who described his job as ‘drop-dead exciting’ in a faintly sarcastic way in his profile, and got fired as a result (by a boss who presumably wouldn’t think twice about using a mind-control device to scan his workforce’s brains for signs of dissent, if only such a thing were available).

Gah. Fah. Pah. Anyway, speaking of teenage-related follies, this week sees the start of the BBC’s contemporary update of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
(BBC1) … and the first episode (‘The Miller’s Tale’) stars none other than BILLIE PIPER!!! Hooray! And in a piece of nakedly appropriate casting, she plays a young chanteuse married to a boozy old duffer twice her age (Dennis Waterman). Sadly, that’s as far as the fun goes, because the programme as a whole is intensely annoying, not least because it largely consists of James Nesbitt reprising his cheeky Irishman role for the billionth time this year.

Fans of nightmarish imagery might be interested to know that he and Ms Piper can be glimpsed rutting feverishly on a sofa at one point. Bluuugh. I can still see it each time I close my eyes. My tip: turn the sound down and hang a tea towel over your screen during that bit. And keep it there till it’s finished.

Nothing will drive you insane faster than a relationship with someone who blows hot and cold at random, flipping from love to indifference like a hyperactive imbecile playing with a light switch.

One minute they’re praying aloud for extra arms to hug you with, the next they’re pissing in your cornflakes while you sob at the breakfast table. Then it’s back to kisses and cuddles for a few days, followed by an inexplicable month-long sulk during which your every action provokes a 10-tonne scornful sigh. Saddle yourself to someone like that and you might as well ram a whisk in your ear and scramble your brains manually.

But when both parties are equally schizophrenic, equilibrium is achieved, and the relationship survives, despite constant detonations from within. It’s the same with international relations: an identical balancing act maintains the bond between Britain and France, two pig-headed countries with eminently slappable faces, clashing neighbours in a bad sitcom, and the subject of
With
Friends Like These
(BBC2), a new series chronicling Britain’s postwar relations with key political allies.

Now before you yawn yourself unconscious, it’s worth pointing out that
With Friends Like These
is better than you think. For a dunce like me, whose knowledge of Anglo-French relations begins and ends with the
EastEnders
special in which Ricky ate a croissant on the Metro, it’s also downright educational, deftly explaining how personal clashes between leaders altered the course of history, typified by the battle of wills between Churchill and De Gaulle.

De Gaulle was a Frenchman so stereotypically arrogant he could have been invented specifically to annoy Richard Littlejohn. Following the Nazi invasion of France, he was whisked to our shores in a light aircraft, where Churchill installed him in a plush Westminster office, pledging full support. De Gaulle repaid our hospitality by sustaining a deep-seated resentment of the British to his dying day, refusing the UK entry to the common market on the grounds that our mindset was ‘insular’ – this from a nation that recently invented its own word for e-mail, just for the bloody-minded thrill of being surly and different.

But, as anyone in a stormy relationship knows, bitter rows lead to mind-blowing make-up sex: fast-forward a few decades and there’s the gruesome sight of Ted Heath and Georges Pompidou practically rimming one another at a press conference, announcing Britain’s entry into Europe like lovers at an engagement party. Following years of mutual animosity, Pompidou’s head had been turned by the fine selection of French wines on offer at the British Embassy; once he discovered Heath shared his passion for immense helpings of expensive food, romance blossomed. The two men consummated their lust by building Concorde together, a totemic phallus symbolising their subconscious desire to tickle each other’s winkies.

Right now, the Anglo-French relationship is going through a rocky patch: thanks to Blair’s insensitive flirting with that brainless slut from the White House, Chirac’s moved into the spare bedroom. Which is where you come in, dear reader. Because together, we can save this marriage. I have a bold suggestion which will a) improve international relations, b) provide us all with a holiday, and c) destroy David Blaine’s career. It’s simple: we all move to France for
the next 44 days. There’s plenty of room; we can camp in the hills, especially since their forests burned down.

Next, we launch a charm offensive with the locals, providing Best of British festivals in which we sing Kinks songs and cook Sunday roasts for entire villages. Then we’ll get drunk on their wine and watch them hit on our women. Our nations will fall in love all over again.

Best of all, back in London, freshly deserted London, there’ll be no one to greet Blaine when he finally slithers from his Perspex cell. He’ll have to drag his skeletal remains into an abandoned Prêt A Manger and make himself a sandwich with his wizened, shaking hands.

And that, my fellow Europeans, will be truly magical.

John Lennon – aintcha sick of him? More specifically, aintcha sick of the endless procession of dickwits who bang on and on about how bloody great he was and how if only the entire human race would sit down and listen to his lyrics there’d be no more war or suffering, and the rainforests would grow back, and all our children could grow up in a carefree world full of flutes and rainbows and tepees?

There’s no denying Lennon wrote some of the most fantastic music ever committed to vinyl, but he also produced his fair share of dreck – a fine example being ‘Imagine’, the song recently voted Britain’s bestest pop song ever, and the subject of tonight’s
Arena:
Imagine Imagine
(BBC2), a programme which could serve as a textbook example of what happens when you ask a Mojo reader to create a documentary.

The song itself is the musical equivalent of one of those airbrushed paintings of dolphins they sell in tabloid magazines, which manages to outstay its welcome despite being little more than three minutes long:
Imagine Imagine
lasts 88 minutes and contains more lumpish padding than an outsize Muppet factory. This is a prog doc – a long, slow, bloated fart of a programme; pretentious
and pompous enough to include everything from Lennon’s inarticulate ramblings about chocolate cake to footage of the Twin Towers exploding in the mistaken belief that the whole unfocused mess will somehow transcend the subject matter to become a powerful statement about … er … something or other. Oh, peace. Yes, that’s it: it’s a film about peace. Or music. Or both.

Along the way, we’re accosted by all manner of talking-head morons: chief offender Yoko Ono on hand to smugly guff out her standard pseudo-deep bullshit.

‘There are only two industries in the world – the war industry and the peace industry,’ she says. Really Yoko? What about the textile industry then? Come to that, what about the John Lennon industry, which, under your guidance, markets a range of branded Lennon products including duvet covers and baby wear?

Cut to some ponderous footage of babies and clouds. Cut to the opening of Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport (at which a marketing expert gushes that ‘the slogan “Above Us Only Sky” isn’t just a beautiful sentiment, it’s a strong corporate message reinforcing how John Lennon Airport has risen above its competitors’). Cut to archive clips of John and Yoko exhibiting artworks consisting of everyday objects from their opulent home sawn in half and sealed in signed jars (an act of self-aggrandising celebrity chutzpah even Victoria Beckham would balk at). Cut to a gathering of hateful American hippies blubbing over the Lennon memorial in Central Park.

Cut to ethnic children performing the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ in sign language. Cut to – arrrrrgh. You get the picture. And there’s an hour and a half of it.

By the end you’ll want to imagine this programme was less abysmal. But that’ll be difficult. Imagining the cynical, caustic John Lennon spinning in his grave at 5,000 r.p. m., however, is surprisingly easy.

Before I go, a quick command: move heaven and earth to catch
Turn on Terry
(ITV1) – Terry ‘The Word’ Christian’s late-night TV review show, and a car crash of considerable force. It consists of Terry Christian sitting in a Manchester nightclub incoherently
‘reviewing’ the week’s television (‘So, like, what’s this
I, Claudius
all about then, eh? Romans and that, innit, right?’) while a bored-looking audience stands around in the background wondering why they’re there. Best of all there’s a house band, fronted by Shaun Ryder’s brother, whose job seems to consist solely of introducing each item with a bit of plodding, Madchester dirge.

If you can sit through 10 minutes of this without wanting to lean forward and rub a big blob of dog muck into Terry’s rictus grin, you’re far more compassionate than me. Or John Lennon. Or the both of us combined as one, living life in peace, above us only sky, etcetera etcetera et-bloody-cetera …