Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (52 page)

The final difference between
X Factor
and
Popstars
is perhaps the most significant one: the addition of an entire category for anyone aged 25 and over. The 16–24s may be desperate, but at least they’ve got youth on their side: the elders are a morass of jowls, grey hair, sagging breasts and broken dreams, so theirs is the most disturbing group of all, consisting largely of feverish last-chancers, deluded ‘eccentrics’ (i.e. the mentally ill) and OAPs.

In a fair world, Cowell and co. would be harder on a tone-deaf grandmother than a talentless teenager, on the grounds that old folk can take it (having been alive long enough to come to terms with an unfair world). In reality, when faced with a well-meaning old biddy whose voice warbled unsurely from one note to the next like a drunken moose trying to navigate a maze in the dark, the judges told her she was lovely and put her through to the next round. Cowards.

Finally – quick, unrelated question: during
X Factor
, did I
really
see an advert for a sinister new kiddies’ health drink called ‘Munch Bunch Drinky Plus’?

By God, I think I did.

I once had an idea for a conceptual art exhibit. The idea was simple: I’d cut out one of those adverts for chintz that appear in tabloid Sunday magazines (you know: a collection of miniature ceramic
Star Trek
kettles; hand-painted plates commemorating ten years of
A Touch of Frost
– that kind of thing). I’d send off for it – closely obeying the ‘SEND NO MONEY NOW’ in the process – then blow the advert up as big as possible, and fix it to the first wall of the gallery.

Once the goods arrived, I’d put them on a plinth in the centre of the room. And once I received a request for payment, I’d blow that up and hang it alongside the advert. But I wouldn’t pay a thing. Each time a demand arrived, I’d blow it up and hang it on the wall
of the gallery, until eventually I’d be hanging up court summonses and bailiff threats.

God knows what it would all ‘mean’ – I just thought it might be funny. But I never got round to doing it, on the grounds that it was a massive waste of time. And that’s the only difference between me and the performance artists showcased in
The Art Show
(C4) – they haven’t bothered making the distinction between worthwhile and time-wasting.

Take the man who spends hours dangling from a tree, like a piece of fruit. ‘I think I’d do it whether it was art or not,’ he explains – which is just as well, because it isn’t. It’s just a berk hanging off a tree. Nonetheless, it bemuses a few passers-by, which tickles our man no end.

‘It’s like being a witness to something,’ he says, which is a poncey way of saying ‘It’s something you look at,’ which in turn describes practically everything in the world. Watch a dog taking a shit in your garden and you’re ‘being a witness to something’. It also means the dog is a conceptual artist, and that’s not a turd curling out of its bum, it’s his latest work.

The main difference is that the dog is probably more likeable and less conceited. ‘This is more important than Hollywood or politics,’ screeches a prick dressed as a cyborg; a girl whose work consists of being chased by a black box on wheels offers the stunning revelation that ‘in a way, what I’m doing is self-indulgent’.

Their get-out clause, of course, is that you’re ‘allowed’ to find it laughable if you want – which is big of them. In fact, any reaction whatsoever validates their performance. Even suspecting they’re a bunch of show-offs who can’t act or perform comedy, and are using the ‘artist’ badge as a flimsy justification for wasting the world’s time – even that’s a valid reaction as far as these twats are concerned.

More time-wasting in
Too Posh to Wash
(C4), the follow-up to
How Clean is Your House?
And it really should be called ‘How Clean is Your Arse?’, because having run out of mentally ill householders to ridicule, Kim and Aggie are now training their sights on people with poor personal hygiene.

Their first victim is Barry, who smells. Barry rarely showers, doesn’t   wash his hair, and spends his evenings picking his feet then eating with his hands, ingesting athlete’s foot fungus as he does so.

Kim and Aggie’s advice ranges from the obvious (‘Have a wash’), to the absurd (‘Wash your hair with beer and vinegar’). Sadly Barry doesn’t make it to the end of the show, abruptly withdrawing his support after a lab report proves he doesn’t wash his hands properly after going to the bog.

Viz
used to run an excellent comic strip called ‘The Bottom Inspectors’, in which a group of Gestapo-like officials pounced on unsuspecting civilians and scrutinised their backsides for signs of poor wiping technique. Kim and Aggie are a bum-hair away from making it a reality.

The performance artists are up their own arses. But at least they’re not up other people’s, like these two crotch-sniffing hags.

It’s amazing how many bad things start with the letter ‘D’. Death, doom, damnation, despair, destruction, disaster, Davros, Des’ree, Da Republican Party … and now
Dirty War
(BBC1), the spiritual heir to classic BBC scarefests like
The War Game
and
Threads
– two shows that could convince almost anyone to commit suicide by the time the end credits stopped rolling.

So how does it measure up? Could it give you nightmares? Does it leave you reeling with queasy, futile horror? Will it stink out your living room with a sense of looming cataclysm so overpowering you’ll want to cry all the water out of your body and swim away to deadland?

Not really.

Simply put, the prospect of a dirty bomb going pop isn’t quite as horrifying as the complete and utter destruction of the world, something
The War Game
and
Threads
had on their side. In fact, the body count is surprisingly low.

Having said that, the programme as a whole feels uncomfortably authentic, and should leave you feeling, oooh, 70 per cent less
secure than you do right now. Depressingly, it also leaves you certain that a dirty bomb will
definitely, absolutely
and
unequivocally
go off at some point in the near future. That’s a given.
Threads
urged the audience to reconsider the madness of nuclear proliferation;
Dirty War
simply asks the authorities to provide sufficient damage limitation.

And it’s gripping. There’s a fair amount of clunky dialogue in which officials quote statistics at one another, but the overall sense of clammy hysteria is both undeniable and frightening.

Still, it’s not all bad news. For one thing, the need for immediate decontamination means that if a dirty bomb goes off near your office, you’ll get to see all your workmates stripping off and showering, like, totally naked. Honestly, you’d see it all: bums, balls, boobs, fannies, willies – the lot.

I can’t stress this highly enough – you will
definitely, absolutely
and
unequivocally
see your boss’s bum.

Secondly, since a dirty bomb would leave a large section of the capital uninhabitable for decades, house prices would tumble – thereby allowing me to finally gain a foothold on the property ladder. Christ, I could probably buy Clarence House for 25p.

So there you go. Always a silver lining.

There’s more death on offer in
Mediums:
Talking to the Dead
(BBC2), a remarkable three-parter following some of the nation’s leading corpse whisperers as they ply their trade.

From where I’m sitting, the vast majority of them are despicable liars – ghastly, bare-faced, ruthless, coin-eyed, opportunist, exploitative, nauseating lickpennies prepared to milk the grieving and bewildered for everything they’ve got, and I’d sincerely like to glue them face-first to a dining table and kick their arses purple with a pair of concrete boots.

That’s how I usually feel about mediums.

Yet even I was flummoxed into silence by Gordon Smith, ‘Britain’s Most Accurate Medium’; who’s either the most amazing trickster I’ve ever seen, or genuinely psychic, or genuinely conversing with the dead.

Not only is he the most humble medium involved in the show,
he’s the only one who doesn’t seem to rely solely on guesswork and fibbing. Smith’s communications are spot on, first time, every time – right down to the full Christian and surnames of the deceased.

Every fibre of my being tells me it
must
be a trick, but I’m damned if I can see how it works. Mind you, I used to think that about Derren Brown, until his latest series seemed packed with obvious stooges and he rather lost his mystic sheen.

Speaking of Derren Brown, I recently noticed the publicity for his live shows contained a quote from this very column – ‘Clearly the greatest dinner party guest in history … or the scariest man in Britain.’

Curiously, the full sentence originally read ‘Clearly the greatest dinner party guest in history – he’s either a balls-out con artist or the scariest man in Britain.’

He must’ve erased the con artist bit with some super-magic ‘mind control’, eh? Now that’s magic!

How can I go about getting a cushy job like yours?

God knows. Tim Lusher, editor of the Guide, asked me to submit a sample column and that was that. If you want to write for a magazine or newspaper, your best bet is to send them some relevant samples and hope they like them. If they turn you down, and you still believe in your own abilities despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, set up a website and write your own columns on there. Update it regularly, keep your writing short and to the point, and if you’re any good and/or lucky you’ll get a job offer eventually.

Why is it called ‘Screen Burn’?

For a description of what ‘screen burn’ itself means, read the ‘Live and Dangerous’ article in the ‘Pre-Screen’ chapter. As for why I thought it made a good name for the column, I think it was a pitiful attempt to sound all cool and hard and that. Christ, I hate me.

Have you ever met anyone you’ve slagged off?

Yes. But they usually don’t realise it’s me, and I’m fucked if I’m going to draw their attention to it. Besides, I’d feel bad. Kate Thornton recently held a door open for me as I was entering a building, and as she did so, she smiled so sweetly I felt guilty for describing her as ‘the human equivalent of a scarcely detectable kitten’s fart’ the previous Saturday. But that way madness lies.

A major advantage of not having a whopping great byline photo above each column is that you get to retain some anonymity. Another advantage is that people won’t point at your photo and laugh a lot and say ‘no wonder he’s so bitter’ for six thousand hours.

Do you choose what you’re going to watch or does the Guide choose it for you, or what? By and large, I look through the schedules in advance and choo
whatever I want. Then I phone up the broadcasters and get a preview tape biked over, assuming one’s available.

If there’s going to be a big feature in the Guide about a particular show, I’ll generally avoid it, in order to reduce overkill. Also, Grace Dent writes a very funny column about soaps every month, so I can’t cover those. Which is a pain when the deadline’s drawing near and all you’ve got to go on is a few ropey old documentaries about archaeology, I can tell you.

Don’t you ever actually like anything?

Of course. You couldn’t do a job like this if you didn’t essentially love television. But as I said in the introduction, reading about programmes I’ve liked is far, far duller than reading about the stuff I didn’t. It’s worth pointing out, incidentally, that in ‘real life’ I’m nowhere near as angry as you might think. In fact I’m often polite to the point of being craven. Basically, I’m a pussy.