Dawn of the Dumb (16 page)

But Reeves isn’t quite as frightening—or as happy- as Dr Richard Stevens, a hippyish, silver-haired ‘psychologist of well-being’ who we first encounter literally prancing about in a dingly dell, grinning so violently he’s in danger of splitting his face in two.

Together, they’re unstoppable. Their first action is to draft a Happiness Manifesto for the Sloughsters—a ten-point personal improvement plan that includes simple advice like ‘take some exercise’, ‘count your blessings’ and ‘have a good laugh’.

Reeves, bless him, walks around Slough handing this document to glum passers-by. The sequence in which he stands in a branch of Gregg’s, attempting to pass the happiness bug on to a line of people miserably queuing for pastries, is heartbreaking.

Stevens, meanwhile, is leading a group of volunteers into a forest, where he encourages them to dance around and, yes, hug trees.

On the face of it, all the experts’ advice sounds insipid and moronic—but you can bet your sweet bippy that if you stifled your cynical snorting and followed their suggestions, you’d end up feeling far better than when you started. That’s the trouble with jovial hippies. They’re often right—the happy bastards.

Happily fertilised

[19 November 2005]

I
t’s a day much like any other. Bob and Mike are dangling from a mucus rope, slowly revolving, with their bodies intertwined…when quite without warning, translucent penises begin to emerge from the back of their heads. Said penises writhe and intertwine also: undulating, throbbing, swapping sperm between the pair of them. Finally, when they’re all pumped out, our loving couple let go of the rope, tumble to the ground and wriggle away- both happily fertilised.

It sounds like the sort of sexually confusing dream you might have after eating six pounds of cheese and falling asleep in a sleeper carriage, but amazingly, this whole psychedelic adult-fun encounter is(a) entirely real, and (b) broadcast in close-up, slap-bang in the middle of BBQ.

Of course, I’ve made it sound more shocking than it actually is. When I say ‘Bob and Mike’, what I actually mean is ‘an anonymous pair of hermaphrodite slugs’. I don’t know what their real names are. Although the one on the left definitely looks like a ‘Bob’. But that bit about the penises growing out the back of their heads? I’m not making that up.

But perhaps Sir David Attenborough is. Because
Life in the Undergrowth
(BBC1), Sir Dave’s latest natural history epic, contains so many jaw-dropping moments it’s hard to shake the suspicion he might be having us on. He might’ve had a bonk on the head and gone a bit crazy, and convinced the BBC to let him spend two years making a series about things that only exist in the darkest corners of his mind.

The footage is the clincher—it’s far too clear, far too spectacular and hypnotic. It must be CGI. They’ve plugged a USB lead into his brain and asked him to dream really hard down the pipe.

It’s the only explanation. At one point he introduces us to a ruddy great foot-long centipede that hangs from the roof of caves in order to catch and eat bats. Come on, pull the other one, Dave—it’s got a translucent penis sticking out of it.

Lord knows what Freud would make of the sexual connotations of the centipede dream—not to mention the same-sex snot-rope slug-shag incident I mentioned in the first paragraph. In fact, sex is clearly one of Dave’s overriding obsessions, because he returns to it again and again.

Take the segment with the arachnid ‘harvestman’ thingamajig, which attracts females by building a showroom full of eggs, then walking around methodically polishing them all day, like an eight-legged jewellery-store owner. Initially, it’s all rather charming, the sight of this chap impressing the ladies by setting out his stall and keeping it tidy. You almost expect him to pop on a bow tie and wax his moustache.

But no. Before long, Dave wanders down a hot velvet alley in his head, and it’s bumpy-thrusty time. A shot of yet
another
translucent penis fills the screen—and it’s
Lovers’ Guide
time, Davey-style: ‘He has a rod with which he injects his sperm. He withdraws, and she’s been fertilised.’

Yeah, yeah. So far, so human. Come on, Sir D—get sick on our ass.

‘Half an hour later, she lowers her white tubular ovipositor…she thrusts the egg into the floor of the nest and covers it with a thin blanket of mud.’

Hoo boy. I tell you, this is some of the hottest white tubular ovipositor action I’ve ever seen. That egg-thrust? And the thin blanket of mud? That’s one heck of a money shot right there. I give it five stars. Bring a tissue.

I’m being both flippant and a moron:
Life in the Undergrowth
is a fantastic programme—captivating, stunning, and occasionally downright poetic. And I’m not fit to wriggle under Sir David Atten-borough’s boots.

Eye-brain mindwipe syndrome

[26 November 2005]

W
hy, it seems like only yesterday we were discussing the last series
of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!
(ITV1)—when we thrilled to the antics of, um…Janet Street-Porter. And. Er. Oh yes: Vie and Nancy. And all the other people who were in it. Those were great days, weren’t they? Vintage times. Ahhh. I’d get dewy-eyed just thinking about it, if I could just remember what happened.

Unlike good drama or comedy, which can resonate somewhere round the back of your soul for years after the event, your memories of I’m
a Celeb
wither on the vine the moment the credits roll. The same is true of every other reality show ever: they exist in the moment, nowhere else. Nothing wrong with that, in moderation: that’s their job. They’re like a fun, throwaway version of the news.

Trouble is, it’s getting to the point where I’m forgetting what’s happening while it occurs. It’s a medical condition known as Concurrent Eye-Brain Mindwipe Syndrome, and it makes writing a column like this very tricky. I have to record each episode and watch it six times over, taking extensive notes as I go. And even then, I still thrash about with astonishment each time the camera cuts to Jenny Frost. Try as I might, I simply can’t remember she’s there.

Recalling the others is easier. David Dickinson’s a doddle, because he’s so audio-visually arresting. With his sagging 32A breasts, cow-length eyelashes and oaky complexion, he vaguely resembles a retired Thai ladyboy who’s jacked in the nightclub act and applied for a DJ position at Magic FM. Unforgettable.

Then there’s Sid Owen, who’s easy to remember on account of his sole facial expression—a cross between a confused boy and a frightened pug. The moment he leaves the jungle someone should cast him as an adult Ron Weasley in a down-at-heel ‘re-imagining’ of the J. K. Howling books:
Harry Potter and the Fight Down Wetherspoons
, or something similar. No idea what happens in it, but with Sid in the cast, the job’s half done. Innit.

Carol Thatcher’s also hard to miss, chiefly because every time she opens her gob, gruesome memories of her mother pump through the veins in my head, and I have to clench my fists so hard my knuckles pop out and shatter against the wall.

Annalise from
Neighbours
is the first one I really have trouble with, because she looks identical to the Annalise from
Neighbours
I spent countless afternoons developing a pathetic stoner’s crush on ten years ago. Either she hasn’t aged, or
I’m a Celeb’s
become so ephemeral, it’s ceasing to exist before it occurs, thereby causing a loop in the space-time continuum that’s allowed her to step straight out of 1995, unscathed, into the present.

The others drift in and out of my head like repressed abuse memories. There’s Antony Costa (who looks like a novelty inflatable condemned man), Jilly Goolden (plum-gobbed ghost-train skeleton), Jimmy Osmond (played by Teddy Ruxpin, the creepy 19805 bear), and Sheree Murphy (about whom—and this is
a fact-
it’s impossible to say anything funny or interesting).

Of these, only Antony Costa has made me laugh so far—not because of anything he’s done on the show, but because of his docile expression in his worm-eating publicity shot.

Still. Early days.

Finally, what is there to say about
OFI Sunday
(ITV1) except: how many weeks, d’you reckon, until Chris Evans slows to a halt in mid-sentence, stares down the lens for a full minute, then silently produces a handgun and starts walking round the studio, firing wildly at the crew, the cameras, and the audience? How many weeks till that occurs? Not sure if William Hill are taking bets on it yet, but I say three weeks. A friend of mine reckons one.

Who’s right? Doesn’t matter. Regardless of the timeframe, it’s clearly destined to happen.

—
It didn’t happen
.

Phil Mitchell fighting a reindeer

[10 December 2005]

W
hen, in your head, does December stop being December and start being Christmas instead? For me, it’s nothing to do with the physical signs you see in the street—lamp posts swaddled in fairy lights, a drunk in a Santa hat throwing up in a doorway, shoppers kicking each other to death to get their hands on an Xbox 360…that’s part of the build-up, not the event itself. Because as far as I’m concerned, Christmas only truly arrives the moment BBC1 unveils its annual Christmas idents.

Last year’s offering featured a group of kids on Christmas-pudding-shaped space-hoppers bouncing around a mock Arctic landscape. The idea for this was selected via a
Blue Peter
competition, which is about as warm and cuddly and all-round BBC as it gets. I’ve no idea what’s in store this year, although I’d love to see any of the following: (1) Phil Mitchell fighting a reindeer; (2) Some baby Daleks building a snowman while a kindly grandpa Dalek looks on, smoking a pipe; (3) a claymation baby Jesus playing Swingball with Pingu; (4) Charlie from
Casualty pooing
into a stocking (hey, it might happen).

(I know what I don’t want to see: a special Christmas edition of that nightmarish CGI-heavy advert the BBC started running a few weeks back to promote their range of digital services—you know, the one where a swarm of babbling human heads flies over the moors, forms itself into the shape of one giant face made up of hundreds of little ones, then squawks at you about how bloody brilliant the BBC is. Once seen, never forgotten, but not in a positive sense. Something about it makes me genuinely giddy: it’s the sort of thing I’d expect to see in my mind’s eye during brain surgery, or while fighting off a fever in a hot and airless room. Brrrr. I’d rather not even think about it.)

Whichever yuletide option the BBC decides to go with, chances are it’ll be (a) as slick and sophisticated as being fellated by a butler, and (b) virtually omnipresent. Because that’s the way all such TV’furniture’ seems to be heading. Gone are the days of the simple, garish BBC1 ‘revolving globe’, or the Thames TV ‘London skyline rising from the waters’ ident—chunks of TV ephemera which look laughably amateurish compared to their modern equivalents, yet possess approximately seventy-eight times the charm. Where once a simple station logo would suffice, we’re now offered polished widescreen mini-movies, smug optical haikus and, worst of all, intrusive little pop-ups telling us what we’re currently watching, what’s coming next, what we should think about it, and what docile pricks we are for sitting there and withstanding it all.

And in case mere visual spam isn’t enough, in recent years all continuity announcers have been trained to butt in and start bellowing over the end tides of your favourite programme within 0.5 picoseconds of the first end credit appearing.

Not that it matters really—because the era of individual end-sequences is over anyway. Today, the precise length and layout of all closing credits is strictly controlled—Channel 4, for instance, specifies all dialogue or voiceovers must finish prior to the start of the credits (so their announcer can shout all over them), while text is kept to the left-hand side of the screen (so a big CGI bum can crap pictures of upcoming shows, spin-off books, holiday snaps, etc, all over the right-hand side).

Thus the branded furniture bleeds ever further into the programmes themselves, until individual shows start to feel more like strands in a single evening-long programme—the BBC show, the ITV show, the Channel 4 show, and so on. Good news for networks craving strong customer awareness, bad news for anyone who just wants to watch something decent on telly without being shouted at, patronised, or congratulated on the supposed ‘lifestyle choice’ some marketing prinkle insists they’ve just made.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a C4 logo stamping on an end-credit sequence—for ever. Bah humbug.

Burned into the memory

[31 December 2005]

P
hew. Bang goes another thrill-packed year of sitting on the sofa staring at a box in the corner of the room. Usually, this
Screen Bum
awards ceremony round-up thing would explore some sort of overriding annual ‘theme’. A while back, when Simon Cowell first appeared on our screens, the defining theme was ‘cruelty’. The year John Leslie ran into difficulties, it was ‘celebrities in trouble’. This time round, I’m jiggered if I can spot a theme. Looking back through the past 365 days, the shows that stand out are a pretty disparate bunch—so maybe the significant trend of 2005 was ‘trend-less incongruence’. Yeah. Because that makes tons of sense.

Enough quibbling. Let’s dish out the awards. First up, the brand new Most Undeservedly Pleased With Itself award, which goes to the David LaChapelle teaser trailer for Channel 4’s
Lost
, in which the cast danced around in slow motion while Beth from Portishead sang about feeling ‘ever so lo-o-st’—almost impossibly, this managed to be even more pretentious and annoying than the series itself. If, upon seeing it, you turned to an equally moronic companion and said, ‘Ooh, that looks interesting,’ feel free to spend 2006 punching some sense into your own stupid face.