Dawn of the Dumb (5 page)

In other words, by their own admission, they’re making grief-stricken relatives cry for entertainment. On a scale of moral repre-hensibility, this isn’t too far away from child porn. It’s psychological rape: disgusting, dishonest and exploitative. Here’s how to solve the psychic problem: make it a jailable offence for any ‘medium’ to charge for their services without a licence. How do they get a licence? Simply by demonstrating their abilities under laboratory conditions (something not one has ever been able to do). That’d sort ‘em out.

Less sickening, though equally preposterous, is
Most Haunted—
an allegedly ‘factual’ cross between
Scooby-Doo
and the
Blair Witch Project
, hosted by Yvette Fielding and ‘Britain’s leading psychic’ Derek Acorah. It’s outrageous nonsense—nothing but a bunch of people lamely making stuff up, holding seances and going ‘woooh’, shot with night-vision cameras to make it look creepy. The only thing genuinely returning from the grave here is Yvette’s career.

Still, Derek’s hilarious, particularly when he gets ‘possessed’ by spirits and screams the word ‘bitch’ right into Yvette’s face. If he believes in what he’s doing, he’s insane. If he doesn’t, he’s a laughable prat. Either way, Derek loses and we win. As a ‘paranormal investigation’,
Most Haunted
is about as scientifically rigorous as an episode
of Bod
, but the audience laps it up. I watched last weekend’s ‘live special’ and was dismayed by the avalanche of texts the show received.

Mind you, many claimed to have experienced a strange sensation of’nausea’ and reported their sets ‘switching off’ during the show. Paranormal phenomena, or flickerings of sanity? You needn’t be psychic to work that one out.

If a penis could choose its own wardrobe

[26 March 2005]

I
f a penis could choose its own wardrobe and hair stylist, chances are it’d end up looking like Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman, star
of Dog the Bounty Hunter
(Bravo). Essentially The Osbournes with pepper spray, it’s a light-hearted docusoap chronicling the life of a family of bounty hunters—Dog, his wife Beth, son Leland, brother Tim and nephew Justin.

The Chapmans all dress like bombastic 19805 action movie heroes—particularly Dog himself, who stomps about wearing biker boots, leather trousers, open shirts and a haircut that makes him resemble the entire cast of
The Lost Boys
crossed with a gay lion.

It’s worth tuning in for about five minutes simply for that haircut, but sadly Dog soon turns out to be about 10 per cent as interesting as he and the producers think he is.

In fact, I only mention it because Dog spends most of his time hauling poverty-stricken heroin addicts out of shit-encrusted trailer homes, thus providing a perfect contrast to
The Queen’s Castle
(BBC1), also a docusoap, but set in one of the most expensive homes in the world: Windsor Castle. Unlike
Dog the Bounty Hunter
, no one gets kicked in the nuts or zapped with a Taser gun in this show and, for reasons which will now become clear, that’s a crying shame.

As the programme begins, a great hoo-hah is made of the fact that the crew has been granted ‘unprecedented access’ to Windsor Castle, as though we should be somehow grateful for being granted a peep at the glittering opulence within—opulence we’ve paid for and which the royals take for granted. But before you come to terms with that, the programme hits you with something else: polishing.

Lots of polishing. Hours of it. Too much in fact. I now understand how the Windsor Castie fire broke out: a member of staff had been ordered to polish the Queen’s teaspoons till they glowed white-hot.

There’s also dusting, wiping, mopping, folding, ironing, arranging…you name it: priceless trinkets and pieces of furniture painstakingly manipulated by subservient staff on behalf of Her Grumpiness the Crone, who turns up hours later and doesn’t even say thank you.

Naturally, the inmates of this slave-labour camp are filled with pride, mesmerised by the prestige of a lifetime spent in pointless backbreaking servitude. One woman almost blubs for joy, recounting how as a girl she dreamed of spending each day on her hands and knees, needlessly wiping any object the Queen might waft within 500 metres of. Now her wildest childhood fantasies have come true.

It doesn’t stop with housework. Every imaginable convenience is taken care of by a crack squad of fawning serfs. Guests staying overnight don’t unpack their own cases: a team of maids does it for them. Diners tucking in to a helping of swan-and-unicorn terrine have it practically spoon-fed to them by grovelling footmen. Nip off for a crap and chances are there’s a cap-doffing peasant stationed by the bowl, punching himself in the face with pride as he wipes your bum, pulls the chain and holds a sprig of lavender under your nose till the stink fades away.

Just when you think things can’t get any worse, you’re treated to the sight of Queen and Co. sitting down to enjoy some modest after-dinner entertainment—the musical
Les Misfrables
, transplanted in its entirety from the West End to one of Windsor Castle’s 8,000 drawing rooms. And what’s that the cast are singing? Why, it’s a song about the miserable lot of the underclass: ‘At the end of the day you’re another day older / And that’s all you can say for the life of the poor…Keep on grafting as long as you’re able/ Keep on grafting till you drop’—all of which plays out over footage of the staff frenziedly washing dishes and licking the bog floor clean with their tongues.

Here’s hoping the series ends with the castle burning down a second time. While the staff get pissed and polish off the wine cellar.

Show us your bum for ten pence

[2 April 2005]

T
ravelling at 7,000
MPH
, 22,000 miles above our heads, a satellite orbits the Earth, beaming a signal to the dish on your roof. This signal then travels down a fibre-optic cable to a receiver which unscrambles the image and sends it to your TV set, which in turn paints it on the screen, line by line, 15,000 times a second, fast enough for your brain to register as a moving image.

All this, just so you can watch girls waving their bums around on shows like
Babestation
(about a million different satellite stations, nightly).

Have you seen
Babestation?
If you’ve got a satellite dish, that’s a stupid question—you can’t miss it. Go randomly channel-surfing any time after 10
PM
and you’ll bump into more
Babestation
variants than you can shake a stick at. If you catch my drift.

In case you don’t, here’s what I’m talking about:
Babestation
is a bit of night-time ‘adult fun’ (i.e. pornography) consisting of several inset windows. One houses live footage of thick girls in various states of undress. Below that lies another window full of texts from even thicker viewers, begging them to blow kisses and jiggle about a bit. Sending the texts cost a fortune, and that’s why
Babestation
is there. It’s a coin-operated wanking machine, in other words, and it’s just as glamorous as that sounds.

Other stations house coundess spin-off variants on this theme: generally dingy webcam footage of girls in rooms as small as coffin interiors, chatting to viewers on premium-rate phone lines.

Grimmest of these is the alarming
Babestation Contacts
, which displays phone-camera snaps of sagging viewers accompanied by voicemail messages encouraging you to get in touch, come round and muck about with them.

This is almost enough to signal the end of civilisation as we know it, which is currently scheduled to occur the day a major network broadcasts a show I’ve recently invented called
Show Us Your Bum for Ten Pence-a
four-hour live broadcast in which viewers nationwide are encouraged to send in phone snaps of their backsides in exchange for a lop discount on their next mobile bill. Scoff all you like, but I guarantee it’ll be on air within a decade.

Anyway:
Babestation—
it’s seedy and gooey and yucky and bluurgh, but even so, it’s nowhere near as puke-inducing as one of its daytime equivalents, the truly hideous
Psychic Interactive
. The name gives it away—yes, it’s another bit of coin-slot bummery, this time aimed at the desperate and gullible (as opposed to the desperate and masturbating).

Psychic Interactive
offers a range of services, from premium-rate one-to-one ‘sessions’ with on-air mystics to text-window Tarot readings courtesy of dowdy bags in the studio. People text in to discover whether their relationships will survive, or their job prospects will improve…even to find out whether they’re pregnant. It’s one of the most nauseating things you’ll ever see. Well, until
Babestation Contacts
turns up later on.

And there’s an incongruously surreal twist: since
Psychic Interactive
is currently only broadcast during ‘dead time’ on a channel normally aimed at video-game fans, it’s interrupted every few minutes by an ‘ad break’ largely consisting of stills of Pac Man accompanied by captions in Italian, or Mortal Kombat characters backed with heavy metal music. This must irritate
Psychic Interactive’s
natural audience immensely, which is why I laugh out loud each time it comes on.

Regular readers will know I don’t have much time for ‘psychics’ of any description, and a few weeks ago I fantasised aloud (well, in print) about a law aimed at shutting them down.

I didn’t realise one already exists: the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act, aimed at people who purport to ‘act as spiritualistic mediums or to exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers’ in order to deceive people for financial gain. Clearly this law doesn’t apply to anyone appearing on
Psychic Interactive
, or they’d have all been booted off screen ages ago.

Be not afraid

[9 April 2005]

C
hunky, golden CGI lettering farts its way across your screen, accompanied by ominous music: ‘One man…One calling…One world…’ What is this, a trailer for the next Vin Diesel beat—‘em-up? Nope. The slogans vanish and are instandy replaced by a cut-out photo of the late Pope, accompanied by his name, spelled out in a medieval font presumably selected for its religious overtones, and a quote along the bottom: ‘BE NOT AFRAID.’

It looks like a computer-generated version of a knowingly tacky Terry Gilliam animation, but it’s not supposed to be funny. It’s supposed to be solemn. It’s a break bumper on Fox News, which is bringing you up-to-the-minute coverage of the death of the Pope.

Of course, Fox can confidently claim to run more coverage of this sad event than anyone else. After all, they got a head start by announcing his death a day early, on April Fool’s day.

Again, uiis wasn’t supposed to be funny. It was a mistake. The only joke is Fox itself, and running the ‘BE NOT AFRAID’ bumper while simultaneously doing its utmost to keep viewers in a state of perpetual ill-informed terror is presumably the punchline. I may not know much about the Pope, but I’d put money on him feeling thoroughly sickened by everything Fox stands for—particularly their star turn Bill O’Reilly, notorious host of
The O’Reilly Factor
, who spent much of last Monday’s show lambasting the dead Pontiff for (a) criticising the Iraq war, and (b) not doing enough to halt the rise of’anti-Christian’ activity in the US.

Bill himself, of course, does his best to promote Christian values. Why, he regularly preaches tolerance and forgiveness—virtues he drew on last year when he settled out of court with a woman who’d accused him of sexually harassing her over the phone. He accused her in return of extortion. In the Christian spirit of tolerance and forgiveness, they’ve agreed to end the battle—although if you fancy a laugh, you can still find the statements lurking on the internet.

From one belligerent monster to another—namely Saira Khan, the most irritating woman in the world, still hanging on against all the odds in
The Apprentice
(BBC2). Saira is a self-professed business supremo who endlessly babbles about her brilliant vision, drive and interpersonal intuition. By her reckoning, these are three great business skills, although she may be doing herself a disservice, because judging by her progress she possesses four key business skills: ‘missing the point’, ‘bullshitting’, ‘hectoring’ and ‘backstabbing’. Above all, though, she’s patronising. If Saira spoke to an unborn foetus through a stethoscope for five minutes, it’d come away feeling somehow demeaned by the encounter.

The Apprentice
being what it is, the stage is set for an ultimate showdown between Saira and Sir Alan Sugar, who, as he reminds us in the opening titles each week, ‘can’t stand bullshitters’. It’s got to happen soon—Saira’s managed to cock things up more than anyone else, yet has miraculously escaped dismissal week after week. At this rate, she’ll win—thereby turning the show into one long hideous parable about the inexorable rise of obstinate morons everywhere.

Horrifying it may be, but
The Apprentice
is also brilliant fun. And Sir Alan’s so good, he deserves a second knighthood. Sir Alan Sugar Squared has quite a ring to it, don’t you think?

Before I go, a quick mention
of Doctor Who
(BBC1), despite the blanket coverage the series has received elsewhere. Thing is, I simply can’t stand by and let this week’s episode,
The Unquiet Dead
, pass by without comment, for the following reason: I think it may be the single best piece of family-oriented entertainment BBC has broadcast in its entire history. It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s exciting, it’s moving, it’s got shades of Nigel ‘Quatermass’ Kneale about it, it looks fantastic, and in places it’s genuinely frightening. TV really doesn’t get better than this, ever. Resistance is futile, as Davros or Saira or even Bill O’Reilly might say.

Cargo of pebbleheads