Dawn of the Dumb (6 page)

[16 April 2005]

E
urope! It’s got everything! Golden beaches! Snow-dappled mountains! Dingly dells! Cities! Cutting-edge modern buildings shaped like kitchen utensils! Culture! Moaning! Welcome to the horrid world of
Coach Trip
(C4), the bargain-bucket daily reality show, which thunders to a climax this week. I say ‘thunders’, I mean ‘trundles’. And I say ‘climax’, but I mean ‘sorry conclusion’.

It works like this: get a coachload of idiots in pairs and drive them round Europe, stopping at tourist spots where they can potter around and disapprove of everything, including each other. At the end of each show, the couples vote to eject one pair from the group, thus souring an already fractious mood even further, before the coach shuttles its now diminished cargo of pebbleheads on to the next location.

Unfortunately, each time a pair leaves, they’re replaced by an equally unpleasant couple. Recently we’ve suffered a pair of substantial hosepipes called Gavin and Nathan, self-regarding oily siblings who work on a ‘freelance basis’ in ‘the music industry’. Gavin doesn’t so much demonstrate an eye for the ladies as openly waggle a penis at them, thereby rendering himself the least agreeable member of the party. But only marginally. Most of the others are standard tutting, parochial Brits, apparently incapable of enjoying or appreciating anything.

Overseeing the whingeing, whining lot of them is glamorous tour guide Brendan, whose faintly camp air of detachment ensures fun is never more than a six-hour air-conditioned coach journey away. As you’d expect, Brendan is also a seasoned diplomat. Last week he playfully chastised a 73-year-old passenger for wearing a miniskirt (to be fair, her exposed legs did have the textural appearance of Peperami sticks), before stoking the holiday-makers’ enthusiasm for the Spanish bullring they were about to visit by describing, in unflinching step-by-step detail, just how grisly the public slaughter of a large angry mammal can be.

I hope they make a second series of
Coach Trip
. Set exclusively in the winding, perilous mountain roads of the French Alps. During a blizzard. With a bomb in the boot. And with each losing contestant being nailed to a cross and hurled into the crevasse below. Directed by Michael Winner.

From one winner to another—yes, it’s
The
(BBC2), and Saira Khan’s still on the playing field, despite her stroppy, oblivious rudeness angering Tottenham Hotspur’s corporate division so badly they virtually withdrew cooperation from last week’s task. Another irritating trait I’ve noticed—She. Talks. In. Broken. Sentences. Very. Very. Slowly. Whenever. She’s. Trying. To. Negotiate. With. Someone. I think she mistakes this for ‘clear communication’, as opposed to patronising baby talk.

If Saira doesn’t win, the BBC should snap her up and give her a role in
Mind Your Own Business
(BBC1), a daily corner-shop makeover show starring Duncan
Dragons’Den
Bannatyne and a mysterious Cruella De Vil type calling herself’Mrs S’. The show seems to work like this: Duncan and Mrs S visit a struggling small business, systematically knock all the joy out of it, and leave a ruthlessly efficient but character-free shark pit in their wake. In the case of a neglected village store, their prescribed changes included placing ‘impulse purchases’ by the counter, charging more for chocolate bars, and developing a ‘brand identity’ for the shop itself.

As a team, Duncan and Mrs S work pretty well—he’s stiff and ungainly, she’s downright terrifying—but they could do with a little added pizzazz, and Saira’s the woman to provide it. While the others faff about installing laminate flooring and hypnotising customers into voting New Labour, Saira could lock herself in the back room with the owner and Talk. Very. Slowly. To. Them. Until. They. Agree. To. The. Programme’s. Every. Demand.

Don’t have nightmares

[14 May 2005]

W
hat do we want? Bleedin’ justice! When do we want it? Right bloody now! Pity, then, that the wheels of justice turn so slowly. I mean, the Michael Jackson trial reconstructions have been running on Sky News for ages now, and we’re only just getting to the bit where they bring in the celebrity witnesses (with any luck, we should get a Stevie Wonder impersonator this week—I’m not making this up).

In our espresso-paced era, to spend months soberly weighing up the facts feels outrageously self-indulgent. Even
Crimewatch UK
(BBC1), once considered the last word in instant justice, takes too long to produce results. Oh, it’s all very well to end the show with a nod and a wink and a ‘we’ve had lots of interesting leads’, but in this day and age we need speedier results. Or we’ll have nightmares. Old-fashioned tip-offs from the criminal underworld take far too long to process, and besides, most of the viewers aren’t members of the criminal underworld anyway—they’re paranoid curtain-twitchers, and the programme should inject a littie mobile-phone interactivity into its format in order to empower them.

How about encouraging viewers to stand by their living-room windows throughout the programme, taking phone-camera snaps of suspicious passers-by and texting them into the studio where we can all have a good look at them? Better yet, they could introduce a 2o-minute break in the middle, so anyone who lives near a canal or secluded area of woodland can nip out, take the dog for a walk, and send in pictures of any bodies they find lying about.

And then the police can parade the suspects in front of us, and we can vote to identify the guilty one, press the red button to slam him in jail and the yellow one to throw away the key, or hold down both at once to bring back the rope and snap his neck like a bread-stick.

Think I’m being flippant? Well I’m not. I’ve got ITV on my side: they’re showing us the way forward in the form
of People’s Court UK
(ITV1). Unfortunately, at the time of writing, it’s being used to settle petty disputes, not murders. But give it time, and that’ll change. This is progress.

The televised small-claims format has been around for years, but
People’s Court UK
is unique because it lets the audience decide who wins, live, by texting in. They also send in comments, which scroll across the bottom of the screen throughout the ‘case’, affording a glimpse into the jury’s mindset: ‘Steves telling the truth and whats more hes cute!!!—Sally, Bracknell’; ‘I hate Dave he thinks hes so clever well Dave u arnt all that!!!—Amy, Lowestoft’.

At a stroke, outmoded notions of impartiality’ have been replaced by a system in which disputes are settled on the basis of who looks most honest, or shouts loudest, or has the prettiest nose—in the opinion of several thousand irredeemably stupid button-pushers. Watching
People’s Court
, it’s easy to see why ITV’s audience has collapsed. Having spent years relentlessly pursuing the lowest common denominator, it’s inadvertently become a specialist channel for the very, very thick, while its traditional audience (the slightly thick) is now openly courted by Channel 4.

Anyone who isn’t thick is probably feeling slightly lost and unloved, so I’d encourage them to turn to BBC4 and be spoiled rotten by (ironically)
The Thick of It
, a fantastic new comedy series. A semi-improvised sitcom set in the back rooms of Westminster’ might sound like the driest, most clever-clever, Bremner-ish bit of business imaginable, but that’s precisely what this isn’t: it’s laugh-out-loud funny—so good, in fact, I watched the second episode on video immediately after finishing the first, then phoned up the BBC to badger them for the third. Don’t let it be wasted on the cognoscenti alone: this sort of thing should be on all the channels, all the time. Tune in and get hooked.

A horse that isn’t there

[21 May 2005]

B
leak but true: last winter, I was strolling down the local high street when I passed a casino. Now, this is south London I’m talking about, not Monte Carlo, so when I say ‘casino’, stop imagining dinner-jacketed high-rollers playing roulette to a Henry Mancini soundtrack, and start imagining Frank from
Shameless
shambling round a cramped, smoky fleapit filled with fruit machines and despair. You know the sort of thing: windows full of’prizes’ (carriage clocks and decanter sets), and a name like ‘Las Vegas’ that only serves to highlight the glamour-gulf between it and its namesake. A losers’ shithole, basically.

Anyway, something about this particular ‘casino’ made me stop dead in my tracks: there, in the window, was a cardboard sign promising ‘FREE SOUP AND BREAD ROLL’ to its patrons. Yes! You can gamble your last pennies into oblivion, but at least you won’t go hungry! It’s a soup kitchen and casino in one! What next—free second-hand shoes?

By ensuring its wrecked, reel-gawping clientele received at least one hot meal a day, was the casino being wildly irresponsible or just savvy? Was it being generous, or simply trying to keep them alive long enough to bleed a few more coins out of them? I don’t know. And I’m similarly conflicted when it comes to the rise of interactive gambling on satellite TV

For starters, there’s poker. What’s going on there? Suddenly, everyone’s talking about it. Thousands of people are haemorrhag-ing money in online games, and poker-dedicated digital channels with names like
Instant Poker Whirlpool 24
are sprouting like weeds. Some of the stations offer interactive play: jab the red button and you can experience the thrill of automated losing from your very own armchair. (Downside: you have to provide your own soup.)

Then there’s the openly moronic puzzle channels, with names like
Grab a Grand
or
Play 2 Win
or
Coins U Waste
or similar. These consist of a simple puzzle (a faintly blurred photo of Sean Connery, say, accompanied by the question ‘Who is this famous actor? (CLUE: SCOTTISH BOND} ‘attached to a premium-rate phone-or-text service. And it’s all hosted by a presenter (usually a woman, occasionally in a bikini) cheerily encouraging you to roll your sleeves up and have a go, as though she’s running a coconut shy. It’s a cash-pisser’s paradise.

Most heartbreaking of all, though, are the games that rob the player of whatever scraps of dignity they’ve got left. Take
Virtual Horse Racing
, for example. This crops up on the Avago channel during the day, and on Sky Vegas through die night, and it’s exactly what you think it is: a seemingly endless sequence of nonexistent race events, recreated whh PlayStation-quality visuals—which you can gamble on. Somewhere, right now, there’s a tearful addict blowing their last remaining pennies on a horse that isn’t there. It’s almost poetic.

There’s
Virtual Greyhound Racing
as well—that’s a recent development. Personally, I’m holding out for
Virtual Cock Fighting
. Well, why not? It’s not like any real birds get hurt, and it’s surely more exciting than watching pixelated horses. What about a game in which a man runs round a small market town punching nine-year-old girls in the face, and the viewer has to bet on which ones will fall over? It’s OK! It’s not really happening!

Back to reality, and as far as interactive TV gambling goes, the absolute biscuit-taking winner has to be
Gerbil Roulette
on the Avago channel. ‘When the wheel stops turning, it’s up to you to decide which house our talented little rodent will enter,’ claims the publicity. ‘It couldn’t be easier!’ Or any more demoralising. All we need now is a coin-slot that bolts onto the side of your television and a hose that pumps soup into your mouth while you play. Bet you a tenner it happens by Christmas.

Shed a tear for Abi Titmuss

[
[28
May 2005]

L
ike a burned-out paramedic gazing tearfully at a blazing pile-up, it’s time for me to sigh, roll my sleeves up and lurch towards
Celebrity Love Island—
the show that makes the score from
Requiem for a Dream
start playing in your head.

I was going to write something damning but I changed my mind because there’s little point getting angry. It’s just a rehash of
I’m a Celebrity
, minus the elements that made that show successful (i.e. the older participants, the bushtucker trials, and Ant and Dec). That’s all. It’s just depressing. So don’t get angry. Get sorrowful.

Start by shedding a tear for Abi Titmuss. Although described on the show as a ‘tabloid babe’ (which is as low as a human being can sink short of gargling sewage for a living), she’s actually rather homely- a bit like a neighbourly dairymaid. This, apparently, is a crime: because she’s plumper than earlier
Nuts
photo-shoots had suggested, the programme openly sneers at her for being ‘fat’. Let’s hope she sees sense and develops a serious eating disorder at the earliest opportunity. Until then, weep for her.

Weep too for Rebecca Loos, the woodpecker-faced Posh-botherer who was presumably hired on the understanding that anyone who’s previously masturbated a pig on television might be prepared to stoop slightly lower and perform the same act on ex-Hol-lyoaks actor Paul Danan.

Sob for Danan, who is a bell-end of considerable magnitude, and the ugliest person on the island—ugly in a unique fashion, like a man whose face was heading toward ‘handsome’ but took a wrong turn at the last minute. He looks like Jude Law crossed with the Crazy Frog, and he’s an absolute aching backside. The only way the producers could possibly justify his presence would be to spike his cocktails till he goes mad and has sex with a melon or something. But that’s not going to happen, because that would be fun, and
Love Island
isn’t about fun. If it was about fun, they’d go the whole hog: call it
Celebrity Fuck Hut
and send paratroopers in to force them to form a grunting, humping human daisy-chain. It’s not about fun, it’s about despair, remember?

Bawl for Fran Cosgrave, whose ‘celebrity’ status is so low he doesn’t actually exist outside shows like this. This is his reality: when the last edition finishes, he ceases to be, like a character in a video game when it’s switched off.