Screen Burn (6 page)

In the event, Rob and Jon survive to cuddle in an entirely nonsexual context another day. But not all BASE jumps go according to plan, and just as you’ve become accustomed to the sight of these likeable daredevils hurling themselves off ledges and somehow escaping unscathed, death makes an appearance and the programme takes an altogether darker turn, and the carefree blokey thrill-seekers suddenly start to look more like self-destructive junkies, pornographically videotaping each new conquest then gathering to watch the recording later, endlessly driven to jump and jump again, hooked on life affirmation through the repeated defiance of monumental risk.

Still, their collated footage makes for genuinely exciting television, so who cares, eh?

Next week in the same time slot: a man with a camcorder glued to his forehead feeding himself face-first into a threshing machine. If we’re lucky.

Casualty
(BBC1) is rubbish – sick, thick, knee-jerk, leery, cynical rubbish; so unrealistic it might as well revolve around an imaginary hospital in the centre of a glass pig’s eye.

Above all, it’s a mess – a local-pantomime-standard blend of patronising hand-wringing and reactionary finger-wagging, slung together into a single, predictable awkward soap (the dull inter-staff feuds and romances are so calculated and forced, they may as
well be conducted at gunpoint) and stuffed to bursting point with as much needless gore as possible.

This is (and always has been) rubberneckers’ television, appealing to the sort of closet ghouls who, on spotting the remains of a car smash, gently slow down the Rover for a good slow-motion porno-peer at the limp arm dangling over the side of a stretcher.

If the BBC went mad and broadcast
Zombie Flesh Eaters
in the same mid-evening slot,
Casualty
viewers would be the first to complain – even though
Zombie Flesh Eaters
is a) only 4 per cent more gruesome, b) 44 per cent more exciting and believable, and c) 2006 per cent less likely to feature yet another variation on the scene in which a pretty nurse delivers a stinging put-down to a man impatiently banging his fist on the reception desk.

Incidentally, hands up everyone who couldn’t give a pliant duck about the ongoing child-custody subplot involving Charlie Fairhead. He’s a smug, soft-spoken, holier-than-thou dishcloth of a man, who deserves as much misfortune as scriptwriters can throw at him. And he’s got tiny eyes. He looks like a cross between a drama teacher and a dormouse: his son’s better off without him.

Charlie’s method of dealing with anyone runs as follows: calmly talk them down in the manner of a pre-school children’s TV presenter demonstrating how a quiet, steady voice can hypnotise livestock, while simultaneously exuding the faintest whiff of malevolent sarcasm that suggests he doesn’t actually give two shits about the trowel they’ve got lodged in their forehead. For a man who’s supposed to represent trust and dependability, he’s strangely incapable of maintaining a fixed gaze on the person he’s talking to. Instead, whenever delivering one of his regular appeasement monologues, his pixel-thick eyes continually wander left or right, or stare into the middle distance, while the rest of him shuffles from toe to toe like a man reluctantly sharing half-hearted conversation as he waits for the in-flight toilet to free itself up. I wouldn’t trust him to fix a cup of Lemsip.

Tonight’s episode contains all your other
Casualty
favourites: vomit, blood, a visit from the police, glassy-eyed extras, an unsympathetic patient who relentlessly complains, staff friction of metronomic 
predictability, and a lonely-but-noble old woman gasping her last on a starched white hospital bed. In true
Casualty
tradition, this last character is played by an ‘ooh-what-have-I-seen-them-in-before?’ celebrity (Lou Beale from
EastEnders
).

Best of all, there’s a textbook example of that most knuckleheaded
Casualty
cliché, the Case of the Injured Tearaway. According to the rules of this overfamiliar subplot, all gangs of teenage ruffians are led by a painfully soft-looking, middle-class actor struggling to project an air of gritty urban malice by means of an unconvincing display of shrugs, slouches, and half-hearted scowls, generally accompanied by an indisputably terrible stab at a working-class accent. Furthermore said gang leader is a one-dimensional coward at heart, who will lamely bully his cohorts into participating in a major criminal misadventure during which the most innocent teenager in the group will suffer nightmarish injuries.

Tonight’s example doesn’t disappoint – a cheerfully naïve Pogo Patterson lookalike rips his face open trying to vault a barbed-wire fence during a bungled robbery. Then there’s the additional bonus of a deep-rooted dysfunctional family dynamic of poster-colour improbability that gets completely straightened out within 28 minutes of his parents’ arrival at the hospital. Plus we get to see him bleed and scream a few more times.

A few hours later, further porn in
Amsterdam: City Of Sin
(C4), which gawps at the sex industry. We see everything from a woman squatting over a live webcam to a man cheerfully browsing through a range of forearm-sized dildos racked up on a wall like weapons from some hideous future sex war.

And what do we learn? Nothing, bar this: these days you’re shown naked breasts every 18 seconds on Channel 4: it’s nothing more than Live! TV with a WAP phone in its pocket and a punnet full of sushi on its lap.

Quick, name a likeable magician. Three … two … one. Time’s up.

Think of any? Course not: they’re bastards. For all their supposed 
skills at achieving the impossible – sawing women in half, making doves fly out of their faces, tying tigers in knots in a box full of fire – they’re useless at making themselves seem even vaguely human.

Paul Daniels? A seething, dry-lipped pepperpot. Siegfried and Roy? Upholstered aliens with too much gold and a big-cat fetish. David Copperfield? Look into his eyes for six seconds and shudder as the yawning abyss within swirls out to engulf you.

Then there’s Jerry Sadowitz; best known as a nihilistic comic, also a gifted magician. Sadowitz doesn’t use dry ice and strobe lighting to mask the fact he’s a shit: he performs spartan close-up card tricks and wears his unpleasantness on his sleeve – nailed to his forehead, in fact – and for this he deserves our support.

His new C5 vehicle
The Jerry Atrick Show
is an endearingly shambolic attempt to showcase his talents.

An uneasy mix of card tricks, gleefully puerile sketches, and stonefaced four-letter misanthropy, it’s like an edition of the
Paul
Daniels Magic Show
fronted by Howard Beale, the suicidal newsreader from the movie
Network
.

And it doesn’t quite work: confused direction renders many of the card tricks hard to follow, while the sketches, taken from his live show
Bib and Bob
(an exercise in escalating puerility that would make any sane person laugh till their eyes pissed acid), suffer in isolation from the motiveless, enthusiastically infantile whole. But amongst the misfires and disappointing VTs lurk some tantalising moments unlike anything else on TV, and while the tricks need to be seen live to be appreciated, they represent a rare opportunity to watch someone doing something they genuinely, passionately adore.

For proof of why the presence of wrecked-but-authentic performers like Sadowitz in the schedules is more necessary than ever before, stare no further than
Making the Band
(C4) a reality show chronicling the genesis of a manufactured American boy band.

Perfectly scheduled between
Hollyoaks, Futurama
and a whirlwind of adverts for garage compilations, pay-as-you-go mobiles
and spot cream,
Making the Band
is essential viewing for anyone who suspects the world might be fucked and secretly hopes it is. It’s mesmerising.

The idea is simple: 25,000 hopefuls slowly whittled down to five band members while the camera looks on. If you’re tuning in tomorrow, I’m afraid you missed the final pruning, in which two wannabes got the chop in a hilariously cruel and drawn-out firing session. But don’t worry: tomorrow, as the chosen ones enter the recording studio, there’s still time to appreciate the show’s core appeal: the hateful insincerity of everyone involved.

The five remaining ‘performers’ are a bunch of hissing Styrofoam meerkats desperately clawing over each other, craning their necks to suckle from the withered tit of fame; whining, mewling, preening, bitching – they coupart thrrldn’t be more dislikeable if they strode around in Nazi regalia firing nailguns at ponies. (Note to anyone working on a British version of
Making the Band
: stop what you’re doing right now. Just put your hands down and walk away. Please. Or there’ll be an uprising, and we’re talking heads-on-poles.)

The music is nondescript, the band is called O-Town – the ‘O’ apparently stands for Orlando although it may well represent the ice-cold hollow zero lodged in the heart of this absolute shit.

They should, of course, have used one of the following names instead: a) Puppet Squad, b) Edifice, c) Apocalypse Yo!, d) Attack of the Omen Five, e) Grinning Despair, f) Your Dreams Lie Crushed Beneath Us, or g) The Petri-dish Kids.

One minute banging on about ‘living their dreams’ and ‘realising their destiny’, the next moaning about their workload, this is a tale of five repugnant egos. Every time they speak, every time their bleating little mouths pop open, you’ll feel like standing on your chair to hurl shoes at the screen. Artless gimps like this shouldn’t be on television or in the charts at all: they deserve to be locked in a cupboard with a gigantic genetically engineered mantis that’ll shift and itch and scratch its spiny little legs against their weeping faces, for a period of no less than sixteen thousand years.

Still, don’t just take my word for it: tune in and learn to hate them yourself.

Here’s what watching TV will be like in the year 2006: you stroke a nubbin on the tip of a matchbook-sized mobile phone, and with a satisfying ‘schhhhick’ sound a gigantic plasma screen unfurls, covering the wall like a tapestry. Next, a huge holographic head rotates slowly in the centre of your living room, reading a list of your favourite programmes, while behind it in the screen it lists 19,000 stations catering for all conceivable interests, from the James Belushi Movie Channel (‘
Curly Sue
to
Red Heat
and back again, 247’) to the Santa Goose Hedge Pointer’s Network (‘
all
people leaning over hedges to point at a goose dressed as Santa,
all
the time’).

Having made your choice, the programme begins – except it isn’t a normal programme at all. No: thanks to ‘convergence’, it’s a magical cross between TV, the Internet and the most sophisticated arcade game you’ve ever seen. If you’re watching
Ground Force
2006, for example, you’ll be able to push a button to digitally graft Alan Titchmarsh’s head onto the body of a dancing cat, and take potshots at it with a light gun, earning Amazon tokens for each paw you blow off.

LSD users can do that already, of course, but until 2006 arrives the rest of us have to make do with the likes of BBC Choice’s E-Mail Weekend – a selection of programmes that ‘gives viewers a chance to browse through the ups and downs of online life’ and – oops – a few myths into the bargain.

Alongside documentaries on cyber-talking, a simplistic and self-conscious comedy-drama ‘about communication, or rather miscommunication’ called
Talk to Me
(BBC Choice) and the unflinchingly realistic movie
Weird Science
(BBC Choice), lurks a series of 10-minute shorts called
Looking 4 Love
(BBC Choice), in which goonish presenter Dan Rowland visits people using the Internet to further their love lives, expecting us to gaze in astonishment as though he’d uncovered a race of talking unicorns. Since the banal reality of a typical online romance (two parties aimlessly exchanging flirtatious e-mails) isn’t significantly salacious or peculiar, the show largely focuses on the predictable extremes – an unpleasant ageing Stringfellow type using the net to woo women, a lanky oddball with a cybersex addiction, and a fat man from Barnsley who married an American he met online, only to have her scarper back to the States a short while later.

Trouble is, not one of the assembled interfreaks is half as strange as Rowland himself, who perpetually gurns and mugs like a man sitting on his hands trying to stop a bee crawling up his nose, and has an incredibly annoying habit of facing the camera to raise an eyebrow whenever someone says something even vaguely risqué, which they manage to do approximately every six seconds.

His final visit brings him to a fetishwear convention with an incredibly tenuous online link (it’s advertised on the web – just like say, the Ideal Home Exhibition, which wouldn’t have made prurient viewing). By now utterly uninterested in talking about the Internet at all, he simply walks around pulling ‘oo-er’ faces at leatherwear and strap-ons until you feel like crawling into the screen to slap him back to normality.

As with the majority of programmes about hobbyists, the underlying attitude is one of cynical scoffing at saddos – but who’s the more tragic: the person using the Internet to communicate with a living, breathing person, or the bloated sofa-bound dunderhead who spent hundreds on a digital box, just to watch Dan Rowland jig around like a sneering marionette?

This year’s been a swindle. As a child the mere mention of ‘the year 2000’ conjured up images of people with purple hair piloting miniature bacofoil hovercraft round and round inside a gigantic doughnut-shaped space station. Yaay! Exciting! And what did we get? Westlife and rain. Thanks a bundle, history.