The Hell of It All (25 page)

Make no mistake, this is graphic stuff. Shot after shot of heads being sawn or jimmied open, and exposed, pulsating brains being prodded with sticks. But if you manage to stay conscious (by pinching the back of your hand and breathing slowly through your nose), it offers some incredible sights.

For instance, early on we see a woman undergoing surgery to remove an errant bit of cranial yuck that’s been causing epileptic fits. They whizz the top of her skull off and peel away a gossamerthin coating to reveal her bloody, gelatinous brain, which they repeatedly squirt with a spray bottle, to wash away the claret and expose the pale pink jelly beneath. We see blood vessels throbbing in her mind, and then – cue the incredible bit – we spin round to the other side only to discover she’s STILL AWAKE and enjoying a chinwag with one of the nurses.

She has to remain conscious, see, because the surgeon needs to know if he’s about to cut out anything important, and the best way of ascertaining that is to zap individual sections of her brain with an electrode, then ask her how it feels. One bit makes her hand twitch about. Another makes her eyes roll back. Gradually he builds a rough ‘map’ of her brain, and adjusts his scalpel swipes accordingly. It helps to avoid unpleasant surgical side-effects, such as spending the rest of your life bumping into furniture and mooing.

Truth be told, watching this woman calmly lie back and natter while the surgeon probed her brain sent me a bit giddy. I’d be useless on either side of the equation. If I were the patient, I’d suddenly freak out, leap to my feet and run screaming down the corridors, sloshing brain goo up the walls as I went, getting stupider with each spillage, and eventually collapsing, drooling, by the lifts. And
as the surgeon, I wouldn’t be able to resist going mad with the electrode, making her jump like a puppet, or seeing if I could fritz her mind in such a way that she’d start seeing noises, or hearing colours, or thinking the air in the room had the texture of biscuits or something.

Speaking of mad surgeons, there’s a fair few of them on display here, such as Walter Freeman, inventor of the transorbital lobotomy, which involved hammering an icepick through the eye socket and into the brain, then wiggling it around until the nerve fibres connecting the frontal lobes to the thalamus were severed. Freeman thought that it cured mental illness, which is a bit like thinking you can fix your computer by jamming a knitting needle through the hard drive.

There’s also an interview with a Spanish surgeon who planted electrodes in a bull’s brain, then jumped in the ring with it, and stopped it goring him to death by pushing a button on a remote which made it spin around in confusion. The footage of that is pretty funny, if you despise animals.

Anyway, great show. Make a note of it now. On your brain. With a sharp stick. And try not to poke the bit that switches your bum on and off while you’re up there.

No apologies, you absolute bastards, for this column returning once again to the horror of crass religious makeover show
Make Me
a Christian
, which draws to a close this week having prompted much wailing and gnashing of teeth – 98% of it in my living room, where each episode has been accompanied by a storm of cries, squawks, and outraged splutters. The bellows came so regularly and automatically (as an instinctive physiological response to what I was seeing and hearing) that after a while I actually forgot it was me making them. They’d become part of my flat’s natural ambient soundtrack, like the ticking of the clock or the sound of mould growing in the fridge. Yell, yell, yell. It was like living on top of a yell mine.

If you were to measure the volume of my shouts and plot them on a graph, you’d discover that the number of sonic peaks corresponded precisely to the number of close-ups of head Christian mentor Reverend George Hargreaves’ simpering tortoisey face. A few weeks ago, after watching episode one, I was so incensed by his self-satisfied air of stubborn intolerance I Googled him as soon as the credits ran. Before long I’d uncovered his astonishing back story: that in the distant past he’d been a DJ and songwriter (responsible for Sinitta’s ‘So Macho’ and ‘Cruising’) before becoming the head of the insanely right-wing Christian Party, which wants to denounce homosexuality, teach creationism in schools, reintroduce the death penalty, ban abortions, remove the ‘satanic’ red dragon from the Welsh flag, and basically make a bollocks of everything. (Fortunately, they’re not very successful, what with the general populace being aware it isn’t AD1500 any more. In the recent Haltemprice and Howden by-election, George received 76 votes. But, hey, perhaps this TV exposure will build his profile.)

Anyway, George’s background is so juicy and mad, I fully expected the show to make the most of it. You know: wait till he’s admonishing Laura (one of the show’s volunteers; a lesbian) for her sinful gayness, then have the voiceover say, ‘But George hasn’t always been so opposed to homosexuality …’ and BAM! – cut to Sinitta performing ‘So Macho’ on
Top of the Pops
in 1983 with a caption explaining who wrote it. And move from there into a cute VT package detailing his loopy political ambitions. Didn’t happen in show one. Or show two. Aha, I figured. They’re saving it for the finale: a classic ‘reveal’. Look! He’s been a vaguely sinister weirdo all along! Gotcha!

But no. His past and his party never warrant a mention. Instead we get the standard makeover show ending: a few participants scratching around for reasons why they feel a bit better about themselves having gone through the sausage machine. Ignore the faintly upbeat veneer and it’s all pretty feeble: none of them appear to have undergone any spiritual transformation whatsoever. They may have enjoyed several of the ‘tasks’, such as helping the elderly or throwing a barbecue for the neighbours, but that’s because
doing good deeds is fun. You don’t need Christ whispering in your ear to appreciate the value of loving thy neighbour.

In fact, the biggest hurdle each of them has had to overcome throughout the series is George himself: his robotic intolerance; his haughty judgements; his stomach-churning opinions stated as fact. Choosing him as its ‘star’ has created a bizarre tension at the heart of the programme: the volunteers have been repeatedly told that Christianity is all about love and acceptance by a man who insists the world must adhere to his dementedly fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. And by giving George a mainstream televisual platform without once pointing out what a marginal and extremist figure he is, the show is hugely unfair on yer average non-lunatic churchgoer, the majority of whom are far more likely to offer you a pot of homemade elderberry jam than hysterically denounce you as a fornicating sinner.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m an atheist defending moderate Christians. Wanna make something of it?

Empathy lives! If you’ve ever doubted your ability to feel compassion for your fellow man, try sitting through the recent DFS commercial in which various out-of-work actors have to mime along to the shit Nickelback song ‘Rockstar’ without squirming yourself half to death with embarrassment-by-proxy. The sorrow and humiliation is overpowering. I can barely stand to watch. Which bit’s the worst? The bit where the porky thirty-something bloke does air guitar, or the bit where the old woman in sunglasses mouths the chorus? Bet they had to repeatedly halt the shoot because people were completely breaking down on camera – collapsing into helpless shuddering fits. Having sex with a dying goose in exchange for basic rations on some apocalyptic porn site would be less demeaning.

The only thing in the universe more shameful than old people miming rock songs is the sight of white people rapping. Not all white people, you understand – about 15% are good at it. The rest come across like Leslie Nielsen in an unseen and unfilmed
Naked
Gun
sequence in which Lieutenant Frank Drebin has to black up and infiltrate a hip-hop video shoot. (In the 1980s, it was the law that every family movie or sitcom had to include a bit where the ‘Dad’ character performed a rap, replete with lots of hand gestures and the word ‘yo’, although the practice was eventually abandoned when audiences began committing suicide en masse.)

Consider that a protracted warning about
Scene Stealers
, a new teenage ‘life swap’ show which as of this nanosecond forms part of the BBC’s yoof strand Switch. Essentially an amiable take on the
Faking It
format (or a shameless rip-off, depending on whether you own the rights to it or not),
Scene Stealers
is all about tribes. Teenage tribes.

Of course being part of a tribe is easier when you’re young, although some types age quicker than others. Stay slim and you can convincingly pull off the Camden indie kid look into your early 30s. Goths spoil sooner. They start to look a bit tatty around the age of 25. Still, no matter which tribe you’ve chosen, there comes a point where you’ve just got to admit defeat. I dimly recall seeing men in their 50s still walking around dressed as teddy boys in the late-70s and early-80s. Even as a child I knew it was heartbreaking.

So if you must experiment with tribery, the full bloom of youth is the only sensible time to do it. This week’s
Scene Stealers
takes two slightly posh kids and tries to transform them into south London rappers. Just to make things that bit more difficult, both kids are firm tribe members already. The first, Nikita, is a ‘plastic’. I’m pretty certain they’ve made this ‘tribe’ up especially for the programme: basically ‘plastics’ dress and act like they’re in Girls Aloud. The other is Josh, who looks like Howard Jones and describes himself as ‘an alternative 80s punk’. He’s got a synth in his bedroom and knows the chords to Gary Numan’s cars.

Josh and Nikita are whisked to London to meet their mentors – two aspiring rappers called Fret-Deezy and Rampz, who have 48 hours to turn them into convincing Channel U types who spit rhymes and rep their endz and all dat. It’d be more interesting to see Fret-Deezy and co become punks, but that’s doubtless in store for week two.

In the meantime, this episode inevitably builds to a climax where Josh and Nikita have to rap in front of a panel of hip-hop ‘experts’. Nikita’s not bad. Josh grew up on a farm. How good do you think he’s going to be?

No successful rapper has ever hailed from a farm. It’s one of the immutable laws of creation. During his gruesome rap, you’ll pray for the DFS ad to appear, just for some light relief. But it won’t, because this is the BBC. You’re stuck watching him flounder.

Overall: harmless fun, provided you’re 19 or under. Any older and it’ll make you feel like a wheezing cadaver. And that’s not a tribe, that’s your future, that is.

Pssst. You know the American election, yeah? That unfolding spectacle across the Atlantic; the one you’ve been a bit worried about of late? Well, the good news is you can stop fretting. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t real.

But don’t take my word for it. I’m a cretin. Ask an egghead channel. As part of this week’s US election mini-season,
President Hollywood
takes a squint at the curious co-dependent relationship between fictional and real US presidents. Each has informed and influenced the other, it seems: Hollywood and the entertainment industry swap positions as regularly as enthusiastic rutters in an even-handed one-night-stand. One minute Kennedy’s giving the world of fiction a blowjob by providing a role model for noble decency that survives to this day, and the next, TV’s slurping straight back, preparing the ground for Obama courtesy of
The
West Wing’s
Matt Santos.

As a result, the lines between fiction and reality are almost hopelessly blurred. And probably a bit sticky. Voters would dearly love to elect some kind of mythic ‘innocent outsider’, the archetype for which was defined way back in 1939 by Jimmy Stewart in
Mr Smith
Goes to Washington
. That’s why both Obama and McCain attempt to portray themselves as warm-hearted agents of change.

Bush pulled the same trick, of course, although his down-home
aw-shucks act rings fairly hollow these days, what with the war and the waterboarding and all that. Nixon’s ignoble spell in the White House inspired a string of conspiracy thrillers and slippery, sinister commanders-in-chief. But Nixon impersonations are growing stale. If nothing else, Bush’s legacy should at least provide an exciting new template for movie presidents: the war-mongering pseudo-rube.

Anyway,
President Hollywood
itself is a pretty interesting programme with one glaring flaw: it was made before anyone knew Sarah Palin existed. If, as the show suggests, every election campaign somehow resembles a movie plot, this was the moment a rough’n’ready Dolly Parton/Erin Brockovich character stepped in to dispense a little butt-kickin’ straight talk on behalf of everywoman. Or at least that’s how Team McCain is spinning it. As a way of distracting everyone from the perceived weaknesses of friendly-but-doddery McCain himself, it appears to have worked, and worked well.

But their inspiration seems to have been drawn not from Hollywood at all, but the world of reality TV. The structure is markedly similar. Palin arrived as a complete unknown, which meant the news media had to spend hours explaining who she was in little VT packages; bung some gaudy pop and a few lens flare effects on top and you could’ve been watching a contestant biog on
The X Factor
. It helps that she’s hot. Hot for a politician, that is. In the street she’s a standard Milf. Stand her next to 500-year-old John McCain and she’s a Barely Legal covergirl. While half the electorate argue about her hardline stance on abortion, the other half is debating which hole they’d do her in first. Not out loud, you understand, but in their heads. Or online.

Furthermore, as a moose-hunting former beauty queen, Palin is a kooky character – precisely the sort of person a producer would home in on at the auditions like a dog sniffing meat. Obama’s a stock character too, of course – the ‘likable try-hard’ – but although he ticks precisely the same reality boxes as Palin (unknown, good looking, etc), he’s not as obviously kooky. Given a choice between ‘kooky’ and ‘able’ in a talent contest, reality viewers reward ‘kooky’
every time. And why shouldn’t they? They’re watching a TV show, not picking the next government.