The Hell of It All (3 page)

But it’s not just London that’s awful. You are too. And by ‘you’, I mean ‘us’. Humankind. After all, we clearly peaked about 40 years ago, and it’s been downhill ever since. For all this talk of the dazzling modern age, the two biggest advances of the past decade are Wi-Fi and Nando’s. That’s the best we can do. Meanwhile the environment’s crashing, fundamentalists and morons are at each
other’s throats, God’s so disappointed he’s wished himself out of existence, and the rest of us are merely pottering around, distracting ourselves by fiddling with our iPod settings.

Ooh look I’ve changed the menu screen wallpaper. Ooh look I’ve changed it back. Ooh look I’ve – oh. A mushroom cloud. That’s annoying. How am I going to power my iPod now? The charger’s just melted. As have my hands. And I’m thinking these thoughts with a boiling molten brain bubbling through a fissure in my freshly carbonised skull. Oh well. Night night.

And even assuming the world doesn’t come to an end while you’re standing in it, the sheer scale of creation renders most existences futile. The universe is so timelessly immense, absolutely anything you say or do is meaningless by comparison. In the grand scheme of things, even mankind’s brightest stars – yer Beethovens and Shakespeares and Einsteins – are fleeting pixels, gone in the blink of a mosquito’s eye. And most of us don’t achieve anything like as much as them. In fact most of us achieve less than, say, Daniel Bedingfield.

So, to return to my opening question, why don’t the vast majority of people just blow their own heads off? The answer, presumably, is that life’s inherent meaninglessness is precisely the thing that gives it meaning in the first place. If Jesus Christ turned up tomorrow on CNN to officially announce what the point of existence was, it would ruin everything. What if it turned out to be ‘collecting teacups’? By that reckoning, most of us are failures. As it stands, none of us are. In the absence of any formal rules, the only thing required of us is basic human survival. And we might as well be upbeat about it.

Daniel Bedingfield, incidentally, worked this out some time ago and wrote a catchy, cathartic song about it – ‘Gotta Get Thru This’ – which went to number one. If he’d called it ‘Might As Well Blow My Own Head Off’ it wouldn’t have had half as much airplay. We can all learn from that. We can all learn from Daniel Bedingfield. Now there’s a sentence rarely used to close newspaper columns.

You know what I miss? Fray Bentos steak and ale pies. I haven’t had one in years. But as a student, I ate them constantly. I thought they represented grown-up cooking. After all, this wasn’t your average takeaway slop. No. A Fray Bentos supper required preparation and patience. You had to shear the lid off with a tin opener, and chuck the pie in the oven for half an hour. The end result was sublime. Except it wasn’t. Having wolfed down better, fresher meals since then, I now realise that what I was eating tasted like dog food boiled in a stomach lining by comparison. At the time I just didn’t know any better. Now I couldn’t face one. I’ve been spoiled. You can’t go home again.

I’m starting to wonder if obsessively watching
The Wire
has similarly spoiled me in terms of TV drama. By now, the sound of yet another person blasting on about how good
The Wire
is probably makes you want to yawn your soul apart, but really: it’s so absorbing, so labyrinthine and bloody-minded, it makes almost everything else seem a bit … well, a bit Fray Bentos.

Take
Dexter
. I’d heard a lot of positive things about it. Beyond positive, in fact: people queued up to give it a blowjob. And tickle its balls. And look it in the eye while they did so. These were people I trusted. And then I sit down to actually watch it and discover my head’s been so warped by Wirey goodness,
Dexter
simply gets on my wick.

The premise is as dumb as a dodgem full of monkeys. Anti-hero Dexter is a blood-spatter expert working for the Miami police department. He’s also a serial killer. But that’s okay, because he’s managed to channel and control his murderous tendencies by indulging in vaguely justifiable slayings – i.e. he only kills other serial killers.

Preposterous, yes, but there’s nothing wrong with a preposterous set-up per se. Unfortunately the show ping-pongs between quirky, tasteless comedy and what it seems to earnestly believe is a compelling study of the psychopathic mindset. It’s a bit like watching an episode of
Scooby-Doo
in which the lighthouse keeper who’s
disguised himself as a sea monster in order to scare people away from his gold spends half his screen time mulling over the philosophical meaning of masks. And then stabs Shaggy in the eye with a toasting fork.

What’s more, the show depends on the viewer finding Dexter himself curiously charming despite the fact that he enjoys strapping his victims to a gurney and torturing them with a drill. The easiest way to achieve this is to make said victims ‘worse’ than he is. Implausibly worse. This week, for instance, Dexter’s stalking a hit-and-run drunk driver – which means he can’t be just any old drunk driver, but a serial offender who’s apparently ploughed through an orphan in every state, repeatedly beaten the rap, and then shrugged it off as no big deal.

They might as well cut to a shot of him dancing on a grave with a bottle of champagne in his hand. Enter Dexter stage left with his power drill. Cue cheering. Cut to ad break. Phew, this show is, like, intense, man. It totally toys with your sense of moral justice and shit. Awesome!

Add to that a bunch of mono-dimensional cops working alongside Dexter (including his sister, whose sole character trait is a potty mouth), an irritating voiceover that’s about one-tenth as wry as it thinks it is, and a smattering of unbelievably bad yet apparently earnest flashback sequences in which young Dexter is schooled in the art of anger management by his FBI-profiler dad, and you’re left with a weird, offensively simplified mulch which only an idiot could truly refer to as ‘dark’.

Which isn’t to say it’s utterly terrible; I’m curious enough to try the next episode. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s any more sophisticated than
The A-Team
. It’s gorier, that’s all.

Shriek! Panic! Kick the neighbours awake and tell them the truth! Your TV is deceiving you! The Queen didn’t storm out! Gordon Ramsay didn’t catch that fish! And that animated 3D map the weatherman stands in front of ISN’T REALLY THERE! It’s all a lie!
A disgusting, despicable lie! HANG THEM! HANG THE LIARS! On live, un-manipulated television – pure and truthful, the way it used to be.

Yes, for months now the papers have been behaving like hairless pod people who’ve just pulled the tube pumping hallucinatory Matrix code into their brains and stood up, truly awake for the first time in their lives, squinting and blinking at the world as it is, rather than the cartoon fib they’ve been fed. And now they’re bravely running round town knocking on doors, alerting the dreaming populace to the cold hard truth, goddammit.

Revelations about premium-rate phone-in lines and misleading news reports are one thing, but come on – Gordon Ramsay didn’t catch a fish? Frankly, I’d be surprised if he was on the boat in the first place. Most of it’s blue-screen trickery anyway. When you see him chopping onions, those aren’t actually his hands – they’re CGI simulations. He’s not even a real man. He’s a bear in a rubber mask. And a violent, angry bear at that. They just edit out the bits where he attacks people and steals picnic baskets, dub someone saying ‘fuck’ over the top, and hide subliminal messages in the accompanying musical bed, commanding you not to question the verisimilitude of what you’re seeing.

Yes, television routinely tells fibs, and should always be approached with a healthy degree of scepticism, and any big lies it tells deserve to be exposed – but to hear the tabloids bang on about it, you’d have thought they were fearless campaigners for truth who’d never, say, take 25 photos of a celebrity emerging from a nightclub, select one in which their eyes are in mid-blink and their gob’s half-open (probably because they’re telling the photographer to piss off), then run it to illustrate a story about how drunk they are, because look, look, you can see it – those drooping eyelids, that dangling jaw.

‘We’re all worried sick about him – he’s on the fast track to an early grave,’ said a source close to the star (who can’t be named for reality-based reasons). Massaged reality is all around us. Although of course, since I work in both newspapers and television, you shouldn’t believe anything I say anyway. These aren’t even real
words. I filmed the individual letters two years ago, then edited them out of sequence to give the impression of an article.

Right now, for example, I’m pretending to write about
Heroes
, which starts this week on vanilla terrestrial television following a wildly successful run on the Sci Fi channel earlier this year, and which I’d somehow managed to miss until now. In fact I know so many people who’ve already seen it – downloading it here, burning it onto a DVD there – I’ve sometimes felt like a Victorian gentleman who’s somehow beamed himself into the future and discovered himself to be a walking anachronism.

And now, finally, I understand what the fuss was all about.
Heroes
is great: a sassy modern take on comic-book superheroes, clearly influenced by Alan Moore’s
Watchmen
. Nonsense, maybe, but hugely entertaining nonsense. Surprisingly grisly too.

If you’re one of the three people who hasn’t already watched the entire first season on an iPhone or something, I won’t spoil any of it for you. But for pity’s sake do tune in, because it’s a beautifully assembled piece of popcorn fun – even though none of the actors have real superpowers, and apparently the words they’re saying are all scripted in advance, and they just turn up on set (yes ‘on set’ – those aren’t their real homes) and read the scripts out and pull faces that make it look like they’re experiencing real emotions and then it all gets edited together into a ‘story’, which the public buy hook, line and sinker. Man, it’s a devious world.

– Despite my kind words here, the dumb-
but-
fun Heroes went all to
shit in its second season. That’s life
.

And on the 55th day, God sent a flood to destroy all of Britainkind. And Oxfordshire sank. And Gloucestershire sank. And the Vale of Evesham became a stagnant puddle with a few bits of roof poking out of it. And Sky News did sadly gaze upon the scene, running a Breaking News caption each time a lilypad floateth past, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, for even though this was
the most boring natural disaster of all time, there was much ruining of carpet and wine cellar, and the people were greatly upset. And eventually God appearethed at a hastily-arranged press conferenceth and said, ‘lo, I missed.’ And God wenteth on to admitteth he’d been aiming for Borehamwood in a desperate bid to silence Charley off
Big Brother 8
who, God explaineth, gets right on God’s tits with her constant bloody jawing, like.

Deities aside, it’s hard to imagine anything that could shut Charley up. She’s the most boring housemate in the programme’s history – far more boring than the ones who spend their time moping silently in the background, like Thingytits from year two and Whatsisarse from year four, because she’s pro-actively boring. Unstoppably so. She’d cross a lake of fire to babble into your ear about herself for 17 solid hours.

Charley’s name is fitting, because listening to her ceaseless self-centred rambling is PRECISELY like listening to a dreary cokehead chewing your ear off at 3 a.m. with a punishing soliloquy about what they’re like and what they think and what the really great thing about them is. Frighteningly, Charley’s not on coke. Can you IMAGINE what she’d be like if she was?

Actually, there’s no point imagining. She’d never get hooked in the first place. Pass her a mirror with a white line on it, and she’d automatically blow it out of the way to get a better look at herself. She can’t strut past any vaguely reflective surface without compulsively pouting and checking her hair. Stand Charley in front of a weeping widow at a funeral, and she’d command her to keep still while she checked her reflection in the teardrops.

Maybe she’ll be out by the time you read this; it’s possible, although I’ve given up assuming. She’s been stuck in there so long, and against so many odds, she feels like a ghost that’s been haunting the building for centuries. Chances are she’ll steadily eat herself alive – courtesy of that weird hand-chewing thing she constantly does – rather than be evicted.

With weeks still to go, rumours abound that yet another twist is in the offing. After the All-Girl Opening twist, the Prize Money twist, the Fake Eviction twist and the Unconvincing Australian twist, loyal
viewers suffering repetitive twist fatigue must be praying for a Not a Twist at All twist in which precisely nothing unusual happens. Although if there MUST be a twist, I’d welcome one in which the twins have to run out of the nearest fire exit and keep going until they’re 10,000 miles from the nearest camera or microphone.

Incidentally, is it me, or are they not ‘identical’ any more? One’s getting thinner, and the other one’s swelling like an ankle. It’d be interesting to see if she’s put on precisely the same amount of weight as the other one’s lost. In fact it might even make the show seem like a valid ‘experiment’ after all. Hey, what’ll happen if we feed one of them nothing but baking soda for a week? Let’s find out! Cool!

Speaking of experiments, Brian is now my favourite to win. Under-educated rather than stupid, and with a voice so low and slow it sounds like the electronically disguised intonations of a silhouetted whistleblower in a hard-hitting documentary, Brian’s so inherently sweet-natured he’s impossible to fully dislike, even if you strain your hate cells.