The Hell of It All (40 page)

Next week, I’ll probably dislike another candidate more. But right now? It’s Philip, Philip, Philip all the way to the Shit Shop and back.

Extreme Male Beauty
is the title it says here on the preview DVD, so naturally I assumed it was a documentary about me. I am terrifyingly beautiful. People often scream and hurl themselves under passing trucks the moment they spot my physical splendour gliding towards them. Embittered naysayers may claim my face resembles a damp curtain billowing in the squall of a bison fart, but these people have neither eyes nor souls. Let’s be honest. I make David Beckham look like a sockful of piss.

But some men, it seems, don’t share my obvious psychological confidence. Men like radio DJ Tim Shaw, who presents this show. He spends half the intro detailing what an average schmoe he is – indolent, a bit flabby, probably flatulent – and generally projects such a familiar everyday air you’ll probably think you’ve met him at some point or another, as though he’s thingummy’s boyfriend you met a few years back at that barbecue thing for Sarah’s birthday. Any sense of mutual acquaintance is dashed, however, when it gets to the bit of the show where he shows you his pale, gingery penis. Especially because his penis isn’t just hanging there like a crippled finger, but being stretched by some kind of metallic device, like it’s had a fight with an articulated corkscrew and lost. And you never saw that at the barbecue, did you?

The point of the programme, apparently, is to ‘explore’ the increasingly demented body-image issues afflicting British men. Men have completely lost their minds in recent years, buying hair
straighteners and eyeliner and stupid bloody clothes in their millions in a concerted bid to craft themselves into a cross between a Manga character and a
Big Brother
contestant. Walk down any high street these days and it’s like passing through the Valley of the Preening Wusses. While women have an impressive variety of ‘looks’, from Girls Aloud to 1940s vamp, fashionable men only seem to have one: vain prick. Why would anyone want to dress like these see-yoo-enn-tees? This is life, not an audition for
Hollyoaks
.

Anyway, for a show investigating insecurity, this seems ironically insecure itself, throwing about 10 million familiar ‘format points’ at it in the hope one will stick. So as well as an ‘authored documentary’ strand in which Shaw hits the gym to see if he can get rid of his ‘man boobs’, we also get a makeover section in which a bloke from Doncaster is transformed by three ‘professionals’ – a surgeon, a dentist and a stylist – who’ve allowed themselves to be filmed in a wanky, swaggering manner guaranteed to make 99% of the audience despise them. On their watch, Mr Doncaster gets sliced up, drilled and tailored until he emerges looking like the sort of man who might host a late-night shopping show demonstrating portable MP3 speakers. And apparently that’s a victory.

On top of that, we’re given a ‘talent show’ in which prospective male models compete for the chance to be an anonymous torso on the cover of
Men’s Health
(a magazine which might as well call itself Abdominal Grail). This section provides the perfect excuse to whip out yet another essential TV staple: the judging panel. But disappointingly for all concerned there’s very little to judge. Just buff blokes taking their shirts off. No crazy blobbos turn up demanding to be seen, waddling into the room with their bellies jiggling around while the producers dub comedy trombone music over it or anything like that.

Then we get some earnest chat about steroid abuse, some footage of Tim Shaw puffing away with a chest expander, a recap on Doncaster Boy, a glimpse of Shaw’s dick, and that’s it. It’s like 10 slightly different shows on the same subject jostling for space in a waiting room. Oh, and male viewers? Unless you’re sitting on an exercise bike at the time, do bear in mind that while you’re
slumped on the sofa watching this, you’ll grow slightly fatter, slightly older, and slightly less attractive than you already aren’t. Take my advice: give up.

In 1983, if you wanted to play a videogame, you had to wait five minutes while your Sinclair ZX Spectrum loaded it from a tape. The game would consist of you guiding a crudely animated car mechanic across three screens of irritating peril, collecting magenta spanners and listening to beepy sound effects. You’d die every four seconds, couldn’t save your position, and when you got to the end your reward was a stark caption reading ‘Well Done’, followed by the game starting all over again, except slightly faster.

Eighties games weren’t fun at all. But TV wasn’t much better. In 1983 the original series of
Knight Rider
hit British TV screens. It was a show about a coiffured berk in a talking car, and it was awful. David Hasselhoff was the berk; the talking car was a Trans Am called ‘KITT’. It’s fondly remembered today thanks to its cool theme tune and amusingly portentous title sequence, in which a bowel-straining voiceover told us we were about to witness ‘a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist’ (presumably because being honest and saying, ‘Here’s a load of made-up shit about a tit in a car which might help you pass another hour before death,’ didn’t play as well with the focus groups).

Knight Rider
was cancelled in 1986, but TV execs just couldn’t let that brilliant berk-in-a-car concept die. In 1991, it returned as a TV movie called
Knight Rider 2000
, which was basically
Knight Rider
in the future (or rather the past, given our current vantage point), in which KITT came equipped with a built-in fax machine. In 1994, they tried again with
Knight Rider 2010
, a sort of Mad Max debacle: it didn’t feature KITT or David Hasselhoff at all. 1997 saw the arrival of
Team Knight Rider
: basically Power Rangers on wheels. Died after one season.

For years, things were quiet on the
Knight Rider
front. Now it’s back, in a vanilla ‘reboot’ – i.e. no ‘future’ nonsense, just the adventures
of a new berk (Michael’s son) and his talking car. Of course while the show was off-air, thanks to the invention of Sat-Nav, everyone got talking cars in real life, so the 2009 incarnation of KITT has to try extra-hard to impress. It’s solar-powered, it can morph into different types of car to confuse the baddies, and it’s got an internet connection.

I’d call the new KITT an iPhone with an exhaust pipe, except if it really was like an iPhone then instead of fighting crime, its owner would spend the entire duration of each episode endlessly droning on and on about how brilliant KITT was, and how he can’t believe you haven’t bought one yourself yet, and every time he passed another KITT driver, they’d feel compelled to pull over and sit there Twittering each other about the latest astounding downloadable KITT ‘apps’, like the one that makes a shoe appear on the screen, then you tilt it and the shoe rocks around a bit and plays the Star Wars theme, and it’s amazing really, the things it can do. Actually, you know what I’d watch? A series about a maniac who drives around singling out iPhone owners, slapping their stupid toys out of their hands and stamping on them. That’s the first three minutes of each episode; the remaining 57 consist of an unflinching closeup of said iPhone owner’s sorrowful face as they scoop all the bits of shattered iPhone off the pavement, clutch it to their bosom, and stagger down the pavement, weeping and lost and alone, unsure whether to carry the remains to the nearest A&E department or drop them in a bin and buy a new one.

Anyway: the new
Knight Rider
is mindless but almost watchable, just like the old
Knight Rider
. Games are infinitely more rewarding than they were in 1983, however. Therefore this series will fail. Its target demographic is busy elsewhere: on Xbox Live, watching blockbusters on their PSPs, playing lightsabers with their iPhones etc.

Knight Rider
2009 could’ve been a fantastic driving/RPG hybrid videogame. Instead it’s a televised quack-fart. Let’s use progress properly, people.

Something’s niggling me about the current run of
The Apprentice
, and it’s this: what with this being the fifth series, my notion of what constitutes unacceptable humiliation for the candidates has become skewed beyond measure. The tasks, ostensibly designed to be a measure of their business skills, are really just exercises in making them look stupid – given a day to create a complete rebranding of the seaside resort of Margate, for instance, anyone without prior twatty marketing experience is going to flounder spectacularly. So it made them look like tits. But I scarcely noticed, because they look like tits every week.

Similarly, each episode culminates in Sir Alan hurling insults at all and sundry in the boardroom whether they deserve it or not, like a grouchy stand-up pre-emptively heckling his crowd. And I’ve developed an alarming immunity to that too. In fact my ‘bollocking tolerance’ has shot through the roof, to the point where I’ve started to believe that’s how regular conversation between normal human beings should work. Only the other day I told a shopkeeper that the way he’d put the items in my carrier bag was a mess, a shambles, a cock-up so big you could see it from bladdy SPACE, son, and that I was starting to wonder if he was just like one of them balloons with a face drawn on it, an impressive face, yeah, but scratch the surface and there’s nothing behind it, just a leaky inflatable full of blummin’ arse gas, so he’d better watch his step if he wanted to keep my custom.

This situation will never do. If repeated exposure has left me impervious to
The Apprentice
, then
The Apprentice
has to change – to develop new, meaner twists. More humiliating send-offs. In short, it sorely and surely needs to adopt one of the following three brilliant gimmicks.

1. Uniforms for the candidates.
At the moment, they’ve adopted a uniform of their own – sharp suits for the gents, power bitchwear for the ladies, with the dominant colours being black and charcoal grey. I’m assuming the production team stipulate this (although they made a notable exception for Lucinda last year, who dressed
like a mad art teacher with a vision deficiency). Why not force them to wear gaudy bright orange ‘fast-food worker’ overalls, complete with a name badge and a number of stars? Better yet, if you’re one of the final three called into the boardroom, you have to do it next week in your pants.

2. Reject all pretence at testing business skills.
The tasks have zilch to do with actual business acumen; we all worked that out ages ago. So why not just see who’s best at performing some entirely arbitrary chore? Who’s best at writing a children’s bedtime story on a laptop computer while sitting in the tiger enclosure at Chester Zoo? Which candidate can permanently cripple themselves the fastest using only one hand and a dowelling rod? The possibilities are endless, and appalling.

3. Make the boardroom a revolting ordeal.
The boardroom showdowns are tense, but they’re not stomach-churning.
I’m a
Celebrity
powers ahead in the ratings each year precisely because it regularly becomes almost too disgusting to watch.
The Apprentice
has to better this. So each week, when the final trio return for the firing ceremony, Sir Alan should suddenly and flatly demand all three of them rim him.

Yes, rim him. And before they rim him, just to make it more humiliating, they each have to describe, in punishing detail, precisely how they’re going to tackle it, and just how good they’ll be at doing it. The one with the worst technique gets fired. After five minutes of stunned silence, I guarantee they’d set about the task with grim desperation, like poisoned jailbirds frantically licking antidote from a rusted keyhole.

Anyway, there you have it: three sure-fire pathways to ratings gold. If the show doesn’t adopt all three of these measures IMME-DIATELY, then absolutely everyone involved in its production – right down to the lowliest runners – is a whimpering pussy. And that’s the TRUTH, yeah? Yeah!

I’ve never seen
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. Not a single episode. Buffy
fans are appalled by my negligence. ‘You MUST watch it!’ they scream. ‘It takes about two seasons to get going, but then … my God, it’s the best show ever made’.

Two seasons to get going? That’s a commitment of 34 episodes before even its fans think it becomes worthwhile. And there’s a further five seasons after that. Given the fans’ sparkly-eyed evangelism, I don’t doubt for a moment that there’s something of worth there. But I’m not a young man any more. I’m greying. My bones ache. It’s too late for me to embark on a quest of that magnitude. Consequently, Buffy’s been consigned to the growing list of things I’ll never try, like bungee jumping and crystal meth.

Yet I have found time to sit through the first two episodes of
Buffy
creator Joss Whedon’s latest creation,
Dollhouse
(Sci-Fi). And it’s bloody awful. Perhaps it’ll turn into a work of genius in its third season. I won’t know, because I’ll have either given up or died by then.

The premise is interesting: it’s about a young person who has their mind wiped each week and imprinted with the personalities, memories and expertise of a bunch of other people, before being sent on a mission. In other words, it’s like
Joe 90
, except you’re supposed to want to screw the lead character, because the lead character is the improbably gorgeous Eliza Dushku, not a nine-year-old schoolboy marionette.

In week one, Echo (that’s her name) was transformed into an expert in Latin American kidnap negotiations, which meant she donned glasses and wore her hair up in a bun. In week two, she’s an outdoor-sports-enthusiast-and-fuck-buddy, which means she gets to dress a bit like Lara Croft and have sex in a tent. Typing this out, I’ve realised it isn’t
Joe 90
at all. It’s Mr Benn, except you’re supposed to want to screw the lead character, because the lead character is the improbably gorgeous Eliza Dushku, not a two-dimensional paper cutout of a middle-aged businessman.