The Hell of It All (43 page)

In fact, in the present climate, with ministers warning that unnecessary panic could harm the NHS more than the flu virus itself, I’ll be downright astonished if the transmission date doesn’t change. It’s grimly fascinating stuff, all in all, with uniformly excellent performances from the cast, but somewhat undermined by a few unnecessary lurches into sensationalism. The first scene depicts an angelic child dropping dead in the street while watching another group of children playing ring-a-ring-o’-roses (the plague song, geddit?). This is soon followed by an absurdly OTT sequence in which a dying man, staggering around as though infected by an alien disease whose chief symptom is gory melodrama, coughs blood and phlegm all over a window in front of a horrified crowd. Before long Dr Niven’s running around trying to convince the doltish, avaricious authorities that there’s a killer on the loose, while the bodies start piling up in earnest. It’s
Jaws
, essentially, but starring an invisible microbe instead of a rubber shark.

Oh, and just to keep you on your toes, each time you find yourself thinking, ‘Yeah, but the 1918 epidemic was far deadlier than ours’, the characters discuss the fact that they’d already had a previous, milder outbreak, that this second wave is far more virulent, and that that’s how plagues always work. At which point they might as well turn directly to camera, rub their hands together and emit a long, slow, maniacal cackle. Viewer discretion is advised.

Good taste is overrated. I ate in a fancy modern Japanese restaurant the other day – like the despicable self-parodying media bastard I am – and the menu was so trendily, minimally written and designed I couldn’t tell where the starters were or how many courses to order, or indeed, whether half of it was actually a ‘menu’ at all. One list of dishes was simply headed ‘news’. Were they edible? I would’ve asked a waiter, but their tasteful uniforms rendered them far too intimidating to question. Instead I ordered at random. My first course resembled a tiny sliced diagram. Again, it was terribly tasteful. So tasteful I felt like shitting in my palms and flinging it around the room while barking like a seal. Hey, it’s a standard panic response. Don’t judge me.

Bad taste is preferable. Eat somewhere where they hand you a wipe-clean laminated menu slathered with gaudy colour photos and you know exactly what you’re getting: something that tastes like it’s been retrieved from a murderer’s basement and reheated in an electronic armpit. Knowing it’ll be bad for you but tucking in regardless – that’s inherently glorious.

Which leads us to
Deadliest Warrior
, an astonishing American ‘theoretical combat simulation’ show that hits our screens this week. Unless you live beside an insane overweight divorcee who regularly shags stray cats to death on his front lawn – and the chances of that are fairly slim – it’s easily the least tasteful thing you’ll see all year.

At heart, it’s a blokey ‘who’s the hardest’ pub debate made flesh. Each week, they take two legendary fighters from history – an Apache and a gladiator in the opening episode – and attempt to work out which is the most effectively violent. Not by, say, interviewing scholars and military historians at punishing length, but by assembling a terrifying arsenal of ancient weapons and getting some ‘combat experts’ to try them out one by one. What this boils down to is almost an hour of footage of unbelievably angry men performing hideous assaults on worryingly realistic human torsos, wired up to a computer that can work out how
loudly a real person would shout ‘ow’ as its jaw flew off.

Throughout the series, everything gets tested, from terrifying slicing weapons that resemble bits of arcane farming machinery, to present-day funnies such as grenades and assault rifles. Ever wanted to find out precisely how much damage a spiked club could do to a man’s face? Here’s your chance. Remember that Martin Scorsese cameo in
Taxi Driver
where he invites Travis Bickle to contemplate the horrors a Magnum (the gun, not the ice cream) could inflict upon ‘a woman’s pussy’?
Deadliest Warrior
could imagine the results and give him a print-out.

But the real fun begins once the arsenal’s been assessed. The Top Trumps data is fed into a computer (running ‘custom-made software’ apparently – Abject Guesswork 4.0, I reckon) and we’re treated to a preposterous live-action ‘reconstruction’ of a theoretical fight between the tough guys; a sort of When Hypotheses Attack. Cue hilariously gory sequences in which Ninjas stab Pirates, William Wallace skewers a Zulu, the Yakuza and the Mafia shoot each other in the knees, and the Taliban take on the IRA.

Yes: the Taliban take on the IRA. In the season finale. Which is better – an Islamic extremist or an Irish republican revolutionary? There’s only one way to find out. Fight!

You’ll have to wait weeks for that, but if you’re a fan of astronomical bad taste, you’ll enjoy it. Especially the bit where they watch footage of real IRA operations and go ‘woah, that’s HARDCORE’. And the bit where they test landmines and nailbombs and flamethrowers. And the bit where the IRA and the Taliban go head-to-head in an American car park for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. It’s one of those pieces of television that defies logic, taste, and decency to such an immense degree, it actually ceases to be offensive and teeters on the brink of inadvertent artistic genius instead. Who’d have thought the spectacle of Western civilisation actively collapsing into madness would be this funny? Ha ha! HA HA HA!

This week, in a break from my traditional self-centred misanthropic festival of whining, here’s an abridged version of the
New Media
Dictionary
: a useful compendium of terms and definitions for the exciting world of modern mass communication.

abbaration
(
abba-rayshun
) n. Inexplicably successful West End musical based on the back catalogue of any once-popular pop act in the vein of
Mamma Mia
; e.g. ‘I see Dancing
On the Ceiling’s
opened at the Lyceum. Think it’s some sort of Lionel Richie abbaration.’

auntiepathy
(
auntee-pathee
) n. Ingrained tabloid hostility towards the BBC.

broverkill
(
bro-
verr-
kill
) n. To be almost, but not quite, as bored of listening to people talk about how they don’t watch
Big Brother
as by the continued existence of the programme itself.

carolemalone
(
carol-
mal-
own
) vb. To viciously pontificate about a celebrity’s perceived character flaws and imagined motivations while grinning like the dung-fed offspring of Peter Cushing and Zelda from
Terrahawks
channelling Kajagoogoo in your nightmarish byline photo; e.g. ‘For God’s sake, Jennifer, take off that fright wig and stop carolemaloning about John Cleese’s divorce, will you? You’re making my soul weep.’

chudge
(
chudj
) n. An underqualified judge on an underwhelming TV talent contest.

commentally ill
(
com-
mental-ly-
ill
) adj. To believe that airing one’s views in either a newspaper column or the Have Your Say section accompanying the online version of said newspaper column is a meaningful activity when compared to, say, spending eternity masturbating alone in a soundproofed cupboard.

craptitude test
(
krap-
ti-
chewed tessed
) n. A televised talent contest with a panel of chudges (
qv
).

crotchdog
(
krotch-dog
) n. Dismal paparazzo whose career consists of lying in the gutter desperately pointing his camera up the skirts of celebrities exiting limousines.

dwindlethink
(
dwin-
dull-
think
) vb. The process by which a
member of the public forms an opinion on a subject of national importance after viewing a plebbledashed (
qv
) news report, then finds themselves passing it on to the nation when stopped in the street for another plebbledashed (
qv
) report the following day.

funography
(
phun-
oh-
grafee
) n. Television programme which gleefully revels in its own hideousness. Also funographic (adj); e.g. ‘Last night’s
I’m a Celebrity
was so funographic I chortled all the shame cells out of my body.’

i-witness
(
eyewitness
) n. Any internet messageboard user quoted in a newspaper article in a bid to pad out a weak story; eg: ‘Leona Lewis fans were furious last night after the star pulled out of a charity gig at the last minute. An i-witness raged: “We’d queued in the rain for hours … Now when I look at my copy of
Spirit
it makes me want to puke.”’

inspector Google
(
inspector googol
) n. Allegedly ‘investigative’ reporter who relies solely on the internet.

life-affirminge
(
life-
affer-
minge
) adj. Descriptive of any TV ‘makeover’ show that purports to boost a participant’s confidence in a positive and inspirational manner by encouraging them to weep and strip completely naked on camera, preferably simultaneously.

mock examination
(
mokk-
eggs-
ammy-
na-
shun
) n. Close-up zoom-lens photograph of vaguely out-of-shape holidaying celebrity accompanied by disdainful copy pouring unwarranted scorn on their physical failings.

mousemob
(
mows-mob
) n. Gathering of indignant reality TV viewers on an internet messageboard hellbent on petitioning Ofcom over some illusory injustice perpetrated by their favourite programme; e.g. ‘Within minutes of Jeremy Edwards being kicked off
Dancing on Ice
there was a 500-strong mousemob screaming “Fix!” on Digital Spy.’

nowtrage
(
nowt-rage
) n. Lame and unconvincing tabloid outrage designed to create a self-perpetuating storm of controversy. Also, nowtrageous (adj); e.g. ‘This Jonathan Ross pensioner sex-joke story in the
News of the World
is embarrassingly nowtrageous.’

phwoared escort
(
fword-
ess-
court
) n. Down-on-her-luck vice girl
unwittingly captured topless on a hidden camera by an undercover tabloid reporter in order to illustrate a prurient article gleefully belittling her desperately unhappy circumstances.

piersonality
(
peers-
on-
allitee
) n. Self-consciously odious celebrity who trades on their own widely accepted repugnance to infuriatingly lucrative effect, thereby creating an unassailable feedback loop of violent loathing in absolutely everyone other than themselves; e.g. Piers Morgan.

plebbledash
(
plebbul-dash
) n. To bulk up a television news report with needless vox-pop soundbites from ill-informed members of the public.

PR-reviewed phindings
(
peeyarr-
rev-
yood-
fyne-
dings
) n. Light-hearted newspaper article based around any risible ‘scientific survey’ produced by a marketing agency to promote a product or service; eg: ‘It’s the BREAST news men have heard in years – Britain’s women are set to evolve BIGGER BOOBS in future, according to scientists at Cardiff’s Wonderbra Institute of Titology.’

printernot
(
pryn-
ter-
knot
) n. Any example of a newspaper’s feeble attempt to appeal to a younger demographic by likening some aspect of itself to the internet, such as re-christening its letters page the ‘Messageboard’.

scoffee break
(
scoff-ee-
brake
) n. Office lunchtime spent sneering pathetically at unflattering snaps of cellulite-peppered thighs in a
Heat
magazine mock examination (
qv
).

twittle-cattle
(
twittul-cattul
) n. Hordes of people patiently queuing up to moo aimlessly at each other in the latest online social networking craze.

zerotoleriddance
(
zero-
toller-
riddantz
) n. The moment the public mood finally and irrevocably turns against a hitherto-justabout-tolerable minor celebrity; eg, ‘We put Danielle Lloyd on the cover and sales nosedived; looks like she’s hit zerotoleriddance.’

What’s that? You think it’s easy filling a page each week with this gibberish? Well, it is. But some weeks aren’t as easy as others. For
one thing, pretty much all I’ve been aware of all week is snow tumbling from the sky, and everyone else has already written about that – and I mean everyone, from Melanie Phillips to the late Roy Kinnear. The only other thing I’ve noticed is some kind of acute muscular spasm in my neck and left shoulder, and that’s hardly entertaining, except maybe for the bit where the doctor rather brilliantly prescribed me diazepam so I necked some and walked very slowly around the Westfield shopping centre listening to Henry Mancini’s
Pink Panther
theme on repeat on an MP3 player, smiling eerily at shoppers.

Anyway, being stumped, I decided to ask the people following me on Twitter for some one-word suggestions as to what to write about. For the two or three of you who don’t already know, Twitter – which has garnered almost as much coverage as the snow in recent weeks – is a monumentally pointless ‘social networking ‘thingamajig that lets you type 140-word ponderings or questions to an audience of other time-wasters.

The high point in Twittering history appears to be an incident last week in which Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift and passed the time by ‘tweeting’ about it in real time. Since Fry has about 100,000 followers on Twitter (other users who sign up so they can read about your every move – like benevolent stalkers, basically), this made his ordeal both more entertaining for him and a harmless diversion for everyone else. Like most meaningless indulgences, it sounds fairly nauseating to anyone who hasn’t given it a go, but once you’ve ‘got it’, there’s something strangely compelling about it. It’s the online equivalent of popping bubble wrap.