The Hell of It All (5 page)

Yet despite this – despite NO ONE GIVING A SHIT – Cowell said, ‘What you see is what happened. We don’t try to censor this show. I’ve always said we will allow viewers to look through the keyhole and that’s what we do. It’s raw and we don’t censor. It’s not a sanitised, make-believe show.’

I had no idea
The X Factor
was part of the Dogme 95 movement, but there you go. Since it’s year zero for authenticity, I look forward to watching the following sequences over the coming weeks:

1. The scene where the producers ‘pre-audition’ the hopefuls, filtering out the merely ‘average’ ones and selecting the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ones to be seen by the celebrity judging panel.

2. One of those post-audition sequences in which a singer is shown returning to their proletarian workplace, where their colleagues are nervously lined up ‘awaiting the news’, except instead of shouting ‘I got through!’ and everyone running in to give them a hug, they mumble ‘I failed’ and everyone weeps and wails and rubs it in their face with dismay.

3. Currently, only the good singers are allowed to have tragic back stories. I’m waiting to see one of the comically ugly or dreadful singers recount a heart-rending tale about how their dad died, or their best friend died, or they got leukaemia of the voice and barely pulled through, before walking into the audition room to be humiliated by the sniggering judges. The show must have amassed a staggering archive containing hour upon hour of boss-eyed fatsos with voices
like harpooned gnus blubbering into camera about how they’re entering
The X Factor
in honour of a dead relative – none of which makes it into the edit because it doesn’t suit the ‘story’.

Well, come on. Apparently this isn’t a ‘sanitised, make-believe show’. So let’s see it. Cough up.

It’s an ongoing, fast-moving story, and events may have drastically changed between the time of writing (Tuesday morning) and the time you read this (Now O’Clock), but nevertheless, I’ve got to discuss the rolling news coverage of the Madeleine McCann case, because I’ve scarcely seen anything else.

Here is a story that’s been granted saturation coverage throughout the slow ‘silly season’ despite, for most of that time, a lack of any concrete developments. For the news channels, it’s perfect: an emotive, unfolding, open-ended human interest drama with regular interest ‘spikes’ each time a celebrity endorses the search campaign or a suspect is named. The news-slingers thrive on these spikes, like junkies clawing at crack rocks.

When Robert Murat popped up, Sky News could scarcely contain their glee. Breaking news! Breaking, breaking news! Here’s video of the man police are talking to. That’s him on the right. Here’s one of his former schoolfriends. Here’s his villa, live from the Sky Copter. Martin Brunt is on the scene. Martin Brunt is on the scene. Martin Brunt is on the scene.

When that trail cooled off, the coverage degraded into mawkish reports marking ‘one more day’ and occasional shrieks accompanying false sightings. And then, last weekend, the McCanns became suspects and things went totally insane.

We were treated to hours of live coverage of a police station door. On BBC
News 24
, reporter Jane Hill stood amongst the throng, expressing her amazement at the size of the crowd gathered there, who seemed to have come merely to catch a glimpse of the McCanns. She described how uncomfortable it all was, as though she wasn’t there merely to catch a glimpse herself; as though we
weren’t tuning in merely to catch a glimpse of her glimpsing it. On Sky News, Ian Woods was doing the same thing. Look at all these locals, they kept saying. They’ve come to stand and stare. Look at them looking at this door. Now keep looking at it.

And then they split the screen in two while the newsreader back in London spoke to someone else in the studio, leaving one half of the screen streaming live footage of the door, so our view of it went uninterrupted; so we wouldn’t miss a nanosecond of door-opening action if and when it occurred. Unlike the backward, ghoulish crowds, we sophisticates could sit on our comfy sofas eating peanuts, looking at the door on our plasma screens.

On Sunday the McCanns headed home. We saw live footage of them leaving the villa. Live footage of the drive to the airport. Live footage of anchors standing outside the airport interviewing their own correspondents about the drive to the airport. You could watch a motorbike drive behind Jane Hill on
News 24
, then flip over to Sky in time to see it pass behind Kay Burley. Sky’s Ian Woods was booked to fly on the McCann’s plane; he conducted interviews with fellow passengers inside the airport. What do you think? And what do you think? Kay Burley spoke to him live on the phone as he described the seating layout prior to take off.

During the flight itself, Adam Boulton’s Sunday morning show was also split in two; one half streaming live footage of the McCann’s home in Rothley, where nothing was happening because they were still several hours away, sitting in the sky, with Sky sitting behind them. It was like an episode of 24 in which all the action was paused. Yet you can’t look away. It’s live. It’s hypnotic. Something might happen. Here is the airport. Here is the house. Here is a relative. Here is looped footage of the car journey. Here is the view from the chopper. Here is East Midlands airport. Here is the news.

At the scene of accidents, Police traditionally wave back rubberneckers by saying ‘move along now, there’s nothing to see’. Sorry, officer. Can’t hear you. 24-Hour News Entertainment has wedged its fingers in our ears. And it’s going ‘nyahhh nyahhh nyahhh’ so loudly it’s completely drowned you out.

I had a rat once. Not as a pet, you understand – I’m not that cool and alternative and lawless and hard – but as an invader. I was living in a shared house near Clapham Junction, and one day my flat-mate heard a noise coming from a kitchen drawer, pulled it open and got rat in his face. It had been nesting there for some time; it was the drawer where all of our overdue bills were kept, and it had gnawed these up into tiny strips of bedding.

Anyway, we cornered said rat in the bathroom, shutting the door so it couldn’t get out, and pondered our next move. We tried chasing it out with a broom – but that didn’t work because every time we opened the door it leapt into a small hole in the wall behind the sink. Instead, a lengthy face-off began. I’d heard that poison is a bad idea, as you end up with a decomposing rat under your floorboards, and the subsequent reek can spoil the mood if you’re trying to get off with someone, so instead we went to the local pound shop and bought some rat traps, slid them gingerly into the bathroom and waited. And waited. And finally, after 24 hours, we heard death arrive with a loud SNAP.

Except it wasn’t death. The trap had simply torn one of the rat’s ears off. A trail of ratty blood led from the trap to the hole. I felt sad and sick and mournful, but re-set the trap with a sense of duty – the next snap would surely finish the poor thing off. This was now a mercy killing. Another day passed, and then SNAP.

This time it had lost part of its face. More blood, but still no body. Clearly, this wasn’t a rat trap. It was a rat whittling machine. We were inadvertently subjecting the rat to the sort of torture you’d see in one of the
Saw
movies. That’s what you get for using pound shops. Unable to bear the guilt, I went out and bought a deluxe top-of-the-range trap called something like RatFuck 2000. It looked like it could slaughter a bear.

Instead it ripped its tail off. I quivered with shame; shouted apologies down the hole, like a concentration camp guard appalled by his own actions. There was no option now but to repeat the process of tearfully setting and re-setting the trap, until finally, on
the third day, Mr Rat went to heaven. He was huge and probably deserved a decent burial, but we didn’t know what to do with him so instead we wrapped him in a carrier bag and, in the dead of night, threw him in a bin across the road, feeling like Dennis Nielsen.

All of which is an overlong and indulgent introduction to what will now be a brief review of
Help Me Anthea, I’m Infested!
, a bizarre little show in which Turner teams up with a cheery/chubby exterminator and sets about ridding folk’s houses of rats, fleas, ants, cockroaches, lice and probably wolves. Normally I’d watch this sort of thing with one side of my face sneering and the other chortling. But thanks to my harrowing rat experience, I found it uncharacteristically hypnotic. Despite her image as a kind of walking, talking doily, Anthea turns out to be a hard, judgemental piece of work who spends most of her time haranguing the human inhabitants for living in filth. The end result is a strange psychodrama in which the punters are caught between unfeeling vermin on one side, and an unfeeling former Blue Peter presenter on the other. And in the background, millions of insects being turned into corpses by the exterminator. There’s shrieking and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and then, finally, salvation. In the first show, a woman whose flat had been cleared of an ant infestation described it as a ‘lifechanging experience’.

It’s empowerment through genocide, essentially. Yes. Empowerment through genocide. Great name for a band. Odd concept for a series.

‘They walk and they don’t smile. I wonder where this lifestyle is taking them.’ As succinct a summary of commuters as you’ll find, and it comes from a Tanna tribesman crossing Waterloo Bridge, walking against the flow of grim-faced drones scurrying toward another day pulling metaphorical levers in the office.

It’s an encounter which pretty much sums up
Meet The Natives
, Channel 4’s quirky anthropology in reverse show in which the
aforementioned Chief Yapa and four of his buddies (Albi, Posen, Joel and JJ) visit Britain to mingle with some tribes of our own – the working class, the middle class and the upper class.

In these wearying, we’re-so-good-at-telly times, I’d assumed
Meet The Natives
was going to be a fairly hateful laugh-and-point sniggerfest in which a bunch of hilarious primitives were manipulated by producers into making arsing great tits of themselves. And I wasn’t alone. Before it had even aired, an article for the website of this newspaper sniffily described it as ‘part of TV’s new cultural voyeurism’, which made it sound a bit like
Big Brother
in grass skirts. But in practice, it’s far more charming. Downright heartwarming in fact. That’s a phrase I don’t get to type very often. Mainly because I don’t know what it means. I don’t have a heart. I have an unbeating onyx cricket ball. And stone-cold marble eyes. And a brain woven from tangled wisps of cynicism. I’m a miserable robot. Pity me.

Anyway, there are a few suspiciously manufactured moments – we see the gang enthusiastically trying on suits in a branch of Asda, for instance – but on the whole, whenever there’s a joke, we’re the butt of it. The tribesmen aren’t portrayed as naive simpletons or noble savages, but regular people from a different background – thanks mainly to the savvy decision to give them their own cameras and provide their own narration. In this way, we see our world through their eyes – or at least feel like we do. It’s one of the strangest, most fascinating examinations of our own culture I’ve seen in years.

This week, they’re hanging with the upper classes, which involves witnessing a fox hunt (which they dismiss as ‘crazy’), swilling champagne and staying at Chillingham Castle as guests of the impossibly posh Lord Humphrey. This perked the interest of my hate cells, because the upper classes always come across as uniquely hateful on TV. I borrowed a loudhailer and prepared to scream at the box. But no. Wrongfooted again. Humph and co turn out to be so gracious and welcoming and spellbound and non-patronising, you can practically warm your hands on the goodwill pouring off the screen. When the Tanna men crew don traditional
black tie outfits and sit down to dinner it feels less like they’re being dressed up for comic effect, like kittens made to wear top hats for a demeaning poster, and more like they’re gamely sampling some of our cultural quirks first-hand. Because they are. At one point Humph talks them through the ins and outs of ritual cutlery use – starting with the knives and forks on the outside, moving inward as you head for dessert, and they look on in polite fascination, admiring the poshos for ‘living according to the ancient ways of their ancestors, like we do’.

After dinner, they change back into their native dress and perform a ceremonial dance designed to promote ‘peace and unity’, inviting the blue bloods to join in if they want. And they do, laughing and singing. It’s so lovely and life-affirming, you want to crawl in through the aerial socket and hug everyone on screen. There’s another sentence I rarely get to type.

By the time Chief Yapa and co are gleefully frolicking in the snow (which they’ve never seen before), you’ll probably be watching them through a haze of joyful tears. If TV manages to broadcast anything as simultaneously thought-provoking and charming this year, I’ll be dumbstruck. And I’ll probably have to switch the set off for good. I tune in to hate, dammit. Stop being so nice.

I’ve got nothing against well-educated people, but it’s hard to behave naturally in their presence. Often, when I’m talking to someone terribly clever, I find I’m concentrating so vehemently on disguising my own ignorance, I can scarcely hear them. My brain’s worried that they’re about to refer to some book I’ve never read, or use terms I don’t understand, and I’m going to have to go into ‘nodding mode’, because the alternative – screwing up my face and going ‘buh?’ like a farmyard animal – is too humiliating to contemplate.

None the less, I’m going to attempt something foolhardy here, by taking a little public journey into the depths of my own stupidity. I’m going to list every fact about King Henry VIII I can think of, off
the top of my head, without resorting to Wikipedia. Ready? Let’s go. Um. Henry the Eighth was a fat Tudor king with a beard. He composed ‘Greensleeves’. He had six wives: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, er, Lady Jane Something (?), another one called Anne (I think), one called Catherine, and another one. He was either involved in the Wars of the Roses or he wasn’t, and he reigned from 15-something to 15-something-else.