The Hell of It All (6 page)

That’s about it. History isn’t my strong point. Try me on theme tunes. Anyway, as you can see, I’m hardly qualified to point at
The
Tudors
and chortle derisively about how inaccurate it is, which is a pity because everyone else seems to be doing it. The other day I heard someone snorting that they couldn’t take any of it seriously because they’d amalgamated two of Henry’s sisters into one single character. Well whoopee-doo! I didn’t know he had ONE sister, let alone a pair of them.

This probably makes the whole thing easier to watch. Historians are doubtless chewing their fists with frustration every time they spot an anachronistic shoe buckle, whereas from my perspective, they could lob in a scene where Henry invents the gramophone or has a holiday in Jamaica or plays Trivial Pursuit with Lloyd George – in fact, virtually anything – and I’d take it at face value.

Even I, however, am unconvinced by a few things. For starters, Henry appears to be using some sort of hair gel. And he looks distractingly like Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in
A Clockwork Orange
, to the point where, in my head, the whole thing has become a bizarre medieval spin-off from the motion picture.

The similarities are legion: Henry, like Alex, is a spoilt, selfish brat who enjoys ultra-violence and plenty of the old in-out, in-out. He’s moody, prone to boredrom, and has a hair-trigger temper. And he’s surrounded by a small coterie of droogs (one of whom appears to be played by Chris Martin from Coldplay, so with any luck he’ll get his head lopped off at some point in the next few weeks). The only thing that’s missing is the spacey Moog soundtrack. Maybe next week Henry will invent the synthesiser and perform an impromptu space jam. I probably wouldn’t notice anything wrong.

Unlike Alex, however, Henry doesn’t have a sense of humour. Or
much charisma. In fact, he’s wholly unlikable. All he does is strop around like he owns the place (which, to be fair, he does), scowling at underlings and screwing anything that moves. In short, he’s a massive arsehole, and as such it’s impossible to care about him.

In last night’s episode he discovered he’d fathered an illegitimate child, and was so overjoyed to have finally proven his spunk worked well enough to produce male offspring, he rode around on a horse bellowing ‘I have a son, God! I have a son!’ at the sky.

This may or may not be historically accurate, but it definitely makes him a twat. Not a fascinating villain, or even just a flawed human being, but a twat. I’m giving him two more episodes to show some redeeming qualities. Or even just mildly interesting ones. And if he can’t manage that, he can sod off back to Tudor-land. Or wherever it was King Henry came from.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Taste buds for one. As I write, I’m suffering from a heavy cold; in fact, I’m having to pause SHNORRFF every few moments to SHLORRRP blow my SSCCCHHHPORFFFF nose.

I don’t know why I typed those sound effects in; sympathy probably. This stinking virus has turned my taste receptors down to a barely functioning minimum, to the point where everything I eat tastes of chewy oxygen and not much else. You could grind a dog’s head and a shoe together into a paste and spoon-feed it to me, and I’d probably think it was chicken liver pâté, provided I kept my eyes closed, and provided you plucked all the dog hair out beforehand, and provided you’d managed to find a pestle and mortar big enough to mash it all up in, and provided – look, it wouldn’t be worth it. I’m just saying I can’t taste anything. There’s no need to get carried away. What’s the matter with you? You’re an idiot.

Still, in my current taste-budless state, I’m probably ideally equipped to look at
Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection
; I’ll never get to taste any of the things he cooks in the series anyway, so I’m not missing out. Each week, Heston, who really ought to buy
a new pair of glasses because the ones he has are completely the wrong shape for his face, and the lenses are so thick his eyes resemble a pair of olives hovering somewhere behind his head, possibly in another dimension, and it all makes him look a bit like a mad German doctor performing experiments in a horror movie … each week, Heston takes a classic dish (chicken tikka masala last week; hamburgers this week) and decides to create the ‘perfect’ version of it. Which involves travelling round the world to try out all the existing variations, then returning home to recreate it under laboratory conditions.

For the uninitiated, Heston’s a renowned chef who specialises in ker-azy scientific cooking. He’s best known for serving things like snail porridge and egg-and-bacon ice cream. He could probably make you a cloud sandwich if you asked. Or a blancmange made of numbers. He can do anything, basically. Which leads me to my first complaint about this programme: instead of
Heston Blumenthal: In
Search of Perfection
, they should’ve called it Mister Impossible’s Smartarse Kitchen. As titles go, it’d be both more interesting and more accurate.

Not that I’m saying the show’s rubbish, no. It’s quite interesting, especially if you like watching a man peering at food, and picking at food, and massaging and injecting food, and putting food in a centrifuge. This week Mister Impossible is creating the perfect burger, so he starts by studying the molecular structure of meat. We see lots of CGI recreations of the tissue structure as he explains how the way in which the beef is cut affects its texture. It’s all a bit CSI: Dewhurst’s.

Eventually he chooses three different cuts of beef and blends them together. Then he spends about 10 years perfecting a homemade bun. And another 10 years creating his own slices of processed cheese. He even makes his own ketchup. And then, just before he slaps the whole lot together and shoves it down his cake-hole, he picks up a bottle of common-or-garden supermarket mustard and squirts it all over the bun, which seems a bit rash after all the trouble he’s gone to.

The end result looks suspiciously like a Burger King Whopper,
albeit at 50 times the cost. It probably tastes 50 times better too, but I’d be astonished if a single viewer follows the recipe to the letter. Building your own nuclear warhead would be simpler, and once you’d made it you could terrorise millions into cooking you as many burgers as you wanted, home-made cheese slices and all.

Still, it’s fun to watch Mister Impossible doing his experiments. It’s nice to know he’s out there, even if you’ll never taste the results. It’s a pointless job, but somebody’s got to do it.

What time is it? Time to swivel our eyes in the direction of the computerised
X Factor
mothership, which has entered stage three – live singathon mode – and is currently hovering over the Saturday night schedules like a brooding cloud; not so much entertaining the nation as inflicting itself on the populace. And either it’s my imagination, or this year’s collection of hopefuls are the feeblest in the show’s history. Last week’s live show lasted eight hours and felt like a tour of a black museum.

Now, obviously these programmes rely on a strange collective hallucination taking place, a nationwide mind-shift which makes substandard performances seem acceptable because they’re part of some important cultural ‘event’ – how else do you explain the almighty success of
Britain’s Got Talent
, in which a man whose act consisted of a puppet monkey waggling its backside made it through to the final – but I can’t imagine the illusion’s going to sustain itself this time round. I fear somewhere around week three, the public’s going to suddenly blink and rub their eyes and splutter, ‘but … but this is RUBBISH’ as one. And then they’ll start questioning everything, and before you know it we’ve got an uprising on our hands. The producers are going to have to start embedding subliminal hypnotic swirls on the screen if this country’s going to survive until Christmas.

It doesn’t help that there are more categories for processing than ever this year. The Girls (14–24) are unremarkable, as are the over-25s and the groups (although creepy brother-sister duo Same
Difference, two smiling pod people who look like they’re about to hand you a religious pamphlet, warrant a mention for sheer shudder value alone).

The Boys (14–24) consist of Andy, Leon and Rhydian, only one of whom stands out. Both Andy and Leon look meek and terrified, like small boys at a circus trying to hide behind their mum’s legs whenever the clown comes near. Consequently, Andy invested his performance with all the surging emotion of a graphic designer selecting a typeface from a drop-down window, whereas Leon, lumbered with an appalling big-band arrangement of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ which sounded like a musical approximation of the hiccups played by an avant garde jazz outfit on a violently yawing ship, looked downright apologetic. There was deep confusion in those tiny eyes: confusion and pleading; the precise look of a human guinea pig who, while dosed beyond reason during a secret military LSD experiment, has just been handed a colouring-in book by one of the overseers and commanded to fill in the blanks with an imaginary pen.

Rhydian, however, is a star, and quite the most bizarre Saturday night spectacle in years. Prior to the live show he’d already wound the nation up by spouting egomaniacal bilge in his VT segments – although it’s worth bearing in mind that he may have been the victim of a standard telly trick, whereby you switch the camera on and ask someone a question like ‘would you like to be bigger than Michael Jackson?’ and they say ‘yes’, and you say ‘sorry, could you say that again, but this time phrase it as a complete sentence?’, and they say ‘I’d like to be bigger than Michael Jackson’, and you isolate that soundbite and edit it into a sequence designed to make them look like the most deluded self-important twat in the universe.

Anyway. Rhydian. Styled and dressed precisely like a gay Terminator (or, if you’re a nerd, Paul Phoenix from
Tekken
), he stomped around the stage howling notes like a terrifying robotic early warning system created by a lunatic. It’s the sort of act you imagine is massively popular in Eastern Europe, or onboard intergalactic cruisers in the year 3400, shortly before they crash into the sun. Or in perverts’ heads while they slice up their victims. Rhydian’s a tit,
obviously, but he’s also the only entertaining act in the entire show. For God’s sake let him win.

– Rhydian didn’t win. Leon won, and disappeared
.

‘Three centuries ago the great English scientist Sir Isaac Newton wrote, “I seem to have been like a boy playing on the seashore whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.” Today once again we are like children playing on the seashore but the ocean of truth is no longer undiscovered … we have unlocked the secrets of matter, the atom; we have unlocked the molecule of life, DNA; and we have created a form of artificial intelligence, the computer … we are making the transition from the age of scientific discovery to the age of scientific mastery.’

So begins
Visions of the Future
, a series in which theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku squints into tomorrow and describes what it looks like, accompanied by plinky-plonky popular science music and the occasional burst of portentous strings.

It must be nerve-racking making a ‘things to come’ show like this, because (a) it’s hard enough to predict tomorrow’s weather, let alone what kind of tinfoil hat you’ll be wearing in 2029, and (b) the archives are cluttered with inadvertently funny ‘ooh, look at the future’ shows from yesteryear which got it hilariously wrong, proudly depicting the family of tomorrow enjoying picnics on the moon and having their bums wiped by kindly pipe-smoking robots with twirling antennae on their boxy metal heads.

In fact, it seems safest to limit your predictions to the assertion that your film about predictions will end up being used in a future documentary series as ironic archive footage illustrating how wrong past predictions used to be – especially if you depicted said future documentary being broadcast in 4D on a magic floating screen in an automated Mars penthouse.

Anyway, Dr Kaku isn’t fazed by any of that. He steams straight in. Programme one concerns computers and artificial intelligence,
and before long he’s confidently claiming that within our lifetimes we’ll be fitted with brain-enhancing microchips, which means every morning you’ll see the Microsoft Windows start-up screen in your head while you’re brushing your teeth, and instead of whistling in the shower you’ll download a ringtone and play it in full Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound through a ring of tiny speakers embedded in your neck. And instead of having a poo, you’ll select a folder marked Stomach Contents and drag it to the Excretion Bin.

Actually, he doesn’t quite go as far as that. But that’s definitely what’s going to happen.

Kaku’s essentially an optimist, which means the show makes a nice change from the usual bleak futurologist’s warnings about how we’ll all be scrabbling around an irradiated wasteland desperately sucking the marrow from polar bear skeletons to survive. Nonetheless, there are a few hairy moments. Things get alarming when he nonchalantly describes how robots will soon be out-braining humans and experiencing emotions. A few talking-head interviewees earnestly discuss the prospect of our new metal chums losing their rags and using us as squishy, screaming batteries, just like they did in
The Matrix
. Kaku’s personal take on the potential Rise of the Machines is characteristically upbeat: he reckons we’ll still be able to control their thirst for vengeance, presumably by ticking the ‘Benevolent Mode’ option on a drop-down menu before they bludgeon us to death.

I’m not so confident. I think the revolution started several months ago, except rather than physically oppressing us with lasers and giant metal fists, the machines are slowly driving us mad by crashing every 10 minutes, forcing us to install drivers at whim, and limiting our power to communicate to typing a humorous one-line ‘status update’ into Facebook. We’re at their beck and call already.