Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Read online

  Endlessly inventive, subversive and surreal – in a sane world this would be broadcast each night in place of the news. One of the recurring characters is a monkey: Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek could tune in especially to smile at him. For ages.

  Untertainment at its finest [26 August]

  They may be plastic, they may be dull, they may even be managed by Pete Waterman, but ho ho ho, we all love Steps really, don’t we?

  No. And nor will you if you’re reckless enough to watch Steps into Summer (BBC1), a Bank Holiday extravaganza which is less fun than falling over and breaking your jaw on a door frame.

  The show maintains an air of market-town mundanity from beginning to end, and contains several scenes some viewers may find distressing, such as an excruciating montage in which Michael Buerk, John Craven, Handy Andy, Titchmarsh, Dimmock, and countless other dignity-phobic nano-celebs are seen capering about awkwardly in time to Steps’ cover of ‘Tragedy’. Does anyone else find these ‘amusingly’ edited musical interludes almost impossible to withstand? Earlier this year, the obscene sight of Anthony Worrall Thompson miming to ‘Ooh La La’ by the Wiseguys in a Food and Drink trailer made me want to sew my eyes shut with fishing wire; this new Steps poptrocity makes me want to saw my own head open and scrape the memories out with a spoon.

  The group’s sterile song-and-dance numbers are punctuated by a series of mesmerisingly lame sketches, each revolving around an awkward cameo from a celebrity guest. The stars in question include Les Dennis, Melinda Messenger and Noddy Holder – presumably more popular and up-to-date acts would have appeared, but Louise Woodward and Kelly Monteith weren’t available.

  The single amusing moment occurs during the dance routine for ‘Summer of Love’, when all five Steps briefly replicate the frantic double-handed tugging motion of a hardcore porn actress attempting to bring two symmetrically positioned penises to climax on either side of her face, but this probably isn’t intentional and therefore doesn’t count.

  On this evidence, it is no longer ‘OK’ to like Steps, even in a flimsily ironic sense. They’re not harmless fun, they’re slapdash trash. ‘H’ is not a loveable scamp: he’s a blank-eyed glove puppet with half the charisma of a discarded ping-pong bat rotating slowly in a pool of pig-trough rainwater. Steps into Summer represents untertainment at its finest and will be warmly welcomed by anyone who regularly sits in front of the box with a loaded shotgun in their mouth, trying to pluck up the courage.

  Your time would be more gainfully employed watching Terry Jones host a stealthily informative documentary called Gladiators – The Brutal Truth (BBC2) instead. This is proper family entertainment: enough grisly detail to shake the younger viewers up a little, dispensed with intelligence and wit. Better still, they’re showing Spartacus directly afterwards.

  Further decadence looms in One Night Stands (C5), home to a parade of odious braggarts eager to share their casual misogyny and knuckleheaded worldview with thousands of viewers, most of whom will doubtless have switched on Channel Five in the hope of encountering some casual late-night nudity to masturbate to.

  Tough luck to the porn-miners, since the programme features no naked women whatsoever. It does, however, include countless gruesome shots of alco-sodden halfwits baring their buttocks, waggling their tongues, and flashing their flaccid dicks for the camera. It’s about as arousing as a fart in a birdcage and will make you want to cry for hours.

  Much of the action centres around a duo named Simon and Lawton, both of whom claim to have enjoyed literally hundreds of one-night stands, apparently with girls too drunk to find the prospect of being violated by a gurgling imbecile in any way troubling.

  As a team, they appear unevenly matched. Simon resembles a cross between Jean-Claude Van Damme and the lead singer from the Stereophonics, whereas Lawton has a face like a freeze-frame snap of a frog’s head exploding. The moment they open their mouths, however, all disparities vanish: each is as boring, stupid, and hopelessly self-centred as the other. ‘I always wear a condom, usually,’ drones Ugly Lawton, while Please-Hate-Me Simon brags of bedding Daily Sport models and reveals his preferred method of dumping his one-night girlfriends: mobile-phone text message.

  We follow them on a night out, which involves wandering around a gaudy nightclub leering at cadavers. This would be depressing enough, but it’s also interspersed with explicit talking-head testimony from other one-night aficionados, mainly ugly grinning men with appalling views on pretty much every facet of anything you care to think of.

  The programme would be massively improved by the insertion of a protracted final sequence in which each participant is glued to a deckchair and kicked down a stairwell. Forty-seven million times.

  The Justice League of America [2 September]

  Christopher Timothy misses the good old days when he stood in damp fields with half his arm up a cow beneath the gaze of millions, according to Starstruck: Holding On (C4), which examines how celebrities cope once their star has faded.

  The former All Creatures Great and Small star is shown visiting a fête to plant a tree in front of a desultory gathering of locals, many of them kids who clearly don’t know who he is and would have been far more impressed by an appearance from any one of the following: 1) Jeremy Spake; 2) the angry money-throwing man from the Direct Line home insurance commercial; 3) a bit of old inner tube dangling off a stick; 4) a hen; 5) nothing and no one.

  Timothy’s lot looks sad and humiliating, but at least he hasn’t been reduced to earning a crust as a QVC stallholder or comically manipulating his scrotal sac for small coins inside a dockside bunco booth. Still, there’s hope.

  He says he misses his television appearances, and yearns to return and play a villain: not just a minor baddie, but a major bastard, ‘a real piece of work’. He should write to the producers of Manhunter (Sky One) a true-crime reconstruction show that’s unpalatably wrong in every respect – and therefore totally mesmerising.

  A sort of ‘Best of …’ companion show to America’s Most Wanted, Manhunter is hosted by a terrifying thing apparently called Jaaaahrn Walsh. Jaaaahrn’s delivery lurks halfway between John Wayne and an animatronic theme-park dummy employed to entertain queuefuls of impatient visitors by wailing outside the ghost train. He shouts, overemphasises every other word, and punctuates his speech with so many ridiculous hand gestures he’ll have his own eye out if he’s not careful. He also has a plastic head, hair like a futuristic combat helmet and was probably spawned in a microwaveable Petri dish by the Justice League of America.

  The title sequence forms perhaps the most jaw-dropping introduction to any programme ever. To the toe-snappin’ sound of howling power rock, Jaaaaarrhn bellows that we’re about to see case histories involving ‘fugitives without compassion’ over reconstructed footage of a wild-eyed madman blowing up a car. Then we see a flicker-book cascade of real-life mugshots. And then …

  And then, suddenly, a photographic montage of a young, smiling boy fills the screen. Jaaaarrrhn explains there’s a personal link.

  ‘In 1981 my six-year-old son Adam was abducted and murdered,’ he booms, and your brain does a backflip before you realise that, yes, you really are watching the host of a ruthlessly downmarket crime-tertainment oglefest reduce the death of his own son to a schlocky title sequence interlude. Whoever told him that this was a good idea deserves to be sealed inside a packing crate full of jackals and razor wire and rolled down a hill.

  Next we cut to Jaaaaarrhn striding through a darkened alley billowing with dry ice. ‘I was shattered,’ he yells, almost cracking the lens with a hand flourish. ‘I was mad at the whole world. I was bitter, angry. I didn’t want justice, I wanted revenge.’ And he got it by reinventing himself as a histrionic TV arsehole.

  The show itself opens with Jaaaaaaaaaahrn hollering that ‘drugs are the poison of American society, and its highways are the veins through which that poison is spread’ – a clumsy metaphor that sets the scene for a reconstruction so offensively one-sided it’s like watching
a crime take place in the imagination of a particularly idiotic fascist.

  Two painfully young Mexicans caught smuggling marijuana get pulled by a rookie highway patrolman and find themselves facing a needlessly harsh 25-year sentence. Understandably aggrieved by this, and egged on by a minor felon sharing their police-station cell, they make a desperate bid for freedom using a bit of glass as a makeshift knife. Any sane viewer will be rooting for them.

  The story of their ill-fated escape is told with soullessly slick camerawork, wailing rock guitar and numerable close-ups of them sweatily rolling their eyes around in the manner of a schizophrenic mime artist glaring at a boxful of snakes. One of the escapees evaded capture for months until his case was featured on America’s Most Wanted – at which point he foolishly turned himself in, receiving 48 years in prison for his trouble.

  Sexual Swearwords [30 September]

  You and I did nothing. The police, the government, the army and the navy all failed to intervene. No one lifted a finger, so now that Simon Bates is back we have no one else to blame.

  Yes, frogchops himself is fronting a TV incarnation of his legendary radio sob-story-and-song spot Our Tune (Sky One). It is, of course, entirely hypnotic.

  Confronted with Bates addressing the camera directly, it’s hard to shake the memory of his legendary video-certification announcements, which used to appear at the start of rented movies and generally proved far more disturbing than anything in the film itself, thanks to the palpable crackle of excitement as he mentioned ‘sexual swearwords’.

  Our Tune doesn’t last much longer than those videotaped cautions: it’s a few minutes long, and is sprinkled throughout the Sky One daytime schedule like tragic croutons in a bowl of poo soup, bobbing to the surface on the hour throughout much of the day.

  The format is identical to the radio strand: Bates relates a real-life tale of misfortune sent in by a member of the public with all the sympathetic compassion of an automated voicemail assistant, then plays a tear-jerking request; invariably a gooey ballad rather than anything with a genuinely appropriate lyric, like ‘So Fucking What?’ by the Anti-Nowhere League.

  This being television, the stories benefit from the illustrative pictures: mainly vague visuals, such as a shot of a calendar with an ‘aged film’ filter laid over the top, or if you’re really lucky, snapshots of the luckless subjects themselves.

  The music videos are interrupted every 30 seconds by a large yellow strap informing viewers what they’re watching. Presumably this is an attempt to catch the attention of channel-hoppers who might otherwise assume they’d stumbled across a VH-1 Michael Ball retrospective, but it also detracts from any sentimental value the song might have – it’s like watching sobbing relatives burying a loved one in a coffin with a corporate logo stamped down the side.

  Now, imagine you’re a bored, lonely, loveless male, slumped in front of your television flipping aimlessly through the showshaker tinseldrift of station after station when suddenly you chance upon G-String Divas (C5), a tawdry little fleshburst lurking out there in the schedule, waiting to seize listless channel-hoppers just like you and mesmerise them into corroding their own self-esteem via a sorry act of desultory armchair onanism. Here’s what you’ll see.

  First, Cashmere, a lap-dancer. Then Brett, a pony-tailed yee-haw who pays for regular private sessions in which Cashmere bends down and grinds her hips while he glowers at her silently, like a circus bear staring at a cat on a meathook. Brett is a tragedy in Bud-streaked denim: currently enmeshed in a bitter divorce, he talks of his plans for a ‘long-term relationship’ with Cashmere, despite the fact that a) he’s a drawling overweight truck-hick who looks like the sort of goon you see getting a pool cue smashed across their skull in an especially bad Chuck Norris film, b) she’s engaged and c) he has to keep shoving banknotes into her hand so she’ll talk to him.

  Anyway, that’s the back story. The rest of the programme consists of repetitive close-ups of Cashmere circling her buttocks into the lens as if inviting us to check whether she’s wiped properly. It’s a sorry example of that curious new TV hybrid, the masturmentary: a programme which exists solely to assist masturbation (to the point where it may as well be introduced by a stern-faced drill instructor who blows a whistle and commands everyone watching to commence jerking off immediately) yet is forced to adopt a flimsy documentary guise in order to appease the broadcast authorities – the modern-day equivalent of 1950s nudie flicks sidestepping the censor by masquerading as earnest examinations of naturism.

  The result satisfies no one: self-abusers have their mental-visual playground spoiled by the constant intrusion of fiercely anti-erotic talking-head soundbites from loserboy Brett, while anyone wanting to watch an actual documentary will have seen through the ruse by the third lingering buttock-shot.

  Perhaps C5 should employ Simon Bates to issue a generic warning at the start of shows like this. Something along the lines of: ‘The following shitcast contains no viable content whatsoever.’ Then again, they’d wear the tape out in a fortnight.

  Craig Something [21 October]

  Question: what’s worse than a bland, toothless BBC holiday programme featuring Trude Vets in Practice Mostue? Answer: a bland, toothless BBC holiday programme also featuring Jeremy Spake, which is precisely what you’ll see if for some mad reason you decide to squander half an hour of the only life you’ll ever have on Holiday Insider’s Guide (BBC1).

  It’s presented by a walking vacuum of a man who looks like he’s wandered straight off the set of a Gillette commercial to fill in for a couple of hours before his next assignment: appearing as a semi-naked fireman in a vaguely homoerotic Athena poster. Not sure what his name is: Craig something, and that’s about as much attention as he deserves.

  Yeah, yeah: in real life he’s undoubtedly a really super guy, but on screen he demonstrates all the personality of Microsoft Excel, simpering around delivering trite links with his nice hair and his nice non-threatening blarney-lite patter, so screw him. Why don’t they go the whole hog and hire a doily to front the show instead? They could tie it to a bit of string and dangle it in front of picturesque locations, accompanied by captions and a nice bit of Julian Bream on the soundtrack. Far cheaper, less insulting.

  Anyway. This new incarnation of Holiday purports to offer a true ‘insider’s guide’ to its featured destinations, thanks to the genius ruse of sending a bunch of nano-celebrity no-marks out to cover locations they’re already familiar with, through having lived or worked in them at some point in their lives. Hosting boy Craig Wotsit opens the show with an uninspiring gawp round his home town of Dublin (being an expert on the city, the first thing he does is wander into a tourist information centre).

  Then we get Marie Helvin lording around Hawaii, in perhaps the single least informative travel report ever shot. All we really learn is a) that Marie Helvin likes the landscape, b) that Marie Helvin likes hula dancing, c) that Marie Helvin likes everything else about Hawaii as well. The one decent piece of advice she dishes out is this: bring a riding hat with you if you’re considering an afternoon’s pony trekking. Hands up everyone affected by that piece of essential guidance. Considering the towering wisdom of these experts, it’s surprising none of them manage to pack more information into their reports – there’s little you couldn’t discover by scan-reading two paragraphs of an average travel guide.

  To prove the point, before you can scream ‘This programme is rubbish’, dull blonde vet Trude Mostue bounds onto the screen, to tell us the shops in Oslo are good but expensive, quickly followed by Sean Maguire in the Algarve (who reckons the beaches are nice), and finally, spoiling your view of St Petersburg, woo-hoo! it’s Jeremy Spake – the only man in existence who can sound overly enthusiastic and embarrassingly wooden at the same time.

  During Spake’s piece, repeated cutaways to apparently bemused Russian onlookers watching him camp it up are used in an attempt to underline his loveable quirkiness – instead they appear to be thinking, correctly, that
he’s a bothersome prick.

  Really, what’s the point of this infuriating half-hour wrongcast? While these gurning chimps swan around the world on behalf of your licence fee, you’re sitting at home in front of a box, a motionless black plastic box with a huge glass screen, pissing this sanitised marionette’s pageant into your bloated little eyeballs, while you pork out on Jaffa Cakes, wishing you were dead or at the very least too wounded to see.

  Still, if you binge on too many biscuits, tune in to the disturbing Witness: Living on Light (C4), which examines the idiotic charms of Jamuheen, a deluded Australian woman (a sort of evil, blonde Sian Lloyd) who claims to have mastered the art of existence without food.

  Three people have died trying to follow her ‘21-day process’, which consists of a merciless starvation regime, at the end of which you’re supposedly able to take leave of food for good. The documentary crew visits a group of would-be fasters: the sight of them lying on the floor, barely able to move after four days without food or drink, smiling weakly even as their kidneys start to fail is hands-down the most upsetting image of the week.

  Oh, all right, apart from Jeremy Spake.

  All the Fun of a Slow-Motion Hanging [28 October]

  Confessions: several years ago, I had a brief spell as a TV news ‘expert’; specifically, I was a high-tech pundit, occasionally called upon to pass comment on computer-related current affairs even though my qualifications were shaky, to say the least. I was billed as a ‘technology journalist’, an astoundingly highfalutin way of saying I reviewed video games for a living (which in most people’s eyes is the lowest a man can sink short of playing the role of ‘anguished receiving-end farmhand’ in a bestial-porn movie).