Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (13 page)

Not bad. Still beats camping.

New! Tonight! From the makers of
Dawson’s Creek
! It’s
Young Americans
(C5)! And it’s set in prestigious all-male boarding school Rawley Academy – although as far as realism goes, it might as well be set inside a gigantic tin banana slowly orbiting the sun.

Rawley Academy is stuffed with Beautiful Boys with Big Issues to tackle. First up is our leading character, the Dawson of the series: local working-class kid Will Krudski, who’s cheated his way into Rawley in a desperate bid to escape an abusive father. Whilst his dad is clearly a nasty piece of work – we see him snarling in the first 15 seconds – Will closely resembles the sort of freckle-faced scamp you see pulling awestruck expressions on toy packaging, making it hard to believe he’s ever suffered anything worse than an unincluded battery. It’s early days, but already Good Will seems like a prime contender for TV’s Blandest Teen Idol 2001 (although he’ll have to work hard to overtake old forehead-face himself, the legendarily insipid Dawson).

Within 20 minutes of arrival at Rawley, Will’s made himself a new best buddy in the form of chiselled senator’s son Scout Calhoun; the pair quickly bond during a remarkably homoerotic sequence
which sees them wandering lazily through a forest wearing nothing but their boxer shorts, trading innermost secrets like Top Trumps.

As for Scout, he threatens to rival Will in the dullard stakes until he meets a local girl called Bella, who works on the pumps in her daddy’s garage when she really ought to be out doing something more suited to her appearance, such as advertising Timotei. Scout and Bella fall in love with suspicious haste; nervous chit-chat one second, slobbery kisses the next, moon-eyed talk of lifelong commitment three minutes later – until the discovery that they’re actually blood relations hurls a considerable spanner in the works. Expect to spend the next seven episodes being disturbed by the sight of them staring hungrily at one other, like athletes awaiting a starting pistol that never fires.

Actually, they’ll probably be too busy staring into the lake to look at each other: Rawley Academy sits beside a vast expanse of calming water, strategically placed so troubled teenage souls can stand on the shore and gaze meaningfully at the wonder of it all, to the accompaniment of some timid acoustic guitar. Huge though it is, the lake can only really accommodate a maximum of two troubled gazers at any one time; with the amount of angst flying around, finding an available time slot must be a nightmare.

The remaining central characters, blue-eyed Hamilton and the mysterious ‘Jake Pratt’, should probably block-book the shore for a summer of protracted staring now. ‘Jake’, you see, is actually a girl disguising herself as a boy – a flagrant breach of school regulations and narrative authenticity. Having undertaken the challenge of concealing her gender within an all-male boarding school (for reasons beyond normal human understanding), ‘Jake’ makes the small mistake of trying to snog Hamilton almost immediately. Hamilton, who has presumably never seen the episode of
Black
adder
II
in which Edmund fell for ‘Bob’, finds himself reluctantly falling for ‘Jake’, prompting fears he may have turned gay. Within a few weeks they’ll have to fly in a skilled negotiator to sort the mess out. Fortunately, such a negotiator already exists within the academy – infuriating ‘inspirational’ teacher and patriarchal linchpin Finn, who walks and talks like an absolute prick from the moment
he appears. ‘Just call me Finn,’ he says to the assembled boys, ‘no need for the “Mister”.’ Then, to their astonishment, he strolls straight into the lake fully dressed, to prove how unconventional he is. Combining the self-consciously eccentric traits of every ‘inspiring’ character Robin Williams has ever played, coupled with looks that hover somewhere between Harrison Ford, Ralph Fiennes and an understanding lion, Finn is the ultimate TV teacher. ‘Spirit is the thing,’ goes his subliminal message, ‘but it helps to be telegenic, like me.’

Young Americans
looks slick and strangely golden, with the majority of scenes apparently shot on a warm, honey-coloured summer’s evening. The formula is identical to
Dawson’s Creek
: beautiful youngsters vapidly discussing complex problems. Emotionally compelling in the most anodyne way: an agony column crashing headlong into a Wrigley’s commercial. So provocative yet so bland: consequently, the fiercest criticism and the highest praise I can muster is this: ‘’S all right, really.’

Saturday evening, ITV? Not tonight, I’ve got a headache: is it my imagination or is some shadowy group of broadcast engineers applying an invasive audio filter to the entire Saturday prime-time stretch, transforming the mildest audience reaction into a massive discharge of ultra-compressed tinnitus that scrapes limescale from the inner walls of your skull as it blasts through your head?

No? Then perhaps I just need to fix the treble on my television. Last week I was reduced to watching ITV’s Saturday offerings with a makeshift cotton-wool hood pulled tightly over my head. It took a while to pluck eyeholes in the thing, which meant most of
You’ve
Been Framed
was hidden from view and had to be enjoyed in sound only. Still, once you’ve seen one blurry clip of a twirling prole fracturing their spine at a wedding reception, you’ve seen them all.

In fact, with the visuals obscured,
You’ve Been Framed
is much more fun; a simple guessing game in which you attempt to deduce
the nature of the footage from the sound of the audience reaction. An ‘aaahhh’ indicates a kitten poking its head from a wellington boot; an ‘ooohhh’ signifies a man falling off a roof to land headfirst on the patio. Oh, and a high-pitched stilted burbling noise means you’re in the middle of a piece to camera by Lisa Riley, a one-woman audio multi-tasker capable of sounding cheerful, terrified and condescending all at once – like a woman being forced to explain the alphabet to a class of remedial children at gunpoint.

Then: commercial break! Incredibly, the PG Tips chimps are still going, still miming their way through a series of excruciatingly unfunny half-minute exercises in dignity-theft at the behest of a teabag company, despite the fact that half the audience become dewy-eyed with shame at the mere sight of them, and the other half aren’t paying attention and have forgotten these are real monkeys. They should ditch the ropey sitcom conceit and film a miniaturised remake of
Nil By Mouth
instead. That’d wake everyone up, although it might not shift quite as many teabags.

First came
Muppet Babies
. Then
Young Indiana Jones
. Now ITV are pinning their hopes on Reeves and Mortimer Junior, in the form of
Slap Bang with Ant and Dec
, a genuinely uplifting slab of excitable primetime silliness that only the most stonehearted, cod-faced curmudgeon could object to.

Slap Bang
is essentially
Noel’s House Party
minus the beard and the whiff of contempt: a mish-mash of strands and sketches performed with such palpable glee that even their lamest gags (of which there are plenty) are instantly rendered more endearing than embarrassing.

The humour is a curious blend of Whizzer and Chips and Roy Chubby Brown; groansome puns mingle seamlessly with absolutely filthy jokes about semen. The relentless spunk gags presumably dodge the watchdog radar on the basis that younger viewers won’t understand them – although were the duo to deliver a 15-minute lecture on ejaculation, using explicit biological terminology and a series of close-up diagrams, the toddlers wouldn’t get that either. Somehow – somehow – they get away with it. To watch
Slap Bang
as an adult is to be reminded how it felt to watch TV as a starry-
eyed seven-year-old: quite an achievement. Still too sodding loud, though.

Then: commercial break! Jamie Oliver and a gaggle of Nathans lad their way through yet another strangely bleached Sainsbury’s ad. Suddenly the PG chimps don’t seem so bad (and they probably took less time to train).

Then:
Stars In Their Eyes
, with its songs and anxiety and garish, cavernous set (think Las Vegas swirling down a plughole). Why are the members of the public only allowed to mimic proper singers? Why not retain the musical numbers, but widen the celebrity net? I’d pay good money to see a Harrogate dentist impersonating Peter Sissons trying a cover version of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’.

Back in my cotton-wool hood, the audience hubbub reaches a dangerous peak during the finale, assaulting my eardrums like a maniac armed with a white-hot knitting needle. I’m forced to switch off the set and crawl away in search of Nurofen. Next week I’ll try watching with the sound off and the subtitles on – although I suspect
Stars In Their Eyes
might lose a little in the translation. Ah well.

Big Brother 2
: The Next Generation. As a gang, they’re a mighty improvement. Last time around, only Anna and Nick could be considered truly interesting and, Anna aside, the only agreeable candidates were Craig and Darren.

Craig was clearly a lovely human being, but not much to think home about: he dumboed his way through each conversation like a man born with a knee where his brain should be. Yet, astonishingly, he was twice as smart as Darren, who was even nicer, but spent most of his time frowning incredulously and asking people to summarise what they’d just said in terms a spoon could understand. The other six were brighter, but projected all the instant loveability of unrepentant seal cullers.

For the 2001 edition, either the calibre of applicants has been higher than before, or the producers simply couldn’t stomach the 
prospect of spending the next nine weeks watching dullards work out which hand to wipe with.

Who you side with is down to you: on my personal ‘Likeable’ list are Bubble (hoarse, bright Jack-the-Lad with a laugh so filthy it sounds like someone flicking soil at a joke book), Amma (sassy), Dean (sardonic Brummie) and Brian (Graham Norton). In the centre of the Venn diagram, in the subset marked ‘Undecided’, lurk Penny (batty born-again Christian), Narinder (stroppy) and Helen (Courtney Love) – which leaves just three in the ‘Overtly Objectionable’ area: Elizabeth (quiet, boring), Paul (prat on crutches) and Stuart (Satan in a Gold Blend commercial).

Together the ten conspire to make
Big Brother Live
(E4), the most addictive piece of broadcasting in recent memory. For the duration, Channel 4’s digital offshoot is spooling live footage direct from the house, affording us the opportunity to eavesdrop around the clock (minus breathers for the odd
Ally McBeal
or
Hollyoaks
omnibus). Once you tune in, it’s hard to switch off.

Most people like to leave the TV on in the background while they go about their daily business, for which a more compatible programme than this is hard to imagine: the ultimate in ambient television. Nothing much happens; the housemates natter away, mill hither and thither and occasionally pick at their arses in close-up. Yet somehow the more mundane the action, the more riveting it becomes. It’s infinitely more diverting than ITV’s
Survivor
, whose overtly swish camerawork only serves to distance you from the contestants. Besides, it’s easier to relate to an everyday schmoe picking their nose in East London than a mud-caked macho shitwit chewing maggots on a tropical island.

Plus,
Big Brother
doesn’t suffer
Survivor
’s distracting musical soundtrack. The moments when the camera chooses to spy on a lone contestant silently wandering through the house are particularly haunting: all you’re left with is raw, undiluted voyeurism – the Rear Window Network.

Intimacy aside, there’s another advantage to the live edition: the contestants discuss things they’re probably not supposed to – members of the production team, and gossip involving celebrities.

Of course, nothing illegally juicy makes it onscreen: to prevent a salvo of f-words battering the nation’s ears during lunchtime, there seems to be some kind of time-delay system which ensures inappropriate language can be edited out by a scrutiniser armed with a blue button that dubs background noise over top of the speech – often the sound of passing trains, temporarily lending the exercise a seriously avant-garde air.

The scrutiniser’s list of audible no-nos presumably consists of the following: pre-watershed smut, allusions to backstage personnel, addresses and phone numbers, libels and inadvertent product plugs. Must be nerve-racking – let a whopping transgression pass and the ITC will don horseshoes and dance on your fingers.

Still, bearing this list in mind, viewers at home can turn the live broadcast into a guessing game: the moment the sound of a train kicks in, use your judgement to ascertain which of the conversational rules has been breached (and in the case of a libellous statement about a celebrity, earn bonus points by imagining something horrendous involving a glue gun).

God knows what the scrutiniser would do if someone ran through the house at 10.30 a.m. sporting an erection: hopefully, activate a big red button that would replace the offending area of the image with the beaming, winking face of John Leslie. You wouldn’t get that on
Survivor
.

Oh. Apparently you would.

Text messages! They’re GR8! Actually, they’re not – in fact, they’re sixteen times less interesting than phone conversations, which in turn are sixteen times less interesting than face-to-face conversations. 

Given their length, and the gnashing inconvenience of typing letter by letter like someone entering their initials in a Donkey Kong high-score table, there is little you can communicate in a text message beyond ‘I LIKE YOUR BUM’ or ‘ME GO WEE PLOPS’.