I can make you hate (11 page)

If you’re not familiar with the format (maybe you had
harpsichord
practice last Saturday), it’s a studio-based cross between
Blind Date
and Boots’ mortifying Here Come The Girls
campaign
. In fact I’m willing to bet
Here Come The Girls
was a working title. You know I’m right.

It’s hosted by Paddy McGuinness, who arrives on the studio floor by descending down a huge glittery pipe, like a showbiz turd being flushed into the nation’s lap. He introduces thirty women – yes, thirty – who march in jiggling their tits and blowing kisses at the camera, cackling and screaming and winking like a hen
night filling the front row at a Wham! reunion. It’s a crash course in misogyny.

The girls line up behind a row of illuminated podiums, and the first of the men arrives, sliding down the same pipe Paddy came in earlier (if you’ll pardon the expression).

Said bloke must impress the women by speaking, dancing, performing party tricks, and so on, like a jester desperately trying to stave off his own execution at the hands of a capricious female emperor. If he does a backflip and six of the girls didn’t like the way his buttocks shook as he landed, they switch their podium lights off, thereby whittling down his selection of available mates, and by extension, the gene pool.

There’s an elephant in the room. Not literally, as a format point, but in the moment where each man first slithers down the tube and some of the girls immediately turn their lights off based on appearances alone. Paddy skitters around asking what’s turned them off, and they dole out diplomatic answers about disliking the way he walked, or his shoes, rather than saying he’s too ugly or fat or that his skin’s the wrong colour for their tastes. At a push, they’ll gently mock someone’s height, but that’s about it. There’s little crushing honesty here. If they were hooked up to brainwave-reading machines, the outcome might be a little more brutal and a lot more disturbing. But probably not very ‘Saturday night’.

Anyway, if our isolated male makes it through to the end with some girls still lit up, he picks one to take away with him. If the show was as hideous as I’d been led to believe, it’d culminate in a round where the newly paired-off couple rut like dogs in a Perspex dome while McGuinness films it on his mobile. Instead they somewhat meekly go for a drink, the results of which we get to see the following week.

That’s it. The clever bit – in format terms at any rate – is that the girls return each week, so we get to know their ‘characters’. And they’re all ‘characters’. There are mouthy ones, stupid ones,
sweet ones, gothic ones, young ones, old ones, and identical twin ones. All human life is here, apart from anyone you’d actually want to spend the rest of your days with. Or more than about an hour on a Saturday night, come to that.

In summary: yes, it’s horrible. But that’s its job.

I’m not especially patriotic – I find the Union flag a tad garish, and the white cliffs of Dover a touch bland – but the news that the US company Kraft had bought Cadbury came as a bitter blow. It’s a very British thing, Cadbury. We’ve all got a great deal of fondness for it. It’s one of the few home comforts you miss while you’re abroad, like the BBC or Marmite or self-deprecatory humour.

Considering how much imagination the Americans have, and how much they like food, it’s surprising we’re so much better at making chocolate than them. And we are better. I can still vividly recall trying Hershey’s chocolate for the first time. The name held a certain glitzy allure: after all, I’d heard it mentioned in countless Hollywood movies. Like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, it was one of those brands you faintly revered even though – at the time – it wasn’t available in British shops. So when I eventually got my hands on an authentic Hershey bar, it was quite an event.

I stared at the iconic packaging for about five minutes, as though it were a prop from the set of
Ghostbusters
, before unwrapping it with care, breaking a bit off and preparing to savour what would surely be the most powerfully glamorous chocolate experience imaginable.

But the moment the product itself hit my tongue I was plunged mouthwards into an entire universe of yuk. In terms of flavour, it tasted precisely like I’d swallowed a matchbox full of caster sugar five minutes earlier, then somehow regurgitated it into my own mouth. And the texture was crumbly, dusty – slightly old even,
as though this was a chocolate bar that had been found in the pocket of a Civil War soldier and preserved specifically for my disenchantment.

It was so horrible, I charitably assumed there was something wrong with it. I was eating it in England (someone had brought it back from the States), so perhaps it had gone off somehow in transit. But no. Subsequent encounters proved I’d got it right the first time. Hershey’s tastes downright bad.

But then American mass-market snack food is downright bad in general. They can’t do crisps either. In addition to 900 varieties of Walkers, we Brits produce Frazzles and Chipsticks and Monster Munch and all manner of wacky corn shapes, in flavours ranging from pickled onion to polar bear. Virtually all American crisps – or ‘chips’, as they doggedly insist on calling them – are prosaic constructions tasting vaguely of watered-down bright orange cheese. We do bright orange cheese too, in the form of Wotsits, but we only did it once because we nailed it first time. They’ve got Cheetos in every shade of orange you could wish for (Spicy Orange! Smokey Orange!), but they’re all a bit weak; no match for the confident chemical oomph of a Wotsit.

Anyway, the prospect of the Americans – so good at so many things, so bad at snack foods – meddling with the Cadbury formula is too much for many of us to bear. Hence the protest signs outside the factory in Bournville. We’ve been told the flavour won’t change – but that isn’t enough. Kraft needs to go one better, and reassure us that our national identity will remain intact by launching a whole new range of Cadbury’s snacks that simply couldn’t exist – or sell – anywhere else in the world. Chocolate bars with a uniquely British flavour. Here are some suggestions:

Walkers have had a stab at a ‘full English breakfast’ flavoured crisp, but the result was disappointing, to say the least, because it relied on various flavoured powders. Cadbury’s Full English
Breakfast bar would contain the real thing: fried egg, bacon, chips and beans, mashed and compacted into a Crunchie-sized slab, covered with a layer of ketchup, then swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate. It’d look and weigh about the same as a Double Decker. And yes, it sounds disgusting – but you’d have to try it once, wouldn’t you?

Creme Eggs are all well and good, but there’s something vaguely continental about them. How about promoting the real ale industry with a chocolate egg containing 2 fl. oz. of Bishop’s Finger? If that fails to catch on, how about a range of special ‘Binge Drinker’s Eggs’ – available only in ‘Happy Hour’ packs of six – filled with sugary blue alcopop swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate.

Nothing fancy: these are just Tardis-shaped slabs of chocolate – part of a range that includes Caramel Cybermen and Toffee Daleks. But the proceeds go straight to the BBC, to help keep it afloat after Cameron gets in and sets about dismantling it to impress Rupert Murdoch. Other BBC-themed snacks could include Holby City Liquorice Bandages, Panorama Mint Crisp Curls, and a disturbing 100 per cent edible lifesize replica of Terry Wogan’s head, replete with crunchy shortbread teeth, praline eyeballs and a brain made of nougat. Swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate.

As you may have noticed, the above suggestions work on the assumption that everything tastes nice when it’s swaddled in Dairy Milk chocolate. Which it does. A bloated corpse dredged from a polluted canal would taste nice if it was encased in a Dairy Milk shell. If it was coated in Hershey’s, you’d find yourself glumly picking the chocolate off to get at the sludgey grey flesh beneath. And that’s a
FACT
.

A star appears over San Francisco and a new gizmo is born. The iPad! At first glance it resembles an iPhone in unhandy,
non-pocket
-sized form. But look a little longer, and … No. You were right first time.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee-table book and created the MacBook. Now it’s taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren’t really asking.

It’s an iPhone for people who can’t be arsed holding an iPhone up to their face. A slightly-further-away iPhone that keeps your lap warm. A weird combination of portable and cumbersome: too small to replace your desktop, too big to fit in your pocket, unless you’re a clown. It can play video, but really – do you want to spend hours staring at a movie in your lap? Sit through
Lord of
the Rings
and you’d need an osteopath to punch the crick out of your neck afterwards. It can also be used as an ebook, something newspapers are understandably keen to play up, but because it’s got an illuminated display rather than a fancy non-backlight ‘digital ink’ ebook screen, it’ll probably leave your eyes feeling strained, as though your pupils are wearing tight shoes.

The iPad falls between two stools – not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it’s the spork of the electronic consumer goods world. Or rather it would be, were it not for one crucial factor: it looks ideal for idly browsing the web while watching telly. And I suspect that’s what it’ll largely be used for. Millions of people watch TV while checking their emails: it’s a perfect match for them.

Absurdly, Apple keeps trying to pretend it’ll make your life
more efficient. Come off it. It’s an oblong that lights up. I’m sick of being pitched to like I’m a one-man corporation undertaking a personal productivity audit anyway. I don’t want to hear how the iPad is going to make my life simpler. I want to hear how it’ll amuse and distract me, how it plans to anaesthetise me into a numb, trancelike state. Call it the iDawdler and aggressively market it as the world’s first utterly dedicated timewasting device: an electronic sedative to rival diazepam, alcohol or television. If Apple can convince us of that, it’s got itself a hit.

Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue to prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a fifteen-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?

And don’t bring up videocalls to defend yourself: it’d be creepy talking to a disembodied two-dimensional head being held at arm’s length, and besides, the iPad is too heavy to hold in front of your face for long, so you’d end up balancing it in your lap, which means both callers would find themselves staring up one another’s nostrils, like a pair of curious dental patients.

Videocalls are overrated anyway. You just sit there staring at each other with nothing to say. It’s like a prison visit: eventually one of you has to start masturbating just to break the tension.

Personally, I’m not sure whether I’ll buy an iPad, although I think – I think – I’m about to buy a MacBook. Yes, I was a dyed-in-the-wool Mac sceptic for years. Yes, I’ve written screeds bemoaning the infuriating breed of smug Apple monks who treat all PC owners with condescending pity. But being chained to a
Sony Vaio for the last few weeks has convinced me that I’d rather use a laptop that just works, rather than one that’s so ponderous, stuttering and irritating I find myself perpetually on the verge of running outside and hurling it into traffic. (That’s a moan about Sony laptops, not PCs in general, by the way. I’m keeping my desktop PC, thanks: that’s lovely. Smooth as butter. Better than I deserve, in fact.)

I just hope buying a MacBook won’t turn me into an iPrick. I want a machine that essentially makes itself invisible, not a rectangular bragging stone. If, ten minutes after buying it, I start burbling on about how it’s left me more fulfilled as a human being, or find myself perched at a tiny Starbucks table stroking its glowing Apple with one hand while demonstratively tapping away with the other in the hope that passersby will assume I’m working on a screenplay, it’s going straight in the bin.

The iBin. Complete with built-in camera. $599.99.

Following my blithering about the iPad the other week, I found myself thinking about ebooks. That’s my life for you. A rollercoaster. Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the ‘physical pleasure of turning actual pages’ and how ebooks will ‘never replace the real thing’. Then I was given a Kindle as a gift. That shut me up.

Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

Crackly warm vinyl sounds wonderful, but you can’t listen to
it on the bus, or squish it into a machine the size of a raisin. And unless your MP3s are encoded at such a low rate that it sounds as though the band’s playing woollen instruments in a water tank, and provided you’re listening to some halfway decent music in the first place, your brain quickly cancels out any concerns about ‘lossiness’ and gets on with enjoying the music.