I can make you hate (13 page)

But in many ways, the rustic serf of yesteryear had a better quality of life than the skinbag-about-town of space year 2010. Computers have freed us from hours of drudgery with one hand, but introduced an equal amount of slightly different drudgery with the other. No matter how advanced civilisation becomes, there’s an unyielding quota of drudgery lurking at the core that can never be completely eradicated.

These days it’s commonplace to do everything online, from designing the layout of your kitchen to locating a stranger prepared to kill and eat you for mutual sexual gratification. Tasks that would have taken years to organise and achieve can now be accomplished in the blink of an icon. Or would be, if you could remember your password. But you can’t remember your
password
. You can’t remember it because you chose it so very long, long ago – maybe three days afore. In the intervening period you’ve had to dream up another six passwords for another six websites, programs or email addresses.

In this age of rampant identity theft, where it’s just a matter of time before someone works out a way to steal your reflection in the mirror and use it to commit serial bigamy in an alternate dimension, we’re told only a maniac would use the same password for everything. But passwords used to be for speakeasy owners or spies. Once upon a time, you weren’t the sort of person who had to commit hundreds of passwords to memory. Now you are. Part of your identity’s been stolen already.

In the meantime: you need a new password. One as individual as a snowflake. And as beautiful, too. Having demanded a brand new password from you for the twenty-eighth time this month, His Lordship Your Computer proceeds to snootily critique your efforts. Certain attempts he will disqualify immediately, without even passing judgment. Less than six letters? No numbers? Access denied. This is a complex parlour game, OK? There are rules. So start again. And this time: no recognisable words. No punctuation marks. No hesitation, deviation or repetition. Go.

Pass the qualifying round and it gets worse. Most modern
password
entrance exams grade each entry as you type, presenting you with an instant one-word review of your efforts. Suppose you glance around your desk and pick the first thing you set eyes on, such as a blue pen. You begrudgingly shove a number on the end, creating the password ‘bluepen1’. You submit this offering to the Digital Emperor, and he derides it as ‘Weak’.

You can use it if you want. It’s valid. But still; it’s ‘Weak’. So you try again. This time you replace some of the letters with numbers and jumble the capitalisation a bit, like a chef with limited ingredients trying to jazz up an omelette to impress a restaurant critic. The Computerlord pulls a vaguely respectful face. You’ve jumped a grade, to ‘OK’. You tingle within.

But you can do better. Admit it: you want HRH Computer to actively admire you. You want him to give you a rosette for creating the most carefully constructed password in history, a password that isn’t merely secure, but is beautiful. A password that sings. A password to make angels weep. You will present His Majesty the Mainframe with a masterpiece of encryption, an ornate lexicographic sonata – a creation whose breathtakingly impressive elegance is magnified by the heartbreaking knowledge that no human other than yourself will ever set eyes upon it. This is your private cryptographic poem, your encoded love letter to the machine. Better be good.

So you take bold made-up words, weave them with numbers,
stud the soufflé with spicy CaPiTaLs and garnish it with a random string of characters carefully chosen for their memorable unmemorableness. You’ve performed reverse cryptanalysis; been a one-man Enigma machine. And your offering pleases God. He deems it ‘Very Strong’: his highest accolade.

Still glowing, you try out your hand-crafted key for the first time, typing it into the lock. With a soft click, the mechanism turns. Access granted. You are now part of the smocklaundry.com community. How many of your smocks need laundering? When would you like them returned? No problem. Thanks for your custom. Farewell.

Three weeks later your smocks are returned, late and still plastered with hideous stains. You revisit smocklaundry.com to protest. But you can’t remember your password. You can’t
remember
it because you chose it so very long, long ago – maybe three weeks afore. And in the intervening period you’ve had to dream up another forty-two passwords for another forty-two websites, programs or email addresses.

Your beautiful password is dead. It was simply too complex and too damned exquisite to live in your humdrum world, your humdrum mind. Now you must face the ignominy of clicking the password reset button for the fifty-eighth time this year. And as you trudge dolefully towards your inbox, waiting for the help letter to arrive, the cruel laughter of His Computerised Majesty rings in your ears. You have failed, human. You have failed.

Reader, I apologise in advance. Words can’t describe the exquisite mix of pain, fury and joy that is
Pineapple Dance Studios
. Yet words must suffice. I can’t just sit here silently popping my mouth open and shut like a surprised mute, although that’s precisely the reaction it provokes.

You know how every so often the natural history unit throws up a documentary about hallucinogenically weird organisms that live fifteen miles down in the deep, during which some
undulating
avant-garde cross between a jellyfish, a diagram and an inside-out seahorse will wobble across the screen, defying any rational attempt at description? This is the docusoap equivalent of that.

Yes, it’s a docusoap. That much we can cling to. It’s a docusoap about the various characters around Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden. The most immediately noticeable example is a berk called Louie Spence, a creature so theatrically camp he seems perpetually on the verge of turning into a disco-dancing peacock. God knows what his job at the studio actually consists of: you could watch for a thousand years and never find out. All he does is mug for the cameras, perpetually striking poses, pulling arch faces, cracking lurid innuendo, shrieking, mincing and generally behaving in a way no fictional gay character has been permitted to do for decades. Given the right narrator, this could be a heartbreaking doc about an incurable mental condition whose sufferers lose their minds at the sight of a film crew and turn into 1978 sitcom homosexuals.

And incredibly it has been given the right narrator: former BBC news anchor Michael Buerk. You’d be hard pressed to find a more sobering voice of authority. Instant gravitas. Each time there’s an establishing shot of a building exterior, I fully expect to hear him say: ‘Dawn – and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine; now, in the twentieth century.’ But he doesn’t. Instead he says something like: ‘9 a.m. – and Louie is pirouetting in a stairwell’. Cut to Louie pirouetting in a stairwell. It’s upsetting and funny and wrong and right. It’s everything. This is madness.

Louie is a show-off, but at least he isn’t Andrew Stone. In reality, Andrew Stone is one of the resident dance teachers. In his head, he’s a global superstar. The show focuses heavily on the ups
and downs of his derivative, deeply uninspiring band, Starman, which he fronts with a level of egomaniacal self-assurance hitherto undocumented on British TV. Seriously, they’ve captured
lightning
in a bottle here: the man is a tool of such breathtaking immensity, it’s a wonder the cameras didn’t simply explode out of horrified glee. One of life’s sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people. This is the clearest possible illustration of that truth ever committed to videotape. Show this to your children. Make them learn from it.

On and on the show goes, swerving effortlessly from
fistchewingly
mundane office-management sequences straight out of
The Day Today
’s famous docusoap spoof
The Pool
one moment, into bizarre choreographed dance sequences the next.

Dance sequences? Yes: they’ve thrown in occasional
fourth-wall
-smashing musical numbers just to baffle you to death.

One minute Louie is complaining to the builders next door about noise and then suddenly – boom! – they unexpectedly start dancing, as though he’s stumbled into a dream sequence. And this breakdown of reality isn’t acknowledged in Michael Buerk’s voiceover at all. No, it simply occurs. And then the show moves on as if it hadn’t. As though the TV fakery scandals never happened. And suddenly you question the veracity of everything you’re watching. Except the rest of it is real. It just doesn’t – just shouldn’t – feel that way.

But that’s
Pineapple Dance Studios
. A show designed to trigger life-threatening cognitive dissonance. As mundane as a breadbin; more outlandish than
Avatar
. As horrible as war; as funny as a guffing cartoon donkey.

Words don’t even graze the surface.

So: those televised prime ministerial debates will definitely be happening in the run-up to the election. The excitement is hard to contain: three separate prime-time shows on Sky, ITV and the Beeb in which Brown, Cameron and Clegg will get the opportunity to talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. And possibly jig. But mainly talk.

Depending on your point of view, this is either a refreshing opportunity for politicians to connect with the electorate, or the least sexy hour of television since that Channel 4 documentary where they chopped up an elephant.

Even though its power and influence are in decline, TV still fascinates and horrifies politicians in equal measure. They’re attracted by its potential to hypnotise and pacify millions, but repelled by its laser-like ability to magnify physical flaws or tonal cock-ups. It’s like a magic amulet that can sometimes control the masses, but also might explode in the user’s hand at any time.

Obviously image is paramount. On TV, no matter how eloquent you are, 75 per cent of the audience can’t even hear what you’re saying: they’re too busy making subconscious judgements about the tone of your voice or the angle of your lips. Conventional wisdom would have it that Gordon Brown is clearly at a massive disadvantage here, since he’s slowly come to resemble a lumbering, doomy Mr Snuffaluffagus with all the carefree joie de vivre of the
Kursk
submarine disaster. But Cameron and Clegg are, if anything, a bit too telegenic, a bit too slick, a bit too
clean-cut
and heigh-ho. They’ve tried too hard to appeal in soundbite pop-up form: stretched over an hour, they may start to grate, their smooth appearances unexpectedly conspiring against them.

Cameron in particular looks like a boring dot-eyed ‘nice’ neighbour from an underwhelming Christian soap opera. He’s
a replicant; an Auton; a humanoid; a piece of adaptive software that’s learned to appeal to your likes and dislikes – ‘customers who bought Tony Blair also bought the following’ – but inadvertently creeped you out in the process. Let’s face it: if you discovered he doesn’t have a belly button or any pubic hair, and spends one night each week lying semi-conscious, face-down, ‘recharging’ inside a giant white laboratory pod filled with amniotic fluid, you wouldn’t be entirely surprised. And voters are likely to sense that eerie unearthliness. He’d better stutter or fluff a few times, just to throw them off the scent.

But even if all three manage to flawlessly imitate human beings, defeat may still be snatched from the jaws of victory: if Nick Clegg spends the first fifty minutes rousing the audience with his fiery, lyrical rhetoric – as per usual – only to sneeze unexpectedly five minutes before the end, leaving a giant pendulum of mucus dangling off the end of his conk, the unfortunate mishap would be looped and repeated
ad nauseam
on every rolling news bulletin for weeks to come. He’d be Mr Snot. And do you want to vote for Mr Snot? No way. What if he sneezed on the nuclear button? He’s out of the running. Which leaves you choosing between a haunted elephant or the humanoid.

(There are other parties you could vote for, obviously. But they’re excluded from the debates and therefore no longer exist – a terrible blow for BNP leader Nick Griffin, who was hoping to win over the public with his devilish good looks and impish personality.)

So: mammoth or android. Which is it to be? To help you choose, the news networks will doubtless offer post-match analysis of each nanosecond. Professional Westminster spods will deconstruct each sentence in search of hidden meanings, like scientists translating garbled messages from space. A
body-language
expert will discuss Cameron’s eyebrows for thirty-eight minutes. A fashionista will tell us who wore the best shirt. And every other citizen in the country will be asked to deliver their
opinion via vox pop, email, tweet, phone poll or synchronised Mexican wave. Eventually a consensus will form regarding who won, at which point the lucky victor will be given the keys to 10 Downing Street, a fly-drive holiday for two courtesy of Virgin Atlantic, a five-album recording contract with Sony BMG, and an ITV2 reality show of their own.

So terrifying-yet-alluring is the prospect of the debates, the parties have only consented to take part provided each broadcaster adheres to a series of seventy-six rules, drawn up in advance. Every aspect will be controlled, from the time allocated to each question, to the layout of the set – even the framing of audience cutaway shots is crucial.

Presumably spin doctors from all three parties will be lurking ominously on the sidelines, ready to run in and kick the
cameramen
to death if their candidate starts looking too sweaty. You can already picture Andy Coulson in the wings, chewing gum and eavesdropping on the gallery audio feed, which has been illegally tapped by a private detective and routed directly into Andy Coulson’s earpiece without Andy Coulson’s knowledge.

Curiously, one thing that’s left open to the broadcaster is the opening and closing credits. Rule 68 states that ‘each broadcaster [is] responsible for their own titles, music, branding etc.’ If I was running ITN – which, at the time of writing, I’m not – I’d make the most of this sole crumb of freedom by creating an insanely inappropriate title sequence in which a claymation Brown, Cameron and Clegg take turns performing sex acts on a cow, a kettle and a hole in the ground, all of it backed by the old
It’s a Knockout
theme tune. Then it abruptly cuts live to the studio, where all three leaders have been waiting to speak, watching with mounting horror as this sickening cartoon unfolded on the monitors. As they storm out, a body language expert analyses their facial expressions, and the studio audience waves giant foam hands around. It might not affect the election either way, but who cares: that’s entertainment.