I can make you hate (18 page)

If you’re a fifteen-year-old boy, chances are
Spartacus: Blood and Sand
will strike you as the finest TV show ever made. The only drawback is that you’re too young to watch it.

This is possibly the lustiest, goriest, most wilfully red-blooded drama series the law and human decency will allow. Roughly every thirty seconds someone gets an axe or sword in the face. Roughly every twenty seconds a woman bares her breasts. Roughly every ten seconds someone grunts a four-letter word starting with either ‘f’ or ‘c’. There’s more fruity language than a week-long Jam convention. Everyone swears like a foul-mouthed trooper stubbing his toe on a slang dictionary. It’s not so much
I, Claudius
as
I Claudi-cuss.
HA HA HA
.

So: sex, violence, and hardcore swearing. Sometimes all three at once. This programme was not written and performed by pussies. They should’ve called it
Spartacus: Blood and Fucking Tits
instead.

The plot concerns a nameless Thracian warrior who spends half his life fighting barbarians on behalf of the Romans in unconvincing green-screen CGI landscapes, and the other half having slow-motion sex with his wife. This violent/sexual idyll is spoiled forever when the Romans betray him and his wife
is kidnapped. Our nameless hero becomes a gladiator named Spartacus, which means his job now consists of weekly kill-
or-be
-killed hack-and-slash encounters in the Colosseum.

According to the head trainer, every time a true gladiator enters the ring he must ‘look death in the eye, embrace it and fuck it’. Which was a round sadly missing from the ITV version of
Gladiators
. But not here. Make no mistake: the gladiatorial scenes are pretty brutal. Limbs are hacked off with such nonchalant frequency, it sometimes feels more like an extreme whittling contest. During one match Spartacus manages to carve two legs off one adversary using a single, uninterrupted back-and-forth slicing action. But the guy’s still going – dragging himself away with his palms as his knee stumps piddle blood. Will Spartacus show mercy? What do you think?

By the end, he’s carved his opponents into such small pieces, it looks like he’s picked a fight with an animated lasagne.

Then there’s the sex. Apparently ancient Rome played host to more blowjobs than the internet. Rich couples nonchalantly screw slaves while discussing the weather. There’s a lot of nudity here, and not just female nudity either. It’s always dick o’clock in
Spartacus
land.

The first time our hero indulges in a little locker-room back-chat with his fellow gladiators, the main antagonist paces around him, penis swinging proudly in the breeze. Usually I find it impossible to hear what actors are saying during a nude scene – my brain’s too busy screaming ‘
LOOK AT THEIR TITS LOOK LOOK LOOK
’ to process anything as complex as dialogue – but here, for once, the nudity is so persistent, the mind quickly compensates for it. By episode four I was staring at orgy sequences and wondering who composed the background music.

But here’s the surprise – after a disappointingly slow (yes, slow – despite the constant sex and violence) pair of opening episodes,
Spartacus
starts to improve exponentially until somewhere round episode five, where you stop enjoying it ironically and start to
enjoy it outright. Yes, it may be the kind of show in which a tattooed warrior gets his face hacked off by a man armed with a hook; it may feature lines like ‘your wife has been fucked to madness by a thousand vermin cocks’; it may toss in pointless cameos of one-armed topless transsexuals – and all three of these things genuinely happen in the early episodes – but it’s also not half bad. In fact I’d go as far as to say it actually gets quite good. There’s just a hell of a lot to desensitise yourself to first. Good luck. Give it a go.

Oh and that nice John Hannah’s in it, and very good he is too. Your mum likes John Hannah. So if she asks why you’re watching it, cite his involvement. Just don’t, under any circumstances, invite her to watch it.

OK, time to revise those nightmare visions of the future. Rather than being laser-gunned in the lungs by robotic shock troopers, we’ll be absorbed by undulating blob monsters – all because a group of scientists in Maryland have created artificial life in a laboratory. What surprised me most about the news was that it was surprise news. I thought artificial life had been mastered years ago, when Sega created Sonic the Hedgehog. But apparently he didn’t count.

Instead we’re meant to be excited by a pair of thing-a-zoids which, placed side-by-side in the photographs, look less like the dawn of a new scientific era and more like a pair of giant googly eyeballs, as though Nookie Bear is staring at you from inside a burqa. The underwhelming bio-glob in question is, we’re told, ‘based on a bacterium that causes mastitis in goats’, which might make an amusingly wry on-screen sub-heading at the start of the next Transformers movie, but doesn’t do much to make the breakthrough any more thrilling.

That’s possibly because the breakthrough itself is impossible to understand unless you’re a geneticist. Here’s what happened: the scientists created a computer simulation of the goat bug thingy, then fed the code into a genetic synthesiser. You know, a genetic synthesiser. It looks like a George Foreman grill, but in white, and with twice as many winking lights on the top. They fed it into that. Probably using a USB stick. Anyway, the DNA grill heated up and went beep and ‘produced short strands of the bug’s DNA’, which I imagine were an absolute bugger to pick up with tweezers. Said strands were then ‘stitched together’ by some bits of yeast and
E. coli
, which eventually knitted the strand into a complete million-letter-long DNA sequence, which you’re probably incorrectly picturing right now.

So far, so baffling. Then it gets weirder. To ‘watermark’ their artificial bug, the geneticists spliced a James Joyce quotation into the DNA sequence. The unsuspecting genome now has the phrase ‘to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life’ written through it like letters in a stick of rock. In other words, it’s the world’s most pretentious bacterium. After Quentin Letts.

This raises the question of whether it’s possible to shove an entire book into the genetic synthesiser and create a new life form. I’d be quite interested in seeing what would pop out if you fed it one of Jordan’s novels. It might result in a lifeform more sophisticated than Jordan herself, even if it was just a burping elbow with eyelashes.

Incidentally, the DNA sequence also includes an email address, presumably so you know who to contact if you discover a bacterium wandering about in the street without its owner present.

Anyway, leaving aside the immense philosophical and spiritual considerations, the most pressing concern about artificial life is the prospect of sinister man-made lifeforms being used for nefarious means. Even Craig Venter himself, who oversaw the experiments, describes it as a ‘dual-use technology’, which is a brilliantly non-specific way of saying ‘good or evil’.

On the one hand, energy companies could create an organism that converts CO2 into power, thereby solving climate change and the energy crisis. And on the other, North Korea could unleash an army of sabre-toothed jackdaws. Or we could accidentally create a kind of whispering, intelligent mud that rises up and smothers us to death in our sleep. Literally all of the above can but won’t happen.

If we survive long enough to perfect the life-creation process, we’ll have zany new animals to look forward to. Entire zoos will be dedicated to ridiculous remixed animals: 100-legged cat centipedes, crocodiles with breasts, ladybirds the size of a church. Ever wondered what happens when you cross a cow with a shark? Wonder no more at the charkinarium.

Disney could breed a real Mickey Mouse, a real Donald Duck, and a real whatever-Goofy-is to greet kids in their amusement parks – genuine walking, breathing mascots, with their own lungs and digestive systems and everything. Your kids won’t know whether to laugh or cry. Although ultimately ‘cry’ is probably the likeliest option, since given the size of Mickey’s head he’ll probably break his own neck when he bends down to shake their hand.

I’d create an animal that excretes meat, just to give vegetarians pause for thought. Ethically, what’s the problem with eating a sausage, if it’s been harmlessly pooed out by an animal? To sweeten the pill yet further, what if you put pleasure receptors in the animal’s colon, so it actively enjoys the sausage-creation process – enjoys it to such a degree that it chases you down the street, yelping in orgasmic delight while shitting a string of
pan-ready
chipolatas?

If you think that’s disgusting, I’d just like to point out that it’s far less revolting than killing a pig with a bolt gun then mashing it up into sausagemeat.

And we could remix humankind too, removing all the rubbish bits we’re cursed with, like the appendix, or empathy.
It’d be fun to create a race of people without memories, pain receptors, or shame cells, then populate a pleasure-island with them: a hyper-decadent, consequence-free paradise where you can spend a fortnight’s holiday having sex with everyone you see, or deliberately ramming your car into them, or both – like a
real-life
3D
Grand Theft Auto
. It’d be just like being an oligarch.

All in all, a brave new world full of sweating, belching horror lies just over our collective horizon. But don’t be scared. Consider yourself lucky to be alive just as we’ve worked out precisely how special that’s not.

I gave up on
Lost
some time during the first season, having decided it was just a bunch of irritating people going ‘woo’ on a rock in the sea. An episode detailing Charlie the rock star’s backstory, replete with hammy flashbacks to a wildly implausible version of Manchester, was the final straw. But since then I’d heard from devoted fans, who insisted that despite a few major wobbles somewhere round the halfway point, it was actually well worth watching.

I never acted on their advice. I could’ve bought the box set, I suppose, but that’d be a lot of investment in a show which had annoyed me so much in the past. Best just to tune in to the final two episodes ever instead, then. I can probably just pick up the story, right?

Wrong. Thumpingly, obviously wrong.

Far from clearing up the mystery of what the island was and why they were there, from my uninformed point of view, the finale consisted of random sequences in which irritating people went ‘woo’ on a rock in the sea and in a city, apparently simultaneously. The city was purgatory and the island was real. Or was it the other way round? Characters I recognised rubbed
shoulders with strangers, all of whom were imbuing each line of dialogue with such sombre, knowing significance, you could be forgiven for assuming we were witnessing the end of history itself.

The plot made less sense than a milk hammock. Jack was apparently no longer Jack, but a man who looked like Jack. He was certainly just as punchably earnest as I remember. There was much kerfuffle over a kind of magic reset button located down a well in the middle of the island.

The story ended with alternative-universe-Jack having an existential chat with his dead dad. I remembered Jack’s boring daddy issues from the first season; back then they struck me as a spectacularly tedious attempt to give our clean-cut hero some depth. Has any viewer, in the history of film and television, ever actually cared about a lead character’s parents? Faced with a character as blankly dull as Jack, I’d be more interested in learning about the tortured background of a piece of office furniture.

Anyway, having healed his life, Jack was free to stand around in an imaginary church backslapping other
Lost
characters while the room was filled with heavenly light: the end. Intense and moving, no doubt, for loyal fans of the show. Might as well have been a pretentious building society advert for anyone else.

But
Lost
isn’t the only series coming to an end.
Ashes To Ashes, Law & Order, 24, Heroes
: it’s almost as though populist TV drama itself is shutting down. Some shows, like
Heroes
, don’t have an opportunity to plan for their own deaths, leaving the characters stuck in limbo. Others, like
Lost
and
Ashes To Ashes,
turn out to have been in limbo all along. Limbo’s very much in vogue at the moment. In fact there’s roughly a 50 per cent chance that any serial you’re following will turn out to be set there. All this publicity must be doing wonders for the limbo tourist industry.

Of course saying ‘aha, it was limbo all along’ is just a marginally more profound way of saying ‘aha, it was a dream all along’, a trope which became a cliché through overuse. There’s no room
for any more limbo-based programming, so anything currently on air is going to have to find a different way of ending, which sadly means
24
– which finishes for good in a fortnight – won’t conclude with Jack Bauer kicking his way through Hell and kneeing Satan in the bollocks. Another twist is necessary. Here’s hoping it transpires the whole thing took place in a paperback novel being read by Shaz from
Ashes To Ashes,
who was herself being daydreamt by Sawyer from
Lost
– while he was trying to think up a satisfying conclusion for
Heroes
. That or it pulls out to reveal it all took place in a cat’s bum.

A cat’s bum doing a poo.

I am thirty-nine years old.

I wish I enjoyed the World Cup, if only for some fleeting sense of common unity with the rest of humankind. But I simply don’t get it. A huge number of my fellow citizens tune in and witness a glorious contest of ecstatic highs and heartbreaking lows. I see twenty-two millionaires fucking up a lawn.