I can make you hate (2 page)

For starters, they’ve deleted the show’s one joke: that the bad singers don’t realise they’re bad until the judges break the news. Now an ocean of cackling dimwits almost drowns them out the second they open their mouths. Consequently, the panel’s comments come as no surprise. The mob’s already beaten the contestants to the ground before Cowell can deliver his death blow.

What’s more, the crowd’s very presence amplifies the cruelty of the format to such a degree, even the smallest of guilty home chuckles is strangled at birth. In the first week, an overweight girl explained she’d been living in her car for six weeks because her family had been evicted from their house thanks to her dreadful singing. The audience tittered throughout. Even Cowell looked embarrassed as he eventually dismissed her from
the stage after a few half-hearted insults.

Speaking of leaving the stage, the biggest absurdity of all is that the traditional moments of ‘candid’ note-comparing chit-chat between the judges, usually conducted as soon as an especially bad or good contestant vacates the room, now have to be performed panto-style, with raised voices, so they can be heard over the general audience hubbub.

‘Y’know, I really liked him. That kid’s got potential.’

‘WHAT’S THAT LOUIS?’

‘I said he’s got potential.’

‘HE’S FOCKING MENTAL?’

‘No,
POTENTIAL
. And he’s pitch-perfect.’

‘DANNII’S A BITCH TO WORK WITH?’

‘No, no – stop crying Dannii, what I said was … oh
FORGET
IT
.’ [
Exits Riverdancing
]

Aside from shattering the relatively intimate dynamic betwixt act and judge, holding each audition in a massive live venue has the added anti-bonus of making each conversation less enjoyable even simply from a technical perspective. Editing it must be a nightmare, what with crowd noise leaking over every comment.

Another thing: it pre-emptively wrecks the live shows. How can the viewer possibly salivate at the prospect of watching a successful auditionee cope in front of a live studio audience when they’ve already seen them slay an entire stadium in week one? Where’s the jeopardy going to come from? Unless ITV suddenly reveal they’ll be singing live in a Thunderdome, dodging cudgel blows as they belt out the best of Elton John, there’ll be little or no sense of peril at all.

Even watching the ‘good’ performers is worse than ever. In
X Factor
world, you’re only considered ‘good’ if you ostentatiously bend every note like Mariah Carey folding a theremin in half. Now each vocal boast is met with an instant standing ovation from the horde of oinking dumbos cramming every aisle. To tune in is to witness a shocking mass rally devoted
to the slaughter of basic melody that sets music back fifty years.

The X Factor
not only fails to provide consolation for the futile horrors of human existence – it’s not even as good as it used to be.

At last weekend’s Edinburgh TV festival, the annual MacTaggart Lecture was delivered by Niles Crane from
Frasier
, played with eerie precision by James Murdoch. His speech attacked the BBC, moaned about Ofcom and likened the British television industry to
The Addams Family
. It went down like a turd in a casserole.

Still, the
Addams Family
reference will have been well-considered because James knows a thing or two about horror households: he’s the son of Rupert Murdoch, which makes him the closest thing the media has to Damien from
The Omen
.

That’s a fatuous comparison, obviously. Damien Thorn,
offspring
of Satan, was educated at Yale before inheriting a global business conglomerate at a shockingly young age and using it to hypnotise millions in a demonic bid to hasten Armageddon. James Murdoch’s story is quite different. He went to Harvard.

Above all, Murdoch’s speech was a call for the BBC’s online news service to be curbed, scaled back, deleted, depleted, dragged to the wastebasket, and so on, because according to him, the
dispersal
of such free ‘state-sponsored’ news on the internet threatens the future of other journalistic outlets. Particularly those provided by News International, which wants to start charging for the online versions of its papers.

Yes Thorn – I mean, Murdoch – refers to the BBC as ‘
state-sponsored
media’, because that makes it sound bad (although not quite as bad as ‘Satan-sponsored media’, admittedly). He evoked the government’s control of the media in Orwell’s
1984
, and claimed that only commercial news organisations were truly capable of producing ‘independent news coverage that challenges the consensus’.

I guess that’s what the
News of the World
does when it challenges the consensus view that personal voicemails should remain personal, or that concealing a video camera in a woman’s private home bathroom is sick and creepy (it magically becomes acceptable when she’s Kerry Katona).

Another great example of independent consensus-challenging news coverage is America’s Fox News network, home of bellicose human snail Bill O’Reilly and blubbering blubberball Glenn Beck. Beck – who has the sort of rubbery, chucklesome face that should ideally be either a) cast as the goonish sidekick in a bad frat-house sex comedy, or b) painted on a toilet bowl so you could shit directly on to it – has become famous for crying live on air, indulging in paranoid conspiracy theorising, and labelling Obama a ‘racist’ with ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture’.

As a news source, Fox is about as plausible and useful as an episode of
Thundercats
. Still, at least by hiring Beck, they’ve genuinely challenged the stuffy consensus notion that people should only really be given their own show on a major news channel if they’re sane.

The trouble is, once you’ve gasped or chuckled over the YouTube clips of his most demented excesses, he’s actually incredibly boring: a fat clown with one protracted trick. His show consists of an hour of screechy, hectoring bullshit: a pudgy middle-aged right-winger sobbing into his shirt about how powerless he feels. It’s an incredible performance, but it belongs in some kind of zoo, not on a news channel. But that’s the Murdoch way.

Now there’s a lengthy, valid, and boring debate to be had about the scope and suitability of some of the BBC’s ambitions but, quite frankly, if their news website (a thing of beauty and a national treasure) helps us stave off the arrival of the likes of Beck – even tangentially, even only for another few years until the Tories take over and begin stealthily dismantling the Beeb while a self-interested press loudly eggs them on – then it
deserves to be cherished and applauded.

To finish his speech, Murdoch claimed, ‘The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’ Or to put it another way: greed is good.

Then he clopped off stage on his cloven hooves, guffing out a hot cloud of sulphur as he left.

NB: years after this article appeared, I co-wrote a comedy for Sky, although by then James Murdoch had stepped down from BSkyB. Incidentally, if you ‘followed the money’ up the chain of previous TV shows I’ve been involved with, you could arrive at Silvio Berlusconi, a man I once described on TV as ‘an ejaculating penis with a Prime Minister attached to it’. And this book is published by Faber and Faber, a company owned and operated by the serial killer Dennis Nilsen.

The sheer breadth of human knowledge is a wonderful thing. But sometimes it’s scary. This morning I was aimlessly clicking my way around the BBC news site – which has become one of my favourite things in the world since I discovered just how much its very existence annoys James Murdoch – reading about the burial of Michael Jackson and the like, when my eye was drawn to an alarming headline.

‘Galaxy’s “cannibalism” revealed,’ it read. This led to a story in the science section that calmly explained how a group of
astronomers
has decided that the Andromeda galaxy is expanding by ‘eating’ stars from neighbouring galaxies. Having studied Andromeda’s outskirts in great detail, they discovered the fringes contained ‘remnants of dwarf galaxies’.

It took me a couple of reads to establish that Andromeda wasn’t literally chewing its way through the universe like an intergalactic Pac-Man, and that the ‘remnants of dwarf galaxies’ were living stars, not the immense galactic stools I’d envisaged. That was what
had really frightened me: the notion that our entire solar system might be nothing more than a chunk of undigested sweetcorn in some turgid celestial bowel movement; that maybe black holes are actually almighty cosmological sphincters, squeezing solid waste into our dimension. What if the entire universe as we know it is essentially one big festival toilet?

That’d be a pretty good social leveller, come to think of it. So there, James Murdoch. You might well walk around thinking, ‘Ooh, hooray for me, I’m the chairman and CEO of News
Corporation
Europe and Asia, not to mention chairman of SKY Italia and STAR TV, the non-executive chairman of British Sky Broadcasting, and a non-executive director of
GlaxoSmithKline
,’ but at the end of the day you’re just one of 900 trillion insignificant molecules in an all-encompassing turdiverse. And your glasses are rubbish.

Anyway, the astronomers who made the discovery about Andromeda deserve our awe and respect, because their everyday job consists of dealing with concepts so intense and overwhelming that it’s a wonder their skulls don’t implode through sheer vertigo. Generally speaking, it’s best not to contemplate the full scope of the universe on a day-to-day basis because it makes a mockery of basic chores. It’s Tuesday night and the rubbish van comes first thing Wednesday morning, so you really ought to put the bin bags out, but hey – if our sun were the size of a grain of sand, the stars in our galaxy would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and if our entire galaxy were a grain of sand, the galaxies in our universe would fill several Olympic-sized swimming pools. So fuck the bin bags.

The human brain isn’t equipped to house thoughts of this humbling enormity. Whenever I read a science article that
nonchalantly
describes the Big Bang, or some similarly dizzying reference to the staggering size and age and unknowable
magnitude
of everything, I feel like a sprite in an outdated platform game desperately straining to comprehend the machine code that put me there, even though that isn’t my job: my job is to jump 
between two moving clouds and land feet-first on a mushroom without ever questioning why.

Perhaps astrophysics stories should come with a little warning. Just as graphically violent news reports tend to be preceded by a quick disclaimer advising squeamish viewers that the following footage contains shots of protesters hurling their own severed kneecaps at riot police – or whatever – maybe brain-mangling science reports likely to leave you nursing an unpleasant existential bruise for several hours should be flagged as equally hazardous. How can I flip channels and enjoy
Midsomer Murders
once I’ve been reminded of the crushing futility of everything? I can’t get worked up about the murders in that kind of mood. Yeah, kill him. And her. And them. Fuck it. It’s all just atoms in a vortex.

Not that the few scientists I know seem to suffer. In fact, they’re unrelentingly calm and upbeat, like they’ve stumbled across a cosmic secret but aren’t telling. One of my friends is married to a quantum physicist who, sickeningly, manages to combine an immense brain with a relaxed, down-to-earth, amused attitude to everything. He once tried to explain the characteristics of different theoretical dimensions to me.

Dimensions one to four I could just about cope with. The fifth made vague sense at a push. But the rest collapsed into terrifying babble. There was no foothold.

I swear, at one point he casually claimed the seventh dimension measured about half a metre in diameter and was shaped like a doughnut. That can’t be right: either I’ve misremembered it because my brain deleted the explanation as it was going in, chewing it up and spitting it out before it could do damage, or – and this is just a wild theory – I’m too stupid to understand much in the realm of science beyond the difference between up and down, and the seventh dimension is beyond me. It might’ve been part of string theory (I like string theory, because I can at least hazily picture the strings). But this seventh dimension stuff was just gibberish.

God knows what the eighth dimension consists of. Probably two chalk moths and a puddle. Whatever it is, and wherever it lives, don’t tell me. The binman’s due and I don’t want to know.

Apologies if I sound a tad woozy, but yesterday I left planet Earth for some time and apparently enjoyed exploring some other reality while medical professionals did something fancy with my neck. It was a minor procedure. Minor by modern standards, that is.

The doctors casually performed the sort of everyday miracle that would’ve seen them worshipped as gods or drowned in the village pond if they’d done it in medieval times. But then,
medieval
peasants would run screaming from anything more complex than a turnip. Show them, say, a Nintendo Wii, and their minds would pop inside their skulls. Pop, pop, pop and down they fall, stupid green smocks and all.

Anyway, the fact I’m sitting here typing this proves nothing went wrong. Nothing was going to go wrong anyway, but that didn’t stop me worrying. All I knew was this: they were going to stick a needle into my neck, right into the spine. Not too scary by surgical standards: it would only require a local anaesthetic. But it was precisely that fact which started my brain whirring.

I figured it was essential to remain still during this kind of procedure if I didn’t want to wind up quadriplegic, which I didn’t. What if, just at the crucial moment they stuck the needle in, I was seized by some awful Tourettes-like urge to suddenly jerk around on the slab, cackling like a madman in a rainstorm, deliberately severing my spinal cord against the cold, hard spike?