I can make you hate (41 page)

Marks & Spencer has excreted a mini-musical starring the
X Factor
finalists, which has to be hurriedly edited and re-edited every ten minutes, as contestants keep getting dropped or
reinstated
courtesy of some scandal or gimmick.

It seems a bit low-rent for M&S. If it really wanted to run with someone who’d been in the papers a lot, it would’ve had more success having its campaign fronted by the bloodied corpse of Muammar Gaddafi. Beats a dog’s head.

Imagine, if you will, that instead of reading this garbage, you’re enjoying an exciting night out at the theatre. You take your seat and, after a few minutes, the curtain rises – but something’s wrong. The actors look decidedly squat. Stretched out horizontally. Their faces smeared to almost double their usual width.

Come to think of it, the set also looks wrong – as if it’s reflected in a funhouse mirror. The whole thing makes you feel nauseous
and slightly drunk. You look at your hand, which appears normal, then back at the stage – which still looks strange.

You glance around the auditorium in distress, only to discover your fellow audience members – also normal – don’t even appear to have noticed. They’re all happily following the on-stage action, apparently oblivious to the bizarre optical illusion taking place before their very eyes.

Confused, you stumble out into the lobby where, as luck would have it, you bump into an usher. You explain what’s wrong and beg him to help. But he merely shrugs and asks: ‘Does it matter?’

Obviously, that’s a mad scenario. But that’s the sort of thing that happens in cinemas these days, when there’s only one
projectionist
looking after umpteen screens.

The encounter with the usher actually happened to someone I know. And to answer the usher’s question: yes, it does matter. Because if your cinema can’t be bothered to show films properly, we might as well stay home and watch dogs blowing off on YouTube. The image might be blocky, but there’s less chance of catching listeria from a hotdog while watching it. And, with any luck, it’ll have been uploaded in the correct aspect ratio.

Did I say ‘aspect ratio’? Yes I did. And if you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, there’s a very good chance your television at home is set to the wrong aspect ratio, in which case I’d like you to stop reading right now and punch yourself hard in the kidneys.

There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who don’t have any problem with watching things that are randomly stretched or squashed, and decent human beings who still have standards.

Seriously, anyone who wilfully spends hours basking in front of a TV upon which every scene, every object, every face is monstrously distorted clearly has such a slovenly lack of
self-respect
, I’d be surprised if they bother to wipe after going to the toilet – assuming they still use a toilet, that is. To be honest, they
probably just go right there on the sofa.

What’s wrong with you people? Why have you given up?

You may say I’m a pedant – but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will live as one. Please note, however, that my vision of global harmony is presented in a 16:9 aspect ratio. And if you don’t know what that means, you’d better find out quickly, before the stormtroopers come for you. Hurry. They’re peering through your letterbox right now.

That last line was an aspect ratio joke you’re not geeky enough to get. See how you’re missing out?

Still, if you choose to punish your own eyeballs in your own home with your own incorrectly adjusted television, at least you’re only hurting yourself, whereas cinemas which lazily fart films at the screen without checking they’re even the right way up are displaying naked contempt for a roomful of innocent strangers paying for the privilege.

Years ago I saw the film
Downfall
at a local multiplex. During the final act, the picture suddenly went out of whack, so Hitler’s forehead was at the bottom of the screen and his moustache was at the top. Turns out it’s hard to take Hitler seriously when that’s happening.

After a few minutes of this, people started calling for the
projectionist
to sort it out. But nothing happened. After ten minutes, someone went to get the manager. After about twenty minutes, the problem was sorted out – at a guess, because the reel changed automatically. When the film ended and the credits rolled (miraculously, the right way up the screen), I tried to complain to the manager, only to find myself talking to an oppressed
ticket-ripper
, who explained, wearily, that despite having about twelve auditoriums, they only had one projectionist, who had to run between screens like a man spinning plates.

‘Why don’t you hire more projectionists?’ I asked.

He just looked at me, trapped and helpless, as another paying customer came over to complain.

If you ask me, every screen should have its own projectionist, as well as an usherette, an organist, a conductor, and a sniper trained to blow the heads off anyone who dares open their mouth after the titles start.

That was about six years ago. Today if you go to the cinema, you’re slightly less likely to be subjected to that kind of error if they’re using a digital projector, in which case there’s probably no projectionist at all, just some kind of iPad app flickering in the darkness.

Fortunately, there’s a chance the film will still be ruined by your fellow audience members, who will loudly field phone calls throughout, because they’re selfish dunces with no concentration span, reared in a modern world with no respect for the correct way of approaching any piece of filmed work, even if it’s
Transformers 3
, which is this: either watch it properly, in the correct aspect ratio and in absolute silence, or get out of the room and go home, where a galaxy of smudgy, twenty-eight-second YouTube videos awaits you with cold, open arms.

2011 was a hectic year – so hectic it required its own language. Phrases such as ‘Lulzsec’, ‘phone hacking’ and ‘Wendi Deng’ suddenly became common currency. But why hasn’t anyone printed a handy cut-out-and-keep handbook explaining what all this stuff means? Well, actually, they have. And you’re already reading it. Shut up and keep going as we start our guide to the Buzzwords of 2011.

Stop thinking about actual sock puppets with buttons for eyes and so on. We’re talking about internet ‘sock puppets’ here: in other words, people pretending to be someone else on the
internet in order to win an argument – or, in the case of Amina Arraf, Syrian lesbian blogger, to further a cause. Amina’s blog was held up as an inspiration – until ‘she’ was revealed to be a forty-year-old student from the University of Edinburgh. Adding to the confusion, days later, one of the editors of a lesbian website that had promoted Amina’s blog also turned out to be a man.

It was a bit like the end of
Some Like it Hot.
Some began to suspect that lesbians, like leprechauns, might not actually exist at all. Fortunately, Channel 5 soon scotched these rumours with a docusoap set in a lesbian bar. Speaking of which …

Once upon a time we had docusoaps. Now we have
The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea
and
Desperate Scousewives
– and what do they have in common? No, apart from that.

That’s right! They’re all ‘structured reality’ shows. ‘Structured reality’ essentially means ‘not quite real’: the people featured in the show are actual people, with actual thoughts and feelings and relationships and kidneys and anuses and so on, but the situations they find themselves in for the purposes of the show are slightly massaged into position by the producers. In other words, they’re told to stand in a particular spot and toss a glass of wine over their boyfriend because he cheated on them in last week’s episode.

Christ. Imagine if that was your life.

But it isn’t your life. You’re just watching it. And when you tune in to a structured-reality show you, the viewer, are actively choosing to spend sixty minutes watching a glossy-looking soap opera performed by non-actors half-improvising a non-script. It’s precisely like a scene from an old-school porn film in which a plumber and a frustrated housewife trade clunky dialogue, but with better lighting and no onscreen sex. Speaking of which …

Throughout the latter part of the year, every economist was debating one issue: would the eurozone collapse? Or crumble? Or melt down and dribble into an abyss? No one could decide which combination of words best described the inevitable impending disaster.

Eventually they gave up and simply started screaming. In a bid to distract them, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy stood beside each other at press conferences and made reassuring cooing noises.

Ever since Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were rechristened ‘Bennifer’ (100 years ago, in 1982), any two proximate individuals appearing in a newspaper must have their names combined by law. Sometimes it catches on (‘Brangelina’) and sometimes it sorta catches on (e.g.
Big Brother
twins ‘Samanda’; famous until toppled by ‘Jedward’), but it’s rarely used in broadsheets (
referring
to ‘the killings of Frose West’ is expressly forbidden by the
Guardian
’s style guide).

‘Merkozy’, however, was a fun nickname even the driest business news section could print without blushing (although in the case of the
FT
it was hard to tell). What did ‘Merkozy’ actually mean? Nothing. But it provided light relief from all that depressing stuff about bond yields. Speaking of which …

Approximately 10,000 cryptic economic phrases suddenly popped up in news reports this year, nonchalantly bandied about as if the viewer knew what they meant. It was all ‘bond yield’ this and ‘sovereign debt’ that. Impenetrable. At one point, numbers were given ‘haircuts’. That’s like something out of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds or a Spike Milligan poem. No wonder the economy’s in such a mess.

If something can’t be described in plain English, maybe you shouldn’t base an entire society on it. Just saying. As it is, the
whole thing’s been a pointless endeavour. Speaking of which …

The widespread distribution of camera-studded smartphones has led humankind to experiment with things it had never bothered attempting before, ‘planking’ being a prime example. This was a short-lived craze that involved posing for a photograph while lying face-down in a rigid plank-like position.

A game of planking one-upmanship quickly swept the internet, with plankers planking in increasingly perilous locations (e.g. balanced on hotel balconies, atop mountains, within the hearts of collapsing stars, etc.) until clumsiness took over and people started toppling off things and dying. Oh, how the laughter dried in our throats. We thought it was harmless fun. But God had other plans.

Recently killed plankers whose bodies hadn’t been carted away yet could always save face by pretending to have invented ‘stiffing’ – lying on the ground being authentically dead.

Sadly ‘stiffing’ failed to take off as a meme until Muammar Gaddafi did it in October, creating front-page news in the process. If only he’d found a way to monetise the craze, he’d have been loaded. But he didn’t. Because he was dead. Speaking of which…

Toppling leaders was all the rage in 2011 as people across the Arab world collectively decided they’d had just about enough of this bullshit. To the casual TV viewer, the Arab spring was initially confusing: previously, whenever the news showed you footage of furious Arabs marching in the streets, they were chanting ‘Death to the West’ or burning effigies of John Barrowman or
something
. Now suddenly they were the good guys, and their despised dictatorial leaders were the bad guys – but the news hadn’t really bothered explaining who these bad guys were before.

The Tunisian president’s a ruthless tyrant, you say? Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?

It was as if these Arab despots had only just landed on the planet, like the intergalactic megabaddies from
Superman II,
and the news was playing catchup. We didn’t know their names or what they looked like, or have much of a clue as to why they were unpopular – unless, like Colonel Gaddafi, they’d previously done something awful to us, in which case we’d not only cheer from the sidelines, but also lend air support.

Basically, in terms of narrative, things hadn’t been set up clearly enough during the first act. Come on, news: you really must try harder to explain this stuff. Speaking of which …

This year scientists got one step closer to confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, aka the ‘God Particle’. Prior to the breakthrough, only scientists knew what the Higgs boson was. Afterwards, once the news had patiently explained it to everyone on the planet, only scientists knew what the Higgs boson was.

Like all complex scientific ideas, I find the concept of the Higgs boson hard to grasp for more than three minutes at a time. You can explain it to me, and I’ll understand it, really I will, but the moment you walk away, the knowledge starts invisibly drifting out of my head. I call this mysterious phenomenon – by which I shift from ignorance to enlightenment, and then back to ignorance – the Brooker Gap. When are scientists going to look into that phenomenon? Never.

CB is walking through a dilapidated ghost town, ranting to camera.

CHARLIE
: Throughout the year, the global economy was in a state of perpetual crisis. It was the most boring apocalypse ever. Numbergeddon. At least I
understood
nuclear war.