I can make you hate (6 page)

The insomniac brain comes in various flavours; different
personality
types you’re forced to share your skull with for several hours. It’s like being trapped in a lift with someone who won’t shut up. Sometimes your companion is a peppy irritant who passes the time by humming half-remembered TV theme tunes until 7 a.m. Other times it’s a morose critic who has recently compiled a 1,500-page report on your innumerable failings and wants to run over it with you a few times before going to print. Worst of all is the hyper-aware sportscaster who offers an uninterrupted commentary describing which bits of your body are currently the least comfortable. No matter where you put that leg, he won’t be satisfied. And he’s convinced you’ve got one arm too many.

This is the point at which ‘sleep lessons’ might actually come in handy. Not when you’re a kid (they’ll only baffle you), but when you’re an adult who spends several hours each night staring at the inside of your eyelids, exploring desolate inner dimensions on a rickety mental tricycle. That’s when you need all the help you can get.

But practical tips only, please. No one needs to be told how important it is for your health. We’ve all experienced the
aftermath
of a sleepless night. You shuffle through the next day feeling fuzzily toxic, as though all your internal organs have been for a twenty-mile run and haven’t had a hot bath yet. I’ve got a phrase for it: ‘time-poisoning’.

Anyway, in a bid to pre-empt the health professionals, here’s a list of insomnia ‘dos and don’ts’ guaranteed to give you a good night’s sleep:

DO
keep your eyes closed.

DON
’
T
try to convince yourself you’re asleep by making snoring noises.

DO
focus on slowing your breathing down as much as possible. A handy tip is to imagine there’s a speed camera pointing at your face; a magic speed camera that can photograph air. If you inhale or exhale too quickly, it’ll fire a sharpened steel bolt into your forehead. Keep thinking about this all night.

DON
’
T
go to bed wearing a makeshift crown fashioned from coat-hangers and bells – and if you do, don’t sit upright violently shaking your head from side to side until sunrise.

DO
keep the ‘worrying cells’ of your brain occupied. Playing simple word games in your head is an excellent tactic. If it helps, imagine you’re a contestant on
Countdown
, but try not to picture the gigantic clock looming behind you on the studio wall, with its huge sweeping hand marking the frantic passage of time, its hideous unbroken sweep impassively signifying the silent extinction of second after second; the hand that describes an arc; an arc that becomes a circle; a circle that becomes a spiral; a spiral that mirrors your twisting descent as you corkscrew downwards through time itself, plunging ever deeper into a void of meaningless decay. If you start thinking about that, quickly interrupt yourself by imagining the presenter throwing to a break.

DON
’
T
stay in bed if you haven’t fallen asleep within thirty minutes. Instead, get up and do something practical, such as driving a car or operating some heavy machinery.

DO
drink nine litres of warm milk before bed.

There. Simple. And if none of that works, eat some drugs, use a different pillow, or saw your head off and stick it on a pole made of lullabies. Piece of piss.

Next week: how to solve the Iranian nuclear crisis.

I don’t want to claim I predicted the state of modern television in its entirety almost a decade ago or anything, but around ten years ago I wrote a website called
TV Go Home
filled with satirically exaggerated programmes, many of which have come frighteningly true.

Here’s the latest example. In its
TV Go Home
incarnation, ‘Masturbation Minefield’ was a pornographic game aimed at lonely male viewers: a show which consisted of rude footage (such as a naked dairymaid bending over) randomly interspersed with profoundly unerotic imagery (such as an extreme close-up of Ian Beale’s eye staring straight through the centre of your soul). It was a lo-fi interactive challenge: could the viewer achieve climax during the ‘rude’ bits without being put off by the ‘unerotic’ bits?

A puerile idea, but there you go. At least it wasn’t real.

I lie. The new television show
Pants Off Dance Off
is essentially ‘Masturbation Minefield’ with one or two tweaks. The premise is as simple as its intended audience: ordinary members of the public dance to music while taking their clothes off. It’s a striptease show. But, lest they be accused of peddling sordid pornography, the producers have cunningly included enough ‘mines’ to ensure that only the most determined psychopath could possibly manipulate their way to fruition.

First of all, the strippers themselves are self-avowedly ‘zany’ types: real yelping, whooping, jumping-up-and-down-
and-clapping
‘I’m-mad-me’ irritants. Not only is it impossible to get turned on in their presence, it’s impossible to assign them any human emotion whatsoever. If, instead of stripping, the
programme
showed them being injected with sedatives and dropped out of the back of a C-130 Hercules flying 20,000 feet above the Nevada desert, it would actually be easier to masturbate to.

Next, neatly sidestepping accusations of body fascism, they’ve
chosen a wide variety of figures from both sexes. Fat ones, thin ones, hairy ones, ones whose faces are so disturbing they look like Steve Buscemi with Bell’s palsy pressing his nose against your bathroom window … all human life is here, apart from anyone you actually want to see naked. Occasionally they’ll feature a Chippendale type or a lapdancer, but to stop this being arousing, they’ll make a little window pop up, in which the next stripper (inevitably a 64-year-old man with a nose like a thumped glans) dribbles something about how they can’t wait to show you their bum.

But they’re not finished yet. There’s still an outside chance you might be excited by the occasional shot of exposed flank, so just to nail that possibility to the floor and stove its face in with a jackboot, there’s a kerrr-azy joke-filled voiceover yapping away in the background, which outstays its welcome at the first syllable. It’s not very funny. In fact, if they replaced it with the soundtrack to one of Michael Buerk’s 1984 Ethiopian famine reports, wailing children and all, there’d be 30 per cent more laughs.

Finally, they’ve cut out the actual nudity. Yes, you read that right:
THEY’VE CUT OUT THE ACTUAL NUDITY
. Instead, every time someone actually takes their ‘pants off’ (which, after all, is the entire purpose of the show), the action freezes and a URL pops up to protect their modesty. In other words, they’re encouraging their audience to stop watching the show and go online instead, which must make the channel’s advertisers very happy.

The website, incidentally, doesn’t contain uncensored
strip-teases
either. But never mind! I’m told you can find footage of people actually taking their clothes off – and occasionally doing racier stuff, like kissing – elsewhere on the internet.

In summary:
Pants Off Dance Off
takes the concept of striptease, and removes both the ‘strip’ and the ‘tease’. That’s not a show, that’s a vacuum. Worst of all, it’s not even amusingly trashy. It’s a load of energy expended for nothing. Just like masturbation itself. But less noble.

NB: This was a review of a real programme. Just worth pointing that out
.

Don’t know about you, but sometimes I can’t sleep at night for wondering what it might be like if Gary Glitter were executed. I just can’t picture it in quite enough detail for my liking. Would they fry him? Gas him? Or pull his screaming head off with some candy-coloured rope? I can never decide, and it often leaves me restless till sunrise. Thank God, then, for
The Execution of Gary Glitter
, which vividly envisions the trial and subsequent capital punishment of pop’s most reviled sex offender so you don’t have to.

I can’t believe what I’m typing: this is a drama-documentary that imagines a world in which Britain has a) reinstated the death penalty for murder and paedophilia, b) changed the law so Britons can stand trial in this country for crimes committed abroad, and c) chosen Gary Glitter as its first test case. It blends archive footage, talking-head interviews with Miranda Sawyer, Garry Bushell and Ann Widdecombe, and dramatised scenes in which Gary Glitter is led into an execution chamber and hanged by the neck until dead.

He’s not just swinging from a rope, mind. The Glitterphile is all over this show, like Hitler in
Downfall
. There are lengthy scenes in which he argues with his lawyer, smirks in court, plays chess with the prison chaplain, weeps on the floor of his cell, etc. Visually, we’re talking late-period Glitter, with the evil wizard shaved-head-and-elongated-white-goatee combo that makes him resemble a sick alternative Santa. It would be funnier if they showed him decked out in full seventies glam gear throughout, being led to the gallows in a big spangly costume with shoulder pads so huge they get stuck in the hole as he plunges through.
I assumed the Glittercution would feature dry ice, disco lights, and a hundred party poppers going off as his neck cracked. But here there’s not so much as a can of Silly String. This is a terribly serious programme.

Yes. It’s illegal to laugh at this, see; it’s not a comedy show, but ‘an intelligent and thought-provoking examination of the issue’ which ‘confronts viewers with the possible consequences of capital punishment in the UK’. There’s going to be an online debate afterwards and everything, which should help clear up all our thoughts about the death penalty. Let’s face it, none of us really knew where we stood until we were ‘confronted’ by the sight of Gary Glitter staring wretchedly at an expectant noose. It really crystallised things, y’know? Before, I always thought of hanging as an abstract, faraway event existing only in ancient woodcuts or the minds of passing clouds. This makes it so much more real. My sincere thanks, Channel 4, for the searing moral clarity I’ve been granted. By the way, is the real Gary Glitter going to be taking part in that online debate thing afterwards? That’d be awesome.

What with this and the previous
Killing of George Bush
drama-doc
a few years ago, the Channel 4 family is establishing itself as the home of thought-provoking celebrity death fantasies. Now they’ve whacked a president and strangled a paedo, what next? How about a two-hour drama-documentary that wonders what Britain might look like if al-Qaida attacked the Baftas? Lots of detailed close-up slow-motion shots of bullets blasting through the ribcages of absolutely everyone off
Coronation Street
, that kind of thing. It’d really kick-start that debate about terrorism we’re all gasping for. Perhaps it could solve it altogether.

Or what about a mini-series showing what’d happen if you kidnapped a bunch of newsreaders and
X Factor
contestants and kept them on a remote island and glued masks on their faces and fed them LSD and MDMA for two years until they started killing each other and rutting the corpses and shoving bits of
blunt stick in their eye sockets and howling at the sun? That’d help society explore its relationship with authority, celebrity, identity, controlled substances, sex, violence and sticks. And God knows we need to. Help us, Channel 4. Guide us. You’re our moral compass. You’re our only hope.

As a child, I never pictured the adult ‘me’ journeying to other planets and having a fantastic time of it. Instead I pictured myself dying in a nuclear inferno. The future me was a screaming skeleton decorated with chunks of carbonised flesh and the
occasional
sizzling hair. Not really someone you’d have round for dinner.

Still, at least my premonition suggested I’d live an exciting life, albeit a short one. The reality is less spectacular. I never pictured myself as I was last week: a fully grown adult: alive, yet slowly losing the will to live while attempting to buy a washing machine from a high-street electrical retailer.

Let’s be clear about this. Buying a washing machine is not the stuff dreams are made of. It’s not a device you’re going to fall in love with. It’s a white box with a round mouth you shove dirty pants into. Hardly a new member of the family, unless you’re a troupe of extreme performance artists.

Buying a mobile phone is easier than buying a washing machine because some phones have the decency to look ugly, thereby simplifying the decision-making process. Washing machines all look the same. Some eat bigger loads or have a more complex array of pre-wash options: whoopee doo. Some doubtless perform better than others: I wouldn’t know. Bet it’s all a con. Bet there’s
only one type of washing machine in the world, and they’re all shipped from the same warehouse in slightly different packaging and sold at randomly generated prices.

I buy washing machines the same way I order wine in a restaurant: avoid the very cheapest on the basis that it’ll be nasty, avoid the second cheapest on the basis that it’s probably even worse, avoid the expensive options at the top of the list on the basis that they can’t possibly be worth it, and wind up randomly picking something from the middle instead.

Just to make you feel even more uncertain about buying one, they don’t have proper names. Once you strip the familiar
manufacturer
trademarks away, all you’re left with is a meaningless series of model numbers chosen specifically to confuse you. Did you order a BD4437BX or a BD3389BZ? Face it: you have no idea. Ring up to place an order and it sounds as if you’re discussing chemical weapon formulae.