Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn (22 page)

PART THREE 2002 

 

 

In which Jonathan King takes umbrage, Jack Bauer watches
the clock, and Uri Geller eats worms in the jungle
.

 

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Yes everybody, but everybody goes to the toilet now and again. Even the Queen does, although it’s hard to imagine her wooden expression ever changes, even if she’s constipated.

But, so the cliché goes, you rarely get to see people going to the toilet on television. You’d never witness, say, Phil from
EastEnders
, sitting resplendent on the throne (although that’s probably because when he needs to go he just gets down on all fours in the middle of the street and lets it drop casually out the back, like a horse).

For too long, broadcasters have been afraid to confront the harsh reality of bodily functions head-on, but there’s recently been some headway, notably from the Americans – first they set half the action in
Ally McBeal
in a unisex toilet, then followed it up with a truly spectacular open-door bathroom sequence in last week’s
Sex and
the City
. Now, in the spirit of solidarity, and to show support for this new world order, the British are following suit with
Toilets
(BBC Choice), an entire series about all things lavatorial, hosted by walking seal-of-quality Claudia Winkleman.

Isn’t it exciting, living in a renaissance?

This week’s edition is concerned with how to go to the toilet. Subsequently, it’s jam-packed with information that absolutely everyone on the planet knows already. Here are just a few of the startling revelations uncovered.

Revelation #1:
Men behave strangely at urinals
.

According to the programme’s exhaustive research, when having a tinkle, men eschew conversation entirely and concentrate instead on staring dead ahead like unfazed shop-window dummies. It then goes on to explain how peeing alongside one another gives some men the jitters, to the extent they dry up completely and have to stand in silent humiliation until the room empties and emission resumes.

What it fails to say is that, for a sure-fire cure for this kind of urinal stage fright, you have to look to the world of contemporary literature,
specifically Nicholson Baker’s
The Mezzanine
, in which the narrator explains how he overcomes his pee-pee nerves by picturing himself urinating on to the face and head of the person standing next to him. The astonishing thing is that this tactic actually works – precisely the kind of useful information this programme could have done with.

Revelation #2:
Men’s toilets are dirty; women’s toilets are clean
.

Now there’s a surprise. Most public gents’ look like the aftermath of a water-pistol fight at an incontinence convention. By contrast, women’s toilets are kept ultra-clean, generally resembling a cinematic vision of an eerily anodyne future society.

There’s the glimmer of some useful information during this section – a writer advises men appalled by the cave-like funk of public conveniences to nip into the disabled loos instead, on the grounds that they’re spacious and clean. Plus it’s easy to barge past the cripples on your way in.

Revelation #3:
People don’t like other people overhearing their
‘noises’ – so they cough, flush, or run taps loudly in a bid to disguise
them
.

Perfectly understandable this, because the moment your backside starts misbehaving loudly, you feel entirely stripped of all nobility – although in my experience, that’s a very British trait. The Americans don’t seem to suffer from it – on several occasions I’ve found myself standing in stateside craphouses reeling with amazement as cubicled rows of clean-cut, Gillette-model businessmen nonchalantly unleash a truly thunderous din – a choir of coughing rectums accompanied by the sound of plummeting mud. And as for the French – well, they’re currently lobbying the Olympic Committee to make loud, undignified defecation a team sport.

Revelation #4:
People used to wipe their bums on old bits of corn
on the cob
.

To give the show its dues, this did come as a genuine surprise.

So there you have it. I can’t help thinking there’s a good show to be made out of lavatories (perhaps a
Scrapheap Challenge
special), but sadly, this ain’t it. Rather than providing any real insight into precisely why we’re so anal about our anuses (as C4’s
Anatomy of Disgust
did last year), it seems content to simply reiterate obvious facts, in the manner of a particularly uninformative retrospective ‘I Love’ nostalgia blast. Perhaps they should have called it ‘I Love Going Plop-Plop’ instead, and given us a clearer idea of what to expect.

That’s it. Now wash your hands.

When the shit hits the fan, you’ll wish you’d seen
Ray Mears’
Extreme Survival
(BBC2). Sitting in an irradiated wasteland, longing to snare, skin and spit-roast a passing mutant rat – if only you knew how – you’ll pause and kick yourself for not having paid attention while Ray was on our screens.

So why didn’t you? Answer: because on the evidence of this week’s edition,
Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival
is actually rather boring, that’s why. So if you don’t tune in then maybe one day you’ll starve to death up a hillside in a tent clutching a tin of beans and no can opener, but at least you enjoyed slightly more entertaining television before death swooped down to snatch you away.

Perhaps I expect too much, but when I see the word ‘extreme’ in a programme title, extreme is what I want. But this feels decidedly softcore. For starters, Ray looks more like a plump village butcher than a weather-beaten survivalist. I was hoping for more macho excitement – even some brutality perhaps. I wanted to see Ray snap the head off a swan, then use its beak to jemmy open a coconut. But no. Instead he seems to spend half his time trudging around New England, setting up tents and making tedious little fires. That may be survival, but it sure ain’t living, and having spent many a miserable, uncomfortable night under canvas myself, I for one would sooner die than ever go camping again.

Still, in case you find yourself stranded in an emergency situation this week – marooned in your living room with the remote control out of reach and Ray Mears on the box – here’s some tips on how to survive the programme itself:

1) Drink strong coffee. 2) Sit with your arms folded, staring straight ahead at the screen. 3) When your attention starts to flag,
simply imagine the programme is more exciting – and if that fails, try glancing at a more interesting object in the room for a few minutes (a rolled-up sock or coffee cup should do the trick) until you feel ready to leap back in.

Still thirsting for macho kicks, I was forced to take a look at
Have
-
a-Go Heroes
(BBC1), a pop-doc blend of real-life stories and psychobabble aimed squarely at the Tony Martin in all of us. The best bits are the almost shamefully unpleasant candid-camera stunts, designed to test the public’s willingness to intervene when crimes appear to happen beneath their noses. Early on, two actors feign a road-rage incident in the middle of Primrose Hill, tossing each other around the pavement, swearing and swiping at one another in an increasingly violent manner.

If Ray Mears were in the vicinity he could doubtless fashion an impromptu bow and arrow out of some nearby railings and put an end to the carnage, but sadly he wasn’t available. Instead, the fight takes place before an audience of gawping pedestrians, with all but one unwilling to step in. Afterwards, the camera crew nose around asking the inert civilians to justify their apparent cowardice.

‘You just stand and watch, don’t you?’ says a man who did just that, before adding cheerfully that even if he’d lived in Ancient Rome he’d ‘still watch the Christians being burnt’.

Once the eye-popping stunt footage has spooled away, impossibly glamorous rent-a-shrink Dr Sandra Scott (as seen on
Big Brother
and – well, pretty much anything else that requires an impossibly glamorous rent-a-shrink) is on hand to provide the analysis, helpfully bothering to explain why passers-by are more likely to come to the aid of a young woman in smart clothing than a dishevelled man clutching a bottle of beer. (Apparently it’s because people make snap judgements about a person’s appearance – something Dr Sandra Scott, who resembles an icy Bond villainess, should know all about.)

This is an overlong show which runs out of steam about 100 years before the end, so in all likelihood you’ll have nodded off before the spectacular finale, in which the genuinely tragic tale of a man who died attempting to defend a stranger is turned into one
of the most jaw-droppingly mawkish pieces of television you’re ever likely to see. Do we really need to see staged shots of a murdered man’s son climbing a ladder in a bid to catch a glowing star representing his late father? Answer: no – but they went ahead and filmed them anyway. It was a taste crime in progress, and someone should have intervened – but all they did was stand and stare.

Q: When is nostalgia not nostalgia? A: When it’s set in the future. Which pretty much sums up
Enterprise
(Sky One), the latest mutated offspring of Gene Roddenberry’s original
Star
Trek
series, boldly going where countless men have gone before.

In the grand tradition of
The Phantom Menace
and, er,
Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom
,
Enterprise
is a ‘prequel’, set in the days before Captain Kirk hauled his paunch around the galaxy in search of strange new worlds and alien hippy chicks hungry for some Earth-man lovin’.

It’s a mixed bag. On the plus side, teleportation devices don’t appear to have been invented yet, so there’s no preposterous ‘beam me up’ nonsense on show. Nor is there any high-concept faffing around in a ‘holodeck’ to confuse matters. Instead the format is more stripped-down, more in tune with the easy-to-grasp original: visit alien planet; discover hostile species; teach them a lesson; kiss and make up; wave goodbye; captain’s log; the end.

All sounds good on paper. But there are drawbacks. The retro touches (old-fashioned phaser effects, endearing nods to the 1960s in the spaceship design, a female Spock) feel at odds with the up-to-date production values. And just to further muddy the general sense of what-era-is-this-anyway? they cast Quantum Leap time-hopper Scott Bakula in the lead role. Sensors indicate Bakula’s Captain Archer contains no character traits whatsoever; he simply walks around looking permanently constipated (presumably he’s having trouble producing the captain’s log).

Then there are the aliens, who in fine
Trek
tradition seem to be little more than humanoids with funny foreheads (generally
shaped like someone’s fired a handful of crab parts into their brow). In these days of CGI dinosaur fun, we deserve better than mere make-up – we want permanent crewmembers with the bodies of spiders and the heads of donkeys, sporting Jamiroquai hats.

And the theme music – Jesus. The worst kind of 1980s soft-metal wanking imaginable; a Gillette commercial from hell. I’m all for rock music in theme tunes – Channel Five’s CSI benefits greatly from having the Who play out over the credits, and if I were in charge
Newsnight
would open with an uninterrupted three-minute blast of Motorhead’s ‘Ace Of Spades’. But the makers of
Enterprise
have commissioned an absolute dirge, whose unironic presence betrays an inherent lack of wit at production level. Sure enough, the programme itself is far too humourless for its own good; overall, it’s got the feel of a bland motivational poster on the wall of a software house (you know the kind of thing: a photograph of some dolphins and a greetings-card motto extolling the virtues of teamwork – distract the worker ants with enough of them and you can reduce desktop wrist-slashings by 13 per cent a quarter).

Marginally more successful prequel confusion can be found in
Smallville
(C4) or ‘Superman: The Pubic Development Years’. Telling the tale of Clark Kent’s teenage existence – a sort of Dawson’s Kryptonite, if you like – it’s just as confusing as
Enterprise
in that it’s set firmly in the present day, when in your head it should all take place on the set of
Happy Days
.

Clark himself looks like a young Rob Lowe, and as befits the future man of steel, he’s nauseatingly pleasant. Any normal hyper-powered teenager would be abusing his abilities to pull off superhuman
Jackass
-style stunts – tossing live cows onto the roof of the local high school, that kind of thing – but namby-pamby Clark contents himself with tidying up at the speed of light and insipid do-gooding. Boo to that.