Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker

It’s mesmerising.
    The idea is simple: 25,000 hopefuls slowly whittled down to five band members while the camera looks on. If you’re tuning in tomorrow, I’m afraid you missed the final pruning, in which two wannabes got the chop in a hilariously cruel and drawn-out firing session. But don’t worry: tomorrow, as the chosen ones enter the recording studio, there’s still time to appreciate the show’s core appeal: the hateful insincerity of everyone involved.
    The five remaining ‘performers’ are a bunch of hissing Styrofoam meerkats desperately clawing over each other, craning their necks to suckle from the withered tit of fame; whining, mewling, preening, bitching – they coupart thrrldn’t be more dislikeable if they strode around in Nazi regalia firing nailguns at ponies. (Note to anyone working on a British version of Making the Band : stop what you’re doing right now. Just put your hands down and walk away. Please. Or there’ll be an uprising, and we’re talking heads-on-poles.)
    The music is nondescript, the band is called O-Town – the ‘O’ apparently stands for Orlando although it may well represent the ice-cold hollow zero lodged in the heart of this absolute shit.
    They should, of course, have used one of the following names instead: a) Puppet Squad, b) Edifice, c) Apocalypse Yo!, d) Attack of the Omen Five, e) Grinning Despair, f) Your Dreams Lie Crushed Beneath Us, or g) The Petri-dish Kids.
    One minute banging on about ‘living their dreams’ and ‘realising their destiny’, the next moaning about their workload, this is a tale of five repugnant egos. Every time they speak, every time their bleating little mouths pop open, you’ll feel like standing on your chair to hurl shoes at the screen. Artless gimps like this shouldn’t be on television or in the charts at all: they deserve to be locked in a cupboard with a gigantic genetically engineered mantis that’ll shift and itch and scratch its spiny little legs against their weeping faces, for a period of no less than sixteen thousand years.
    Still, don’t just take my word for it: tune in and learn to hate them yourself.

Cynical Scoffing at Saddos     [2 December]
     
    Here’s what watching TV will be like in the year 2006: you stroke a nubbin on the tip of a matchbook-sized mobile phone, and with a satisfying ‘schhhhick’ sound a gigantic plasma screen unfurls, covering the wall like a tapestry. Next, a huge holographic head rotates slowly in the centre of your living room, reading a list of your favourite programmes, while behind it in the screen it lists 19,000 stations catering for all conceivable interests, from the James Belushi Movie Channel (‘
Curly Sue
to
Red Heat
and back again, 247’) to the Santa Goose Hedge Pointer’s Network (‘ all people leaning over hedges to point at a goose dressed as Santa, all the time’).
    Having made your choice, the programme begins – except it isn’t a normal programme at all. No: thanks to ‘convergence’, it’s a magical cross between TV, the Internet and the most sophisticated arcade game you’ve ever seen. If you’re watching Ground Force 2006, for example, you’ll be able to push a button to digitally graft Alan Titchmarsh’s head onto the body of a dancing cat, and take potshots at it with a light gun, earning Amazon tokens for each paw you blow off.
    LSD users can do that already, of course, but until 2006 arrives the rest of us have to make do with the likes of BBC Choice’s E-Mail Weekend – a selection of programmes that ‘gives viewers a chance to browse through the ups and downs of online life’ and – oops – a few myths into the bargain.
    Alongside documentaries on cyber-talking, a simplistic and self-conscious comedy-drama ‘about communication, or rather miscommunication’ called Talk to Me (BBC Choice) and the unflinchingly realistic movie Weird Science (BBC Choice), lurks a series of 10-minute shorts called Looking 4 Love (BBC Choice), in which