Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker Page A
Authors: Charlie Brooker
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, Television, Television programs, Television personalities
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goonish presenter Dan Rowland visits people using the Internet to further their love lives, expecting us to gaze in astonishment as though he’d uncovered a race of talking unicorns. Since the banal reality of a typical online romance (two parties aimlessly exchanging flirtatious e-mails) isn’t significantly salacious or peculiar, the show largely focuses on the predictable extremes – an unpleasant ageing Stringfellow type using the net to woo women, a lanky oddball with a cybersex addiction, and a fat man from Barnsley who married an American he met online, only to have her scarper back to the States a short while later.
Trouble is, not one of the assembled interfreaks is half as strange as Rowland himself, who perpetually gurns and mugs like a man sitting on his hands trying to stop a bee crawling up his nose, and has an incredibly annoying habit of facing the camera to raise an eyebrow whenever someone says something even vaguely risqué, which they manage to do approximately every six seconds.
His final visit brings him to a fetishwear convention with an incredibly tenuous online link (it’s advertised on the web – just like say, the Ideal Home Exhibition, which wouldn’t have made prurient viewing). By now utterly uninterested in talking about the Internet at all, he simply walks around pulling ‘oo-er’ faces at leatherwear and strap-ons until you feel like crawling into the screen to slap him back to normality.
As with the majority of programmes about hobbyists, the underlying attitude is one of cynical scoffing at saddos – but who’s the more tragic: the person using the Internet to communicate with a living, breathing person, or the bloated sofa-bound dunderhead who spent hundreds on a digital box, just to watch Dan Rowland jig around like a sneering marionette?
Westlife and Rain [23 December]
This year’s been a swindle. As a child the mere mention of ‘the year 2000’ conjured up images of people with purple hair piloting miniature bacofoil hovercraft round and round inside a gigantic doughnut-shaped space station. Yaay! Exciting! And what did we get? Westlife and rain. Thanks a bundle, history.
This year’s television has been particularly disappointing since the last few months of nigh-on uninterrupted drizzle have meant we’ve had little to do except sit indoors watching the box (or if you’re in a flooding hotspot, watching the box bob up and down).
And by God we must be bitter: this year’s most talked-about programmesall revolved around cynical voyeurism and mean-spirited in-fighting. The inescapable Big Brother flummoxed everyone by being both appealing and mesmerising at the same time, drawing a huge audience as it slowly whittled down ten cackling boredom-droids to one goon-eyed dum-dum. Craig’s elevation to hero status was always going to be short-lived the moment he stepped outside that rickety little house; hopelessly inarticulate, he’d have trouble explaining the price of a chisel in a B&Q commercial let alone wowing the crowd on a chat show – and besides, he doesn’t really do anything annoying, unless ‘having large biceps’ counts as a bona fide gimmick these days.
Still, at least he had the decency to donate his winnings to a worthy cause – the others would have blown the lot on jet-skis and fun. Next year they’re reportedly raising the stakes by dragging the contestants away from the isolation of the diary cupboard to vote one another out in a bad-tempered, face-to-face Judas session in the main living room. And come series three you’ll be able to go on the Internet and click a button to make the ceiling rain piss, while the ejection process will consist of effigy-burning and lethal injection.
The Weakest Link was a huge success, thanks to the simple device of letting Anne Robinson tell the contestants they were rubbish and stupid. Trouble is, they weren’t rubbish and stupid – the questions were often genuinely tricky. What we really want
Trouble is, not one of the assembled interfreaks is half as strange as Rowland himself, who perpetually gurns and mugs like a man sitting on his hands trying to stop a bee crawling up his nose, and has an incredibly annoying habit of facing the camera to raise an eyebrow whenever someone says something even vaguely risqué, which they manage to do approximately every six seconds.
His final visit brings him to a fetishwear convention with an incredibly tenuous online link (it’s advertised on the web – just like say, the Ideal Home Exhibition, which wouldn’t have made prurient viewing). By now utterly uninterested in talking about the Internet at all, he simply walks around pulling ‘oo-er’ faces at leatherwear and strap-ons until you feel like crawling into the screen to slap him back to normality.
As with the majority of programmes about hobbyists, the underlying attitude is one of cynical scoffing at saddos – but who’s the more tragic: the person using the Internet to communicate with a living, breathing person, or the bloated sofa-bound dunderhead who spent hundreds on a digital box, just to watch Dan Rowland jig around like a sneering marionette?
Westlife and Rain [23 December]
This year’s been a swindle. As a child the mere mention of ‘the year 2000’ conjured up images of people with purple hair piloting miniature bacofoil hovercraft round and round inside a gigantic doughnut-shaped space station. Yaay! Exciting! And what did we get? Westlife and rain. Thanks a bundle, history.
This year’s television has been particularly disappointing since the last few months of nigh-on uninterrupted drizzle have meant we’ve had little to do except sit indoors watching the box (or if you’re in a flooding hotspot, watching the box bob up and down).
And by God we must be bitter: this year’s most talked-about programmesall revolved around cynical voyeurism and mean-spirited in-fighting. The inescapable Big Brother flummoxed everyone by being both appealing and mesmerising at the same time, drawing a huge audience as it slowly whittled down ten cackling boredom-droids to one goon-eyed dum-dum. Craig’s elevation to hero status was always going to be short-lived the moment he stepped outside that rickety little house; hopelessly inarticulate, he’d have trouble explaining the price of a chisel in a B&Q commercial let alone wowing the crowd on a chat show – and besides, he doesn’t really do anything annoying, unless ‘having large biceps’ counts as a bona fide gimmick these days.
Still, at least he had the decency to donate his winnings to a worthy cause – the others would have blown the lot on jet-skis and fun. Next year they’re reportedly raising the stakes by dragging the contestants away from the isolation of the diary cupboard to vote one another out in a bad-tempered, face-to-face Judas session in the main living room. And come series three you’ll be able to go on the Internet and click a button to make the ceiling rain piss, while the ejection process will consist of effigy-burning and lethal injection.
The Weakest Link was a huge success, thanks to the simple device of letting Anne Robinson tell the contestants they were rubbish and stupid. Trouble is, they weren’t rubbish and stupid – the questions were often genuinely tricky. What we really want
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