Read Online Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Charlie Brooker
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insincerity with every glance, each gentle dismissal of a shivering tune-dodger followed up with a deadpan backstage barb regarding their overall worthlessness.
And he’s right: most are rubbish. Of the instant losers, the boys in particular all appeared identical – each resembling an anxious Dixons trainee moving limply in for the kill on a damp Saturday afternoon. The girls at least displayed emotion by bursting into tears and shouting bleepwords at the moment of jettison.
(How come winners and losers alike deem it necessary to adopt the same hideous homogenised transatlantic ‘singing voice’ when they perform? You know the one – Robbie Williams uses it permanently, and it knocks all the soul from a tune with the brutal efficiency of a carpet-beater.)
Yes, Popstars is pretty mindless; yes, it’s yet another programme that insists on treating the canon of Ronan Keating/Robbie Williams/Celine Dion with wholly undeserved respect, and yes it’s exploitative, but hoo, boy – can’t you feel the SADISM?
Despise the aforementioned megastars? Then tune in to this week’s instalment, as several hundred fame-chasers have their dreams bent, shattered, cracked and pissed on by Nigel and co. – then televised for the whole world to see? Yuk yuk!
And when the final five are in place, we can settle down to some agony and in-fighting. Then slag off their records together.
Right there’s where they start paying. In sweat.
Out in the Digital Neverwhere [20 January]
Anyone who enjoys watching sport on television is an imbecile; a dangle-mouthed, cud-chewing, salivating ding-dong with a brain full of dim piss, blobbing out in front of a box watching a grunting thicko knock a ball round a field while their own sad carcass gently coagulates into a wobbling mass of beer and fat and thick white heart-attack gravy.
That’s my opinion anyway, which is why I wasn’t the slightest bit annoyed when Sky began gulping up all the major sporting events, whisking them away from the terrestrial networks to be sealed inside a trio of peek-a-boo pay channels I’d be perfectly happy to hurl at the moon. The less sport on mainstream TV the better – it leaves more room for truly entertaining stuff, like comedy.
Except it doesn’t. To the terrestrial audience, comedy’s turned invisible. Oh, it’s still being made all right, but it’s lurking off the corner of your screen, out in the digital neverwhere with the sport and the pop and the documentaries about skirting boards. New comedy is getting banished to the wilderness of cable and satellite, where it’s forced to fight over scraps until it’s considered mighty and strong enough to be allowed back inside Terrestrial Kingdom.
This is the age of the ‘feed channel’ – digital offshoots of major networks that nurture and develop new shows until they’re ready to be broadcast by the mothership. BBC Choice, ITV2 and the freshly minted E4 all function as feeders to some extent. A good idea? Well, yes and no.
Case in point: Attention, Scum on BBC Choice; perhaps the finest title for any television programme ever, and a potentially brilliant show clearly handicapped by a restrictive budget. It stars Simon Munnery (as the League Against Tedium), using a relentless multimedia lecture to remorselessly bully laughs from your mouth inthe manner of a SWAT team tossing tear gas through a window to force a suspect into the line of fire.
And at first, it’s thrilling – stark captions declare the viewer to be a teeny speck of awful nothing, while Munnery loudly demands that you ‘pay attention’. Cut to Munnery atop a transit van, bemusing passers-by with salvo after salvo of smart aphorisms and cheap jokes, bellowed like the commands of a terrifying robot god. Cut to a weird sketch with Kevin Eldon. Cut to some rude opera. Cut to a piece of wilfully crude quasi-animation, accompanied by another bellowed lecture. Cut back to the transit van. And so on and so on. After
And he’s right: most are rubbish. Of the instant losers, the boys in particular all appeared identical – each resembling an anxious Dixons trainee moving limply in for the kill on a damp Saturday afternoon. The girls at least displayed emotion by bursting into tears and shouting bleepwords at the moment of jettison.
(How come winners and losers alike deem it necessary to adopt the same hideous homogenised transatlantic ‘singing voice’ when they perform? You know the one – Robbie Williams uses it permanently, and it knocks all the soul from a tune with the brutal efficiency of a carpet-beater.)
Yes, Popstars is pretty mindless; yes, it’s yet another programme that insists on treating the canon of Ronan Keating/Robbie Williams/Celine Dion with wholly undeserved respect, and yes it’s exploitative, but hoo, boy – can’t you feel the SADISM?
Despise the aforementioned megastars? Then tune in to this week’s instalment, as several hundred fame-chasers have their dreams bent, shattered, cracked and pissed on by Nigel and co. – then televised for the whole world to see? Yuk yuk!
And when the final five are in place, we can settle down to some agony and in-fighting. Then slag off their records together.
Right there’s where they start paying. In sweat.
Out in the Digital Neverwhere [20 January]
Anyone who enjoys watching sport on television is an imbecile; a dangle-mouthed, cud-chewing, salivating ding-dong with a brain full of dim piss, blobbing out in front of a box watching a grunting thicko knock a ball round a field while their own sad carcass gently coagulates into a wobbling mass of beer and fat and thick white heart-attack gravy.
That’s my opinion anyway, which is why I wasn’t the slightest bit annoyed when Sky began gulping up all the major sporting events, whisking them away from the terrestrial networks to be sealed inside a trio of peek-a-boo pay channels I’d be perfectly happy to hurl at the moon. The less sport on mainstream TV the better – it leaves more room for truly entertaining stuff, like comedy.
Except it doesn’t. To the terrestrial audience, comedy’s turned invisible. Oh, it’s still being made all right, but it’s lurking off the corner of your screen, out in the digital neverwhere with the sport and the pop and the documentaries about skirting boards. New comedy is getting banished to the wilderness of cable and satellite, where it’s forced to fight over scraps until it’s considered mighty and strong enough to be allowed back inside Terrestrial Kingdom.
This is the age of the ‘feed channel’ – digital offshoots of major networks that nurture and develop new shows until they’re ready to be broadcast by the mothership. BBC Choice, ITV2 and the freshly minted E4 all function as feeders to some extent. A good idea? Well, yes and no.
Case in point: Attention, Scum on BBC Choice; perhaps the finest title for any television programme ever, and a potentially brilliant show clearly handicapped by a restrictive budget. It stars Simon Munnery (as the League Against Tedium), using a relentless multimedia lecture to remorselessly bully laughs from your mouth inthe manner of a SWAT team tossing tear gas through a window to force a suspect into the line of fire.
And at first, it’s thrilling – stark captions declare the viewer to be a teeny speck of awful nothing, while Munnery loudly demands that you ‘pay attention’. Cut to Munnery atop a transit van, bemusing passers-by with salvo after salvo of smart aphorisms and cheap jokes, bellowed like the commands of a terrifying robot god. Cut to a weird sketch with Kevin Eldon. Cut to some rude opera. Cut to a piece of wilfully crude quasi-animation, accompanied by another bellowed lecture. Cut back to the transit van. And so on and so on. After
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