Read Online Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Charlie Brooker
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, Television, Television programs, Television personalities
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of those. That is Keith Barron. Not Fargo again. Phonebox vandalism is a sport? Couldn’t eat a whole Poirot. Didn’t he used to be Kelly Monteith?
And so on and so on, until the programmes I contemplated have ended unseen, and I feel so empty inside you could screw a handle to my back and use me as a cupboard.
How long before my remote has a ‘random play’ feature that automatically carousels its way through every channel at a rate I can barely withstand? Or, if it’s truly attempting to mimic my viewing habits, repeatedly fiddles with the widescreen settings in an obsessive bid to fill as much of the screen as possible without rendering everything hopelessly horizontally elongated (am I the only person in the country who can’t watch 14:9 ratio broadcasts on a 16:9 screen without feeling drunk or irritable?).
Fuck progress. There’s too much choice and I’m sick of it. Take the extra channels away. Just leave me the regulation five.
And smash that remote while you’re at it. Let me stand up and prod when I want to flip sides. My muscles are turning to limpstrips of tripe and according to the Health Channel I must work out or die.
Multiplex Livestock [13 January]
Fame! They want to live for ever!
Who? Why, the glory-chasing wannabes of Popstars (ITV), of course – ITV’s prime-time approximation of Making the Band , ‘the boy band genesis’ documentary Channel 4 used to air on Sunday lunchtime; the show about which I said the following back in November: ‘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.’
And did they listen? No. The arrogance!
Still it’s here now, so we might as well get used to the idea, which is this: a trio of talent scouts tour the country auditioning an endless procession of potential teenage pop icons, slowly whittling them down from 16 billion amateur shriekers to five polished automatons, while we sit on the sofa enjoying the inevitable humiliation that occurs en route.
Two initial impressions. First: tragically, this is nowhere as hideous as Making the Band . Yet.
MTB centred exclusively on a dizzyingly hateful boy band full of preening Yank jockboys with names like Eric and Brett and Shunt and Testosterone Zitpop Jr. Popstars is packed with UK multiplex livestock rather than US mallrat scum. Plus it’s got girls in it. The final line-up is likely to consist of fresh-faced interchangeables called Sarah, Sandra, Lorraine, Simon and Tom, and it’s going to be far harder to get wound up by them, in the same way that getting annoyed by S Club 7 is a bit like waving your fist at a Lakeland Plastics catalogue.
Second, and more worryingly, some of the participants show signs of being genuinely likeable – such as Claire, the uncompromising chunky Scot with the powerful voice. In order to enjoy Popstars , the viewer should ignore any glimmer of congenialityemanating from a contestant at all costs. Concentrate on Darius, the slick-haired beanpole who manages to combine inarguably strong vocals with a nauseating overconfidence that makes you want to tattoo an indelible ‘kick me’ sign on his back, so that one day, years from now, a disaffected orderly in an old folks’ home will spot it during bath time and plant their foot so far up his arse it’ll get jammed between his vertebrae.
Still, at least he can sing, unlike the 18 zillion no-hopers rejected last week by Nigel Lythgoe, talent scout extraordinaire.
Ahh, Nigel. Glamour with its shirt tucked in. He looks like a man ordering gammon steak in a motorway service station. He looks like Eric Idle watching a dog drown. He’s got faintly sad eyes, the world’s least fashionable hair, and the complexion of a man who’s held his hair out the window of a speeding car for the past two days. Standing before the tide of wannabes, he exudes deflated
And so on and so on, until the programmes I contemplated have ended unseen, and I feel so empty inside you could screw a handle to my back and use me as a cupboard.
How long before my remote has a ‘random play’ feature that automatically carousels its way through every channel at a rate I can barely withstand? Or, if it’s truly attempting to mimic my viewing habits, repeatedly fiddles with the widescreen settings in an obsessive bid to fill as much of the screen as possible without rendering everything hopelessly horizontally elongated (am I the only person in the country who can’t watch 14:9 ratio broadcasts on a 16:9 screen without feeling drunk or irritable?).
Fuck progress. There’s too much choice and I’m sick of it. Take the extra channels away. Just leave me the regulation five.
And smash that remote while you’re at it. Let me stand up and prod when I want to flip sides. My muscles are turning to limpstrips of tripe and according to the Health Channel I must work out or die.
Multiplex Livestock [13 January]
Fame! They want to live for ever!
Who? Why, the glory-chasing wannabes of Popstars (ITV), of course – ITV’s prime-time approximation of Making the Band , ‘the boy band genesis’ documentary Channel 4 used to air on Sunday lunchtime; the show about which I said the following back in November: ‘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.’
And did they listen? No. The arrogance!
Still it’s here now, so we might as well get used to the idea, which is this: a trio of talent scouts tour the country auditioning an endless procession of potential teenage pop icons, slowly whittling them down from 16 billion amateur shriekers to five polished automatons, while we sit on the sofa enjoying the inevitable humiliation that occurs en route.
Two initial impressions. First: tragically, this is nowhere as hideous as Making the Band . Yet.
MTB centred exclusively on a dizzyingly hateful boy band full of preening Yank jockboys with names like Eric and Brett and Shunt and Testosterone Zitpop Jr. Popstars is packed with UK multiplex livestock rather than US mallrat scum. Plus it’s got girls in it. The final line-up is likely to consist of fresh-faced interchangeables called Sarah, Sandra, Lorraine, Simon and Tom, and it’s going to be far harder to get wound up by them, in the same way that getting annoyed by S Club 7 is a bit like waving your fist at a Lakeland Plastics catalogue.
Second, and more worryingly, some of the participants show signs of being genuinely likeable – such as Claire, the uncompromising chunky Scot with the powerful voice. In order to enjoy Popstars , the viewer should ignore any glimmer of congenialityemanating from a contestant at all costs. Concentrate on Darius, the slick-haired beanpole who manages to combine inarguably strong vocals with a nauseating overconfidence that makes you want to tattoo an indelible ‘kick me’ sign on his back, so that one day, years from now, a disaffected orderly in an old folks’ home will spot it during bath time and plant their foot so far up his arse it’ll get jammed between his vertebrae.
Still, at least he can sing, unlike the 18 zillion no-hopers rejected last week by Nigel Lythgoe, talent scout extraordinaire.
Ahh, Nigel. Glamour with its shirt tucked in. He looks like a man ordering gammon steak in a motorway service station. He looks like Eric Idle watching a dog drown. He’s got faintly sad eyes, the world’s least fashionable hair, and the complexion of a man who’s held his hair out the window of a speeding car for the past two days. Standing before the tide of wannabes, he exudes deflated
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