Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker

Author:Charlie Brooker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Performing Arts, cookie429, Television, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, Television personalities, Television programs, Extratorrents, Kat, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780571227556
Publisher: Faber
Published: 2005-04-15T22:24:58+00:00

Ethically Right? [31 August]

In the good old days (you know, back when we all lived in fear of nuclear extinction and greed and bigotry were rife, utterly unlike the present era), there were only three or four channels, so it was easy to keep tabs on what was showing where. Kelly Monteith on BBC1, snooker on BBC2, Cannon and Ball’s ‘Madcap Snooker Chucklehouse’ on ITV, or subtitled ‘Disabled Lesbian Snooker with Extra Pubic Hair’ on Channel 4. Simple.

Today there are 1,500,000 channels, growing at an exponential rate, and you can’t flip open the Guide without noticing a new addition to their ranks: one minute there’s an Open University programme about hills on BBC2, and the next there’s the Discovery Hill Channel (documentaries about hills), Hill 24 (24-hour hill news), The Txt-a-Hill Network (teenagers communicating via text message captions superimposed over footage of hills), and Fantasy Hill X Super Hardcore Plus (fat men having sex with hills).

It’s bedlam out there. Hence the trend for ‘Ronseal’ programme titles – shows that explain exactly what they do right there on the tin, with names like ‘Britain’s Scariest’. The idea is that they stand out in the listings, so you’re more likely to tune in. Why name your programme A Touch of Frost (which could be mistaken for a documentary on winter mornings), if you can call it ‘The Shortarse Detective’ instead?

ITV has honed this practice to such a fine art, you don’t even need to watch the programmes any more, just read the titles: Britain’s Sexiest Builders, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Game Show Host, To Kill and Kill Again, and now the latest example, I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here! (ITV1), in which a bunch of vaguely famous people have been dumped in the Australian outback in order to suffer for Ant and Dec’s amusement.

OK, so the use of the word ‘celebrity’ contravenes the Trades Descriptions Act, but the programme itself is a guilty pleasure, and everyone who’s wearily grumbled about the bile-scooping tackiness of it all is wasting their time: this is vastly entertaining stuff; no amount of hand-wringing is going to change that. And I can sum up the appeal in two words: Uri Geller.

See, the big surprise about I’m a Celebrity is that most of the ‘stars’ seem quite nice: Tony Blackburn, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Nell McAndrew, and Rhona Cameron. Heck, even Christine Hamilton’s grown on me. Nigel Benn you can keep, and Darren Day could annoy me just by breathing in and out, but Uri Geller … CHRIST.

Don’t know about you, but I always assumed that behind closed doors, once the cameras had been put away and he’d finished spoonbending for the day, Geller magically transformed himself into a normal person – but no. For him it’s a lifetime gig. I wouldn’t be able to stand in the same room as him for five minutes without feigning a fatal brain haemorrhage, just to make him stop banging on about spirituality and his psychic bloody powers, which he’s not going to use on this expedition because ‘it wouldn’t be ethically right’.

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