Big Bother

Ziggy and Chanelle are in the bedroom lying silently on his bed, incapable of even feigning an interest in one another. Charley is arguing with Liam about the nature of the Lacanian "Real"

CHARLEY: Fing is right, Lee, what I was saying was that what is foreclosed from the symbolic order comes back to haunt it, right, and then you was like gettin all up in face, yeah, and saying fings like "the "Real" ain't closed then" and I wasn't sayin that, yeah, and you was sayin that I was...

Liam tries to interject

CHARLEY: Na, na, na, na, na. Listen to me for a minute, right? I got nuffin to say to you no more, you're dead to me, right?

CAROLE: Charley...

CAROLE: Oh fuck off right, Carole. Know what I mean though, Lee? You're lucky I don't get a stick and drop ya, yeah, d'you know what I mean though?

Nicky enters

NICKY: Does anyone want a nice meal? I'm happy to cook a nice meal if anyone wants to eat my nice meal. Charley, do you want a nice meal?

CHARLEY: Right fuck off, Nicky, right yeah? You're always up in my face about food and it's really irri...irrigravatin...can't fink of the word....irrigating me or whatever now and it's like really fucking me off, right?

Charley storms out

NICKY: Go-od, I was only asking if she wanted a nice meal. That is so rude. I mean, I'm happy to cook a nice meal but if you don't want a nice meal, then I won't cook a nice meal.

LIAM: I'll have some food if you're cooking some like, lass.

NICKY: Well, I'm happy to do that. There's some pasta left over from lunch, and I was thinking about getting a tin of tomatoes and, like, bulking it up, and doing a bit of a side salad as well? That'll be nice, won't it, Liam? That'll be a nice meal. And I'm happy to cook that for you.

LIAM: Aye, thanks like...

NICKY: Anyone else for a nice meal?

CAROLE: I'm alright thanks, Nicky, but can I just say, when you're cooking..

NICKY: Oh, fuck OFF, Carole. Everyone is so rude in this house...

CAROLE: Nicky, I was just....

NICKY: No, Carole, just NO, alright? It's really fucking me off now...God...

Nicky storms out

OK, OK, OK! Big Brother.

You know I normally love to write about Big Brother? Well, I haven't yet felt the urge this year for some reason. What is there to say? Chanelle is vacuous and self-absorbed but has the potential to become a sentient person at some point in the future (although not over the next ten weeks) ; Emily is so arrogant she is unable to find the connection of 200 years of black oppression with her need to be seen as ironically street; Charley and Shabnam are superficial idiots; Ziggy looks like a tortoise; Lesley should have stayed. Maybe I'll talk about someone no-one else has, and I'm pretty fascinated by Carole myself. Well, intrigued by the mindboggling banality of her statements; "I think I'll have a cup of tea", "Those eggs needs to be put in the fridge", "It's cloudy but clearing from the west". Yet there is real depth underlying the seeming straightforwardness of her conversation. For instance, on the live streaming the other night I was enthralled by her description of how to remove depilation wax from glass surfaces. Apparently, because it is acetate-based, your standard Jif and Flash is as good as useless. You have to HEAT the substance from underneath until it starts to lift and then SCRAPE it off. This must be the sort of stuff you pick up at Greenham; Lesley certainly didn't contribute any domestic hints as handy after all her years with the WI. I suppose I should keep tuned for Carole's ideas on how to remove yellow sweat stains from your white summer shirts.....

The Apprentice (2/5/07), Crimewatch and How to Look Good Naked (1/5/07)

The best series of The Apprentice EVER - fact! Ex-army lieutenant Paul got fired last night, one of the only team leaders in any Apprentice to make a loss on the task. This was largely because he was an unrelenting knobend. I don't mean to be a reverse snob, but the posh voice and inability to take criticism from any person of a lower social class meant I was gunning for him from week one. Paul said 'noozes' instead of 'noses', 'meerketing' for 'marketing'; sneery little cannon-fodder. Send him to Iraq.

Have to catch up on Tuesday night's TV too. It was gobsmacking. Channel 4 had actual minge - pubes and everything - at EIGHT O' CLOCK with their new series of How to Look Good Naked. I mean really. People do eat at that time you know, young children are still up. On the one hand, maybe it's a good thing that the kiddies are exposed to 'normal' female bodies rather than the airbrushed fantasies which dominate advertising; on the other, maybe it's going to seriously derail their nascent sexuality. Either way, the series focuses solely on how WOMEN should look good naked, so there's an inbuilt inequality in the programme itself which no amount of lopsided boobs can counter.

Crimewatch was funny, more specifically Nick Ross, who said with incredulity at one point, "Running away. In Ealing" - as if the act of fleeing in Ealing was the crime rather than the stabbing of two men on a bus. First time I've seen it in years, and I might just return for the humour.

Lastly, I don't often review films, but I must warn you to STAY WELL AWAY from Proof with Gwyneth Paltrow because it's a PIECE OF SHIT. It makes you wonder how it did so well on Broadway and in the West End and whether the average theatre-goer in the US and the UK has in fact been LOBOTOMISED. Americans CAN'T WRITE PLAYS. Both dialogue and acting were EXCRUCIATING. I can't talk about it anymore, it's making me angry.

Hair Wars (23/4/07)

This wasn't at all the programme I expected, having read the TV guide for Monday night, but Morgan Matthews made a fascinating documentary out of the ostensible subject matter of competitive hairdressing. Cue lots of images of ridiculous hairstyling: the men looked the funniest, particularly in the 'fashion' section of the competition, with particularly kitsch creations indescribable within mere language. It was Dawn, however, the 14-year-old step-daughter of John Phelps (a winner of the world cup of hairdressing in the 1990s) who became the focus of the programme. A troubled teen, tagged by the police and unloved by her real father, hairdressing was seen as her route out of crime and an inevitable stay at Her Majesty's Pleasure. But she just couldn't help herself from attempting to bottle winos and defying her curfew, and the documentary veered into a study of adolescent deviance which made for severely uncomfortable viewing. At one point, Matthews gave her twin sister a camera to record her own observations, aware that Dawn had become the centre of the family's attention, but Dawn stole it and that was the end of that. When you learnt that Dawn was simply desperate to see a father who had moved on with a new girlfriend and saw his first offspring as part of a forgettable previous existence, Hair Wars came to explore the effects of the dismembered modern family much more cogently than it did its premise of competitive hairdressing. Disturbing stuff.

The Apprentice (18/4/07) and Holby City (17/4/07)

The Apprentice is the most brilliantly structured, gripping programme on television. From the moment the task gets going through to the boardroom showdown, there is not a bit of flab and absolutely no opportunity to make yourself a cup of tea. It just builds and builds until the inevitable despair of Sir Alan when he realises what a bunch of dunces he has as potential employees. Last night's laugh-out-loud moment came when Adam, team leader of Eclipse, employed a Measure for Measure style of management - explaining to Sir Alan, as he was being berated for prancing around in a lion suit instead of selling sweets, that the suit helped him to oversee what his team was doing covertly. Yes, because a FULL-LENGTH LION SUIT is as anonymous as disguise comes. I shall be sure to remember this technique if ever I need to stage the Duke in production. Genius.

Not so genius was Holby City the night before last, which unashamedly ripped off the plot of Flatliners for one of it's storylines. The thing is, Flatliners was not only a lot of balls, but also a film, and the premises of the cinema tend to be on a slightly larger and more unbelievable scale than TV. So it was just incredibly embarrassing watching a group of med students nearly kill each other on weekday telly for the purpose of finding out if there's anything on the other side. The leader was inevitably constructed as evil, laughing darkly as he injected himself with 10 mg of deathjuice. When he crossed back over the Styx and his mate asked, "What did you seeee?" with all the acting skill of a GCSE student, it was me who wanted to die. Literally eating a cushion, and my flatmate had his jumper firmly pulled over his head in the vain hope of making it stop. We won't even go into the storyline about the African doctor who nearly killed someone because, well, did the script imply it was because she was trained in Africa? It certainly seemed that way to me. Bad Holby, bad, bad Holby.

I also have to mention the most bizarre quote on TV in quite some time which came from Mr Miss Pageant - a programme about the transgendered Miss World competition and in which a Thai competitor stated, "I'm sucking a woman's cock. I'm not gay." I simply can't make head nor tail of it......

Hotel Babylon (12/4/07)

Hotel Babylon is funny. Well it's not actually, it's really bad, but that's what makes it funny. It was the last in the series last night - I won't bother you with the details but Tamsin Outhwaite made her exit for good. It was an incredibly sentimental episode, in which Max Beesley offered voiceovers about how all the cogs are important to Hotel Babylon, how every worker helps it to run like "a well-oiled machine". The cliches and commonplaces took on the status of great profundities by the end of the programme, so that the final voiceover had Outhwaite claiming, "What is a hotel? A hotel is a place to stay." Can you hear it? Can you hear the words coming from Outhwaite's mouth like some latter-day Plato?

Funny thing, voiceovers. They're able to generate automatic gravitas just by virtue of being voice-overs - they sound as if someone is looking back on something years later with greater wisdom, or perhaps like the universal consciousness part of their brain is at work rather then the petty, day-to-day, individual bit. So when a writer expresses the banal or stupid through this device it becomes hilarious; similar to Tony Blair answering PMQs after having inhaled helium. I wondered also - disturbed by the final scene between Outhwaite and Beesley - if the workers at Hotel Babylon are like family as the voiceovers told us OVER and OVER again, does that make Tamsin's kissing of Max incest? The final V/O should have started during this - "What is incest? Incest is sex with a close relative....."

The Worst Sex Change Surgeon in the World (10/4/07) and The Apprentice (11/4/07)

I wasn't going to mention this, but Channel 4, oh my god. Having spared us wank week, they then put on this 'documentary' which was really an opportunity to see some psychopath botch up people's genitals. Who watches this stuff? Well, admittedly, I did try, but I was defeated THREE TIMES. It was horrific. They showed a video of Dr Brown preparing for one sex-change operation, holding up his sketches of the procedure for the camera which seriously looked like my 5 year old half-sister had drawn them. The there was a knife, a cock, and a lot of blood. Turned over. Tried again 15 mins later, this time there was a fanny and lots of blood. Turned over. Third time, Butcher Brown had managed to chop off someone's leg, thereby killing him (he must have thought it was an awfully big penis). But they showed the pictures of the corpse. I mean, that's practically snuff, isn't it? I repeat, who watches it? Who is able to watch it? OK, so the murder(s) did occur and may be of interest to some people, but Channel 4's documentaries are getting increasingly gratuitous while masquerading as objective docujournalism. I'd say I'm pretty hardcore when it comes to operations, but that's TV for the mentally ill. And whoever produced it needs help too, with their mortal soul.

The Apprentice was fairly depressing last night in that the women's team decided to sell kisses - ie. themselves - to make money for the task. I commented on this last year, women in business acting as if feminism never happened. There is a sort of business in which women sell kisses - the oldest profession - but we can do without that it the millennial workplace, I feel. Jadene was against it, and has gone up in my estimation as a result. And Gerri got the boot last night; I was glad despite commenting on her promise previously. I'm afraid I mistook her severely elevated left eyebrow for shrewdness. It appears it was just a lucky trick of the face.