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.

Nada (10/4/07)

Apprentice tonight, Apprentice tonight, Apprentice tonight. Sooo excited.....

Telly was rubbish last night. I tried Get Your Act Together With Harvey Goldsmith but didn't know who Saxon were in the first place, so it seemed pointless rooting for their comeback. That show needs bigger names. And Goldsmith is such an unrelenting cock, I found myself engrossed in finding pictures of Vanessa Feltz for a collage I'm planning instead of watching his bloated mug. Maybe I'll watch nothing except The Apprentice until Big Brother comes back. (Unlikely). Speaking of which, I faced the terrible truth with a fellow BB fanatic this weekend that, if it goes down the same contrived root as it did last year, I won't be watching. We looked at each other with genuine horror as the words came out of my mouth, but it's out there now, so I may as well share it with you. (Though Endemol are so clever, we probably won't realise we've been manipulated until week 10, by which point it will be August and I'll be pasty for another year. We did also phone each other last week and say, "It's April now, that means it's May next, and you know what that means....?" I'm not as free of the obsession as I'm claiming).

Now you must go to disappointed kid's blog and see the latest video he's posted. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

The Apprentice episode 2 and Deadline (4/4/07)

The Apprentice kicked up a gear last night and showed that it may even compete with the first series after a disappointing second. There were good quantities of incompetence, bad pitching and jargon ("ideation" anyone?). Ifti got fired because he didn't "bring it to the table" - a product design specialist who failed to suggest any product design in the challenge. But then, THEN, Sir Alan said he was firing another member of Eclipse. Who would it be? Rory - the bumbling poshboy and ineffectual leader - or Trey - the most irritating, loudmouthed, insubordinate apprentice of them all? If Rory had defended himself by saying, "I spent so long arguing with this little twerp I couldn't focus on the task" he would have been saved, but instead he said "Erm...errr....Sir Alan...it was er... horrible...erm", and the bigwig had no choice but to get rid of him. Or did he? Did Sir Alan keep on someone who will definitely get the boot later because the series thrives on the Sairas and Syeds who make the thing (un)watchable? I rather think the second. Trey is so annoying, so confrontational, so very punchable, he's what The Apprentice is all about.

Then I watched Deadline which held much promise. A bunch of celebs (if you can include Chris Parker and Imogen Lloyd-Webber in such a description) have to produce a 12 page celeb insert for 'Closer' each week, under the terrifying eye of Janet Street-Porter. Now I know JSP is responsible for the downfall of Snub TV in the 80s, one of the best things ever on British television, which she replaced with her boyfriend's derisory Normski's House Party, but it was a long time ago, and I do admire her strong will, intelligence and ginormous teeth. And I also appreciate Lisa I'Anson being dressed down by anyone because she's thick, superficial and arrogant, a particularly hateful combination in my book. She's also a starfucker. Every time a name came up, Naomi Campbell being the most notable instance, I'Anson would say in her affected drawl, "Oh, ya, Naomi, I know her, I'll give her a call". Yeah, right, you once got coked off your tits in The Metro and chewed her ear off about how great you both were more like it. Hilarious to see her trying to back track once it has slipped out her gob. One to watch.

Celebrity Wife Swap (1/4/07)

Exchanging Vanessa Feltz with Debbie McGee was obviously a stroke of genius for the Wife Swap team. Is there a man you would want less as a husband than Paul Daniels? And the programme bore out that he's the old, self-centred fart we know him to be; no surprises here. My favourite aspect of the programme was Feltz's partner, Ben Ofoedu. You know Ben Ofoedu? No? Well he sung, 'Got to turn aro-ooun-nnd' a few years ago, as he insisted on telling everyone and anyone who questioned his contribution to society. You'd have thought he'd figureheaded a cultural revolution the way he went on about it. At one point McGee pointed out "You're not Robbie Williams. I haven't even heard of you." "What?" he replied, almost dumbstruck but not enough to stop him from singing for the fifth time, "You haven't heard of 'Got to turn aro-ooun-nnd'?" Well, why should she? She's been stuck at home with Daniels and an alsation for the last twenty years. It just made you feel rather sorry for poor deluded Feltz who I quite like these days. Despite her lively intelligence, she's so blinded by graititude that she can't see Ofoedu for the no-mark he is.

Watched a good programme about haute couture on BBC2 late last night. Ever wondered what happens to those ridiculous dresses that we see on the catwalks? Well, I have. Turns out they get brought up by wives of very, very rich men or descendants of the aristocracy. Only about 200 women have access to them. A woman called a 'premiere' follows the dresses around the world to fit them on their new owners after the catwalk shows, removing the more theatrical elements to make them more wearable for philanthropic functions. What an incredible waste it all seemed, creating the carbon footprint of Goliath just for the sake of three or four dresses. But, my god, did I want to have a go in some of those clothes. Lucky bloody loaded cows. Anyone know of a spare oil tycoon?

Dr Who (31/3/07)

Sometimes I like to imagine I'm a time traveller. Especially when I realise three years have passed and I can't remember what happened during them. Perhaps I've been surfing the space-time continuum all the while with an alien cunningly disguised as Richard Hammond, saving the world from calamity and being dropped back in Blighty several years later. Or perhaps I've just been sitting about smoking weed and watching the tellybox. Who's to tell? (Not you).

People seem to have a problem with David Tennant as Dr Who - they don't appear to like his wide-eyed, gurning portrayal of a fictional national treasure. I think he's ok. In fact, I think the revival of Dr Who on BBC1 has been more than ok, at least 50% of the time it's been good, perhaps even better than the original (not counting the Baker or Davison years). It's certainly better produced, with better effects, good plots, and genuinely scary moments which, after all, define the series. And it's definitely one of the best things on TV on a Saturday evening.

I just hope with the return of the new series, the writers aren't tempted to try and make the Doctor all sexy with his new assistant, as they did with Who and Rose. It's surely not the point of Dr Who to get the horn, and if there is a sexy subtext, it shouldn't be accessible to the kids. In retrospect, one of the best things about watching Dr Who as a little girl was the complete lack of sexual tension. The tone of the programme made it possible to imagine that I could join the Doctor on his travels, and be perceived as his mate and an equal whilst doing so. In other words, that I could be just as adventurous and daring and valid as the boys. How liberating is that? - and what a missed opportunity not to send the same message to young girls today. They're not going to extract it from The Pussycat Dolls.

Another slight moan about the revival of Dr Who. Why do they keep on setting it in Cardiff or London or Stoke? The writers could take the story anywhere within our known galaxy, or the entire universe, and they won't even go to Prague. More creativity and scope in the narratives wouldn't go amiss. After all, I don't think anyone would really care or even notice if Cardiff disappeared into a hole in the fabric of space. I'm not entirely convinced it hasn't already.

Mummy's War (29/3/07)

Friends and I harbour such a deep desire for Thatcher to pop her clogs, that if she happens to pop up on the TV screen whilst the sound is turned down, we all look at each other with an almost hysterical glee. "Is she dead? Is she dead?", we exclaim, not even trying to conceal the laughter in our voices. But no, usually she's just been down to Portsmouth to open a Tescos or something, and we have to dampen down the excitement again, keep a lid on it till another time. I should feel bad; I know that the image which comes from the screen is of an old frail lady. And then I remember growing up in the '80s. I remember the Brixton riots, the Miners' strike, the Falklands war. I remember her systematic economic disenfranchisement of single mothers and her criminalisation of the least privileged members of society. I remember the latent violence, ennui and ill-will that undersored British life, and then I don't feel so bad. Then I know that there will probably be spontaneous street parties when the happy news is announced. Down my street at any rate.

Any feeling I have must be intensified a thousand fold - it is almost idiotic to say - by those mothers who lost their sons on the Belgrano. In C4's Mummy's War, Carol Thatcher faced off with these women last night. It was repugnant to watch, as if she had summoned the ghost of her mother's wilfully blind statesmanship to ward off their pain and misery. "It was a war, we shot at you, you shot at us," she explained, as if to the subnormal. "But what about the 200 mile exclusion zone?", they asked, desperate to find something on which to hang the meaningless loss of their children. But there were no answers here; no reasoning profound enough to illuminate how a fellow mother could become the feminine face of destruction; just a retreat into the middle-class values of common-sense and fair-play. "Well, you started it," said C-Thatch. Gone were the almost manic facial expressions of the boarding-school girl whose exeat has been cancelled because her gym slip was dirty; they were replaced by the anonymous, timeless mask of self-righteous stupidity. And yet the language was the same - you started it, whoever smelt it dealt it. Funny how politicians and their ilk (in which I include Maggie's daughter) are reduced to the language of the playground to express something as huge, as horrific, as grown-up, as war. War for goodness sake - violation, rape, murder, trauma, displacement. "You started it". Well, I hope we're all very happy in Great Britain, knowing that the Malvinas are safely under our sovereignty. It certainly helped me to sleep a little easier last night.

The Apprentice (28/3/07)

Alan Sugar returned to our screens yesterday, looking a little less like "Mrs Tiggywinkle" (as Charlie Brooker noted in Screenburn last year) after alleged plastic surgery to make him more telegenic. Difficult to make judgments on the contestants yet because no-one was as obviously selected for their personality disorders as series 2; no-one as insane as Jo or as contemptible as Syed. Slightly intrigued by Gerri, or perhaps more accurately, mildly frightened of her. She has that quality of shrewdness which would no doubt lead her to sell her own ovaries to please Sir Alan.

With the personalities of the current contestants on standby, I mourned the fact that the Celebrity Comic Relief version wasn't a full series. I was so looking forward to seeing the despicable Alistair Campbell get his comeuppance, or Cheryl Tweedy exposing what a nasty little turd she really is. Also found myself comparing the UK version to the US Apprentice with Donald Trump. Trump trumps Sugar every time. For a start, there's an actual bona fide job for the 'apprentice' at the end of the series; they aren't likely to get offloaded just because they got up the duff a la Michelle Dewberry, or be reduced to selling anti-wrinkle cream on the internet under the aegis of Amstrad, like Tim Campbell (who, as of 21/3/2007, has left the company). And then there's the 'boardrooms': Trump's all dark oak and gentlemen's club, Sugar's - as a friend noted last night - looking as if it's "filmed round the back of Sainsburys". Sugar has all the bluster of the wide-boy-made-good but this masks his latter-day failure as a businessman. He pales next to Trump; could never be as iconic, could never have a comb-over so unrelentingly bouffant. And no amount of plastic surgery is going to make up that difference.

Show me the burger (27/3/07)

Sorry about long absence...life fell apart and had to reconstitute it, so sorry about that. Back now though! And what a long winter it has been in the land of telly. I was going to make a come-back with a critique of CBB5 but seeing as every two-bit hack under the sun had their say after the whole Anglo-Indian international incident, I didn't bother. For the record though, despite the recuperation of the whole debacle at the moment, it WAS racism. And seemingly no-one except DK and I saw the utter stupidity which motivates Jade's existence in her demonstration of her range of accents to H a couple of days after entering the house*. One of these being her "African" accent - you know, that well known nation in which everyone has the same accent, and 'they' say things like, "Keep your evil eye away from me"? Twat. The others? Jamaican and Irish. Quick, someone get her in the West-End, quick!

The thing that's yanking my chain at the moment is not so much the casual racism as the casual misogyny on telly; the main purveyors, of course, being those hellbound advertisers. It's too obvious to mention Carlsberg and Lynx; those ads are just a hangover from laddism. But laddism is coming back with full force even as we speak. Consider the ad for 'Rustlers' - a burger microwaveable in 60 seconds, which, as a result, could only only be marketed at men. 'If only women were that easy to prepare' - imagines the ad - showing the viewers a bespectacled, covered-up, nervous female entering a bloke's flat (prissy bitch). As the burger revolves inside the microwave, the action is mirrored by the sofa which turns to reveal....wait a minute, what's that?...the same woman with no glasses and sexy black lingerie on! 'YES!!!' screams the advert, 'Let's cut through the crap, lady. The talking, the bonding, the terrifying spectre of emotional attachment. Get your facking kit off, bird!'. Nice, huh? I'm going to keep my eye on this one. The return of the lad in the ad. Very annoying INDEED.

*Ignorance doesn't excuse racism, by the way, it just explains it.