I’ve been in London for the past few days, just generally wandering around the city, hanging out and drinking with my good friend Steven – a fellow Glaswegian who made the move dahn sahhf last year when he got a job with the BBC. The Beeb banter has been a riotous opportunity for blagging visitor’s passes, sitting in the staff cafe whilst Jeremy Paxman looks tall and terrifying and (most excitingly of all) getting the opportunity to see Charlie Brooker’s new show being filmed, hurrah!
My TV experience thus far includes:
An audience with Lenny Henry doing some shit where he watched funny crap off the internet (and explained why it was amusing, thanks Lenny, DURRRRRRRR) as well as patronising Scots and affecting annoying accents, as is the way of the Henry. We had to spend three times the length of the recorded pick-ups doing laughter tracks because we didn’t know when to laugh or clap given he’s quite simply NOT. FUNNY.
I noticed – a few months after the experience that he was accusing the British media of being racist because ethnic minorities weren’t being represented in jobs in and around the entertainment sphere. To be fair, black or not, if any act had been peddalling out the same ‘Biiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrmmmmingham’ act for the past thirty years I’d probably stop inviting him round to careers day too; not because of the colour of his skin, but because he’s a cunt.
T4 Transmission: we got invited to this one by Channel 4 who wanted me to blog about it. Unfortunately I don’t think they’d read any of my columns before so it may very well have come as a shock to them to recieve what they did after they plied me with free booze, surrounded me with shit bands and put me through the tedium of watching Steve Jones suck the personality out of an autocue for four hours. He is ever so pretty though, like a shiny thermos kept in a specially knitted flask-holder: sigh
My third encounter with the camera came with a filming of The Culture Show at the start of January. I admit that most of the event has been blanched from my memory; seared by the blinding light that emenates from Northern Goddess Lauren Laverne. One memory that will unfortunately be burned onto my memory forever, slowly creeping up on me whenever I get anywhere within a square mile radius of marine life, will be that of Anthony Hegarty, aka: Anthony of ‘and the Johnsons’ fame. We were seated about a metre away from his piano, so when he sat down in preparation for being interviewed by The Laverne we were not sure whether to act like he wasn’t there (given he’s famous, which is the only logical manner to deal with such beings) or to attempt to sympathise with his Laverne induced lip-sweat. The result was that he looked at us with such a sad, defeated, inflated expression that he resembled a slightly philosophical, beached whale – and we, of course, were the sadistic Sea-World workers, witholding buckets of carp and seawater from his withering body. I was also perturbed by the notion that if I were a NY-LON trans atlantic, trans gender goth I’d look an awful lot like him. I might have an image overhaul: fat tranny was not the desired look.
Anyway, this Brooker example was quite different from the others, largely because I am a fan of his work and so was genuinely excited about seeing his new show. Unfortunately twenty-one years of disappointment hadn’t prepared me for the possibility that this might not be ‘like Screenwipe, yeah? But, like, Brooker’d to the max, yeah? Like Misanthropy 101, yeah?’ The premise is Charlie is now hosting a panel show called ‘You Have Been Watching’ in which he discusses the week’s TV with four guests who compete against one another for laughs and points – this time being David Mitchell, Rufus Hound, Jamelia and Terry Christian. It was entertaining in its own right, featuring the sorts of tangeted rants which appeal to my mind’s everyday inner workings, but it felt like any attempt to mock a show’s formula for being lazy and/or calculated was dismerited straight away given that the whole show was a mash-up of pre-existing crappy panel quizshows, like 8 Out of 10 Cats and all that vaguely entertaining and completely disposable waffle. The television related chatter seemed forced in a way which was uncomfortable to Brooker, either that or his earpiece was suggesting he should perhaps try smiling for the audience; I could see either possibility being the cause of his controlled grimace. Fans of screenwipe will probably be disappointed at the back-seat role a largely charming and jovial Brooker takes during the show; fans of TV will probably have seen it before, but be OK with that.
In conclusion: Charlie Brooker in a suit: pro
Lack of puerile mock wanking: total con. This was not part of the deal, Endemol, NOT PART OF THE DEAL!!!
