The best TV show ever would be a programme where really fat people were made to live in a house with a really thin door, and the winner would be whoever got thin enough to get out first. And all the furniture was made of cake. But we can’t even have that because it wouldn’t be quite deadening enough.
I find it incredibly odd that TV, a terrible succession of images of ever-increasing meanness and bankruptcy, holds such a fascinating appeal for people. Even those like me, who believe they reject it, watch and tweet about it. Maybe we kid ourselves that we’re talking about the death of culture or something. Really, we’re just sprinkling the salt that helps people shovel this shit into themselves. Sometimes, when I found myself on TV crucifying some celeb or game show, I wondered if I wasn’t just filling the role of the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in 1984.
I actually think that being viewed ironically is the only way much of our culture can survive. How could Louis Walsh be viewed with sincere feeling? If we view Louis Walsh as a text, there’s no reading of him that suggests he is supposed to be interpreted as anything other than the very arseflute we feel so superior about viewing him as.
Indeed, it’s possible that sincerity would destroy capitalism, as none of its products are really supposed to inspire sincere feeling. There’s a singer called Daniel Johnston, who was a big influence on Nirvana, and a great documentary was made about his mental illness called The Devil and Daniel Johnston. At one point he’s in an asylum, really struggling, and he asks his manager to try to get him a job writing jingles for Mountain Dew, the fizzy drink. He’s an amazing artist who’s just obsessed with writing this jingle, for some reason. They play the song he wrote over a shot of the Mountain Dew vending machine in the asylum. It’s just this heartbreakingly beautiful thing crafted from love and disappointment and regret and it’s all about Mountain Dew. And, of course, it’s hard not to sit there and think what a stupid fucking thing Mountain Dew is to sing that about. In the face of his sincerity, the triviality and crassness of cans of sugary water seems obvious. So instead, Mountain Dew get (previously) credible rappers to do ironic promos and there’s a general air of ‘Hey, we all know what this is, right? This is the bit where I’ve got to sell you the drink’, and it sure sells a lot of fizzy pop.
As a comedian, I find it odd that people imagine a comedian is better because they’ve seen them on TV. When I see a comic on TV it’s . . . well . . . it’s kind of like when I see a doctor on TV. Someone good at presenting themselves without necessarily being technically competent. A haircut. A cunt. It’s almost fun that something as banal as telly has this hold over people. Like everybody sat down of an evening and stared at a ball of coloured wool. A nurse actually stabbed her boyfriend to death because he didn’t want to watch Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Well, there was only one way to decide . . . FIGHT!
Being a comedian gives you an interesting view of how the media works. Most people whom I’ve read writing media columns for papers seem barely above the level of punters. I wonder if maybe this is because there’s a lot of money in TV, and if you had any understanding of how programmes worked you’d go and make some yourself.
One thing you notice is the increasing depoliticisation of TV shows. Obviously, there’s still a huge political agenda at work, but much less overt politics. The main satire show in Britain, Have I Got News for You, begins with picture jokes so forced and dispiriting they act as a kind of ideological security scan. If you can smile and nod your way through that shit then they know you won’t flip out during the shrieking cognitive dissonance of playing guessing games against a backdrop of worldwide war and financial meltdown.
I was on there once when they showed a picture of a girl being captured by police as she tried to steal a leg of frozen lamb. She was pictured attempting to climb a fence as several police officers dragged her down from below. Everyone made jokes like, you know, maybe she should have stolen three more legs and ridden off on them. I dimly knew I was supposed to join in with a ‘I suppose if you saw enough lamb thieves jumping over a fence you’d fall asleep!’ or whatever, but all I could think was how hungry do you have to be to steal a leg of frozen lamb. I can’t imagine what any decent human being could possibly have interjected. ‘She looks frightened’, perhaps.
There’s always a terror on these shows that someone will say something offensive, but there’s a bigger fear of someone saying something relevant. In a world where we fly remote-control bombs into civilians and rip out our planet’s lungs to fund our appetite for shiny gee-gaws, I find the idea of being offended at a joke vaguely decadent. I don’t wish any harm on such people, except perhaps that they suddenly develop a sense of irony as they tweet their moral outrage on a phone made by a suicidal slave.
I think if someone announced that the whole of the last couple of decades of telly had actually been a huge overarching art project about banality and worthlessness, a deliberately clumsy shadow play of exhausted memes, I would stand up and applaud. Perhaps you can just view it that way, anyway. I mean, the only interpretation that really matters for you is your own. I always enjoy The Matrix a lot more by pretending that Morpheus is the spiritually enlightened version of Laurence Fishburne’s character in King of New York.*
Perhaps our media output is an enormous subconscious defence mechanism. You know how radio waves and TV signals travel off through space? Perhaps we know that we’re not ready for first contact and fear the malevolence of a race advanced enough to travel easily among the stars. So that’s what our culture is for. No technocratic alien race will willingly visit the world that produces Take Me Out.
Look at the sheer creative morbidity of our top-rating shows. Strictly gets 11.5 million viewers – I never even realised there were so many people in the country going through the menopause. The show lost viewers with Bruce’s return – which shocked me. I thought the only point in watching was the grim anticipation of seeing him collapse, develop a cocoon, then fly off like a giant moth.
Alan Sugar says that The Apprentice has not been sexed-up for ratings. It must be for more sinister reasons, then. It was the sexiest series so far, yet still presented by a man who looks like he’s been cleaned out of someone’s belly button.
I have to accept some responsibility for The X Factor’s reappearance this year. The sloppy calibration of my flux capacitor meant I failed to go back to 1924 as planned, and beat John Logie Baird to death with a replica TV Quick Best Entertainment Show Award. I overshot by a full decade, the one consolation being that, thanks to my efforts, we’ve at least been spared the empty hypnotic indulgence of Professor Hugo Moffat’s clockwork mesmetron.
I confess I lost a big X Factor bet at the bookies this time round. I’d got 4 to 1 on me taking my own life before the end of the series. Every week we’ve heard who was the bookies’ favourite. Is that much of a guide? Can the best judge of the nation’s mainstream musical tastes really be someone whose perfect sound is a chorus of divorced men coughing and sobbing as they try to light tear-stained roll-ups?
In 2012 The X Factor lost two million viewers. Perhaps it’s simply becoming harder to operate a remote control when you’ve got cloven hooves and a twitch. I think ‘viewers’ is the wrong word. It’s too active. Still, I suppose there’s just not the space to write ‘This Saturday two million fewer people had the deluded shuffling of sterile karaoke puppets reflected in the glaze that coats their lifeless eyes.’ I’ve started to wonder whether ratings are down because people have absorbed all the crap they can take. Maybe it’s literally brimming up to their eyeballs and when they next chop an onion their face will shit itself. Are there too many ad breaks on it now? I’m glad of them. At least it’s a relative break from the relentless
