And another one bites the dust. Dennis has been removed from the house for spitting at fellow contestant Mohamed. They’ve really picked a lovely bunch of people this year, eh what?
I didn’t take to Dennis from the off. What with his being an androgynous leotard-sporting retard who immacs his chest, thinks he’s the bee’s knees and looks like Rab C Nesbitt’s wife.
Is anyone watching?
I very much doubt it.
Comments for this post – a prediction:
Zero.
Nasty Nick Cotton (R.I.P) from Eastenders was an ‘orrible piece of work. A racist bully who tried to poison his own Mum.
If you’re a sci fi fan then there’s always that twat Davros, rolling about in his demi-dalek wheelchair. What about that berk who tried to kill Gail off of Coronation Street? I hear he was a bit of a cad. I never watch it so I wouldn’t know.
Then there was Broadbent as Delboy’s nemesis in Only Fools in sitcom-land… Nasty Nick Bateman from Big Brother in reality TV world (though he wasn’t actually very nasty at all – just as thick as two short planks)… Gripper Stebson on kid’s TV…
Any more?
Who was television’s best villain?
After reading Charlie Brooker’s description of this bizarre slice of mainstream American television, I had to tune in. And after 20 minutes of tuning in, I had to tune out. This is the lowest piece of disturbing muck I think I’ve ever seen transmitted. Take your Big Brother gangster threats and race wars, take the inoffensive Heinz advert and shove those teacup-storms where the sun don’t shine – for ‘To Catch A Predator’ is the television show we should really be complaining about.
Brooker outlines the premise above, but to recap, it goes as follows:
In the section I saw, Dallasbadboy2002 (oh how they revel in mocking their internet pseudonyms) – a father of two – was busted and a cock-ring found in his car – along with the standard discovery of rubber johnnys and lube.
Next up was Itnew2me – a 52 year old who went from claiming he was just going to sit and wait till the girl’s Mommy arrived home to be sure she was safe, to saying he was working for Jesus before settling on the fact that he may have a bit of a mental problem. Watching Itnew2me pour himself an icy cola as he went from one rationalisation to another was deeply unconfortable viewing.
Before I switched off I caught Rockandrollrule0281 who admitted in his online banter that he’d seen the show before. He still turned up, thinking it was an asian girl he was talking to, presumably assuming that in previous shows a caucasian girl had been used as the decoy. When he got inside he realised the girl wasn’t the asian he’d been promised and was busted immediately. His expression fell from worry to a kind of deep depression and realisation in a second. It was as though his impulse had been stemmed and he hadn’t a clue where he’d just been.
To be honest, if you weren’t aware of how he’d got hiomself in that situation then you might have felt a smidgen of sympathy for him. But then you recall that he had just married, only three weeks previously, and was in this situation as he was hoping to bone a child. It was hard to know what to make of him. Mr. Hyde was definitely superceding Dr. Jekyll that day, on a massive scale.
What got me about the whole exercise wasn’t so much the aspect of entrapment – American law is not something we can do much about, as viewers. I also felt numb to the ‘predators’. We’ve seen these kinds of people before and despite the fact they’re dangerous, sneaky, idiots who live their double lives in complete denial, there isn’t too much depth to them. They’re cowards, to put it simply.
The truly worrying facet of this stinking crapshow isn’t the legal point of view or the subject matter. It’s the glee ringmaster Chris Hansen appears to take in snaring the ‘predators’. He bathes in the glory of his position, using the enormous flaws in the twats he questions to get himself off.
It seems we’ve arrived at a point where we’re are so numb to the idea of children being abused that we’re prepared to allow the exploitation of the very notion of paedophilia to go on. Is it possible that by making mainstream shows which are so superficial in any exploration of the condition and are so over the top in every way that we’re making the crime in some way more acceptable? The more it’s discussed by morons on the TV and in the newspapers, the longer the issue is in the hands of idiots rather than experts. Most importantly, capturing sex criminals by any method simply isn’t the job of TV producers. The fact that the police collude with the TV network to make TCAP is beyond belief.
Anyone who watches this show and punches the air everytime a paedophile gets captured is a fucking idiot - and the show itself is pretty much as deplorable as the people it sets out to counter.
Truly depressing stuff.
Though we here at WWM are not noted for taking a stand on current affairs, may we just say that the decision by Heinz to withdraw its commercial for New York Deli Mayonnaise after receiving two hundred complaints is, to put it politely, A GREAT BIG BAG OF SHIT.
Not withstanding the fact that the advert – which depicts a mother magically transformed into a New York deli chef thanks to her marvellous mayonnaise – has nothing to do with ‘promoting a gay lifestyle’, just what, WHAT(???), the fuck do Heinz think they’re playing at withdrawing it even if it did?
I thought we’d got past listening to the lunatic rumblings of a bunch of squirming, middle-class buffoons who find the idea of homosexuality uncomfortable? Apparently not, if their idiot, knee-jerk reaction to a handful of gripes written by prejudiced fools is anything to go by.
Shame on you, Heinz. Shame on you for withdrawing an advert that didn’t actually ‘promote a gay lifestyle’, but should now stand as a symbol for the shit homosexual people still have to deal with from an ignorant bunch of tosspots stuck in the fucking Dark Ages.
I’ve never had a worse morning. I got hit by a car once, walking down High Holborn on the way to work. I’ve vomited my stomach lining into a gutter at 8am due to an apocalyptic hangover while my shirt sleeves dangled about my wrists. Then there was the time I mistakenly locked my better half in the flat, and the time a water pipe burst and flooded the carpet and there’s also the time a swift flew into my front room through an open window at dawn and proceeded to dump birdshits all over the fittings.
All of these pale in comparison, wilt into insignificance and transform into memories of better times when I think back to this morning, June 24th 2008 and the 50 minutes I spent with George Lamb and his zany pals in their 6 Music podcast as I rode the bus into work. My headphones have never had to handle such drudgery.
Lamb and his cronies get a lot of stick for their banter-based show. A lot of people have accused 6 Music of selling out in going for a populist option when they appointed the ex-T4 and current Big Brother’s Big Mouth host.
Conversely, Lamb has been lavished with a Sony award for his services. Mind you, looking at the competition, Jonathan King could have returned to the airwaves and beaten Lamb as the other nominees were largely small-fry. Lamb was the only DJ on the list who’s regularly on national radio and who has adverts on the TV plugging his show. Apart from Kelly Osbourne, who everyone hates anyway.
I like 6 Music, but I’m not precious about it. I find the DJs are occasionally a little bit too muso for my liking but more often than not, one song in three is half decent. 6 Music is undoubtedly a good thing.
The appointment of Lamb for three hours a day is not something that ever bothered me, what with old muggins ‘ere being at work all day and only ever tuning in to the station in the morning or evening. I watched the furore develop from afar – websites starting up decrying the Lambster, other websites starting up and championing him. All this fuss over a Channel 4 presenter with a new radio show? It reminded me of Russell Brand’s ascent from Big Brother’s Big Mouth presenter to small-time superstar – buried deep in the late night schedules then rising on the strength of his popularity to greater heights on the strength of goodwill. Brand hasn’t got websites devoted to disliking him, but he’s certainly got detractors. Maybe this was what Lamb was experiencing… I wanted to give him a chance, at least. So I downloaded his new podcast. Is George Lamb an exciting new voice?
In the event, no. 50 minutes of Lamb’s podcast, with music removed for legal reasons, has confirmed that we’re not dealing with a Russell Brand phenomenon here. We’re not dealing with a Dermot O’Leary either. We’re not even dealing with a Vernon fucking Kaye. We’re dealing with an inept, unfunny shambles fronted by a man with a haircut for a personality and backed by the bottomless cackling of his posse of berks.
I can’t begin to describe how inane it all is. Not inane in the sense of something going nowhere but everyone enjoying the ride. Inane in that nothing is being achieved. No humour. No anger. No sadness. Just nothing. Just minutes, seconds and milliseconds popping by and never coming back as Lamb stutters his way through heavy-handed links, nicked jokes that weren’t funny the first time round and interviews with people who, like the rest of us, are just too smart to find any of this shit funny.
We start off with Lamb and his producer gloating about their award by way of introduction. Giggling at their own jokes, they talk like little kids with catchphrases they’ve invented for the playground that’ll last for a day of bullying before evaporating like humourless silent fart-puffs. Then we’re into the main content. I think it’s a week’s worth of content – 15 hours then – all condensed into 50 minutes (which says a lot considering Adam & Joe manage 30 minutes of material from three hours and Collins and Herring get a solid hour from improvising).
Anyway, here are the standout bits:
And then it’s over. It feels like days have passed. You’re more wrinkly than you were before – as though you’ve bathed for weeks in someone else’s urine.
I’m only glad I didn’t subscribe, as that might’ve aided their ride up the iTunes podcast charts. According to the blurb, ‘it took a while but the podcast is finally here’. So we have to ask ourselves why did it take a while?
The idea of podcasts from the BBC is that existing radio shows are pared down to the essentials. Music is removed so that the banter can be distilled and the jokes will rule the roost. Problem is, with Lamb there are no jokes. There isn’t really any banter either – it’s just a few borrowed catchphrases being repeated back and forth as the crew pat one another on the back. The process would involve choosing which smug guffaw to include over which conceited cackle… so editing this must’ve been a nightmare akin to polishing the proverbial turd.
I urge you to continue in your ignorance of George Lamb.
A disappointment, in the same vein as the very-poor-indeed Land of the Dead. Diary of the Dead focuses far too heavily on the survivors – all of whom are irritating stereotypes. We have the geek, the macho jock, the Texan beauty queen and, hysterically enough, the bow and arrow-wielding professor with his terrible English accent.
Worst of all, we have the man holding the camera. Romero’s point about this generation of rubbernecked, car crash watching youtube-addicts is all well and good – but when a pretty girl is being chased by a zombie only metres away and the cameraman (himself a character in the movie) decides to just keep rolling rather than intervene with a sharp implement to the eye socket, any realism sought through the use of digital camera imagery is blown out of the water.
Still, for all that, there are zombies. But the sad thing is, there aren’t many of them. Nowhere near enough of them and at no point do we get a whole load of them swarming towards us – the essential visual when you consider the genre.
Still, there is a really good bit where they use those ECG things you use to jump start a heart on a zombies head, making her eyes pop out like strawberry angel delight – so for that alone it’s worth renting. But a much better and more considered undead film shot from the first person is The Zombie Diaries, an under-the-radar British oddity.
And it’s got Dr Legg in it.
JQW raised the issue of televisual guilty pleasures last week. We needn’t limit it to daytime TV though… so what’re your guiltiest televisual pleasures? And if you don’t feel guilty, what TV do you watch knowing full well that it’s unbounded shite?
I’ll come clean – I quite often find myself watching Shipwrecked of a Sunday morning. Looking at the picture above, I’ve no idea why…
And you all know about my Big Brother condition.
Open your hearts, let honesty prevail…
What shit TV do you enjoy then, eh?
From The Press Association:
Alexandra allegedly made the comment about gangsters while speaking to albino contestant Darnell, while a number of other housemates were in proximity.
According to Channel 4’s transcript, while discussing the fact that she had been nominated, Alexandra told Darnell: “I’m not throwing water at anyone. It’s bigger than that…personal offence is never forgotten, do you know what I mean?
“We are just inside the house. I’ve got a very, very, very, very, very strong team outside the house”.
She added: “I just can’t wait to see my mans and them and see what their plans are, who they got…I’m not talking about those mans, I’m talking about my gangster friends. They got some instructions to follow out.”
She added later: “I get to go out, see everyone’s friends, I get to see their family. I get to do the s*** that I wanna do. Pow, pow, pow.”
Angela Jain, Head of E4 and Big Brother at Channel 4, said: “Alex’s comments will be widely interpreted as having been intended to intimidate. Other housemates have said they found her comments to be threatening and we believe that is the reasonable conclusion for them to have reached given the way Alex has behaved previously.”
Making threats alluding to gun-crime… very smart work, that – given the current climate. Pow, pow, pow indeed.
For those of us still half-watching (I find myself tuning in on catch-up, then tuning out after half an hour) – this is good news in that the tedium of Alex’s self-important screech has been ripped from the screen. When muslim Mohamed pulled on a frock for a laugh, she told him ’you’ve disgraced me and you’ve disgraced your religion’, which is not only harsh on the ear in terms of mangled grammar, it also has a vague waft of persecution about it. She’s not a Muslim after all (no matter what she may have said). She was purely using his faith (waning or otherwise) against him.
Having said that, BB without incident and controversy is literally a bunch of idiots being nice to each other in Ikea. I only really catch it to see what monstrous individuals our publishing and broadcasting industries have created. So now my fingers are crossed that maybe Darnell is secretly a trained killer, or Mikey’s a psychopathic robot and real violence is going to kick off.
In other news, last night I genuinely had a nightmare involving me attending Mario and Lisas’ wedding. It was in a car-wrecking yard and featured Brad Pitt who, despite being called Brad Pitt, resembled a young Jason Donovan. It was awful.
I watch too much TV. Remember I told you.
The row that kicked it all off:
I don’t usually leave the confines of my hovel, unless it’s to buy milk or biscuits. Despite my better judgement, I made the effort to visit the White Cube gallery in London’s glamorous Piccadilly last Saturday in order to see Jake and Dinos Chapmans’ ‘Fucking Hell’. The next room housed their ‘If Hitler Had Been A Hippy How Happy Would He Be?’ It’s the former I’ll attempt to review, as the latter was shit.
So – ‘Fucking Hell’. Firstly – the gallery was crammed - which is always bloody irritating. Trying to poke your head through a couple of haircuts to catch a glimpse isn’t at one with the essential nature of art, surely? You’re meant to be free to contemplate, getting all pensive about the work in front of you and coming to glorious conclusions about the nature of everything.
That’s not possible when you’re getting irritated by the prick with the bad breath and the clear-framed media spectacles whose babbling on like a twit about contextual continuity to his exotically ugly bird. But that’s not really the Chapman’s fault. They need to make The White Cube a bit more oblong to house the ponces who inhabit it.
The nine cases display a vision of hell on an epic, yet miniature scale. The detail is inescapable immediately upon setting your eyes on it. A lot of work has gone into the placement of the figures and the fine tuning involved in painting them. With every slight eye movement there’s a new scenario, set up solely to shock. Skeletal Nazi stormtroopers float on a raft with smiley face paint daubed on them. Stephen Hawking sits in a military wheelchair for no apparent reason. Severed heads on sticks protrude from the ground a countless number of times. Pigs seem to shit out the dead whilst eating severed limbs. Figures wander the terrain with skin half flogged off. Crucifixes hang deformed weird humanoid creatures with multiple heads. Peek through a broken window and bizarre Nazi experiments are being carried out, just a little too far away to be distinct. A factory appears to be fashioning numerous Hitlers from a collection of torn off arms and legs.
It’s all quite horrifying.
But once you’ve seen the first box, all of which are arranged in a swastika formation, you’ve kind of seen them all. The extent of the destruction and plasticated violence becomes irrelevant, serving only to highlight how banal it all becomes. The violence is replicated to some extent – with cloned figures seeming to go through the motions by box nine. There are slight variations on location – a ruined building for one, a factory for another, a church – but the violence pretty much remains the same with minute changes from area to area. There are little touches – Hitler the painter with his easel and palette, the baptised baby with the moustached dictators head etc… that all force a smile, but beyond that it’s carnage for the sake of carnage.
Visiting only out of curiosity rather than to bore people in bars about how amazing I thought it all was, when it came to thinking through what this all actually meant, I could only come up with the following. Jake and Dinos Chapman make art to shock, first and foremost. The fact that they are masters of their craft makes their work entertaining, but in terms of its significance, very little is said here. They play with the shocking imagery of Nazi regalia haphazardly, with no real accuracy or thought. They scatter violence without prejudging the intelligence and sensitivity of the viewer and they make little visual gags among morbid scenes for their own amusement. It’s childish.
Having said that – it is an epic, brilliantly realised and painstakingly constructed immaturity. You can’t help but be impressed by the scale and craftmanship involved in making this nightmare unfold – not least when you consider the first version burnt to a melty pulp in a warehouse. I’m not sure if celebrating glee in the horrific is necessarily a good or a bad thing, but it passed a Saturday afternoon pleasingly enough.
As if we weren’t bored enough by it in the first place, Mad May returns to the Square to try and nick Dawn’s fucking baby. Again.
Now – this baby used to be nothing but a source of stress for young, crumple-faced Dawn who would attempt to foist it on any willing baby-sitter going so she could go out with unrealistic best mates Shabs and Carlie on the razz. Now that Carlie’s conveniently disappeared and Shabnam appears to have been locked in a basement, the coast is clear for Dawn to act like a responsible mother again – one who actually gives a shit about her baby. And as we all know, this means guaranteed boredom for those of us who watch this crap as May – the Howard’s Way type actress who looks like she’s on the wrong set – turns the lunacy up to eleven and we’re shown a bajillion shots of Dawn running away from something uninteresting. Hoo-fucking-ray. They’re trailing this rubbish as though we’re all excited about it. It’s a fucking disgrace.
It was entirely unrealistic in the first place. May and her husband could easily have adopted from overseas what with them both being rich, young professionals. Why would they want an infant from a working-class gene pool? If they were going to go for a peasant child, it might as well be an ethnic one, like Madonna’s or Jolie’s.
So what involving storylines have we got to keep us going while all this sprog-theft is going on? Since Bradley and Stacey broke up – nothing whatsoever. It’s enough to make you miss Max Branning.
Heather and Minty and Gal and Shirl and Bobby bleeding Davro can get lost. The Slaters are relying on schizophrenic Jean for laughs, which seems a bit off. Bradley’s starring in the most ill-thought out Indecent Proposal thread going – and even if the Millers ever find that lottery ticket after all this time, I’ve lost all patience by now. Phil Mitchell must’ve exploded, as he’s not been huffing and wheezing behind his bar for weeks.
And in other news – where on God’s green earth is Billy? Apparently he turned up for five-a-side training a week ago and he’s been mentioned in conversation as though he’s been about – but clearly Perry Fenwick is on some kind of sabbatical as I’ve seen hide nor hair of his E.T-shaped head for months. He’s even taken Honey and his kids with him, though admittedly that’s actually a massive blessing.
Despite the fact I’ve said this a million times before and never come good on the promise – if things don’t get spicy – and fast – I’m leaving Walford for good.
