TV and music. It’s a marriage made in heaven, isn’t it? From Ronnie Hazlehurst and his rotten orchestra to Sheridan Tongue and his wistful tinkling, TV just wouldn’t be the same without a few banging notes and thundering scales.
Author Archives: piqued
Quite Like: Getting On
131 CommentsJuly 23, 2009 – 10:59 am
I’m not going to bugger about here. As you may know, I used to be a nurse. Not a qualified one – an auxiliary. A shit-shifter.
I’m projecting a bit here, but I can imagine if I’d not taken on such a role that the last thing I’d want to do would be to put myself in the firing line of a ‘darkly black comedy’ about an everyday geriatric ward in a typical London hospital. I’d fail to see what is amusing about a place that so involves itself in abject misery, pain and, of course, death. Getting old is horrible; getting so old you wind up in one of those places isn’t even within our perception either by a simple lack of consideration or, more probably, an abject refusal to regard such matters.
Tourette’s: I Swear I Can’t Help It
71 CommentsJune 2, 2009 – 12:29 pm
Perhaps warning the viewing public that a programme featuring Tourettes Syndrome contained ‘strong language’ was akin to advising the presence of wheelchairs in a documentary about quadriplegia. Perhaps not, but I felt it a tad unnecessary. Tourettes involves involuntary tics and expletive outbursts. That’s the nature of the condition. It can’t be helped.
Either way, we didn’t have to wait long for the symptoms to become apparent. Within the first nanosecond the first of many ‘fucks’ was bellowed from the entrance of a supermarket by a large and distinctly recognisable character…
1066: The Battle for Middle Earth
126 CommentsMay 19, 2009 – 2:54 pm
How many of us remember the behemoth wooden box being wheeled in by the caretaker, placed under the blackboard and opened to reveal a shiny black TV screen? Chairs scraped into position to allow all the pupils a good view, the studious congregating at the front, while the rascals and the class-bike lurk-snigger at the back.
Just a Thought: Desperate Housewives
164 CommentsApril 20, 2009 – 12:29 pm
I’d never seen this before, though I recognised some of the actors. Kyle McLaughlin from that Twin Peaks, a lady from the TV series Superman and another one from pictures of her bottom in The Sun, which caused me to look at her face after a while.
My first impression is that it’s complete and utter shit. Everything’s so garish and bright and super-real, like the first twinklings of a hastily consumed microdot at the exact moment you discover all your friends have left you alone in a strange pub. The actors themselves are all clean and symmetrical like children’s painted wooden blocks and the acting follows suit.
Of course, apart from being shit, the look of the show is entirely deliberate. It’s meant to be cod-surreal, a bit ‘weird,’ but the acting is so knowing it completely lacks any subtlety. What wit that may have existed in the first place is condensed unto an unblinking blob of soulless drudgery.
I’m very sure that the makers of this tripe knew they’d cooked a turkey; this is born out in the tooth-grinding score which seeks to emphasis the whole ‘ooh, isn’t this weird’ aspect by employing a pizzicato plinking, plonking string section to imbue every scene with a supposed quirkiness. It’s unbelievably awful. It’s so loud that, even if you wanted to hear the script, your ears have to strain round the pumps of some bored session muso earning his living on his cacky cello.
In one scene the tempo of the score sped up every time the shot featured a male, only to drop to its heartbeat pace when the female mugged into the middle distance. This drone is there all the time; it’s gradually fed into the beginning of scenes and ends them with a self-satisfying ‘plong!’ But it’s also oddly hypnotic and I’m convinced that the incidental music is the key to the programme’s ongoing success.
At first it’s mildly irritating, then it becomes intolerable and all of sudden, your tea is cold and you’ve dribbled all over your pants. The only reason I saw 15 minutes was because I was channel hopping and happened on it. You see, I saw the last 15 minutes; I made it to the end – it was the music that made me do it.
I still don’t understand.
Interview With a Cannibal
71 CommentsMarch 30, 2009 – 7:54 am
In 2002, German cannibal Armin Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to over eight years in prison for killing, dismembering and eating another man.
Most of us have heard of this fellow and what he did with Bernd Brandes, so watching ‘Interview With A Cannibal’ on Channel Five was, on the face of it, no more than one’s own voyeurism taking advantage of the channel’s tendency to sensationalise events.
As the programme trundled inevitably towards the ‘good bits’ I was surprised that Five had made some effort to explain why on earth the man might have a vibrant fetish for the consumption of human flesh. Putting it bluntly, his dad left the homestead when he was nipper, his domineering mum remarried three times to rotten types, all of whom nicked her money before nicking off and when the last one left Meiwes obsessively cared for her until death.
In short Meiwes wanted something permanent for himself – what he described as a ‘brother’. He concluded that, by consuming a lover, the digested flesh would physically transgress into his being for evermore. We learned that aside from a spell in the army, the desire to eat human flesh had been an all-consuming urge (excuse the pun) since he hit puberty.
Whilst his character was being dissected (if you’ll excuse the pun, again) much less was made of the victim. We got a miniscule amount on his background. It wasn’t dissimilar to Meiwes, but there was nothing to explain why he wanted some random fellow to eat him – in particular, his winkle.
I’m not saying I can understand why anyone would want to eat another person, though I can project my sympathies sufficiently to inform you that I’d much rather be the diner than the meal. Incidentally Brandes wasn’t the only person offering himself for consumption; apparently Meiwes had a pick of over 400 individuals that wanted to be his tea…
After meeting online and discussing plans, Miewes arranged to meet Brandt at the station near to his late mother’s 44 bedroom mansion and drove him home. After showing him around, lobby, winter lounge, kitchen, ‘slaughter room,’ as he openly referred to it, they had sex because, according to Miewes, Brandes wanted to. After the latter dosed up on sleeping pills and cough syrup, and following one failed attempt, Miewes cut off his lover’s manhood, as discussed of course.
At this point I started to feel a bit peculiar. Far from a barrel of laughs, Miewes came across as quite affable. He was almost affectionate when discussing his lover, but the manner in which nonchalantly described some of the events had a tendency to suddenly chill the blood like liquid nitrogen. In two or three instances it was impossible not to feel physically sick. One period of nausea arrived when Miewes recalled how Brandes screamed for no more than 30 seconds before expressing his disappointment that it didn’t hurt more, casually acknowledging the spurting wound.
As Brandes ‘relaxed’ upstairs, Miewes popped down into the kitchen, split and broiled the winkle, fried it with some garlic and took it back upstairs for a spot of post-penectomy dining. Apparently Brandes was very upset that it was inedible, which is a disappointment to say the least, especially as he was, by that point, bleeding heavily from the hole where his penis / sausage was.
I have to say I found the next part the hardest bit of all to comprehend, which may come as some surprise with regard to what has happened so far. Miewes ran his pal a hot bath and, whilst he went downstairs to read a Star Trek book, left him there for a few hours to ‘bleed out.’
I don’t think this translates as well in writing as it does when spoken by Miewes, and this was the programme’s strength. The interviews were inter cut with footage of the actual locations within the house – kitchen, slaughter room, bed, hook in the ceiling etc… This gave the variously unpleasant stages an insidious quality which occasionally convulsed into unmitigated horror.
Brandes was still alive after his bath – by now more blood than water (‘as he was still spurting’) – and after getting out and collapsing a few times, eventually he passed out for good.
Miewes made it clear he wasn’t interested in killing anyone (weirdly I sort of believed him, killing was a means to an end in the same way as carnivores buy meat at the supermarket) nonetheless, after a small struggle with himself he slit his lover’s throat, removed his head and hung him on the meat hook where he was disembowelled and dismembered in accordance with instructions attained online. The body parts were packed as choice cuts (65lbs worth) and placed in the large chest freezer in the kitchen. For the next 10 months he ritually cooked and ate Brandes daily (describing its taste as ‘rich Pork’) with his best dinner service by candlelight.
Incredibly none of these facts are remotely contentious. From the outset Miewes and Brandes agreed to film the whole evening, particularly as Brandes was keen to watch himself having his penis cut off. When 20 minutes of the more grisly ‘highlights’ were shown to the jury all but two vomited in their seats as Miewes stood by watching calmly.
This will probably be the part of the programme that will stick in my brain. Miewes’ calmness, his matter-of-factness, made the events he described seem virtually normal, like he was talking about two mates on a Saturday night eating pizza, getting drunk and one of them passing out from over-indulgence…
But there was something else in this interview that concerned me and it took me a while to work out what it was. Initially I thought he was a little arrogant, almost smug – but it wasn’t just that. As the credits rolled I got it. Miewes appetite had been sated. He was full.
Barnardo’s
18 CommentsDecember 17, 2008 – 12:46 pm
The Barnardo’s advert, currently casting a black shadow over commercial TV, will continue to air despite attracting almost 500 complaints. According to the Advertising Standards Authority the advert was ‘justified,’ despite some of the complainants being victims of abuse who found the advert ‘distressing.’
Before we tackle the commercial itself it’s worth noting the power of the buck in this instance. Barnardo’s are paying a lot of money to run this advert. If they weren’t I should imagine 500 complaints would see the bastard taken off the air at once, especially ones from abuse victims. This is something the BBC, a publicly funded organisation, don’t have in their favour. Complain about them and a national scandal emerges, moan about your rights as a viewer after suffering shock following a confrontation with poorly judged and sensationalist shit such as this offing from Barnardo’s and you get brushed off like pubic hair that’s escaped from Stalag Luft Underpant.
The main problem with the advert is that it makes no fucking sense.
Yes, we get the cycle of abuse thing on paper but how does this offing from a Children’s Charity reinforce this? Who is this targeted at?
Teachers who don’t listen to adult women in school uniforms saying ‘I don’t understand’? That rotter who gives her a good smack round the head as she’s trying to eat toast?
Even if this was made clear I’m not sure where Barnardo’s fit into all this and am now left confused as to what Barnado’s actually do. I thought Barnardo’s was a children’s home. Are they advertising for residents or what?
The advert falls on its arse from the off by the choice of lead. The blonde ‘teen’ could be anything from 18 to 35. Either way, the character doesn’t have ‘vulnerability’ written all over her. In fact, the first thing you notice is she’s quite hot with big tits.
The choice of the ‘cycle of abuse’ is bizarre too. Not just the sequence of events, but the situations in which our heroine finds herself in. First off, we see her assaulting someone so our sympathies aren’t really engaged with her. When we see her crying in nick, a few of us probably thought she jolly well deserved it (what-ho).
Then comes the hitting scene which is as powerful as it is upsetting. Between you and me, it’s very well done, but it can’t be justified in any rational way as it doesn’t function outside of what it is… which is ‘nasty’.
The final scene of her getting whacked on horse is more farcical than hard-hitting. The makers may as well have portrayed her with a dribbling tongue hanging out, trying to catch imaginary butterflies over a Jefferson Starship soundtrack. Speeding the sequence up (instead, perhaps, on focusing on her welfare when she was younger which may have saved the whole shambles) demonstrates an ironic ‘fuck it, this’ll do’ mentality.
Should it be banned?
Not really, there’s no such thing as bad publicity and through foul means or fair, many more people will now have heard of Barnardo’s. Its just a shame that because of the poor way they’ve portrayed themselves you’ll have to find out what they actually do via other sources. The twits.
