charlie brooker..love him!
Some things in life are permanent. Others are fleeting. And a precious few are ostensibly fleeting, but feel permanent anyway. The DFS half-price sale is perhaps the clearest example of this. The gap between individual DFS sales seems shorter than the average sneeze; all but imperceptible.
Still, that's nothing compared to the microscopic delay between individual Channel 4 documentary seasons examining the world of sex and bums and people with nothing on. Right now, the theme is "Sex In The 80s", which must've been an exceptionally hard sell round Channel 4 towers. Mullets! Tits! Duran Duran! More tits! Bigger mullets! Ha ha ha! All you need is a few seconds of voiceover babble about "changing attitudes" and "social upheaval" laid over the top and hey presto: you've justified everything. It's not just a load of tit shots - it's a sociological investigation. With tit shots.
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Anyway, the randy nostalgia shudders to a climax this week with Club 18-30 (Wed, 11.05pm, C4) - a nudge-wink documentary essentially consisting of hee-larious archive footage intercut with soundbites from people who once got their end away on holiday. There's also a thuddingly pointless thread in which two former Club 18-30 reps return to the Portugal resort they once ruled in their prime... and walk around a bit. The contrast between their 1980s snapshots (gangly youths drooling over sunburned knockers) and the present day reality (waddling middle age) is a disturbing testament to the ravages of the ageing process. One now resembles Ben Dover, while the other's blobbed out and looks like a cross between a tortoise and a mayor.
By the end of the show, you've been mildly entertained, but learned nothing. A bit like an actual Club 18-30 holiday really, but with fewer unwanted pregnancies. Next week on Channel 4: a season of documentaries examining the complex shift in sexual attitudes during the 2001 foot and mouth crisis. With tit shots.
In many ways, Big Brother (daily, C4) is the present day equivalent of a 1980s Club 18-30 Holiday - flirting, sunbathing, silly little organised games, and lots of people you'd like to remove from the genepool with a cricket bat.
Over the past fortnight, I've managed to establish a pattern whereby whichever housemate I've ranted about most has been magically evicted by the time the article makes it into print, leaving me feeling even more pointless and impotent than usual; an idiot shrieking at a shadow. Still, I won't let that stop me having another pop at Grace, the poisoned twiglet - even though I secretly hope she survives the jinx because I rather enjoy hating her. She single-handedly redefines the word "snob" for the 21st century: a new, self-deluding breed of snob that considers itself not just superior, but inherently cooler, more compassionate, and more down-to-earth than everyone else.
Last week I said she looked like Michelle Fowler, but that's not quite accurate enough. She actually looks more like Howdy Doody, the popular American kiddy show mascot - do a Google image search (go on) and you'll see what I mean. Then pass it on.
Howdy Doody was a puppet, so it's fitting that Grace's current squeeze is the spectacularly wooden Mikey - a man so profoundly thick he can scarcely form sounds, let alone words.
He's hardly even sentient. Lord knows what he's using in place of a brain. Presumably there's some low-wattage internal organ wired up to his nervous system, providing just enough kick to make his eyes blink twice an hour and push shit through his arse when required. A kidney perhaps. Or a liver. But not a brain. Push him into a burning building and he'd simply wander into the flames with a cowlike expression on his face. And when his clothes caught fire he'd spend his final moments trying to swat out the embers with his tail, never quite realising he doesn't have one.
The spectacle of Grace repeatedly binding her spindly frame to this semi-mute humanoid log, breaking off occasionally to bitch about anyone within mindshot, is making this year's Big Brother a grinding, masochistic, darkening trial. With tit shots