is the last shot of this Pepsi Max commercial:
It makes me angry beyond words. Well okay it doesn’t do half of that. However it is terrible. What exactly are they doing at the end there? I don’t understand. Maybe I refuse to understand or comprehend. In fact I do.
I’ve just been reading Charlie Brooker’s latest Screen Burn column. You should too. Then come back here.
Done that? Good. Right, where were we?
Okay, early on he sums up nicely one thing that really annoys me about television at the moment. Sometimes there is a need to explain who a person is, what makes them tick. However most of the time, if you’re on a game show say, it really doesn’t matter. So don’t bother telling me.
I. DON’T. CARE. ABOUT. YOUR. FUCKING. JOURNEY. The journey is you auditioned for a telly show, you had some degree of knowledge about said show. You then did your thing. You’re probably not an expert in the field the show deals with, as if you were, you’d be doing it for a living. So sometimes you may find doing said thing a bit tricky. Most of the time though you do the thing to the best of your ability. Then you either win, or you get so far in the show, and go home. Even if you win, you’ll probably make little impact on that area you chose afterwards. Life goes on. It’s not really a journey.
The worst example of this is Total Wipeout on BBC1. If you’re going to run across some big balls and probably fall off, get on with it, don’t give me your life story. The infinitely better Viking (Japanese telly shown on Eurosport 2) doesn’t bother with this, their contestants shout, then get on with something far harder and more impressive. For a bit of fun, they sometimes have them do the same thing with their kids in tow. No lifestory needed.
The other upside of this is that you either get more or less telly, rather than pointless filler about lives I don’t care about. And that is a good thing.
So tonight’s episode of Big Brother 10 had quite a lot going on. Kenneth the Evil Villain in tears over the thought of his girlfriend doing naughty things without him, despite one of his first sentences on greeting her in the house being “Wow, 58 days of loyalty, who would have thought it?” Siavash and Noirin finding themselves in a painful love tryst. Bea and Freddie Halfwit drawing closer together. Bea’s incredible 60 second dating video that would scare any possible suitor clean away.
However for me, the strangest moment was part of the Greek themed task where Charlie and Rodrigo peformed as Stavros Flatley, the tribute act to Riverdance who found fame on Britain’s Got Talent. It was just an odd moment, as being young men compared to the father, and being in better shape than either the son or father, and even with a minimal amount of ability or training, they were able to provide a more competent tribute to Riverdance than Stavros Flatley themselves. Of course it lacked the ermm, charm or hmmmm, soul of the original, but it was just methodically better. This was just odd, a reality tribute to a reality tribute, a half-thought out act of a half-thought out act with marginally more talent. Reality television turning in on itself.
Last night’s show had a slightly different feel to it, it seemed like Charlie Brooker was a little brasher, a little louder, a little more cunty. This was no bad thing at all. Mixed in with some quality comments from Frankie Boyle (“they’re supposed to be experts, what did they expect when they cut open a giraffe, a horse with a periscope?”) it made for a strong and enjoyable episode.
