Not the Delicious Sugary Wonka Ones

GSGC is thinking tonight about nerds, and now so are you. From the earliest cave painting of a weedy caveman who's rubbish at mammoth catching through to the Milhouse and Mosses of the modern televisual hoo-hah, these intellectual-yet-puny cornerstones of our society have been found in entertainment media since time began.

Yet they've only recently become the stars in their own right, instead of having to loan technical support and trivia hoo-hah to some handsome jerk instead (1980s frat-comedy Revenge of the Nerds aside). Channel 4's the IT Crowd plants a pair of socially inept computer dorks in the limelight, centering its plots on their cunning outwitting of their less-technically minded bosses and perplexion at the operation of normal social activity. Meanwhile, e4 import The Big Bang Theory cranks up the social inability even further, smattering its cast of science dorks with every cliché out of the big book of nerdish stereotypes. While they're still undeniably the heroes, in both shows the character we're meant to cheer along the most is the one with the biggest inkling of how everyone else operates. The one closest to normdom, the least offensive one to their fully functional, twenty-twenty, non-coke bottle-glasses eyes.

On first viewing of The Big Bang Theory, I was so disappointed as to be offended. The show's portrayal of nerdkind was seen through the eyes of norms, and it was a cruel one. We were clowns to them, nothing more than bumbling idiots with glasses, comic books and an inability to talk to girls, sweeping generalizations which are only mostly true. While I've come round to the show's charms since that day, the fact remains that its portrayals of nerds are no better than those of the fat kids who got sat on and flushed down the toilet all the time in Grange Hill, or even worse, that one that was in The Breakfast Club*.

Nerd power as a social movement has grown hugely since the days of Ro-land, though. Nerds are the richest men in the world now, there's a nerd in the White House, and thanks to the Internet a million bored office workers owe nerds a debt they can never repay. And yet. Mainstream media hangs on to the lazy image of the nerd, frozen in the 70s, and by watching it in droves, the nerd masses implicitly capitulate. Vote with your remotes, fellow dorks. End nerdsplotation today.


* He should have got the girl - why did that stupid jock get the girl? What a cop out. He was the most decent human being among them, and yet all he got out of the thing is an important lesson about himself. This is two years post-WarGames, which proved that nerds could do awesome stuff like save the world, and yet nobody's willing to give a high school nerd a punt at getting the girl if he's not going to save the world. I'm not bitter, honest.

Eleven of One, Only One of T'other

It's a retroventure this evening, as GSGC turns its snobbishly loquacious eye on BBC4 this 7.30pm and a repeat of Richard Something-or-other (I'll be hereby saying 'Beckinsale' even though I know that's entirely untrue)'s classic historical jaunt series, War Walks. As a youth, I recall watching this one of an evening, and being excited by the whole notion of wars and walking around them, what with all the fighting and explosions and people dying in brilliant ways. Now I'm a namby leftist peacenik and I'm no longer a fan of fighting and people dying (explosions are still brilliant, though), let's give it a whirl with grown up eyes.

With an epic 'tache, looking like that one what was in Last of the Summer Wine, Richard not-Beckinsale introduces our locale du jour, today Bosworth, where Richard III got deaded by the Tudors, in a big fight he knew he couldn't win. Then, he bobs around some contemporary tapestries and portraits, explaining the political whatnots leading up to the big scrap of the day. It's standard-issue historical stuff, all kings and barons and no poor people unless absolutely necessary, which fits into not-Beckinsale's lovely BBC accent in a way that talking about peasants, pig-farmin' and being poor just never could.

Fifteen minutes of that and there's still been no walking, making me wonder if I could get a bit of my license fee back under Trades Descriptions. Instead, he has a chat with a local Bosworth barmaid and churchwarden who both reckoned, without any possible evidence to back their claims, that Dicky Three was actually one of the goodies, and that they'd've been cheering him on from the sidelines if they could only go back to 1485. If anything, I wish I could get my license fee back even more after that.

Ten minutes left, and at best not-Beckinsale has done a bit of sauntering at best, and no walking to speak of. He also rode a horse a bit. Instead, he's been watching the 'war' bit of the programme, provided by some typically worryingly keen re-enacters. This kind of thing always looks rubbish on the telly, because there's never enough of them for a proper war, and the ones that there are are never dedicated enough to their art to want to get stabbed. Then some bloke in post-production plays some clanging and vague shouting sounds over the top in an effort to help out. Never works.

Five minutes to go till programme's end, and finally Richard not-Beckinsale deigns to do a bit of the promised walking. He does a good job, too, with the classic one-foot-in-front-of-the-other technique we've all come to expect from a walker of this man's standing. Alas, he's just not putting in the effort - a thirty second piece to camera here, a two minute wander up to a stone there, it's really not what the fans have come to expect. Overall, an unbalanced effort from the wandering academic, who seems to have forgotten he's go two mandates to cover in this show. Conclusion: should be called "War and Fighting and Kings and That and a Little Bit of Wandering.”

Mighty White

Tuesday - it's the new Thursday, apparently. Which used to be the new Monday, itself being a replacement for the old Friday. Sitcoms, they get about, don't they? Time was you could turn on the telly on a Friday night and there'd be something on to make you feel better about not having any friendss to go to the pub with, but nowadays they throw you a paltry documentary about Concorde and the implication that everyone else is out having fun without you instead.

But I digress. More than usual. My intention was just to point out that BBC Two are showing comedy on a Tuesday night nowadays. Alan "rumour has it he bit a tramp once" Davies gets a 9pm billing in Whites, where he's been asked to grow a Marco Pierre White beard just to rub it in a bit. I was prepared to diss it with vitriol and evil, but then Issy Suttie and Jen out of off'f The IT Crowd appeared within two minutes of each other and delivered cracking performances, so I thought I'd stick it out. Super Hans out of off'f Peep Show gets a look-in later on, too, but the problem with Super Hans out of off'f Peep Show is that no matter which role he's playing, you always hear Super Hans out of off'f Peep Show and assume that whenever he's out of shot he's probably smoking some bloody lovely crack. Which is a shame, because he's actually played all kinds of non-crack related roles, but you just can't see past the crack. It's a kind of mental typecasting; he could play Harold Wilson, and all you'd be thinking was "I bet that's not tobacco in that pipe".

Anyway, long story short, thanks to a particuarly excellent supporting cast I warmed to the whole thing by the end, despite a script which veered from so-so to actually-alright-really-I-suppose; despite Alan Davies, whom I can't generally tolerate for too long without wanting to pull off my ears; even despite the trailer for Jools Holland afterwards which made me want to pull off his ears (he's a horrible little suckup, isn't he?). Which came as a bit of a surprise, but I'll roll with it. At least it's not Harry and Paul, which was on afterwards and did nothing but make me long for the Fast Show. Which itself probably wasn't that great, actually, but at least I was young enough to not know better.

Tomorrow: I might just watch a documentary on BBC4 about paintings or Jesus or something, if you’re lucky.

Nice Ahse, Darlin'

GSGC returns to our fancy modern flatscreens in an inauspiciously rubbish way, by means of no wifi in my hotel and a bit of fiddling with a USB stick the day after. For lack of anything better, your daring reviewer is watching a possibly-new episode of Grand Designs (More4, 9pm). Tonight's idiots wanting to build an inefficiently-costed house are a Sue Perkins-alike and a confused-looking bloke who are desperate to go live in a hobbit-hole underneath an old crumbling barn in the middle of a field.

Why bother with the barn bit and not just dig a big hole? I don't know either, but someone at the local council planning department thinks it's funny, because they've demanded our idiots leave the barn perfectly intact. What an awesome job that dude must have. It's like he knew they were going to be on Grand Designs and reckoned they could do with a bit more of a challenge. Perhaps he reasoned as I do, that the odds of anyone nowadays building a pretentious super-middle-class house in a field not being on some kind of telly programme are rapidly approaching zero, so he took a punt and is, as I type, sitting in his bedsit chuckling into his pot noodle at an irritating sabotage well done. I salute you, Mr Council Planning Department Man; you've done a narratively important thing. Hope the troubles with your wife blow over and you can move back in soon.

The reason we (and by 'we', I mean 'me'. Well, 'I', grammatically speaking) watch Grand Designs, in determined opposition to the reasons we watch most other telly, is in order to watch people succeed. Nobody cares who wins the Apprentice, we just tune in to watch shitbags be shitbags to each other, in an environment wher there aren't any non-shitbags around to get hit with the crossfire. Nobody likes the people who successfully pitch to Dragon's Den, they're all smug arseholes. But the ones who try to get 200k for a badger eyepatch factory: we'll watch those idiots all day. What awful people we are. By which I mean, what an awful person I am.

Except when I watch Grand Designs, and I have no idea why. By all the standards of the glowing box of judgement, I should be hoping this eco-hobbit hole falls down on the heads of these creatures who dare aspire to live in a nice house. I should be appalled that by the end they've gone and made a quite nice hole with a lovely view of some fields where they can sit and drink ice tea and say 'rah' with their friends. But I'm not. If I may sum up in my best Kevin McCloud impression, that's the real achievement of Grand Designs. Anyone can film some people building a house, but it takes a certain magic, a commitment to making you not hate people, a reminder that nice houses are nice no matter how irritatingly smug and privileged their builders, to make a Grand Design.

Tomorrow: GSGC watches something else, hopefully a bit more writing-worthy.

Glee Is a Synonym of Happiness

At first glance, I carefully decided that my opinion of Glee (E4, just now, don'cha'know) was that it was like Ed or the Gilmore Girls, but on prime time telly for some reason. Possibly it's even like Judging Amy, but I wouldn't know as I only watched that once. Regardless, this is one of the greatest compliments a fifth-rate TV blogger can offer, so pay attention at the back there.

At second glance, I decided to throw Britannia High, High School Musical and The Biz into the mix, because I'm mad like that and every other review in the world ever won't get away without mentioning at least one of the above, so I at least fit into the safety of the fold here. Luckily, though, the comparisons are wasted, because the only thing shared between Glee and the above three are singing and education, while everything else is thrown into the bins of awful-and-possibly-forgotten children's programming where it belongs.

The show's dialogue is chock-full of the kind of fast-talkin' smooth understandin' characteristic of the higher quality US soap operas (or "comedy-dramas" if you're a bit up yourself) so beloved of E4 afternoon schedulers. This results in everyone, from intellectual and vaguely disaffected teachers to high school drama queens and attendant nerds all talk like they were flicking through the dictionary just before they walked into shot and still manage to get away with it.

For those of us who love to flick through dictionaries before we walk anywhere, this is awesometastic.

As is legally required in programmes of the type mentioned above, the cast consists entirely of variously lovable characters all of whom are quirky in some obvious yet for some reason entirely forgiveable way. There's the quirkily crazy teacher-with-a-crush-on-another-teacher, the quirkily mad drama queen, the quirkily steroidy gym teacher lady and the quirkily whatever everyone else. It's a high school, so you can pretty much fill in the rest of the stereotypes yourself and then just add the epithet 'quirky' in there somewhere, it probably won't matter where. Don't feel bad about it, because that's evidently what Glee's writers have done. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it rather handily saves the programme about sixty minutes' worth of tiresome character introduction, because you already know who everyone is by looking at them. That way, they can get on with a standard loser-bulling based plotline and still fit one in about how being a teacher is apparently an awfully-paid job and any teachers with kids on the way should quit and become accountants in the first hour. Also, the music's awesome! There's Journey, for one, and then a load of a capella stuff over scene transitions and montages.

For those of us who love Journey and a capella hoo-hah, this is equally awesometastic. Somehow, though, the bit where the two are combined manages to suck monkey balls, but you can't have everything.

So, in brief: Glee is good, but then again, so were Ed and the Gilmore Girls, and you never watched them either, you bastards. It's like you don't even care.

Your Democracy Pounds At Work

As of the start of this paragraph, the eager eyes of umpteen million political car-crash loving viewers are only thirteen minutes away from seeing Britain's most popular fascist appear on BBC One's flagship political debate show. The previous sentence was never one I foresaw myself typing during my short and anteillustrious blogging non-career, but there we are, I've been forced into it by the moronic actions of a million protest-vote cretins. If not for them, GSGC could have continued to wallow in internet obscurity.

So, our Question Time players for tonight, shortly to be introduced by BBC super-stalwart Dimbleby, include Demon Headmaster clone and Justice Minister (surely a job for a Demon Headmaster itself) Jack Straw, woman who appears in the Guardian and the Indy a lot Bonnie Greer, generic Lib Dem Chris Huhne, Conservative something-or-other Baroness Warsi (didn't she write the Scarlet Pimpernel?), and a room full of angry hippies and BNP supporters on their best behaviour. Oh, and a fat racist.

And we're off! To answer Mark Lawson's question posed in the G2 this morning, Griffin's been sat second from the right, with Bonnie Greer on one side and Dimbleby on the other. I note she's got her back to the racist swine, in quite a fantastic gesture of pretending he doesn't exist. She keeps this up throughout the show, even when addressing him directly, and sometimes when pointing viciously at him. Her eyes are locked directly on the studio lights, presumably so she can blind herself and not have to see him at the end when she gets up.

First question about how shit the BNP is goes to Jack Straw, who says yes, they're well shit, because they define themselves on race. He goes on to talk about how the World Wars were won by so many black and asian soldiers. Griffin bats back with "Churchill hated Muslims" and "my Dad was in the RAF while yours was a consciencious objector." That was, of course, fucking cheap, and the audience ain't buying it. Dimbleby calls him on his bullshit, which he pretends to ignore.

A black bloke in the audience asks why Griffin won't acknowledge the contribution immigrants like his parents have made. Racism-chops reckons he's been misquoted, but won't say which quotes in the media were false. Not even the one about holocaust denial.

Baroness Warsi digs out a quote from a (presumably former, by the way fatty denies it) communications type calling Churchill a "bleeping bleep" (bless the BBC compliance department) who shouldn't have joined the war. Griffin splutters. He'll be doing that a lot tonight.

A bloke at the back of the room has just noted that Enoch Powell had the same attitudes as Griffin. He seems to be reading it as given that the room liked Powell, for some mad reason. Then it's Huhne's go to have a dig at the racist nobhead, finding his own quote-of-evil. I couldn't really concentrate on it, mind, because I just realised how much Chris Huhne looked like the deputy head at my primary school.

Anyway, just tuned in on Dimbleby observing that he's on Youtube hanging out with the head of the KKK. Griffin denies it, saying he was only the leader of "a Ku Klux Klan, an almost totally non-violent one". He's looking ever more blustery, even trying for a rabble rousing "why should anyone trust any politician" line, normally the kind to make the QT audiences scream with approval, but the best he gets is a don't-try-to-play-us murmur. Jack Straw calls him the Dr. Strangelove of British politics, which was actually a fucking nice comparison.

What the hell IS an ethnic minority, asks some girl, in the audience, followed by why did you deny the holocaust from an unfortunately stereotypical Jewish-looking lad. I can't explain because of the law! claims Tubby, shot down by the two people in the room who pretty much make said law. He stutters and blusters on, and then Dimbleby says its time to move on.

"Why is Islam a wicked and vicious faith" asks an audience chappy. Griffin replies it's because a
literal interpretation of the Koran would be well bad, with the stoning and the whipping and that. Britain should remain a Christian country, he claims, rather missing all those nasty things in the Christian holy book. Warsi gets another dig in, and says he brings Christianity into disrepute.
I'm going to stop mentioning when people get a dig in, otherwise this will be a long read. Bonnie Greer's coming in with a nice speech about how selective Nick Griffin is about British history, which in his book seems to start at 700AD. Later, Fatty Grffin reckons the English have been here for over seventeen thousand years. Bonnie Greer corrects him, pointing out that the only humans present at that point were Neanderthals. She's too classy to point out the obvious gag, mind.

We're 35 minutes in, and it looks like the whole thing's descending into a BNP-bashing circus. Obviously the panel can only work with the questions they're given, but nobody wants to get off the subject of what a bunch of shits they are and how wrong they are to be racist. Obviously, none of this needs saying, and everyone spending an entire political panel show reiterating it gives too much attention to them. Having said that, we are now onto Labour's immigration policies, and Warsi's taken the opportunity to point out her lot would change immigration for the better. But not in a racist way. But for the better. But not racist. Ad infinitum. Tubby seems to be taking notes, so look out for a recycling of this bit for future misquote purposes.

Good ol' Jack Straw. He's almost certainly espousing some kind of clever policy on immigration now, but I can't for the life of me concentrate on his hypnotically boring voice.

A bloke at the back shouts out that we should kick 'em all out, or similar. He's wearing a horrible yellow jumper, and he asked the question about Enoch Powell earlier. Another bloke sat in front of him goes yeeurrr. I can see where the dickhead contingent's sitting, now.

Chris Huhne's dropping a classic Lib Dem trick now, by dissing things that any previous Tory or Labour government's done. It's one of those that only a party which hasn't been in power since the fifties can't pull off, unless Jack Straw later intends to have a go at past Liberal policies on gramophone ownership or mangles.

A bloke now has a question for 'Dick' Griffin. There's a cheer, like you'd get in the school cafeteria when someone drops a plate.

"Under ten minutes left, and I didn't want this whole programme to be about the BNP" - Dimbleby there, demonstrating how little control he really had over proceedings tonight. Still, we now have a question about whether the Daily Mail should have printed the Jan Moir article about Stephen Gately. Is this a weak parrallel for racism on Question Time I spy? Of course it fucking well is, and Bonnie Greer is so damn careful to not look Captain Racism in the eye while she approves of Jan Moir's right to write the article while at the same time knocking her prejudice. Chris Huhne has a go, too, but drops the ball by mentioning the racist elephant in the room. Damn it, man, try to emulate some Greer-class!

Tubby has a go at the teaching of "homosexuality... indeed, any sex, to primary school children", which would indicate that breeding rates in a BNP-led Britain would be likely to shoot through the roof. He also claims "there is no head of the Christian sect in Britain" which rather makes me wonder what exactly the Queen's job is, then.

"The British people have too much common sense" says our Bonnie, with regards to being swayed by Griffin's appearance on QT. Judging by the standard of common sense I see out in the street, the average BNP voter must have less than most doormats.

And so, with a little more bluster and racist-dissing, Dimbleby calls a halt, and the credits roll. So what have we learnt tonight? That racists appear to melt under studio lights, and that members of the Big Three political parties are always willing to climb all over each other to point out how not racist they are. We've learnt that Bonnie Greer is the epitome of class, while I'm quite the opposite, choosing to refer to a man's unsightly waist a little too often for humour. It's alright, he's a racist; racists don't have feelings. We've learnt that grey hair and headmastery appearances are de rigeur when it comes to putting down bigotry, and that my usual style of televisual blog-review doesn't work as well with political hot topics as with glossy entertainment shows. This is almost certainly because Nick Griffin doesn't have a very good tan, what with needing to look whiter than Daz.

The Box of Judgement

Yes, folks, just when you thought it was safe to return to an obscure part of the web with fewer pageviews than Harold Shipman had Facebook friends, GSGC returns to blither inanely for slightly too many paragraphs at the same time as fan favourite Shipwrecked (Channel4, 1230, Sundays) saunters back onto our hungover screens.

Ah, Shipwrecked! Where else can the hungover of our fair isle go to witness a band of poshos, fucktards and cavemen-from-the-stupid-ages argue about whether to build a shelter to protect them from vicious storms or lie in the sun all day? Where else on British television can such a high dose of self-involvement and ego be present in one location? No wonder these throwbacks are sent out to a desert island in the Pacific - at some point all those shoulder-chips will explode in a bloody, horrible mess, and nobody wants to have to clean that up in Luton town centre.

Anyway, things kick off especially nicely this year, since the tribes have been forced to elect a leader, resulting in Thug #1 and Bint #2 being elected leaders of their respective isles. Bint #1 is less-than-happy at Thug #1's plans to maybe do some work at some point, and the whole thing kicks off in a joyous explosion of what-the-fuck. 

Television nowadays has turned the corner of Reith's inform/educate/entertain mandate and has overriden the whole thing with 'judge' instead. Judge idiots on game shows! Judge parents for having fat kids! Judge foreigners for their crazy ways! Judge poshos, fucktards and cavemen for having the temerity to be poshos, fucktards and cavemen on your telly! How dare they? Then, when you're done with all that, the shiny box in the corner of the room can judge you right back. Why aren't you recycling more? Eat healthier food, fatso! People are dying and you're just watching television! You make us sick!

Anyway, back to Shipwrecked for a moment, where aggressive Bint #1 has just screamed in the face of Thug #1 in the rudest way possible; "who are you to tell me I don't have manners?"

I love to judge strangers.

Bitchanca!

How does that Bianca Jackson do it? Not only has she starred in what is possibly EastEnders' most ill-concieved TV trailer ever (and if you haven't seen it, be grateful and make sure never to turn on the Beeb at switch-over time for the next week or two, just in case), turns out she's also the business world's most evil bitchmonster on the side.

This week's Apprentice has to rank as one of the best ever, alongside that one with the cheese. Beautiful juxtapositioning showed us the awesome power of an Apprentice team at full pelt, with Raef (wittily retitled Lawrence of Araefia by his team of wags) leading the boys through that rarest of things, a perfect game. It looked like maybe there was some tension as the poshos took their time getting to the laundry to help out the Johnny Commoners, but then they did get there and they did help out, much to the chagrin of the programme's editors.

Thank fuck for Bianca, then, who cunningly disguised herself as sales manager Jenny Celerier and proceeded to give a room full of salespeople a one-hour lecture on selling before pissing that away when she offered to iron a hotel's pillowcases for a fiver a pop. Luckily, though, she'd already spotted her scapegoat, and dragged the poor girl kicking and screaming into the slaughterhouse with her by ignoring everything she offered then making her cry for not offering any help. Grade A bitch material indeed, particularly because she picked the clearly-quite-lovely-but-clearly-no-Apprentice-winner Lucinda as her target, who, bless her cotton socks, was taken aback by the fact that she was given no real orders from the off and never recovered. She didn't really make that good a showing of herself in the boardroom, alas, which meant the ire of Alan Sugar had to be directed on Shazia, a mostly-innocent, who just happened to be there because she'd opened her trap.

Much as the Bianca from hell deserves to burn at the stake for her evils this night, I'm confident that her punishment will be justice enough: when she finally pops her boardroom clogs, she'll have to face the audience on The Apprentice: You're Fired which the rather genial (and increasingly ubiquitous) Adrian Chiles gets to host on BBC2 straight after the main show. For one of those low-budget reality show discussion bits, it's actually rather good, in part because every week the Chilester points out all the funny bits you'd already pointed out to the rest of your living room, thus making you look witty and that. Anyway, it also involves the just-fired contestant getting to say their bit in front of an audience who've just watched the main show, so by rights Bianca ought to be set upon like Pope Joan was.

Imageless Telly? Egads!

There are times when we all despair of the kind of cock that Radio 4 puts out under the banner of 'comedy'*. Dear audience mine, the current 1830 slot on a Wednesday blows all that despair out of the water. Series two of Look Away Now was trailed as a comedy sports quiz, and thus made me worry for the wellbeing of my teatime ears, but it's possibly the most fun I've had in any thirty-minute slot over the past week. Actually, it's an awesome sketch show, with highlights including commentators reporting on the action in this week's crime dramas, Fabio Acapella (the unaccompanied singing tribute act) and the secret identities of Britain's all-conquering cyclists. This is, to be frank, pitch-perfect stuff, and, despite its sport-based subject matter, doesn't need any kind of in-depth sports knowledge to have you rolling about. I understand it'll be on again tomorrow night at 11, and there's a podcast for the next seven days, too.

For all those hoping for some more unleavened hatred of all things broadcasty, I must apologise. You'll just have to wait till I've watched tonight's Apprentice and finished this in-depth discussion of M*A*S*H I've got going on.


* - Feel free to put forward your own nominations for the award of 'worst radio 4 comedy' in the comments box and I may just force myself to listen to them and present some kind of vitriolic hate-prize to the worst.

Alan Sugar Wants YOU

Ah, yes, there are few better ways to kick off a cliched knockoff tellyblog than to talk about what everyone else in the talking about telly world already talked about this morning; The Apprentice kicked off for a fourth bout last night on BBC One. See that? It was in bold, like in the papers and everything.

This year, Sir Alan appears to have obtained his wannabe apprentices from the books of a low-grade lookalike agency. Already, David "yah, call me Dave" Cameron, in his less known but even more toffy guise as Nicholas de Lacey-Brown, barrister, surname embellisher and suspicious facial hair grower, has been given the Sugary boot. Chief among his crimes, and let's not kid ourselves on this, was publically acknowledging that he was in school for longer than Alan "call me Sir" Sugar. Possibly the array of poshos paraded into the boardroom every year should be given a cheat sheet advising them not to bring up class, education or an inability to discuss football when defending their business decisions. I imagine mentioning shoddy electronics and ridiculous telephones wouldn't go down too well either. He'll never let anyone forget that he's got less education than a barnacle and still has zillions of pounds.

The best thing about the whole affair is the fact that this left-school-at-sixteen, done-it-all-meself, ain't-never-needed-nothing-from-nobody-and-anyone-who-did-is-a-sissy overgrown barrow-boy is so fond of his knighthood that he insists on having everyone else use it all the damn time. You'd think he'd do the courtesy of returning the favour and addressing everyone else by their formal titles, too, but does he fuck. It's all Raef this, Claire that and Alex the other, although in the latter case that's probably a blessing in disguise, because there'd be too much cracking up if he turned to the boys' team and asked Mr Wotherspoon* what went wrong. I look forward to the day he has a baronet or an honourable on or something, so's he can learn what a dick he looks when he gets people to massage his ego like that.

It's shaping up to be a pretty fun series, as it generally is, and I'm looking forward to Lord Snooty and his Pals being recreated before our eyes courtesy of the likes of Raef "hair like a tunnel into eternity" Bjayou and Michael "I *sniff* thought we were friends" Sophocles while the rest of the lads form up into an hilariously incompetent version of the Bash Street Kids. Possibly even the Jocks and the Geordies, should we manage to squeeze another schism out of them.

Raef for the win, incidentally, mostly because Sugar would quickly come to loathe having to work with him.

* - Anyone else picturing a chain of kuh-razy pubs, where everything is topsy-turvy and nothing is what it seems?

Great Goolies of Guatamala!

Well, folks, welcome to yet another episode of 'I just watched something on TV and like to delude myself that other people care.' Today's rant subject is possibly the best episode of Wife Swap USA (More4, 8pm) ever. And I mean ever.

With the UK's version of the show, you pretty much know what you're getting: common, poor types who like to spend money and get pissed swap with middle-class self-employed types who sit on their pile of cash so's they can be buried with it like an ancient Egyptian Pharoh. The rich types learn to loosen up a bit, the poor types learn that children aren't just a ticket for free dosh from the DSS, and everyone goes home happy.

Wife Swap USA, however, is a far more beautiful beast. This particular episode runs thusly: middle class family from the middle of some city or other who love to hang around the city and be all swank swap with a family of farming hicks who believe that cooking meat makes it less nutritous and therefore eat nothing but raw meat every five hours, brush their teeth with a mixture of butter and clay and believe that God wouldn't put anything on the Earth to harm us, therefore bacteria are good things and that they shouldn't clean anything at all, ever.

Some fine choice lines available: "your children are being brainwashed by the schooling system, so I'll be unschooling them" claims hick lady, pointing out that school is a waste of time, since you don't learn anything of any use. Nobody opted to point out that most people do, lesson one being "for fuck's sake, cook your meat, you cretin" followed by a swift burst of "Jesus, you force your children to live like the cavemen you clearly wish you are? What the hell? Seriously, how inbred are you?"

A week on the cooked food diet proves difficult for crazy hick lady, who claims that since she stopped brushing her teeth with butter, she's found it hard to concentrate without any cholesterol or fat on her brain. She's also shocked that these city slickers don't have any contingencies put aside for disasters, and insists that they stock up on a week's worth of emergency rations, just in case of giant tornadoes, nuclear war, or, of course, God bringing about the End of Days as punishment for us all refusing to acknowledge the humble e.coli baccilus as our brother and kin.

The worst bit is the way that these hick morons have actually managed to produce spawn whose digestive systems have adapted to a raw meat diet such that cooked food actually causes them to fall ill, whether psychosomatically or because their twisted parents have performed some form of genetic devolution, I don't know, but these are kids who actually have a use for their appendices. Science-tastic, and by which I mean, not science-tastic.

It's a shame, really that the producers couldn't find a similarly mental family to match them against, but, alas, all they've found is a group of city-bound residents whose only failure is a slight squeamishness about knowing where their food comes from. Deploreable, yes, but rare, alas no.

I forget what the point was; I'm not even sure that there was one. Except maybe that certain people are absolute morons who don't deserve the school education they've so kindly rejected, thus clearing a seat for someone else. If only the state could sterilise them and prevent their passing on their demented seed, we'd all be happy.

This rant was brought to you by the mood 'restless' and the state of unemployment. Accept no imitations. Unless they're good ones, in which case, what the hell, you're only young once.

On The Highly Comprehensible English Legal System, And Telling Jeffrey Archer To Fuck Off

Via the handily lotterial (I don't care what you may think, it's a word. Put your hand down and pay attention at the back there) method of rant generation, BBC2's prime-time, nail-in-the-coffin-of-judicial-process controversy farm The Verdict gives ample opportunity to hate all kinds of things and still come out at the end of it all looking all intellecutal and clever-like.

To summarize, for the benefit of those who had the foresight to pull out their own brains and then cauterize the vestigal stump that remained for fear of infecting themselves with this guff: a convicted perjurer, three individuals of varying talent who all linger under the moniker of 'actors', two musicians, one of whom sees fit to name himself after a Japanese manga craze and still thinks he ought to be taken seriously, the CEO of a well-known high-street purveyor of knickers and hilarious inflatable animals (erm, so I've heard, anyway), a footballing-type fellow, a woman who wasn't very happy when her daughter got murdered, some stripling of a lad of twenty-one who's too successful for his own (or is it my own?) good and a former Shadow Chancellor all get together to decided on the guilt or lack thereof of a made-up group of defendants accused of raping a made-up woman. So, just your average jury, then.


Oh, but wait, it's not. It's actually not a legitimate jury at all, containing as it does at least one man with criminal convictions who's served jail time within the last ten years, and at least a good few grounds for objection by even the most half-witted of barrister smattered around the place. It's also, let's be fair, so astonishingly unlikely that all twelve of these vaguely-known individuals would all a) be called for jury service at the same time, b) all be within the catchment area of the same Crown Court and c) all serve on the same jury that we may as well give up now and call in Darth Vader as the foreman.

Ah, but, say the programme's advocates (the puns! Oh, the terrible terrible puns!), that's the point! We get all these people together to crack open the nature of the jury and show everyone what the law's all about! Then it's not a big mystery any more and we all go home happy, discussing last night's episode of the case over the water cooler and on the BBC message boards, presumably with gusto. Well, here's news to you all, chumps: you can't have both, and, to be frank, you shouldn't have either. If you want to treat this like a real case, and if you want to watch what a jury go through as they take the agonizing decision between possibly locking up an innocent man and allowing a guilty one to walk free, while learning how the law that frames all this works, then fine. Go ahead and do it, you ghouls. But don't be surprised if I come round and bash your smug little heads together when at the end of the week you congratulate yourselves on guessing correctly whether or not she was lying. If you want Archer and his cohorts to treat this deal as though it was the real McCoy, you need to be doing that yourself, too. Of course, you've probably stopped reading by this point, because it's a long paragraph and mostly it flies over your head a bit with all the legal talk. Well, it gets thicker from here, so we'll have a Tourette's-style outburst so the stragglers can catch up.

Boobies!

But, much as I'd love to blame Jeffrey 'Perjurer Mcperjury Perjury Perjuryface' Archer and the whole damn programme for the whole mess, it really isn't their fault. If we've got to the point where a programme like this actually becomes plausible, then somewhere down the line someone's put a foot wrong, and I think I can guess who. Hint: it's quite a lot of people. Quick pop quiz: which piece of legislation defines the offence of murder? If you answered anything other than 'none, it's covered in the common law and always has been, you charlatan', possibly substituting 'charalatan' for your own highbrow insult of choice, then I'm not at all surprised and don't think any the worse of you. Unless you're a legal professional of some kind, in which case you'll understand if I don't hire you to defend me against my forthcoming lawsuit from made-up PhD lady 'Doctor' Gillian McKeith, with 'Doctor' here rhyming with 'not a doctor'. But I digress.

The only reason I have any particularly decent knowledge of the English legal system is because I chose to study it at A-level. Had I not done so, I'd probably be in the same boat as everyone else, which is mad: I actually had to elect to learn the law as a purely academic and university-attention-grabbing qualification to know anything much about it at all. Compare with the United States, and their schools' undying devotion to their beloved Constitution. Sure, it creates obsessively silly patriotic zeal of the kind that should've died out with all the rest of the Nationalist movement about seventy years ago, but at least it gives the little 'uns, and by extension, the big little 'uns, at least the vaguest grounding in their laws and how they come about. And then they go and spoil it all by doing something stupid like televising trials.

Citizenship lessons, that's the key! To most Johnny Commoners on the street, courts and laws and parliaments are all just a load of blokes in silly wigs talking in code while occasionally one of them sees fit to appear on the news and talk down to them, thus making the football late. Thanks to Law & Order and its brood, I'd hazard most English citizens have more idea how US criminal law works than does their own. Probably best not to dwell on what goes on on the civil side of things. Teach little Jimmy Commoner about Magna Carta, the blowing up of shit all over the world for the Campaign For This Sort Of Thing (as it was never known) and about a thousand years' worth of blokes with swords shouting at each other and getting quite huffy over the whole affair and you've suddenly got a whole new ball game. Probably best to leave out all the boring stuff, and quite right, too, but all little Jimmy needs to know is the beautiful balance of nature which has somehow fallen out of a constitutional Monarchy being ruled by a democratic assembly and a convention of aristocrats under a joyously simple set of legal frameworks and he'll leap for joy. Well, probably not, but possibly the little bastard will stop kicking peoples' bins over and laughing.

This rant was brought to you in conjunction with the letter 'K' and the number 7.

Bill Lawrence Ought To Be Ashamed

I'm not normally given to making two blog posts within the space of four hours, but there you are, my blood's up. Seeing as though all I've done with it lately is rant about TV programmes I've watched, I may as well continue the theme and pretend like I'm Charlie Brooker and get paid for this stuff. Also, there's little point in my discussing details of my actual life, since anything of interest I'd probably tell people in a slightly less nerdy way.

So, I've just this minute watched episode seven of Scrubs's sixth season, which aired on NBC last Thursday and then on a lot of computers via various quasi-moral file-sharing facilities about three hours later. 'Nuff said, a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse, need I say more et cetera et cetera. Anyways, bearing in mind that up this point, the show has been one of the smartest, best written and obscenely well-soundtracked TV sitcoms to date, I'm willing to forgive even quite a big duffer of an episode now and then. So what is it that makes me want to rant about it to an audience who mostly won't see the show until this autumn at the earliest, and therefore won't have a clue what the fuck I'm on about?

It's probably the obscenely childish portrayal of the touchy subject known as politics and also the linked notion that bringing it up would throw all notions of professionalism out of the window. Without going too in-depth into the plot (mostly because I don't need to, not because I actually think it's worth protecting anyone from accidental exposure to the plot of a half-hour sitcom they'll have forgotten by the time they get around to seeing anyway), the presence of a wounded soldier fresh from a tour in Iraq causes instant and suspiciously equal division between the staff at Sacred Heart hospital in the pro- and anti-war camps. What follows was no doubt billed by NBC as a fair and balanced portrayal not of the views involved, but rather the ancilliary effects of the conflict and what happens when friendship and politics mix. I'd describe it either as the sort of thing that could only be concieved in the most childish and simple-minded of intellects or a demonstration that life in America really is as bad as TV news-based panel shows and comedians would seem to suggest.

You see, as the two camps of staff continue to argue and dispute with one another, they end up neglecting their work, and, who'd've thought it, the injured soldier fellow nearly dies because of it. Eventually, tiring of all the bickering, Dr Kelso saves the day by setting himself up as a figure they can all love to hate and start getting along again. Oh, and JD demonstrates a complete ingorance of the whole situation, lovable scamp that he is, and goes off to read Iraq For Dummies while it all goes on.

So we're supposed to imagine that the assembled medical types (so, doctors, mind. Educated people who've done some learnin' in their time) are actually some form of robot or Jack Russel terrier, grabbing onto the touchy subject of the war with their sharp little teeth and refusing to let go until their jaws are forcibly unclamped and they can go back to running around yelping. There's nobody, in a hospital full of people, who has the wit to go "hold on, guys, we're not going to agree. What say we all abandon this endless bickering and, God, I don't know, stop that guy from dying and do our jobs?" Apparently, you see, in America, professionalism is just something to do while you're waiting for the next argument to come about. Or, to put it another way, there's a clause in the Hippocratic oath which excuses the doctor from performing his duty if the guy he's got to do it beside is a Republican jerk.

But oh! As long as we remember that we both hate our boss, then it's all cool and I don't know what we were fighting about in the first place, I really don't. Come on, let's sew this guy's chest back together, and I bet you fifty bucks that we never mention this incident again in the entire series. Meanwhile, poor ol' JD can't even point to Iraq on a globe, and has no idea what the fuck's happening until it's too late.

One might be forgiven for dismissing all of this as just really bad writing, but my meagre research performed on the subject indicate that the regulars on the show's message board count among their number several people who thought this an interesting, relevant and (sweet baby Jesus, don't let it be true) accurate portrayal. Which means, of course, that this kind of thing is more widespread than I'd dared believe, here in my liberal cocoon of intellect, education, relying on more than just the breakfast radio for my source of news and not letting people die because I was busy arguing with my colleagues. Silly old me for thinking that doctors in a TV sitcom might do the same.

Alternative to this view is the proposal that the writers actually know that what's on the show is a load of tripe-flavoured bollocks, but actually what they're doing is using their lovely medium to highlight an undeniably present issue by overblowing it so massively. All well and good, then, but they don't actually highlight anything. If they were to do so, there'd be a whiff of controversy about the thing, with possibly some sort of resolution. All I see is the use of a potentially hugely volatile (and, thanks to what's known informally as the Brass Eye Equation, potentially pant-pissingly hilarious) piece of current affairs as a throwaway bit of tat so disastrously wasted it's nearly as bad as that time I used the V & A's collection of Fabergé eggs to learn juggling with. God, that was a costly trip to the museum.

So, in conclusion, either this is a portrayal of a country so arse-backwards that it's not even funny anymore (which would make it dead serious and volatile, which would, via the Brass Eye Equation, make it funny again) or a disastrous waste of writer's resources the like of which they won't find again.

Right. I'm off to watch the whole of M*A*S*H. I'll no doubt be seeing you all around the point Alan Alda gets too preachy and BJ Hunnicut grows a 'tache. There's bile material in there for months.

The Pathos of a Chicken's Funeral

Ah, the journalistic pride I feel in reporting the fact that the Shipwrecked crew harboured a raving racist a whole two or three days ahead of most of the country's news agencies, who all had to wait around for Ofcom to tell them. Oh, the bitter sting in knowing that it doesn't matter anyway and most people have learnt the news in question and then forgotten it again since then. Such is life; a fleeting mass of information travelling at such a speed that the world as an entity suffers from collective ADHD and can't pay attention to anything more than - oh look, goats.

This week on the show, token-gay-man's week-old pet chicken died, and a funeral was held in which the fool looked down upon the body of his former pet and recited the lyrics to Goodbye by the Spice Girls while his two companions looked on and sniggered their slightly-more-sane hearts out. The whole affair was drenched in rain, as any TV funeral should be, and couldn't have come out more beautifully if the producers had hired Harold Pinter to write the whole thing.

Meanwhile, a snippet of conversation illustrates exactly what we're all in for over the coming months. It went like this:

TANNED, SHIRTLESS BLOKE: So, what did you come on the show for?

BIKINI CLAD HOT GIRL: Well, I suppose to find out who I am.

Which is all indicative of the sort of thing that goes on on tropical islands, I suppose. If I wanted to find out who I was, God forbid, I'd go and look at my birth certificate. That seems to have all the salient information. Why are you lying, Bikini Clad Hot Girl? The answer to that kind of question goes like this: I like islands, especially of the tropical variety; I like money and the chance to win it; and finally I like scantily clad members of the opposite sex who have a similar level of absolute lunacy to my own. I also may like the chance of being out of the reach of the Long Arm of Her Majesty's Law for a few months due to some misdeeds which I may or may not have accidentally committed after my husband came home one night reeking of perfume which was not my own and then tried to lie about it, the bastard.

God, that's be great, wouldn't it? I don't know under whose law the Shark and Tiger islands are governed, but if they didn't have an extraditon treaty with Britain, there's all kinds of room for runaway felons there. And I bet the damn Guardian wouldn't even know about it till Ofcom told them next Wednesday.

Confessions of a cowboy-astronaut-secret-agent

Right-o. Confession time, sports fans. Confession number one: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of any organisation or group dedicated or supportive to the downfall of the United States, unless you count that time I stook my foot out as George Bush was walking past. (That's a hilarious joke about downfall. Just think about it in relation to tripping up and it'll come flooding to you.)

Confession number two: I appear to have passed what is known as the Hair Event Horizon. By some rough calculations, I appear to have spent round about 80.4%, give or take, of what is vaguely referred to as my adult life with hair long enough to keep my ears warm during a cool breeze. My hair and my being have become, in many ways, inexorably linked; at some point, I suspect it was around a year and a half ago, when I realised I could tie my hair into a legitimate ponytail, the notion of a haircut stopped being just something that happens to people sometimes and would now be considered a major lifestyle choice, perhaps equivalent to deciding that I'm gay or that the whole eccentricity angle of my lifestyle is a bit rubbish and that what I really want to do is shave my head, tattoo something ridiculous onto my bicep and stand at the front of the crowd at football matches yelling racial slurs at opposition players and banging on about how great it is to be British. My only hair-related choices now are to retain my ponytail my whole life, thereby ageing really quite disgracefully and ending up either balding at the front and ponytailed at the back or just being sixty and having exactly the same hair but grey, which is the sort of thing no-one wants to see, except possibly people who teach maths or physics.

Confession number three: my estimeed colleague Mr Christopher S Gifford, BA (hons), is a raving crack dealer. Not, perhaps, crack in the sense of cocaine specially treated to become extra moreish, although truth be told my trusty ol' pipe does need a refill, but rather a far more sickening form of crack in the shape of Channel 4's bikinis-boobies-and-buff-looking-blokes-with-a-token-gay fest Shipwrecked, which is, for a man who spends his time living on an intellectual pedastal looking down at the thickoes and laughing at them, about five times more damaging than a real crack habit. Having acquired the habit last year via the televisual osmosis that occurs when sharing a house, I found myself sitting down earlier tonight in no state less than anticipation of this year's event, which proposes to steal my Sunday evenings for the next six months. Handily, though, I've found that it's entirely legitimate for the following reason: it's got a great big racist in it. A proper racist, mind, who goes around talking about how immigrants are destroying the British culture and seems to think that she and her ilk are the only thing standing between our soverign, noble shores and a wave of dirty foreigners who will, first chance they get, burn down all our libraries and start using the Union Flag as dishcloths or somesuch. Being on this particular show means it's a shoe-in that she's a veritable covergirl for the BNP, and she's also got a rather handy sideline in hating fat people, too, just in case the racism doesn't work out for her. Fresh out of public school with a string of top A-levels (probably, I wasn't actually listening at that point, but it's a nigh-on given), we're faced with a well-educated Farquarette or Quentina who insists on throwing around the sort of talk you expect from the aforementioned thuggish morons at the side of football pitches (halfway through the previous paragraph, if you're only skim-reading this).

So, let's take this in the direction we've all predicted; why the fuck has Jade 'couldn't find her arse with both hands, a map, and a neon sign saying "Jade, your arse is behind you, just at the top of those obsencely lardy thighs"' Goody been grabbing all the headlines? She may or may not be a racist, but she is ultimately, and chiefly, a total knob. Why are we all feigning surprise that someone from her background's demonstrating racist behaviour anyway? Didn't we all realise it went on? The tidy pile of cash she made from being a fuckwit on telly a few years ago aside, Jade's not been given the greatest of lives, and we all surely remember the basic principle that those at the bottom of society's untidy feudal pyramid tend to find other people they think they're above, don't we? The headlines last week may as well have read 'Underpriviliged Person Displays Characteristics Found In Many Of Same Ilk', perhaps with another article further down the page about the forest-based defecatory activities of certain ursine mammals chiefly found in the temperate-to-cold areas of the northern hemisphere. Compare Goody with our island-based racist, and we find a girl who's just been given the best education money can buy (presumably, by damnable fine British teachers, eh, Farquar? Too right, Quentin) and for whom, one would expect, university careers and God-knows-what-else beckon. So, class: whom do we think we should show more concern about? I think it's pretty clear which of the reality TV choices is more important, nationally, here. Also, the same one's got more boobies and bikinis.

Cast your vote by pulling on the appropriate lever while singing the Star Spangled Banner and holding your left shoe above your head and leaning to one side as though a slight gale was assaulting you.