The Randomness Times: Saturday 3rd - Friday 9th of January

Friday 2 January 2009

Saturday 3rd - Friday 9th of January

This week's big TV news is BBC1's decision to re-edit its new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank for an early-evening slot, rather than the "adult" post-watershed slot that's been reserved for most of its recent historical dramas. However, the Randomness Times has acquired the publicity material for the original, uncut version of the programme, and what follows is a complete transcript of the trailer.

ANNOUNCER: A major new historical drama, coming soon to BBC1. From the producers who brought you the power and the passion of The Tudors…

ANNE BOLEYN: YES! YES! COME ON MY TITS AND DISSOLVE THE MONASTERIES!

ANNOUNCER: From the writers who gave you the epic majesty of BBC2's Rome…

OCTAVIA: TAKE ME UP THE APPIAN WAY, BIG BOY!

ANNOUNCER: From the director of Mo Mowlam: The Secret Negotiations…

MO MOWLAM: OH, GOD, YOU ANIMAL! IT FEELS LIKE MY BRAIN'S GOING TO BURST!

ANNOUNCER: …comes the most explicit and taboo-breaking drama of them all: The Diary of Anne Frank.

ANNE FRANK: GIVE IT TO ME IN THE ATTIC!

ANNOUNCER: Based on the uncensored, unexpurgated diary, with all the lesbian bits they cut out of the paperback version, and a few more we just made up. "The Diary of Anne Frank" is the story of one girl's sexual awakening in a time of tragedy, and perverts the private lives of dead people in a way that borders on necrophilia.

BOY: Oh, Anne! I know you're young and inexperienced, but let's do it right here, ironically in the shadow of this enormous Nazi flag that's been put up in the town square.

ANNE FRANK: Yes, let's. But, wait! I'll have to make a note of this in my diary.

BOY: No, Anne. Don't write this down for the sake of historical accuracy. Let's make it… special.

ANNOUNCER: The urge that drives her. The lust that will eventually destroy her.

NAZI OFFICER: Ve have searched this house, Herr General. Ve have found nothing.

NAZI GENERAL: Then let us move on to the next house, Oberleutnant Schmidt.

(Muffled bumping and gasping from the floor above.)

NAZI GENERAL: Vhat's that noise…?

ANNOUNCER: The new season on BBC television. Where history is made from nipples.

Meanwhile, in the "real" Radio Times...

...oh, look what I've gone and done! Instead of showing you the "real" RT's dynamic Alan-Sugar-standing-in-a-room cover, I've somehow used the June edition of The Word magazine, still available from all major newsagents. Did I mention that it features a three-page article by me, at all...? (Mind you, it had to be edited before publication, which explains surprisingly mild invective like: "What could be better? Well... from the evidence so far, being castrated with a rusty Stanley knife." Just try to pretend that it reads: "What could be better? Well... from the evidence so far, being castrated with a rusty Stanley knife, then being forced to eat the left-overs." Because I'm having a Titus Andronicus kind of day.)

Among This Week's Repeats, Soaps, and Chat Shows...

Saturday, BBC1
20:40. Casualty
Those who witnessed the berserk Christmas edition of spin-off series Holby City may still be reeling from the scene in which the Ghost of Christmas Past took the cute redheaded nurse back to the moment of her own birth, so that she could (a) deliver herself and (b) be named after herself by her grateful mother. The appearance of this sort of in-and-outy timey-wimey paradox in a mainstream soap opera / hospital drama makes Steven Moffat look even less revolutionary than he did already, but all good sci-fi fans will now be thinking that the BBC should rename Holby's sister-programme Causality, in order to stop anything like it happening again. These shenanigans would never have been possible while the Time Lords were around.

Those 2009 BAFTA Awards Again...

Best Drama
- Shameless Channel 4
- Spooks BBC1
- Doctor Who BBC1
- Wallander BBC1
The Winner: Two tramps knifing each other to death in a public urinal, while posh people gather round to point out how ironic it all is and make bets on which of the tramps will be the first to vomit into the other one's open sores.

Best International Programme
- Dexter ITV1
- Mad Men BBC4
- The Wire FX
- The Daily Show More4
The Winner: All the faecal matter produced in Los Angeles over the course of one whole year, spray-painted gold while a group of Tourette's sufferers roll around in it repeating the word "fuck".

Best Serial
- Dead Set Channel 4
- The Devil's Whore Channel 4
- House of Saddam BBC2
- Criminal Justice BBC1
The Winner: A seventy-year-old prostitute with no arms or legs, making farting noises out of a suppurating wound in her side where the flesh was eaten away by syphilis.

Best Comedy Programme
- Star Stories Channel 4
- Harry and Paul BBC1
- That Mitchell and Webb Look BBC2
- The Peter Serafinowicz Show BBC2
The Winner: A dead cat on a piece of string.

Best Entertainment Programme
- Friday Night Project Channel 4
- QI BBC1
- Harry Hill's TV Burp ITV1
- The X Factor ITV1
The Winner: A succession of disabled people having their useless legs crushed under a gigantic stone effigy of Chris Moyles while being forced to scream "look, look, I'm a hilarious cripple" at gunpoint.

Best Features Programme
- Top Gear BBC2
- The Apprentice BBC1
- The Choir BBC2
- Celebrity MasterChef BBC1
The Winner: Top Gear.

Ten Genuinely Defining Things from the 1980s

1. Pretending to have seen I Spit on Your Grave. The now-rather-tame I Spit on Your Grave was the most notorious of the early-'80s "video nasties", possibly just because of the scene in which a woman cuts off a man's willy in the bath. But its sheer inaccessibility - firstly because it was confined to the "forbidden" shelves of the video shop, then because it was removed from the shelves altogether - resulted in a suitably extreme urban myth among the ten-year-olds of the day, namely that the film had been made by the Mafia and included footage of real killings. Naturally, this came from the same oracular source as "the Elephant Man's mum was frightened by an elephant while she was pregnant". Anyone watching I Spit on Your Grave today would be surprised to discover that so many of the Mafia's enemies sounded like low-grade bit-part actors, and might wonder how the homicidal film-makers convinced their victims to stand in exactly the right spot on the jetty to be pushed into the propeller of a motorboat. In organised crime, as in comedy, timing is everything.

2. Jokes about Chernobyl. In fact, the leering, amoral '80s were a golden age of jokes about disasters all round, especially where sinking ferries and mass football-stadium deaths were concerned. (You may know the old joke which involves pretending that your hand is some kind of arachnid, but basically goes: 'What's this…? A dead one of them.' In 1989, there was a variation about Hillsborough. And in a way, you have to be impressed by that level of awfulness.) The meltdown of Chernobyl was prime material for impolite comedy, ranging from the genuinely satirical to the radioactively stupid. At one end of the spectrum: 'The government has claimed that there's no fall-out risk to the UK from the Chernobyl disaster. They say that it's all a lot of hot air, and it'll soon blow over.' At the other: 'Never operate a nuclear reactor in second-hand underwear. Chernobyl fall-out.' The latter is more contrived than it may seem, since the joke has to invent the concept of "second-hand underwear" in order to function.

3. Gayness. Gayness is just so '80s. We should remember that previously, gay men on television were divided into two categories: "screaming pooftahs" who generally only appeared to provide a punchline on The Two Ronnies, and celebrities who were obviously interested in man-meat but pretended to chase '70s crumpet anyway (Up Pompeii looks "camp" today because it's flagrantly obvious that Frankie Howerd couldn't care less about all the Roman jugs on display, yet at the time, nobody asked questions). The most telling point is that in 1987, the Top Ten was penetrated by "I Was a Male Stripper in a Go-Go Bar" by Man 2 Man Meets Man Parish: possibly the most overtly homoerotic seven inches in pop history, yet despite the threefold use of the word "Man" and lyrics like 'built like a truck / I'd bump for a buck', it never even occurred to us that this might be a gay thing. Yet by the early '90s, the prototype Modern Gay Characters in EastEnders were no longer surprising, and the country was frankly sick of hearing about all their friends who'd died of AIDS. Oh, that's another thing…

4. Children's games involving HIV. Quite simply, AIDS was the '80s version of the Lurgi. Young children in the nation's playgrounds, who might have pretended to be Daleks just ten years earlier or twenty years later, developed numerous variations on "tag" in which defeated competitors would be marked with AIDS and thus have to fall down dead. And if that sounds hideous, then you should have heard what the grown-ups had to say on the subject (Ashes to Ashes may think it's terribly witty and ironic to have old-school policemen using the word "poofs", but I bet we never get to hear Gene Hunt use the phrase "Arse-Injected Death Sentence", as men of his calibre would have done in the actual '80s). Of course, the most evocative HIV-related cultural artefact of the decade was the much-repeated public information ad, which successfully avoided any sexual imagery and - yes, I'm afraid it's true, it's not just a myth - convinced many younger viewers that AIDS was something you got from swimming too close to icebergs. "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…" A cinema advert of the same oeuvre illustrated the problem with an image of the Grim Reaper knocking down HIV sufferers in a bowling alley as if they were tenpins, but this was withdrawn after someone noticed that it was f***ing stupid.

5. The skeleton from the Scotch videotape adverts. Given all of the above, I'm tempted to say that a gutless mass of grave-matter was the perfect icon of the age, especially since it reminded us of Norman Tebbit even then. The original ad is easy to find on YouTube (just type "Scotch Skeleton" into the browser), but what it comes down to is this. We're addressed by a geriatric skeleton from the future with the voice of Corky from Sykes, who tells us that he bought his Scotch VHS tape back in 1983 - i.e. our present - but that he's still using it in the twenty-first century. This may raise an awful lot of question (for one, why the people of the future have forsaken all technology more sophisticated than home video and resorted to necromancy instead), yet the point is to draw attention to Scotch's Lifetime Guarantee: 'Every recording as good as the first, or we'll give you a new tape,' claims Martin Jarvis' voice-over. This was a brilliantly meaningless piece of hard-sell, because even at the time, it must have been clear that nobody in the early 2000s would still care about VHS. Since all the Scotch tapes I own from the mid-'80s are now almost unwatchable, there may be an elaborate lawsuit here, although I think I'll leave it until the advertised date of 2021. The ad ends with the skeleton staring into the camera, jaw wide open: this is meant to be comical, but with hindsight, it looks like a noiseless twenty-year scream at the mortality and transience of all things.

6. Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. Sadly, this is what the 1980s really sounded like. Brothers in Arms was the first album to be heavily-promoted on compact disc, which meant that everybody who claimed to like "serious" music - i.e. anybody over thirty, who'd previously held that the ideal form of rock music was an album covered in pictures of Hobbits - bought it as their first CD. This way lay madness and Coldplay. (In one of the Hitch-Hiker novels of the age, Douglas Adams claimed that Mark Knopfler's guitar work is one of the most profound experiences in the universe, which actually makes his vision of the universe seem worse than H. P. Lovecraft's.) These days, the only track anyone remembers from the album is "Money for Nothing", Knopfler's "ironic" comment about people who say that rock musicians should sod off and get proper jobs. It's memorable for having the first video to employ computer-generated characters, because in those days, we had no idea that computer-generated characters were going to destroy our entire wretched civilisation. Still on a musical vibe…

7. Teenage boys wanking off to Transvision Vamp videos on Night Network. Don't look at me, I preferred Fuzzbox. See also "Joanne Whalley greasing up Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective".

8. Paedophiles. We tend to forget, now, that nobody in the 1970s ever talked about kiddie-fiddling: it simply wasn't done. Our parents told us not to get into cars with strangers, but they never quite explained why, so we imagined that these curious predators wanted to kidnap us and hold us for ransom (you know, like in The Professionals). So when - for example - my twelve-year-old self was "amusingly" tickled by the jovial old man who worked in the skanky garages near my middle-school, it never occurred to me for a moment that he was getting a stiffy out of it. Ohhh, yes, I was a fine piece of ass in 1984. But since the '80s made it fashionable to talk about nothing-but-sex rather than everything-but-sex, we had more license to consider what strangers in cars actually did to children, and many things which seemed innocuous at the start of the decade seemed rather dirty by the end of it. When Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, nobody found it at all suspicious that Darth Vader described the presence of his son with the words 'I have felt him'. These days, even hardcore Star Wars fans start sniggering. Especially since the Emperor's response is 'strange that I have not', as if they belong to the same paedophile ring. Oh, all right then. Since I've mentioned Star Wars, let's lighten this up…

9. People saying how crap Yoda was. You know those death-nerds who whine on about the Star Wars prequels, and claim that Jar Jar Binks is proof of some ongoing mental degeneracy in George Lucas…? After The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, exactly the same sort of people were saying exactly the same things about Yoda. [Petulant child-voice.] 'But he's just a pupp-et! He's got the same voice as Fozzie Be-ear!' [/Petulant child-voice.] Yoda didn't become officially hip until the 1990s, and punch Simon Pegg in the face if he tries to tell you anything else.

10. Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, Jo Brand, Jeremy Clarkson... By some remarkable fluke, exactly the same people who are ballsing up television today. Again, none of these are likely to appear in Ashes to Ashes, since they might draw attention to the fact that travelling twenty years back in time is actually rather pointless.

Meanwhile, on the Commercial Channels...

Six examples of abusive ad-language, and how best to react to them.

1. 'Dettol protects… fact.' As Dan Brown is due to reveal in his forthcoming novel The Cleansers of Time, the Dettol Company is merely a front for a secret monastic order which has spent the last few centuries collecting and indexing all the wisdom of human history, then storing it in the catacombs beneath Catford sewage-works in preparation for the day when civilisation is destroyed by a nuclear war or apocalyptic plague. Actually, the suggestion that 'Dettol protects fact' is rather ironic, given that the company's "here's some lovely-looking fresh fruit…. BUT IT'S SITTING ON A TOILET SEAT!!!" advert had to be withdrawn after its claims were found to be misleading. I'm also reminded of the slogan for the BBC's pretend-archaeological pretend-drama series Bonekickers: 'The search for the truth is beneath us.' Yes, most people who work in television seem to feel that way these days.

2. 'Intelligent stain-seekers.' As with 'friendly bacteria' and the general misapplication of the word 'nanotechnology', we're now being encouraged to believe that our consumer products really are full of tiny little people who do our bidding, and that it's not just a metaphor like those firemen who rush into your guts when you take Gaviscon. But what happens when the stain-seekers become too intelligent? What happens when they decide that all humanity is a stain on the surface of the world, and elect to remove it…? I'm also curious to know whether friendly bacteria might feasibly mutate into over-friendly bacteria, who invade your personal space and don't seem to understand that you're not interested in a relationship right now.

3. 'Vivid plums.' Traditionally, the High Warlocks of the beauty industry haven't bothered to try the hard-sell on men, despite the rise of male-grooming products: it's just too difficult to make self-pampering seem masculine enough, at least without suggesting that the product can keep you looking good even after you've been in a fight outside the pub ('L'Oreal… leave it, he's not worth it'). But the latest campaign from Maybelline can make even the butchest of he-consumers start wondering about his physical attributes, since it claims that the company's new make-up range can give you 'vivid plums'. Can we assume that, as with The Mentalist, nobody was on hand to tell the Americans that certain words have a different meaning in Britain? 'Maybelline: maybe she's born with it… or maybe she's had the operation.' And even if you accept that 'vivid plums' is a colour rather than a promise, the same sentence promises us 'glam indigoes' and 'knockout nudes', which suggests that the High Warlocks create their advertising copy by speaking in tongues.

4. 'You wouldn't wash your dishes in a dirty sink…' You're not the boss of me.

5. 'Filled with passion.' Advertisers have to be careful when suggesting that companies put "love" into their products, since the cynical-minded punter - i.e. those who'll never believe that Shredded Wheat is loom-woven by delicate pale-skinned servant-girls in the style of Vermeer - will always react badly to the idea of a machine on the production-line that's got a special nozzle for affection. And the really cynical-minded punter may even wonder if this "love" is platonic, or whether the company hires someone to stand at the end of the conveyor belt and… well, you know. (This may explain why Orio cookies have never been as popular in the UK as in the US. They're a lot harder to swallow if you're familiar with the public-school ritual known as "the biscuit game", and thus inclined to ask how they get their creamy filling.) The Giovanni Rana company is entering perilous territory by claiming that its products are 'filled with passion', so it really wasn't a good idea to begin the ad with a smarmy-faced young man forcing his girlfriend to taste his pasta, then asking: 'Can you guess what's in the ravioli?' Because it's all too easy to believe that his next words will be: 'And this time you're going to swallow it, bitch.' Worse still, Giovanni Rana himself appears on-screen at the end of the advert, to reassure you that the product is based on his own special recipe. But he's the Creepy Uncle type, so whereas the advertisers want us to think that he's on a one-man crusade to improve our cuisine, we actually find ourselves wondering whether his idea of the "personal touch" is to stand at the end of the conveyor belt himself rather than delegating the task to an employee.

6. "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?". You may have noticed that a lot of companies like to co-opt a piece of pop music as their theme tune, and that the theme remains constant from advert to advert, so that our emotional, instinctive reaction to the music is automatically associated with the brand. You may also have noticed that in a lot of cases, the music has no relation to the product whatsoever, something we seem to accept without question. Yet I still find it remarkable that nobody comments on Asda's use of - and I still can't quite believe I'm saying this - a reggae version of the theme from Dad's Army. And there's a brilliantly cynical logic here, because apart from the fact that a tune from the UK's most nostalgia-inducing TV programme is the perfect way to sell Asda as a natural part of the British landscape, the music always plays while the voice-over is accusing Tesco of overcharging its customers. Think about this for a moment. The Ska rhythm is a good enough disguise to stop us noticing it on a conscious level, but while the lilty-voiced Asda-Man describes Tesco as if it were a common enemy of all human civilisation, the words "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?" are quietly being invoked in the background. Not because we're being asked to think of Tesco as literally run by Nazis, but because of our instant gut response: even as children, we knew that this was meant to be a song of defiance in the face of a big bully. In other words, we're being conditioned to think of Asda as our ally in the war against the "evil" Axis of Shopping, even though Asda's union-busting activities are a damn sight closer to actual fascist policy than anything else in the war between supermarket chains. Ooh! Satire.

Friday 2 January 2009

Saturday 3rd - Friday 9th of January

Welcome to the Randomness Times...

Meanwhile, in the "real" Radio Times...

Among This Week's Repeats, Soaps, and Chat Shows...

Some of 2009's Imaginary Covers So Far...

Those 2009 BAFTA Awards Again...

Ten Genuinely Defining Things from the 1980s

Meanwhile, on the Commercial Channels...