Television Can Blow Me Read online

  Why? Because success isn’t enough. It never is. He wants to do something classy, doesn’t want to be remembered as a man in a stupid wig spouting stupid catchphrases. So he dumps the hapless Darren for Tre Cooper, a young thrusting agent who promises to get him onto the A-list if he is willing to play the fame game TO THE EXTREME. Andy thinks he can have it all. He is so, so wrong.

  The final Extras is about how we square our integrity with increasing success. Andy hates himself for churning out his desperate cookie cutter sitcom but he can’t tear himself away from the benefits of fame. He becomes a cynical industry operator, too snotty to talk to the herd of extras from which he emerged, too typecast to get respect anywhere else. He shitcans his sitcom to do work with more credibility and ends up playing a space slug on Doctor Who. It was never meant to be like this.

  After his new agent stops returning his calls, Andy goes down the path of least resistance and enters Celebrity Big Brother among such luminaries as Lionel Blair, Chico, June Sarpong, Lisa Scott-Lee and an actress playing a celebrity who is clearly meant to be Abi Titmuss (boyfriend accused of rape, sex tape, lads mags, glass-eyed fame-hungry scuttling). You wonder if Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais asked Abi to do the role herself. How would that conversation go?

  As you would expect, the Celebrity Big Brother house is a hellish three-ring circus where the palely notorious seek to raise their profiles. The pressure cooker environment begins to take its toll on the celebs. “You know what I look forward to these days?” Lionel Blair tells Andy “Death”. Isn’t everyone looking forward to Lionel Blair’s death? KIDDING!

  After Abi Titmuss talks about the politics of selling her wedding to Hello! magazine Andy finally snaps and delivers a brilliant monologue on the insanity of celebrity culture. “You open a paper and see a picture of Lindsay Lohan getting out of a car and the headline is “cover up Lindsay we can see your knickers” - of course you can see her knickers! Your photographer is lying in the road pointing his camera up her dress to see her knickers. You’re literally the gutter press”. Has this ever been better put?

  He delivers a heartfelt message to Maggie, apologising for being mean to her earlier in the episode. “You’re my best friend... you’re my only friend” he says, choking back tears. Under normal circumstances it would be quite moving.

  The problem is that Maggie is not a great friend. She is an appalling friend - a vile, poisonous cretin who undermines Andy at every turn. Not once does somebody call him fat and ugly without her nodding in agreement. Not once does she miss an opportunity to imply he has no talent or is shit with women. Too cowardly or talentless to pursue her own dreams, she spends her time mocking and undermining his.

  A weaselly shitbag who nearly ruined Andy’s big sitcom break by running her mouth to the gay producer she nonetheless spends her time leeching off his success, getting extras roles she is not entitled to, eating dinner at swanky restaurants she never pays for and meeting stars she would never have met were it not for the friend she routinely abuses.

  Not only passive aggressive, disloyal and undermining she is also an industrial strength whinger. Andy needs to get out, make some male friends and start using his celebrity to get some primo pie of the kind Aerial Telly would consider entertaining during one of his barren patches1.

  Damp eyed reconciliations with someone who represents and embodies all his failures are not what Andy needs for redemption. He needs to be using his fame for good and that means picking up strumpets in exclusive clubs and getting all the sex he missed out on when he was banging Ronnie Corbett lookalikes. Now that would be a happy ending. Andy being blown by the Abi Titmuss character while he snorts a line of cocaine and crushed Ecstasy off her Prada handbag.

  Aren’t they the real benefits of fame?

  The verdict on Extras Christmas special: Impressive farewell to an excellent show

  Marks out of 10: 8

  1Aerial Telly barren patches? Fuck out of here.

  PhoneShop

  Nothing can really prepare you for how bad E4's new shitcom PhoneShop is but my advice is to keep the volume as low as you can. Because above all it is an aural assault as gratingly unfunny turds Ashley (Andrew Brooke) and Jerwayne (Javone Prince) employ cloddish Ebonics in exchanges that seem to never end. The idea that urban argot is intrinsically funny is as persistent as it is false. Like Coming of Age before it, it chases the youth demographic with as little dignity and as much desperation as it can muster. It's fucking pitiful.

  Let's get this straight one last time. Young people are scum - selfish, illiterate, mewling, gump-ass mopes with no more right to walk the earth than a parakeet has to own a condo. Their opinions don't matter, nothing they say or do is of consequence and they should be ignored totally by all broadcast media across the board in every circumstance. Aerial Telly has schooled chumps on this before but apparently television wasn't listening. So he would like to make it clear to the next person ignoring one of his fatwas that he will personally amputate their face with a knife dipped in shit the next time they make a program pandering to that 16-24 slime.

  Incidentally, a reviewer in a national tabloid writes of PhonePlop “viewers outside London whose ears aren’t assaulted by urban youth-speak every day might want reassurance we are still in Britain”. I'm from Birmingham, what the fuck else do you think I hear when I pass shitbag schoolkids? Thundernause hack bastard.

  It barely matters but the first episode introduces us to Christopher (Tom Bennett), the New Man in the shop - a graduate but hopelessly lacking experience in the field. Seasoned retail humps Gashley and Turdwayne give him impenetrable, useless and interchangeable advice (these two are exactly the same character, a character replicated again by some freak looking skank from a rival shop who materialises spontaneously from the show's insatiable need to stick more shit street talk in a mannequin's mouth and hope that the audience are too dipshit stupid to notice what a turd is being served up).

  There's so many ways PhoneShop is bad. People do stupid shithead things people only do in sitcom. Boss Lance (Martin Trenaman) keeps a shrine to previous star employee Little Gary Patel. Nobody ever has or ever will do this in real life and it isn't consistent with Lance's character so it just isn't funny. Timid underling Janine (Emma Fryer last seen in Home Time) also venerates Patel. No one does this; nothing in their characters suggests they ever would. Yet more character points sacrificed to the false god Zany. The death toll rises with each new shitcom.

  Ricky Gervais edited the script and, assuming this isn't an honorary credit, I would hate to see what it looked like before he saw it. As is increasingly the case these days, there are a lot of commentscum suspiciously defending it online as if they have some kind of stake in it. They can all go fuck themselves as can this absolute dog of a show.

  The verdict on PhoneShop: This is about as bad as television gets. This is about as bad as life gets.

  Marks out of 10: 2

  No Heroics

  Aerial Telly has pretty much had it with superheroes. He has no idea who goes to see The Hulk, Spiderman 1, 2 or 3 or who the fuck Tobey Maguire is. He understands perfectly well why small children would want to see such films but these screenings are attended by adults. What the frak is up with that? It puts you in mind of those people whose favourite book is Harry Potter - a Band-Aid placed over the slashed jugular of their illiteracy. But I suppose a sitcom about superheroes could have potential? For the sake of No Heroics, we better hope so. It’s an ITV sitcom after all, the television equivalent of being born with no arms or legs in Johannesburg’s darkest slum to an abusive meth head father and schizophrenic crack ho mother who killed her last 14 children with scissors to the head.

  No Heroics is ITV2’s first original sitcom and features a group of off-duty superheroes drinking, whingeing and fucking up together in The Fortress - the superhero hangout with three immutable rules: “No Masks, No Powers and No Heroics”.

  There’s Alex, “The Hotness” (Nicholas Burns) who produces heat at will.
Stupid, vain and cowardly, his search for the hero inside himself seems to be taking longer than usual. His ex-girlfriend Sarah (Claire Keelan) is “Electroclash”, blessed with the power to control machines with her voice. She usually uses this to fuck up her dad’s car batteries and steal from ATMs. She’s a stroppy dark haired piece of pie who, it must be said, looks pretty good in superhero slut boots.

  Electroclash once formed one half of the brilliantly named Ladytrouble duo with Jenny, “She-Force” (Rebekah Staton), a fat lass with superstrength, a sunny outlook and no clue at all about anything.

  Perhaps the weirdest of the bunch is Don, “Timebomb” (James Lance) an alcoholic Spanish homosexual into no strings sex and torture who can see 60 seconds into the future. The scope for planet saving heroics with this particular combination of traits is pretty limited but Don is a funny fucker and quite insightful for a sociopath.

  As the low ranking capes unwind in The Fortress, discussing their mediocrity and self-loathing they have to negotiate the superhero pecking order clear to everyone in the joint. Alex’s life is made miserable by Devlin, “Excelsor” (Patrick Baladi), Britain’s most successful superhero. A smug and cruel egomaniac, he gets great pleasure from bullying Alex in front of his crew of flunkies at every opportunity. This is always funny because Alex kind of deserves it for being such a tit and Devlin is a remorselessly unpleasant bastard. Patrick Baladi does great with this one.

  No Heroics is a lot of fun. Our heroes are treated with contempt by pretty much everyone whose path they cross and there’s no embarrassing Heroes style meditation on what constitutes a real hero. If anything, it’s a celebration of human weakness. No one really knows how to do the right thing and the best that they can hope for is to be slightly less than useless... just for one day.

  The verdict on No Heroics: Hate the caper, not the cape.

  Marks out of 10: 8

  The Thick of It Series 3

  No show cares more about language than The Thick of It. Dialogue heavy, it is brutally gangbanged into shape through multiple drafts, read-throughs and cast improv and if a syllable is one degree off rotation it is vaporised and rebuilt from scratch. It’s probably why writers like the show so much and why the verbal violence they revel in is more dangerous than a surgeon who dips his scalpel in shit.

  Series 3 begins with a new dawn at the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship. Hugh Abbot is no longer with us because the public believe Chris Langham is a baby rapist1. In his place is Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front) - inexperienced and out of her depth in the piranha pool. Her marriage is flailing around like Danielle Lloyd exiting a nightclub and her son’s about to be expelled from school. Glenn and Ollie are still doing their double act which, as you can imagine, is a massive help to her.

  Murray is stuck in a conceptual cul-de-sac while trying to explain her big idea: fourth sector pathfinders. Pathfinders are people who get themselves out of poverty and inspire the community to do the same. No one really knows what this means and it commits the government to nothing but platitude. It’s the perfect modern policy.

  In episode five Nicola goes head-to-head with her Tory shadow Peter Mannion on The Richard Bacon Show and it’s glorious. The pair take turns in mangling the party line, prompting both Tucker and Tory spin doctor Stewart Pearson to parachute in to shore up their defences. Pearson, a brilliantly drawn rucksack sporting rat fuck played terrifically by Vincent Franklin, is one of the lesser known joys of the show. Brought in by the Tories from the world of brand management he’s an unexpectedly good foil for Tucker. He wants the Tories to appeal to “One Show man and Holby City woman”. There’s something heroic, almost epic about his shitheadedness. It’s barely human.

  And showing he’s sometimes human, Tucker reveals a chink of vulnerability in episode six after Terri (Joanna Scanlan who has the knack of appearing in some very good comedy) gently points out that many of the things that have gone wrong that day have been his fault (“I think you’re wrong, Malcolm - you’re like a sultana in a salad”). He takes her to “have a word” and instead of the skewering we expect he opens up about the pressure he’s under “I used to be the fucking pharaoh” he tells her “But now I am fucking floundering in a fucking Nile of shit.”

  This scene has been criticised elsewhere (“we like our Malcolm bulletproof” type objections), but Aerial Telly liked this. He likes his characters to have layers. Tough guys like Tucker are allowed to be vulnerable as long as you don’t totally lob their balls off like Buffy the Vampire Slayer did to Spike. Malcolm Tucker walk around castrato? Fuck out of here.

  Naw, dog. What we’re watching is a show at full throttle, at the peak of its powers and out for blood. It’s about idiots in extremis and how reasonably smart people can be dumb as Easter Island statues when under briefed, underqualified and under pressure. It’s as acute as Yes Minister was on squirrelly self-preservation when the political tides change. Praise comes no higher.

  The verdict on The Thick of It Series 3: Implausibly good right now.

  Marks out of 10: 9

  1 If they were looking for precedent to justify employing the nonce they could have cited Jeffrey Jones who appeared in three seasons of Deadwood after his child pornography conviction.

  Saxondale

  Comedians do their best work when they’re miserable. It’s a cliché as truthful as it is hackneyed. Domesticity, moderation and sexual fidelity produces smug observational truisms that amount to nothing. Sexual incontinence, substance abuse and mental breakdown produces searing, insightful life-affirming comedy. And the reason Steve Coogan is still doing good comedy is because he’s made such a colossal fuck up of his personal life that all his energy is being sublimated into his art. Aerial Telly doesn’t make judgments but hooking up with Courtney Love at this time of your life is a sure sign that things aren’t right. The whole point of fame and talent is that they allow you to trade up the nookie food chain, not end up balls deep in the grunge Yoko Ono while you pat the masturbating Michael Stipe on the head like the little bald man off Benny Hill.

  So the Chris Morris collaborator, Perrier Award winner and tabloid love skunk has briefly swapped self-destruction and Catholic self-loathing to unveil his latest creation: former roadie and present pest-control agent Tommy Saxondale. Like his creator, Saxondale has lived the rock’n’roll lifestyle but has now settled down into a relationship with young flagcracker Magz (Ruth Jones, last seen in Nighty Night) who designs those hysterically piss poor T-shirts you see advertised in the back of lads mags - the Pope smoking a joint, Prince Philip smoking a joint, (you get the picture).

  Coogan brings to bear the same obsessive attention to detail here that he brought to Alan Partridge, Paul Calf and the critically panned but actually rather wonderful Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible. The seventies musical references, vocal tics and gestures of the ageing rocker are faultless. Coogan’s characterisations are real works of art - nothing is left to chance. Tommy is driven by some of the same demons that plagued Alan Partridge - obsessive pedantry, need for recognition, dismay at turning into a relic of a former time. He attends an anger management course at his local library which seems to have the effect of just making him more angry - I’m pretty sure that’s not how this anger management thing is supposed to work.

  Morwenna Banks takes time out from spawning mini-David Baddiels to spin an impressive turn as Vicky, the motormouth receptionist Tommy relies on for pest-control jobs. Banks totally nails the effortlessly patronising manner of the underworked receptionist, complete with unfunny wisecracks, single entendres and phoney concern for your private life. She’s one of the many random irritations that stack up in Tommy’s life - not enough by herself to tip him over the edge but the aggregate of the annoyances frequently see him spitting feathers at the sheer absurdity of it all.

  He’s also often to be found lacing his conversation with references to Noam Chomsky and the like and the spectacle of the self-taught working-class intellectual dealing death to the urban rodent
is one of the less obvious joys of the show. Like so much of his work, it’s terrifically well observed. Coogan has an eye for human weakness and delusion that’s totally unerring. Tony Ferrino is long-forgotten. He’s one of our best comic performers.

  The verdict on Saxondale: Simply the pest.

  Marks out of 10: 8

  Gong intermission

  Aerial Telly Awards 2009

  There isn’t a single human being breathing whose word carries more weight than Aerial Telly. Those TV motherfuckers hang on his every word like a chump chained to a nuke in a made-for-TV movie listens to a bomb disposal expert. Think they give a damn about an Emmy? They’d push their kids in front of a Tube train to get even the most cursory of acknowledgements from the television panopticon. So in the industry, the Aerial Telly awards are the most eagerly anticipated and feared event in the calendar and now the time has arrived. You might want to take something for your nerves. This could get ugly.

  Best show: Battlestar Galactica

  30 Rock still rocks, Mad Men’s still crazy and Dexter’s still killing it but 2009 saw a gutsy and moving end to Battlestar Galactica, the arthouse reimagining of a 70s curio that shocked and awed its way through four brilliant seasons of melodrama, genocide, theology and war stories culminating in a breathless finale that stayed true to the show’s quirky, dark, captivating vision. Caprica gets the Galactica saga up and running again in January. The pilot was illing. No way on earth will it not rock.

  Worst show: Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show

  Michael McIntyre blew harder than Katrina, Paradox was dumber than Fearne Cotton, but neither came close to the comedy holocaust that was Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show. Snide, fuckwitted and life-threateningly unfunny it demonstrated the depressing truth that many comics are quite happy to use a celebrity’s name in lieu of a punchline. Shamelessly derivative, it was a show as contemptuous of its audience as any in living memory. No-talent, zero-integrity Twitter groupie TV critics who sucked up to this should contemplate suicide.