James Delingpole
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It’s a privilege granted very few of us to be able to crap on our professions from within. No matter how free a spirit you are, there are certain rules you have to obey: headmasters can’t do pills or go clubbing; policemen have to make out like it’s nice and fun being asked directions by members of the public; TV people are obliged to act as if their careers are worthwhile and they still have standards.
Brooker doesn’t play this game. Crunch time will come, I suppose, if ever he gets asked to appear in Comic Relief. I like to think he’d do what poor Jeremy Vine should have done when some lamebrain came up with the truly evil idea of having him present last year’s Euro elections dressed up as a cowboy and talking in a Texan accent: reach for his flamethrower and torch everything in the vicinity, with luck including that bear with the patch over his eye.
Like all the best critics — e.g., me — Brooker understands that TV is a medium now so debauched and debased, created by people of such vile cynicism, controlled by loons of such unutterable wrongheadedness that hatred and despair and bitter laughter are the only reasonable responses.
Take BBC2’s recent The Speaker. This was a knockout competition designed along the lines of The Apprentice, only with, instead of hamster-on-steroids Paul and all the other weapons-grade onanists competing for S’rAlan’s hundred-grand-plus job, a veritable rainbow of ethnically representative teenagers vying for the slightly less thrilling prize of being named the best child public speaker to appear in April 2009 in an unwatched BBC public-broadcasting-service-remit-fulfilment series.
Who won? Sorry, I never got that far. I was too traumatised by the episode where the hapless kids spent a weekend being tutored in the art of political speechmaking by Alastair Campbell. You should have seen the creepy smile of welcome he gave them all: it made Dr Crippen look as wholesome as Ben Fogle. Worse, though, was to come. ‘I’m going to show you an example of a really great political speech. Can any of you guess what it might be?’ asks Al. Several hands rise dutifully into the air. ‘President Obama?’ guesses a child. Did you guess that too, dear reader? Because, if you did, you were right.
Now I am sorry to have to say this but I caught a bit of Ashes To Ashes (BBC1) the other night and I was quite impressed by how unrubbish it was. Others have spotted lashings of quite-uncalled-for PC worthiness, and it’s true it could scarcely be more ‘hello-in-case-you-hadn’t-noticed-this-series-is-set-in-the-early-Eighties’ than if Christopher Biggins came on in shoulder pads, legwarmers and a Limahl wig and bashed you over the head with a Roland Rat puppet in time to Howard Jones. But there are definitely some good bits. This week’s episode featured an animal rights fanatic on hunger strike. ‘The public’s had a belly full of hunger strikers,’ complained DCI Gene Hunt.
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