This is what I've heard - people, as a breed, are meant to be 100% happy and contented all the time. That is supposed to be our natural state; grinning inanely at the empty space inside our heads, like an acid-house smiley, or a post-shitting baby. (Please insert your own postal strike gag here, depending on geographical location) Which is great. Fair enough. But if all our behaviour is reward-based, as a genus, we don't half spend a lot of time deliberately making ourselves miserable. Something as simple as looking at beautiful Facebook pictures of long-lost lovers until your heart aches and your insides churn and your brain does a sudden bluescreen data dump, or as complex as writing an offhand comment about gawping over long-lost lovers on your blog in the knowledge that your partner may read it, and not ever mention it, but file it away among a litany of other slights which will eventually lead to the irretrievable breakdown of the relationship and all the myriad unexplored facets of misery that will result therein.
I'd never do something that stupid, of course. He doesn't read it. Checkmate.
Or you could do something as ridiculous as subjecting yourself to a TV programme that has previously enraged you utterly for the purposes of squeezing some rancid blog juice out of it, especially when that involves you missing the last in the series of House, and another hour of truly, truly awful screen-kissing. Good on you, Hugh! American in every way but you show your true Britishness with your sexual inadequacies. Thus I salute you with everything but my similarly inadequate genitals.
Gird your loins, people. Charley's back for another pointless jolly at the taxpayers' expense. This time he's going from I don't care to I DON'T CARE via the method of DEAR GOD, REALLY, I ACTUALLY DO NOT CARE and again, the BBC are filling a large plop of Sunday night real estate with it. To explain to the uninitiated: Charley Boorman filled the sidekick/dunce role in a show where Ewan McGregor rode some bikes into small villages and spread his Scottish charisma among them like rampant cholera, whilst raising money for charity. And Boorman and his Richard Herring face is now inexplicably on his second - SECOND - series of a similar travelogue adventure. But without the charity aspect. Oh, no: this is just for our "entertainment." My, what good children we must have been.
As the hour of miserable television settled heavily upon my shoulders, there to loom angrily at me for days and days until it could be shifted by repeated Peep Show viewings, the following observations smacked me round my sad little face:
- Boorman has nothing to say about anything, except for a small set of excited ejaculations and obvious facts. "Brilliant! Amazing! Australia is a big place, and it takes a while to get anywhere! Fantastic!" It sounds like it should be on CBeebies. At one point, he visited an Aboriginal community riddled with alcoholism and broken people, due to years of institutional human rights abuses, and said nothing and did nothing but rattle about noisily, messing up stuff that didn't belong to him, like a toddler in a Tesco Extra. Why are the BBC subjecting us to this non-entity?
- He whines and whinges almost constantly, almost as if he isn't being given a free six-month holiday where everything is pre-arranged for him and all he has to do is get up every morning, do a great big self-satisfied shit and put on his stupid boxfresh Converse trainers. (I know about the shit because a good two minutes of the show was dedicated to him telling us. It was a beautiful synecdoche. Ohhhh yeah. I'm a tit)
- He blundered dangerously close to death on so many occasions - being bitten by a snake, wandering idiotically into jet engines - and it so mirrored the innermost desires I was unknowingly screaming incoherently at the screen that I began to think the production team were just toying with me. Teasing, tempting... "Oh, look! Look at the imbecile! Wouldn't it be nice if he just...just dropped off the cliff he's walking along? Yeah? Just lost his footing, and down he'd go? Bones crumbling, flesh rending, heap crumbled? Well...he ain't gonna! How does that make you feel? Nauseous, is it? Bile-ridden?"
It was at this point that an eerie calm washed over me. I realised that's probably been his whole life. Born into privilege, veering through life with nary a care, trouble and strife sliding off his Teflon form. I can't fight it. He's invincible. Of course he's got *another* series. Of course I've watched it, contributed to the ratings, made it a little bit easier for him to be recommissioned. He is evil. He is the Antichrist. Stuff Derren - he has nothing on this guy.
And that, my friends, will be my last ever post. I have a holy mission now. It must end! He must cease to be!
No, I'm only kidding. It was quite good actually.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Debunking The Derren
Well...I bloody hope not.
God, I love Derren Brown. I love his pixie beard, I love his little nodding tic, I love the fact he collaberates with Patrick from Dead Set, and I love every single mind-bending stunt he pulls. During Russian Roulette, I whooped so loudly I roused my then-flatmate from a gin coma. She had been clinically dead for 20 minutes. THAT'S how good Derren Brown is.
So now here he is, back for an extravaganza of guessing. He says he's going to predict the Lotto numbers - one assumes correctly, although I'm not sure that's been specified, and it will slightly damp-squibbish if he dances merrily onto screen, swigs from a can of Fosters and says, "Errrr, I dunno, four? Never said I'd get them right. Ha! You didn't read the small print, you tiny-brains!" And for once in my life my late working hours are working right in my favour, if you don't count that one time I was here so late that the canteen started giving away free food that was out of date and I caught a parasitic worm from a king prawn wrap, as if there's one thing there's an abundance of round these parts, it's TVs that can broadcast independently from each other. So I can monitor both Channel 4 and the BBC at once, to prove there is no cheeky exploitation of broadcast signals.
So, initial thoughts - it's gotta be a reveal rather than a prediction - a sealed envelope or box with the numbers inside, rather than a beautiful duet between Derren and Alan Dedicot, voice of the balls... DB: "Four!" ADVOTB: "Four! The number of scotches I can imbibe between balls!" A reveal is something that Derren has done many, many times before, always successfully, and can be easily twiddly-doo'd. Plus, if it was an actual prediction, quite large chunks of statistical theory, relativity, and rational thought would have to be hoofed out of the universe's window, and I'm not sure Mr Brown would like the inevitable rift in the space-time continuum laid on his opulent doorstep.
Right, pointless liveblogging section alert.
10:30 OK it's nearly go time. I have Gordon's Kitchen Nightmares in one ear and the weather in the other. Oh, it's Jay Wynne! The croakiest man in all the land. One cough away from a lung flopping onto Wales and gliding gently down the Channel.
10:33 The continuity bloke on Channel 4 made a balls joke. Dammit! My ballsjoke sweepstake didn't go into negative values.
10:36 AAAAH ANNE ROBINSON'S FACE HAS HURT MY FEELINGS. Well, the two shows are starting at roughly the same time.
10:37 Who the hell is this guy on the lotto? When did Danny Wallace and Vernon Kaye produce vile progeny?
10:40 Awww, look at him filling. This is either ridiculously good acting or actual desperate filling.
10:41 Is the answer in among some of this legality stuff? Did he secretly just say "by the way this isn't live and I'm in on it with Camelot, which is of course run by an evil cabal of lizards, of whom I am king, yes, that's right, king of the lizards?"
10:43 There's definitely no delay between the feeds. My BBC1 and the BBC1 on his telly are as synchronised as my brain and this trick are not.Very impressive. Mayhap: a) Camera trick. Some kind of whizzery with the locked-off camera, easy to split the screen in half, replace the footage of the balls and have a little helper pop the right ones in as the draw progresses. Come on! We've all seen Speed. But, as Derren kept pointing out, he is going to show us how to predict the Lotto numbers on Friday, and I'm pretty sure most of us don't have the whole of Television Centre in our back gardens. b) Clever balls. They light up with the correct numbers? They have tiny miniature printers inside them? The lizards have technology far beyond our ken! Fear it! c) Collective hallucination. There is one poor person somewhere in the country who is immune, screaming at the TV, "he's just written down zero six times! Why can't you see?!" He's probably put it on Twitter with a #DerrenBrown and everything, just to be swept away by the 40,000 tweets saying "OMFG how did he do that????" He's sitting there now, rocking slightly, just waiting for that one little reply saying "yeah, me too!" I believe you, Mr Cynical.
I just have to go to sleep now. Truly sorry for the quality of the above. Hard to type with brain puttyfied.
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