Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker Read Free Book Online Page A

cuddle in an entirely nonsexual context another day. But not all BASE jumps go according to plan, and just as you’ve become accustomed to the sight of these likeable daredevils hurling themselves off ledges and somehow escaping unscathed, death makes an appearance and the programme takes an altogether darker turn, and the carefree blokey thrill-seekers suddenly start to look more like self-destructive junkies, pornographically videotaping each new conquest then gathering to watch the recording later, endlessly driven to jump and jump again, hooked on life affirmation through the repeated defiance of monumental risk.
    Still, their collated footage makes for genuinely exciting television, so who cares, eh?
    Next week in the same time slot: a man with a camcorder glued to his forehead feeding himself face-first into a threshing machine. If we’re lucky.

Casualty
Is Rubbish     [18 November]
     
    Casualty (BBC1) is rubbish – sick, thick, knee-jerk, leery, cynical rubbish; so unrealistic it might as well revolve around an imaginary hospital in the centre of a glass pig’s eye.
    Above all, it’s a mess – a local-pantomime-standard blend of patronising hand-wringing and reactionary finger-wagging, slung together into a single, predictable awkward soap (the dull inter-staff feuds and romances are so calculated and forced, they may aswell be conducted at gunpoint) and stuffed to bursting point with as much needless gore as possible.
    This is (and always has been) rubberneckers’ television, appealing to the sort of closet ghouls who, on spotting the remains of a car smash, gently slow down the Rover for a good slow-motion porno-peer at the limp arm dangling over the side of a stretcher.
    If the BBC went mad and broadcast Zombie Flesh Eaters in the same mid-evening slot, Casualty viewers would be the first to complain – even though Zombie Flesh Eaters is a) only 4 per cent more gruesome, b) 44 per cent more exciting and believable, and c) 2006 per cent less likely to feature yet another variation on the scene in which a pretty nurse delivers a stinging put-down to a man impatiently banging his fist on the reception desk.
    Incidentally, hands up everyone who couldn’t give a pliant duck about the ongoing child-custody subplot involving Charlie Fairhead. He’s a smug, soft-spoken, holier-than-thou dishcloth of a man, who deserves as much misfortune as scriptwriters can throw at him. And he’s got tiny eyes. He looks like a cross between a drama teacher and a dormouse: his son’s better off without him.
    Charlie’s method of dealing with anyone runs as follows: calmly talk them down in the manner of a pre-school children’s TV presenter demonstrating how a quiet, steady voice can hypnotise livestock, while simultaneously exuding the faintest whiff of malevolent sarcasm that suggests he doesn’t actually give two shits about the trowel they’ve got lodged in their forehead. For a man who’s supposed to represent trust and dependability, he’s strangely incapable of maintaining a fixed gaze on the person he’s talking to. Instead, whenever delivering one of his regular appeasement monologues, his pixel-thick eyes continually wander left or right, or stare into the middle distance, while the rest of him shuffles from toe to toe like a man reluctantly sharing half-hearted conversation as he waits for the in-flight toilet to free itself up. I wouldn’t trust him to fix a cup of Lemsip.
    Tonight’s episode contains all your other Casualty favourites: vomit, blood, a visit from the police, glassy-eyed extras, an unsympathetic patient who relentlessly complains, staff friction of metronomic predictability, and a lonely-but-noble old woman gasping her last on a starched white hospital bed. In true Casualty tradition, this last character is played by an ‘ooh-what-have-I-seen-them-in-before?’ celebrity (Lou Beale from EastEnders ).
    Best of all, there’s a textbook example of that most knuckleheaded Casualty