Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker Read Free Book Online Page B

cliché, the Case of the Injured Tearaway. According to the rules of this overfamiliar subplot, all gangs of teenage ruffians are led by a painfully soft-looking, middle-class actor struggling to project an air of gritty urban malice by means of an unconvincing display of shrugs, slouches, and half-hearted scowls, generally accompanied by an indisputably terrible stab at a working-class accent. Furthermore said gang leader is a one-dimensional coward at heart, who will lamely bully his cohorts into participating in a major criminal misadventure during which the most innocent teenager in the group will suffer nightmarish injuries.
    Tonight’s example doesn’t disappoint – a cheerfully naïve Pogo Patterson lookalike rips his face open trying to vault a barbed-wire fence during a bungled robbery. Then there’s the additional bonus of a deep-rooted dysfunctional family dynamic of poster-colour improbability that gets completely straightened out within 28 minutes of his parents’ arrival at the hospital. Plus we get to see him bleed and scream a few more times.
    A few hours later, further porn in Amsterdam: City Of Sin (C4), which gawps at the sex industry. We see everything from a woman squatting over a live webcam to a man cheerfully browsing through a range of forearm-sized dildos racked up on a wall like weapons from some hideous future sex war.
    And what do we learn? Nothing, bar this: these days you’re shown naked breasts every 18 seconds on Channel 4: it’s nothing more than Live! TV with a WAP phone in its pocket and a punnet full of sushi on its lap.

Sadowitz     [25 November]
     
    Quick, name a likeable magician. Three … two … one. Time’s up.
    Think of any? Course not: they’re bastards. For all their supposed skills at achieving the impossible – sawing women in half, making doves fly out of their faces, tying tigers in knots in a box full of fire – they’re useless at making themselves seem even vaguely human.
    Paul Daniels? A seething, dry-lipped pepperpot. Siegfried and Roy? Upholstered aliens with too much gold and a big-cat fetish. David Copperfield? Look into his eyes for six seconds and shudder as the yawning abyss within swirls out to engulf you.
    Then there’s Jerry Sadowitz; best known as a nihilistic comic, also a gifted magician. Sadowitz doesn’t use dry ice and strobe lighting to mask the fact he’s a shit: he performs spartan close-up card tricks and wears his unpleasantness on his sleeve – nailed to his forehead, in fact – and for this he deserves our support.
    His new C5 vehicle The Jerry Atrick Show is an endearingly shambolic attempt to showcase his talents.
    An uneasy mix of card tricks, gleefully puerile sketches, and stonefaced four-letter misanthropy, it’s like an edition of the Paul Daniels Magic Show fronted by Howard Beale, the suicidal newsreader from the movie Network .
    And it doesn’t quite work: confused direction renders many of the card tricks hard to follow, while the sketches, taken from his live show Bib and Bob (an exercise in escalating puerility that would make any sane person laugh till their eyes pissed acid), suffer in isolation from the motiveless, enthusiastically infantile whole. But amongst the misfires and disappointing VTs lurk some tantalising moments unlike anything else on TV, and while the tricks need to be seen live to be appreciated, they represent a rare opportunity to watch someone doing something they genuinely, passionately adore.
    For proof of why the presence of wrecked-but-authentic performers like Sadowitz in the schedules is more necessary than ever before, stare no further than Making the Band (C4) a reality show chronicling the genesis of a manufactured American boy band.
    Perfectly scheduled between Hollyoaks, Futurama and a whirlwind of adverts for garage compilations, pay-as-you-go mobilesand spot cream, Making the Band is essential viewing for anyone who suspects the world might be fucked and secretly hopes it is.