The Hell of It All by Charlie Brooker Read Free Book Online Page B

matter with you? You’re an idiot.
    Still, in my current taste-budless state, I’m probably ideally equipped to look at Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection ; I’ll never get to taste any of the things he cooks in the series anyway, so I’m not missing out. Each week, Heston, who really ought to buya new pair of glasses because the ones he has are completely the wrong shape for his face, and the lenses are so thick his eyes resemble a pair of olives hovering somewhere behind his head, possibly in another dimension, and it all makes him look a bit like a mad German doctor performing experiments in a horror movie … each week, Heston takes a classic dish (chicken tikka masala last week; hamburgers this week) and decides to create the ‘perfect’ version of it. Which involves travelling round the world to try out all the existing variations, then returning home to recreate it under laboratory conditions.
    For the uninitiated, Heston’s a renowned chef who specialises in ker-azy scientific cooking. He’s best known for serving things like snail porridge and egg-and-bacon ice cream. He could probably make you a cloud sandwich if you asked. Or a blancmange made of numbers. He can do anything, basically. Which leads me to my first complaint about this programme: instead of Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection , they should’ve called it Mister Impossible’s Smartarse Kitchen. As titles go, it’d be both more interesting and more accurate.
    Not that I’m saying the show’s rubbish, no. It’s quite interesting, especially if you like watching a man peering at food, and picking at food, and massaging and injecting food, and putting food in a centrifuge. This week Mister Impossible is creating the perfect burger, so he starts by studying the molecular structure of meat. We see lots of CGI recreations of the tissue structure as he explains how the way in which the beef is cut affects its texture. It’s all a bit CSI: Dewhurst’s.
    Eventually he chooses three different cuts of beef and blends them together. Then he spends about 10 years perfecting a homemade bun. And another 10 years creating his own slices of processed cheese. He even makes his own ketchup. And then, just before he slaps the whole lot together and shoves it down his cake-hole, he picks up a bottle of common-or-garden supermarket mustard and squirts it all over the bun, which seems a bit rash after all the trouble he’s gone to.
    The end result looks suspiciously like a Burger King Whopper,albeit at 50 times the cost. It probably tastes 50 times better too, but I’d be astonished if a single viewer follows the recipe to the letter. Building your own nuclear warhead would be simpler, and once you’d made it you could terrorise millions into cooking you as many burgers as you wanted, home-made cheese slices and all.
    Still, it’s fun to watch Mister Impossible doing his experiments. It’s nice to know he’s out there, even if you’ll never taste the results. It’s a pointless job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Like a gay Terminator [27 October 2007]
    What time is it? Time to swivel our eyes in the direction of the computerised X Factor mothership, which has entered stage three – live singathon mode – and is currently hovering over the Saturday night schedules like a brooding cloud; not so much entertaining the nation as inflicting itself on the populace. And either it’s my imagination, or this year’s collection of hopefuls are the feeblest in the show’s history. Last week’s live show lasted eight hours and felt like a tour of a black museum.
    Now, obviously these programmes rely on a strange collective hallucination taking place, a nationwide mind-shift which makes substandard performances seem acceptable because they’re part of some important cultural ‘event’ – how else do you explain the almighty success of Britain’s Got Talent , in which a man whose act consisted of a puppet monkey waggling its backside made it