John Walker's Electronic House

1) Car Poolers.

2) This video

Four hundred and sixteen years ago, I wrote about the NBC micro-series Thank God You’re Here. The model is: guests are dressed in a costume and sent into a room they know nothing about, and have to improvise their way through a scene with the regular cast. It ran for only a few weeks, and hasn’t been picked up since. Dave Benson-Phillips was a hopeless host, with the wonderful Dave Foley wasted as the so-called judge. Where it did succeed was the regular cast’s ability to cope with the guest changing things, quick to adapt the scene appropriately.

Already an import from Australia, it’s now reached the UK, with little changed but for only one host, Paul Merton. And rather bizarrely, it’s on ITV1. Presumably part of Grade’s attempts to rejuvinate the channel, it’s a good purchase, but peculiarly delivered.

The first show’s guests were a mixed bunch. John Thompson and Ben Miller were the comedian contingent. Then there was Australian radio presenter (and let’s assume veteran of the format) Hamish Blake, and the mystifying selection of Fern Britton.

So it was an odd surprise that Britton was, by leagues, the funniest. And that’s not a slight on the others – Blake was very funny in his scene, and Thompson got in a few good gags. Fern Britton, out of nowhere, was superbly quick and remarkably amusing. Ben Miller, however, was not. One of the most irritating aspects of NBC’s version is the constant insistence that the guests make a big fuss about how terrified they are. The same was attempted here, but only Miller seemed genuinely frightened. So much so that he blanked his way through the most piss-easy scene of being a Star Trek-style captain – ten thousand easy jokes available to anyone, and he found none of them.

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I don’t care what you think of me. I’m excited.

Will Arnett as KITT!

I’m not going to deny it. I’ve been looking forward to this since it was first announced back in November or so. Not because I thought it was going to be good. Oh no. But because I knew it was going to be ridiculous.

I loved American Gladiators. You’ll understand that I was about 12 at the time. I discovered it when staying over night at my friend Mark Arden’s house. We were proving our immortal strength by trying to stay up all night, aided by flicking through late-night television nonsense. I believe that evening we watched the film Elvira. Yes, that sort of 12-year-old boys type of night. So 3am comes along, and we’re weary. We’re ready to give in. And then on ITV comes something called American Gladiators. It’s already amazing by name alone. Just imagine being 12, and discovering the pure, ludicrous nonsense that is Gladiators – the bravado, the presentation, and the It’s A Knock Out With Weapons games. It was like discovering a new room in your house, filled with sweets and arcade machines.

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I officially declare, having signed all the relevant documents, that I will never watch another RTD-penned Doctor Who so long as I both shall live.

That was the worst thing that has ever happened on planet Earth. Holocaust, you’re in second place.

Every stinking cliche imaginable, with no purpose or direction. An insult to eyes and ears. Big fat stupid people are heroic because they’re fat and stupid, and so hard-done by. Rich people are EVIL. Robots have to die. Kylie Minogue has a magical cycling non-accent. Russell T Davies should be sealed in concrete and buried at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.

So it survived its full 13 episode run, and the controversy was all nonsense.

In fact, it was something really special. Horribly over-produced, laboriously forced, and certainly had nothing to do with the premise: 40 kids left to build a town. Instead it was 40 kids in a controlled environment, clearly surrounded by a crew of adults, being set a series of challenges to work through. And in doing that, it succeeded.

It’s funny. The controversy before the programme was broadcast – dumping kids in the middle of nowhere and filming the results for entertainment – has been revealed to be of a peculiar prejudice. Somehow because they were children, it was assumed to be exploitative or cruel. This assumption was an insult to kids. They were all perfecty autonomous individuals, each given the option to go home whenever they wished, living in a confusing mix of a childhood fantasy and nightmare. It was 40 days long, and that’s a fair stretch. But Americans send their kids to camp for a week or two every summer – being away from home is a healthy part of childhood. They got homesick, but this always resulted in the others surrounding them and caring for them. A few left, more considered leaving, but most accepted that it was tough, and worked hard.

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Nothing but nothing but nothing fills me with more glee than Dirty Jobs.

Here’s the concept: Mike Rowe (the voice of the fantastic fellow Discovery show, Deadliest Catch) spends his days doing the dirtiest jobs imaginable. “Doing the kinds of jobs that make civilised life possible for the rest of us.”

At that level, it would make for an interesting show. But it works out that the programme is much more about simply enjoying watching and listening to Mike Rowe be very, very funny.

Sample dialogue:

“We’re just a couple of guys squeezing the poo out of chickens.”

“Normally my chief concern would be protecting my lungs from corrosion. Sadly, I left my lungs in tank number two.”

“You might be tough, captain, but if my mother sees this she’s going to track you down and kick your pirate ass.”

“I can’t finish my thought because I have to put my finger in this alligator’s bottom.”

“They eat their poo? Now we’re getting somewhere. We get the kelp, we feed it to the abalone, the abalone eat the kelp, the abalone poo the kelp. Then they eat the kelp again just to let them know they’re serious. Mm, sure could go for a big steamy pile of my own poo.”

So he might be cleaning septic tanks, making soap out of goat milk, painting bridges, inspecting sewers, wrangling pigs, but what you enjoy most is how Rowe interacts with the people who do the job every day, and indeed how the crew gets involved. Refreshingly, rather than pretending the film crew aren’t there, they get heavily involved, sometimes a lot moreso than they planned.

Constantly mocking his camera guys, and mostly his producer Dave Barsky, they get as dirty as Rowe, and they don’t hold back on flipping the cameras around to show the mess they’re in. In fact, for season six Mike has his own mini camera to up the ante on crew mocking. This was never better/funnier than when they were taking eggs (for legitimate reasons) from alligator nests in Florida swamps, and the crew’s hovercraft tipped over, $100,000 worth of equipment destroyed. You know, alligator-infested waters.

It’s just non-stop fun. I makes me grin throughout, from the awesome opening (different each episode) to the hilarious outtakes during the closing credits. My undying thanks to Kim and Nick for introducing me to it. Now everyone, watch this show. Seriously, it’s the best thing on television.

One show that’s been continuously great, but rarely gets any coverage, is My Name Is Earl. And its third season is developing really nicely.

Season two ends with Earl taking the rap for his ex-wife Joy’s kidnapping crime, and has gone to prison. Which you’d imagine would put something of a dampener on a series about a man trying to make up for the wrongs in his life by helping people on his list. But, no.

Thanks to the show’s frequent use of flashbacks, and Earl’s dealings with a number of other prisoners, there’s no problems there. But interestingly, recently they’ve entirely ignored the list, and yet the show hasn’t lost anything for it. Over the first two seasons they built up such a fantastic collection of recurring characters that it’s almost as developed as the Simpsons for being able to spin off new stories by mixing and matching from the collective (except unlike the Simpsons, it’s funny). So the one-legged woman, the middle-aged hooker, drunken Timothy Stack, the weedy thin gay guy… these ludicrous stereotypes, all presented with real affection, let it concoct any nonsense that comes to mind. The feel-good, do-gooder morality that spoiled the endings of some of season two’s episodes is completely abandoned now, far more interested in really well presented silliness.

A recent double-length episode saw them returning their second season idea of showing the characters through the eyes of Fox’s show, COPS (which is a weird collaboration between NBC and Fox). Again, it gave them an excuse to set a show in the past – the prisoners were watching the episode – this time set in 2002, on the 4th July. And, amazingly, the entire episode was a satire of the over-reaction to terrorist fears inspired by 9/11. Sure, it’s six years later, but it’s hardly any less topical, and some of the gags felt surprisingly close to the knuckle, mocking not the government, but the public response. Even the show’s pun jokes were delivered in a surprisingly deadpan manner, creating a weird atmosphere that felt far from sitcom. A highlight was a cop walking around with two paint sample cards, one a beige “Swiss Almond”, the other a brown “Coconut Husk”, seeing if people’s skins fell between the two to see if he needed to question them.

Then the following episode takes the mocking in another direction, tackling last week’s completely daft initiative by NBC to have a “green” theme in every programme, with their peacock logo all green. 30 Rock apparently did some whoops-my-trousers-have-fallen-down-vicar references to networks overreaching, but My Name Is Earl’s approach was far more direct. There’s a story about the inept, incompetent prison warden asking Earl to organise a “Scared Straight” initiative (with the obvious jokes involved) taking prisoners into primary/junior schools to scare children out of committing crimes. During a meeting about this, there’s the following exchange:

Warden: Just had another thought. What if the Scared Straight show had a green message too?
Earl: I don’t follow.
Warden: Green! It means environmentally friendly.
Earl: Yeah… The thing is sir, going green… doesn’t fit with the rest of the show.
Warden: Well work your magic, make it fit.
Earl: Well I’d just be wedging it in.
Warden: What if I told you you had to do it because I’m your boss?
Earl: Then I’d say I could take the shower kill in the story and turn it into something about the importance of conserving water?
Warden: That’s good… And how about if we start the show when the guy bends down to pick up the phosphate-free soap?

It must have been the exact exchange between the writers’ room and the network execs.

Another line later on:

Prisoner: Things were going from worse to even worser. Not only did the cops have my footprint from the casino vault, but my carbon footprint was off the charts.

And finally,

Randy: Great show guys! I heard one kid say he’d never stab anyone, or order Chilean sea bass.
Huge Terrifying Prisoner: They are dangerously over-fished.

Don’t forget it. It’s been consistently brilliant this season, with a much more careful use of guest stars that the sophomore year, and the smarts to know when a character is good enough to keep coming back. If you ever worried that the show would die with the list, put that aside. Also, try to forget that Jason Lee is a Scientologist.

I’ve finally managed to get hold of the full version of Phenomenon episode two, and it’s far more ludicrous than simply the fight. The bemusing format spirals off into madness. There are ten contestents, who will be gradually voted off. But not in any order the audience could ever guess at. In the first week four magicians performed their half-arsed routines with various degrees of pretending it was psychic power, and then the viewers were told to vote. This week, all four of them did a quick one minute trick (and it really was just lame tricks by this point, without the time to pretend it was the magic of their dead brother), and then the final six did the same. Now, two of the first four are getting thrown off. Huh?

It’s so astonishingly poorly conceived. But worse is Tim Vincent’s ludicrous, biased presentation. His script requires him to announce that we will “believe the impossible” and so on, calling them “remarkable people” rather than “mediocre magicians”. When they were going through some bullshit about channelling spirits to achieve that which most magicians can do without the help of the undead, it was silly. When they’re performing really standard party magic, especially with the dire sleight of hand on display from some, Vincent just sounds like a lunatic.

The only female competitor took part in episode two, and you’d think she was the first woman any of them had ever met. Obsessed over the fact that this magician contained a vagina, they asked her if she felt she was representing all women ever. Embarrassing fawning over her, even from Angel, had the exact opposite effect of their intent, seeming like something from the 1950s.

However, it did feature the first decent act by a man called Mike Super. He did an excellent prediction trick, based on multiple participants’ suggestions, with a wonderful finish where the audience found they had the final part – the time 3:13 – printed on their hands in UV paint. Which is just a lovely way to end a trick. So when it came to the judges, Uri of course didn’t like it. Why? Because as Criss Angel immediately pointed out, he hadn’t claimed he was psychic. To which Super immediately responded categorically stating that he makes no such claim. It was a refreshing moment in this pile of woo-woo tosh. Of course, despite this they edited his intro movie to try to imply that there was something there, chopping up his comments about his parents’ dying to sound like it was somehow involved in his act. Cretinous producers.

When I wrote about it before, I mentioned MAGICIAN Uri Geller’s pathetic moment where he gets to use his brainrape on the viewing public. When I joked that he’d be asking us to pick a number from 3 to 5, I also had in mind suggesting he’d stoop so low as to do the 9 planets trick. Where the nine planets (Pluto keeps his old status for this maths-based trick to work) are in a circle, you pick one, and the follow his instructions about counting back and forth. AND SOMEHOW HE KNOWS WHICH ONE YOU’LL LAND ON! Now, perhaps this nonsense could be gotten away with when most people didn’t have a VCR, but in the age of DVR and torrents, only a complete moron would attempt this, surely? It’s a simple maths exercise, whichever you choose always resulting in landing on Venus. So anyone with the show recorded can go back and check. So fine – if you’re watching a magic show and you figure out how something’s done, whatever. But when it’s presented as proof of psychic powers, it’s so astonishingly weak as to be unbelievable. Geller will sue anyone who suggests he is a CHARLATAN or even a MAGICIAN, and yet he’s happy to go on live TV and present one of the most excruciatingly obvious tricks, known to most children, as an example of his powers. It’s bewildering.

To see this for yourself, follow it through with any planet:

Pick any planet. Then starting on Jupiter, spell out the planet you chose. (So if you picked PLUTO, you go P: Jupiter, L: Earth, U: Pluto, T: Mercury, O: Saturn. So you’re on Saturn). Then carry on going clockwise, spelling out the planet you landed on. Then eliminate Pluto. Carry on clockwise with the new planet you’re on. Then eliminate Neptune. Spell out your new planet again. Eliminate Uranus and Mercury. Spell out the last planet. And you’ll land on Venus. Every time. Wow – I’m a psychic too.

A Brief History of Rubbish Magic

It’s funny how magic has come full circle. After the naivity of the 70s and 80s, the 90s saw us get all cynical and want to know how it was done. As Paul Daniels fell from grace, and Penn & Teller rose to popularity, it was, appropriately enough, the illusion of being told how tricks were done that appealed to us. P&T really gave nothing away, but everyone giggled with the pleasure that they thought they might be. This then went to the next stage, and “magic’s greatest secrets” were revealed. The only room for primetime magic was ruining it. And you’d think, if anything, we’d have gained some sort of maturity from this.

Of course then everyone went a bit Derren Brown. (I continue to think Brown is a fantastic magician, and I still wish he’d stop using deceit to achieve his excellent effects. While he has thankfully abandoned pretending there’s any reality to NLP, he still maintains nonsense about hypnotising and still lied about not using stooges. I’m also really pleased that his act has gone toward disproving hoaxes, but I wish he would take an honest position like James Randi’s to do this from.) We started believing all over again, because the patter changed. In America, this took the form of Criss Angel – an incredibly carefully crafted persona that taps into every zeitgeist theme imaginable for winning over a decent chunk of the cable audience. Oscillating between emo and goth, on Mindfreak he freshened up American magic while simultaneously making it unwatchable to anyone over the age of 15.

The Old School

So it’s with a confused face that I discovered NBC’s new Phenomenon wasn’t further post-millennial illusions given primetime space by a confident network executive, but the most dated, tired old routines dressed up as some form American Idol style show. But it gets weirder/worse: the audience aren’t asked to vote on who is the best magician – in fact the word “magician” only appears once in the episode, with the presenter practically trying to shout over it – but who “amazes you the most”. We’re being asked to believe in these acts. Oh, and of course, MAGICIAN Uri Geller is a judge.

But so is Criss Angel, which didn’t strike me as such great news at first. The ponciest opening credits imaginable have Angel prancing around in the desert, floppy shouldered and shouting disaffected muted cries, along with MAGICIAN Uri Geller staring at the camera looking really rather cross. And having tried to watch Mindfreak in the past, Angel always came across as a self-important moron. Which makes me pleasantly surprised to find out he’s a properly decent guy, who promised Randi he’d tell the truth on the live show.

Two episodes have aired now, and I’ll admit I started writing this after the first and was then distracted by a bee. And it’s got a whole lot more interesting. So I’ll say what I was going to say, and then get onto the FIGHT!

Oops

Angel stayed true to his word, and scoffed at those who tried to pass off really poor tricks as Real Life Magic. Remember, this is a programme that refuses to use the word “trick” or “magician” (probably because MAGICIAN Uri Geller’s head would start spinning around like a mad top), so after a particularly pisspoor performance where a man claimed he could cause people to feel like they were being touched when they weren’t, through mystical mind power, Angel responded by naming both the trick, and the man who invented it, and added that it was a rather average demonstration of it. This was hilarious, and if the show wasn’t live, would surely have been cut. But then even better, Geller gets his turn where he praises the performance, and states that the man was proof that there really are mystical brain powers at his behest. After Angel has named both the trick, and the trick creator.

Of course, things don’t go so entertainingly when someone does a trick Angel has bought and performed as well. After a particularly dreadful rendition of the Russian Roulette trick Derren Brown made very famous – this time done with weedy nail guns, one loaded, five not – Angel can’t immediately point out how poor it was, and how it was a simple trick, because it’s something he’d done on his own show with ludicrous over-hyping. So instead he praised NBC for being brave enough to air the trick (admittedly, Channel 4 did have to jump through all sorts of hoops to show the Brown trick, including filming it outside the UK), and then pointed out that he did it better on his own show, but added that therefore he understood the risks that were involved. i.e. none at all, but he couldn’t say that without making his own pomp look a little silly.

And so there’s a problem. Angel, being a particularly pompous and overproduced performer, is rather stuck with his own exaggerated claims in his past, and doesn’t want to diminish his own effects. So if someone were to reproduce his walking on water, or disappearing in the desert on the show (I’m not sure how either would be managed on the stage, but you know), he won’t be groaning and saying, “That’s easy – any idiot can do that trick”. Meanwhile, MAGICIAN Geller will be furiously masturbating in excitement because someone else claimed to have powers while doing shitty parlour tricks, just like him.

I’m thinking of a number between 3 and 5…

Pathetically, they’re giving MAGICIAN Geller a slot to demonstrate his psychic abilities each week. In the first episode he showed five ESP symbols, picked one (the star, because EVERY TIME HE DOES IT HE PICKS THE STAR) and forced it into our minds with his brainrape. The phonelines opened, the internet voting began, and the viewers let them know during the live show which symbol he’d inserted within them. And guess what – like it always does, because for whatever reason people are more likely to pick the star, it won! By a whopping 1% over the second place circle. 27% to 26%. So damn close. Of course this was claimed as a clear victory, and proof of MAGICIAN Geller’s actual real-life magical powers that he definitely does have. Good grief, in a couple of episodes he’ll be resorting to one of those “and take away the number you first thought of” tricks. Seriously – YOU TAKE AWAY THE NUMBER YOU FIRST THOUGHT OF – OF COURSE IT’S GOING TO LEAD TO THE SAME NUMBER. Sigh.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

So in the second episode, this got a whole lot more interesting. Something Angel had specifically promised Randi was that he’d not allow anyone to claim spiritualism powers on the show, and if they did he’d debunk them immediately. And so, sure enough, there was the most atrocious performance of a sealed envelope trick you’ve ever seen, with the ‘psychic’ in a trance bordering on convulsions, as a pre-recorded video of him narrated what was happening – with remarkable timing. He was channelling the dead spirit of someone-or-other, and it was causing him great pain and effort. And what for? So he could write down the name of an object someone who used to be on The Cosby Show had chosen from a collection of 100, off camera, before the show, and then sealed in a box. Because all spirits are retarded, the writing came out backwards and spelt wrong, but fortunately he just happened to have a mirror set up on stage to show the audience the results. And wouldja believe it? It matched! So he basically did the same trick as pretty much everyone else on the show – picked the number/word/object that was sealed in the envelope/box, but this time with an epileptic fit.

MAGICIAN Geller did his usual half-asleep ramble about how the man convinced him that he had a spirit guide, and that therefore he must be a real psychic too, and not a MAGICIAN who has been debunked and shown to be a fraud on live television numerous times. Then Angel reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of envelopes, declaring that if either the idiot on stage, or Geller, could name the words written in the envelope, or even allude to them, he’d give them a million dollars of his own money. At which point the performer suddenly recovered from his exhaustion and began calling him a “bigot”. And then tried to punch him, as Angel kept repeating his challenge. Sadly Angel, who is clearly a bit of a twit, started squaring up to the guy, leading to the hilarity of watching former Blue Peter presenter Tim Vincent and Geller break the two of them up before going to commercial. And you can watch it all here:

Hilariously, this is uploaded by someone supporting Callahan (or indeed Callahan himself), claiming at the end to demonstrate Angel’s hypocrisy – which appears to boil down to his presenting his tricks as remarkable feats on his own show. I don’t doubt Angel has gone too far in the wah-wah bullshit in the past, but it’s hardly a defense of a psychic to point out that another magician lied.

It does look a bit staged toward the end, but I’ve got a feeling that it’s not. Something about Vincent’s Alan Partridge-like panic, and the fact that those involved are all puff-chested performers anyway, suggests to me that were they to get into a fight outside a pub over who was looking at whose girlfriend, it would appear just as scripted and set up. But that’s not really important anyway, since the final score goes in favour of the skeptic, fake or not.

So, kudos to Criss Angel, even though he can’t spell his own name.