Horizon: Why Do We Dream?

I woke up this morning in a cold film of panic. The second I awoke, I realised absolutely nothing had happening in the preceding dream that was in any way ultraviolent or depraved.

Usually I can set my clock by the fact that my dreamscape will involve outright butchery and gore-smashing  as I wander through it like a blood-spattered droid – all alongside a morally bankrupt attitude to libidinous activities. It keeps me grounded and acts as a counterweight to my conscious life – the bloodshed and perviness brilliantly balancing the mundanity of reality. So this sudden overnight change is disturbing.

Perhaps this means I’m bound for a murderous rampage? Maybe I’m going to wander down the street later today, my conscious mind tasked with getting me the papers whilst my subconscious is bent on carnage. I’ll probably end up slaughtering a puppy with my end flopping out of my fly. They’ll take me away, peel my scalp off and do experiments on my brain.

So – why do we dream?

Time for Horizon to ask ‘science’ again, despite the fact it couldn’t answer Why Thin People Aren’t Fat and couldn’t make its mind up (probably stoned) as to whether cannabis is the Evil Weed.

Puny science.

I always thought William Golding was right – that “sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind”. It’s just a load of fear, insecurity and desire coming out in a slew of meaningless, dirty thoughts. And it seems science isn’t much further ahead in its thinking. Despite people being hooked up to those neuro-sensors that look like sticky-tape and string attached all over a swimming trunked body, they haven’t got much further than the fact that we have nightmares at certain times of night and get depressed if we we wake up at certain times. And they pay scientists for this rubbish.

If I may, I suggest that this lack of a decent conclusion across the scientific board on Horizon so far this series is down to inaccuracies in the testing methodology. It seems ludicrous that we’re trying to work out if skunk is addictive by feeding it to mice – and we’re not likely to learn which bit of our grey-matter triggers wet dreams by sticking a chimp in a brain scanner.

So let us test on humans, damn it!

I’m not suggesting we round up volunteers. Only a moron would stick his hand up when asked if he fancied having a lobe-probe. And obviously it wouldn’t be fair to test on the underclasses – both from a humanitarian point of view and also pragamtically, considering they’re all preoccupied by drinking lager and raising staffordshire bull terriers and, as such, would provide uselessly biased responses.

Therefore, I conclude the only decent subjects are the supposed great and good. We could get Will Self and Stephen Fry strapped to chairs in isolation booths and stick metal sticks in their ears to see how certain words twist up their vocab glands. We could test spatial awareness by looking up Andy Murray’s mechanically dilated nose whilst giving him cumulatively more and more powerful electric shocks. We could test the very notion of celebrity by culling Calum Best, Chico and Vanessa Feltz and measuring the amount of tears the public weep.

Let us stride forward into a new age of scientific boundary – with fiendish grins on our faces, devilish murder in our hearts and metal sticks gripped in our fists.

The Friday Question: Quiz Easy

It’s a simple question this week.

We want to know which gameshow you watch regularly, in the certain knowledge that you could conquer the entire thing, round after ridiculously easy round.

Do you sit and score yourself whilst watching University Challenge, smug in the knowledge that you’d beat the hapless dons hands down?

Do you watch Mastermind and clench your fists when the participants miss a sitter?

Can you get EVERY Catchphrase, sitting half-drunk in your bedsit, watching Challenge TV on the cable connection you nicked from next door?

Which quiz show could you easily conquer?

Trisha’s Guest Dilemma

Can YOU solve yesterday’s Trisha’s Guest Dilemma? Here are the facts of the case:

Wayne comes home.

Wayne realises he’s lost his keys.

Wayne climbs in through an open window.

Wayne’s partner Rose comes down the stairs naked.

“It’s not what it looks like,” says Rose, without being asked anything.

Wayne goes upstairs to discover a naked man cowering in the wardrobe.

Rose explains the man’s her cousin, and there’s no funny business going on.

So, what Wayne wants to know from YOU, the WWM Trisha audience, is this:

Is his partner Rose guilty of adultery or not?

You may want to take a bit of time before reaching your conclusion …

Boys & Girls Alone

I hated being a child. I chuckle with glee when I spot a grey hair on my thinning crown and dance a jig on my doddering old legs in celebration of the fact that I’m one increment further away from the horrendous swamp of bright colours and squawking idiocy that was childhood.

Childhood mainly seemed to involve making friends (often based on who could run fastest), those friends eventually pissing you off, you pissing them off in return and ultimately one of your number (possibly you) being ejected from favour and left to wallow in immature misery on the sidelines. With grass-stains all over your shorts and scabs on your knees. And then you’d get home late as a result and get a ruddy good telling off for your troubles from those looming, intolerable swines you were forced to call parents.

Childhood’s little more than a prolonged period of mania, like a horrible, frenetic dream. You’re constantly searching for answers and coming up short because you lack the experience to form conclusions. And if you’re not wandering around in a tight circle, despairing in the midst of what could be existential angst – but you don’t know because you’re too young to figure out what that actually means – you’re wasting the best years of your life absorbed in digging a hole in the garden with a spoon. And then getting told off for digging a hole in the garden and for bending the cutlery, again.

The concept of sharing stuff with your pals and siblings was one of the hardest ideas to get your soft head around. You were handed a bag of crisps, say, and your first instinct, wasn’t to say thankyou. You’d have to be prompted to do that. You’re not, in that first moment, remotely concerned with saving them for later.

You want to wolf them all down, every last maize snack or potatoey morsel. You don’t want to give a single scrap to anyone near you. You want to hide in a cupboard until you’ve stuck them all in your stomach and you’re damned if anyone’s going to stop you. But adults would make you share your crisps as you sat there in hand-me-down, discoloured trousers, diluting all the fun in one breath of unreasonable reason. The long-bodied bastards.

The worst of it all is that you didn’t know what you had until it had buggered off, leaving you in a bedsit with an overdraft and loads of forms to fill in. Suddenly it had all gone away, and those old sods who stopped you taking your Speak ‘n’ Spell into the bath had stopped giving you pizza and making your bed.

So I don’t envy the kids in Channel 4′s Boys & Girls Alone. They’re in the midst of an orgy of awful insanity, filled with thumps, recrimination and bitching arguments. After that, they’ve got a festival of hair-sprouting, self-doubt and insecurity to go through before they’re left to face the world of work without any real assistance (after a stint of humiliating themselves through ill-judged activities at University, if they’re unlucky enough to be shunted in that direction).

I feel even more sorry for them in that their own folks felt it’d be a good idea to stick them in a same-sex house for a couple of weeks unsupervised (apart from the odd social worker, solely placed there to prevent them from killing one another).

Two episodes have been and gone and the kids, in isolation, are charming. Full of hope and innocence, they trundle along contentedly or speed around willy nilly, without a care in the world. But the moment they come head to head with one another, as the production team probably predicted, fireworks follow. So many arguments, tears, physical and mental abuse, so much confused ideology smashed heartlessly by common sense, that it makes excellent television, but to describe it would be hopeless. With minds this undeveloped, it’s impossible to characterise or stereotype any of the infants as they’re learning every single day exactly who they are. Each one is simultaneously a bully and a victim, or an idiot and a genius in one stunted parcel.

As for the argument that this could impact negatively on the kids, I don’t buy it. I went on a PGL Adventure Holiday when I was a youngster – and the bizarre and ludicrous event that is ‘cub camp’ – and the antics we got up to on those jaunts (setting fire to a dead rabbit, force-feeding a fat kid dry pasta, reading lots of split-beaver porn and smoking proper fags) would put these kids to shame in the bad behaviour department.

The fact it’s televised is the only danger, I reckon. But these short-arse runts can just blame the whole thing on Mum and Dad when they become spotty adolescents. They’re bound to blame everything else on them anyway, so it won’t change a thing.

Masterchef: Johan Et Gregoire.mp3

Today we offer a tribute to tweedledee and tweedledumpling, in the form of an mp3 that needs clicking, below.

I like chocolate.

The World’s Most Enhanced Woman And Me

Mark Dolan first arrived in the public eye on the Richard Taylor Interviews – a slightly amusing Channel 4 comedy stunt show in which he posed as the MD of a fictional company, then put hopeful interview candidates through a gruelling process of humiliating tasks. It was designed, I think, to prove that management speak was a load of guff – featuring footage of these upstarts in the days before The Apprentice discussing just how 110% they are, followed by the satisfying sight of yet another young pretender to the corporate throne making a right royal tit of themselves in the desperate hope of landing a £30k management team leader ‘role’.

So, a decent start to his TV career. But then things started to descend – as anyone who’s seen Balls of Steel will attest. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to do anything other than mention the title and remind folk that it was Dolan who gleefully presented it to get your gag-reflexes swinging.

After that, a stint sitting beside Nick Ferrari in the LBC studio, a punishment in itself, one would imagine. And now he bafflingly finds himself involved in an hour of good-slot Channel 4 TV every week. Without googling or scanning Wikipedia, one suspects Dolan has worked in production or commissioning before, so pitching himself a new show is as simple as telling Channel 4 what hours he can work. Otherwise there’s no way someone so monumentally untalented – either in front of the camera or coming up with concepts behind it – would get this much work. Otherwise there is simply no justice in the world.

This latest outing has been criticised by critics as a tasteless neo-freakshow and coming at it with fresh eyes, having not seen any of the last series, you can see exactly why. In The Most Enhanced Woman In The World, Dolan travels to America (where else?) to track down women who cater to the ‘big boob’ fetish. A dying breed (in some cases literally) since their wobbly bosomed heyday in the decadent 90s.

Dolan doesn’t say why he wants to meet ridiculously augmented women and he neglects to add a Louis Theroux style disclaimer at the start explaining that he’d like to know what these people are all about. He simply dives in there, like an over-enthusiastic public schoolboy, intent on fulfilling his pointless mission. Without any context for the brief, we’re left with a lanky moron going on a jolly to poke fun at the spiritually bereft.

Ho ho!

First he meets a big-boobed blonde who, since the softcore work dried up, recently made the move into hardcore. Her silent (and much younger) husband retrieves two implants from a carrier bag that she no longer fastens to herself because they’re too big and they leak – with the potential for the silicon to enter brain cells and the bloodstream, causing paralysis, brain damage and death. Despite her life choices, this one was quite aware of the inherent tragedy of her surgery. Without any suffering to poke his pointy stick at, Dolan cruised off to find something a little more perverse for the camera.

And he found it. Minka was, once upon a time, an adequately proportioned South Korean lady, doing normal things – like playing tennis and working in a mundane job, all the while with a normal set of dumplings – until Woody entered her country and her life. Woody swept her off her feet and dragged her to America where he persuaded her to stick implants the size of space-hoppers up her armpits so they could make millions of dollars.

Their household, as far as we could tell, was a loveless void where the big-boob obsessive kept his disfigured missus for two reasons. Firstly, so that he could live with a grotesquely adorned doll (that’s what she had become – all trace of personality wiped) and secondly so he could make money out of it. Dolan made steps towards obtaining an understanding of Minka, but so superficially that he needn’t have bothered. It was left to the viewer to use the scantest of evidence to piece together how this relationship worked. The devil is in the detail – owning seven small dogs might demonstrate that Minka is lonely, for example – but rather than go searching for more of this kind of stuff, Dolan just snorted and singgered his way through before committing the ultimate documentary-making sin.

The ‘judgement piece to camera’, where the presenter addresses the audience (or the cameraman), is a major mistake in this sort of television. Especially when the presenter judges the subject and offers his opinion. Notice how Theroux only talks to camera if he’s telling the cameraman to get out of the way, of if totally necessary to give a sense of time and place. Nick Broomfield also avoids it at all costs. This is why they get awards. They’re aware of what documentary actually is. Dolan, however, treats his audience with contempt and attempts to tell us what’s going on despite the fact we already know, and think he’s an arse for not being able to cope with it properly.

Finally, Dolan visits Brazil where Shayla was going for the world record in terms of the size of her waps. Shayla was immediately a sympathetic character, and Dolan initially appeared to make a connection. We were witness to tears and insecurity which came to a head in a scene on a beach, were Shayla admitted she had self-esteem issues due to a lost love, and then a shopping mall scene wherein Shayla hoovered up the curiosity of onlookers, mistaking it for love. There was a lot here that could have been said about the culture of celebrity. With a few more questions along those lines, we’d have got to the heart of Shayla. But Dolan couldn’t be arsed. He was too busy watching her balance her boobs on the table so she could take the weight off her spine.

When Shayla went for her record-breaking augmentation, instead of asking pertinent questions, Dolan stood like a spare prick at a wedding doing bugger all. He appeared to have lost all emotion in the face of truly troubling subject matter. It was obvious that he was in too deep and, without the charm, charisma of presence of mind to deal with it, what could have been quite a startling piece of insightful TV turned into the absolute opposite. Freakshow TV where the host becomes even freakier than his subjects by virtue of his ignorance.

The final piece to camera did nothing to rescue this nasty slice of nothingness. Dolan simply bailed, with words to the effect of ‘I’ve met the most enhanced woman in the world, and I wish I hadn’t’.

He’s all heart.

The Friday Question: Watch Your Mouth!

TV history is littered with the problematic words of presenters and pundits who have said the wrong thing at the wrong time. The case of Carol Thatcher is only peculiar in that it was said off-mic, where you’d assume a smack on the wrist might’ve been the usual response.

It’s the on-mic blurtles we’re talking about today. Ron Atkinson is the recent king of idiotic babble, with his assertion that Marcel Desailly was a ‘f*cking l*zy n*gger’, ruining his career as a talking head with three simple words last decade.

Recently, and flipping the race coin, Jesse Jackson came against a hell of a lot of stick across the pond when he said this presuming he was of air. ‘Cut his nuts off’ indeed!

Even more race-based idiocy arrived in the form of Jade Goody’s second Big Brother outing, this time as a ‘Celebrity’, when she had a mad moment (actually, loads of them) and referred to Bollywood Queen  Shilpa Shetty as ‘Shilpa Poppadom’.It wasn’t helped by her pals joining in as they made a series of slurs on the hygiene of a whole nation.

But we’re not restricted to race on this. Anyone who screwed up their career, or shamed themselves a bit is up for discussion. Think George Best or David Icke on Wogan.

Any more for any more?

Your View – Carol and the ‘Golliwog’

Go on then – it’s all over the press so let us discuss it here.

Carol Thatcher, daughter of an evil alien and winner of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here compared a black tennis player to a golliwog – as we’re all aware, by now. This occurred in a ‘green room’ at the BBC in the company of Adrian Chiles, Jo Brand and the delightful Christine Bleakley.

Several people in the room took offence, one called The Sun(?) and Jay Hunt sacked the Thatch.

Case for the prosecution:

• The term, if overheard and out of historical context, could cause offence.
• Comparisons to Jonathan Ross are irrelevant as he was only offensive to one individual.
• Ross apologised whilst Thatcher refuses to.
• It was a Comic Relief event, making it somehow even worse.

Case for the defence:

• We don’t know the exact context of her blatherings.
• Jonathan Ross was offensive (all the same) and didn’t get sacked.
• It was a comparison pertaining to appearance alone.

Personally, I’m just glad she’s off the TV.

What’s your take, WWMers?