Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn Read Free Page A

Jamie Theakston or Dale Winton in the top 25, and the shocking revelation that Gloria Hunniford is still working – although only on Channel Five, which means she might as well be reading Ladybird books to a bunch of worms in a skip. Oh, and one truly terrifying fact: the average viewer watches Jim Davidson for a full 6.49 minutes every week. Coincidentally, this is also the precise amount of time it takes to grind your own teeth to powder in an impotent rage.
    But the list also shatters several key TV presentation myths – such as the assumption that to enjoy success you have to be young and attractive. This simply isn’t true.
    Take the ‘attractive’ bit. Consider Michael Parkinson (number 25), a man with a face like a corpse’s shoe – or the downright Tolkeinesque Alan Titchmarsh, who could wander through a forest scaring knotholes from the trees simply by smiling at them. Think: did you really splash out on that top-of-the-range brushed-aluminium Panasonic set just so you could experience Titchmarsh’s inadvertent gurning in digital widescreen? So you could hear your kids screaming about the scary man with his face pressed against the glass? Well? Maybe it’s just me, but whenever Titchmarsh turns to camera I always imagine he’s about to lean out of the screen and try to lick my neck. It’s frightening. But there he is regardless, sitting unpretty at number 9. Then there’s Davidson, Whiteley, Scully … all of them about as easy on the eye as a handful of shattered monkey-nut husks unexpectedly flung in your face by a passing drunk.
    Still, it’s unfair to judge people on appearance. There’s age to consider as well. And the nation’s top telly faces are old, man. The average age of the top five BBC1 presenters is 47.8, while their ITV equivalents are even older, at an average of 50.8 years of age. Even the painfully hip Channel 4, which arrives at work riding a pavement scooter and clutching a punnet of takeaway sushi, can only manage 45.6. The unseen, ghostlike Channel Five has by far the perkiest presenters – their top five come in at around 38.3 years old, despite the handicap of a sixty-year-old Hunniford dragging their average age coffinward.
    So if duff looks and senility aren’t handicaps, what will hold you back? The answer, it would appear, is a personality, since themajority of names on the list are about as inspiring as a scratch on a Formica desktop. Lineker (2), Lynam (3), Aspel (20), Kilroy (23) … they may be professional, but they sure as heck ain’t interesting. Perhaps the blandest of the lot is Steve Rider, described as ‘TV’s Mister Charisma’ for the first and only time in his life in this very sentence, straight in at number 14, thanks to his Grandstand appearances (doing a regular sports gig is a good way of gatecrashing the list, which explains the appearance of David Vine, six places ahead of Carol Smillie at number 10).
    There are bright spots. Ant and Dec (6) are chirpy and likeable, and even if you can’t bear Barrymore (18), or Tarrant (5), they’re at least vaguely anarchic in spirit. Otherwise, it seems we like our TV presenters to encompass everything we wouldn’t look for in a potential sexual partner: aged, ugly, and utterly personality-free. And considering the amount of time we’re going to end up spending with them, that’s downright sick.

No Pain, No Gain     [22 November 2000]
     
    Last week, Coronation Street was accused of sadism. Not because of that aggravating theme tune (the aural equivalent of having half-chewed, week-old Battenberg cake dribbled into your ear canal by a senile grandparent), but because of the bothersome antics of Weatherfield’s number one bad guy, Jez Quigley – a seriously unpleasant cross between John ‘Cold Feet’ Thomson and the head Blue Meanie from Yellow Submarine . The majority of complaints were provoked by a scene in which Quigley attempted to smother Street wideboy Steve McDonald as he lay injured in