Britain's love affair with wittering, breathless, sexless, woeful chantreusses continues. After Katie Melua and Sandi Thom, step up Kate Rusby and her cover of The Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society. This record neatly combines the meandering, dopey lists-as-lyrics of Melua with mind-shatteringly irritating Thom style "nostalgia for a time I didn't actually live in". The thing that gets my goat most is the inclusion of "Donald Duck" along with all the imagery of a WI-ran rural England long since lost. The invocation of a character belonging to one of the most rapacious megacorporations in the world is bad enough, but that they should pick one who is typically seen lathered in a beligerent, incoherent, violent frenzy of misanthropy... Wait. Actually, he's perfect. I can't think of a cartoon character that more closely resembels the Daily Mail-reading yahoos at whom this release is aquarely aimed.

Has anyone else noticed how the plot of pretty much every episode of "adult" Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood is either predicated or at least partly depends upon how stunningly attractive the main characters are, despite the fact they are played by a typically pasty troop of sub-Casualty jobbing actors? For example, in the first show of this second series guest villain James Marsters straight-facedly referred to this bloke as "eye candy". Last night, on BBC 3, Freema Agyeman turned up for a spot of inter-series nod and winkery. A genuinely attractive woman, by the internal logic of the drama all narrative should have ceased as our bunch of bi-curious alien-busters greeted her like a paragon of female sexuality, falling to the floor in paroxysms of orgasmic joy. Meh. Bring on Dave Ross, says I.

Speaking of hit-and-miss BBC 3 drama, did anyone else bother with Phoo Action? Jamie Hewlett's work is poorly served by live action adaptation; just how shitty the ill-fated Tank Girl movie is becomes clear when you consider the last ninety seconds of it, which constitute one of the most thrilling and well-executed pieces of animation seen on cinema screens in the nineties. Shame they had to be preceded by as many minutes of unfunny, lazy film. Based on his Get the Freebies comic strips, Phoo Action came off like a love child of The Banana Splits, the sixties Batman tv show and Kill Bill. On paper, that sounds like tv made for Tel, especially when you factor in the cartoonist author and presence of Spaced's Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) on the writers' list. In practice the hour long show was in need of liberal use of the red pen; the observations on celebrity culture and mass media- Hewlett's original target back in the day- were welcome. But it was overloaded with non-sequiters and half-assed jokes. The show looks fantastic, but it's not up to Hewlett's simian-themed best (be it Monkeys or Gorillaz). I note six more episodes have been commissioned sight unseen, all to be filmed in Glasgow. If nothing else, the increased chance of encountering a basketball-headed goblin on Buchanan Street is a reason to be cheerful.

Georgian purveyor of "so-cute-it-hurts" lyrics Katie Melua has now released a pun-packed ballad about (of all things!) the marriage of Douglas Fairbanks to Mary Pickford.

Clever references to United Artists (the studio they founded) and Pickfair (their home) and borderline nonsense rhymes ("moustache" with "much cash") don't mask the fact that the subject matter has all but passed from living memory. Who is this thing aimed at? Terry Wogan* will no doubt, and as ever, champion it as the best single for months if not years, but that says it all, no? For all Ms Melua's youth and pep, there's no sex there and scarcely any coherent philosophy; just a grim determination to adhere to the very geometric centre of the stripe that marks the middle of the road. Toothless, shapeless elevator musak writ large. Bill Drummond's No Music Day this week makes more and more sense.

*His performance on the recent Children in Need telethon betrayed a broadcaster hopelessly at odds with the medium; no ability to think on the hoof, no ability to improvise, barely capable of a sentence not provided on idiot boards. And an eccentric style of delivery that seems to involuntarily waver between chesty mumbling to arm-flailing and shouting.

Y and I took in two gigs over the weekend; Bill Bailey at the Clyde Auditorium (the "Armadillo") on Friday and Calvin Harris at the Barrowlands last night.

Both were early shows in nationwide tours, Tinselworm and I Created Disco respectively. The latter was my first visit to the legendary Glasgow anachronism that is "ra Barras". That it's taken me thirty years to get there is probably testament to my aforementioned relative indifference to music, and live music in particular. In fact, I honestly think the last time I paid to see a chart-placing artist was in the company of mcgazz, some thirteen years ago, when we took in The Divine Comedy (plus full orchestra) at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

Yesterday's experience was entertaining, but did little to change my mind on the subject. Someone had joked that our party would be the oldest in the crowd and that wasn't very far from the truth. As I looked around at the assembled writhing masses, merrily throwing their drinks at each other and the performers, I found it hard to "let go". Mr Harris' entreaties to put our hands in the air, or jump up and down, or join in on his hits, fell on deaf ears in my case. I don't think it's my age; I don't think I was ever fully on board with the sweaty, cramped, loud, mindless experience of the rock gig. Too up-tight? Too white? My biggest beef remains the inferiority of the aesthetics. Go see a painting in a museum and you'll be rewarded in a way that no reproduction can manage; but such is the process of modern music production that no live performance can ever measure up to the recorded version. Such was the case yesterday. God knows, Calvin is no song bird. His records succeed because of their one-man-band, bedroom-bound retro synth approach. Transferred to the stage, with a full band and CH on lead vocals, the tracks are certainly bigger and louder. But better? Not sure.

Plus, I couldn't help but compare the thing to Bill Bailey's show the night before. BB's gig made extensive use of special effects, short films, digital animation and props (most especially a Corby trouser press/Segway hybrid) as well as his own mix of music and stand-up. He was on stage for about an hour and a half, gave us almost entirely new material and his encore was more of the same, plus a reprise of an old favourite. CH's set lasted fifty minutes at most, was staged in a thoroughly pedestrain manner, conspicuously failed to include all the tracks from his album and the encore was perfomed by his (inferior) support act. Hmm. Double hmm.

Anyway, it got us out of the house and nights like that, were neither of us are working, are running at a premium these days. Speaking of work, I'll be doing some extensive updating on t'other site in the next day or two, so I'll point to that once it's done.

A trawl of the hard drives of not one but two defunct computers that preceded this one has unearthed several confusing and delightful presents from past lives.

Among them are these two articles that I wrote for a never-happened magazine in 2002. I think they hold up pretty well. The most surprising thing is that- despite my criticism- the Britain of five years ago looks like a goddamn paradise compared with what we have now. Had I known that theX-Factor and its predecessors would have so little impact on music and do so much damage to television, and that R&B would soon dissolve into chipmunk-voiced mobile phone fodder, I'd have tacked my rigging differently. And my comment on Jarvis could, arguably, be refuted by the last track on his self-titled album.

Charlie Brooker, look out!
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MUSIC
“I never ask where do you go.
I never ask what do you do.
I never ask what’s in your mind.
I never ask if you’ll be mine.

Come and smile, don’t be shy, touch my bum, this is life.”

Since time immemorial, man has tried to encapsulate the human condition, transcend it and touch the divine through the sublime art that is Music. From the earliest madrigals to the grandest of symphonic orchestrations, from opera to jazz, folk to punk the songsmiths have struggled to give voice to the inner soul. But in the end it took two ectomorphic vampire clones from Transylvania to reveal The Answer: that the female buttocks are the one true source of lasting happiness.

Before returning to Castle Frankenstein in the form of bats, the Cheeky Girls were able to spread their gospel thanks to the unrelenting crapola factory that is ITV’s Popstars project. Conceived by The Devil with the specific intention of destroying Britain, the Popstars and Fame Academy series form an interminable televisual Purgatory, a limbo of regional auditions, live phone-in heats, backstage footage, interviews, analysis and commentary that pare several thousand contenders down into the blandest act possible. These hollow-eyed automatons then go on to empty the pockets of the country’s youth with merchandising campaigns of military precision, whilst twisting their ambitions by propagating the myth that any untalented twat can become a famous million-pound-contract-landing popstar, provided midriffs are bare at all times and an unswerving resistance to originality, wit or sensitivity is maintained.

The modern pop star has a life cycle only slightly longer than your common mayfly. All too often, the “singer” or “band” are nothing more than drama school graduates or, worse yet, hired models, contributing only their perfect smiles and toned bodies. These kids are puppets, literally dancing to someone else’s tune. This is the final, decisive victory of style over substance, splitting British popular music into two camps. On one side, that vast legion of plastic, pinkish, paedophile-pleasing pop pish best exemplified by SClub Juniors. On the other, battered, bruised and bleeding, the Real Musicians struggle to find the energy to down sixteen pints of Newcie Brown, tap out another line of Colombian Marching Powder, or even slightly trash their Rotterdam hotel room.

There’s an old adage that says “they don’t write ‘em like they used to”. This is a hollow truism of the worst kind. Obviously, they don’t write em like they used to! Liam and Noel Gallagher, whilst recording and releasing several dozen hours’ worth of their repetitive, mithering, stultifying drek have not once explored the possibilities of iambic pentameter. Jarvis Cocker, throughout his frequent meditations on seedy sexual encounters Oop North has yet to pen a single lyric concerning feudal land reform or the injustice and hardship of peasant life. Bono rarely finds the right moment to invoke Thor, Odin or any of the Norse gods in his compositions. I might be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard David Gray use the words “Forsooth” or “Hey, nonny-nonny” on my copy of A New Day at Midnight.

But, hey! I am by no means an old man. My trousers have yet to migrate north of my navel. I’ve been known to get down, freak out and- once, in 1997- wave my hands in the air like I just didn’t care. However, I am afraid that the current trends in music present an interesting problem for my future self. A time will come when I finally do succumb to the soporific charms of Countdown and the minty-fresh taste of Fixodent. The wheel will turn full circle, the rose-coloured lenses will be installed and I’ll find myself berating a gaggle of unruly grandchildren for listening to some incomprehensible din or other. I’ll turn to my old cd collection in an attempt to educate the youngsters. As I dust off the laser-etched silvery discs, laughably over-sized to the eyes of the nano-botic kids of 2052, I’ll become misty-eyed and start to sing along. And herein lies the problem.

What little respect they have for their wizened patriarch will evaporate like summer rain when they witness me, arms flailing like two sets of sinewy nunchucks, belting out the Prodigy classic, Firestarter:

“I’m the bitch you hated, filth infatuated. Yeah, I’m the pain you tasted, well intoxicated. I’m the firestarter, twisted firestarter.”

What sort of youth did Gramps have, they’ll wonder, that led him to embrace this anthem of gender bending, drug abuse and pyromania? They’ll ask if I’m being ironic, yanking their chains a little. Yeah, that’s it. The old duffer’s having fun with us. But wait... Another selection:

“Who the man allowed to make you moist and wet? Who the man allowed to make you moan and sweat? Who the man allowed to make you scream out yes? MISTER LOVER-LOVER!”

The kids’ embarrassment and confusion can only deepen further. Not only does the old man appear to be making filthy sexual advances toward his reclining chair, but he’s listening to a recording made by a tracheotomy patient. And until this point they’d thought of Shaggy as nothing more than an entirely lovable animated goon with a goatee.

A restoration of calm looks likely with the intervention of grandma, yet the horror intensifies as she’s caught up in the nostalgia and sticks on a bit of Destiny’s Child, sincerely informing the stricken children that, despite all evidence to the contrary, her “body is too bootylicious” for them. The mood mellows a little as we octogenarians enjoy an R&B tip, mixing in some UK garage (“Bo’ Selecta!”) and a little drum & bass. Finally, all hell breaks loose as my own children arrive to collect their offspring just in time to witness me rounding off the set, launching into a lusty accompaniment to Eminem’s Without Me from The Real Slim Shady Show:

“So, come on and dip, bum on your lips, fuck that, cum on your lips and some on your tits, and get ready cause that shit’s about to get heavy, I just settled all my lawsuits, FUCK YOU DEBBIE!”

Institutional care, if not criminal prosecution, seems inevitable.
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TELEVISION
The late, great Orson Welles once said of television: “I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.” These would prove to be doubly portentous words for the lardy dramatist. Indeed, he could not stop eating peanuts, or anything else for that matter, and his girth ballooned to an astronomical size. His last screen role was as the voice of the living planet “Unicron” in TransFormers: The Movie, Welles being the only actor then living large enough to convincingly portray a celestial body. The film itself was, of course, based on a television show.

The fact that I’ve opened this article with a piece of trivia from a 1980s kids’ cartoon should leave the reader in no doubt as to where I’m coming from. I’m very much a member of the TV generation. For my peers and I, television is not and never was a novelty, or even a luxury, but an everyday staple: a necessity. My own affianced often needles me on this very subject. She’s the kind of buxom, twinkly-eyed wench that’s the result of summer afternoons spent gallivanting through sun-dappled meadows, bedecked in daisy chains and covered in grass stains. One look at my whey-coloured skin, flat ass and potbelly betrays how my childhood was spent; prostrate before endless episodes of Thundercats, Rent-A-Ghost and Help! It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!

Television has changed the way we live our lives, and mostly for the worse. Television has sent the instances of childhood diabetes, obesity and attention deficiency skyrocketing. It’s killed the art of conversation, and made grown-up peoples no can read good. It’s exposed us all to unprecedented levels of violent, degrading and pornographic imagery. It’s allowed the advertising industry a chokehold on our minds and wallets. It’s sustained and deified the likes of Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, Bob Monkhouse, Richard Madeley and Chris Evans. Think of David Dickinson’s orange, gurning, perpetually punchable face and ask yourself if perhaps John Logie Baird knew the horror he was to unleash through his new fangled contraption.

Yet the Dark Lord Television, once a polite, informative servant, now a bloated unsleeping monster, continues unchecked; sweeping the world and growing ever closer to omnipotence thanks to the phenomenon of Technological Convergence. In short, the rise and rise of digital media over analogue (meaning, as I understand it, 1s and 0s, not magical elves, now transmit information) is leading to a blurring of formerly discrete technologies. Now we can send email through our televisions, listen to radio on the computer, look at home movies on our mobile phones, and look forward to a future where we’ll never again enjoy another moment of thoughtful privacy or ring-tone free silence.

So much for the Wired magazine crowd. What of today’s idiot box? It can be summed up in one word: Choice. Consider today’s television magazines. Oh! I’m weeping now as I recall the days when there were but two, just two listings magazines available in this country, and both were slender enough to jimmy a lock with! Nowadays they’re Freemans catalogue-style affairs, containing colour-coded labyrinths of column after column of point 2 text, exhaustively detailing the full schedule for such treats as the Discovery Channel’s “Mummy Week”. But what am I saying? The Discovery Channel is as extinct as their own beloved dinosaurs! Digital television has allowed the all-documentaries all-the-time Discovery Channel to evolve beyond that straight-jacket remit and splinter into several hundred topic-specific Discovery Channels.

The effect is not unlike that of the constant schism and fracturing of Christian Protestantism. Should the faithful stick with the familiar, Orthodox values of Discovery Animal Planet? The severe, Puritanical dogma of Discovery Sci-Trek (surely the Wee Frees of cable TV)? Or be lured away by the charismatic, Baptist flamboyance of Discovery Home & Leisure? All the other major channels have been touched by the hand of Luther: the Disney Channel, the Cartoon Network, the various digital-only offshoots of BSkyB, Channel4, ITV and the BBC all offer dizzying array of sub-channels and alternative options, including the truly bewildering “Plus 1” channels. The idea behind these being if you’ve missed today’s episode of, say, Sabrina the Teenage Witch on Nickelodeon, you needn’t fret as the same shows run sixty minutes later on Nickelodeon Plus 1. Never mind that the episode in question has been repeated two hundred and seventy times already, is available on home video and collector’s edition dvd, and is just about to be screened as “new” on SMTV:Live. The point is you have the choice to look at that awful animatronic cat whenever you want: the option is there.

Those that cannot fill 24 hours of airtime with endless repeats must pad things out another way: wholesale importation of cheap telly from other English-speaking nations. Clearly no lessons have been learnt from this country’s colonial past, when the introduction of alien species to fragile environments led to ecological catastrophe: see how the ravenous, hyperactive Steve Irwin now threatens the majestic, wattled, silver-haired Attenborough with total extinction.

The next big thing will be television that you can tailor to your own wishes. People prepared to pay the several million pounds needed for the system can disregard unwanted programmes, rearrange schedules, even pause and save live broadcasts as required. Imagine! The ability to stop The Eurovision Song Contest dead in its tracks, retire to the vomitorium and then resume safe in the knowledge that not a single iota of Terry Wogan’s odd, rambling brain fart has been lost. Soon every one of us can expect the ability to create and manage our own personal television channel. Having sated oneself with 24 hours of the Sam Kelly oeuvre (Allo!Allo!, On the Up and Barbara together on one channel at last!) the real fun will be found in hopping on to the stations of friends, relatives, but even more so complete strangers. Soon enough, Warholian cult favourites will emerge; I hope to attract a modest following with my own network, dedicated entirely to the dynamic “Danny Kendall versus Mr. Bronson” era of Grange Hill, perhaps interspersed with the odd Chorlton and the Wheelies retrospective, or in-depth critiques of Hugo Myatt’s ground breaking performance as “Treguard” on the much-missed Knightmare.

Pass the peanuts, Orson!