Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker Page B

is a bit like waving your fist at a Lakeland Plastics catalogue.’ And sure enough, while it’s easy to snort at the mechanics behind them, Kym, Noel, Danny, Myleene and Suzanne themselves are proving infuriatingly hard to fully despise. Funny-looking bunch, though. Noel’s head distinctly resembles an obscure computer game character called Dizzy, a cheerful cartoon egg who appeared in a string of budget platform games in the late 80s. And then there’s Danny.
    Picture Danny in your mind’s eye for a moment. Knead some mental plasticine around and ah! there he is! He really is astonishing to behold, isn’t he? Each separate component of his head appears to be engaged in a no-holds-barred fight for your undivided attention. I’d leap to my feet and applaud whether he sang through it or not.
    Just as well, too, since for the duration of Meet the Popstars everything – absolutely everything – is greeted with thunderous clapping. The sight of the band’s mums walking onstage to show off old baby photos triggers deafening applause, while each musical number the band performs provokes mounting hysteria, despite the fact that most of the time they’re belting out covers – ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ (‘Beerrridge Ovah Ter-Ruh-Huh-Bulled Wahahderrr Mmmyeah’), ‘Monday Monday’, and a dreadful version of ‘Boogie Wonderland’ that sounds like a fairground ride dying in its sleep. If Hear’Say came on and kicked a dog to death, they’d receive the most roof-raising ovation since Live Aid.
    There’s also weeping. Tears of pride and joy, dripping from the eyes of proud relatives and acquaintances, prodded on to yap about the flabbergasting loveliness of each band member in turn. The greater the flood of tears, the louder the applause from the crowd. Blub, clap, blub, clap: it’s a new form of hand-operated lawn sprinkler.
    The only participant who doesn’t sob is ‘Nasty’ Nigel Lythgoe, off shooting the British version of Survivor in Borneo. Davina and the band chat to him via satellite and pretend it’s live: chinny reckon.
    Since his dalliance with tabloid fame, Nigel’s lost weight and that grim haircut’s disappeared (it now vaguely resembles an orderly bird’s nest). He looks less like Admiral Ackbar and more like a million dollars: at least until he smiles, at which point he reveals a grin like a second-hand mah-jong set.
    Song lyrics aside, Hear’Say themselves don’t say much. They’re just sort of there. Instead of Meet the Popstars , they should’ve called it ‘Look! Look! LOOK AT THEM! THEY’RE FAMOUS!’ That or ‘Grin Orgy’.

‘They’re like bits of rope, only angrier’     [14 April]
     
    Snakes! They’re like bits of rope, only angrier. Snakes are feared by millions because a) they’ve been demonised by the entertainment industry, which portrays them as emotionless predators, and b) they look weird and awful when they try to swallow eggs.
    Oh, and c) they kill about 100,000 people a year. Snake popularityis currently at an all-time low, and with westerns also out of favour there’s a lack of decent serpentine roles in contemporary cinema.
    No one would have cared about the outcome of Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves if it had starred a pair of grass snakes. You’ll never see a puff adder share the star billing in a kooky Meg Ryan rom-com. I did once glimpse a snake enjoying a romantic clinch on the front of a video, but that was in an Amsterdam shop window which doubled as a kind of pornographic zoological triptych (as far as I could make out – and I didn’t stare for more than a couple of hours – the only animals that didn’t appear anywhere amongst that menagerie of lurid video sleeves were giraffes and coelacanths).
    But I digress. Most people despise snakes but Australian maniac Steve Irwin adores them, and in Deadly Spitting Cobras (ITV) he scours the African countryside on his hands and knees in a bid to prove it, grabbing gigantic cobras by the tail