Free Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker

half an hour of relentless shouting, you’ve just about had enough: it’s all too one-note, like being cornered on a stairwell by an entertaining madman while a Styrofoam cup of coffee burns the palm of your hand.
    But invention and ability aren’t the problem: time and money are. Sketch shows are phenomenally expensive, which is one reason why running gags using a single character and location feature so heavily: you can shoot loads of them at once, thereby freeing up time and money to lavish on your one-off set pieces.
    Attention, Scum seems to have a budget capable of sustaining a small collection of lo-fi running gags and little else: as a result there’s too much enforced repetition – leaving each half-hour edition feeling more like three 10-minute broadcasts crammed together.
    It doubtless cost twenty times as much as Munnery’s previous digital shows – FuturTV and Either/Or , both created for music and comedy channel PlayUK for about 16 pence. The cheaper the show, the harder everyone connected with it has to work: Munnery must be knackered. Someone give him the money to do it properly before the poor bugger keels over.
    In other news, Popstars (ITV) continues to amuse and appal, despite last week’s edition being practically identical to the first. From here on in it starts to get nasty. And there’s also the prospect of the finished band being named by a public vote – the Australians went for the dull-sounding Bardot when the series ran down-under, so we owe it to ourselves to pick a more suitable, memorable moniker.

    Your suggestions will be gratefully received – e-mail them in, and I’ll announce the finest. To get you started, my initial suggestions are as follows: 1) Synchronised Yelping Head Multiplex, 2) Songy-Wongy, 3) Funtrocity, 4) Sweatshop Jailbait, and 5) Misery Distraction Patrol. But you can do better. Get scribbling.

Spiritual Liposuction     [27 January]
     
    Kids today, eh? They’ve had all the innocence sucked out of them, like they’ve undergone some kind of spiritual liposuction operation. You know it’s true. You’ve heard them at the back of the bus, swapping Fight Club stories and the kind of filthy anecdotes that could get you thrown off an oil rig. You’ve seen them knocking each other insensible in the playgrounds, gleefully twirling nunchakas, biting and kicking like uniformed participants in a special dwarves edition of ‘Tekken’. They’re scary.
    As a 10-year-old, the mere mention of the word ‘fart’ was enough to make me giggle until milk came out of my nose, even when I wasn’t drinking any; a modern 10-year-old wouldn’t laugh unless they were carving it into a pensioner’s forehead with the lid of an old tin can. I was once so frightened by a midnight showing of King Kong on BBC2, I spent a largely sleepless night with my head tucked under the duvet, half-expecting to be attacked by an animated gorilla. These days the average primary-school child can sit through thirteen consecutive hours of 3D bestial porn on a WAP-enabled Internet bong without so much as blinking.
    Blame television. Go on. Never before have kids been presented with such an endless stream of glamorous images they don’t have a hope of living up to. When you realise, age nine, that you’re far too ugly and normal to be in S Club 7, you figure you might as well spend the rest of your life flicking snot at the walls, shouting ‘Bollocks to everything’ every six seconds. And who can blame you?
    Here is hope.
Grange Hill
(BBC1) is still going. And it’s just as good as it used to be. Better, in fact. Of course, it’s changed a bit. Don’t worry, they haven’t replaced the famous ‘hurled-sausage-on-a-fork’ from the opening titles with a severed penis impaled on asyringe, although the iconic ‘comic strip’ sequence and twangy signature tune are long gone – replaced by a nondescript visual collage and a theme tune which, unless I’m mistaken, is a weedy plinky-plonk