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Full-on integrity – Jackass reviewed

Sunday, January 06, 2002

Attentive readers will be familiar with my enthusiasm for watching people fall over. From Kirsty’s Home Videos to You’ve Been Framed, I’m right there if someone’s going to do a face plant, and so today I bow before the sick wonder that is Jackass.

The film of the MTV show is due here soon, and with a new season on the telly, it’s time for a look at why Johnny Knoxville and the boys are so damn watchable, as they find new ways to hurt themselves and gross us out.

Partly it’s because they are fully aware of the absolute stupidity of what they’re doing. It’s not called Jackass for nothing, and when they’re being knocked over by oranges being rocketed from jai-alai slingshots, you’re reminded of that country song, ‘If you’re going to be dumb, you’ve got to be tough.’

Another part of the appeal is that they clearly enjoy doing this shit. Knoxville himself says that they were doing it before they got the show, so they might as well get paid. The defining moment of most stunts sees at least one of them (usually Steve-O) rolling around in agony, laughing like a drain.

And while the guys share a predilection for hurting themselves in imaginative ways, and a scatological approach to life, they’re also quite different people. Knoxville is the something of the straight man – he rides bulls and gets classfuls of kids to kick him in the nads, but he actually seems the most sane.

Steve-O is clearly stone mad – he’s the one who had his arse cheeks pierced together, and had all his hair (everywhere) removed with waxing. Ryan Dunn and Bam Margera do more of the purely physical stuff, and Chris Pontius adopts some bizarre characters and gets naked whenever he can.

Add in Wee Man, Rab Himself and a few other bit players and you’re presented with an unlikely assortment of delinquency and strangely charming insanity. Yes, it’s all incredibly juvenile, and I really should know better, but when compared with other recent TV successes, Jackass also has some integrity.

There’s a purity to the foolishness feels much better than the bitter immorality of Temptation Island, and the clumsy voyeurism of Ibiza Uncovered and the like. The Jackass boys, as it says in the health warning at the beginning of the show, are professionals, paid for acting the maggot.

They’re not teenagers who volunteer to be pimped by unctuous music industry hags, or desperate wannabes who lock themselves in the Big Brother house. They’re not Jerry Springer guests or Survivor candidates or even materially-obsessed would-be interior desecrators on Changing Rooms.

They’re just big kids doing good-humoured stupid stuff and loving it. More power to them.

Posted by David in • Square EyesUSATelevision

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One Film to Rule them All – LOTR reviewed

Wednesday, December 19, 2001

Most films invite you into a different world for a couple of hours, showing you people and places that you know little about. We expect this world to be convincing, and to have a depth that allows us to suspend our disbelief for a time.

But very few films – whether fantasies or not – have created as coherent and powerful a vision as that shown in The Lord of the Rings.

Unlike the well-made but shallow Harry Potter, this is myth for grown-ups, with a palpable sense of evil, and a sweep and scale that wins out over the problems of bringing such a dense book to the screen.

The opening of the film suggest the purview of the movie, with the first words being, ‘The world is changing,’ and it’s director Peter Jackson’s triumph that he gives a sense of the broad context for the actions of Frodo and the others, while also allowing them to live as individuals.

To create a convincing fantasy world that exists in the moment is challenging enough, but to give us history lessons at the same time as telling us a taut adventure story is a real triumph.

Throughout the three hours the pacing is excellent, and if some events are given little enough screen time (Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler went a long way for not much work), the rhythm seldom sags.

If the world that Tolkien imagined is brought impressively to life, it can also be argued that the film also reflects Tolkien’s inability to draw complex characters. So elves are all ethereal and vaguely Arian, dwarves sturdy and quick-tempered (and Welsh), while the hobbits are good-natured and surprisingly resilient.

But Tolkien and the film are making epic, and the point is that the characters have a nobility and grandeur that has passed from the current world. Nor does this suggest that the good vs evil battle is clumsily drawn.

Saruman’s expediency as he engages in the Middle-Earth versions of genetic engineering and industrialization hints at the dangers of the modern age, while Boromir’s tragedy is that his sense of duty and honour to Gondor overcome his better judgement.

Aragorn’s burden as being a king without a kingdom, and heir to the hero and villain Isildur is particularly well-drawn.

At the council in Rivendell (symbolically during autumn – winter is coming, the elves are leaving, foolish humans are taking over) there’s a sense that the world is doomed, and this air of real menace permeates the film.

The performances also support this complexity of vision. Elijah Wood, with his translucent skin and childlike eyes, captures Frodo’s brave uncertainty, while Ian McKellen’s Gandalf is impressively stern and careworn, and Sean Bean nails Boromir’s Viking spirit.

And they all move in a world that is a joy to behold. If the ring is a supporting character in the drama (it certainly is more in control than the Fellowship), then so is the New Zealand landscape. It looks both very familiar and also slightly alien – the mountains and rivers heightened versions of what we’re used to in this small-scale continent.

There are problems, though. The fight scenes are brutal but chaotic, and it’s hard to work out exactly what’s happening. Viggo Mortensen’s English accent goes astray at times, and his weasel blankness is supposed to hint at Aragorn’s nobility, but sometimes he just looks blank.

But Jackson has created a dense, well-structured and rewarding version of the book, and I’m already looking forward to the next film, and thinking about how cool it would be to be like Legolas, firing two arrows at a time and walk across the top of snow without leaving footprints.

Posted by David in • Square EyesFilm

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Up the War Wall – Sky News’ Afghan war coverage

Wednesday, November 21, 2001

In conducting its attacks on Afghanistan, it can be argued that the Americans have relied too much on flashy technology and not enough on old-fashioned, on the ground intelligence. But they’re not alone – you can level the same charge against the TV channels reporting the war.

It’s a standard American mistake to confuse technological superiority with real superiority, but of course smart bombs are only as smart as the people aiming them. Spending lots of money on kit and then not being able to use it without making a huge mess of things is something that Sky News knows a fair amount about as well.

Sky’s NewsWall, SkyStrator and video stings complete with martial music must make Chris Morris wonder why he bothered at all. Murdoch’s executives obviously watched ‘Brass Eye’ with their notebooks out, muttering ‘Oh, that’s a good idea’.

But behind all this nonsense is a marked lack of joined-up thinking. Some of Sky’s journalists in the field are doing a pretty good job – David Chater, for example – but despite having all the time necessary for some intelligent analysis back in the studio, instead we see the same stories repeated on top of an underlying set of assumptions that are never questioned.

The military analysts they wheel on can discuss the effect of a daisy-cutter bomb, and the designers in the graphics studio can do up a nice graphic of this monster being lumbered out the back of a Hercules on a pallet, but you’ll not see anyone on Sky asking whether it’s a good idea to be dropping such devices in the first place.

The anchors on the shows are so lightweight that it’s no wonder the coverage drifts aimlessly around. While a tape of Osama bin Laden is dismissed as ‘Taliban propaganda’, the clip of a gung-ho George W. that immediately follows is presented as ‘the latest news’, as if it were inherently more reliable.

Like the middle-market tabloids in the UK like The Mail and The Express, Sky News accompanies its selective accounts of events with a limited range of opinions that won’t upset its viewers. Just occasionally a guest will make a more interesting point, and the anchors look aghast before it’s back to Francis for the weather.

Of course it’s my own fault for mistaking quantity for quality. Despite its immediacy, I find it a waste of time watching Sky News, because I only have to check everything they say against a more reliable news source later. Watching what the BBC and Channel 4 can do with a couple of videophones and a commitment to fair-minded broadcasting is a heartening contrast. And when David McWilliams is talking to Noam Chomsky on TV3’s Agenda programme, you begin to see that there is a wider range of opinion about events in Afghanistan than Sky can imagine.

When the BBC’s John Simpson is sifting through the rubbish in an abandonned terrorist training centre, or reporting on the hoof as he follows the Northern Alliance into Kabul, you know he’s asking himself ‘What is really going on here, and why should I believe what I’m told?’. 

Meanwhile, Sky’s James Forlong is on board a US aircraft carrier getting excited over all the cool bits of kit. Chiselled pilot Chuck is telling him, ‘I’m going out on these missions and just doing my job,’. Well at least one of them is.

Posted by David in • Square EyesUKTelevision

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What is says on the tin – Harry Potter reviewed

Monday, November 12, 2001

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ is that rarest of birds – a big-budget adaptation of a successful book that works. And it not only works, it also remains true to the plot, vision and values of the original.

Normally, ‘based on the novel by . . . ‘ means ‘well, it’s got the same title’, or at the very best ‘it was all going fine until we did the test screenings, and then we had to reshoot the ending’.

But here the film does exactly what it says on the tin. Aside from the most minor changes to the plot, we get the full story told in a faithful way, even down to the set design, where everything we’re told about Hogwarts is included (candles floating in the air over the dining hall tables, for example), and augmented by sympathetic details not in the book (like the medieval feel for the quidditch stadium).

And the casting is excellent: Richard Harris, John Hurt, Alan Rickman, Ian Hart (that’s John Lennon in ‘Backbeat’, not left back at Elland Road), Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, John Cleese, Julie Walters, Robbie Coltrane and Zoe Wannamaker. Some of them have no more than a handful of lines, but they add such heft to the film that you can forgive the three child stars when they falter a little.

If there’s heft from the cast, then there’s even more solidity from the story itself, an unlikely collision between a universal myth and an English boarding school jape. The narrative as Harry moves from neglected orphan to chosen one in a fight between good and evil is a classic mythic trope, and any similarities with ‘Star Wars’ are entirely deliberate, as they both draw on the same sources. Where George Lucas added space ships and blasters, Rowling adds dormitories and house points, but it’s a tribute to the film-makers that they left well alone. Voldemort is Darth Vader – the talented master of magic who went over to the Dark Side – but he’s also Lucifer, Sauron and any number of other examples of hubristic evil. And no prizes for seeing Harry as Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins.

My fear with the film version was that this sense of real badness would be toned down, but the movie is appropriately gruesome, and doesn’t pull any punches with some of the more graphic elements in the book. As one little girl remarked after the showing I saw, ‘it’s scary, disgusting but good’.

One result of this fidelity to the book is that the film runs for two and a half hours, but the thing is so carefully plotted and well-played that you scarecely feel the time drag. After the great immediacy of the quidditch match things get a little slow for a while, but in a cinema packed with kids, I didn’t see much restlessness at all.

So if you like the books, you won’t be disappointed in the film. If you’ve never read Harry Potter, the film gives you such a faithful version of the first book that you may as well just jump straight in with this. And don’t believe anyone who tells you that the book’s better, because what you’re seeing _is_ the book.

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Sharp Cards – Late Night Poker reviewed

Monday, November 05, 2001

It’s 1am in the morning. Why would you want to watch complete strangers sitting around a table playing a card game you don’t fully understand? Because ‘Late Night Poker’ is the best game on TV, that’s why.

The premise is brilliantly simple. Stick serious poker players (some gifted amateurs, many hardened professionals) in a studio and record them playing cards. Add engaging expert commentary and the cool feature of being able to see what’s in everyone’s hand (there are cameras under the glass table), and you’re quids in.

Watching it, you’re being given an insight into a shadowy world that would normally be closed to you. The players are a diverse bunch, from Malaysian playboys to Irish builders, from glamorous Austrian women to a guy from Hull called the Devilfish, but they all share a few characteristics.

Firstly, the obligatory poker face. When you know they’ve got nothing in their hand, watch them try and bluff, or even more impressive, watch them feign uncertainty and fear when they’re on a strait. Remember their skills the next time you take your mangled bike to the shop and try a blank, ‘I don’t know what happened. I was just riding along. I’m sure it’s still under warranty.’

Secondly, the players take chances with the air of people who understand more about the world than the rest of us. In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose, and you won’t win anything without luck. In other words, these prodigiously calm risk-takers use their abilities as well as they can, in the full knowledge that it’s not completely down to them what happens. A lesson for us all.

Helping you understand all this is the excellent Jesse May, a commentator with the Technicolor vocabulary of an old Wild West movie. He describes the play as if it’s a bar-room brawl – when the river card is turned over on the table and someone’s just got slammed by a flush, he’s yelling, ‘say goodnight and call me a doctor!’, and after a fine piece of subterfuge sees a player bet big in the mistaken belief that they’ve got the best hand, Jesse reflects, ‘he had him sucked in like a dead dog.’

The play is remarkably dramatic when you consider that it’s just a few chips and some bits of card being passed around. The type of poker they’re playing means that there’s always some uncertainty, and glory or disaster can hinge on the revelation of the last card. 

The immediacy is enhanced by the judicious use of the under-table cameras. We see what one or two players have got, but are left guessing about some of the others. This puts us in the same position as the players, trying to read their opponents, and deciding how far to back their own hand. 

If this all sounds like I know loads about poker, I’m just bluffing, as I’ve never played in my life, and all my knowledge has come from a couple of episodes of the programme. But I’m hooked, and can’t wait for next week to hear Jesse wailing, ‘Here comes the flop, and ohhh, the Devilfish’s two sevens are down in flames, as Anand’s matched his eight with the eight on the table. Two snowmen freeze out the Devilfish!’

Posted by David in • Square EyesUKTelevision

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After the Film

Friday, October 26, 2001

You walk out of the cinema and everything is changed. You entered the big boxy building in the light of an ordinary afternoon. But now it’s dark, and the city feels a little different. You wonder if what you’re seeing is actually there. Everything seems kind of real, but then you’ve just spent two hours believing what you saw, when you knew it wasn’t real.

You look harder, noticing things that you would have missed before in this stylized version of the familiar. The lights are brighter, the shadows more pronounced. You listen to the noise of the traffic, as it washes like waves on the walls of the buildings; you watch the forklifts loading bright boxes of veg as you walk past the wholesalers. Into a square and your eye pans across it, and then the focus pulls back to the office block at the far end. Now you cut to details of the halo round the top of a lampost, and you close in on the faces as people come out of the shining shop. 

You’re not just heading home, you’re walking down a street in a city on a specific evening, with the light just so, and particular cars driving past, individual noises reaching you, and so many different things all happening at once. You’re glad you went to the cinema on your own, because if you’d been talking about the film on the way home, or headed off for some drinks, your customary life would have intervened and you’d have missed all this wonder.

What’s the story? It’s like you’re in the movies. Or maybe the movies are in you.

Posted by David in • Square EyesFilm

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When in Rome – television in Europe

Friday, October 19, 2001

While on a recent journey across Europe, I had the opportunity to watch even more bad television than I normally do – this time, in a range of languages I hardly understand.

Some of it was the same rubbish we get here, just given the exotic patina of being dubbed into Swiss German or the like. Anyone for ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch’ in French, or ‘Walker Texas Ranger’ in German, or my own favourite, ‘Robot Wars’ in Italian. Not a franchised Italian version of the show, mind, just the English programme with frantic Italian commentary: ‘Adesso, Iron Awe da Wolverhampton!’

It was the locally produced output that I was more interested in, and as I sat in my succession of hotel rooms, I was drawn to the sports coverage. I have little French, less Italian, and no German, but I even I could tell that Italian football shows could teach ITV and TV3 a lot about stylish presentation. And I don’t just mean the scantily clad lithe beauties that cavort across the screen as a staple part of seemingly every program in Italy.

The real highlight of the endless football coverage was the use of 3-D computer modelling of fouls and goalmouth incidents. Rather than just show the suspected dive from as many camera angles as they could (which would probably be more than enough for most people), the incident is then mapped in 3-D, and rendered in a full-screen version that can be zoomed, frozen and spun ad infinitem. For the final kicker, the presenter can be placed into the middle of this environment, to lean against a virtual goalpost, or stand next to a computer-generated player that’s as tall as he is.

Of course, this flashy stuff assumes you have rights to broadcast football in the first place. But not having the rights to Champions League matches doesn’t stop RAI offering a three hour footiefest on evenings when there are games. they improvise with the mad solution of having a panel of experts all watching different games on monitors that the audience can’t see. When something happens in one of the games, the expert pipes up, and describes the event. With the host leaping between the two storeys of experts, it looks like nothing so much as a bizarre version of ‘Blankety Blank’. 

Maybe the BBC should consider this, as they have precious little sport left to show. If they can’t run to a panel of experts, they could follow the lead of one of the low-rent cable channels I saw: just have one man at a desk, watching one game, and giving live commentary of what he’s watching. It’s televised radio commentary – aside from a clock and a display of the latest score, it’s 90 minutes of watching the top of a bloke’s head while he watches the TV.

More generally Italian TV looks like it’s still 1975, complete with the Roman equivalent of ‘Seaside Special’, Pan’s People and ‘Live From Her Majesty’s’. The whole country is still entranced by the debatable delights of the variety show – you can’t move for big performance numbers, sequined top hats and three costume changes for the unctuous host. When there’s no football, this is prime-time TV. I’m glad to be back to a diet of ‘Eastenders’ and ‘Corrie’.

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Order and Chaos – the logic of tv dramas

Monday, August 27, 2001

TV drama shows have to move comfortably in two different scales. Firstly, the small circles of the hour, with the plot coming to a reasonably conclusive end after each episode, giving the audience a satisfactory feeling of closure. Secondly, they also have to play the long game, with events building up episode by episode so the major characters develop over time.

This is why medical dramas work so well. You can bring in new characters as patients every week to power the plot for that particular episode. At the same time, the fortunes of the staff fill out the longer-term plot needs. Interlacing the two makes the whole experience much more rewarding.

Cop shows follow a similar logic, with crimes being solved in the space of one episode, but other events in the main characters’ lives stretching over whole seasons.

As we commit to watching every week, we get to feel like we’re growing with the show in the same time frame – what happened several weeks ago to Dr Green happened several weeks ago in our memory.

All this assumes a narrative order – watching one show after another in succession. So what happens when this order breaks down?

In Ireland this occurs when different stations show the same programmes. In any week you can watch the X-Files or The West Wing three times, with Sky One being quickest out of the blocks, then RTE and then one of the British terrestrial channels.

In practical terms, this is great if you happen to miss an episode, but the question is whether you start watching on one channel and stick to it, so as not to interrupt the flow, or whether you get your promiscuous kicks anywhere you can. 

The problem with this is that one channel might be leading up to a big climax, while another is way past it and into the (less suspenseful) aftermath.

In America the problem is exacerbated by the fact that popular shows are on daily, or even more frequently. Don’t ask how I know, but in New York you can watch Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman once in the afternoon, and then again at 2.30 in the morning (and some days in the early evening as well, I think).

So without trying too hard you can see Dr Mike single, happily pregnant and living with Sully, and then unhappily separated from him – all in the same day.

On the one hand, this mightn’t matter too much, as each episode has its own internal flow, and looked at one way, it’s a suitably postmodern way to watch tv. Questing for a narrative order and logical progression is considered so 19th century in critical circles.

To misquote Truffaut, watched in this way a tv series has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Personally, I have a compromise option: I try and watch new episodes in order, and use the range of stations to make sure I don’t miss one. This means I have some linear sense of the big picture, and don’t get any nasty surprises.

Once I have that shape sorted out, I’ll watch as many reruns as I can stumble across (unless it’s an episode I really didn’t like the first time round). This way, watching the old ones is like looking through a photo album, remembering how things used to be and contrasting that with the sense of the ‘present’ I get from the new ones. ‘My, how Scully’s clothes have improved since the early episodes.’

We all like to think that our lives make some narrative sense, that there is some reason to things, some sense of cause and effect. Watching shows in order plays to that view of the world. Arguably, of course, people’s lives don’t make any sense seen in any way, they just happen – like drama episodes watched out of order.

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Conoisseur of Crap – what’s good about bad television?

Monday, July 23, 2001

Why do I like watching people falling over on television? Probably for the same reason I like to see clips of 1970s soup commercials featuring minor celebrities when they were ten years old.

Bad TV can be really good, and I stand by my commitment to ‘You’ve Been Framed’ and ‘Before They Were Famous’ despite all criticism about the intellectual bankruptcy and all-round crapness.

First, with ‘You’ve Been Framed’ – what’s not to like? A stupid adult gets on a rope swing across a river, and even though you know exactly what’s going to happen next, it’s still great to behold when the branch snaps and the bloke gets dumped into the mud.

Or two goats arrange a cunning trap where one crouches down behind a kid and the second gives her a nudge from the front, sending the hapless four year-old falling backwards over the goat obstacle. Priceless.

Slapstick comedy is considered to be very low-brow (unless it’s Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, when you’re allowed to say it’s genius), but I’d argue that while it might not be very subtle, these pratfalls are just flat-out funny.

Normally people stay upright, stay in their rowing boats, ride their bikes OK and open patio doors before they walk through them. But on the other hand, the universe tends towards chaos, so if you have enough people standing beside a swimming pool (especially with a video camera to hand), then sooner or later someone will fall in.

And when they do, it’s funny. So long as nobody gets hurt then this stuff is a gentle reminder of our hubris in thinking that we’re in control around here. Being dumped in the mud is a forceful suggestion that you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously.

A similar reminder is watching Jeremy Irons dancing around like a fool with Brian Cant on ‘Playaway’.’Before They Were Famous’ is the celebrity version of your mum showing your baby photos to your new girlfriend. You have to sit there squirming while she sees your toddler self naked on the sheepskin rug (or maybe I’m sharing too much here).

One baby looks pretty much like another, and it doesn’t really tell you anything about the person now, but it’s entertaining for her to see you in a former life, and reflect on how far you’ve come.

And it’s exactly the same when we see Martin Clunes in some 1980s horrorshow outfit trying to act tough in ‘Doctor Who’, or Grant Mitchell from ‘Eastenders’ singing ‘They’re tasty, tasty, very very tasty – they’re very tasty,’ in a Kellogs ad.

Seeing these clips (and ones of a shiny young Tony Blair trying to smile when he’s just lost his deposit in his first run for parliament) reminds us not to lionize these folks, and maybe tells us something about the fleeting nature of fame. And it makes you laugh.

So don’t feel guilty if you find yourself watching ‘You’ve Been Framed’. Even when someone ends up with a portaloo tipped over them, it’s all good clean fun – you’re just becoming a connoisseur of crap.

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Who should win Big Brother 2?

Wednesday, July 11, 2001

OK, we’re down to six people in ‘Big Brother’, and there can be no doubt who the winner should be; so here’s the order in which I would off them,

In an ideal world, Paul would be the first on my list, but he’s dodged nomination this because his fellow inmates have given up trying to get the public to vote his sorry Teflon-coated ass out of the house. His continued survival is nothing short of astonishing. I’ve heard suggestions of rigged telephone voting and that wouldn’t surprise me since it’s the only waythis self-important, arrogant ignorant homunculus could have beaten Bubble a couple of weeks ago.

Paul’s boast to Amma that he ran the household shows the depths of his foolishness, and his conspiracy theory involving Josh being straight is plain bizarre. Becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the house can’t be much fun, but he’s brought it on himself. Run him out of town on a rail the first chance you get, but meanwhile send Josh packing.

Josh is funnier and more empathetic than Paul, but he hasn’t contributed a great deal and would be no loss to the group (although he does use a skipping rope in a much more polished fashion than Elizabeth, who skips like she’s eight). He appears to be reasonably controlled and secure, but his sudden gatecrashing of Brian’s head shaving pointed to a need to grab some attention.

On which point, we come to Helen. At first I hated her whining childishness, but I’ve come to be more entertained by her antics, and the nocturnal hand-holding with Paul was great drama. She’s got a heart of gold, but she’s as stupid as a box of rocks – Monday night’s diary room discourse on whether or not time was passing quickly in the house was bewildering in the extreme.  She’s got some sparkle, but not enough to deserve to win, so she’s next after Paul.

That leaves a final three of Brian, Elizabeth and Dean. The next to pack their Samsonite is Brian.  Yes I know he’s Irish and he’s funny and he’s been a real help to some people in the house, but he’s also bitchy and juvenile and shallow. Sometimes he’s all of these things at once, blowing up when Bubble asked him to remove the letters from above his bed.

His best has been pretty good, though – his fake rows with Bubble were much better than his real one, and his jaw-dropping exchange with Helen and Paul this week was priceless.
Brian to Helen: “I think you and Paul would be good together.”
Helen (taking the bait, of course): “Why?”.
Brian: “Because you’re a dirty bitch and I’d say Paul would like that.”

But with Brian, it’s all about Brian.

Whereas for Elizabeth, it’s hardly ever about herself. The Mother Teresa of the household, she’s always looking after the practical stuff, offering sage advice to the kids and not letting this cat herding get to her.

When she had her birthday party I was amazed to discover that she’s only 27.  She and Dean have ended up in the position of parents in this wildly dysfunctional family, and Elizabeth’s outburst to Dean last week was a frustrated mother moaning to her husband over a gin and tonic when the kids have finally gone to bed.

But there can be only one winner, so Elizabeth goes next leaving our hero, Dean. He’s clever, funny, calm and is the undisputed leader of the house, because he doesn’t want to be. He’s kept his head, got on with everyone and managed to preserve some integrity and sense of proportion under the most bizarre circumstances.

When he slagged Brian for not knowing when the first moon landing was, he raised the level of debate in the show at a stroke: “I know when it was not because I was around then, but because it was a massively important event.” For this and other signs of having a few brain cells and the will to use them wisely he wins my vote (and he can also build a record-breaking tower of sugar cubes).

So that’s it then: Dean should be the winner of ‘Big Brother’ (not that I’ve been watching it all that much, you understand).

Posted by David in • Square EyesUKTelevision

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