Give Me That Powerpoint Presentation, Bitch

At the news that Endemol were planning a show where a terminally ill woman decides which recipient she’d like to donate her kidney to, I was shocked but unsurprised. It may have been a hoax but it wasn’t unthinkable. Reality TV’s come a long way since the early pantomines. I still remember the first Big Brother, seven years ago. How different things were then: just consider the innocence of a national audience who were enthusiastically prepared to watch an eleven week show where the runner-up spent much of his stay in the house fondly tending to a chicken.

That just doesn’t cut it today. Reality TV now is faster, nastier. I write this as eleven women in a converted house filled with strip lights and hidden cameras are currently brewing an oestrogen timebomb to levels that would fail a Hans Blix inspection. We’re no longer content with the bright lights and bubbly furniture. We want grit, hell and pissing rain. We want scrumpled fivers and Mayfair traders. We want limos splashing the tears of a crying contestant into the gutter. Dragon’s Den, The F-Word, Kitchen Nightmares – today’s shows are played for high stakes with the kid gloves off. Out with the cute sets, in with a cold fist of realism slamming you in the stomach like a Monday Morning you didn’t want to wake up to.

Yes, ‘nasty’ reality shows are cleaning up right now. Shows depicting people working all hours of the day for shitty bosses, going demented with stress and dreaming about money have proved enormously successful with a population, strangely enough, that spends its life working all hours of the day for shitty bosses, going demented with stress and dreaming about money. Ah, us Brits and our Protestant work ethic. Blame it on that drizzle that hammers like a headache on the windows of our offices… Because right now the most popular of these reality shows is – of course – The Apprentice, where a bunch of marketing consultants all but mud-wrestle one another in the nude for the chance to stack the toilet paper at Amstrad.

The Apprentice is all about money. You want money? Then you’ve got to do anything. Screw over your co-workers. Blame them in the boardroom. Come on, man, friendship is for pussies. This isn't friendly competition – this is a full-blown gladatior arena, and if Sugar suddenly ordered them to strip naked and ride around on enraged bulls hurling bloodstained scythes at one another they would. Or was that last week’s task? No wonder it gets high ratings. It certainly ticks all the boxes. Satisfies a widespread desire for personal wealth at any cost? Check. Contains semi-pornographic glimpses of obscene wealth for frustrated middle-managers to masturbate to? Check. Packed with macho, swaggering business-speak? Check. That’s why it’s got the loyal attention of a nation of undergraduates doing ‘Marketing’ or ‘Business Studies’ or any of the other subjects shorn of all traces of humanity to train a compliant workforce of cell-centre operatives to spend the next fifty eight years of their lives selling holiday insurance through an earpiece.

And how satisfying it is! All that ritual humiliation… Personally I love the way the odds are always stacked absurdly against the participants in each task, like selling icecream within the sub-zero penguin tank at London Zoo, or being given a pocket full of 50p trinkets and being forced to hassle the entire executive board of Goldman and Sachs to buy them. And just watch the way the slightest sidecrack from Sugar is met with a round of sycophantic laughter from the contestants, who obviously have their tongues so far up his arsehole that they could regurgitate his digestive tract. Go on, watch it. It’s hilarious.

But is there something problematic about all this deliberate nastiness? Sugar’s barking, Ramsey’s abuse, even Simon Cowell’s pantomine put-downs – great TV, but I’m not sure what it says about the people who want to watch it. All of these shows are based on some kind of dizzying hierarchy distance between slavish contestant and whip-cracking boss, a hierarchy the shows enthusiastically glamorises. See that fleet of cars? See that country house? All that could have been yours too… Now get back to licking that floor clean, you fucking loser.

Screaming abuse at stressed-out employees while a camera’s shoved in their face – now that’s cool, isn't it? Look at Gordon, look at him go. He nearly made that girl cry! How entertaining. Oh, who’s he starting on now? It’s that tired looking one, that mother of two. What did she do? Grated too much parmesan on the Cattucini?? Five seconds late with the Fettucini cutlets? You stick it to her, Gordon! How enjoyable to watch a rich middle-aged man reduce a failing employee to tears!

And all this in an age where school bullying achieves national headlines. Hmm. What was that one about the woman donating her liver again?

Why Did Colin Murray Destroy My Fucking Radio?

This might do major structural damage to my credibility, but I’ll admit it – I used to listen to Radio One. Yeah, I did. It was good for a while. From a channel that previously served up Culture like a prescription for cough medicine, you were getting a genuine slice of the underground. This couldn’t last, could it?

It could not.

Realising that actually playing good music was diverting the nation’s young away from their future punching data into computer screens for multinational corporations for the next fifty years, the blokes at the beeb quickly changed the act. The black and Asian shows were all moved to five minutes a week at 3:39 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and Satan was given a probationary contract to Destroy Music.

He chose Colin Murray to do it for him.

Murraynacht happened about eight months ago, as I recall. One morning the listener awoke to find out that all the other DJs and producers who used to fill the evening schedule had suddenly disappeared, never to be mentioned again. Any who brought the issue up were led down to the cellars of the British Broadcasting Corporation to have their brains smeared over a rusting pipe, while balding, sweating BBC Commissioners looked on through a glass wall, their glasses slowly steaming with excitement.

And so it was that Colin Murray began to spew a stream of twittering shite through the loudspeakers of the land.

Since then all leftfield indie, underground hip hop or Asian desi have been cancelled and replaced by Colin Murray – who’s on for eight or nine hours a day, from six in the evening to about three in the morning, playing the occasional bit of music but mostly just chatting, with his friend, about, well… stuff. His girlfriend’s toe operation. The time he tried to move some book-cases, but got stuck halfway through and had to wait till the removal men came round. The funny film he saw last Tuesday. Oh, it was so funny! What a funny film it was… Did you see it?

And all this in a mild, bubbly Belfast accent that could have Beatrix Potter hacking the heads off blind children from sheer rage. Because Murray’s a nice guy. Murray’s ridiculously nice. Murray’s so nice that heat-seeking missiles would stop mid-flight, turn back around and belly flop happily into the sea rather than blow him up. So fucking sickeningly nice you want to take a desklamp and ram it through his head, then twist the glass down into the gaping empty hole of his brain until a twenty foot high geyser of blood spatters the radio mixing console and his screams of pain haunt your conscience for eternity. That nice.

You remember when you were a kid and you wondered what would happen if you mixed all the colours together, and you tried it, and you ended up with a crappy muddy brown? That’s what Murray is – an insipid mix of regions, tastes, agegroups and demographics, offensive to no one, repugnant to any single person in possession of a working soul.

Personally I’m convinced it’s the product of a new sinister Blairite initiative to stop all subversive thought by drowning it out in a tidal wave of pitter-patter. Soon, no doubt, windowless cells in Guantanamo will be filled with the sound of Murray being played at three hundred decibels while prisoners scream for mercy at the thought of spending the next five years of their life hearing about his trip to Tesco’s followed by another one from the Foo Fighters. What better for the War on Terror than the kind of anodyne shite that could rot the brains of a chess champion at thirty paces? This level of stupidity is practically a military asset.

I have no doubt that in years to come, gigantic telescreens erected in every public space throughout Britain will feature Colin’s eternally Nice face waffling on in a Nice voice about which kind of chocolate he likes while lines of gawping, lobotomised shoppers drop to the ground with heads bowed in fevered awe. When we finally invade Iran he'll be there with the latest Snow Patrol track to take our minds off all those upsetting civilian casualties. There, there, your government is protecting you. Shh...