Television
Modern life is rubbish
Published 07 August 2006
Two satires on Blair's Britain take savage swipes at celebrity culture
Time Trumpet BBC2
Modern Toss Channel 4
It is said that the nostalgia industry is enjoying such a boom that we shall soon be nostalgic about yesterday. With his customary flair, the satirist Armando Iannucci has produced a show that is nostalgic about tomorrow. Set 30 years from now, Time Trumpet (Thursdays, 10pm) takes the format of one of those I Love the Sixties-type shows and looks back with maximum condescension at the year 2007. The good news is that Britain has survived to see 2037, although its new capital is a water-surrounded Leeds. Despite the two million deaths, the voice-over tells us, Britain is booming. The comedian Richard Ayoade, guying one of his own stand-up routines, asks: "What was petrol all about?" So much for the threat of global warming. The bad news is that the first decade of the century is seen, from the standpoint of the future, to have been obsessed with personalities, fashion and freak shows. The worse news is that so is the fourth.
In a metaphor slightly too obvious for the coming implosion of our celebrity culture, one of the top stories of next year was the sad tale of Charlotte Church vomiting her insides out, a medical tragedy that incited a visit to her hospital bedside by David Cameron but did not prevent her from singing with her intestines hanging outside her body. Plastic surgery became so common that the BBC launched a kids' show in which children volunteered for facelifts. Meanwhile, David Beckham's adventures in fashion - and androgyny - reached their apex when he had a vagina sewn in to his upper arm.
But most rotten in the British state in 2007 were its leaders. Blair, we are told, went mad and began to see ghosts when out in public, and judicious clips of his haunted face seem to bear out this theory (there's a thrilling dash of Macbeth and Banquo in this conceit). Cameron is a conman: Iannucci has found a clip in which, in trying to hide his disdain while meeting staff at Asda, he jerks a plastic bracelet past his cuffs so that the word "England" is visible.
In a tremendous sequence that is more political commentary than satire, Blair's and Cameron's speeches are spliced together in order to prove that the two speak, phrase by phrase, the same language (Platitude).
Happily, Iannucci is also very funny. There are all kinds of jokes here, among them the ravages that age will inflict on today's celebrity: Ant and Dec are transformed into old-school club comedians; Jamie Oliver, 30 years on, has lost his hair, gained a gut, and is finished off with a bristly white beard. However, episode two, which I am fortunate enough to have seen, does expose a weakness. The programme assumes an obsessive attention to television on the part of its audience at a time when, with so many channels and so little time, such intimacy is becoming rare. In the programme to be broadcast on 10 August, a pundit admits that he watches TV only when someone takes one out of his pocket at a party. That's the future.
If you want to see what today's kids are laughing at, take a look at Modern Toss (Tuesdays, 11.05pm, Channel 4). It is not television. The provenance of this crudely drawn but brilliantly voiced cartoon is a magazine and website, and its canvas is the streets. Observational social comedy here meets surrealism. A customer complaints rep has to deal with any number of moronic consumers, such as the man who bought a brain-booster drink, came up with a new version of string theory and now has "the international science community" camped in his garden "waiting for a quote". A middle-class family copes with the repeated sabotages of its token working-class friend, Alan (drawn as a mad frenzy of black felt tip). On his scooter, the proleish Drive-By Abuser makes return trips past the objects of his scorn in order to shout fresh insults ("Red, amber, green? Rather a limited range," he says, mocking a set of traffic lights). Modern Toss's subject is working-class aggression, but Time Trumpet makes you feel superior to contemporary culture. You watch Modern Toss, laugh, and feel your IQ dip in sympathy with it.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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