Wider Watching | Silkworms Ink Gets Drunk And Watches The X Factor.

It looks bad, I know. I was forced to watch the X Factor final last night against my will. Now, I could still argue that by being made to watch it as part of a large group, although I added to the actual number of people watching it, I'll have brought the viewing figures down by the law of averages, so, in the end, I helped to slow its climb. It's a bit like how car-sharing helps the environment.

Nevertheless, I've been told things I had no desire to know, like why that little over-effusive Irishman is famous (Boy bands, it turns out. Makes his bow tie seem even creepier). I'm still a little uncertain as to why Dannii Minogue is famous; but that's okay, because I think she is as well.

Anyway, as the man who stared into Cthulu's gaping maw said, 'It was an eye-opening experience, and I'm glad I lived through it.' 


The format, as it turned out, was fairly simple. An apparently perfectly pleasant human being or group of human beings would come onstage and do a bit of karaoke. Just to ensure that we didn't get bored by, y'know, singing, each act seemed to have been given a million pounds to spend on fireworks, A-list celebrities, violinists and cavorting mime artists. Then the panel of four transparently horrible human beings would applaud these apparently perfectly nice human beings and tell them how nice they were.

Needless to say, this made for a riveting fifteen minutes of television, which was for some reason bulked out by tearful retrospectives, talking heads, some tedious bloke in a dinner jacket endlessly shilling the programme's phone lines, and, finally, an extremely high-looking Robbie Williams and some other middle-aged men. (Presumably this last act was intended as a dire warning to the boy band that was participating, about the ravages of time and why they shouldn't do drugs or try to pursue a solo career.) All in all, it went off with all of the speed, casual modesty and grace of a Royal Coronation, if a Royal Coronation was punctuated by shots of the Queen begging for money and a stadium full of people howling enthusiastic white noise at her.

The contestants, as I've said, seemed perfectly decent. One act was a collection of small children who'd apparently made it through to the final thanks to the confused feelings they elicited in other small children with access to a phone, and enough worldly wisdom to say 'Yes' when asked if they had their parents' permission. For some reason these ordinary young lads - who in their pre-act video gurned and mickeyed about for the camera - had been wardrobe-departmented up as if they were adult super-hunks, and they even sang a slightly dreary version of that Natalie Imbruglia song about adult feelings as if they were world-weary, sex-weary adult super-hunks. I guess they were the opposite of mutton dressed up as lamb. Veal dressed up as beef, if you like, and with much the same implication of their handlers' cruelty towards them.

You can find plenty of groups of fans devoted to photos just like these online. Or, as the police call them, 'rings'.

The second contestant; again, amiable enough. A pudgy-faced Daniel Bedingfield clone who appeared to be wearing a toupee. 'Harmless', you would have said, even if he did fall over a lot dramatically at the end of his songs.

The third contestant I found myself unexpectedly rooting for. Her first song was just...well...'Sweet Dreams'. You know. Android dancers. Weird hair. Cold, emotionless sexuality. 80s stuff. And throughout this song she did the thing we seem to admire in our female pop stars nowadays, which is to be a weird funky unattainable cold android sex robot. (Rihanna. Hi!) 


And then as soon as the song ended, she started doing something else. She smiled, with delighted bewilderment, as if not quite sure what she was doing there, and her body language shifted perceptibly from 'Superstar diva with potential back problems in later life' to 'ordinary person; or, big unco-ordinated lummock like the rest of us, who has absolutely no idea what it is these PR people keep telling her to do with her hands.'

Bugger the singing, this woman has a future in the yearly Derbyshire County Awards for 'Looking Happy, Uncertain of Yourself and Completely Flummoxed'.

'Hurrah!' I cried, cradling my half-empty vodka bottle. 'This woman doesn't have the X Factor! She has the opposite of the X Factor! She's a perfectly good singer who's far too self-effacing, unerotic and un-self-conscious to rub up to 50 Cent in a leather catsuit while warbling a chorus about how big his penis is. Let her win this golden ticket to a year of fame and a long-term future of appearing in a Never Mind The Buzzcocks 'guess the singer' lineup.'

More tedious events ensued. The young children were booted off the show. Simon Cowell said a very bitter thank-you 'to the people who bothered to vote', which seemed to me a fascinating step towards actively chastising those apathetic wastrels who didn't agree to give him money. Then there were some more songs, more retrospectives, advert breaks every ten minutes, more shilling. This went on for some time.

'Christ,' I thought, checking my watch, 'is this how ordinary people feel when I make them sit through the last Lord of the Rings movie?'

Finally, the inevitable happened; Daniel Bedingfield won and was immediately presented with a copy of his album. One of the panel judges thanked the public for 'supporting the show', much as the RSPCA might thank people for supporting them by keeping them in doggy bandages, cat-food, fireworks, vaultfuls of cash and guest appearances by Christina Aguillera. 

You're right; I'm just being silly about the toupee. Plenty of people have real hair that looks just like that. Well, maybe not hair. You know. A hefty splodge of greasy chocolate meringue perched on the top of their heads. 

I left the show confident that if I were to vote for a Christmas number one, I'd probably buy a copy of the latest cover version of John Cage's piece of silence 4'33", which seems to me a far funnier joke than 'Killing in the Name Of'. 


But I was struck by a last final image; as the boy band and some other non-entities ran onstage and began to congratulate Bedingfield with a bouncy enthusiasm which suggested that either they wanted to show how magnanimous they were, or they'd been snorting cocaine in the green room, I caught sight of the third contestant, the single mother. The frenzied contestants had pushed past her to hug the winner and fondle his dubious hair; her head poked through at the back, smiling, not quite sure what to do with herself.

Jon Ware is recovering from post-traumatic stress caused by his X-Factor experiences in a very secure clinic. We're hoping nobody tells him that Susan Boyle is in the same ward.

Quote | Comedy | Ricky Gervais

"We picked on something people identified with - a decent job of work, a relationship and a boss who needs to be loved going through a mid-life crisis."

-Ricky Gervais

It seems fitting that, what with our topic this week being ‘Quote’, that we talk briefly about Ricky Gervais.

My Dad’s generation had Monty Python and Derek & Clive to parrot inanely whenever they found themselves with nothing actually funny to contribute to conversation. The generation before him had The Goons and, um, Winston Churchill whenever they were short of banter.

My generation has Anchorman and The Office.

I won’t complain about this, The Office (before you say anything, of course I mean the British one) is one of the finest things ever filmed. Five hundred years from now, people who want to better understand our society so that they can write theses about the paradigmatic subtext of Simon Armitage’s oeuvre will definitely watch The Office.

There has never been a better, more honest and entertaining representation of the tertiary sector than Gervais and Merchant’s debut project. Every line of dialogue spoken is imbued with that sense of banal claustrophobia that characterises life in any type of office.

As a result of its ‘nail-on-head’ brilliance, people of my generation quote segments from The Office ad nauseum, swapping snippets of naturalist dialogue through mustered smirks as a substitute for witty comments in a way that is… well, imbued with banal claustrophobia. Ironic, innit?

So, with no hesitation, I’ve made the effort over the years to watch, listen to and read everything Gervais has ever done. It has been hit and miss, but the hits have outweighed the misses and the misses have outweighed most comedians’ hits. I was therefore fairly excited about the release of his latest stand-up routine, ‘Science’, on DVD this week.

I suppose Gervais’ entire creative range would place ‘The Office’ on one end of the spectrum and his stand-up routines at the other (the podcasts serving as a fairly tidy bridge between the two). Whilst his TV series strive for, and achieve, a certain level of down-played pathos and his movies aim at a slightly glossier version of the same, his stand-up shows represent an altogether darker, unsympathetic side to Gervais’ comedy.

Structurally, Science is the tightest, cleverest show that Gervais has performed so far. His seemingly erratic and tangential themes are all intermingled and cross-referenced in a way that suggests a real coming of age of Gervais as a comedian – he’s learnt the spinning-plate technique that allows Ross Noble to get away with being so incomprehensible by creating the illusion that it all fits together somehow.

In terms of content, however, I have always seen Gervais’ stand-up as a step backwards. As a writer and director, the guy’s at his best when he’s playing it subtle.

Take Cemetery Junction for example. There are two shots (one at the beginning, one at the end) of the street where the main character lives. At the start of the film, subtly during a tracking shot, you see a young boy hitting at his garden fence with a cricket bat as if to compound the theme of ‘breaking out and getting away’. At the end of the film, you see the same boy hitting at the same fence, even though there is now clearly enough room for him to have climbed through. Just like one of the film’s main characters… the boy could escape but chooses senseless violent rebellion instead. That entire thing takes up no more than 4 seconds screen time.

That’s the Gervais I love… the subtle, nuanced one that wants you to pick out the details of what he has achieved.

In his latest stand-up, Science, the comedy springs from Susan Boyle looking like a “mong”, an obese, mentally disabled woman masturbating in public at a Ken Dodd gig, God choosing to give AIDS to African babies and the fact that (wait for it…) the fact that the story of Noah’s Ark doesn’t make any sense.

I’m not saying that comedians should never handle these things, but I would really rather it wasn’t Gervais that was doing it. Everything about his script-writing style is so antithetical to uproarious laughter, his wit is far more potent in producing awkward winces during pregnant pauses. For him to make the concession from being auteur to crowd-pleaser seems a little sad to me… I’d much rather his stand-up was more at odds with the very genre of live comedy in the way that Stewart Lee manages so convincingly.

But then, that’s what poets do too, right? We write books and magazine submissions that can be silently, appreciatively, thoughtfully frowned at. But put a live audience in front of us and we’re banging out the punch-lines like a crack-fiend clucking for an appreciative half-laugh.

If you enjoy Gervais’ work, you’ll buy ‘Science’. And, to be honest, you’ll enjoy it, the guy’s quite good at doing stand-up. What I really think he needs to do though, is strip away the impressive sets and the desperate provocation and give his live routines the uncomfortable, nuanced, drawn-out awkwardness that makes his television shows so haunting and entertaining.

Phil Brown

Failed Comedian