The Hell of It All Read Online Free PDF Page B

Just to liven things up.
    The Cheesiest Git award goes to Ziggy, the lipless human shrug.Obsessed with preserving his nice-guy image, he spent decades tirelessly explaining what a reasonable and tolerant human being he was, accompanying each monologue with a series of open-palmed, eyebrow-raising ‘honesty’ tics that made him look absolutely mental on fast forward. As a result of these incessant hey-I’m-one-of-the-good-guys routines, Ziggy wrinkled his forehead so often it developed an alarmingly deep set of lines, like isobars on a weather map drawn in charcoal. In fact by the end of the series, his forehead was so weird and furrowed I kept mistaking him for one of those rubbish aliens that used to turn up on shows like Deep Space Nine , indistinguishable from a human apart from some kind of zany prosthetic brow.
    As narcissistic as Ziggy appeared, he wasn’t a patch on the Most Psychotically Self-Obsessed Housemate In History – Charley. Or Hurricane Charley, to use her full name. Apparently suffering from some kind of OCD compulsion to repetitively flick her hair and pout at the nearest mirror, Charley wasn’t content to be the centre of her own universe, and tried to impinge on everyone else’s. The mildest perceived slight would cause her to launch into a feverishly gabbled diatribe, often so absurdly one-sided and abusive it scarcely made sense. Arguing seemed to give her purpose in life; locked alone in a shed for six days, Charley would pick fights with her own thumb for entertainment.
    The Best Lookalike Award is always a hotly contested category, and this year was provided a bumper crop. Almost everybody looked like somebody famous. We’ll overlook some of the glaring doppelgängers (Ziggy = Christian Bale, Chanelle = Posh Spice), and subtler similarities (Charley = Charlie Williams, David = Ray Liotta), and present the award to Jonty, for his startling quasi-resemblance to Mark Lawson – not the closest lookalike ever, but close enough to make it vaguely possible that some day soon Lawson will be walking down the street only to find himself suddenly surrounded by squealing teenage Big Brother fans jumping up and down and taking his photo, while a van driver zooms past parping his horn and bellowing ‘Jontyyyyyy you fuckahhhh!’ out the window and then we zoom in on Lawson’s face and he’s absolutely fuming andIT’S FUNNY TO THINK ABOUT THAT. Which is why Jonty wins.
    Finally, the Let Brian Win award goes to Brian, on the grounds that Brian should win. He’s possibly the most thoroughly good-natured housemate in the programme’s history, and deserves the prize money simply for being so nice. At the time of writing, the creepy twins are his closest competition, but they’d only waste the cash on nonsense. So will Brian, of course, but at least he’ll guffaw like a baritone cartoon bear as he does so. BRI 2 WIN!!!!!!
     
    – Brian did, indeed, win .
‘What you see is what happened …’ [1 September 2007]
    If the ratings are to be believed, almost everyone in the country has been watching The X Factor . Last week, 500 million people tuned in: a whopping 654% audience share. It almost won its slot, but was narrowly pipped to the post by a repeat showing of Rockliffe’s Babies on UKTV Gold 2 +1 (a brilliant episode, to be fair – it was the one where they caught a man doing a thing and then some stuff happened and then it was the end).
    We’re clearly still not sick of Cowell and co just yet. In fact it seems we’re content to watch what is essentially the same series year in, year out; the broadcast equivalent of a recurring dream. Rather than forming an angry mob and storming the ITV building armed with cudgels and staves, we sit and dribble and clap our hands, gurgling ‘again! again!’ like toddlers enjoying the repetition on Teletubbies . Well, I do anyway.
    These bumper ratings have come in the middle of an interesting time for TV, as the industry suffers a collective nervous