I did rather enjoy Charlie Brooker’s version of the future where people live in cells surrounded by four walls of super wall screen TV then get up to spend the day on a treadmill – literally – a cycling machine at a global gym where you gain points for every kilometre notched up and, just like today’s gym, with a personal TV screen in front of you to keep you going. The screens in the cell and in the gym show much the same stuff every day, interactive war games, banal game shows, soft porn, and, the highlight of the day, ‘Hotshot’ where contestants perform in front of three judges and an audience of avatars based on real people in their cells. (No prizes for guessing what that is based on!) In order to enter Hot Shot, the points earned from watching the silver screen all day and for distance cycled could be exchanged for a golden ticket – valued at 15 million points. Penalty points are incurred for not watching the screen particularly the porn bits and even for putting your hands over your eyes.
The programme was aired on a commercial channel and, as ever, I turn on the mute for the adverts but still find myself distracted by the flickering screen. Even with dextrous use of the mute button, I am still familiar with the current slogans such as ‘you’re worth it’, and am fully nauseated now by the excessively repeated creation of ‘black forest gateaux’ (it is Christmas after all). There is loud banging music and sounds for some ads and ‘funny’ regional accents on others, ‘gud with fud’. One channel advertises all night poker sessions as ‘WIN/WIN!!’ CSI promotion is getting ever more ridiculous and the money question this week is ‘which building is in the US: Empire State, Blackpool Tower, or Buck Palace?’ There are perfect families (just for Xmas), comedy ads, opera and fatmen, mellow deep throat BBC voices, computer game noises, jerky images, manic Xmas lights and Xmas music, lurid colours, happy voice overs and if that is not enough, constant promotion of programmes yet to be aired as if we did not have channel listings on screen, in the papers and on the computer. One such is for a programme about excessive compulsive disorder. Look who’s talking, methinks.
Back to Black Mirror where more semi familiar sights of twenty first century living are portrayed but where everything is accessed by a flick of the hand and a deduction of points: – the automated drinks machine that needs a judicious poke in the right place to work, toothpaste, water in the wet room, even a screen above the urinals – the latter has just arrived for real.
As the plot develops and the protagonist enters ‘Hot Shot’ with the intention of making a protest, it hammers on home the very current message that even sincerity and ‘authenticity’ can be marketed, just another commodity.
I turn to my other flickering screen, the home computer, where yahoo is offering information on ‘how to pull off wearing white’ and the latest news is about plans to use rubber bullets (‘kinetic impact munitions’, ‘energy activational system’) and water cannon against any future rioters. Indeed, the next article I read says that real bullets are now considered to be a necessity as, according to one MP, ‘the balance of risk has changed’. There has been a survey (one of those ‘consultations’ I daresay) where the majority of people have expressed that they are in favour of real rounds being fired. As for tent demonstrations, ‘more flexible and dynamic ways’ of dealing with them and a new law is being considered by our glorious Home Sec, Theresa May.
Yahoo public comments on these topics (I assume these comments are put up by real people but who knows….) range from ‘use petrol’, ‘use dye’, ‘then shoot ‘em’, to the rather outnumbered mild remonstrations like: ‘slippery slope’, ‘compare the Arab Spring’.
I don’t bother adding any comments myself (already wondering who is watching….who is reading…..) but I am feeling like I am slipping into a parallel universe through the ‘Black Mirror’. I don’t remember voting for any of this. Maybe Theresa May is just an avatar in ‘Call of Duty’ and I can get a few points for blasting her and all who agree with this stuff off the planet. Maybe use an energy activated missile from my cartoon armoury.
Be very scared? Yep, I’m scared.
