The Droogs of Society

Every dog has its day and this week it was the turn of the TV bottom feeders to bark. Bolstered by morbid curiosity and a peculiarly bereft schedule, I’ve recently been trying to score in some of the less salubrious corners of digi-land and this is what i turned up.

Excess all areas: Rock Stars was a remarkable Sky Three docu-druggy-drama that retold the final highs and lows of rock stars Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix with a unique mix of reconstruction, personal testimony and computer animation.

Interviews with close friends were cut with reconstructions of the errant rock stars eating out of bins, smashing up hotel rooms and generally making a nuisance of themselves before injecting, snorting or dropping their way into oblivion. At this point the graphics took over as the image dissolved into a representation of the stars insides, replete with heroin molecules attaching themselves to receptors inside their glowing exo-skeletans.

Terry Christian narrated in a cynical attempt to inject some cult cool into the travesty with the result that both Christian and the programme dropped a few notches more in my esteem. Towards the end I couldn’t even laugh at how shite it was, and had to turn off the TV before they showed Sid Vicious stabbing Nancy Spungen and telling people to fuck off a lot (although this might have been cool in retrospect.)

Over on More4, I’ve spent the last few weeks dipping into Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip to see whether it was something I could dig. As far as I can see this is little more than a shit programme about an even shiter programme.

Based around the lives and loves of a bunch of smart arse American media types as they quip their way through the production of what looks like one of the most boring programmes ever fictionally created, Studio (I’m doing that irritating thing people do when they try to make something sound better than it is by shortening the title) suffers a lot from its association with political cheeser The West Wing. Much of the programme is given over to proving that the actors can walk, talk and crack jokes at the same time, as well as demonstrating the quirkier sides of the characters’ personalities (which it becomes quickly clear is incidentally the only side of the characters’ personalities.)

I think there was a plot in there somewhere, and definitely something about snakes, but other than that the hour or so I spent watching this mush has pretty much been erased from my memory, heroes style, and that’s probably for the best.

As such Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip does provide something of a therapeutic function. In much the same way as high-powered executives like to submit to a dominatrix, watching this programme allows your brain to take a holiday from worrying about all your personality defects and making decisions such as whether to buy one of those new i-pods after all.

The rest of the week News 24 and BBC Parliament was pretty much the default option, as at least with it something exciting could happen. Sundays on the latter are taken over by C-Span, the American political channel and in my view, lengthy footage of the Senate’s ratification of the presidents Attorney General nominee trumps the Hollyoaks omnibus any day.