Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe (2013) s02e02 Episode Script
Episode 2
1 This programme contains strong language.
Hello I'm Charlie Brooker and you're watching Weekly Wipe, a programme all about things that are happening.
Things like this.
Former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon finally left the coma he'd been controversially occupying since 2006.
There's been outrage in France a Frenchmen's been accused of having an affair.
He's also rumoured to enjoy soft cheese and shrugging.
Sky News reveals ?250,000 has been spent on weirdly looking portraits.
Hanging is too good for them.
But we start with television.
I don't know if you have seen it, but Channel 4 has launched a British remake of The Wire.
Benefits Street is a fly on the wall documentary.
It's brought to you by the letters DSS.
Benefits Street is a fly-on-the-wall documentary series, it's a bit like Sesame Street but brought to you by the letters DWP.
It follows some of the residents on an apparently notorious Birmingham street, where, we're told, most of the residents are on benefits.
As well as impoverished single mums, it also depicts petty criminals on the rob.
On the one hand it's a gritty slice-of-life expose, but it's also packaged with a knowing nod and wink.
And it's so full of larger than life characters, it almost feels like a sitcom.
A bit like Friends, with benefits.
Usually when people on the breadline are exploited for entertainment it's done unsubtly on grubby bellowing chambers like the Jeremy Kyle Show.
Whereas Benefits Street is presented more like a safari park tour through poor people's natural environments.
It's even packaged a bit like a nature show, complete with sweeping shots of the landscape so you could see what benefits look like from a balloon.
There's also footage of the loveable offspring gambolling in the wild, sequences in which predators scavenge for scraps, and the violent majesty of Darwinian survival.
Some have complained the programme depicts lazy neer-do-wells living the high life sponging off the state, and to be fair the level of luxury they're enjoying is outrageous.
I mean, just look most of them have got shoes.
The sense of entitlement is amazing, they use oxygen without even paying for it,they just inhale and convert into carbon dioxide, selfishly leaving less for the tax payer.
They've even got sticks and bits of old fan.
I haven't got sticks and bits of old fan; why should they? And they're so lazy, they sit around on their arses, contributing nothing of value to society, boozing themselves stupid and stuffing their faces with cheap junk food.
Wouldn't catch me doing that.
Oh, I'm nearly out of artisan crisps.
Society likes to let off steam by having a set of sanctioned hate figures it's OK to openly deride, a list that changes with the times, and currently, benefits claimants are on it.
Under this blackboard with sanctioned hate fires, Channel 4 says Benefits Street is about community spirit in adverse circumstances, but the problem is it's not called 'Community Spirit in Adverse Circumstances', it's called Benefits Street, a button-pushing title attached to a programme with more buttons than a shirt factory.
They might as well have called it The Great British Skive-Off or Layabout Way.
To wear my earnest hat for a moment I actually thought Benefit Street was broadly sympathetic to it's participants, although being a TV show it also inevitably boiled their lives down to eye-catching 'highlights' and outrageous soundbytes.
But thanks to that title, and the ingrained assumptions of some viewers, on both sides of the political divide, it also caused and the sort of noisy publicity-stoking press reaction that must've had Channel 4 in dismay.
The debate came alive on a feisty edition of Newsnight as a man from Channel 4 had to defend himself against accusations of being a poverty porn baron.
Are you comfortable with being a porn baron? I'm deeply uncomfortable with that statement.
That's true, Benefits Street isn't porn.
I mean what's pornographic about seeing six sweaty men crammed into one filthy hole.
There's not even any money shots.
Well they haven't got any money.
The ideological lines were drawn: representing the unimpressed left, pious newborn Owen Jones, who said Benefit Street was a damaging distortion of society's most vulnerable.
Isn't that patronising? Of course it's not.
You miss a turn.
No sorry that's far too patronising.
Owen you lose ten points and miss a turn.
Amongst the unsympathetic reactees, opinion-pissing human clickbait Katie 'Thatcher' Hopkins popped up on This Week to hector the work shy.
I don't care if it's raining, get out of bed and get a job.
Fair enough, I'll have yours.
What the lock is it again? The show's producers, aware of how much crap Hopkins spouts, cannily positioned her in a toilet so she could at least mop up after herself.
Or any street.
Don't sponge edge off the system, if you can get a job, get one, even if it's one you don't want to do.
We do.
Quite right, they're scared of doing the kind of tough minimum wage job you're pretending to do here.
Hardnut Hopkins disapproves of ignorant scumbags living off money and handouts siphoned from hardworking folk, which is why she refused to accept her BBC appearance fee, possibly.
And she used it as a springboard to call for further cuts.
There was a fascinating insight into people who have next to nothing so you could you couldn't think anything about them.
They were different benefits that they weren't entitled to because they were poor.
Unemployed.
Normally when you see poor people, it's hard to judge them because you feel empoo dhi and think, I hope humankind does something to help them.
This was clever because it stopped you feeling like that.
I felt sort of pity for the people in it.
But when I went on Twitter, everyone was angry with them, so I thought, oh, I've got it wrong.
Better join in with that.
So then I wrote these Tweet things about how they were scum and I hoped the Government shoots them and stands over their bodies pumping bullet after bullet into their benefit scummy bodies and I got 20 new followers for that so it was a good programme, yes.
People say there's no community any more, but watching that interesting show and joining in with everyone hating them together on the Internet outdoing each other was amazing, expressing yourself so much to hate someone.
I never felt so much of a part of a big group with all this anger.
It made me feel ie r alye.
Can't wait until next week's episode.
Gameshows! And BBC One locates a clever way of stretching 45 seconds of action into 45 minutes of entertainment with Reflex, a gameshow which should've been called Every Second Counts but can't because Paul Daniels bagsied that some time ago.
It's a programme with Shane Richie in which every second seems to last an eternity.
Or in other words, it's a programme with Shane Richie.
Standing in the middle of the movie Tron, Shane and some plucky members of the public compete in a series of high-speed physical trials filmed with state-of-the-art slowmo cameras, which are then replayed using every sodding FX filter they could find in post-production.
The tasks they have to do may look unspectacular, but when they slow them down by a factor of 1,000, they're boring too.
Tragically even when you fast-forward it, you can't tell you've fast forwarded it.
The whole thing culminates in a stunning finale in which a man in a crash helmet tries to avoid some basketballs, slowly.
America's got a fearsome reputation for violence doesn't it, yes it does.
But is it well deserved? Well one person who thinks it isn't is US comedian and shambles Doug Stanhope.
I'm Doug Stanhope and this's why I drink.
America has a reputation from violence that we don't live up to in real life.
There is a lot of gun violence and some of that's necessary.
Guns are the great equaliser.
They level the playing field against ass holes.
You can be the biggest bad ass bike, MMA, street fighter guy in the world, they put you in a cage with any honey-boo-boo with a shotgun with Las Vegas are going to alter drastically.
America promotes violence, we make violent movies, exploit the out out of violent news stories.
This is the coverage of the deadly rampage.
When it comes to day-to-day street violence, it's mostly all crap talk, chest-bumping, everyone waiting for the bouncer to come and break it up.
As opposed to, in the UK, the most violent people I've ever seen in my life was on any given Tuesday night when the pubs close, it's like USC in the street, you don't know which corner to look at, people beat the out of each other for no particular reason.
It's like "don't look at my girl "where are you from? ! "Across the street".
"There's only one side of this street! ".
I was in Manchester where I saw a poster, a public service announcement poster on a men's room wall, something to the effect of "don't beat up ambulance drivers".
".
I don't remember the specific text but that was the gist of it because evidently that's a thing over there.
I think the difference is, in the United States, we don't have free universal health care and we do have guns.
That makes you think twice before you take a swing at a guy over a pool game.
I Juan that that hit that guy but even if I chip a tooth, that's like 1500 bucks to get fixed.
I can't get paid for that.
Over there, you have free health care and no guns, so take the risk of beat each other's heads in.
Worst case scenario, the state picks up the tab to fix it.
For the last few years Winter in Britain's been all about been snow, snow, snow.
But this year's shock January weather has been a different kind of snow: warm snow, or what scientists call rain.
Yes, recently Britain's fluid intake went through the roof, and much of the country was transformed into a sort of shit rip off of Venice.
The problem was water: specifically too much of it, coming from overhead.
Experts quickly traced the source of the leak to an immense hole above us known as the sky.
And the bad weather had been going on for some time.
As the news pointed out, the country had just experienced its wettest December since 1993, as had your mum, and according to ITN this deluge was caused by something called the quasi biennial oscillation.
And one look out the window confirmed it was indeed quasi-biennially oscillating it down.
Anyway, in a bid to highlight just how shitty the current climate was, the nation's reporters stood outside like miserable moaning scarecrows.
It's sad really.
Awesome sight.
The public were also out, and so were their cameras.
Thing is, while cautionary newspaper front pages and the authorities were warning people to keep away from the water's edge the news seemed to be almost encouraging viewers to head outside and film the great national waterboarding for them, by showcasing their depressing photos and alarming videos.
It even started advising people to hold their phones the right way round, so their pictures would Film your pictures in land scope mode.
Idiots have been filming in portrait mode which is awful on the news! If you witness a kill, for Gods' sake do the right thing and turn your phone siteways before hitting record or you are ten times worse than the murderer! .
Of course those showy Americans always have to go one better, and consequently their extreme weather was extrem-ier than ours.
Picturesque US news footage made America look more like The United States of Narnia thanks to something called the Polar Vortex which sent temperatures plunging so low the best way to warm up was to stay indoors and climb inside the fridge.
Lots of people caught in reports had to virtually mummify themselves to avoid freezing to death, to the point where some reports resembled bulletins from the Anarchist News Network.
Having delighted viewers with his cheap Batman impression, he then performed a sort of David Blaine magic trick with a cup of boiling water.
Yes, someone somewhere had discovered that if you throw a cup of boiling water in the air in super sub zero conditions, you can make instant snow, something the news didn't tire of demonstrating, occasionally offering a step-by-step how-to guide and encouraging You can do it at home with your kids.
It is a fun experiment isn't it? At least it makes me laugh.
Ha ha, serves you right: next time, landscape mode.
Yes it turns out the downside of repeatedly showing millions of people a trick in which you throw boiling water around is that people might actually try and do it, turning scenes from what should've been a Winter Wonderland into something more like When Idiots Happen.
Still it's going to get cold here too and that's worrying people already.
And it's worrying no-one more than our resident inquisitive human, Limmy.
This is Limmy.
See the news? It's cold out there.
Cold in winter? ! Bit serious.
People are dying.
Happens every year.
Stick up the price of gas and still another granny in the ground.
Don't blame us fat cats.
It's because the world is running out of gas and wholesale prices are up.
It's because blah blah blah, but I know it's not.
Cos I worked it out.
It was when I was on the phone.
My granny was freezing.
I tried to keep her spirits up.
She has some amazing stories to tell.
There is a three for two offer on the go for lentils.
I said, that's it, the more you buy, they lower the price, but the less you buy, the higher the price and that's gone on with the fat cats.
Still here I mean, have you not noticed.
They only start to stick the price up if we started to cut down, trying to save the planet.
What? You think that's just a coincidence? Come on! They can't come out and say stop saving the planet and we'll save you money.
No, this offer's only available for people who can read between the lines.
So I turned it all, all up and told my granny to do the same.
Full last.
I told the world.
"Get it up.
We can do this.
But we need to do it together # Fullblast.
" Now I'm telling you to tell your granny, "get it up, right up.
Let's have ourselves the warmest winter since records began".
As for the gas bill trurks me, I think we are in for a big surprise.
-- trust me.
Gadgets! And nerd mecca the Consumer Electronics Show opens in Las Vegas, the one bit of America too hot to freeze.
It's your first chance to guess just which unnecessary bit of microchipped bibble might be enslaving us all tomorrow, as various effusive news reports unveiled an exciting vision of a future we should probably be fending off with sticks.
One of the biggest trends is for wearable tech, like video glasses that will utterly transform the way you 2014 is the year of the smart glasses.
Yes, super computerised video glasses aim to change the way you accidentally molest passers-by forever.
The incredi-specs will allow you to do astounding things, such as switching lights on and of, just like you can with your real hands! But that's not all! There were also computer enhanced domestic gadgets that defy sense and description entirely, including one called Mother.
Never mind what 'Mother' looks like, who knew Penfold was real? Turns out the oddly-named 'Mother' is a horrendous central intelligence agency for the home that keeps tabs on everything in your house, from how you flush the bog to how well you brush your teeth, as it monitors how closely each individual is sticking to their dental hygiene routine.
It's a fun way of getting children to brush their teeth instead of shouting at them.
Yes, according to a series of informative reports, soon absolutely every gadget in your home will be connected to the internet, whether you want it to be or not.
Why, soon you'll be able to conduct Google searches by entering them orally into your toaster.
How many people died in the 1854 cholera epidemic? 1616.
Wow.
Other innovations include a range of exciting bendable televisions seen here flaunting their curves.
TV screens used to be a bit curved, which was rubbish, so we made them flat, which was rubbish, so now they're going to be a bit curved again, which is brilliant.
So what advantages does a curvy TV have? That is a bench TV.
Apart from none? Luckily a CNET tech guru spotted some pluses in his perky report.
Sometimes things are muddled.
If you have window, the reflections could be slightly less annoying.
Yeah and if that doesn't work, buy some curtains.
Still, no matter what kind of TV you're using the shows remain the same.
This Morning on a curvy TV is still This Morning.
It still takes three hours to watch.
If only there was a more efficient way to ingest it.
Well, guess what there is.
A Mr Jake Yapp has condensed This Morning down to to 97 seconds as he'll prove to you now.
Start the clock.
Welcome to This Morning, coming up in the show then, it's a TV nursery for ex-boy band members who've seen presenters in a strange TV limbo for the Paul Rosses and Phil Vickeries who never quite manage to attain the velocity to get into real prime time TV, an event horizon.
Let's find out more of what you have been saying about that.
Jeff brazier.
You can smell the aftershave before I come on screen.
Popular with the house wives.
Let's read out your TV Tweets before we throw to the competition with that one off Big Brother.
Hi guys, do you fancy tearing up your mortgage for two months and give us what is left on the pay-as-you-go and you could be in with a chance of a hope of a possibility and I'll say good luck even though it's meaningless but I'm saying this to all of you.
Time for the sad bit.
Wendy Pleb's son died of something.
We'll have a two-minute filler interview with her ahead of Gino di-Campo.
Meatballs with the six inch sausages, a couple #07 Fern buns and lovely jubbly coconuts with sauce! Laughing so hard.
Didn't see that one coming.
Coming! Oh, still laughing! See you next time on Fizz Morning, "Fizz Morning! ".
".
Music! And for several weeks the nation's been utterly weirded out by this creepy ad depicting the inevitable future in which scientists start breeding children specifically to perform on talent contests.
Er OK, that one sings: drown the others!It was of course promoting BBC1's electrifying sing-em-up The Voice, the third mesmeric series of which kicked off this Saturday, presented by a cat and a man and a foursome of sit-and-swivel judges: namely Colonel Sanders, Madge Off Neighbours, the Protective Eyewear Must Be Worn symbol, and the crew member who'd get killed in an episode of Star Trek.
In order, that's Tom Jones, Kylie, William, and it's essentially a quest to find the forgotten stars of tomorrow as members of the public perform John Lewis cover versions of well-known hits.
Up all night to get some Up all night to get lucky More interesting was what started proceedings.
It's I predict a riot I predict a riot Which was an unfortunate choice on the same night a vigil was held in Tottenham while news cameras looked on, apparently hoping it might kick off.
Which was an unfortunate choice on the same night a vigil was held in Tottenham while news cameras looked on, apparently hoping that bus would catch fire again.
What with the Duggan verdict and recent Plebgate admissions, trust in the police seems to be at a pretty low ebb.
Of course without dem feds, crime would run wild.
But what is crime anyway? To explore what it is and who put it there, here's our resident expert Philomena Cunk with another of her Moments of Wonder.
Cinema! One in 20 people has been a victim of crime.
Which means that 19 out of 20 people are criminals.
No wonder we need police.
In the olden days, if someone did something wrong, there was nothing you could do except form a mob with your neighbours and hunt them down and kill them.
But today, we've got one other option, thanks to Sir Robert Peel who in 1829 discovered the police here on a spot marked today by a ceremonial wind turbine.
Once the police had been invented, victims of crime knew who to ask for help, because of their special hats.
Designed to be visible at a distance by people being murdered in the London fog.
Police tried to stop crime, but couldn't exist without it.
If there was no crime, what would they do? Except spend all day putting dresses on bikes with their hammer.
If no-one's going to steal those bikes, that's just deck rating.
Of course, there's no point fighting crime if you don't know what it is.
That's where rules come in.
But what is rules? A rules is basically a collection of laws.
The first example being the Ten Commandments which were left on a hill by God.
Many of those laws, killing, gravity and the one about not interfering with oxes, are still used today.
Even though God's dead.
So, who decides what's right and what's not right? And works out what the punishment should be and then writes it down? Maybe an expert can help us get to the truth.
Hello, who are you and what are you an expert on? I'm Chris Williams, a senior lecturer at the Open University and I'm an expert on the history of crime, policing and justice.
If a policeman broke the law, would he be able to arrest himself? I don't think so, no.
Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the arresting officer has to sign the prisoner over to the custody officer and if they were one and the same person, I can't see how that would work.
Also, I don't know how the investigator can interview themselves legally under that Act.
If the case ever got to court, which I don't think it would, the defendant would be in a position to cross-examine himself -- wouldn't be in a position to cross-examine himself.
I think the judge would then stop the crime.
So no would be the answer to your question.
When you do reconstructions, you know, on telly, they are dead convincing, aren't they? Have any of them, sort of, like, got a bit out of hand and turned back into an actual crime? Not to my knowledge, no.
It money happened.
Must have.
Probably not.
.
Cinema.
And in a lushly-composed and thought provoking promo for a satellite film channel, Harrison Ford himself shuffles glumly around asking us relentless questions about the silver screen.
Um that'd be, Edward Penishands.
I saw it on VHS like 20 years ago.
When was the last time you saw a movie you really wanted to watch? What was the last movie you had to tell someone about? Edward Penishands.
Seriously, he's got penises for hands.
What was the last movie you had to tell somebody about.
Disgusting.
What would be the next? What will be the next? Err, that'd probably be Edward Penishands 2.
But that won't be on Sky Movies, so sling your hook Dr Jones.
Hotels 4U Websites! And a candy-coloured couple mug their way through a garish advert with the accent on irritation.
Find us a hotel in the comforts of home.
Anything for you cup cake? I'm pretty sure this is the most pitiless, unrelenting attempt to hammer a catchphrase into the public consciousness since Zieg Heil.
Anything for yow cupcake Hahaha! It's funny cos he's brummie! I don't think I'll ever tire of him saying that.
Anything for yow cupcake Hahaha! Anything for yow cupcake Ha ha ha.
Anything for yow cupcake Hm.
Anything for yow cupcake That's enoof listening to yow, foockface.
Well that's all we've got for this week.
Until next time, do go away.
Hello I'm Charlie Brooker and you're watching Weekly Wipe, a programme all about things that are happening.
Things like this.
Former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon finally left the coma he'd been controversially occupying since 2006.
There's been outrage in France a Frenchmen's been accused of having an affair.
He's also rumoured to enjoy soft cheese and shrugging.
Sky News reveals ?250,000 has been spent on weirdly looking portraits.
Hanging is too good for them.
But we start with television.
I don't know if you have seen it, but Channel 4 has launched a British remake of The Wire.
Benefits Street is a fly on the wall documentary.
It's brought to you by the letters DSS.
Benefits Street is a fly-on-the-wall documentary series, it's a bit like Sesame Street but brought to you by the letters DWP.
It follows some of the residents on an apparently notorious Birmingham street, where, we're told, most of the residents are on benefits.
As well as impoverished single mums, it also depicts petty criminals on the rob.
On the one hand it's a gritty slice-of-life expose, but it's also packaged with a knowing nod and wink.
And it's so full of larger than life characters, it almost feels like a sitcom.
A bit like Friends, with benefits.
Usually when people on the breadline are exploited for entertainment it's done unsubtly on grubby bellowing chambers like the Jeremy Kyle Show.
Whereas Benefits Street is presented more like a safari park tour through poor people's natural environments.
It's even packaged a bit like a nature show, complete with sweeping shots of the landscape so you could see what benefits look like from a balloon.
There's also footage of the loveable offspring gambolling in the wild, sequences in which predators scavenge for scraps, and the violent majesty of Darwinian survival.
Some have complained the programme depicts lazy neer-do-wells living the high life sponging off the state, and to be fair the level of luxury they're enjoying is outrageous.
I mean, just look most of them have got shoes.
The sense of entitlement is amazing, they use oxygen without even paying for it,they just inhale and convert into carbon dioxide, selfishly leaving less for the tax payer.
They've even got sticks and bits of old fan.
I haven't got sticks and bits of old fan; why should they? And they're so lazy, they sit around on their arses, contributing nothing of value to society, boozing themselves stupid and stuffing their faces with cheap junk food.
Wouldn't catch me doing that.
Oh, I'm nearly out of artisan crisps.
Society likes to let off steam by having a set of sanctioned hate figures it's OK to openly deride, a list that changes with the times, and currently, benefits claimants are on it.
Under this blackboard with sanctioned hate fires, Channel 4 says Benefits Street is about community spirit in adverse circumstances, but the problem is it's not called 'Community Spirit in Adverse Circumstances', it's called Benefits Street, a button-pushing title attached to a programme with more buttons than a shirt factory.
They might as well have called it The Great British Skive-Off or Layabout Way.
To wear my earnest hat for a moment I actually thought Benefit Street was broadly sympathetic to it's participants, although being a TV show it also inevitably boiled their lives down to eye-catching 'highlights' and outrageous soundbytes.
But thanks to that title, and the ingrained assumptions of some viewers, on both sides of the political divide, it also caused and the sort of noisy publicity-stoking press reaction that must've had Channel 4 in dismay.
The debate came alive on a feisty edition of Newsnight as a man from Channel 4 had to defend himself against accusations of being a poverty porn baron.
Are you comfortable with being a porn baron? I'm deeply uncomfortable with that statement.
That's true, Benefits Street isn't porn.
I mean what's pornographic about seeing six sweaty men crammed into one filthy hole.
There's not even any money shots.
Well they haven't got any money.
The ideological lines were drawn: representing the unimpressed left, pious newborn Owen Jones, who said Benefit Street was a damaging distortion of society's most vulnerable.
Isn't that patronising? Of course it's not.
You miss a turn.
No sorry that's far too patronising.
Owen you lose ten points and miss a turn.
Amongst the unsympathetic reactees, opinion-pissing human clickbait Katie 'Thatcher' Hopkins popped up on This Week to hector the work shy.
I don't care if it's raining, get out of bed and get a job.
Fair enough, I'll have yours.
What the lock is it again? The show's producers, aware of how much crap Hopkins spouts, cannily positioned her in a toilet so she could at least mop up after herself.
Or any street.
Don't sponge edge off the system, if you can get a job, get one, even if it's one you don't want to do.
We do.
Quite right, they're scared of doing the kind of tough minimum wage job you're pretending to do here.
Hardnut Hopkins disapproves of ignorant scumbags living off money and handouts siphoned from hardworking folk, which is why she refused to accept her BBC appearance fee, possibly.
And she used it as a springboard to call for further cuts.
There was a fascinating insight into people who have next to nothing so you could you couldn't think anything about them.
They were different benefits that they weren't entitled to because they were poor.
Unemployed.
Normally when you see poor people, it's hard to judge them because you feel empoo dhi and think, I hope humankind does something to help them.
This was clever because it stopped you feeling like that.
I felt sort of pity for the people in it.
But when I went on Twitter, everyone was angry with them, so I thought, oh, I've got it wrong.
Better join in with that.
So then I wrote these Tweet things about how they were scum and I hoped the Government shoots them and stands over their bodies pumping bullet after bullet into their benefit scummy bodies and I got 20 new followers for that so it was a good programme, yes.
People say there's no community any more, but watching that interesting show and joining in with everyone hating them together on the Internet outdoing each other was amazing, expressing yourself so much to hate someone.
I never felt so much of a part of a big group with all this anger.
It made me feel ie r alye.
Can't wait until next week's episode.
Gameshows! And BBC One locates a clever way of stretching 45 seconds of action into 45 minutes of entertainment with Reflex, a gameshow which should've been called Every Second Counts but can't because Paul Daniels bagsied that some time ago.
It's a programme with Shane Richie in which every second seems to last an eternity.
Or in other words, it's a programme with Shane Richie.
Standing in the middle of the movie Tron, Shane and some plucky members of the public compete in a series of high-speed physical trials filmed with state-of-the-art slowmo cameras, which are then replayed using every sodding FX filter they could find in post-production.
The tasks they have to do may look unspectacular, but when they slow them down by a factor of 1,000, they're boring too.
Tragically even when you fast-forward it, you can't tell you've fast forwarded it.
The whole thing culminates in a stunning finale in which a man in a crash helmet tries to avoid some basketballs, slowly.
America's got a fearsome reputation for violence doesn't it, yes it does.
But is it well deserved? Well one person who thinks it isn't is US comedian and shambles Doug Stanhope.
I'm Doug Stanhope and this's why I drink.
America has a reputation from violence that we don't live up to in real life.
There is a lot of gun violence and some of that's necessary.
Guns are the great equaliser.
They level the playing field against ass holes.
You can be the biggest bad ass bike, MMA, street fighter guy in the world, they put you in a cage with any honey-boo-boo with a shotgun with Las Vegas are going to alter drastically.
America promotes violence, we make violent movies, exploit the out out of violent news stories.
This is the coverage of the deadly rampage.
When it comes to day-to-day street violence, it's mostly all crap talk, chest-bumping, everyone waiting for the bouncer to come and break it up.
As opposed to, in the UK, the most violent people I've ever seen in my life was on any given Tuesday night when the pubs close, it's like USC in the street, you don't know which corner to look at, people beat the out of each other for no particular reason.
It's like "don't look at my girl "where are you from? ! "Across the street".
"There's only one side of this street! ".
I was in Manchester where I saw a poster, a public service announcement poster on a men's room wall, something to the effect of "don't beat up ambulance drivers".
".
I don't remember the specific text but that was the gist of it because evidently that's a thing over there.
I think the difference is, in the United States, we don't have free universal health care and we do have guns.
That makes you think twice before you take a swing at a guy over a pool game.
I Juan that that hit that guy but even if I chip a tooth, that's like 1500 bucks to get fixed.
I can't get paid for that.
Over there, you have free health care and no guns, so take the risk of beat each other's heads in.
Worst case scenario, the state picks up the tab to fix it.
For the last few years Winter in Britain's been all about been snow, snow, snow.
But this year's shock January weather has been a different kind of snow: warm snow, or what scientists call rain.
Yes, recently Britain's fluid intake went through the roof, and much of the country was transformed into a sort of shit rip off of Venice.
The problem was water: specifically too much of it, coming from overhead.
Experts quickly traced the source of the leak to an immense hole above us known as the sky.
And the bad weather had been going on for some time.
As the news pointed out, the country had just experienced its wettest December since 1993, as had your mum, and according to ITN this deluge was caused by something called the quasi biennial oscillation.
And one look out the window confirmed it was indeed quasi-biennially oscillating it down.
Anyway, in a bid to highlight just how shitty the current climate was, the nation's reporters stood outside like miserable moaning scarecrows.
It's sad really.
Awesome sight.
The public were also out, and so were their cameras.
Thing is, while cautionary newspaper front pages and the authorities were warning people to keep away from the water's edge the news seemed to be almost encouraging viewers to head outside and film the great national waterboarding for them, by showcasing their depressing photos and alarming videos.
It even started advising people to hold their phones the right way round, so their pictures would Film your pictures in land scope mode.
Idiots have been filming in portrait mode which is awful on the news! If you witness a kill, for Gods' sake do the right thing and turn your phone siteways before hitting record or you are ten times worse than the murderer! .
Of course those showy Americans always have to go one better, and consequently their extreme weather was extrem-ier than ours.
Picturesque US news footage made America look more like The United States of Narnia thanks to something called the Polar Vortex which sent temperatures plunging so low the best way to warm up was to stay indoors and climb inside the fridge.
Lots of people caught in reports had to virtually mummify themselves to avoid freezing to death, to the point where some reports resembled bulletins from the Anarchist News Network.
Having delighted viewers with his cheap Batman impression, he then performed a sort of David Blaine magic trick with a cup of boiling water.
Yes, someone somewhere had discovered that if you throw a cup of boiling water in the air in super sub zero conditions, you can make instant snow, something the news didn't tire of demonstrating, occasionally offering a step-by-step how-to guide and encouraging You can do it at home with your kids.
It is a fun experiment isn't it? At least it makes me laugh.
Ha ha, serves you right: next time, landscape mode.
Yes it turns out the downside of repeatedly showing millions of people a trick in which you throw boiling water around is that people might actually try and do it, turning scenes from what should've been a Winter Wonderland into something more like When Idiots Happen.
Still it's going to get cold here too and that's worrying people already.
And it's worrying no-one more than our resident inquisitive human, Limmy.
This is Limmy.
See the news? It's cold out there.
Cold in winter? ! Bit serious.
People are dying.
Happens every year.
Stick up the price of gas and still another granny in the ground.
Don't blame us fat cats.
It's because the world is running out of gas and wholesale prices are up.
It's because blah blah blah, but I know it's not.
Cos I worked it out.
It was when I was on the phone.
My granny was freezing.
I tried to keep her spirits up.
She has some amazing stories to tell.
There is a three for two offer on the go for lentils.
I said, that's it, the more you buy, they lower the price, but the less you buy, the higher the price and that's gone on with the fat cats.
Still here I mean, have you not noticed.
They only start to stick the price up if we started to cut down, trying to save the planet.
What? You think that's just a coincidence? Come on! They can't come out and say stop saving the planet and we'll save you money.
No, this offer's only available for people who can read between the lines.
So I turned it all, all up and told my granny to do the same.
Full last.
I told the world.
"Get it up.
We can do this.
But we need to do it together # Fullblast.
" Now I'm telling you to tell your granny, "get it up, right up.
Let's have ourselves the warmest winter since records began".
As for the gas bill trurks me, I think we are in for a big surprise.
-- trust me.
Gadgets! And nerd mecca the Consumer Electronics Show opens in Las Vegas, the one bit of America too hot to freeze.
It's your first chance to guess just which unnecessary bit of microchipped bibble might be enslaving us all tomorrow, as various effusive news reports unveiled an exciting vision of a future we should probably be fending off with sticks.
One of the biggest trends is for wearable tech, like video glasses that will utterly transform the way you 2014 is the year of the smart glasses.
Yes, super computerised video glasses aim to change the way you accidentally molest passers-by forever.
The incredi-specs will allow you to do astounding things, such as switching lights on and of, just like you can with your real hands! But that's not all! There were also computer enhanced domestic gadgets that defy sense and description entirely, including one called Mother.
Never mind what 'Mother' looks like, who knew Penfold was real? Turns out the oddly-named 'Mother' is a horrendous central intelligence agency for the home that keeps tabs on everything in your house, from how you flush the bog to how well you brush your teeth, as it monitors how closely each individual is sticking to their dental hygiene routine.
It's a fun way of getting children to brush their teeth instead of shouting at them.
Yes, according to a series of informative reports, soon absolutely every gadget in your home will be connected to the internet, whether you want it to be or not.
Why, soon you'll be able to conduct Google searches by entering them orally into your toaster.
How many people died in the 1854 cholera epidemic? 1616.
Wow.
Other innovations include a range of exciting bendable televisions seen here flaunting their curves.
TV screens used to be a bit curved, which was rubbish, so we made them flat, which was rubbish, so now they're going to be a bit curved again, which is brilliant.
So what advantages does a curvy TV have? That is a bench TV.
Apart from none? Luckily a CNET tech guru spotted some pluses in his perky report.
Sometimes things are muddled.
If you have window, the reflections could be slightly less annoying.
Yeah and if that doesn't work, buy some curtains.
Still, no matter what kind of TV you're using the shows remain the same.
This Morning on a curvy TV is still This Morning.
It still takes three hours to watch.
If only there was a more efficient way to ingest it.
Well, guess what there is.
A Mr Jake Yapp has condensed This Morning down to to 97 seconds as he'll prove to you now.
Start the clock.
Welcome to This Morning, coming up in the show then, it's a TV nursery for ex-boy band members who've seen presenters in a strange TV limbo for the Paul Rosses and Phil Vickeries who never quite manage to attain the velocity to get into real prime time TV, an event horizon.
Let's find out more of what you have been saying about that.
Jeff brazier.
You can smell the aftershave before I come on screen.
Popular with the house wives.
Let's read out your TV Tweets before we throw to the competition with that one off Big Brother.
Hi guys, do you fancy tearing up your mortgage for two months and give us what is left on the pay-as-you-go and you could be in with a chance of a hope of a possibility and I'll say good luck even though it's meaningless but I'm saying this to all of you.
Time for the sad bit.
Wendy Pleb's son died of something.
We'll have a two-minute filler interview with her ahead of Gino di-Campo.
Meatballs with the six inch sausages, a couple #07 Fern buns and lovely jubbly coconuts with sauce! Laughing so hard.
Didn't see that one coming.
Coming! Oh, still laughing! See you next time on Fizz Morning, "Fizz Morning! ".
".
Music! And for several weeks the nation's been utterly weirded out by this creepy ad depicting the inevitable future in which scientists start breeding children specifically to perform on talent contests.
Er OK, that one sings: drown the others!It was of course promoting BBC1's electrifying sing-em-up The Voice, the third mesmeric series of which kicked off this Saturday, presented by a cat and a man and a foursome of sit-and-swivel judges: namely Colonel Sanders, Madge Off Neighbours, the Protective Eyewear Must Be Worn symbol, and the crew member who'd get killed in an episode of Star Trek.
In order, that's Tom Jones, Kylie, William, and it's essentially a quest to find the forgotten stars of tomorrow as members of the public perform John Lewis cover versions of well-known hits.
Up all night to get some Up all night to get lucky More interesting was what started proceedings.
It's I predict a riot I predict a riot Which was an unfortunate choice on the same night a vigil was held in Tottenham while news cameras looked on, apparently hoping it might kick off.
Which was an unfortunate choice on the same night a vigil was held in Tottenham while news cameras looked on, apparently hoping that bus would catch fire again.
What with the Duggan verdict and recent Plebgate admissions, trust in the police seems to be at a pretty low ebb.
Of course without dem feds, crime would run wild.
But what is crime anyway? To explore what it is and who put it there, here's our resident expert Philomena Cunk with another of her Moments of Wonder.
Cinema! One in 20 people has been a victim of crime.
Which means that 19 out of 20 people are criminals.
No wonder we need police.
In the olden days, if someone did something wrong, there was nothing you could do except form a mob with your neighbours and hunt them down and kill them.
But today, we've got one other option, thanks to Sir Robert Peel who in 1829 discovered the police here on a spot marked today by a ceremonial wind turbine.
Once the police had been invented, victims of crime knew who to ask for help, because of their special hats.
Designed to be visible at a distance by people being murdered in the London fog.
Police tried to stop crime, but couldn't exist without it.
If there was no crime, what would they do? Except spend all day putting dresses on bikes with their hammer.
If no-one's going to steal those bikes, that's just deck rating.
Of course, there's no point fighting crime if you don't know what it is.
That's where rules come in.
But what is rules? A rules is basically a collection of laws.
The first example being the Ten Commandments which were left on a hill by God.
Many of those laws, killing, gravity and the one about not interfering with oxes, are still used today.
Even though God's dead.
So, who decides what's right and what's not right? And works out what the punishment should be and then writes it down? Maybe an expert can help us get to the truth.
Hello, who are you and what are you an expert on? I'm Chris Williams, a senior lecturer at the Open University and I'm an expert on the history of crime, policing and justice.
If a policeman broke the law, would he be able to arrest himself? I don't think so, no.
Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the arresting officer has to sign the prisoner over to the custody officer and if they were one and the same person, I can't see how that would work.
Also, I don't know how the investigator can interview themselves legally under that Act.
If the case ever got to court, which I don't think it would, the defendant would be in a position to cross-examine himself -- wouldn't be in a position to cross-examine himself.
I think the judge would then stop the crime.
So no would be the answer to your question.
When you do reconstructions, you know, on telly, they are dead convincing, aren't they? Have any of them, sort of, like, got a bit out of hand and turned back into an actual crime? Not to my knowledge, no.
It money happened.
Must have.
Probably not.
.
Cinema.
And in a lushly-composed and thought provoking promo for a satellite film channel, Harrison Ford himself shuffles glumly around asking us relentless questions about the silver screen.
Um that'd be, Edward Penishands.
I saw it on VHS like 20 years ago.
When was the last time you saw a movie you really wanted to watch? What was the last movie you had to tell someone about? Edward Penishands.
Seriously, he's got penises for hands.
What was the last movie you had to tell somebody about.
Disgusting.
What would be the next? What will be the next? Err, that'd probably be Edward Penishands 2.
But that won't be on Sky Movies, so sling your hook Dr Jones.
Hotels 4U Websites! And a candy-coloured couple mug their way through a garish advert with the accent on irritation.
Find us a hotel in the comforts of home.
Anything for you cup cake? I'm pretty sure this is the most pitiless, unrelenting attempt to hammer a catchphrase into the public consciousness since Zieg Heil.
Anything for yow cupcake Hahaha! It's funny cos he's brummie! I don't think I'll ever tire of him saying that.
Anything for yow cupcake Hahaha! Anything for yow cupcake Ha ha ha.
Anything for yow cupcake Hm.
Anything for yow cupcake That's enoof listening to yow, foockface.
Well that's all we've got for this week.
Until next time, do go away.