God, normal people. Look at them. Open your front door and look at them, all scurrying around, making normal decisions and having normal opinions about things.
Aren’t you just pleading, desperate, dying to know more about them and their insignificantly normal little lives?
Don’t you wish you could follow them around all through their normal week and bathe yourself in their normality? No? Well, tough tits, bucko! Channel Four have decreed this is the future of reality television so you’re stuck with it. Seven Days (Channel 4, Wednesday, 22 September, 10pm) has started; God, we wish it hadn’t.
It’s been a few weeks since Big Brother parped off our screens in a colourful flurry of revisionist nostalgia and instantly forgotten tears, leaving fans of gawping mindlessly at people with a gaping reality void in their hearts. Seven Days is the rebound fling – a new kind of reality show, we are told, charting the everyday lives of a cross-section of the happy folk of Notting Hill, a semi-affluent semi-not corner of West London. And if that were not pant-soilingly exciting enough, it’s interactive; each episode is filmed in the week immediately before broadcast, and we, the all-powerful British nation, are encouraged to form our own opinions on the protagonists’ life choices and bark at them into the nearest computer for the protagonists to read and nod sagely at in the next episode.
But for that to happen, we’d have to give a flying hoot about ’em. And on the evidence so far, that’s not bloody likely.
Trouble is, quite a few of the participants in Seven Days are vaguely awful bastards. There’s Laura and Sam, flatmates, models/singers/whatever, swanning about town pouting into mirrors and crying like brats over hairstyles and shoes, passive-aggressively machine gunning “Babe“s at one another through perfect gritted teeth. There’s Hannah, working for Mummy’s interior design company, who is so horrified at turning 26 she plans to spend the whole day “hiding in a teepee in Ben’s garden.” Then there’s Malcolm, the dreadlocked-Keith Richards plasterer-turned-property magnate, with 14,000 houses, a bizarre Frizl-basement tiny subterranean pool area and a frightening obsession with his dead cat. Malcolm had mortgage issues and a Yeah, We Do This All The Time, No Way We’re Just Putting This On For The Cameras party where he and a select group of his closest escorts …erm…friends danced to ten-year-old trance in a disturbing and salacious manner. Thankfully the cameras didn’t linger too long on this scene, but hecklerspray’s imagination could do with a steam clean after that little jaunt into Malcolm’s afterparty hell.
Anyway, the rich bitches were not the only problem with Seven Days. Apparently, you don’t have to be white, middle class and skull-burstingly wealthy to live in Notting Hill – news to us and Richard Curtis alike – and there were other people featured: Moktar, about to start uni and fretting over money and job prospects; Cassie, bohemian yummy mummy and pilot; and Javan, aspiring rapper and resolute non-dole scrounger.
Fine, but normal. Normal people are boring. Listening to what normal people think about current events, another supposed highlight of Seven Days, is even more boring. We all have to listen to the stupid tedious nonsense that pours forth from normal people every single day – on the bus, at work, on the news, everywhere we go. TV is where we go to get away from the white noise of daily life, and this show just feeds that white noise through My Bloody Valentine’s most bestest brainmelt amplifier. Sections of it are like being trapped in an endless episode of The Wright Stuff with no Z-List celebrities to sniff around and the whole audience just reading bits of the Sun to each other and chuckling ruefully. Watching Moktar poke a chip around a plate and ponder whether it’s worth going to uni or not could provoke a boredom-based involuntary coma in 90% of sentient beings. Basically: Christ, it’s dull in parts.
Not the parts where Malcolm talked about freezing his cat, though. That was just hella-terrifying.
But never mind the yawning and occasional disgusted scream. Do you care yet? Feel moved to send Malcolm and co any helpful hints and tips on their lives? During the show you are regularly invited to go to the Seven Day’s appallingly-named “Chat Nav” website to holler advice at this ragbag crew of mostly overprivileged horrors, which brings up an interesting point.
Next week, will we be watching our non-heroes reading page after page of “This comment has been removed by a moderator”? Or will the production team pass on what we can only imagine will be brutal criticism from a public used to loudly booing anyone with money and a sense of entitlement, leading to an endless feedback loop where we slag them off and they defend themselves so we slag them off more, until each episode is just footage of our own front doors being kicked in by burly men hired for vigilante revenge attacks while Laura and Sam watch, cackling, from a nearby Mercedes?
Actually, that would be quite cool. Very meta. We’ll have to wait and see what next week brings. Not that we’ll be watching; we have no interest in seeing the further comings and goings of a bunch of normal people and a handful of filthy rich?shitbags. But if it comes to a violent end, hecklerspray towers is still heavily fortified from our last run-in with the Beliebers and their tiny powerful fists, so we’re OK.
You can hole up with us. Bring gin.
OrlaD says
Absolutely ace review, spot on and snort-inducingly funny. More of the same please!
Mark says
This is funny. And good.
So, here’s the inevitable snark: If you must do an Eastenders-themed webtraffic-driving post then get this guy/gal “justrestingmyeyes” to do it, rather than whoever that is who currently does it so badly.