If I’m honest, I wasn’t really taking the global financial crisis seriously. I’ve been far more interested in my new job- which, for those who are interested, remained a novelty for about 4 days before my superiority complex kicked in and ruined everything- and the U.S. Elections which have now essentially boiled down to a scrap between Denzel Washington and a man who seems more and more to be a facsimile of George W. Bush. Although actually this is unfair on Bush- he was a much better pilot than McCain.
The financial crisis seemed to revolve mainly around various rich people who were interviewed coming out of offices in the City of London looking terribly flustered before slinking off to their mansions while the stock market lost more points than Newcastle United. And to be fair, it’s hard to take a monetary panic seriously when it revolves around stocks losing ‘points’ rather than tangible pounds and pence. If they equated the loss of the stock market in a day to a real value, like ‘The FTSE lost 4 million pints of Stella today’ or ‘Panic in Tokyo today as the Nikkei dropped by a thousand Nissan Micras and Andrei Shevchenko’ then everyone would start taking things seriously and dutifully cacking themselves.
Luckily though this step will not be necessary as something has happened to bring to the world’s attention just how much the bankers have pushed us to the brink. Iceland’s gone bankrupt. Not the supermarket. The country.
A. Whole. Chuffing. Country.
Now I’m no economist but I’m pretty sure that’s not meant to happen. The forces of capitalism and the free markets are desinged to cause various weak businesses and organisations to fall by the wayside as time rolls merrily forward but when it’s a nation going down the swanny it’s hard not to think it’s time to start mainlining smack directly into our eyeballs and find out just what bumming sheep is actually like. Truly, these are the end of days. Once Iceland have sold Bjork they’ll be out of assets and then the finance devils will come looking for the rest of us.
But before an apocalyptic global meltdown comes and snaffles us all it’s probably a good idea to have a sit down. (Personally, as much as I admire how much Shakespeare contributed to the English language, I doubt the Bard ever summed up the English better than the first man to turn ‘sit down’ into a noun). When having the aforementioned sit down we’ll probably end up watching the telly and, if you time it right, you’ll catch a show that’ll make the oncoming economic catastrophe seem like blessed relief. If you’ve watched Charlie Boorman’s ‘Dublin to Sydney… By Any Means’ you’ll invade Wall Street and start short-selling like a madman just so you can send the planet back to the Stone Age before the next episode is broadcast. It might just be the worst programme in television history and, considering it’s transmitted just a day after BBC 1′s extraordinary ‘Hole In The Wall’, that’s quite some achievement.
The premise of the show is that professional hanger-on Charlie Boorman, shorn of the star charm of ‘Long Way Round/Down’ co-star Ewan MacGregor, travels from Dublin to Sydney by any means of transport he can find FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON WHATSOEVER. He isn’t following a historical trade route, or retracing the adventures from a book, or sticking to any particular geographical feature- he’s merely taking your licence fee and taking his preposterous little beard across four continents for no better reason than the fact that he just can. And not only does he drag a film crew along with him, he then dedicates half the show to detailling how hard it is to make the kind of show he’s currently dedicating half of to pointing out how hard it is to make this kind of show. It’s tough not to think that if he dumped the camera crew and made the trek by himself it’s be a whole lot easier for everyone involved but then we’d never catch a glimpse of just how difficult it is for a bunch of jumped up media fuckwits to get a stack of expensive digital video equipment up the Khyber Pass on a 70 year old bus. And there’d also be no-one there to watch Boorman take patronising local residents to stratospheric heights.
Boorman clearly comes from the school of gap-year twatism that believes that anything being done by a peasant in Indian bandit country is worthy of gasps of delight and breathless tales of how “simple the life is there” even though the peasant in question is weighing up whether or not to infect the Europeans with cholera or sell them to the local bandit leader and pinch their i-Pods. He schleps from country to country and village to village eating terrifying meats in everyone’s front rooms and taking part in rituals that the locals clearly made up on the spot just so they could get on the telly. Then it’s time to move on though, instead of a travelogue, we’re greeted to another 20 minutes of some work-experience girl in the London office struggling to get Charlie and his crew visas to get over the next border. They genuinely believe we give a flying fuck about any of them and their preciously challenging documentary shoot when, in fact, we’re sitting on our sofas watching Boorman piss out licence fees up the walls with gay abandon. If the show’s premise was changed to an eight part series of Charlie and his team brutally chronicaling the difficulties of getting a film crew up to a Scottish island to burn our collective licence money in cash a la the KLF it would be no worse. In fact, the locals in this case would be Scottish rather than backwater peasants which would be infinitely more entertaining- especially when Boorman desperately tried to condescend his way through a visit to a local chippie for a deep-fried Twix and a fight.
Luckily, once Charlie’s finished filming his latest intercontinental mid-life crisis, James May potters onto our screens with his show ‘Big Ideas’ to remind us that, imminent global financial catastrophe aside, the future might be a good place to be after all. Like Boorman he travels around the globe but, instead of wasting time with people who haven’t even bothered to get out of their hovels and buy a widescreen TV, he meets scientists and inventors who are at the bleeding edge of everything. Encouragingly, this has so far involved bespectapled chaps in white coats who spend their time perfecting either a) robots or b) jetpacks. While this may seem like simple Boys Own fun he is actually, in the current climate, giving us all a glimpse of a world worth fighting for. One that we will all enjoy if all the bankers of the world stop trading in money that doesn’t exist and whisking us promptly back to the Great Depression. He is giving us something to aim at, a world to aspire to. Forget Barack Obama- maybe Top Gear’s shaggy-haired third-wheel may actually turn out to be the 21st century’s Franklin Roosevelt. As a side-note, he also manages to shoe-horn the fact that he’s actually a pretty nifty pianist into proceedings which at least demonstrates he has a talent beyond being mates with Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Maybe I’m being harsh on Charlie Boorman. He might be squandering the licence fee on his self-indulgent trek but at least his folly hasn’t managed to bankrupt an entire island. Mind you, much like the Masters of the Universe on their trading floors, he’s failed to think of things in the long term and that’s to his eternal discredit and demonstrates what makes James May a much more worthy TV presenter. After all, imagine ‘Dublin to Sydney… With a Robot on a Jetpack’.
Who wouldn’t want to watch that?