Pants Off, Dance Off

[faceless]

Charlie Brooker's Screen burn
'Pants Off Dance Off's strippers are real yelping, whooping, I'm-mad-me irritants'
Charlie Brooker
The Guardian,
31 October 2009

I don't want to claim I predicted the state of modern television in its entirety almost a decade ago or anything, but around 10 years ago I wrote a website called TV Go Home filled with satirically exaggerated programmes, many of which have come frighteningly true. Here's the latest example. In its TV Go Home incarnation, "Masturbation Minefield" was a pornographic game aimed at lonely male viewers: a show which consisted of rude footage (such as a naked dairymaid bending over) randomly interspersed with profoundly unerotic imagery (such as an extreme close-up of Ian Beale's eye staring straight through the centre of your soul). It was a lo-fi interactive challenge: could the viewer achieve climax during the "rude" bits without being put off by the "unerotic" bits? A puerile idea, but there you go. At least it wasn't real.

I lie. Pants Off Dance Off (weeknights, 11pm, Viva) is essentially Masturbation Minefield with one or two tweaks. The premise is as simple as its intended audience: ordinary members of the public dance to music while taking their clothes off. It's a striptease show. But, lest they be accused of peddling sordid pornography, the producers have cunningly included enough "mines" to ensure that only the most determined psychopath could possibly manipulate their way to fruition.

First of all, the strippers themselves are self-avowedly "zany" types: real yelping, whooping, jumping-up-and-down-and-clapping "I'm-mad-me" irritants. Not only is it impossible to get turned on in their presence, it's impossible to assign them any human emotion whatsoever. If, instead of stripping, the programme depicted them being injected with sedatives and shovelled out of the back of a C-130 Hercules flying 20,000 feet above the Nevada desert, it would actually be easier to masturbate to.

Next, neatly sidestepping accusations of body fascism, they've chosen a wide variety of figures from both sexes. Fat ones, thin ones, hairy ones, ones whose faces are so disturbing they look like Steve Buscemi with Bell's palsy pressing his nose against your bathroom window … all human life is here, apart from anyone you actually want to see naked. Occasionally they'll feature a Chippendale type or a lapdancer, but to stop this being arousing, they'll make a little window pop up, in which the next stripper (inevitably a 64-year-old man with a nose like a thumped glans) dribbles something about how they can't wait to show you their bum.

But they're not finished yet. There's still an outside chance you might be excited by the occasional shot of exposed flank, so just to nail that possibility to the floor and stove its face in with a jackboot, there's a kerrr-azy joke-filled voiceover yapping away in the background, which outstays its welcome at the first syllable. It's not very funny. In fact, if they replaced it with the soundtrack to one of Michael Buerk's 1984 Ethopian famine reports, wailing children and all, there'd be 30% more laughs.

Finally, they've cut out the actual nudity. Yes, you read that right: THEY'VE CUT OUT THE ACTUAL NUDITY. Instead, every time someone actually takes their "pants off" (which, after all, is the entire purpose of the show), the action freezes and a URL pops up to protect their modesty. In other words, they're encouraging their audience to stop watching the show and go online instead, which must make the channel's advertisers very happy.

The website, incidentally, doesn't contain uncensored stripteases either. But never mind! I'm told you can find footage of people actually taking their clothes off – and occasionally doing racier stuff, like kissing – elsewhere on the internet.

In summary: Pants Off Dance Off takes the concept of striptease, and removes both the "strip" and the "tease". That's not a show, that's a vacuum. Worst of all, it's not even amusingly trashy. It's a load of energy expended for nothing. Just like masturbation itself. But less noble.

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Seems like a load of daft nonsense rather than something to be that bothered about that you'd use your column in a fucking national newspaper to complain about! Up yours, Brooker - you're talking out your arse!

[SquareEyes]

I was about to achieve climax, then I saw the pixellation :p