Blood-spurting wounds, painful accidents and gory prime-time operation porn. The latest
website craze amongst smack-addled youths? No, it's what Charlie Brooker sees on his television every Saturday night..
The Game of Life
Hey. Here's an idea for a computer game. Stop me if you think it's sick. OK.
First of all, we use a state-of-the-are 3D engine to produce stunningly realistic visuals. Our game is populated by real people, and we want them to look as authentic as possible. We want convincing body movements and believeable facial expressions.
Some of them even use the faces and bodies of well-known people, complete with lip-synching. We put them in realistic situations - driving a car on a motorway, perhaps. We simulate a busy motorway, with cars and trucks hurtling along at breakneck speed, and we put the car with one of our realistic polygon people slap-bang in the middle of it. Then we make the car crash. Let's say it ploughs into the back of a coach. We show our polygon stooge being thrown through the windscreen and landing beneath the wheels of his own car.
There's blood all over the place, and he's screaming in agony. Before long, a polygonal ambulance arrives and our victim is ferried off to a virtual hospital. He's prodded, cut open, and operated on, while he's still screaming. It's extremely lifelike, and very gruesome. By now you're probably wondering where the player comes into this. Well, here's where: He just sits there, not pressing a button.
The point of the game is to sit and watch, for your own entertainment. Nasty, isn't it? If you produced a game like that, the press would go bananas. But what I've just described is an episode of Casualty, one of the most fondly-loved TV shows in the country. Well, fondly loved by everyone except me. I can't stand it. In fact, I think it's sick and wrong. Not to mention ghoulish, voyeuristic, manipulative and contrived. And unrealistic. And did I also mention how boring it is? Ooh, that damn Casualty. It gets away with murder!  How come games like Kingpin get an 18 rating, just because a few heads roll now and again (well, OK, a few heads burst apart like shattered watermelons every couple of seconds), wheras Casualty is pumped into our homes, apparently unregulated, straight into the eyes and minds of a nation of horrified children?
Notional Health Service
Casualty is a deeply unpleasant thing. It's like a three-month season of stomach churning public information films rolled into one. It plays with your mind. It leaves you frightened to exit the house. In the alternative universe in which the show takes place, anyone working in on a factory, or on a building site, or even attempting to do a little DIY around the house is gambling with their life. Try to saw a bit of wood in half and 30 seconds later you're reeling around the house with a gory, spurting stump where your arm used to be; toppling backwards into a roaring fireplace before staggering headlong into a churning Moulinex. Thanks to that show, I'm terrified of my local B&Q. It's like Scotland Yard's Black Museum in there. I can practically hear the shrieks of the mutilated in there. They should sue. Bloody Casualty. Every scene should be shot from the point of view of an overhead vulture, while the viewers at home wear fake feathered wings.
They're always banging on about how authentic all the medical procedures are, and how many doctors they've consulted to ensure that an arc of blood pipes across the screen at just the right angle, or a gouged eyeball oozes just the right amount of aqueous humor down the cheek of a screaming victim. They go to this effort to appall us efficiently? How disturbing. Still, it's funny how nobody ever gets a huge wooden splinter stuck in their genitals - they only ever get injured in areas we are allowed to see.
Hospital of Lies
Sod the medical specialists - why don't they also consult real people to check their storylines and see how believable they are? I've seen more credible scenarios in cheap West German porn films (which, lets face it, have a lot in common with Casualty - both feature repeated close-ups of engorged body parts and drizzled biological fluids).   The plots are sheer pantomime! It's comic strip hoo hah! If Charlie from Casualty (surely the most smugly punchable character on television ) suddenly sprouted wings and flew to the scene of an accident, I for one wouldn't be in the least bit surprised. People in Casualty world are either very, very bad (you know- heartless, greasy haired drug pushers, who deserve everything they get) or very, very good (attractive and abused teens, who don't); with little room in between these two poles of the moral spectrum, unless of course they've just been injured in an interesting way: "Help! I've got a fish hook lodged in my eye!" I say the we campaign to get Casualty banned.
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this article originally appeared in Pc Zone magazine.
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