The Hell of It All Read Online Free

channel and control his murderous tendencies by indulging in vaguely justifiable slayings – i.e. he only kills other serial killers.
    Preposterous, yes, but there’s nothing wrong with a preposterous set-up per se. Unfortunately the show ping-pongs between quirky, tasteless comedy and what it seems to earnestly believe is a compelling study of the psychopathic mindset. It’s a bit like watching an episode of Scooby-Doo in which the lighthouse keeper who’sdisguised himself as a sea monster in order to scare people away from his gold spends half his screen time mulling over the philosophical meaning of masks. And then stabs Shaggy in the eye with a toasting fork.
    What’s more, the show depends on the viewer finding Dexter himself curiously charming despite the fact that he enjoys strapping his victims to a gurney and torturing them with a drill. The easiest way to achieve this is to make said victims ‘worse’ than he is. Implausibly worse. This week, for instance, Dexter’s stalking a hit-and-run drunk driver – which means he can’t be just any old drunk driver, but a serial offender who’s apparently ploughed through an orphan in every state, repeatedly beaten the rap, and then shrugged it off as no big deal.
    They might as well cut to a shot of him dancing on a grave with a bottle of champagne in his hand. Enter Dexter stage left with his power drill. Cue cheering. Cut to ad break. Phew, this show is, like, intense, man. It totally toys with your sense of moral justice and shit. Awesome!
    Add to that a bunch of mono-dimensional cops working alongside Dexter (including his sister, whose sole character trait is a potty mouth), an irritating voiceover that’s about one-tenth as wry as it thinks it is, and a smattering of unbelievably bad yet apparently earnest flashback sequences in which young Dexter is schooled in the art of anger management by his FBI-profiler dad, and you’re left with a weird, offensively simplified mulch which only an idiot could truly refer to as ‘dark’.
    Which isn’t to say it’s utterly terrible; I’m curious enough to try the next episode. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s any more sophisticated than The A-Team . It’s gorier, that’s all.
Death to the liars [21 July 2007]
    Shriek! Panic! Kick the neighbours awake and tell them the truth! Your TV is deceiving you! The Queen didn’t storm out! Gordon Ramsay didn’t catch that fish! And that animated 3D map the weatherman stands in front of ISN’T REALLY THERE! It’s all a lie!A disgusting, despicable lie! HANG THEM! HANG THE LIARS! On live, un-manipulated television – pure and truthful, the way it used to be.
    Yes, for months now the papers have been behaving like hairless pod people who’ve just pulled the tube pumping hallucinatory Matrix code into their brains and stood up, truly awake for the first time in their lives, squinting and blinking at the world as it is, rather than the cartoon fib they’ve been fed. And now they’re bravely running round town knocking on doors, alerting the dreaming populace to the cold hard truth, goddammit.
    Revelations about premium-rate phone-in lines and misleading news reports are one thing, but come on – Gordon Ramsay didn’t catch a fish? Frankly, I’d be surprised if he was on the boat in the first place. Most of it’s blue-screen trickery anyway. When you see him chopping onions, those aren’t actually his hands – they’re CGI simulations. He’s not even a real man. He’s a bear in a rubber mask. And a violent, angry bear at that. They just edit out the bits where he attacks people and steals picnic baskets, dub someone saying ‘fuck’ over the top, and hide subliminal messages in the accompanying musical bed, commanding you not to question the verisimilitude of what you’re seeing.
    Yes, television routinely tells fibs, and should always be approached with a healthy degree of scepticism, and any big lies it tells deserve to be exposed – but to hear the