Being a geek, or being interested in geeky things, isn’t the albatross around the neck it used to be when I was at school. As a teenager, I hid my love for Star Trek like it was a secret identity. Not a sexy secret identity like Superman’s, but one that if discovered would almost certainly prevent me from losing my virginity before the turn of the millennium. The third millennium.
I remember sitting in the opticians with my mum when I was about 15 or 16. I was browsing through an Argos catalogue when I spied the complete first season of Star Trek Voyager on VHS. I hinted that it might make a nice gift for a space-loving chap such as myself, but my mother never gave it any serious consideration, preferring instead to launch into a tirade about how I didn’t appreciate the value of things, and how her parents had never bought her box-sets of popular American science-fiction programmes when she was a girl growing up in the Glasgow tenements. I think the closest she’d ever got to flying saucers was when her mum got angry and threw plates at her.
About half-way through this parental primal-scream, the shop door tinkled to announce the arrival of a new customer. It was a girl from my class at school. She took a seat next to us. This wasn’t good. Mum was still in full, red-faced swing, a few ‘and another things’ leaping from her tongue. I couldn’t let this Star Trek-shaped secret get out. I mustered every sliver of verbal dexterity I possessed in a desperate attempt to derail the subject of conversation.
And I failed.
Miserably.
Have you ever tried to stop a mother from talking, much less a Glasweigen one? After a few awkward hellos, my mum turned to the girl, jabbed a finger at the Argos catalogue and said: “He wants me to buy him these bloody Star Trek videos. Look how expensive they are!”
She might as well have said: “Honest to God, I don’t know how I’m going to stop him from wearing his granny’s knickers to bed every night, and touching himself as he watches Prisoner Cell Block H.”
The girl was now an Athenian herald, sure to take news of my plummeting sexual stock back to school, where it would be met with frenzied murmurs of ‘… Jamie…Jamie…which one’s he again?’ This was the bitterest pill to swallow. The realisation that I probably didn’t have stock to plummet in the first place.
How times have changed.
Not in terms of my sexual stock, you understand, which still remains low, but in terms of the things that impact on a young lad’s sex appeal. These days, admitting you like Star Trek isn’t going to stop you from boldly going to bed with someone; admitting you like Star Wars isn’t going to stand in the way of you getting a good Chewie.
It’s a brave new world for the geeks of yesteryear. Superhero movies routinely gross billions at the box office. Sagas like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are almost universally adored, or at least universally respected. Sci-fi shows and comic book adaptations are everywhere. Fewer and fewer people are confusing Star Wars with Star Trek while wearing dismissive sneers on their faces.
Arguably, geeks have inherited the earth because technology has finally caught up with the dreams, visions and what-if-eries at the pulsing core of geekdom. Fans have finally been able to say to a scornful population (whose perspectives on sci-fi, superheroes and fantasy worlds had perhaps been shaped by stereotypes like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons): ‘See? This is what’s been happening inside our heads all these years. This is what it looks like. It’s pretty cool, right?’
So geek is now cool.
Except… not all of it.
Oh god, not all of it.
Even factoring in mainstream acceptance, there are still elements of the best sci-fi and fantasy shows, and moments within them, that make me want to take up sports, bin my books, burn my DVD collection and never contemplate the fantastical or the high-concept ever again; there are things out there that must remain hidden from new geeks and the yet-to-be converted; things with the power to turn me back into that embarrassed, shame-ridden boy sitting in my local optician’s, ready to curl up into a ball that’s roughly the same size as the smallest letter on the bottom line of the eye-chart.
Strap yourself in. This ‘aint going to be pretty.
Kling-a-long-a-ding-dong
I watched the first season of Star Trek Discovery last year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t instantly convince me of its Star Trekkiness. It seemed to owe more of a debt to the 2004 series of Battlestar Galactica (and perhaps even The Punisher) than to its franchise forebears. Some of the violence is nauseatingly brutal, with frequent scenes of bloody torture and merciless bone-crunching. The characters even swear. OK, it’s not a Star Trek first. Data once uttered the word ‘shit’ to comedic effect in the The Next Generation crew’s first cinematic outing ‘Generations’, but until 2017 that was – to the best of my knowledge – the one and only swear word that Star Trek had ever dropped.
Now, not only do Star Trek crews say shit, they say ‘fuck’, too. The ‘f’ word?? In fucking Star Trek? What mirror-universe trickery is this? I can only posit that the creative team behind the show must once have been teenage Trek fans and found themselves sitting in a version of my opticians’ office, timidly browsing through a catalogue of Star Trek box-sets, terrified that their shameful secret would be exposed, and vowing to themselves: ‘When I’m eventually in charge of this show it’s going to have tits and it’s going to have blood and broken necks and shagging and people saying ‘fuck’ all the time, and everyone’s going to think it’s edgy and hip, by God! And the geeky kids who watch it are going to be drowning in sexual effluent – AND NOT THEIR OWN THIS TIME, DAMMIT!’
Despite being self-conscious as a lad, I always thought Star Trek was cool. Well, OK, not cool, exactly, but worthy, cerebral, exciting. If only the majority of people in my school and neighbourhood would set aside their preconceptions and give it a chance I was certain they’d grow to love it.
But not if they ever, ever, ever, EVER tuned in just as a bunch of Klingons started singing. Then all bets were off. They’d be left thinking to themselves that they’d accidentally started watching a documentary about angry German death-metal fans, or the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Finally convincing someone to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and having them randomly select an episode with lots of Klingon sing-alongs is the equivalent of talking about how cool, friendly and funny your best friend is to a group of new acquaintances at a formal occasion, only for your friend to turn up dressed as half-Ike Turner, half-Tina Turner, and caked in human shit from head-to-toe.
Mind you, any episode from the first season of TNG would have a similar effect on the uninitiated. Almost without exception the episodes were hammy, crummy and execrable, and in one infamous instance really rather quite racist – looking at you, Code of Honour.
Deep Space Nine was – and still is – my favourite incarnation of Star Trek. It quickly became a gritty, dirty, rough-and-tumble, serialised saga filled with flawed and imperfect heroes and relatable villains, an obvious spiritual predecessor to the revived Battlestar Galactica… but let’s not forget that it, too, began its life as, well… shite. The first season episode, Move Along Home, in which some of the principal characters become trapped in a weird alien game that can only be defeated by playing hopskotch and singing daft otherworldly nursery rhymes, is so cringe-worthy that even a young Russel Brand would’ve been killed by all the vicarious shame compressed and distilled into its ferociously fucking awful forty minutes.
Red Face in Space
I loved Red Dwarf as a lad, and was never happier than when out in the playground imitating the cast and trading catchphrases. I used to tape episodes from the TV so I could watch them with my grandfather, a continuation of a sci-fi-watching tradition that had started with repeats of Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. I had a deep, symbiotic relationship with Red Dwarf, as we all have with our favourite things, be they TV shows, football clubs or Gods.
My grandfather’s laughter wasn’t just a vindication of the writers and a salute to the comedic chops of Craig Charles et al; to me it signified acceptance, validation. As we bonded over those half-hour nuggets of space-based hijinks, my being became indivisible from Red Dwarf. If he hadn’t have liked it as much as he did, or actively hated it, I would have taken it as a personal insult, and left my grandparents’ home nursing a psychic wound an inch deep around my soul.
Watching Red Dwarf slowly die from 1997 on-wards was like finding out that all of my favourite childhood entertainers had been prolific child abusers, which isn’t just an extreme analogy, because most of my favourite childhood entertainers were prolific child abusers. I remember watching an episode from season seven with my Dwarf-sceptic sister and becoming increasingly angry at the show for being shit, and at my sister for not laughing anyway. Then came season eight – aka Chuckle Brothers in Space – featuring slapstick that was about as funny as watching your gran being beaten to death by angry werewolves with cricket bats.
After season eight the show was quickly and quietly (and completely understandably) dropped by the BBC, only to be resurrected ten years later on the satellite channel Dave. Red Dwarf’s come-back special was Back to Earth, a made-for-TV movie told in three parts. Creator Doug Naylor took the bold step of removing not only every shred of laughter from the new show, but all of its humour, too, replacing it with a mixture of existential dread and Coronation Street. Fuck, it was dreadful.
Seasons ten and eleven were a mixed-bag, but in their defence there were a few diamonds strewn among the rough, just enough to justify the show’s continued existence. In season twelve, though, Doug Naylor successfully squandered every dollop of goodwill he’d managed to build up by dropping a single episode that was so gut-grindingly, skull-breakingly, world-endingly awful that it made all of the shittest episodes he’d made up until that point seem like comedies co-written by Steve Coogan, Graham Linehan, Billy Connolly, Trey Parker, Matt Stone and the Marx Brothers combined.
It was so bad it made Mrs Browns’ Boys look good; truth be told it made having your eyes punched in by a spike while a crocodile rips off your cock look good. That episode was, of course, Timewave, signalling to even the show’s most ardent fans that it might be time to wave goodbye to the show forever. Red’s dead, baby. Red’s dead.
Oh, come on, was it really that bad, Jamie? Really?! WELL YES IT WAS, ACTUALLY, YOU DOUBTING THOMAS! So exquisitely terrible that if a nuclear missile were to wipe out half the planet as you watched it, the end of mankind wouldn’t be the worst thing to have happened to you during that half-hour; so bad that my grandfather came back from the dead to throat punch me for ever making him watch this shite when he was alive.
If you haven’t seen Timewave, I beg you not to seek it out. I don’t even want to describe it, lest the plot when written down opens a portal to Hell or something. Trust me and just forget it ever existed. It’ll make you hate not only Red Dwarf, but puppies, kittens, freshly-baked scones, rainbows, laughter and even your own children.
I worried about being exposed as a Star Trek Voyager fan, but being caught even talking about this episode could set back a teenager’s sex life by at least 65 ice ages.
An arrow through the ear
I stopped watching Arrow during its fourth season, so who knows, perhaps it broke free from its strange blend of cheese, grit and ridiculous character trajectories to become a slick, gritty Nolan-esque powerhouse…
I always thought it was funny that there wasn’t anyone in Oliver’s orbit that didn’t eventually become a crime-fighting, vigilante superhero, complete with their own brand-name, trademark and costume. The roster was as impressive as it was improbable: the dude who used to be his driver, his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s sister (who is also his ex-girlfriend), his sister, his sister’s boyfriend, his employee (and now girlfriend), his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. At this point, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that in season five a new janitor started at Queen Consolidated and within two episodes was fighting off baddies with a titanium broom and calling himself ‘The Sweeper’.
If you’ve watched shows like Daredevil and Punisher with their cavalcade of brutal, hyperkinetic, technically impressive fight scenes, then you probably find it hard to appreciate Arrow’s fight scenes, which in comparison look like they were staged by a local Morris dancing troupe.
By far the most embarrassing element of Arrow, though, was the Canary, aka Laurel, the ADA, not only the least likely and least plausible crime fighter among Oliver’s friends and relatives, not to mention the most irritating character by a country mile, but also the crew-member with the very shittest ‘power’. Her method of dispatching the baddies was to open her mouth and shake her head around like a nursery teacher pretending to be a dragon, while making a noise that sounded like a vacuum cleaner with tonsillitis.
Canary, you have failed this.
Shitty.
O Batman, Where Art Thou?
Gotham the series was a bubbling mish-mash of tones, vibes and characters that didn’t quite manage to simmer into a particularly flavoursome or satisfying pot of soup, lacking pep and sustenance. It didn’t taste awful. Some sips were quite tasty, even sometimes had a bit of a kick, thanks to a sprinkle of salt here, a dash of pepper here, the Penguin with a rocket launcher there… but in a medium awash with such a glut of delicious televisual fare it regularly failed to justify its existence.
However, despite occasional bouts of cheese-scented preposterousness, it was rarely cringe-worthy. It’s actually pretty hard to come over as embarrassing or ridiculous when you’re already a show about people in costumes trying to kill each other in the campest ways imaginable.
There were exceptions. Like when Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play anything other than stoic. In a set of sequences near the end of the second season Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play the face-morphing baddy Clayface masquerading as Jim Gordon. Mackenzie’s acting technique was to channel a sex-addled Popeye after an entire brick of cocaine, which admittedly sounds awesome when I describe it like that, but really wasn’t. It made me cringe to the point where I wanted to take a whole brick up my own nose, but an actual brick. The kind you build houses with.
Doctor Oooooooh, that’s nasty
The first 26 seasons of Doctor Who gave us some truly great science-fiction, a vast multitude of episodes and ideas that were thoughtful, imaginative, resonant, frightening, exciting, funny and unapologetically weird. It also gave us potato-headed monsters, great snuffling genitalia beasts and men wrapped in tinfoil chasing screaming women around cardboard spaceships.
Even allowing for the technology that was available at the time, and the limited budget, some Who serials looked like they were knocked up by a gang of hobos between bouts of under-bridge boozing. There are episodes in the Classic Who canon that are about as welcome as an actual cannon would be if you found it pointing up at your arse cheeks from the bottom of the toilet bowl seconds before it fired.
I watch an episode from the early years with my kids every morning at breakfast time. They love it, no matter what they see. They’re too young, and their imaginations too immersive, to let a silly little thing like a man in a rubber suit with big googly eyes selotaped on to it ruin their enjoyment.
My partner, though, occasionally wanders in when something really, really, really shit is happening, and she always judges me for it. Like Bonnie Langford screaming as a giant cock waddles towards her; Jon Pertwee’s face bulging out hilariously as a sentient telephone cord tries to strangle him; London being invaded by the shittest dinosaurs ever imagined; Tom Baker being subsumed by a pulsating testicle; a man being eaten by an evil plastic seat; a human eye peering through the neck of the Jagaroth; Sylvester McCoy; Jon Pertwee again, singing a gibberish Welsh lullaby to a man in an unconvincing Singing Telegram costume whilst waving a dentists’ mirror in his face.
‘How can you watch this shit?’ she’ll ask me.
‘How can… YOU… watch this shit?!’ I sputter, flouncing out of the room, all red-faced and agog.
It’s still tough being a geek sometimes.
And don’t you forget it.
Please feel free to recommend your own most cringe-worthy moments from otherwise serviceable fantasy and sci-fi shows in the comments below, or over on the Facebook page.