The World According to Gogglebox Read online

  STEPH: … because the majority of them are arseholes. The Fucking Fulfords.

  DOM: Idiots.

  STEPH: And Christine and Neil Hamilton. They’re just hideous. There’s this sort of right to privilege that I think a lot of posh people wander around with. And it’s that, obviously, that people generally hate.

  WHAT DO YOU DISAGREE ON?

  STEPH: He loves Dad’s Army. I can’t fucking stand it. It’s so puerile and basic. Really not very clever.

  DOM: Two and a Half Men is very clever writing.

  STEPH: Can’t stand it. Catherine Tate: she’s great. Catherine Tate makes me change my pants. I love her. And Karl Pilkington. Fucking makes me die laughing. I’m on the floor, feet in the air, howling and howling with laughter. Dom’s looking at me, going, ‘What? There’s nothing funny about that.’

  DOM: You love awkward situations.

  STEPH: Farting jokes still make me laugh. I’m forty-eight and I still find farts funny. If someone farted in my face, I would die laughing. I’d be really upset, but I’d die laughing first. I’d probably watch a channel that was just people farting. And maybe the repeat.

  DOM: On +1.

  STEPH: Bottoms and farts make me laugh.

  DOM: But not burps.

  WOULD YOU NORMALLY WATCH TV TOGETHER?

  DOM: Yes. We enjoy the odd rom-com movie. Steph’s very much into her hospital dramas. We like the occasional period drama – Downton Abbey, Lark Rise to Candleford – and we’re big fans of Midsomer Murders.

  We do like murder mysteries: Body of Evidence, Jonathan Creek, that sort of stuff. I’m quite keen on a bit of comedy, quite like a good laugh: Fast Show-type things. We’re not really very big on sport, the two of us. And because we’ve got kids, watching telly is quite a big part of our lives. But it’s nice to watch what we want to watch, and not necessarily football, football, football, football, football, which is all my son wants to watch.

  ANYTHING YOU’VE MADE YOUR KIDS WATCH?

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  STEPH: Bugsy Malone. Love that film. Jodie Foster and Scott Baio. Lovely film.

  DOM: I thought it was childish shit.

  STEPH: And Fame. I thought, ‘Oh, marvellous,’ because I used to watch it every week. Put the DVD of the film on. My God it’s rude! Effing and fucking and blinding everywhere. Leroy can’t stop himself. I stopped it. I said, ‘You can’t watch this. Not with me sitting here.’ But we did watch Bad Grandpa. Oh my God! He gets his knob caught in the drinks machine. Again, I like knob jokes and bollock jokes, obviously. And there’s me saying I like intelligent humour …

  THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON

  ANDREW: I used to make them watch Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans: classical Greek stuff.

  ALEX: Oh my God! Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. We absolutely love it. We used to re-enact bits.

  ANDREW: ‘Children of the night – kill, kill, kill the bull …’

  CAROLYNE: We were going to call our son Jason at one point.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  KATE: We take great pleasure in introducing our children to classics. One of the privileges of being a parent is sitting them down and going, right, we’re going to watch a film together now. And the film we’re going to watch is Star Wars or Singin’ in the Rain or Forrest Gump – and you put it on and then you watch them watching it. And it’s almost as good – in fact, it’s better than the first time you saw it.

  MADE IN CHELSEA

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  JUNE: You never see a Chelsea Pensioner in Made in Chelsea, do you?

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  BAASIT: I’m sure there’s a word for something like this – you know, when it’s not real, but it is a bit real as well.

  SID: It’s ‘crap’.

  LINDA, GEORGE & PETE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  GEORGE: Spencer is so slippery you would not believe. He’s like a corn on the cob covered in butter. He’s disgusting.

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  JUNE: That’s the first one I’ve ever watched from beginning to end. And it’ll be the last.

  JOEY ESSEX

  THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL

  RALF: And this is someone who really annoying me: Joey Essex.

  EVE: I love him. He’s adorable. I really want to meet him. I want to go and get my teeth whitened with him.

  RALF: But the annoying thing about him is he is clever. Because he is stupid … and he makes money with it. When I saw him on The Cube, they make it really simple for him.

  EVE: ‘Find the big ball, Joey. You’ve got to feel the balls and see which one’s bigger.’

  RALF: Everyone in this room here would pick a ball, yeah, keep it in his hand, and then put another hand in the box … And then we’re looking for a bigger one. But him …

  EVE: I want to go on a shopping trip with him because I’d come back looking like a twat and it’d be dead funny. I’d come back in some leopard print onesie.

  RALF: And he is a fucking millionaire. ‘This is five, this is ten, this is quarter past, you know …’

  VIV: He can tell the time now.

  THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON

  LOUIS: He’s probably gonna be, like, ‘Oh, my nan died of a brain hemisphere.’

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  STEPH: A real idiot abroad.

  I’M A CELEBRITY, GET ME OUT OF HERE!

  LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  PETE: I’m not eating no worms or bugs, or some bleeding kangaroo’s knackers.

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  STEPHEN: But sometimes they do the trial, eat all that shit, and then the thing comes down and it’s crocodile. After eating all that, you’d think they’d give them a bit of chicken, wouldn’t you? Or a bit of beef? Or shepherd’s pie or something?

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: I’d actually love to go in the jungle, but I fundamentally wouldn’t eat any of that shit. I would just be sick. So, the long and the short of it is I’d end up doing all the tasks, and everyone would stop dead, because I would refuse to eat any of that shit.

  LINDA, GEORGE & PETE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  GEORGE: Starve or fucking chuck the spider in your mouth. If you give them a week without any food, they’d eat the fucking spiders without you asking them.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: QI. We’re very big on QI.

  STEPH: I’m not clever enough for that.

  DOM: Yes, you are.

  STEPH: Absolutely not. I’d be completely overwhelmed. Blankety Blank, maybe. Or 3-2-1.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  KATE: The One Show. And Loose Women, just because I’d like to challenge them on my feminist principles.

  GRAHAM: Countryfile.

  KATE: No! I’d shoot myself in the head if I had to do Countryfile. And the same for Songs of Praise. If ever I’m on Songs of Praise you have the right to kill me.

  I hate Songs of Praise. It’s great for people who can’t get out and go to church – that’s lovely, and people can have a nice singalong. But it perpetuates the myth that the church is still the same place as 1951, and it’s not. Vicars don’t ride around on bicycles any more in their cassocks. We’ve moved on.

  I’d like to challenge religious broadcasting, actually. (Gosh, that’s a big statement, isn’t it? Flipping heck.) I’d like to see some religious broadcasting that is actually relevant and applicable and is not piecemeal – the nod to the religious budget that the BBC or whichever channel seems to have. I mean, Rev is more authentic religious broadcasting than Songs of Praise, I would argue.

  GRAHAM: I’d be on Grand Designs.

  KATE: I’d like to be a zombie in Rev. In fact, they could do the apocalypse in Rev. They could actually do the day of judgement. How cool would that be?

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  CHRIS: I’d love to do something like 60 Minute Makeover. Get bloody Peter Andre off it, because he can’t even u
se a drill. Imagine if they brought back Changing Rooms. That’d be really, really good.

  STEPHEN: Yeah … I don’t think I’d do that with you, because I once decorated my bedroom in five different shades of green. It was fucking vile. I’d do some sort of travel show. Try and be the next Judith Chalmers. I’ve got the fucking tits for it.

  CHRIS: We’d be really good at something like that Tom Daley show, where he’s going round with his mate. We’ve been on a few holidays, haven’t we? Especially the time when we were in bloody Egypt and we were on that doughnut thing …

  STEPHEN: We were on this thing that pulls you along the water and I thought I was going to fucking die. It went round and round and I shot off into the air and I was in the air long enough to think, I’m going to break my neck when I hit that water, and when I hit the water it went THUMP! And took me shorts clean off.

  CHRIS: So if we did a travel show, I’d want it to be more a cross between An Idiot Abroad and Bear Grylls.

  STEPHEN: A Bare Idiot.

  The Moffatts

  COUNTY DURHAM

  The Moffatts are Mark, 48, Betty, 44, and Scarlett, 23.

  Mark works as a fabricator welder and Betty manages

  a shop. Their daughter Scarlett graduated from York

  St John’s University with a 2:1 in Sports and Teaching,

  and they have one younger daughter, Eva, who is

  seven. The family live in County Durham.

  HOW DID YOU MEET?

  BETTY: Through mutual friends. We met on a night out, but we already knew each other.

  SCARLETT: They’ve been together since my mam was, like, eighteen, and yet they only got married last year.

  BETTY: So, on our first wedding anniversary, we’d been together twenty-five years. We always were going to get married, it was just always something that we put off. Just never got round to it.

  MARK: Why fix something’s that not broken, I always say? The reason we got married was that the top table was getting smaller, wasn’t it?

  BETTY: He wanted to get married before he was completely bald. And then it was a leap year, so I said to you, ‘Shall we just get married?’ So we did. We didn’t go on honeymoon, because we got married on 29 December, just after Christmas, so it was a straight-back-to-work-two-days-later type of thing. So, I’m still owed one.

  HOW DID YOU GET ON GOGGLEBOX?

  SCARLETT: Someone I know from college was working on the show. And I didn’t even tell these two that I’d put ourselves forward for it. Literally a couple of hours before they came, I was like, ‘Oh, what are you doing this afternoon?’ She was like, ‘Oh, I’m not working.’ I said, ‘Come home on your dinner hour because Gogglebox are going to come round.’

  MARK: It was just dropped on us. To be honest with you, I thought, ‘Ah, it’s just one of Scarlett’s wind-ups.’

  BETTY: Me and Mark, we’ve watched it from the beginning. I said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to watch this programme, it’s so funny. It sounds boring, you’re watching people watching TV, but it’s really, really, really funny.’ So when they asked us, I don’t suppose we thought about it that hard. I think if I’d had weeks and weeks to think about it, I might have backed out.

  HAD YOU BEEN ON TV BEFORE?

  SCARLETT: I was on a programme on MTV, called Beauty School. So I knew, on TV, you need to keep talking, because they can’t edit silence. So I was quite clued up, but these two were just a bit gormless.

  MARK: The camera was there, and I was leaning over, to keep out of shot. Subconsciously I was, like, getting out of the way. And they kept saying, ‘Look, move back in, can’t you?’

  WHAT WAS YOUR FAMILY’S REACTION?

  BETTY: We’re just ourselves. The people that know us know. My sister watches it, thinking, ‘That’s my sister, and my niece, and my brother-in-law.’ Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Oh, Scarlett was picking on you last night.’ But, you know, nothing new in that, really.

  BEING RECOGNISED

  SCARLETT: We walked out of the library after this charity night, and this man – no joke – he just pointed and went, ‘Gogglebox!’ I was, like, ‘That’s rude!’ It happens when I’m out and people are drunk, and they think they know you. We went to the Metro Centre, and people talk and talk, and then I’m, like, ‘It’s been ten minutes … We need to go … ’ I’m like, ‘Howay man, you’re going to do this to every person that’s talking to us, you’d never get anything done.’

  WHAT DO YOU THINK

  OF YOURSELVES ON SCREEN?

  SCARLETT: When I saw us on telly, I wanted to hide.

  BETTY: I don’t wear much make-up as a rule, but for the show I took what I had off. Now I always wear my hair up and no make-up.

  MARK: When I watched myself, I was, like, ‘I really have no hair.’ I’m contemplating shaving the lot off, you know?

  WOULD YOU NORMALLY WATCH

  TV TOGETHER?

  SCARLETT: We watch the soaps together. Well, me and Mam’ll watch EastEnders, but he’ll fall asleep. But he’ll be in the room. If that counts. But we will watch anything to do with aliens and UFOs.

  BETTY: These two are into conspiracy theories.

  MARK: I got our Scarlett into it years ago.

  SCARLETT: Anything. What was that thing we were watching? It was really good. It was about Queen Elizabeth, wasn’t it?

  MARK: About Queen Elizabeth I being a man.

  SCARLETT: It was so interesting, honestly. It made sense, didn’t it?

  MARK: Our Scarlett doesn’t believe we’ve been to the moon.

  SCARLETT: Yeah. Anything to do with the moon, I get a bit obsessed.

  MARK: Now I’m starting to think we have done.

  SCARLETT: No.

  BETTY: I don’t care.

  SCARLETT: I’m into conspiracy theories because I like to think that what we’re being told isn’t real. People think that I’m stupid because I’m, like, ‘No, this isn’t right.’ And I think that they’re stupid for just believing everything that they hear. So who’s the stupid one, really?

  BETTY: You can’t say anything but she’ll say the government’s covering it up.

  SCARLETT: There’s a conspiracy theory for almost everything. Fluoride in the water and all that, and, like, they have a cure for cancer, but they’re just not telling it because they get too much money out of all of it. I could go on for ever.

  BETTY: But her ideas …

  SCARLETT: I think it’s even more scary to think that we’re in this universe by ourselves. Like, you would like to think that there was someone else there, because it’s scary to think we’re all alone. But no one else sees it like that. Apart from me dad. So there you go. And me mam just sits and laughs at us when we talk about it.

  MARK: We heard there was a crop circle up in Shildon, so we went up there. It gives you goose bumps when you walk into one. I know it sounds a bit mad, but if you like that sort of thing, you like it. It would be boring if everybody was the same, wouldn’t it?

  MERMAIDS

  SCARLETT: My dad made a forum about mermaids. It was really interesting.

  BETTY: How sad’s that?

  SCARLETT: It’s not sad though, mam!

  BETTY: What’s wrong with your head?

  SCARLETT: There’s nothing wrong with us. What’s wrong with you?

  MARK: There’s loads of evidence that there is mermaids.

  SCARLETT: You know, not like Little Mermaid mermaids.

  BETTY: They’ve not got long hair, or shell bras, have they, Mark?

  MARK: Hybrids from Atlantis or something like that. You know what I mean?

  SCARLETT: They found skeletons, didn’t they?

  MARK: There’s cave drawings in Egypt of us fighting creatures in the water. Driving spears in them.

  SCARLETT: In the pyramids. And they look like mermaids.

  BETTY: Everyone’s going to think, ‘What a load of idiots.’

  DOGS: THEIR SECRET LIVES

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  BAASIT: How secret c
an the life of a dog be? They’re just stuck indoors all day, aren’t they?

  UMAR: The British do love their dogs like no other nation, really. I mean, the Chinese like dogs as well, but not in the same way.

  LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  GEORGE: Do you think dogs think you’re mad when you’re picking up their shit? They think, ‘What the fuck’s he doing?’

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  STEPHEN: We should get a dog. You can run around like a big Mary-Anne with it.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  KATE: Everyone goes on about Buster’s gonads, and Buster and his furry purse. He’s five this year. Ex-racing dog. One of the great things about Twitter was that we didn’t know any of his history at all. We just knew that he couldn’t race, and the one time he did, he ran into the wall, that was all. And through his Twitter account, someone got in touch and said, ‘They have tattoos in their ears, racing dogs.’ So we gave them his number and within five minutes we’d got his parents’ names, his family tree, his racing name and a photo of him as a puppy. Isn’t that great? It was quite emotional. I got quite tearful. It was canine Who Do You Think You Are? And then all of a sudden people started messaging going, I’m your cousin, and I’m your brother, I’m your half-sister. I’m your this, I’m your that – and before long, he’d got this whole Twitter thing of his long-lost family. His racing name was Felltop Chaos. It’s quite grand really, isn’t it, for Buster? We would not have called him Buster. We would have called him Heston. We like Heston Blumenthal. I’d quite like to lick his wallpaper. That’s not a euphemism.