While watching the latest Chuck last night (‘Chuck Versus Tom Sawyer’, which, knowing UK TV, aired sometime last year in the USA), Missile Command became a major plot point. Chuck (the show) is harmless fun, but it did highlight a problem in taking history and messing with the truth with merry abandon.

The episode was mostly quite well-written and the revisions not nearly as irksome as, say, Titanic taking First Officer William Murdoch and turning a guy who saved lives into a murderer, but I was nonetheless decidedly uncomfortable at times. The reason? Missile Command is essentially a pacifist game. As ex-Atari guy Greg Rivera mentioned to me in a recent interview: “One of the goals [of the Missile Command team] was to teach the futility of war. No-one ever won Missile Command,” adding that there’s no ‘game over’ in the production, just an ominous ‘THE END’ when all your cities are destroyed. In Chuck, however, Dave Theurer is turned into Atari’s Japanese chief engineer, with terrorist ties.

All shows take liberties with history, and I’m sure no malice was intended by the scriptwriters. But in an increasingly hostile age, it’s a shame to see a fantastic satirical, pacifist statement by a true giant of classic videogames misrepresented in such major fashion. Then again, the concept of a living, breathing, vibrant and bustling Atari HQ in the USA almost makes up for it.

When Tim Kring’s Heroes first aired on British TV, I admit I was hooked. Despite being in my 30s, I’m a big fan of comic books (albeit mostly those written by Brits, and not the ‘superhero’ genre), and this series looked like it could be an exciting and different television adventure.

Initially, this was the case. Although lumbered with a US-style season, there was relatively little padding, and a genuine feeling that anything could happen. The nature of the series—combining various elements of ‘real life’ drama, superhero-style powers but without the ‘superhero’, sci-fi and imagination—meant I always tuned in to see what would happen next, and the series culminated in a suitably satisfying finale.

Since then, it’s all gone a bit wrong, and I found myself genuinely bored with the last series of Heroes far too often. I think I know what the problem is: Heroes has become too much like a US superhero comic book.

Some explanation is clearly needed here, so: generally, in British comics a character gets killed and stays dead. There’s mercifully little retconning, and stories are typically pretty linear, taking into account past history. Things happen and they affect what subsequently happens. In the traditional US superhero comic, this isn’t the case. Major characters are often killed off (such as in the Death of Superman) or their histories massively changed on a whim (such as in Spider-Man: Brand New Day), largely to boost sales, after which point there’s usually a return to the status quo via typically convoluted means.

The difference is stark: in the UK, you never entirely know who’s going to be safe; in the US, even death is not the end. Sadly, the US model is now endemic in Heroes. The stars have become too big and the characters are too popular, and so Kring and his team refuse to take risks. Only minor characters get the chop (in fact, they might as well dress them in Star Trek-style red jerseys), while the writers dream up increasingly implausable means of bringing back the leads time and time again. Net result: you know that major character will almost always survive, which leads to a lack of tension in the series, no real suspension of disbelief, and, eventually, boredom.

If Heroes could inject a little more of the British sensibility into its ethos, it would become more like the show I always assumed it was trying to be: “What if these people exited in the real world?” As it is, we’re increasingly getting a marginally more plausible version of X-Men, crossed with the worst facet of Star Trek, and sooner or later that’s going to drive even relativly dedicated fans away.

This is the news!

Being late to the party, I just watched Newswipe while eating breakfast, thereby setting myself up to be thoroughly confused for the rest of the day. Superficially, the show is like a news-oriented version of Brooker’s first-rate TV-bashing Screenwipe being smashed into The Daily Show with a hammer.

Although superior to previous BBC4 Daily Show wannabe The Late Edition—primarily a vehicle for Marcus Brigstocke to be smug and patronising, and Steve Furst to be as unfunny as humanely possible—Newswipe at times left me bewildered, and may just be the instrument that propels reality into a whirling vortex of postmodern news doom.

The problem with Newswipe is the news itself. When Chris Morris parodied the genre, in 1994, via The Day Today, he was remarkably prescient, but still able to stroke the absurd stick until it burst, exaggerating every aspect of the news to comic effect. Unfortunately, the news subsequently became The Day Today. While idiots in 1994 somehow mistook the Morris show for real news (“Sacked chimney sweep pumps boss full of mayonnaise”/”Headmaster jailed for using big-faced child as satellite dish”), today, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the real from the fake, such is the flash, sound-bite-oriented, ratings-grabbing and absurd nature of modern news broadcasting.

And so with Brooker, the show begins with him being Chris Morris (the newsreader and the comedian), talking in Chris Morris fashion about real news, which is being portrayed in a manner like The Day Today, without irony, and continues to dissect news broadcasts that look like they’re written by Chris Morris by highlighting the absurd nature of them by sometimes being Chris Morris and by sometimes being absurd.

Overall, the show—bar the odious poetry section—is still worth a look. Brooker’s entertaining, and he briefly waggles his fact muffin to debunk a few of the wilder news claims. But I couldn’t help feeling that the show is almost redundant. The news has become a parody of itself, and trying to create a comedy vehicle around it (albeit one concentrating on satire and deconstruction) results in the frustration of a show being slightly drier and more serious than what it’s reporting on, which is supposed to be dry and serious in the first place, but isn’t.

It’s enough to make your brain hurt.

The latest Popbitch reports on a new BBC3 ‘observational gameshow’, Clever vs. Stupid. Apparently, it sets challenges for two teams, one formed from stereotypically clever people (academics) and one from stupid people (presumably, chavs, tactfully referred to on the show as ‘stupids’).

Unless I’ve taken leave of my senses, isn’t this the original pitch for QI, but without the amusing celeb types (clever or otherwise)? Still, good to see BBC3 has enough time for recycling panel show ideas and making them worse, rather than just being busy ruining perfectly good pilot shows by removing the darkness and ideally suited actors.

No wonder Chris Morris had trouble funding his upcoming Jihadi comedy (see Warp films for the latest—more positive—development)—satire, it seems, is dead.

I recently moaned about the unbelievably stupid, over-the-top public reaction to Brand and Ross’s telephone prank, where tens of thousands of people who hadn’t witnessed the incident nonetheless complained, which has led to the powers-that-be saying we need a register of ‘high risk’ programmes. Whether this means killing something like Brass Eye (or even Mock the Week) at birth remains to be seen—probably, as we enter another Mary Whitehouse era.

However, what totally bowled me over today is how, without even a hint of irony, ITV replaced Jonathan Ross with Angus Deayton at the Comedy Awards. For those of you with memories presumably as short as ITV’s, Deayton was kicked off Have I Got News For You? six years back after revelations regarding links with prostitutes and cocaine. Therefore, they’ve replaced a disgraced presenter who was rude to an old man with one who once had a penchant for ladies of the night and sniffing exciting white powder.

It’s quite possible the Daily Mail and all its readers will self-combust upon hearing the news. Good.