Cuppliance

All contestants have to drink it. It’s a compulsory mood stabilizer. More to the point it stops you puking with nerves.

In late nougthie and early teen Britain, the entertainment landscape looked a lot different than it does today. Every Saturday night was a bloated, pyrotechnic-heavy karaoke nightmare, led by bitch-titted grumblewank Simon Cowell and assorted chirruping NPCs like Louis Walsh, Dannii Minogue and Tulisa Contostavlos. And just to be clear; if the latter two of these lot think you can sing, you should probably just pack it in and throw yourself into the nearest ravine. Likewise, Walsh… though I wouldn’t take *anything* that he says seriously. The man looks like a Henson Workshop reject that has partially melted after being left on a radiator for too long.

So after a roughly a decade of this neon-splattered freakshow, people started to get a bit fucked off with it. Rage Against the Machine hit number one at Christmas and in 2011, this episode was aired directly after the X factor final. And it pulled no punches. The protagonist Bing (played by Get Out hero Daniel Kaluuya) made no bones about it: he’d rather slice up his own neck than have to sit through anymore of this sob-story driven popularity contest arse. Though, to be fair, in the show they do turn Abi – the woman he loves – into a porn actress and then force him to watch her perform. Which smarts a bit.

Anyway, Hot Shots is obviously the X Factor here and once a performer is vetted, they’re given a mandatory hit of ‘Cuppliance’ before they do their stint. The stuff seems to be some kind of inhibitor drug so that the person on stage doesn’t go mental and smash the place up. Bing circumvents this by keeping Abi’s old carton of the stuff and claiming to a floor manager that he’s already had some before he goes on.

His story arc is a clear nod to the 1976 film ‘Network‘ – something that Charlie Brooker had mentioned being a fan of in Screewipe almost a decade before. In that film, Howard Beale is about to get replaced as a news anchor, so goes off on a vein-bulging rant about how shit everything is. People are surprisingly receptive and as such, his ranting then *becomes* the show. And as such he’s forced to compromise and it just ends up as watered down and fake as it ever was.

The logo is a replication from the show, as you see the Cuppliance logo on the floor at one point, so I’ve smartened it up and given it a bit of extra, adding the Hot Shots logo on a sticker, along with the broadcast date. Also, the number 324 is Bing’s bike number, as shown many times in close up on the programme.

Incidentally, this is a fully funtioning barcode. If you can work out what it does, I will legit give you a discount to this product if you contact me with the correct answer.