FILMS and TV are often desperate for you to like certain characters, but balls it up so badly you’re praying for them to die horribly. Here are some deeply unloved creations.
She-Hulk
She’s a sassy career woman struggling to juggle work, a personal life and being a hulk. God, that sounds shit written down. The main character is annoyingly bubble-headed (not ideal if she’s your defence lawyer) and the show is comedy grafted onto the frequently serious Marvel Universe, which has all the appeal of Del Boy popping up in The Long Good Friday.
Any character in Bread
Ar Joey, ar Aveline, ar Billy, ar Jack, ar Granddad – they’re all so annoying and contrived you want them to suffer and die then be resurrected to suffer some more. ‘Thatcher should have been a lot tougher on the fiddling Scouse dole scum of the 80s’ is probably not the message Carla Lane intended. Maybe she was a Tory plant.
Forrest Gump
Our cruel, capricious, cynical world seen through the eyes of the ultimate naif. Unfortunately Forrest’s extremely low IQ means he understands nothing, except some dubious crap about chocolates. He may as well have ended up in a Viet Cong POW camp during the Vietnam bit – he’d probably have been perfectly happy tucking into his free rice and talking to his new maggot friend.
Doctor Who (Northern idiot regeneration)
Oh dear. The children’s TV presenter outfit. The breathless delivery. The tiresome alternating between serious-minded defender of Earth and ‘I’m completely mad, me!’ wackiness. Yep, it’s safe to say the dogshit version of the Doctor handed to Jodie Whittaker in script form ‘divided fans’. Best of all were the pious lectures about such tricky concepts as destroying the environment being bad. Thanks, Doc. I’ll stop dissolving endangered otters in acid right now.
Twiki
Theoretically viewers were going to love this cute little robot from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Two slight problems: he only ever said ‘bedeep bedeep bedeep’, thus limiting his relatability, and his head looked like an engorged glans. Not to be outdone, Battlestar Galactica had a cute, ie. f**king terrifying, robot dog, Muffit II, which looked like a sheepdog had been run over by a lorry and rebuilt with scrap metal parts, and was probably in constant pain and craving death.
Jack Sparrow
He’s so unconventional! He’s so funny! He’s so irritating and we’re only halfway through the first movie! Jack Sparrow is fine when the other characters get plenty to do, but too much Sparrow, as is the case in the later films, becomes like eating too many Haribo – fun at first but three bags later you want to explosively puke your guts up.
Rey Skywalker
There’s a worrying amount of hate directed at Rey by male YouTubers. Maybe Finn being permanently stuck in the friend zone was too close to home. The aim was clearly to create a ‘strong female character’ and everyone took it to mean ‘Rey is ace at everything’. And she is – wielding a lightsaber against trained Sith, flying the Millennium Falcon, bringing people back from the dead. Seriously, if you’re putting together an IKEA wardrobe you should get Rey along. She’d do it in one minute, and she’d have brought her own Allen key.
Howling Mad Murdock
The A-Team’s obligatory comic relief in a show not really noted for its grim seriousness. The comic relief effect was mitigated somewhat by Murdock not being at all funny. Still, an easy mistake to make. Nowadays the makers would think twice about this frankly strange portrayal of mental illness, so thank f**k for humourless woke censorship.
Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch version)
Here’s an idea: why not swap out the traditional suave gentleman sleuth for an arrogant, emotionally strung-out smartarse in an expensive London flat who’s gratuitously unpleasant to ever-loyal Watson? Then when Sherlock solves a puzzle that is pure bullshit – eg. deducing that Moriarty has been in Kenya because he’s slightly taller and gravity is less on the equator – it’ll be the last f**king straw for viewers and they’ll never watch it again.
Jar Jar Binks
George Lucas genuinely believed he’d be bringing joy into the lives of millions of kids with Jar Jar, and the figures would be flying off the shelves faster than factories could make them. Strangely the public wasn’t as keen on a grotesque amphibian in flares with racist undertones. Jar Jar has faced stiff competition in the unpopularity stakes from newer Star Wars characters like Rose Tico, Admiral Holdo and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s L337, but he remains the daddy of unpopular wankers.
