Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn

Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn

 

Title Page
Dedication
Foreword By Graham Linehan
Introduction
Prelude: Pre-Screen
Part One
Part Two
Three 2002 
Part Four 2003
Part Five 2004
Screen Burn FAQ
Index
By the Same Author
About the Author
Copyright

Imagine watching television for a living.

You wake up, you’re at work. Your boss (you) has no problems with his sole employee (also you) sitting in a cornflake-spattered T-shirt and undies while trying to focus on
Trisha
. You don’t feel guilty watching
Trisha
because it is your job to watch
Trisha
. If you weren’t watching
Trisha
, you wouldn’t be doing your job! A dream ticket! The perfect crime!

But there’s something shifting and swirling in the pit of your stomach. You were up late last night, watching a page-3 girl eating a maggot (it was your job to watch that too). That was followed by a programme in which people described catching rare genital diseases while on holiday. And then there was that show in which an elderly woman demonstrated her blowjob technique on a brightly-coloured dildo while a studio audience went into spasms of delight and her son (her son!) shook his head, laughed and pretended to enjoy himself?

Your breakfast, you now realise, hasn’t gone anywhere.

An explanation. During the time that Charlie Brooker was writing these pieces for the
Guardian
, British television underwent a reverse evolution. Early pioneers on shows like
Eurotrash
and
The
Word
showed that there was an audience for pure, 100 per cent, evil, ugly, drunken cak, and others took that ball and ran with it, and so here we are. Television has a curved spine, a jutting lower jaw and its knuckles are red and raw from being dragged along the ground. It’s as if someone, somewhere said, ‘Why isn’t British television more like Italian television?’ and was promoted rather than slapped across the face.

Good, attention-grabbing television is achieved in one of two ways. The first is quite complicated and involves a certain amount of expertise behind and in front of the camera. A memorable production  might involve a strong cast, a timely subject and a director who knows how to tell a story. Or it could require years spent waiting with a movement-sensitive camera for a crab to crawl onto a beach at exactly the right time and impregnate a turtle.

The second way is simpler and currently very much in vogue. Basically, you get a few
Big Brother
contestants, dress them up in school uniforms, give them enough booze to make a table stagger, and hope that security steps in before someone gets raped or killed.

Disasterporn, funography … Call it what you will, to be a TV critic at this point is to be subjected to the sort of imagery that previously only film censors of the seventies and eighties had to endure. You need the sort of reckless disregard for your own sanity shared by war photographers and people who have to work with Elton John. You need a very special sort of person, someone who has the ability to stare into the abyss and, when it stares back, make it look away in shame. If this were a trailer for a big US film, this would be the moment when the President looks just to the right of the camera and says ‘Get me Brooker.’

Imagine Charlie’s surprise when television started mirroring his entirely made-up ‘TV Go Home’ satirical website. Imagine how that felt – conceiving an imaginary TV show so appalling that it bends your brain like a Gellerspoon and then turning on the TV to find that programme is on after the news. That’s why only he has the undercarriage to do this job; anything television throws at Charlie, Charlie throws right back. How he has maintained his sense of humour is beyond me, but somehow he has managed it. It is now at such a keen pitch, in fact, that the mere idea of Charlie reviewing certain shows is enough to make me laugh. Anyone who calls Tiff Needall Tiff “Quick Turn Over” Needall needs no lessons from the Chuckle Brothers on how to provoke a laugh. Anyone who points out that Ross Kemp could stare out a man with two glass eyes doesn’t need an introduction from the likes of me. (As I write, my wife is reading through Charlie’s columns nearby. She’s laughing like a drain … a fleeting happiness soon to be violently cut short by my asking her to review this foreword.)

Charlie is the funniest TV writer around, and the only person who truly understands British telly as it is in these final years before the world ends. This is not something to be envied. Spare a thought for him now, because as you read this, he is probably watching a programme in which a party of celebrities need to eat each other’s eyes in order to win a dildo.

He watches these things so we don’t have to. Bless him for that.

 Apart from a stint behind the counter at Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill Gate, every job I’ve ever had has come about by accident. Writing ‘Screen Burn’ was no exception.

It was the year 2000, and I was writing a website called ‘TV Go Home’, which consisted of nothing but spoof TV listings. These were the kind of hoary old whimsy you used to find in
Not the Nine
O’Clock News
spin-off books several decades ago, but because it was on the Internet and was jam-packed with foul language, it was considered shocking and cutting-edge. This was just before the dot.com bubble burst, naturally – a feverish time when even a cross-eyed farmhand could be valued at billions if he put on a foil hat and claimed to be a pixel.

Furthermore, because ‘TV Go Home’ often laid into people in the media, people in the media
really
enjoyed it, because every single one of them secretly hates themself and wants to die, or should do.

Thanks to all of the above, I was now so cool and underground and bleeding-edge, the
Guardian
invited me to pen a few articles about television for their G2 section. Shortly afterwards, when the
Guide
’s Jim Shelley decided to stop writing his excellent ‘Tapehead’ column, they tried me out in the same slot. And I’ve clung on, like a desiccated tagnut ever since.

Still, I may have become a TV critic unintentionally, but I picked an interesting time to fall into it. The first series of
Big Brother
was broadcast in the summer of 2000, marking the start of the reality TV boom, and, in a roundabout way, the beginning of an era during which TV finally jettisoned any pretence at being an important, socially beneficial medium and simply concentrated on sticking its bum in our face and giggling.

Or did it? In fact, alongside the attention-grabbing luridness, there were arguably more high-quality shows on our screens during  the 2000–2004 period than ever before (the majority of them, admittedly, were American). But you won’t find much praise in this book, largely because good shows are far duller to read or write about than the rubbish, the stupid, the grotesque or the gaudy.

You don’t need me to tell you how good
The Sopranos
is. In fact, you don’t need me to tell you anything, and I’d have to be a pompous little tugwad to think otherwise. The bits that matter are the jokes, the stupid asides and the odd bit of savagery.

Speaking of which, looking back through these columns, I finally understand why the editor keeps complaining about the amount of violent scatology that creeps in: I can’t even review, say, a simple cookery programme without veering off at a tangent about someone getting a spoon rammed down their pisshole, or up their bum, or down their pisshole
and
up their bum. I counted ten separate and entirely needless references to people shitting pine cones, most of which I’ve now removed in a desperate bid to appear less bum-fixated. There are other recurring obsessions too – Peter Sissons, petri dishes, made-up videogames, bizarre acts of violence … But I’ll shut up now and let you stumble across them for yourself. Enjoy the book.

It’s bye-bye to TV’s Mr Boo Hoo. After twelve years of unrelenting gloom, Ricky Butcher, Walford’s human raincloud, has finally had enough.

‘There’s nothing left for me here,’ he keeps muttering, intermittently performing that funny swallowing, gulping, staring-from-side-to-side thing he does whenever he wants us to know he’s really upset. He’s leaving Albert Square the only way he could: in unfettered misery.

Ricky stumbled onto our screens in 1988, and fate has pissed mercilessly into his eyes ever since. It’s been nothing but disappointment, heartbreak, humiliation and plodding, battleship-grey drudgery. And while he may not have suffered with dignity (there’s nothing dignified about him) he has at least avoided pulling an ‘Arthur Fowler’ and plunging into full-blown mental unhingery. Until now.

Previously, Ricky coped with life’s bleaker interludes by slumping morosely on the special ‘crisis’ bench in Albert Square gardens, peering into the depths of an abyss he’s simply too dim to understand.

Now, with pro-am cuckolder Dan contesting ownership of his dad’s pub, and estranged wife Bianca happily settled in Manchester with baby Liam, Ricky’s finally overdosing on despair.

Tuesday night’s episode in particular contained scenes of harrowing indignity on a par with the infamous male rape scene from
the film
Scum
: Ricky on his hands and knees cleaning a pub toilet; Ricky watching his own sister flirt with Dan; Ricky having his IQ compared to that of a mop by the notoriously half-witted Barry Evans, while the entire population of the Square stood laughing in his face. All that was missing was a sequence in which he found himself unpleasantly surprised by an empty toilet-roll dispenser and forced to frog-hop around the Vic in search of a crumpled beer mat to wipe himself with.

In tonight’s episode, Ricky finally breaks down and confesses to feeling suicidal. And what precisely does he have to live for anyway? Not love. There are backward farmhands with more successful private lives.

It’s hard to see why. Despite having all the charm of a bit of old flannel hanging off a bush, Ricky is at least blessed with intriguing looks.