I can make you hate
Read I can make you hate Online
Authors: Charlie Brooker
CHARLIE BROOKER
For Covey
In which the author has an out-of-body experience, is shaken to discover that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is slightly younger than he is, and decides there is too much ‘stuff’ in the world.
In which Jedward are born, Dubai is revealed to be a figment of the world’s imagination, and snow falls from the sky to the amazement of Britain’s rolling news networks.
In which Paddy McGuinness gets flushed down a tube, the Cameron era creeps closer, crisps are eaten and newspapers are likened to a narcotic.
In which Katie Price takes on the afterlife, some white supremacists show off in prison, and cows stare at you. Just stare at you.
In which a mosque is not built at Ground Zero, everyone in the world is strangled, and Screen Burn comes to an end.
In which
EastEnders
is revealed to be a work of fiction, Nick Clegg worries about human beings with feet, and a teenager incurs the wrath of the internet for singing a bad song badly.
In which tabloid journalists make the world worse, Ed Miliband tumbles into a vortex, and cars are driven too quickly.
In which David Cameron is a lizard.
In which Sonic the Hedgehog’s sexual orientation goes under the microscope, a man in a penguin suit proves surprisingly popular, and idiots salivate over an arse that isn’t there.
This book contains a lot of words, each of which had to be typed by hand. Consider that next time you’re complaining about writing not being a proper job.
All the words in this book were individually typed, letter
by-letter
– see what I mean about the truly gargantuan level of effort involved? – between August 2009 and July 2012.
And as you will soon discover, some of them weren’t merely typed, but were then fed into an autocue and read aloud on television. That’s an unnecessarily opaque way of saying ‘I’ve included bits of scripts from some TV shows I was on.’
My previous collections of scribble have alternated chapters full of TV review columns with other, more general writings. But since I quit writing the
Screen Burn
column roughly halfway through this book, this time around everything’s presented in chronological order, unfurling like a long, inky turd.
Not that you have to sit down and read it all in sequence. I recommend dipping in at random. Easy if you’re reading this on paper: not so simple if you’ve chosen the snazzy and futuristic ‘ebook’ edition. Unless I’m mistaken, ebooks don’t yet offer you the option to read books in ‘shuffle’ mode, on the basis that the result would be meaningless chaos, unless you’re reading
The Way I See It
by Sir Alan Sugar, in which case it’s a stunning improvement.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the book. Don’t take anything in it too seriously, and don’t glue it to the end of a Kalashnikov and carry out an atrocity. Apart from that, do what you want with it. It’s yours now.
Charlie Brooker,
London, 2012
In which the author has an out-of-body experience, is shaken to discover that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is slightly younger than he is, and decides there is too much ‘stuff
’ in the world.
23/08/2009
Try not to bellow with fear and/or excitement, but video screens are coming to magazines. Next month, thousands of copies of vapid US showbiz journal
Entertainment Weekly
will contain a slimline electronic display capable of showing forty minutes of video, activated when you open the magazine. As an added bonus, if you dip it in the bath while reading it, you’ll instantly win a free forty-minute full-body electroconvulsive therapy session (although sadly, for legal reasons, I have to point out that isn’t true).
This tragic news is no surprise. Screens have us surrounded.
Last week I stood on a tube platform watching a Persil commercial being digitally projected in HD on to the opposite wall, to give me something to stare at while waiting for my delayed train. It showed gurgling kiddywinks in polar-white clothes gambolling in a field at the height of summer, tumbling and rolling and skipping and laughing, as if the sheer supernatural luminance of their outfits had somehow short-circuited their minds.
The contrast between the faces in the advert and the faces on the platform couldn’t have been more marked. In the advert, all smiles. On the platform, morose expressions laminated by a thin sheen of grime and sweat; hangdog mugs smeared with London.
There’s no air-con on the underground, so on a hot day people quickly resemble clothed piglets trapped in a can waiting for the air to run out. In these circumstances, the Persil ad was downright sarcastic; not a harmless video, but a magic window showing what life could be, if only you weren’t stuck in a stinking, clammy pipe, jostling for space with fellow victims.
The underground also has video adverts lining the escalators. Where once stood rows of little posters with the occasional blob of dried chewing gum stuck to the nose of a beaming model, now stand rows of plasma screens displaying animated versions of movie posters and slogans for chain stores, and no one knows where to stick their gum any more because the pictures slide around.
It’s impossible not to be slightly impressed, not to think, ‘Ooh, I’m in
Minority Report
,’ even as you glide by for the 10,000th time. The screens seem to belong there more than the real people trundling past them. Ad-world looks so vivid and clean, we humans are grotty streaks in a toilet pan by comparison.
They should ban us flesh-scum from using the escalators, and lovingly place glossy examples of technology on there instead: MacBooks, iPods, shiny white smoothie makers, Xbox 360s and so on; one brilliant white machine quietly perched atop each step, screens advertising
Ice Age 3D
mirrored in their gleaming minimalist surfaces as they scroll steadily upwards, ascending into the light. Hey, it’s their destiny. We can use the stairs.
At London’s Westfield shopping centre – picture the Duty Free section of a twenty-second-century spaceport – a series of ‘
information
centres’ vaguely resembling giant iPhones stand dotted around the echoing floorspace.
If you want to know where to buy some jeans, simply tap the interactive touchscreen and it instantly returns 500 different store names with step-by-step directions on how to find them.
And if you want to know where to buy a radio or some comics or maybe just something with a bit of character to it, simply tap it again and it’ll sit there ignoring you; judging you somehow, like a mutely brooding obelisk – until you can’t bear the chill any longer and run screaming from the complex, passing across 2,000 CCTV screens as you go.
If a Victorian gentleman arrived in present-day London, he’d think we’d been invaded by glowing rectangles. The average single
Londoner’s day runs as follows: you wake up and watch a screen until it tells you it’s time to leave the house, at which point you step outside (appearing on a CCTV screen the moment you do so), catch a bus (with an LED screen on the outside and an LCD screen on the inside) to the tube station (giant screens outside; screens down the escalator; projected screens on the platform), to sit on a train and fiddle with your iPod (via the screen), arrive at the office (to stare at a screen all day), then head home to split your attention between the internet (the screen on your lap) and the TV (the screen in the corner) and your mobile (a handheld screen you hold conversations with).
All we city dwellers need is a screen to have sex with and the circle is complete. Panasonic is doubtless perfecting some hideous LCD orifice technology as we speak. Probably one that makes 3D adverts appear in your head at the point of orgasm. Coco Pops are so chocolatey they even turn the milk brown. Now pass me a tissue.
The absolute omnipresence of screens is still a recent occurrence – they’ve only become totally unavoidable in the last four years or so – but already I’m utterly acclimatised. When I venture into the moist green countryside, the lack of screens is stunning. I stare at wooden pub signs with dumb incomprehension.
The King’s Head? Is that a film? Why isn’t he moving? Is it a film about a king who can’t move?
When a cow saunters by without so much as a single plasma display embedded in its hide, I instinctively film it on my phone, so I can see it on a screen where it won’t freak me out. Then I email a recording to the folks back home, so they can look it up online and tell me what it is. Ooh: apparently it’s a type of animal. I get it now, now it’s on my screen.
Yes. Screens. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a screen pissing illuminated phosphor into a human face – forever.
28/08/2009
Animals, all of us: dying, desperate animals, alone in our skulls, in our souls, quietly tortured by our foreknowledge of death,
wandering
a mindless rock, baying with pain or killing each other.
That’s the working week. Come Saturday we crave relief. Slumped, defeated in the corner, our flagellated cadavers scarcely held together by the gentle cocooning pressure of our armchairs, wearily we pivot our milky, despairing eyes in the direction of our television sets, seeking consolation or distraction or maybe just a little inconsequential merriment: a dab of balm to spread on these anguished bones, this empty heart.
And this is what you give us, universe? You give us
The X Factor
?
It doesn’t even work right now.
The X Factor
is broken. They’ve changed the audition process. Bye bye claustrophobic rehearsal room, hello cavernous stadium. The wannabe singers used to perform
a cappella
in front of four poker-faced judges; now they have to perform karaoke in front of a thousand mooing wankers. The programme may have been a cruel machine before, but at least it worked. This latest build is a mess.
