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The Guardian's Charlie Brooker |
Hell hath no fury like a Brooker scorned
Charlie Brooker’s column is a beautifully lurid commentary on everyday life – but his vitriol is best enjoyed in small doses, writes Richard Osley
The Hell of it All.
By Charlie Brooker.
Faber and Faber £12.99
HE'S top stuff – even if the mumbling, jealous critics will say the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker, for all his talent and imagination, picks on easy targets. Like dunderhead contestants on The Apprentice, judges on telly talent competitions and reporters struggling to cope with the pressure of keeping round the clock news channels rolling by plebbledashing.
Plebbledashing? That’s a word he dreamed up, meaning “to bulk up television news reports with needless vox-pop soundbites from ill-informed members of the public”.
You can find it in Brooker’s new media dictionary section of his new book, The Hell Of It All, and sits alongside “Inspector Google” (meaning: an allegedly investigative reporter who relies solely on the internet) and “broverkill” (to be almost but not quite as bored of listening to people talk about how they don’t watch Big Brother as the continued existence of the programme itself).
I wonder if he has a word for a newspaper columnist who can perform the trick of getting paid for the same work twice.
With this new hardback brick, he revives all of his Guardian work since August 2007 and his acerbic TV reviews, with only a few minor amendments.
You can understand him wanting to strike while the iron is hot. Not only do some of his comments on recent television feel time-sensitive – nobody’s going to care whether or not Ben from The Apprentice looks like “a He-Man figurine with the head of a six-year-old girl” in a few years – but also because he’s everywhere at the moment.
Like James Corden. And Adrian Chiles, who has been everywhere for two years and refuses to relent. Switch on the television or
the radio, and there Brooker is. Being funny. Everywhere. There’s probably a new media dictionary word for that as well.
Since somebody in tellyville agreed that he could cross over from the pages of the Guardian and onto television, he’s been on panel shows, his own and other people’s. He’s done more series of his excellent “Wipe” programmes, Screenwipe, Newswipe, Gameswipe, full of shouty but clever reviews and incisive rants, again often on the desperation of 24-hour news coverage.
He’s also been recording radio shows to showcase more of his disgusted take of modern life. At this rate, don’t rule him out of being on Strictly Come Dancing. I hope he never reaches that stage.
In the current Brooker overload, The Hell Of It All is a chance for recent converts and non-Guardian readers, or non-G2 readers – perhaps the people put off by the rambling interviews with Ben Fogle every week – to catch up.
As easy as his targets may be, he is undeniably witty and is often spot-on with his observational work. For instance, we’ve all been frustrated by standing behind someone prevaricating at a ticket machine when we’re in a rush.
“His hand hovered over the touch screen, afraid to choose like a man deciding whether to stroke a sleeping wolf.” Nobody does a “like a” line better than Brooker.
Yet the old adage that “less is more” does come into play.
This is effectively 380-odd pages of why living in London in your 30s is so awful, in beautifully lurid commentary. A barrage of shitty things explained in minute detail.
It’s a lot of shit to digest and consuming two years of Brooker in one sitting is a bit like trying to watch every episode of The Thick Of It in a row. As wonderful as Peter Capaldi’s character is, you’d be pig-sick of Malcolm Tucker’s mad swearhili by the end of nine hours of it.
The same goes with Brooker: Brilliant, but better in small doses.
Charlie vents his spleen on...
Phillip from The Apprentice
‘HE looks like he throws himself roughly onto the bed each night, hungrily moving his hands all over his own body, trying to kiss himself deep in the mouth. If it were legal or even possible to do so, he’d probably marry himself, then conduct a long-term affair with himself behind himself’s back, eventually fathering nine children with himself, all of whom would walk and talk like him.’
The Spice Girls
‘SPEAKING of embarrassments, the Spice Girls have managed to imbue their long-awaited comeback with all the glamour and class of a hurried crap in a service station toilet by whoring themselves out to Tesco.’
Gordon Brown
‘HE can’t even pop onto YouTube and attempt a smile without everyone laughing and calling him creepy. And they’re right. The smiles were creepy: they made him look like the long-dead corpse of a gameshow host resurrected by a crazed scientist in some satirical horror movie.’
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