Screen Burn
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Anger is an energy,
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Charlie Brooker is the man behind the infamous TVGoHome site, where he invented television programmes such as Get Hen!, where contestants had to get a hen, and Daily Mail Island, where single mothers, asylum seekers and other targets of tabloid ire were torn to pieces by rabid Middle Englanders. Proving that life often imitates art – or at least, arse – even more bizarre programmes were actually broadcast, and in his new role as TV critic for the Guardian Guide, Brooker had to review such pinnacles of popular entertainment as Big Brother, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, and the truly bizarre Touch The Truck. Screen Burn is a collection of these reviews, spanning the last three years.
Whether you’ll enjoy Screen Burn depends on your attitude to life. If you’re the sort of person who has a sunny outlook, believes that people are fundamentally decent and greets the dawn of a new day with a big smile, Screen Burn will make you weep hot, salty tears. If on the other hand you’re a twisted misanthrope with an abiding hatred of pretty much the entire human race, the book will make you laugh until your eyes bleed. Brooker doesn’t pull his punches: while other critics might suggest that a programme is below par, Brooker demands that the presenters be locked in a barbed wire cage with angry hyenas and rolled down a mountain. If – as John Lydon once sang – anger is an energy, then Charlie Brooker could power the national grid.
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|Take a bow, Charlie Brooker,
You may not think reading several years’ collected columns one after another could sustain itself for the entirety of this book, but somehow it manages to work. To buy it isn’t just to read some extremely sharp and extremely amusing observations about television (I was in stitches at one description of Jim Davidson), but to be forced to take a step back and look at society, feeling Brooker’s pain as he attempts to hold on to his sanity and intelligence in an insane world of bleating, porcelain drones. It’s got to the stage where the piss-take show concepts he dreams up are actually SHOWN on television, and as a result no-one is safe from his venom if he thinks they deserve it, regardless of class, age, pastimes, nationality, wealth, fame, looks or intelligence. Jim Davidson, Simon Cowell, football fans, the Daily Mail, neo-conservatives and Middle England get a particular pasting. This isn’t to say that Brooker’s without a sense of fairness; perhaps unexpectedly, he sticks up for a few people commonly pilloried by both the media and the public, including John Leslie, Sharon Osbourne and Jamie Oliver, and even some marginalised groups like drug addicts and asylum seekers.
Profane, angry, venomous, heartfelt, intelligent – but above all, EXTREMELY funny. Especially considering the bargain cover price, this is a must buy.
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|Charlie Brooker is angry. Very angry.,
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Charlie Brooker loves television.
He just hates the way it is now.
This book is a passionate, scathing, vicious and occasionally scabrous attack on the dumbing-down of television over the last five years or so; the rise of interminable reality programmes, lowest-common-denominator “talent” shows, and incessant downmarket soaps and violent dramas.
Put that bluntly, it could be seen as a depressing book. However, Brooker is the man who gave us TV Go Home and Unnovations, and is the creator of the odious Nathan Barley, so there’s a savage, excoriating wit there – this is appallingly funny, and full of well-directed ire.
As television fragments into thousands of channels targeting ordure at the masses, Brooker’s book is a powerful scream calling for sanity and some artistic integrity. It’s also filthy and hilarious.
Superb.
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