Open Season
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What a fantastic gift Charlie has for seeking out deserving targets and what an icredibly witty and acidic delivery of his megaton scorn, and the recipients truly deserve it. I noticed on breakfast TV a couple of days ago we had a celebrity builder (a legitimate target if ever there was one). Maybe next we will have a celebrity welder, mini photolab operative or VAT inspector in line for the Brooker treatment.
A great book of truly amazing humour and I think one that is best enjoyed in short bursts, so that you can gird up your loins for the next bit, Brilliant stuff. Also check out Viz's 'Roger's Profanisaurus' and Alan Bates' 'The Post Box at the Crossroads'
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Charlie Brooker is right about everything
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This is a collection of Charlie Brooker's newspaper articles and TV reviews from 2004 to 2007. About half is television reviews, the other half is what I'd hesitantly call 'lifestyle' which can cover anything from Facebook to haircuts to Banksy.
Brooker is the best ascerbic angry writer and reviewer there is. Maintaining an almost constant level of fury throughout, underneath the sarcasm and the comedic threats of violence are reams of very interesting points about the TV we watch and the culture we're a part of it.
To really appreciate some of the TV reviews you'll be better off if you do have an idea how Big Brother works, or who Gillian McKeith is, and if you do know those things but you wish you didn't, then even better.
Personally I enjoyed reading this book in bite-sized chunks- just the odd few pages here and there when I was feeling complacent. Reading it all in one go would put you in a seriously bad mood- or perhaps it would be a very cathartic experience for you..?
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Spider Jerusalem meets Oliver Kalkofe
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... the first one being the "Transmetropolitan" comic series cynic' journalist/hero, the second being a German comedian feared and loved for his witty comments on German TV rubbish.
Too obscure? That's exactly my problem with Brooker's book: Not coming from the UK, I haven't heard of half of the TV shows he refers to, and hardly ever bothered to watch the (usually: continental version of the) other half. But brainless idiocy is a world-wide phenomenon - the mindless TV formats and media goons are indeed so generic that it doesn't really matter.
Throughout most of the book, the author is busy shouting back at TV shows that would insult a six-year-old's intelligence and sense of taste. Funny, witty, and aimed at a deserving target - but tiring after some time. It's when he focusses on the retarded stuff of real life this book really gets interesting: Politics. 9/11 conspiracy nuts. Religion, as in "notoriously offended feelings" and violent fundamentalism.
Brookers unrestrained use of sarcasm is simply hilarious, even if his targets are quite often not worth the effort. If you like watching dumbness being bludgeoned in all its forms, you will probably find this book as refreshing as I did.
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Puerile, mordant, genius
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Poor old Charlie Brooker. He's a man out of time, trapped in a world he understands little and likes even less. Here is an essentially decent, liberal man who feels the need to defenestrate himself for our reading pleasure each week in the dear ol' Grauniad.
Reading this book is really like reading a potted social history of recent times, or at least for most of this book the televisual part of it. CB takes random and withering potshots at most of the deserving targets of our pathetic adulterated culture. Thankfully, most of the time, he manages to score direct hits. And how.
This book is not really to be read cover to cover, instead to be dipped in and out of because these columns were produced to be satisfying little gobbets; little secret missives that we read and where we knew that finally, here was someone who saw our risible so-called celeb-culture for the hollow, dead-eyed, grasping sham it all undoubtedly is. And worse, he loves TV the same we that we do (you can tell). As a result he is all the more coruscating when he thinks it falls short of what it should be. his rants about TV companies, their dalliances with premium rate phone lines and journalistic integrity were just beautiful.
And while I don't quite agree with the 'Macs are Fisher Price activity centre's for adults' line, it was was still funny enough to make me spit out hot tea through my nose as I laughed. Damn you, Charlie Brooker!
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The Best Stand-Up Comic You Never Saw
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Many books claim to be laugh-out-loud funny. This is the Real Deal. I'm just glad I've never read it in public as there were moments when I genuinely couldn't get my breath. I've not been a Brooker fan long (I only discovered Screen Wipe during the last series, which wasn't that long ago) but, on the strength of this material, I'm now a fully-fledged convert to his brand of excoriating, sardonic, not to mention laugh-your-lungs-up-funny bile. He's like the best stand-up comic you never saw - imagine Bill Hicks doing 'Harry Hill's TV Burp'. The weaker chapters are merely inspired but there are definitely pieces that are touching genius, if only for the completely original thought processes that Brooker goes through. These are most evident in the non-TV related chapters, which I generally enjoyed more than the TV stuff. Which is not to say that the TV stuff isn't also joyously mirthsome because it is. Imagine every other TV critic in the world (particularly the NOTW's Ian Hyland) as a scurrying cockroach...then picture a huge, black, hobnailed boot slowly descending to crush them. That's Brooker. To sum up then: Charlie Brooker takes absolutely no prisoners in perhaps the most nihilistically comedic collection of prose money can buy. And I make no apology for fawning all over this because it's utterly bloody brilliant. Buy it.
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