Charlie Brooker

ThePirate · #1 02-15-2007, 10:13 AM

is a don.

here is his excellent summing up of Torchwood:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZYGHd0mdg

bow down.

drivelBABY · #2 02-15-2007, 12:06 PM

i remember seeing this in his show summing up 2006
i like torchwood, but it made me cackle!

Dig For Fire · #3 02-15-2007, 02:12 PM

i used to love his tvgohome site, probably the first site i visited regularly, back in IT class when i was in school lol, about 6 years ago.

ThePirate · #4 02-15-2007, 03:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dig For Fire

i used to love his tvgohome site

there was a channel 4 show of loads of the recurring programmes from that. it were great, espcially Daily Mail Island.

Squarepusher · #5 12-03-2007, 09:12 AM

Charlie Brooker is a complete fucking legend. I've been looking for somewhere appropriate to post his column from today's G2, and this seems like the best place for it.

Quote:

Heat magazine - the tittering idiot's lunchbreak-pamphlet-of-choice - has caused a bad stink by printing a collection of comedy stickers in its latest issue. Said stickers are clearly designed to be stuck round the fringes of computer monitors by the magazine's bovine readership in a desperate bid to transform their veal-fattening workstation pen into a miniature Chuckle Kingdom and thereby momentarily distract them from the bleak futility of their wasted, Heat-reading lives.

Most of the stickers are baffling to anyone who isn't a regular reader - there's one of Will Young sporting a digitally extended chin, a shot of a man's head on a crab's body accompanied by the words "Roy Gave Me Crabs", and a photo of the editor looking a bit like a monk. So far, so hilarious.

But one consists of a shot of Jordan's disabled five-year-old son Harvey, with the words "Harvey wants to eat me!" printed next to his mouth. In other words, we're supposed to find Harvey's face intrinsically mirthful and/or frightening. Ha ha, Heat! Ha ha!

Jordan herself is on the cover of the same issue, as part of a montage depicting Stars Who Hate Their Bodies ("Jordan: SAGGY BOOBS"), so chances are she wasn't in an especially upbeat frame of mind when she later stumbled across the snickering point-and-chortle demolition of her blameless disabled son nestling in the centre pages. She immediately lodged a complaint with the PCC. Personally, I'd have caught a cab to their offices, kicked the editor firmly in the balls, taken a photo of his stunned, wheezing, watering face and blown it up and hung it on my wall, to be contemplated every morning over breakfast.

Of course, Heat's always had a psychotically confused relationship with celebrities. On the one hand, it elevates them to the status of minor deities, and on the other, it prints clinical close-ups of their thighs with a big red ring circling any visible atoms of cellulite beside a caption reading "Ugh! Sickening!". This is what the misanthropic serial killer in Se7en would've done if he'd been running a magazine instead of keeping a diary.

This might seem a bit rich coming from someone (ie me) who regularly says cruel things about public figures for comic effect. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I scrawled some fairly abusive things about Jordan myself in this weekend's Screen Burn column in the Guide, for instance. Isn't Heat effectively doing the same thing, only with more gusto, not to mention photos?

Good question. Thanks for asking. My defence, in as much as I've worked it out, runs like this: people on TV aren't real people. They're flickering, two-dimensional representations of people, behaving unnaturally and often edited to the point of caricature. They're fictional characters and it's easy to hate them. Everybody hates someone on TV. But you never really hate them the way you'd hate, say, a rapist. Because they're not really there, and with one or two exceptions (TV psychics, say), they're ultimately harmless. Put Vernon Kay on my screen and I'll gleefully spit venom at him. Sit me next to him at a dinner party and I'll probably find him quite charming, unless he does something appalling. That's not hypocritical, it's rational.

In fact, in my limited experience, the more unpalatable you find someone's TV persona, the nicer they turn out to be in real life. Recently I was walking down the street when someone I'd written something nasty about suddenly darted across the road and introduced himself. Almost immediately, I started apologising for the article, explaining (as above) that people on TV aren't real people and so on. At which point he looked faintly crestfallen. He hadn't read the piece at all, but he'd seen a TV thing I'd done and just wanted to say how much he enjoyed it. Then he asked what it was I'd said that was so bad, so I found myself sheepishly repeating it while staring at the ground. There was an uncomfortable pause. And then he laughed and said it was all fair game and not to worry. And I thought, who's the dickhead in this scenario? Because it sure as hell wasn't him. I'm the dickhead. I'm always the dickhead: always have been, always will be.

Even so, and speaking as a dickhead, there's surely a world of difference between tipping cartoon buckets of shit over someone's TV persona, and paying a paparazzo to hide behind a bush to take photos of their arse as they stroll down the beach in real life, so you can make your readers feel momentarily better about themselves because ha ha her bumcheeks are flabby and ho ho he's bald and tee hee she's sobbing. And even if you accept that degree of intrusion, on the basis that these people rely on the media and yadda yadda yadda, how insanely superior and removed from reality do you have to be to invite your readers to laugh at a photograph of a small disabled boy whose only "crime" is a) being disabled and b) having a famous mum with "SAGGY BOOBS"?

Each week, Heat opens with a featurette called Everyone's Talking About . . . detailing the latest showbiz scandal. Last week, it was Everyone's Talking About . . . Marc Bannerman. This week it ought to read Everyone's Talking About ... What Total C***s We Are. And maybe it will. We shall see.

In summary: Heat magazine = total c***s.