Costcutters

Thoroughly cheesed off to read in the latest edition of the Guardian Media guide that Grace Dent is leaving.

Not only that, but she claims that she is being replaced not by another proper professional reviewer, but by reader contributions supplemented by copy generated by 'android pigs with hats on' (must remember to check this quote again and amend if necessary, rather than spend ages online reading the latest developments in the extremely disturbing Anders Behring Breivik trial and attempting to find out how the hell the bloody appalling man has managed to get himself any fans at all, let alone a German woman penfriend who might have even fallen in love with him).

In other words, those tight-fisted buggers on the Guardian are desperately trying to save money by cutting down on the number of qualified experts they employ.  The excuse they are going to use is that they want to make the paper more 'interactive' and 'user-friendly', because the advent of the Internet has turned everyone who watches telly (aka 'downloads content' - yuck, horrible modern techno-bollockese phrase de jour) into a critic.

Enter endless screeds of rabid fanboy dork-dribble, half-illiterate two-word summaries that tell you five fifths of fuck-all about the programme and hordes of students doing unpaid work experience who reckon the best way to create a reputation is by doing word-perfect impressions of Charlie Brooker circa 2003.

Grace is right to describe television as an artform that deserves to be taken seriously.  If the Guardian agrees with her conclusion, then they should be prepared to splash out on a full-time, appropriately experienced and qualified reviewer.

And if they claim to support up and coming new journalists, then they should be coughing up the going NUJ rates for every piece of copy that the work experience bods knock up. Plus a full byline.

Further crepe to make you cackle when times is hard

Or rather, me.

I really don't care if laughing at the following extracts from the great Charlie Brooker makes me childish, silly or maladjusted.  All I know is that I fell about until my face went puce, tears streamed down my cheeks and I almost suffered an asthma attack.

"If reading these words sent you temporarily crazy, and you ran outside and stripped naked and pressed your bum cheeks against the nearest Starbucks window - really pushed them apart so everyone inside got a gruesome view up your rear aperture - and then started defecating against the glass to a backdrop of tumbling lattes and horrified screams ... if you did THAT, it might irrevocably alter your life, what with the ensuing court case and all, but it would make absolutely no difference to the trajectory of history.

"In summary: you're pointless."

(From: They're, like, totally ethnic, 14 June 2008)


"And how are we, the snickering public, supposed to refer to these recidivist saps when we spot them emptying the poop bins anyway?  Do we call them 'paybackers' or 'CPs', or what?  If you're going to label them, at least come up with something populist. Something we can use.  How about 'SCUM SLAVE'? Or 'CHAIN GANG BETTY'?  That last one would definitely catch on.  I might start shouting it at them in the street tomorrow.  So put that on the back of the jacket.

"And, bearing your stated aim of 'visibility' in mind, don't just stop at bold capital letters: the typeface should physically light up, like a Vegas casino hoarding.  Actually, the whole jacket should light up.  And it shouldn't be a jacket.  It should be a fluorescent green leotard with a transparent panel located over the testicles, so you can see them squashed up against the window like depressed balding commuters and, above it, a small flashing sign with the words 'HA HA LOOK AT MY HILARIOUS BALLS' accompanied by an arrow pointing at them, picked out in multicoloured LEDs visible from half a mile away.

"Blind pedestrians who wouldn't otherwise get to enjoy the spectacle should be catered for too, thanks to a looped iPod soundtrack consisting of assorted celebrities describing precisely how ridiculous the miscreant's balls look, backed with comedy tuba music blasting from a heavy iron tannoy mounted on the offender's head.

"That's a more effective deterrent than a little orange bib.  And perhaps Jack Straw could model one at the press launch, doing one of his trademark sober expressions.  He could probably even pull a serious face with his balls, so they looked suitably noble and statesmanlike even while flattened against the transparent pane, thereby underlining the scheme's commitment to visibility and aversion to humiliation.

"If anyone can do it, he can."

(From: Chain Gang Betties, 1 December 2008)

[Jack Straw is listed in the index of Charlie Brooker's collection 'The Hell Of It All' as: 'Straw, Jack; effectively told to fuck off, 279-81; effectively told to fuck off again, 343-5' - which tends to make you suspect that Charlie probably compiled the index to his book himself]


Perhaps I should offer to teach Charlie my patented protest song about Jack Straw some time?  It's fast, effective - and probably gets you straight onto the files of MI5 in no time (along with Jack himself, so you're in good company there).


"I'll never forget the Concrete Menagerie, for example.  Picture Madame Tussauds, but with the celebrity waxworks made out of concrete.  And instead of stunning likenesses of the rich and famous, imagine a group of misshapen figurines that were scarcely recognisable as human beings, painted by an especially hamfisted group of GCSE art students in a hurry.

"That was the Concrete Menagerie.

"It was housed in the back garden of a house in Northumberland.  A full-scale model of Jaws (the shark, not the Bond villain) which resembled a giant grey phlegm glob with eyes was one highlight.  Another was a figurine of Lawrence of Arabia sitting astride a camel.  Lawrence had a set of real false teeth stuck in his mouth, leaving him with an unsettling rictus grin.

(From: The day Santa died, 8 December 2008)


This particular article actually inspired me to look the place up online - but alas, I so far have not been able to track down pictures of either the Jaws statue or Lawrence of Arabia.  If anyone out there can help me with this endeavour, please send all communications to the usual address, where I shall open them and proceed to have yet another bloody good laugh.

Stuck for words

Think I'll copy Charlie Brooker and ask for your ideas on what I should write about next.

Please send all suggestions to the usual address.

Up the revolution

Wouldn't Charlie Brooker make a brilliant Jacobin?


Having just finished his Screen Burn collection for about the third time since buying it in the post-Christmas sale at HMV, I think I'm well qualified to say that he would have made a great addition to the Committee of Public Safety.

Never hesitating to preach the most violently radical solutions to the perennial problems that beset human society, this is a man who has studied at the feet of the masters.

He’s tough, he’s uncompromising, he’s a man who stays true to the purity of his vision through thick and thin.  And most importantly of all, he commands the rhetoric (if not the crowds) to prove it.

Misanthropy, he insists in Like The Doritos Friendchips Crew, But Worse (31 May 2003), is “not a personality flaw, it’s a skill.

 “It’s nothing to do with sheer numbers.  Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I’d learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year.  I can’t abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones.  Bill Hicks called the human race ‘a virus with shoes’, and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses: I’d consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn’t so bad.”

Whatever the time, wherever the place, Brooker insists on nothing but the highest standards in both ethics and practice.

“They say the first casualty of war is truth, but actually it’s picture quality,” he complains in his review of Gulf War II news footage The Third World War In Low-Res JPEGS (29 March 2003).

Well, if we will insist on inflicting our Weltanschauung on an unwilling nation, then surely we’ve also got the right to see for ourselves the full extent of the damage.

“I’m not being callous … it’s just that this being the twenty first century I thought we’d get a digitally perfect, Dolby Surround kind of war, with swooping Michel Gondry camera moves and on-the-fly colour correction.  But no.  It’s all shots of empty skylines and blurry videophone bullshit.  Most of it isn’t even in widescreen, for Christ’s sake.”

He’s quite right to have us all pinned down as ghouls.  Myself I remember watching all the news reports on the television in the pub, whilst feeling more than a little disappointed with the results of modern technological progress.  Quite often the video-phone footage used to freeze or even break up into tiny pixilated fragments during the actual news bulletin, leaving me feeling somewhat shortchanged.   

“This obsession with live coverage reached a ridiculous nadir last week on the ITV News Channel,” he continues.  “ Alistair Stewart breathlessly announces incoming live footage of behind-enemy-lines conflict: cut to an indistinct green blur with the odd dark blob wobbling around, like a plate of mushy peas behind a layer of gauze.  But the viewers’ bafflement was nothing compared to Alistair’s – because he’s got to explain what’s happening.  ‘And there you can see … uhhh … well, it’s hard for me to make out because my monitor is situated quite far away, but I’m sure at home you can see more.’ Nice try, but all I could see was my own bemused reflection.  Sod the Second World War in Colour – this is the Third World War in Low-Res JPEGS.”

Yes, I can just hear good old Sir Kenneth Branagh doing the narration for The Third World War In Low-Res JPEGS, sandwiched somewhere in his future daily schedule between playing King Lear to Frankie Boyle’s Fool at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank, attending Lord Simon Russell Beale’s memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields and watching the bouncing bosoms of the latest female streaker to come running on the pitch during the first over at Lords.

That’s the sort of imagination you need to kick off on behalf of an entire disgruntled generation. 

But Charlie Brooker also has a soft side.  And he’s not too proud to reveal it to his more dedicated readers.

“Really, it feels rubbish being a man at the moment,” he admits in Skull-Flaunting Cueballs (5 April 2003), “assuming you base your self-perception on the images pouring from your TV set, that is.  I know I do, and I’m beginning to feel like scum simply for owning my own testicles.”