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23 June 2023
[tv] Best ‘Black Mirror’ Episodes, Ranked … ‘A pair of men hunker down during a blizzard at a remote outpost to share three tales of deception and murder, but they’ve both got secrets galore. In what must be the darkest Christmas special ever made, Jon Hamm relates his past life of sleazy seduction-coaching by night and torturing digital copies of living people by day, racking up a host of futuristic sins along the way. His companion Rafe Spall isn’t much better, having handled his separation from his wife, shall we say, poorly. As mini-twists give way to jaw-dropping mega-twists and the episode’s core concept gets frightfully postmodern, both actors deliver skin-crawling work as villainous but sympathetic figures.’ — White Christmas Episode
9 March 2022
[tv] Charlie Brooker: ‘Mr Dystopia? That makes me sound like a wrestler’ … A catch up with Charlie Brooker. Before he was Mr Interactive, Charlie Brooker was Mr Dystopia, creating disturbing, prescient vistas of the very near future. What if the prime minister had to have sex with a pig, live on air? What if anxious modern parenting turned into 24-hour hyper-surveillance? Even Nathan Barley, his 2005 comedy co-written with Chris Morris, came eerily to pass. That eponymous, portfolio-careered hipster could have been written yesterday. “That makes me sound like a wrestler,” Brooker says, not without satisfaction. “A really mean, horrible wrestler. Here he comes, in the blue corner: Mr Dystopia.”
It’s not so much that he predicted things, and then they happened, he says. Rather, Black Mirror plots were “extrapolations of whatever was already happening”. The pig plot was inspired by Gordon Brown’s Gillian Duffy moment, when he called a Labour voter a bigoted woman and “had to go and apologise, and it became this bizarre circus of calamity. I was just watching it thinking, ‘No one’s in charge here.’”
4 March 2021
[tv] Charlie Brooker in Conversation with Adam Curtis … A long discussion covering many topics. All the unedited tapes from which the news stories were cut… They are extraordinary. They’re like a strange, magical world that is halfway between real life and the snippets of doom that we transmit. There are terrible things on them – but the overwhelming amount is just the record of stuff happening. I’ve got hundreds of thousands of hours of it, and the effect of watching it is incredibly calming. It sends you into that kind of dream state we talked about earlier, where you start wondering what happens to all the billions of billions of moments of experience that are never recorded. Where does that all go to? And I find myself drifting off into wondering about what other people’s experiences must have been like in the fragments I’m watching.
3 January 2020
[politics] Who said it: Dominic Cummings or Nathan Barley? … ‘We need some true wild cards, artists … weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB.’
14 October 2016
[tv] Charlie Brooker: ‘The more horrible an idea, the funnier I find it’ … Charlie Brooker on the various subjects covered in the new series of Black Mirror … ‘I’ve scaled back my involvement with Twitter; it’s too easy to get dragged into an argument. It’s also completely futile. Is it helpful for trolls, is it cathartic? Does it prevent them from going out on a shooting rampage? It’s tricky. One person’s troll is another person trying to make a point. They’re trying to get you to listen to an argument. I don’t make sweeping statements on social media, mainly because I can’t be fucking arsed with the argument that follows.’
19 July 2010
[news] The News … Charlie Brooker on the news coverage about Raoul Moat … ‘The hunt for Raoul Moat got the news so flustered, it shrieked its reports at a pitch several hundred octaves above satire. Beneath a photograph of Britain’s Most Wanted Man as an infant, The Sun ran the caption “Cute baby … but two-month-old Moat clenches his fists”. On the front page, his estranged mother apparently wished him dead.’
22 June 2009
[curtis] Charlie Brooker on Adam Curtis’ latest projects … TV industry! Here’s a little bombshell for you. From now on, all of Curtis’s work will be produced first and foremost for the internet. It will be hosted at bbc.co.uk/adamcurtis (coming soon). Go there to find a trailer for It Felt Like A Kiss. An hour-long cut of the whole thing will be placed on the site on the last day of the Manchester International Festival (MIF). It will also host his next two projects: “A long thing about our complicated relationship to the Congo over the last 100 years and how our idea of nature as a sacred yet terrifying realm has risen up during that same time.” That will be followed by a piece about “the political and cultural ideas that underlie the internet – and the idea that we are all linked in an interconnected web – out of which can come a new form of democracy.”
5 December 2008
[funny] The Charlian … Charlie Brooker takes over the Guardian’s front page … On his incompetence: ‘It recently took me 21 days to get round to replacing the lightbulbs in my kitchen, which for several weeks had been blowing one-by-one until finally the room was plunged into darkness. For 21 days I had to feel my way into the room like a blind man, then prop open the fridge door in order to have enough light to be able to see. Your eyes get used to it after a while. So does your brain. It became a routine. Soon opening the fridge felt as natural as flipping the light switch. Standing there, chopping onions in the artificial gloaming, all felt well with the world. It took an incident with a broken glass on the floor and a shoeless foot to nudge me in the direction of the nearest lightbulb stockist, and even then I instinctively used the fridge as an impromptu lamp for another two days before re-acclimatising myself to the concept of ceiling-based light sources.’
11 October 2007
[tv] Charlie Brooker reviews Billie Piper’s Secret Diary Of A Call Girl — extremely funny, NSFW and surprisingly, goes easy on Billie and Belle … ‘We love a morality tale us Brits. Especially if it’s disguised as a fuckfest.’ (more…)
10 September 2007
[comics] Charlie Brooker on BBC4’s Comics Britannia … ‘British kid’s comics have finally been swallowed up by this hideously plastic modern age in which almost any creative work is described as “content” – and demographically-targeted content at that. When I read about Dandy Xtreme, I feel like Victor Meldrew, sighing while a robot prepares his dinner. And I never used to read the Dandy anyway. As a child of the 1970s, I grew up on Whizzer And Chips, and the rest of the IPC/Fleetway comics stable…’
25 June 2007
[music] ‘Oh good, it’s raining again’ — Charlie Brooker does Glastonbury … ‘Once you’re in, the sheer scale of it is initially overwhelming. Imagine forcing the cast of Emmerdale to hurriedly construct Las Vegas at gunpoint in the rain. Then do it again. And once more for luck. That’s Glastonbury: a cross between a medieval refugee camp and a recently detonated circus. Roads of sloppy mud and drunken civilians shivering in tents; this is what London would look like if I’d been in charge for 100 years. Not because I’m some kind of laid-back dreamer, but because I couldn’t organise a piss-up in a pissery. It’d take me six decades to assemble the most rudimentary infrastructure. There’d be no museums in my London. Maybe a bin or two, at a push.’
11 March 2007
[tv] Charlie Brooker on Adam Curtis’s The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom? (on BBC2, tonight, 9 PM) … ‘Curtis has an uncanny knack for hovering coolly above recent world history and spotting huge, sweeping, disturbing trends, then recounting them in a way that feels subversive and playful, thoughtful and entertaining, all at once. He has an incredible eye for archive footage, assembling one haunting montage after another, apparently from thin air. His programmes unfold like a series of revelations; watching one is like having all your slumbering suspicions about the world – suspicions so dormant you didn’t even realise they were suspicions – confirmed and explained for the very first time.’
24 February 2007
[tv] Charlie Brooker on The Half Hour News Hour: ‘A lot of people think right-wingers aren’t capable of being amusing at all. Not true. Mussolini looked hilarious swinging from that lamppost.’
5 February 2007
[apple] Charlie Brooker: I Hate Macs … ‘So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign. I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.’
17 October 2006
[doom] Supposing … We invent some decoy doomsday scenarios — more from Charlie Brooker … ‘Terrorist extremists? Yeah, they’re frightening – but what about those North Korean nukes? Or global warming, come to think of it? I need a personal bloody organiser to sort it out – a gizmo that’ll set me a “timetable of concern” just so I can break down my overall sense of creeping dread into manageable, bite-sized flurries of panic. Otherwise, I’m in danger of forgetting to worry about some things – like bird flu, for instance. I haven’t seriously crapped myself about that since, ooh, February? Whenever it was, a top-up’s long overdue.’
22 August 2006
[comment] Charlie Brooker’s Columns on Comment is Free — On Dark Matter: ‘There are millions of people who essentially consist of dark matter; unknowable swaths of the population I have never encountered and will never understand. People who watch Emmerdale, for example. Emmerdale is Britain’s third most popular soap opera – second, actually, when EastEnders is having an off day. It attracts something in the region of 5 million viewers, which means approximately one in 12 Brits regularly tunes in. Yet I’ve never actually met anyone who watches it.’ [via linkbunnies.org]
27 May 2006
[bb] Charlie Brooker on Big Brother: ‘Of course, there’s one bit of knowledge Shahbaz can comfort himself with: whatever his faults, at least he isn’t Sezer. Sezer: yuk. Just what we need on our screens: a pint-sized, pixel-eyed, monotone, priapic, hair-gelled rodent, so in love with himself he probably masturbates to videos of himself masturbating. And it’s misplaced adoration…’
21 April 2006
[it] Supposing… Computers are deliberately wasting our time — by Charlie Brooker. ‘…the endless stream of finickity little tasks a computer will set you without warning. The tiny hoops you have to jump through before it gives you what you want. Install this driver. Now update it. Now update it again. Register to login to our website. Then validate your membership. Forgot your password? Click here. Now there. Fill out this form. And this one. And this one. Please wait while TimeJettison Pro examines your system. Download latest patch file. Please wait while patch file examines own navel. Remove cable. Insert cable. Gently tease USB port with cable. Yeah, that’s it baby. That’s the way. Now show us your bum or I’m deleting your inbox.’
11 August 2005
[bb6] The Going, Going Gong Show — Charlie Brooker neatly sums up this years Big Brother. ‘…the prestigious Most Sickening Housemate award, which this year goes to a couple: Maxwell (London’s village idiot) and Saskia (burly, wrathful harridan with a face that could advertise war). Their daily routine consisted of bullying, bellowing, cackling at their own dismal non-jokes, glaring, sniping and discussing their imminent ascent to the toppermost peaks of stardom – until the last week, when, faced with eviction, they settled for sulkily rutting like doomed livestock. The latter surely ranks as the least sexy thing ever broadcast on television. I’d get more aroused watching a dog drown in petrol.’
24 December 2001
[tvgohome] Charlie Brooker’s alternative Christmas Day TV listings… ‘9.30 I Love the Succession of Glittering Images Which Distract and Amuse Yet Ultimately Do Little to Quell the Boundless Sadness at My Core.’
3 December 2001
[web] A Cunt Compendium … The Nathan Barley Extravaganza — All your favourite Cunts in one place. ‘The continuing adventures of a total wank stain.’ [ Related: TVGoHome]
24 April 2000
[funny] TVGoHome is pretty much the funniest thing on the web. Even its submissions guidelines are amusing: “We run very few listings whose title is a weak and obvious pun on an existing show: i.e. Changing Wombs, Ainsley’s Big Cock Out, Blind Rape, Scooby Poo, etc etc.”
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