The Charlie Brooker Collection

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

There have been a few threads about individual articles from Charlie Brooker but, such is the standard of work he produces, he needs a place for his articles, tv shows, youtube clips etc. for those that wouldn't necessary get to see them otherwise. So, this is it.

 

Charlie on

 

Manuelgate

 

bJOK5dbrSpM

 

American Media

 

2aEk864YrKw

 

EDIT: Removed the first embedded video because stupid youtube decided that they'd use the S*n as their thumbnail.

[Pdool]

I just got Dawn of the Dumb for £4 at HMV yesterday.

 

Any good?

[RJ Fan club]

[YOUTUBE]xPlEIryW8zA[/YOUTUBE]

 

Some old Brooker here. But all good.

[RJ Fan club]

I just got Dawn of the Dumb for £4 at HMV yesterday.

 

Any good?

 

Its essential bog reading in our house.

[Pdool]

Its essential bog reading in our house.

 

Awsome.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Brooker on the Chinese Olympic Games

 

Thank God for dishonesty. I can't have been the only Briton to shift awkwardly in their seat throughout the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games the other week. The Chinese mounted an unprecedented spectacle. Thousands of synchronised drummers, acrobats, fireworks, impossible floating rings made of electric dust (surely alien technology, that), dancers, prancers, singers and flingers. Maybe not flingers. I just threw that in to complete the rhyme. But you get the picture. It was amazing. It cost around £50m and was probably rehearsed at the shooty end of a machine gun. Dance, beloved populace! Miss three steps and we take out your kneecaps. Miss five and we go for the head. Dance till your homeland is the envy of the world! Stop weeping and dance!

 

Yet even as my eyes took delight in the colour and magic, my spirits sank. I'm no patriot, but I feared for our national pride come the 2012 London Olympics. How the hell are we going to top a display like that? Our plans currently consist of six roman candles, Bernie Clifton riding his ostrich, and some Britain's Got Talent prick-a-ma-boob beatboxing on a trampoline. It would be less shameful if we all marched into the arena one by one, dropped our trousers, yanked our bumcheeks apart and let the entire globe gaze right up our apertures for an hour, while the Kaiser Chiefs perform their latest single in the background. If nothing else, it would give the rest of the planet something to think about. They'd never mess with us again, that's for damn sure.

 

But my defeatism, for once, was misplaced. The ceremony wasn't as spectacular as it seemed. An impressive swooping aerial shot of fireworks bursting in footprint-shaped constellations turned out to be a computer-generated lie. And the cute little girl singing the Chinese anthem was only miming to the voice of another girl, whom the authorities considered too hideous to warrant airtime.

 

Actually, they were right. The original girl was an absolute pig, with teeth so higgledy-piggledy you could be mistaken for thinking her skull was trying to chew its way out of her face. You could possibly use her head as the basis for the lead puppet in a children's programme set in Ugly Wood, provided you didn't mind your kids vomiting in fear and disgust each time she wobbled on screen.

 

Oh shut up. I'm joking.

 

Anyway, the deception didn't end with the opening carnival, but bled into the events themselves. Hordes of volunteers, known as "cheer squads", have been been planted in the stands during under-attended events, to disguise empty seats and goad the rest of the crowd into whooping on cue.

 

What's remarkable about all this trickery isn't the trickery itself - but how ineptly it's been maintained. Even a six-year-old knows that once you tell a lie, you stick to it. You never admit the truth. Never. And when confronted with irrefutable evidence of your guilt, you dig your heels in further still - loudly denying reality until your accusers die of exasperation. It's a brilliant strategy that's kept the Bush administration going for years.

 

But the Chinese? A few timid queries and they admitted it all with a shrug. Yeah, they were computer-generated image (CGI) fireworks. Yeah, the kid was miming. Yeah, we're using cheer squads. So what? We're not arsed. Stop wetting your pants. What are you going to do about it anyway? Did you know that if we all stood up and sat down at the same time, the resulting tidal wave would destroy your capital cities? Ask us again if we're arsed. Go on. Fire away.

 

They didn't even try to cover it up properly before they were rumbled. The "cheer squads", for instance, were hardly subtle - they were decked out in bright yellow shirts and huddled together in conspicuous clumps. They couldn't have been more noticeable if they'd had searchlights for faces and foghorns for hands. All of which provides an effective blueprint for us to follow circa 2012. First up, the opening ceremony, in which a volcano rises from the Thames, spewing flaming Olympic rings into the night sky while Big Ben - or rather, a genetically enhanced version of Big Ben, one with straighter teeth and bigger tits - pirouettes in the background, miming to the Kaiser Chiefs' latest single. This goes on for 15 hours or until the nearest superpower threatens to bomb us. Then the events themselves begin. None of them takes place in the Olympic stadium because there is no Olympic stadium. We've not bothered building one. Instead, we've got a host of exciting made-up CGI sports. Moon Snooker! Unicorn Wrestling! Quantum Deathball! Dissenter Beheading! Pac-Man with Guns! Naturally, none of the other countries has been allowed to practice any of these games, whereas we've had four solid years to develop and perfect them. So we're guaranteed, ooh, at least three bronze medals. We'll thrash Paraguay, that's for damn sure.

 

And as our virtual athletes (who aren't really there) take their place on the podium (which isn't really there either), thousands of specially trained spectators will loudly voice their appreciation at gunpoint. Then we'll kick the shit out of one or two overseas journalists and claim the whole thing's been a roaring success. Again and again, till we're blue in the face. Bish bash bosh. Job done. As a twat might say at the end of a column.

[RJ Fan club]

Barry Shitpeas

 

[YOUTUBE]BhGzsgDWSxU[/YOUTUBE]

[cochyn]

I don't get people. What's their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They're awful.[/quoteIT]

 

Charlie Brooker on Facebook

[RoboRiise]

Ahem:

 

TV Go Home Archive

 

Mick Hucknall's Pink Pancakes and the origins of Nathan Barley. Some of these still have me in tears.

 

Ken Loach's Tron, fucking brilliant.

[razor]

Its essential bog reading in our house.

 

Mine's in the little room too: perfect 'chapter' lengths. Or two or three. Depends, doesn't it.

[Total Longo]

I just got Dawn of the Dumb for £4 at HMV yesterday.

 

Any good?

 

It's caused me to have several "moments" on the train where I have literally been crying with laughter and had the people around me clearly questioning my sanity.

 

So, i liked it.

[The Robot Tank]

This dude is probably one of the funniest on television or the papers. I have lost count of the times I've cried with laughter at one of his shows or his articles.

 

His latest show on BBC Four, Charlie Brooker's Newswipe was as funny as it was informative. So it was fuckin hilarious, in case you didn't know.

 

Link to his articles on The Guardian:

 

Charlie Brooker | guardian.co.uk

[RoboRiise]

I've just nearly coughed up a lung laughing at this one.

 

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

His latest from the Guardian title 'The most dangerous drug isn't meow meow. It isn't even alcohol...'

 

I'm a lightweight; always have been. I didn't get properly drunk until I was 25, on a night out which culminated in a spectacular public vomiting in a Chinese restaurant. Ever wondered what the clatter of 60 pairs of chopsticks being simultaneously dropped in disgust might sound like? Don't ask me. I can't remember. I was too busy bitterly coughing what remained of my guts all over the carpet.

 

Not a big drinker, then. Like virtually every other member of my generation, I smoked dope throughout my early 20s. It prevented me from getting bored, but also prevented me from achieving much. When you're content to blow an entire fortnight basking on your sofa like a woozy sea lion, playing Super Bomberman, eating Minstrels and sniggering at Alastair Stewart's bombastic voiceover on Police Camera Action! there's not much impetus to push yourself. Marijuana detaches you from the world, like a big pause button. The moment I stopped smoking it I started actually getting stuff done. I still sit on my sofa playing videogames, necking sweets and laughing at the telly, but these days if I have to leave my cocoon and pop to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk before they close, it's a minor inconvenience rather than a protracted mission to Mars. That was the worst thing about being stoned: there came an inevitable point every evening where you'd find yourself shuffling around a massively overlit local convenience store feeling alien and jittery. Brrr. No thanks.

 

I tried other things, only to discover they weren't for me. LSD, for instance, definitely isn't my bag. Call me traditional, but if I glance at a wall and before my very eyes it suddenly starts smearing and sliding around like oil on water, my initial reaction is not to be amused or amazed, but alarmed about the structural integrity of the building. My most benign lysergic experience consisted of an hour-long stroll around an incredibly verdant, sun-drenched meadow, watching the names of famous sportsmen appear before me in gigantic 3D letters carved from fiery gold. Eventually someone passed me a cup of tea and the spell was broken: there I was, sitting in a student halls of residence, watching late-night golf on BBC2 on a tiny black-and-white TV. From that point on it was like being trapped in a David Lynch film that lasted for eight hours and was set in Streatham. Once again: Brrr. No thanks.

 

These days I'm sickeningly lily- livered, by choice rather than necessity. I don't smoke, I drink only occasionally, and I'd sooner saw my own feet off than touch anything harder than a double espresso. I don't want to get out of my head: that's where I live.

 

In summary: if I've learned anything, it's that I don't much care for mood-altering substances. But I'm not afraid of them either. With one exception.

 

It's perhaps the biggest threat to the nation's mental wellbeing, yet it's freely available on every street – for pennies. The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this "awareness" is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they've even been known to form mobs and attack people. Technically it's called "a newspaper", although it's better known by one of its many "street names", such as "The Currant Bun" or "The Mail" or "The Grauniad" (see me – Ed).

 

In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards.

 

Tragically, widespread newspaper abuse has become so endemic, it has crippled the country's ability to conduct a sensible debate about the "war on drugs". The current screaming festival over "meow meow" or "M-Cat" or whatever else the actual users aren't calling it, is a textbook example. I have no idea how dangerous it is, but there seems to be a glaring lack of correlation between the threat it reportedly poses and the huge number of schoolkids reportedly taking it. Something doesn't add up. But in lieu of explanation, we're treated to an hysterical, obfuscating advertising campaign for a substance that will presumably – thanks to the furore – soon only be available via illegal, unregulated, more dangerous, means. If I was 15 years old, I wouldn't be typing this right now. I'd be trying to buy "plant food" on the internet. And this time next year I'd be buying it in a pub toilet, cut with worming pills and costing four times as much.

 

Personally speaking, the worst substances I've ever encountered are nicotine (a senselessly addictive poison) and alcohol (which spins the inner wheel of judgment into an unreadable blur). Apart from the odd fond memory, the only good thing either really have going for them is their legality. If either had been outlawed I'd probably have drunk myself blind on cheap illegal moonshine or knifed you and your family in the eye to fund my cigarette habit.

 

But then I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to narcotics. Like I said, I'm a lightweight. I can absolutely guarantee my experience of drugs is far more limited than that of the average journalist: immeasurably so once you factor in alcohol. So presumably they know what they're talking about. It's hard to shake the notion half the users aren't trying to "escape the boredom of their lives": just praying for a brief holiday from society's unrelenting bullshit.

 

Charlie Brooker | The most dangerous drug isn't meow meow. It isn't even alcohol . . . | Comment is free | The Guardian

[Remmie]

Charlie Brooker - Screen Burn (Book) £2.99 + quidco delivered @ HMV - HotUKDeals Forum

[Johnni]

I remember when i was a teenager that he had a column in the 'PC Zone' and did some prank phone calls to games publishers etc which were very funny. Here's my fave:

The 'files or folders' bit fucks me up.

[YOUTUBE]<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKWV8_Fpgm4&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKWV8_Fpgm4&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>[/YOUTUBE]

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

So: the weirdest election in history has produced the weirdest government imaginable. Well, almost. If Cameron had formed a coalition with the cast of Bergerac, that would be weirder – but only by about seven per cent.

 

The worst part is working out who to hate, and why. I was eight when Thatcher got in, and didn't really understand what was happening. Nonetheless, before long the Tories had replaced the Cybermen as my number one bogeymen. At first there was a simple, visceral reason for this: they seemed alarmingly gung-ho about nuclear war. They believed nuclear missiles were an effective deterrent, and furthermore, that a nuclear war might be winnable anyway.

 

I was opposed to all kinds of nuclear war – even little ones between neighbouring Welsh counties were simply not on, in my book. It was my understanding that these things tended to spiral out of control, and burning to death in a massive exploding fireball didn't rank very high on my list of hopes and dreams for the future.

 

(My paranoia wasn't that far off, as it happens. According to the book Rendez-Vous: The Psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand, at the height of the Falklands war, Thatcher threatened to nuke Argentina unless President Mitterrand handed over disabling codes for the French-built Exocet missiles which were pounding British ships. If that was true, and had actually happened, you wouldn't be reading the Guardian right now – you'd be fighting a giant scorpion to impress the village elders.)

 

As if plotting to destroy the world wasn't bad enough, the Conservatives went on to preside over the most wilfully obnoxious and polarising decade imaginable: braying yuppies at one extreme, penniless strikers at the other. The Tories weren't just nasty – they seemed to actively enjoy being nasty. And there was no getting rid of them, even when Thatcher got the boot. Consequently, an entire generation grew up regarding the Tory government as something like rain, or wasps, or stomach flu: an unavoidable, undying source of dismay.

 

Until 1997, when they were eradicated overnight. It was as if scientists had suddenly discovered a cure for the common cold. A permanent millstone – gone! The initial glow of jubilation never completely faded. For years afterwards, simply knowing the Conservatives weren't in power left me mildly delighted on a daily basis. Even when Blair and co turned out to be so disappointing, I could console myself with the thought that the Conservatives would have been even worse. OK, so Labour started an illegal war. The Tories would've started six – four of them nuclear. So what if the rich/poor divide grew bigger under Labour? The Tories would've reopened the mines just so they could enjoy closing them again, right? Then they'd fill them full of tramp corpses and raze the surrounding communities to the ground, yeah? Yeah.

 

As this year's election crept closer, and a Conservative government appeared ever more likely, the Tories became meaningful bogeymen once again. The fact that Cameron generally looks and sounds even less sincere than Blair ever managed to, meant that the more he professed to be caring, the more sinister he became. Around a year ago, it seemed clear that Cameron would be PM and that, after six weeks in power, the mask would slip and he'd legalise the hunting of single mums. The BBC website would be deleted and replaced with a 24-hour Sky news propaganda feed. Thatcher would be commemorated on banknotes. Drunk with power, Cameron would issue breathtakingly heartless decrees from his onyx throne, while Andy Coulson squatted at his feet, cackling like Gollum and drinking from a skull.

 

But instead we've got this . . . coalition thing. This disorientating mash-up. Cameron and Clegg engaging in public foreplay. A sour Tory cookie with chunks of Lib Dem chocolate. Even the prospect of George Osborne as chancellor seems less chilling in the knowledge that Vince Cable can pop his head round the door from time to time, if only to pull disapproving faces. If the Tories had won more seats, or slogged on as a minority government, at least we'd have a clear set of hate figures we could start despising immediately. Instead, we've got the Nazis forming an alliance with the Smurfs.

 

We couldn't even hate the Tories for looking smug on the steps of Downing Street – partly because Downing Street doesn't have steps, but mainly because the result forced a helping of humble pie down their necks, which they swallowed with infuriating good grace. Cameron appears to be making a sincere attempt to permanently drag his party toward more moderate ground, which is a crushing blow for those of us who were expecting outright malevolence from day one.

 

Then there's the scrapping of ID cards and limits on the spread of CCTV, which is genuinely refreshing. What next? Harsh new punishments for anyone caught snooping on private voicemails? Chances are, Coulson's typing up a cheery press release on that very subject right now.

 

As long-dreaded bogeymen, these 21st-century Tories are proving a damp squib, like the brightly coloured Daleks. No doubt they'll do something horrific fairly soon, but so far they haven't quite obliged, thereby depriving us all of a good cathartic hate-in. I always knew the Tories were selfish at heart, but this really takes the biscuit. Why can't they just be massively and obviously unreasonable from the outset, like they're supposed to? If all this pragmatism and inclusion they're apparently demonstrating doesn't turn out to be a cynical ruse, I'll be sorely disappointed.

 

In the meantime, we'll just have to wait for them to do something unequivocally shitty before we can say "I told you so" – unless the whole "55% majority" thing turns out to be their equivalent of Hitler's enabling act, which strikes me as unlikely at the time of writing, since even constitutional experts can't agree whether it's a disgraceful abuse of democracy or nothing to worry about.

 

But by all means remind me of my nonchalance on this subject in four years' time, when we're being issued uniforms and ushered down the bunkers. Unless it's illegal for citizens to converse by then, in which case simply arch your eyebrows and shrug a bit, and I'll know what you mean.

 

Quality from Brooker this fine Monday.

[RedBrian84]

He is just fucking hilarious. Long may he reign.

[Pidge]

hXv3IKfqKmI

 

About 3 or 4 parts but a great watch.

[Pidge]

l76IjT6Guaw

 

YkgDhDa4HHo

 

I also love him for introducing me to my new favourite comedian (other than Stewart Lee and Daniel Kitson)

 

anyone with Spotify needs to check him out.

[Guest davelfc]

If TV was ever put in the dock for it's crimes, then Charlie Brooker would be possibly the only evidence the defence could produce.

 

But in a weird twist, also the chief witness for the prosecution.

Edited May 17, 2010 by davelfc

[Pidge]

tHj6y7nld1A

[Baldi]

Love Charlie Brookers stuff some of his stuff is also very underrrated like Nathan Barley the series. Got his TV Go Home book which is really good also.

[Lucky Pierre]

I was laughing reading that article in work today. He's brilliant.

[Mendoza]

BBC News - Konnie Huq and Charlie Brooker get engaged

 

An unlikely pairing.