Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn Read online

  Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn

  For Liz, with love

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword By Graham Linehan

  Introduction

  Prelude: Pre-Screen

  Part One

  Part Two

  Three 2002

  Part Four 2003

  Part Five 2004

  Screen Burn FAQ

  Index

  By the Same Author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Foreword by Graham Linehan

  Imagine watching television for a living.

  You wake up, you’re at work. Your boss (you) has no problems with his sole employee (also you) sitting in a cornflake-spattered T-shirt and undies while trying to focus on Trisha. You don’t feel guilty watching Trisha because it is your job to watch Trisha. If you weren’t watching Trisha, you wouldn’t be doing your job! A dream ticket! The perfect crime!

  But there’s something shifting and swirling in the pit of your stomach. You were up late last night, watching a page-3 girl eating a maggot (it was your job to watch that too). That was followed by a programme in which people described catching rare genital diseases while on holiday. And then there was that show in which an elderly woman demonstrated her blowjob technique on a brightly-coloured dildo while a studio audience went into spasms of delight and her son (her son!) shook his head, laughed and pretended to enjoy himself?

  Your breakfast, you now realise, hasn’t gone anywhere.

  An explanation. During the time that Charlie Brooker was writing these pieces for the Guardian, British television underwent a reverse evolution. Early pioneers on shows like Eurotrash and The Word showed that there was an audience for pure, 100 per cent, evil, ugly, drunken cak, and others took that ball and ran with it, and so here we are. Television has a curved spine, a jutting lower jaw and its knuckles are red and raw from being dragged along the ground. It’s as if someone, somewhere said, ‘Why isn’t British television more like Italian television?’ and was promoted rather than slapped across the face.

  Good, attention-grabbing television is achieved in one of two ways. The first is quite complicated and involves a certain amount of expertise behind and in front of the camera. A memorable production might involve a strong cast, a timely subject and a director who knows how to tell a story. Or it could require years spent waiting with a movement-sensitive camera for a crab to crawl onto a beach at exactly the right time and impregnate a turtle.

  The second way is simpler and currently very much in vogue. Basically, you get a few Big Brother contestants, dress them up in school uniforms, give them enough booze to make a table stagger, and hope that security steps in before someone gets raped or killed.

  Disasterporn, funography … Call it what you will, to be a TV critic at this point is to be subjected to the sort of imagery that previously only film censors of the seventies and eighties had to endure. You need the sort of reckless disregard for your own sanity shared by war photographers and people who have to work with Elton John. You need a very special sort of person, someone who has the ability to stare into the abyss and, when it stares back, make it look away in shame. If this were a trailer for a big US film, this would be the moment when the President looks just to the right of the camera and says ‘Get me Brooker.’

  Imagine Charlie’s surprise when television started mirroring his entirely made-up ‘TV Go Home’ satirical website. Imagine how that felt – conceiving an imaginary TV show so appalling that it bends your brain like a Gellerspoon and then turning on the TV to find that programme is on after the news. That’s why only he has the undercarriage to do this job; anything television throws at Charlie, Charlie throws right back. How he has maintained his sense of humour is beyond me, but somehow he has managed it. It is now at such a keen pitch, in fact, that the mere idea of Charlie reviewing certain shows is enough to make me laugh. Anyone who calls Tiff Needall Tiff “Quick Turn Over” Needall needs no lessons from the Chuckle Brothers on how to provoke a laugh. Anyone who points out that Ross Kemp could stare out a man with two glass eyes doesn’t need an introduction from the likes of me. (As I write, my wife is reading through Charlie’s columns nearby. She’s laughing like a drain … a fleeting happiness soon to be violently cut short by my asking her to review this foreword.)

  Charlie is the funniest TV writer around, and the only person who truly understands British telly as it is in these final years before the world ends. This is not something to be envied. Spare a thought for him now, because as you read this, he is probably watching a programme in which a party of celebrities need to eat each other’s eyes in order to win a dildo.

  He watches these things so we don’t have to. Bless him for that.

  Introduction

  Apart from a stint behind the counter at Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill Gate, every job I’ve ever had has come about by accident. Writing ‘Screen Burn’ was no exception.

  It was the year 2000, and I was writing a website called ‘TV Go Home’, which consisted of nothing but spoof TV listings. These were the kind of hoary old whimsy you used to find in Not the Nine O’Clock News spin-off books several decades ago, but because it was on the Internet and was jam-packed with foul language, it was considered shocking and cutting-edge. This was just before the dot.com bubble burst, naturally – a feverish time when even a cross-eyed farmhand could be valued at billions if he put on a foil hat and claimed to be a pixel.

  Furthermore, because ‘TV Go Home’ often laid into people in the media, people in the media really enjoyed it, because every single one of them secretly hates themself and wants to die, or should do.

  Thanks to all of the above, I was now so cool and underground and bleeding-edge, the Guardian invited me to pen a few articles about television for their G2 section. Shortly afterwards, when the Guide’s Jim Shelley decided to stop writing his excellent ‘Tapehead’ column, they tried me out in the same slot. And I’ve clung on, like a desiccated tagnut ever since.

  Still, I may have become a TV critic unintentionally, but I picked an interesting time to fall into it. The first series of Big Brother was broadcast in the summer of 2000, marking the start of the reality TV boom, and, in a roundabout way, the beginning of an era during which TV finally jettisoned any pretence at being an important, socially beneficial medium and simply concentrated on sticking its bum in our face and giggling.

  Or did it? In fact, alongside the attention-grabbing luridness, there were arguably more high-quality shows on our screens during the 2000–2004 period than ever before (the majority of them, admittedly, were American). But you won’t find much praise in this book, largely because good shows are far duller to read or write about than the rubbish, the stupid, the grotesque or the gaudy.

  You don’t need me to tell you how good The Sopranos is. In fact, you don’t need me to tell you anything, and I’d have to be a pompous little tugwad to think otherwise. The bits that matter are the jokes, the stupid asides and the odd bit of savagery.

  Speaking of which, looking back through these columns, I finally understand why the editor keeps complaining about the amount of violent scatology that creeps in: I can’t even review, say, a simple cookery programme without veering off at a tangent about someone getting a spoon rammed down their pisshole, or up their bum, or down their pisshole and up their bum. I counted ten separate and entirely needless references to people shitting pine cones, most of which I’ve now removed in a desperate bid to appear less bum-fixated. There are other recurring obsessions too – Peter Sissons, petri dishes, made-up videogames, bizarre acts of violence … But I’ll shut up now and let you stumble across
them for yourself. Enjoy the book.

  Prelude: Pre-Screen

  Before landing the ‘Screen Burn’ column, I wrote a few pieces on television for the Guardian’s G2 section. This was the first one, covering Ricky Butcher’s exit from EastEnders.

  Ricky’s Luck [20 April 2000]

  It’s bye-bye to TV’s Mr Boo Hoo. After twelve years of unrelenting gloom, Ricky Butcher, Walford’s human raincloud, has finally had enough.

  ‘There’s nothing left for me here,’ he keeps muttering, intermittently performing that funny swallowing, gulping, staring-from-side-to-side thing he does whenever he wants us to know he’s really upset. He’s leaving Albert Square the only way he could: in unfettered misery.

  Ricky stumbled onto our screens in 1988, and fate has pissed mercilessly into his eyes ever since. It’s been nothing but disappointment, heartbreak, humiliation and plodding, battleship-grey drudgery. And while he may not have suffered with dignity (there’s nothing dignified about him) he has at least avoided pulling an ‘Arthur Fowler’ and plunging into full-blown mental unhingery. Until now.

  Previously, Ricky coped with life’s bleaker interludes by slumping morosely on the special ‘crisis’ bench in Albert Square gardens, peering into the depths of an abyss he’s simply too dim to understand.

  Now, with pro-am cuckolder Dan contesting ownership of his dad’s pub, and estranged wife Bianca happily settled in Manchester with baby Liam, Ricky’s finally overdosing on despair.

  Tuesday night’s episode in particular contained scenes of harrowing indignity on a par with the infamous male rape scene from the film Scum: Ricky on his hands and knees cleaning a pub toilet; Ricky watching his own sister flirt with Dan; Ricky having his IQ compared to that of a mop by the notoriously half-witted Barry Evans, while the entire population of the Square stood laughing in his face. All that was missing was a sequence in which he found himself unpleasantly surprised by an empty toilet-roll dispenser and forced to frog-hop around the Vic in search of a crumpled beer mat to wipe himself with.

  In tonight’s episode, Ricky finally breaks down and confesses to feeling suicidal. And what precisely does he have to live for anyway? Not love. There are backward farmhands with more successful private lives.

  It’s hard to see why. Despite having all the charm of a bit of old flannel hanging off a bush, Ricky is at least blessed with intriguing looks.

  Constant failure has battered his face into an amalgam of glum dejection and astonished distress. Despite the bruiser’s physique, the sour mouth, the flattened nose, there’s something childlike about his permanent state of upset: Ricky has the sorrowful eyes of a small boy watching a clown die in a grotesque circus accident. He also does a very good line in tireless devotion. Compared to, say, Phil, he’s quite a catch.

  Nevertheless, he always lucks out. First he fell for Sam Mitchell (Daniella Westbrook), younger sister to Phil and Grant, who soon twigged she’d got herself hitched to the human equivalent of a Little Chef gammon steak, eventually deserting him on the grounds that he was simply too dull to actually matter. Then he met Bianca (Patsy Palmer). She spent years tirelessly henpecking him into teary-eyed bewilderment, before launching into a pointless and doomed affair with her mother’s surly boyfriend.

  Finally, in the most glamorous moment of Ricky’s life, their marriage came to a tearful halt on a grimy Euston concourse.

  Leaving Walford is clearly a good move, even if he has to do it in a box.

  You’ll have to tune in this evening to find out what happens, but here’s an alternative ending, which, while admittedly outlandish, is at least in keeping with Ricky’s luck thus far. But be warned: the following paragraph contains scenes not suitable for viewers of a nervous disposition …

  So, then. Seeking a new life, Ricky Butcher boards a coach bound for Amsterdam, carrying all his worldly possessions with him, three sets of overalls and an old teaspoon. But 20 miles out of London, a baby lamb runs into the road and the vehicle overturns. The other passengers die horribly, but Ricky miraculously survives. Dazed and bleeding, yet largely unharmed, he is slowly counting his lucky stars on the fingers of one hand when the wreckage catches fire. Trapped in his seat, he gapes in horror as the flames rage towards him. Unable to face the prospect of a fiery death, he grabs the teaspoon from his knapsack and rams it into his eye in a desperate attempt to pierce his brain and finish himself off. But alas! Seconds later a rescue team arrives to douse the blaze. Surgeons at the nearby hospital are unable to remove the spoon, leaving Ricky to walk around with the handle jutting from his head like a miniature diving board.

  Monumentally depressed, he returns to Walford to continue his job as a mechanic, with the protruding spoon repeatedly pranging the underside of every vehicle he tries to fix. Finally, after five months of unbearable clattering, Ricky dies of a violent headache. OK, so that’s absurdly grim and unfair. But, hey, it’s also very Ricky Butcher.

  Sid Owen had left the soap to pursue a recording career, kicking off with a cover of Sugar Minott’s ‘Good Thing Going’. Two years after this article appeared, Ricky Butcher returned to Albert Square, and hung around pointlessly while the scriptwriters failed to come up with anything for him to do. He left for a second time soon afterwards.

  Contentious? Moi? [7 July 2000]

  Tonight sees the start of the thirteenth series of Eurotrash. Yes, the thirteenth. Channel 4’s high-camp helping of sleaze, sex and undulating silicone returns once more, providing queasy chuckles for an audience of boggle-eyed stoners, simultaneously saving the nation’s most desperate bachelors the bother of having to use their own imaginations (although the show is an onanist’s minefield – one minute the screen’s full of trampolining supermodels, the next there’s a Scandinavian Chuckle Brother lookalike unblocking a sink in the nude).

  For tonight’s curtain-raiser, it’s a case of same old, same old: there’s a look at the world of erotic lingerie, an artist who paints with his own semen, a magician placing his penis in a guillotine and a lengthy report on a female wrestler whose breasts are covered with oil. As ever, it’s linked – at considerable length – by the ever-likeable Antoine De Caunes (minus the late Lolo Ferrari), and enlivened with appealingly garish graphics and sarcastic voice-overs.

  But there’s a problem. Eurotrash simply doesn’t outrage any more, and not just because it has reached season 13. No. The trouble is that in the years since the programme first spurted onto our screens, everything else on television has steadily degenerated into a slew of dead-eyed, opportunistic, utterly heartless quasi-porn, which leaves Eurotrash’s recipe of cheerful, cheesy smut looking positively archaic. On any commercial station you care to mention, unashamedly lecherous programming piles up in the schedule like sour-smelling refuse sacks in a midnight alleyway. ITV brings us documentaries on sex, swinging and strippers (well, they look like strippers – and since they were renamed ‘lap dancers’, it’s apparently OK to show them on TV every 67 seconds). Channel 4 parades Caribbean Uncovered, Something for the Weekend, and Naked Elvis. The whole of Channel Five feels like nothing but a single nightmarish, drawn-out edition of Eurotrash, complete with unconvincing voices (Sunset Beach), harrowing male nudity (Keith Chegwin’s Naked Jungle) and profoundly dispiriting ‘erotica’ (courtesy of about a zillion assorted pornographic schedule-pluggers with titles like ‘Nude Saxophone Cops’ and ‘When Checkout Girls Bend Over’). Digital and cable viewers, meanwhile, can wallow in the nightly shock-o- rama of Bravo or the joyless Granada Men and Motors (demographic: underachieving loners interested in motoring, glamour photography and self-abuse).

  These days, watching television is like sitting in Travis Bickle’s taxicab, staring through the window at a world of relentless, churning shod. Some day a real rain’s going to come and wash the scum off the screens. Until then, sit back and gawp in slack-jawed indifference as television slowly disappears up a lap dancer’s bottom. In close-up. To the echoing strains of ‘Roll With It’.

  The upshot is we’ve become
hopelessly desensitised – but it’s not just the box that’s to blame. Consider the impact of technology. The past five years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people with Internet connections in the workplace, enabling office-bound tragi-bores to access and distribute stomach-churning muck with tiresome ease and gusto. Once you’ve got accustomed to having your attention regularly drawn to the kind of extreme imagery previously reserved for the racier shop windows of Amsterdam, all pornography rapidly becomes a crashing bore, no matter how bizarre. Hey, look – an MPEG clip of a circus clown sodomising a wolf on the deck of a Mississippi steamboat. Yawwwwn. Seen it before. Seen it twice. Rather watch a bit more Microsoft Excel, thanks.

  So, faced with competition from a bottomless technological smutweb on one hand, and a range of post-ironic pornorific TV programming on the other, what chance does Eurotrash have? Not much. To compete in the current climate it needs to grow harsher, less affectionate, more ruthless. Scrap the ‘Euro’ prefix; have the show re-christened just ‘Trash’. Ditch the wacky German fetish bars and Dutch pot-smoking contests; shoot each edition in the seediest quarter of Bangkok. Throw out the irony and humour; exchange it for eerie, misplaced fascination. Replace Antoine with a naked amputee who sits on a barbed-wire toilet seat repeatedly threatening to murder members of the audience, reading their addresses out on air and nonchalantly toying with a bloodied switchblade. Broadcast the entire show in 3D, pumping each and every image directly into the viewer’s cerebellum via a length of magic spacewire connected to the Internet. Sorry, Rapido, but that’s it. That’s the only way to restore the outrage.

  That’s how low we’ve all sunk. It’s either that or you have to kill the whole thing off. Who’d have thought it? Sleazy, scampish little Eurotrash – slowly rendered far too innocent to survive. These are dark days, readers. Dark days.