The Hell of it All Read online

  Charlie Brooker

  The Hell of it All

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  In which nightclubs are derided, spiders are feared, and the vast majority of people inexplicably fail to blow their own heads off

  Chapter Two

  In which lies are told by everyone except Simon Cowell, Jamie Oliver cooks tomatoes, and the 24-hour news networks look for Madeleine McCann

  Chapter Three

  In which David Cameron loses weight, neighbours fight for their right to party, and someone from Five appears

  Chapter Four

  In which Cerys Matthews romances a baby, Peter Andre and Jordan cause bafflement, and total sensory deprivation is attempted

  Chapter Five

  In which George Clooney becomes a coffee ambassador, all-out war is declared on reality, and Lulu has a wonderful dream

  Chapter Six

  In which young men are the enemy, Michael Portillo hosts a warthog parade, and the Iraq war becomes a set of dizzying numbers

  Chapter Seven

  In which celebrities perish, Valentine’s Day fails to raise hopes, and smokers are threatened with paperwork

  Chapter Eight

  In which The Apprentice provokes confusion, the Gladiators change their names by deed poll, and a TV show baits real-life paedophiles for chuckles

  Chapter Nine

  In which the idiots start winning, Boris runs for mayor, and the sexual habits of various animals are contemplated

  Chapter Ten

  In which ethnicity is admired for the sake of it, Christianity is misrepresented, and Dale Winton threatens to bring on the wall

  Chapter Eleven

  In which deadly marketing strategies are brainstormed, conspiracy t heorists grow upset for the 85th time, and Britney Spears is depicted naked

  Interlude: An American road trip

  Chapter Twelve

  In which the world as we know it comes to an end, Kerry Katona is defended, and the Daily Mail pretends to be outraged by Russell Brand and a butterfly.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In which Sachsgate rumbles on, Bagpuss goes to sleep, and MTV introduce the most vapid TV show in history

  Chapter Fourteen

  In which Barack Obama is elected, Santa dies, and Tatler prints an exhaustive list of the biggest cunts in Britain

  Chapter Fifteen

  In which Noel Edmonds rants down a lens, Knight Rider makes an ill-advised comeback, and Greece Has Talent

  Chapter Sixteen

  In which MPs provoke fury, potato crisps appear in appalling new flavours, and the British National Party offends anyone with a basic grasp of human decency and/or graphic design.

  Gaming Appendix

  Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Hello, reader, and welcome to another collection of scrawled gibberish, scraped from the pages of the Guardian and fashioned into the unassuming paper brick you currently hold in your hands. I hope you enjoy the majority of what you’re about to absorb. If not, well, sorry. Use the book for something else. Like security: you could probably club a burglar unconscious with it, if you swing it forcefully enough and angle the spine just right, so it connects with the bridge of their nose. Or just rip it up, make a papier-mâché shield out of it, and go fight dragons. It’s your book. Go crazy.

  Just like my previous anthology, Dawn of the Dumb, the columns here are assembled into chapters, alternating between Screen Burn TV review columns written for the Guardian Guide and more wide-ranging (some might say random) pieces tackling any subject under the sun, scribbled for the Guardian’s G2 section. The contents are rather arbitrarily presented in chronological order, although you can read the individual articles in any order you like. Like I said earlier, it’s your book. Honestly. You own this.

  Eagle-eyed readers may spot the occasional word or turn of phrase that didn’t appear in print. That’s because I’ve gone back and dug out the ‘uncensored’ versions of a few of the columns, where it was possible to do so. In a couple of other places I’ve simply rewritten something slightly to amuse myself. Usually, I’ve made things more childish. God I hate me.

  Thanks are due to many people for their help and assistance in getting this all together: Julian Loose, Liz May Brice, Annabel Jones, Lisa Darnell and Lucinda Chua. Also Malik Meer and Kathy Sweeney at the Guide, and Emily Wilson and Mike Herd at G2. The largest, belated thanks are due to Tim Lusher at the Guardian, who gave me my first real ‘break’ with the paper. Apologies to anyone I’ve missed out. I’m forgetful, not to mention an absolute shit.

  Anyway, stop reading this now and go enjoy your book. YOUR BOOK.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In which nightclubs are derided, spiders are feared, and the vast majority of people inexplicably fail to blow their own heads off

  The hell of nightclubs [13 August 2007]

  I went to a fashionable London nightclub on Saturday. Not the sort of sentence I get to write very often, because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a glamorous friend of mine was there to ‘do a PA’, and she’d invited me and some curious friends along because we wanted to see precisely what ‘doing a PA’ consists of. Turns out doing a public appearance largely entails sitting around drinking free champagne and generally just ‘being here’.

  Obviously, at 36, I was more than a decade older than almost everyone else, and subsequently may as well have been smeared head to toe with pus. People regarded me with a combination of pity and disgust. To complete the circuit, I spent the night wearing the expression of a man waking up to Christmas in a prison cell.

  ‘I’m too old to enjoy this,’ I thought. And then remembered I’ve always felt this way about clubs. And I mean all clubs – from the cheesiest downmarket sickbucket to the coolest cutting-edge hark-at-us poncehole. I hated them when I was 19 and I hate them today. I just don’t have to pretend any more.

  I’m convinced no one actually likes clubs. It’s a conspiracy. We’ve been told they’re cool and fun; that only ‘saddoes’ dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled ‘sad’ – it’s like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.

  Clubs are despicable. Cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can’t hold a conversation, just bellow inanities at megaphone-level. And since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the overbearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.

  Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they ‘enjoy’ clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.

  Drugs render location meaningless. Neck enough ketamine and you could have the best night of your life squatting in a shed rolling corks across the floor. And no one’s going to search you on the way in. Why bother with clubs?

  ‘Because you might get a shag,’ is the usual response. Really? If that’s the only way you can find a partner – preening and jigging about like a desperate animal – you shouldn’t be attempting to breed in the first place. What’s your next trick? Inventing fire? People like you are going to spin civilisation into reverse. You’re a moron, and so is that haircut you’re trying to impress. Any offspring you eventually blast out should be drowned in a pan before they can do any harm. Or open any more nightclubs.

  Even if you somehow avoid reproducing, isn’t it a lot of hard work for very little reward? Se
ven hours hopping about in a hellish, reverberating bunker in exchange for sharing 64 febrile, panting pelvic thrusts with someone who’ll snore and dribble into your pillow till 11 o’clock in the morning, before waking up beside you with their hair in a mess, blinking like a dizzy cat and smelling vaguely like a ham baguette? Really, why bother? Why not just stay at home punching yourself in the face? Invite a few friends round and make a night of it. It’ll be more fun than a club.

  Anyway, back to Saturday night, and apart from the age gap, two other things struck me. Firstly, everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgement of others, trapped within a self-perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. I’d still secretly like to be them, of course, but at least these days I can temporarily erect a veneer of defensive, sneering superiority. I’ve progressed that far.

  The second thing that struck me was frightening. They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that’s all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.

  Surely this is a new development. Clubs have always been vapid and awful and boring and blah – but I can’t remember clubbers documenting their every moment before. Not to this demented extent. It’s not enough to pretend you’re having fun in the club any more – you’ve got to pretend you’re having fun in your Flickr gallery, and your friends’ Flickr galleries. An unending exhibition in which a million terrified, try-too-hard imbeciles attempt to out-cool each other.

  Mind you, since in about 20 years’ time these same people will be standing waist-deep in skeletons, in an arid post-nuclear wasteland, clubbing each other to death in a fight for the last remaining glass of water, perhaps they’re wise to enjoy these carefree moments while they last. Even if they’re only pretending.

  Think of a number [20 August 2007]

  I was queuing for a ticket at Clapham Junction when it happened. The train was leaving any minute from a platform at the other end of the station, so I was tense. To add to my woes, the person in front of me using the machine was one of those professional ditherers the Sod’s Law Corporation apparently employs to arrive in your life at the most infuriating moments.

  As time drained away, he gawped at the screen like a medieval serf trying to comprehend helicopter controls, confounded by one simple question after another – questions such as where he was going, and how many of him there were. His hand hovered over the touch screen, afraid to choose, like a man deciding whether to stroke a sleeping wolf. Meanwhile I ground my teeth to chalk dust.

  Finally the prick was done, and once I’d waited for him to collect his tickets and his bloody receipt, it was my turn. Having no change, I opted to pay by card. But just as my hand moved towards the keypad to enter my pin, a voice in my head whispered: ‘You don’t know what it is.’ And it was right. I didn’t. I scanned my head, but nope: my pin had vanished. It had gone.

  I tried inputting something that seemed about right. INCORRECT PIN said the screen. I slowed my breathing to clear my head. Rested my hand on the keypad a second time. Tried to fall back on muscle memory. Performed a finger dance. INCORRECT PIN.

  I became aware of the snaking, sighing queue behind me. Now I was the ditherer. A third bum guess would swallow the card, so I snapped it back into my wallet, turned on my heel and walked off, past the eyes of everyone in the queue, trying vainly to look as though not buying a ticket had been my plan all along, and everything was going smoothly, thanks for asking. Annoyed, I went outside and hailed a taxi.

  As I sat in the back, I examined the contents of my head. The number had to be in there somewhere. After all, I’ve only got one card. One pin to remember. And I use it all the time, every day; in supermarkets, cafes, cashpoints, stations … everywhere. I realised that I’d better remember it soon or I wouldn’t be able to function in modern society. Yet the harder I thought, the more elusive the number became. The only thing I knew for certain was that it didn’t have a letter J in it. And that wasn’t much of a clue. My brain had deleted it for no reason whatsoever.

  I asked friends for advice. One told me to close my eyes and visualise my fingers on the keypad. Trouble is, I’m so scared of thieves peeking over my shoulder, I’ve perfected the art of making my hand look like it’s entering a different pin to the one it’s actually entering. When I try to picture it in my mind’s eye, I can’t actually see what I’m doing. I’ve managed to fool myself within my own head.

  Someone else told me the key was to stop worrying about it and go Zen. Next time you’re passing a cashpoint, relax: it’ll just come to you, they said. But I couldn’t relax. If you forget your pin, you have two guesses at an ATM, and two guesses in a shop. A third incorrect guess incurs a block, and isn’t worth risking. Fail on your first two tries and you have to wait till the following day, when your guess tally is reset. All of which makes each attempt pretty nerve-racking – like using an unforgiving and incredibly irritating pub trivia machine.

  Over the past few days I’ve approached cashpoints with misplaced confidence, only to suffer last-minute performance anxiety. It’s like trying to go at a crowded urinal, when you’re wedged between two men with penises the size of curtain rods, pissing away like horses. Just as a shy bladder refuses to wee, my brain refuses to dislodge the number. It won’t come out. Not a drop. I’m impotent.

  This morning I gave in and called the bank, ashamed. Sensibly, they wouldn’t read my pin out over the phone, but offered to post a reminder. But because they’re a bank, and banks work to an infuriating Twilight Zone calendar in which any task that would normally take five minutes in our dimension suddenly takes five to ten ‘working days’, I’m currently operating in that unsettling limbo familiar to anyone who’s lost a wallet; you become a social outcast, carrying ID into your home branch and begging for some old-fashioned banknotes to tide you over.

  Inconvenience aside, what’s creeped me out is the thudding blank hole in my head where the number used to live. It can’t be possible to completely forget something so familiar. Perhaps it was stolen. Perhaps someone hacked into my mind while I was dreaming and sucked it away through a pipe. Or perhaps this is stage one of my inevitable descent into thrashing, bewildered madness. What am I going to forget next? How to chew food?

  In the meantime, if anyone’s got any hints on lost-memory retrieval, pass them on. I’ve tried everything from getting drunk to lucid dreaming, and the little bastard is still hiding in the bushes, looking on and laughing. I can sense it. But I can’t see it.

  Whippersnapper TV [27 August 2007]

  Young people today are nothing but trouble. They slouch. They’re lawless. They tote knives and flob on the ground. Look into their eyes: there’s no gratitude there. Just blank-eyed nihilism and belching. Although the belching’s coming from lower down, from the mouth bit. Young people undermine society. They come over here, into our present, downloading our ring tones. Would you want your daughter marrying one? Young people think they own the place. Well, they don’t. Yet.

  But what can be done? The softly-softly approach is as much use as a Plasticine ladder or a glass trampoline. Take a group of youths hanging out by the local bus stop, intimidating innocent pedestrians with their 21st-century patois. Now approach them. Try to point out where they’re going wrong. Be patient. Take your time. Use diagrams. Will they listen? Will they heck. They won’t even look you in the eye. While you politely set them straight, they stare at their shoes and snort, because you’re old and dull and they hate you. That’s how their minds work. They’ve got no respect for their superiors.

  You can’t win with young people. But you can punish them. The older male generation loves dreaming u
p punishments for the young. It’s the only thing that still gets them aroused. Last week, moon-faced political letdown and professional idiot David Cameron suggested a new kind of penalty.

  ‘I’d like to see judges and magistrates tell a 15-year-old boy convicted of buying alcohol or causing a disturbance that the next time he appears in court he’ll have his driving licence delayed,’ he said, through his fat failing mouth, adding, ‘And then I’d like that boy to tell his friends what the judge said.’

  Dribbling gump though he is, Cameron’s on to something here. And that bit where the crook-boy has to tell his mates what happened is the key.

  In the mind of a young person, being told off is cool. An asbo, therefore, is like a badge of honour: a sort of alternative Victoria Cross. What’s required is a form of punishment that genuinely humiliates the offender.

  Every so often a comedy judge in America will sentence someone to some kind of embarrassing public penance: walking down the street in a chicken suit, and so on. We need to go one better, by establishing a dedicated 24-hour digital TV channel on which young offenders humble and debase themselves.