The Man Brooker
Let’s face it, you’re a massive hypocrite. You sit there at your la-di-da dinner parties sipping Tempranillo and pointing out that you don’t own a television, and as soon as the guests have gone you whip out the laptop and gorge yourself on half a box-set of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Six Feet Under. No TV? All you’ve done is boil it down to a syrup of video sweetness, minus the hours and hours of bum-wincingly tedious drivel that selfless critics like Charlie Brooker sit through so that they can warn you, in sarcastic rant-filled form, what to avoid. Forget hypocrite—you’re a super-hypocrite, a hyper-hypocrite: you should be chased around a hippodrome by a horde of hypnotised hippos.
What’s worse, you didn’t even discover his column until mid-2004, even though you were buying the paper it ran in for three years beforehand, because you thought what was the point in reading a TV column when you don’t watch TV?—denying yourself the funniest writing in British journalism this century (okay, so it’s a short one so far). You didn’t need a TV to enjoy it: you know about all the good shows, thanks to a personal DVD collection with a bigger range than Blockbuster (admittedly not hard—you passed them on the third 3-for-2 deal at HMV). You know about most of the bad ones too, the Big Brothers, the Pop Idols, thanks to all those stories in Metro. And for the really godawful ones—the one-off “specials”, the daytime horrors, the Jim Davidson appearances—Charlie will tell you all you need to know, in a far more entertaining way than the shows themselves.
No TV? It’s too late, your attention span is already shot after years of sketch shows and MTV and the Internet. It’s been eighteen months and you’re only half-way through Neal sodding Stephenson; in the meantime you keep reading these collections of short snippets, like Michael Quinion’s Port Out, Starboard Home: The Fascinating Stories We Tell About the Words We Use, and even though its entries were fascinating you even got bored with that, and would have given up halfway if it hadn’t meant feeling unsatisfied not knowing the origins of all those words and sayings after A-Q. So you need Brooker’s Screen Burn, where the unfolding horror of 21st century television keeps you obsessively reading, along with its writing style unsuitable for buses but perfect for reading aloud to friends—the style that you’ve absorbed and regurgitated wholesale for its own review. You need it because it covers all the columns you missed, right up to the point where you started paying attention.
No TV? You’re trapped by TV, like David “watch me disappear up my own arse” Blaine in his glass box, dangling in a transparent boob tube a hundred yards above the pop-cultural landscape, waiting to fall and be kicked to death by the angry crowds of licence-payers below. Because if you love Charlie Brooker you must love television, and nobody loves a hypocrite.