I can make you hate

by Charlie Brooker

  As I fumbled with menus, trying not to betray my embarrassment, I glimpsed at the man and something in his eyes told me that he knew, somehow – he knew what had happened, but couldn’t snatch the phone off me for fear of embarrassing his girlfriend, who remained oblivious.

  Eventually I took the photo. His smile was fixed and unconvincing. I handed the device back. She thanked me. He stared at the ground. We went our separate ways in silence. Somehow, it was as if we’d all taken part in a terrible threesome.

  This kind of acute personal embarrassment simply wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago. But with our every folly entered into an electronic ledger somewhere, it’s becoming commonplace. Scarcely a week goes by without a leaked nudey phone photo of some hapless celebrity doing the online rounds. Paris, Britney, Rihanna, Miley … eventually we’ll be treated to raunchy snaps of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Vince Cable. Don’t pretend you’ll turn away. You’ll stand and stare like the rest of us.

  And those are just the famous people. By the year 2022, there’ll be a naked photo of everyone on the planet lurking somewhere in the interverse. You might as well take a really good one this afternoon, while you’re young and pliable, and upload it yourself before some future peeping-tom equivalent of WikiLeaks does it for you.

  Face it: there’s a 45 per cent chance that Julian Assange is rooting through an exhaustive collection of photographs of your bum right this very minute. And you know he’ll release the least flattering ones first.

  So you might as well beat him to it.

  ‘Bah’ and ‘boh’

  20/12/2010

  You can’t put a price on a good education. Except, actually, you can – and it turns out that price is just over £9,000 a year.

  Unsurprisingly many students are furious at the hike in tuition fees; but apart from shouting about it or trying to smash the Treasury to bits with sticks, what practical steps can we take to make education more affordable?

  Nine thousand pounds a year sounds like a lot – but actually, it’s shitloads. Yet it turns out that if you divide shitloads by fifty-two, it comes out at around £173 a week, which sounds more achievable. Especially if your course only lasts seven days. So let’s only provide week-long courses.

  Obviously, to compress a three-year course into one week, the field of study will have to be streamlined a bit. Whittled down. Reduced to a series of bullet points. But in many cases, that’s an advantage.

  Take history. There’s already far too much of it. In fact, mankind is generating a ‘past mountain’, which grows twenty-four hours in size every single day. No one can be expected to keep all of that in their head. There simply isn’t room. Even award-winning historians will be lost for words if you unexpectedly leap out in front of them and demand they list everything that happened on, say, 6 July 1919, before the special quiz music ends, especially if they thought they were alone in the house.

  So instead of studying the whole of human history, why not focus on a concentrated period, such as the most exciting five minutes of the Second World War? That way you just get the fun bits with the machine guns and everything, and there’s none of that boring exploration of the ‘consequences’ or the ‘causes’ or ‘how we can stop it happening again’. The philosopher George Santayana famously remarked that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. But if you have forgotten history, you won’t know you’re repeating it – so it won’t matter. And you won’t have heard of George Santayana, either. Which is just as well because he sounds like a smart arse.

  Likewise, when it comes to studying politics, let’s not waste time examining both sides of an argument – that’s just confusing. Instead of learning the pros and cons of say, slavery, why not just learn the pros? Not only is it far quicker, but you actually stand more chance of getting a job when you graduate, perhaps as a feisty TV news pundit or Daily Express columnist. Or as the owner of a cotton plantation.

  Speaking of careers, there are far too many courses with no clear vocational goal. If you’re not studying with a view to ensuring your future prosperity, why, precisely, are you bothering to read the Decameron? For the cultural benefit of all mankind? Look around you. Culture’s doing just fine without your help. We’ve got everything we need – from cage-fighting at the lowbrow end of the spectrum through to the dizzy heights of James Cameron’s Avatar right up at the top. There’s something for everyone.

  Rather than providing frivolous courses in artsy-fartsy-thinky-winky subjects with no obvious revenue stream, our educational institutions could save a lot of time and unnecessary expense by only providing courses that train students for jobs we’re definitely going to need in the brilliant future we’re steadily carving for ourselves. What’s the point in learning botany? We all know there won’t be plantlife. Apart from maybe the odd triffid, or whatever sort of moss can withstand a dirty bomb. So why bother learning about it? There’s no money to be made.

  Instead, let’s focus on giving young people the skills society will be crying out for in the years or months to come. Practical vocations such as water-cannon operator, wasteland scavenger, penguin coffin logger, Thunderdome umpire, dissident strangler, henchperson and pie ingredient.

  Come to think of it, even those courses are going to be costly, and the eventual wages so insultingly low it’ll take them three lifetimes to repay the loans. They can make up some of the shortfall by taking part in medical experiments, fellating ministers or breeding offspring for food, but the chances are that the big society will never recoup the funds it lent to these little people.

  Which leaves us one final option. Let’s simply give up. You know, as a species. Put an end to this weird ‘progress’ experiment we’ve all been taking part in and actively revert to the level of farmyard animals. They look happy, don’t they, with their tails and their mud? Let’s join them.

  Starting tomorrow, let’s stop bothering to learn or teach anything. Within months the whole world will be far simpler for all concerned. We can issue the next generation with a few basic instructions, some warm clothes and toilet paper, and leave them to it.

  Eventually society will regress to the point where there are only two words – ‘boh’ (meaning good) and ‘bah’ (meaning bad). Everything will be either bah or boh; we’ll shuffle around bahing or boh-ing, chewing the cud or eating the vitamin rusks they occasionally fire in our direction from the turrets on their trucks. And everyone will be happy. Or ignorant. Or both.

  Merry Christmas.

  PART SIX

  In which EastEnders is revealed to be a work of fiction, Nick Clegg worries about human beings with feet, and a teenager incurs the wrath of the internet for singing a bad song badly.

  EastEnders and Monster Munch

  10/01/2011

  I’m not entirely certain I can pinpoint the moment I first realised EastEnders isn’t a documentary. Maybe it was when Den Watts was assassinated by a bunch of daffodils. Or when he came back from the dead and then got killed again. Or when Steve Owen’s mother tried to French-kiss him on her deathbed.

  Or when Ricky Butcher became a speedway champion for one week. Or when Melanie Healy slept with Phil Mitchell on Christmas Day.

  Or when Max Branning got buried alive.

  Or when Janine pushed Barry off a cliff. Or when Janine got so agoraphobic she sat indoors eating dog food. Or when Janine ran over Danielle in a car. Or when Janine framed Stacey by stabbing herself on Christmas Day. Or when Janine slept with Ian Beale and then blackmailed him by threatening to tell his third wife, Laura. Or when Janine slept with Ian Beale and then blackmailed him by threatening to tell his fourth wife, Jane.

  Or when, while Googling a list of Janine’s crimes, I realised Ian Beale had managed to convince four whole women to marry him.

  Somewhere along the way I must have twigged that none of these people were real, possibly during the bit at the end where the names of the actors who play them floated up the screen accompanied by theme music.

  Contrary to popular
opinion, EastEnders isn’t set in London, or even Britain, or even the world – it’s situated in an absurd alternate universe overseen by a malicious, tinkering God with a hilarious sense of timing. Each wedding, anniversary, national holiday or mid-sized social gathering is visited by major tragedy. The most familiar noise in Albert Square is the sound of party poppers being drowned out by sobbing. Quickly followed by some pulsing electronic drums.

  Over the last few weeks God was at it again. Having given both Kat Slater and Ronnie Branning newborn offspring to enjoy, God capriciously decided to kill Ronnie’s baby on New Year’s Eve.

  As midnight neared, Ronnie wandered the square in a stunned daze, unnoticed by revellers and clutching the body of her deceased child – until, alerted by the sound of Kat’s baby crying from an open window, she snuck into the Queen Vic and swapped the two infants, in a scene that looked more like a Tramadol Nights sketch than the heartbreaking drama it was presumably intended to be.

  And now there’s an entirely predictable storm of protest; predictable, apparently, to everyone except the EastEnders production team, who seem to have failed to anticipate the sheer size of the furore – which is odd, since their job largely consists of hypothesising about all the different ways in which people can unwittingly stumble their way to an acrimonious row.

  The usual excuse for any soap opera planning a headline-grabbing plotline is that they’re ‘helping to build awareness’ of some social ill, as though the average citizen can only truly come to terms with drug abuse after seeing Phil Mitchell smoke crack.

  Of course, you only ‘build awareness’ by depicting events with some degree of accuracy, which is why the soaps often proudly announce that they collaborated closely with charities to ensure that Steve McFadden’s portrayal of the dark spiral of addiction would be as harrowingly authentic as possible, especially the bit where he smashed through a door like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and burned the Queen Vic to the ground.

  EastEnders would never screen an episode in which Ian Beale has a breakdown and decides to walk around the Square with a dead baby balanced on his head like a hat, although that would ‘explore the issue’ of bereavement and mental health just as effectively as the current child-swap storyline, which is equally unrealistic, yet has to be presented as a hard-hitting study of bereavement because the alternative is to admit that EastEnders is mindless entertainment – with the occasional dead infant thrown in for your amusement.

  There’s a basic rule in drama that the audience can suspend disbelief only long enough to accommodate one extreme event at a time. A cot death is one extreme. A baby-swap is another. Combining the two events at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve was the scriptwriters’ first big mistake. Trying to pull all of this off within the context of a populist soap was the second. A self-consciously weighty one-off ITV drama-of-the-week with an A-list cast and lots of sombre camerawork would probably have got away with it, unless they did something totally crazy, like casting Jedward as the swapped babies.

  Still, if broadcasting the storyline was fairly crazy, complaining to Ofcom about the lack of realism in EastEnders doesn’t seem much saner – almost on a par with threatening to sue the manufacturers of Monster Munch because their crisps don’t taste of monsters.

  Nonetheless, the BBC appears to have backed down and the storyline, in a weird reflection of itself, will be laid to rest prematurely. The mad God of Walford originally wanted the zany saga to reach a festive climax next Christmas Day, typically. But now the whole thing will apparently be rewritten to accommodate a viewer-friendly ‘happy ending’.

  Yes: that’s a cot-death-baby-swap storyline with a happy ending.

  Now there’s a script meeting I’d like to sit in on.

  Alarm Clock Britain

  17/01/2011

  Nick Clegg – currently Britain’s 7,358th most popular public figure, sandwiched between Maxine Carr and the Go Compare tenor – has written an article for the Sun in which he bravely stands shoulder-to-shoulder with a shamefully overlooked, uniquely burdened segment of our population.

  And he’s obviously given the matter plenty of thought.

  ‘Now more than ever, politicians have to be clear who they are standing up for,’ he writes. ‘Be in no doubt, I am clear about who that is.’

  Who? Ethnic minorities? The poor? The disabled? The original lineup of Gerry and the Pacemakers? Beekeepers? Milkmen? Necrophiles? Yeomen?

  No. They can all piss off. Because Cleggsy Bear has someone else in mind. But despite claiming to be ‘clear about who that is’, it’s a group he defines in the vaguest, most frustrating terms possible – almost as if he doesn’t really know what the hell he’s going on about.

  He’s on the side of ‘Alarm Clock Britain’, apparently. Yeah. You know: Alarm Clock Britain. Stop staring blankly at me. Alarm Clock Britain! It’s everywhere!

  ‘There are millions of people in Alarm Clock Britain,’ Clegg writes. ‘People, like Sun readers, who have to get up every morning and work hard to get on in life.’

  Basically, Alarm Clock Britain consists of people who use alarm clocks. That counts me out, because I wake each morning to the sound of my own despairing screams. Which I guess makes me part of Scream Wake Britain – a demographic Clegg has chosen to ignore. There are millions of people in Scream Wake Britain, and approximately half of them voted for him.

  Still, it’s undeniable that millions of Britons use alarm clocks, so it’s nice to know someone at the heart of government is prepared to speak up on their behalf. We are yet to discover Clegg’s stance on Toothbrush Britain (Britons who use toothbrushes), or Bum Wipe Britain (Britons who use toilet paper), or Newtonian Physics Britain (Britons subjected to the law of gravity), but I think it’s fair to assume he’s on their side too.

  Which is not to say Alarm Clock Britain is an amorphous group with no boundaries whatsoever. Students, for instance, are notorious for waking up late, so they’re definitely excluded, which is just as well since the average student trusts Clegg about as much as I’d trust a hammock made of gas.

  Anyway, Clegg goes on to pepper the phrase Alarm Clock Britain throughout the rest of the article as often as he can, as though it’s some kind of transformative mantra, in the apparent belief that the more he repeats it, the more we’ll identify with it. He even managed to slip it into TV interviews, telling BBC News that he could understand why ‘the people of what I like to call Alarm Clock Britain’ are pissed off about bankers’ bonuses (not that he promised to actually do anything about it – one of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough).

  The trouble is that no one apart from Clegg himself is talking about Alarm Clock Britain (unless, like me, they’re mocking him in print), so his attempt to seed this spectacularly meaningless catchphrase into the national conversation merely comes across as desperate.

  It reminds me of a heartbreaking Peanuts comic strip in which Charlie Brown, in a rare moment of unguarded candour, tells Lucy he wishes he had a better nickname.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to be called Flash,’ he says. ‘I hate the name Charlie. I’d like to be real athletic so that everybody would call me Flash. I’d like to be so good at everything that all around school I’d be known as Flash.’

  Lucy stares at him for a bit before laughing out loud, incredulously cackling the name ‘FLASH?!?’ a few times, before running off to share this hilarious news with the rest of the gang. Charlie Brown is left standing in the frame on his own, looking as suicidal as it’s possible for a circle with dots for eyes to look.

  Still, it’s not as if Clegg’s been the only one trying to attach a preposterous name to a group of potential voters. Unstoppable political dynamo Ed Miliband recently tried appealing to ‘The Squeezed Middle’, which sounds like a frighteningly nonspecific sandwich filling, but is, in fact, precisely the same group as Alarm Clock Britain – middle-income households too rich to rely on benefits, too poo
r to shrug off VAT rises. As if this group didn’t have enough to contend with, they now have to face the ignominy of their parliamentary representatives failing to rustle up a media-friendly pigeonhole term that defines them.

  Maybe Cameron could enter the fray, and start calling them ‘The Nameless Ones’ or just ‘Thingy People’. Or ‘Thingy Things’. ‘Things with Feet’. ‘Feety Folk’.

  Yes! Only when our leaders outline their desire to walk a mile in the shoes of Feety Folk Britain will we appreciate how much they truly value us.

  Miliband DX-9

  07/02/2011

  Poor old Ed Miliband. Those aren’t my words. Those are the words your mind thinks whenever you see him on television. And then you feel bad for thinking that, which makes you feel vaguely sorry for him again, and that in turns feeds back into the initial pity you experienced, and the whole thing becomes a sort of infinite commiseration loop that drowns out whatever he’s actually saying and doing.

  I keep reading that if he really wants to build support for Labour, Miliband doesn’t actually have to do anything: just sit back, let the coalition slowly appal and repel the population, and voilà: future votes will be his, by osmosis. This low-risk strategy seemed to be working. And then, bafflingly, over the past few weeks he’s decided to break the spell by granting interviews and popping up for photo opportunities.

  First he was interviewed by Piers Morgan for GQ magazine. Incredibly, he managed to withstand the urge to vomit long enough to describe himself as ‘a bit square’, and mutter something about wanting to share a desert island with Teri Hatcher, Rachel Weisz and Scarlett Johansson. I can’t work out whether that’s a reality show I’d like to see or not.

  Then he went to Afghanistan, shadowed by ITN’s Tom Bradby, who was compiling a profile piece. Unfortunately, Ed looks incredibly silly in a helmet and flak jacket. Like a toucan in a fez, it just doesn’t go. Rather than making Ed look like a thrusting leader, the end result was several minutes of footage which, with the sound off, looked like a report about a small boy who’d won a competition to go and see a war.