I can make you hate

by Charlie Brooker

  All these people should be employed to make shows, not adverts for shows. That’s like paying Heston Blumenthal millions to design a bespoke scent that’ll tempt people to your soup truck, which only serves bargain soup made with cheap ingredients because that’s all you can afford, having blown all the money on the smell.

  All that time and money to advertise a show which everybody knows about anyway. You could hold a bit of cardboard with ‘STRICTLY’S COMING BACK’ scrawled on it in front of the lens for ten seconds and it would have ten times the impact. Madness.

  And it’s not just madness in the short-term: what about legacy? If all that time and money and street-closing and dancing and filming had been used to create a show instead of an advert, they might’ve created something they could broadcast again, or sell on DVD, or flog to the Swiss and the Kenyans. Instead they blew it on a promo that’ll air for a few weeks before getting tossed on to the ever-mounting stack of other never-to-be-shown-again adverts, which sit there gathering dust in nobody’s memories – pointless visual epics informing you that the BBC sometimes broadcasts football and has radio stations.

  I wouldn’t mind if they used the money to sew some shiny new buttons on Ian Beale’s shirt. Or maybe a bunch of pitchforks and flaming torches for those terrified farmers round Cameron’s way. Film that. At least it’s money spent on the right thing.

  David Cameron is a lizard, Pt. 2

  16/10/2011

  Last week, during the opening preamble to a fairly pedestrian whinge about glitzy BBC promo trails, I called Prime Minister David Cameron a ‘pitiless blank-eyed hell-wraith’ and described his familiar evening ritual: a stomach-churning rite which opens with ceremonial skin-shedding and climaxes with the swallowing of a live foal.

  So far, so utterly reasonable. But Graeme Archer of the Daily Telegraph was less than impressed. In a riposte entitled ‘Charlie Brooker and the Tragedy of the Modern Left’, he wrote that he was appalled that ‘Mr. Brooker felt the need to spend four paragraphs to tell us that the Prime Minister is, in fact, a lizard [and] that he is served by lizards who aid him in the consumption of live flesh once the sun goes down.’

  He went on to criticise the article’s ‘quite repellent imagery, deliberately deployed in order to de-humanise a perfectly reasonable Conservative’, before complaining that ‘to describe a political opponent as a blood-sucking lizard isn’t amusing; and even if it were, it is depraved’. In conclusion, he wrote: ‘Neither good people who vote Tory, nor their honourable opponents who vote Labour, are less than human: they are just people who happen to disagree on political objectives and tactics.’

  Archer has a point. It isn’t fair to imply someone is ‘less than human’. It would be unfair, for instance, to describe Geoff Hoon as ‘an overfed, self-satisfied cat, oozing smugness’ or to describe Labour MPs en masse as a ‘legion of dead-eyed Brown spawn’, as Archer did in his Conservative Home blog, presumably as part of some strange unconscious typing accident.

  Archer writes vividly and from the heart and, if his byline photo is anything to go by, appears to be a perfectly reasonable man (specifically, Ross Kemp). He deserves the benefit of the doubt. But I fear in his rush to reprimand the ‘Modern Left’, he has overlooked one key fact: David Cameron is a lizard.

  Yes, David Cameron is a lizard. A lizard that devours live foals in its lair. And as far as Archer is concerned, it’s perfectly fine for this limbless, non-human, Cameron-reptile-beast-thing to squirm across the stone floor of its den merrily excreting the bones of its victims, yet I’m ‘depraved’ simply for writing about it. This is the tragedy of the Modern Right. They’re idiots.

  Well, let me spell it out: you cannot dehumanise a lizard. Not without humanising it first, by giving it a little top hat, say, or a monocle. Maybe put some lipstick on it. And a wig. Teach it to walk sexy. That’s the way. Now confess: you already feel like getting to base three with the thing. But don’t! It’s still just a creature.

  But that’s a standard lizard we’re talking about. Sadly Cameron is no standard lizard. He can’t even be classified as a conventional reptile, because that would require him to have some kind of quantifiable earthly form – which, as a malevolent paranormal entity continually shifting between dimensions, he simply doesn’t have.

  I know this sounds crazy. But don’t take my word for it. Last week I asked the online community if it had further proof of Cameron’s true nature. I was immediately inundated with terrifying eyewitness accounts.

  Twitter enthusiast @djamesc wrote: ‘I went to school with Cameron. He used to curl up next to the radiator during lunch. He only ate once a week.’

  Steve Hogarty said: ‘I once saw him behind a branch of Wait-rose using both hands to squeeze a swollen pulsating neck gland (or ‘sac’) into a dustbin.’

  Pianist Stephen Frizzle ‘witnessed Cameron slice off his finger whilst preparing vegetables, and it just grew back. No word of a lie.’

  Rob Carmier from Brighton recalled that on the day the lift wasn’t working at the G8 summit, Cameron ‘merely climbed the glass exterior with flattened palms’.

  Gareth James explained the recent hot weather was caused when Cameron ‘surrounded the UK with glass walls because he needs to live in a vivarium’.

  While a few of Cameron’s lizard properties sound almost charming – as Betsy Martian pointed out: ‘if ever he thinks his backbenchers are conspiring against him, he can turn his head a full 180 degrees to check’ – others are less attractive.

  For instance Paul Yates recalled: ‘I went to a business lunch with Cameron once and he ordered spiders. We all laughed, but he just stared at us.’

  This chilling behaviour was merely the tip of a deeply unsettling iceberg. Pete Strover encountered ‘a pack of feral dogs gathered in an underpass’ which ‘barked Cameron’s name in unison’, Dave Probert ‘once saw Cameron vomit up his entire skeleton to avoid having to admit he doesn’t know where Wales is’, Tom Bain ‘saw Cameron put his entire hand through the hole in the middle of a CD’, while perhaps most damningly of all, Darren Smith said: ‘I heard he strips completely naked to have a shit.’

  Hundreds of similar reports flooded in. I did my best throughout the week to alert everyone on Twitter to Cameron’s reptilian ways, but after several hours of unrelenting lizard warnings from me, they grew bored. Some begged me to ‘be funny again’. Others asked me to ‘drop the lizard shit’ or ‘change the record’ or ‘STFU’. Undeterred, I bravely persisted, all week long, repeatedly tweeting that Cameron was a lizard. Or maybe two lizards. Or some sort of ghost. But definitely evil and definitely not human. Yet still, thousands unfollowed me. It was almost as if they simply didn’t want to be told that David Cameron is a reptilian daemon that enters our realm each morning by slithering through a haunted mirror in order to feast on human souls.

  No one wants to know. They’re in denial, or maybe hypnotised by the sulphurous mind-control gas Cameron emits from a series of gummy, puckering apertures along his underbelly. At least here you get the truth. Which is that he is a lizard. And by ‘he’, I mean Cameron. David Cameron. Who is a lizard. David Cameron is a lizard.

  One foot in front of the other

  06/11/2011

  You know how occasionally someone you know will suddenly do something so wildly uncharacteristic, you begin to question whether you ever really knew them at all?

  You’ve known Jane for fifteen years. She’s always been a vegetarian. And now she’s married a human being made of meat. You’re confounded and slightly hurt. Who exactly was this ‘Jane’ you spent so much time with? What other surprises might be lurking within the Jane-shaped shell you once called a friend? Where was she on the night of the 5th? Is that her real leg? Who is Keyser Söze? Etc., etc.

  Still, if it’s slightly creepy when a friend behaves atypically, it’s borderline terrifying when the person behaving out of character is wearing your shoes and your haircut and looks like you and is you. Take me for instance. For years, I thought I knew
vaguely who I was, and the kind of things I liked. And one thing I’d definitely class myself as is ‘un-sporty’. I’ve never had a gym membership and have always been profoundly suspicious of anyone who willingly does anything more physically demanding than wiping their arse.

  So imagine my shock, in recent weeks, to find myself running around a local park. Not once, not while being chased in a waking nightmare, but voluntarily and often.

  I confess: I have become a runner. I go running. I run. Like a runner. Which is what I have become. A running runner. Forgive me. Oh Christ. Forgive me.

  It started innocuously, not to mention geekily. I stumbled across an app. An app designed to encourage couch potatoes to ‘get into’ running by easing them in at a pace so non-threatening you’d have to be physically glued to the sofa to be daunted by it.

  Here’s how it works: you pop a pair of headphones in and put some music on. Then you start the app. It fades the music down for a moment and tells you to stroll around for about ninety seconds. Once that time limit’s up, it interrupts again and politely asks you to run for sixty seconds. Sixty seconds, no longer. Then you walk for ninety seconds again. And so on. It’s literally a walk in the park. And before you know it, the app’s voice – a slightly patronising female whose accent hovers somewhere between Devon and Melbourne – is saying well done, that’s enough for today, you can go home now, and incidentally you’re wonderful.

  You repeat this three times a week; each time, it incrementally lengthens the run and shortens the walk. After nine weeks, to your own astonishment, you’re running uninterrupted for thirty minutes.

  I always hated healthy outgoing types. Really despised them. And when they smugged on about how physical exercise gave them an endorphin rush, I felt like coughing blood in their eyes. Now, to my dismay, to my disgust, I discover they were right. If I don’t get to run, I become irritable, like a constipated bear that can’t find the woods. I have to get out there. And I run for longer: I’m up to an hour at a time now, sometimes more.

  I remember the psychological barrier I had to pass through when I bought my first pack of cigarettes. I’d cadged here, dabbled there, mainly at night, over a drink, until finally one day, I had to face facts: it was the middle of the afternoon, and I was gasping. I popped into a newsagent’s and bought my inaugural pack of Marlboros with a burning sense of shame.

  I don’t smoke any more, but I felt that shame again a few months ago, when I finally snapped and bought a decent pair of running shoes to replace the crappy trainers I’d been using. Once that dam was broken, I bought some wanky running shorts. Not one pair – but several. I even bought a preposterous sports top made of some kind of cybernetic superskin designed to slurp sweat off your back and email it to a parched section of the developing world. It’s a fabric with its own trademarked name and diagram, squarely designed to appeal to the kind of person I hate, and I own it. I can scarcely bear to look at myself in the mirror.

  This is how low I’ve sunk: I went on holiday recently, all the way to Australia, and on the way there we stopped in Singapore for a night and I … I can scarcely type this … I used the hotel gym. At 6.30 a.m. God help me I ran on a treadmill at 6.30 a.m. With other people in the room. And then I went on a cross-trainer. In full view of everyone. It feels good to admit it. It feels cleansing, somehow. And that was the first day of the holiday. I ran as often as I could after that. And then flew home and ran some more.

  Running, exercising, using gymnasiums … it’s a betrayal of everything I stand for. I hope it’s some kind of temporary life crisis. Or a complete mental breakdown from which I’ll eventually recover. Otherwise I’m going to have to start physically beating myself up. And even then, even as my own fists swoop towards my self-hating face, I’ll be secretly anticipating the endorphin rush of all that extra exercise.

  Doomed. Doomed.

  *

  The app was called Get Running.

  Slot the bastards

  13/11/2011

  A curious thing happened to me the other day while I was playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which, if you’re not familiar with such things, is a video game in which you participate in a bloody big war. It’s a very popular franchise; devoted fans camp out on pavements for a launch copy, which makes it the royal wedding of violent video games.

  Anyway, I’d got about a quarter of the way into it and was ‘doing’ a level based in Sierra Leone that required a bit of stealth and sneaking around. You spend most of the game accompanied by various computer-controlled characters, and I was walking behind one of these, a crotchety moustachioed soldier who’s supposed to be my friend, when he suddenly goes ‘shhhh’ because he’s heard a guard coming.

  So we both stop in our tracks, and moustache man snatches the guard, pins him against the wall, and stabs him right through the throat with a hunting knife, killing him instantly. Then the body hits the floor, moustache man says ‘OK, come on’, and we continue sneaking into the compound.

  Or rather, we were supposed to. But I stopped after a few steps and walked back to where he’d killed the guard.

  I just stared at the blood on the wall. Stared and stared at it. And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be friends with the man who did that.’

  Obviously there was no means of expressing a thought like that within the game engine, so I had to keep it to myself.

  Moments later, moustache man orders me to climb a watchtower and dispatch a guard myself. I climb the ladder to find a man asleep in a chair. Just dozing with his back to me. And as I walk near him it says ‘Press X to take out the guard’, so I press X, and rather than bonking him on the head, or maybe just persuading him to leave, my character also grabs the guard and stabs him right in the throat.

  And I thought, ‘I’m no better than moustache man: that was an appalling thing I just did.’

  Again, there was no way to explore these feelings in the game, so I forgot about it in favour of taking out mercenaries with my massive sniper rifle while moustache man and his pal shouted ‘slot the bastards’ and similarly inelegant encouragements.

  I don’t particularly mind the level of violence in computer games, partly because it’s absurd, and partly because I’m hopelessly desensitised. What I do object to is the dick-swinging machismo that infests games like this. If I had a penny for every time I’ve spent the opening moments of a game sitting in the back of a transport vehicle listening to a soldier called Vasquez repeatedly use the word ‘motherfucker’, I’d have enough money to buy the Sesame Street game instead. And even that probably starts with Sergeant Grover warning Private Elmo that, ‘shit is about to get real’.

  Every soldier in every game I’ve ever played is a dick. A dick that sounds like a fourteen-year-old boy reading dialogue discarded from an old-school Schwarzenegger action movie for displaying too much swagger. They seem like a bunch of try-hard bell-ends, desperate to highlight their gruff masculinity. What, exactly, are they overcompensating for?

  Well, for one thing, games are inherently wussy. The stereotype of the bespectacled dweeby gamer is an inaccurate cliché, but there’s no denying games are far from a beefy pursuit. Which is why shooty-fighty games go out of their way to disguise that.

  Every pixel of Modern Warfare 3 oozes machismo. It’s all chunky gunmetal, booming explosions and stubbly men blasting each other’s legs off. Yet consider what genteel skills the game itself requires. To succeed, you need to be adept at aiming a notional cursor and timing a series of button-pushes. It’s about precision and nimble fingers. Just like darning a sock in a hurry. Or creating tapestry against the clock.

  In other words, Modern Warfare 3 would be nothing but a gigantic needlework simulation were it not for the storyline, which is the most homoerotic tale ever created in any medium, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood videos. Behind the military manoeuvrings, the human story revolves around people backstabbing, bitching, making catty asides, breaking off friendships and betraying one another. Ignore the gunfire and it’s like
a soap opera set in a ballet school.

  Many of the missions require you to adopt the guise of Yuri, an impressionable young Russian lad hanging around with a pair of impossibly butch men, one of whom, Captain Price, is the aforementioned guy with a moustache – not just any moustache, mind, but a full-blown leatherman’s handlebar number. I think Captain Price’s ‘look’ was designed by Tom of Finland.

  Your other companion is a Scottish lad called Soap. I’m not sure why he’s called Soap, although I think it’s because Captain Price once picked him up in a bathhouse.

  Price is definitely the ‘top’ in the relationship, and before long both you and Soap appear to be vying for his affections. Often when you look at Price, the word ‘Follow’ literally appears over his head – a sincere instruction presumably beamed directly from your heart – as you walk behind him, tracing his footsteps while gazing forlornly at his back like a pining lover.

  When Price commands you to ‘get down’, you literally crawl behind him on your hands and knees. Sometimes you’ll be crawling so close, your viewpoint goes right up between Price’s legs until his crawling, pumping backside takes up the entire screen, which is precisely the sort of cinematography that failed to occur in Delta Force starring Chuck Norris.

  Perhaps that’s why Modern Warfare 3 will make more money than Delta Force did. Because presumably they’ve done market research and discovered that that’s what their consumers want.

  I just wish they’d be honest about it and let the lead characters kiss. And press X to use tongues.

  A dog’s head in a box

  20/11/2011

  Nothing merely ‘happens’ any more: every occurrence is now an ‘event’, which leaps up and down pointing excitedly at itself.

  Once, the end of a school term would be marked with a shabby disco down the village hall; you’d turn up wearing the one pair of jeans you owned and circumnavigate the dancefloor nodding your head to the sound of ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’. Now, in 2011, teenagers don outfits chosen by their personal stylist weeks in advance and arrive at their school ‘prom’ in a stretch Hummer. Come, friendly asteroids, and fall on Earth.