2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  As a result, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the first edition of Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns (BBC4), which examines Keaton’s work in some detail. By the end of the show I was blown away, partly because Merton’s unabashed love for his subject is infectious (and a delight to see), but mainly because the clips themselves are genuinely bloody funny.

  I used to think people only pretended to like silent comedies in order to impress girls in glasses, but on this evidence I was wrong. And when you’re not laughing, you’re gasping. We’re always told that the appeal of slapstick lies in its sense of Schadenfreude: the sickening delight of watching misfortune befall another, generally in the form of a banana skin and an open manhole—but on this evidence, you’re more likely to experience the chair-clenching terror of watching a man genuinely dicing with death before your very eyes. Perhaps I’m stupid, but I’d forgotten just how perilous early slapstick could be. After witnessing clip upon clip of Keaton literally risking his life on camera, even the most demented excesses of Jackass or Dirty Sanchez look hopelessly tame.

  But the best thing about the show is that it isn’t just a load of clips. The first 35 minutes consist of a potted history and mini-lecture from Merton—and then just at the point where you start thinking ‘this is all very well, but now my appetite’s been whetted I wish they’d show us a whole Keaton film’, they bloody well do: for the final 25 minutes we’re treated to a 1921 short called The Goat, in its entirety. And suddenly an eighty-five-year-old silent film becomes the freshest piece of comedy you’ve seen in years. Tinkling pianos and all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In which Sandi Thorn is unmasked, romance is denounced, and Justin Timberlake is told to go and fuck himself

  Time to get tough on flags

  [26 May 2006]

  Rejoice! Thanks to the national obsession with football, the cross of St George has finally been reclaimed from the racists. Nowadays, when you see an England flag on a car, sprawled across a T-shirt or flapping from a novelty hat, you no longer assume the owner is a dot-brained xenophobe. Instead you assume he’s just an idiot. And you’re right. He is.

  It’s a great piece of visual shorthand. Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation’s dimbos to wear dunce’s caps in public. No one would stand for it. There’d be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and Co. to the Nazis. We’d see rioting in the streets—badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.

  Instead, every numbskull in the land is queuing up to voluntarily brand themselves. They even pay for the privilege! As brilliant ruses go, it’s the most brilliant, rusiest ruse you could wish for. I can’t wait for stage two, when they’re persuaded to neuter themselves with safety scissors.

  The only problem I have with this berk-demarcation scheme is the design of the flag itself. Personally, I’d jettison the big red cross/white background malarky in favour of a black rectangle with the word CRETIN printed in the centre in stark bold text.

  Traditional flags are hopeless. A few weeks ago, I took part in a pub quiz. In round three you had to match countries to their national flags. It was impossible. With a few notable exceptions, most flags are more or less identical. A different colour here, a thicker line there, but on the whole they all just look like…well, like flags.

  Perhaps I’m wrong, but I always thought that the whole point of flags is to make it easy to tell which country you’re dealing with. Instead, thanks to a rash of uninspired design choices, they do the precise opposite. Flags have become a tedious puzzle, a tosser’s clue. What next? Replace the names of countries themselves with anagrams? What is this, The Da Vinci Code? The system’s in chaos.

  Who decides what can and can’t go on a flag anyway? Is there a worldwide flag council overseeing this stuff? Presumably drawings are permitted—the Welsh flag’s got the right idea with that lovely dragon—but what about photographs? If, say, the Dutch decided to replace their boring tricolour with some hardcore pornography, would they still be allowed to hang it outside the UN?

  Or what about sarcastic flags? If I was prime minister of Iraq—which I’m not—I’d commission a parody of the Stars and Stripes and insist on using that. Replace the stripes with missile trails and the stars with skulls. And a little cartoon of George Bush pooing into a bucket or something. It wouldn’t cost much and it would make literally everyone in the world laugh out loud. And perhaps all that laughter would bring us all together as one, and we’d spend the rest of the century hugging each other and tumbling around in a great big bed. Or perhaps not.

  Anyway, in summary: those protesters who burn flags outside embassies have got the right idea—but they shouldn’t be burning them because they disagree with something the country in question has done. They should be burning flags just because they’re flags. And flags are rubbish.

  The great online dick fight

  [2 June 2006]

  Last week I wrote a load of nonsense about flags and idiocy; as well as appearing in print, it also turned up on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ blog-o-site, where passers-by are encouraged to scrawl their own responses beneath the original article.

  Some people disagreed with the piece, some agreed; some found it funny, some didn’t. For half a nanosecond I was tempted to join in the discussion. And then I remembered that all internet debates, without exception, are entirely futile. So I didn’t.

  There’s no point debating anything online. You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky. The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional ‘live audience’ quickly conspire to create a ‘perfect storm’ of perpetual bickering.

  Stumble in, take umbrage with someone, trade a few blows, and within about two or three exchanges the subject itself goes out the window. Suddenly you’re simply arguing about arguing. Eventually one side gets bored, comes to its senses, or dies, and the row fizzles out: just another needless belch in the swirling online guffstorm.

  But not for long, because online quarrelling is also addictive, in precisely the same way Tetris is addictive. It appeals to the ‘lab rat’ part of your brain; the annoying, irrepressible part that adores repetitive pointlessness and would gleefully make you pop bub-blewrap till Doomsday if it ever got its way. An unfortunate few, hooked on the futile thrill of online debate, devote their lives to its cause. They roam the internet, actively seeking out viewpoints they disagree with, or squat on message boards, whining, needling, sneering, over-analysing each new proclamation—joylessly fiddling, like unhappy gorillas doomed to pick lice from one another’s fur for all eternity.

  Still, it’s not all moan moan moan in NetLand. There’s also the occasional puerile splutter to liven things up. In the debate sparked by my gibberish outpouring, it wasn’t long before rival posters began speculating about the size of their opponent’s dicks. It led me to wonder—has the world of science ever investigated a causal link between penis size and male political leaning?

  I’d theorise that, on the whole, right-wing penises are short and stubby, hence their owners’ constant fury. Lefties, on the other hand, are spoiled for length, yet boast no girth whatsoever—which explains their pained confusion. I flit from one camp to the other, of course, which is why mine’s so massive it’s got a full-size human knee in the middle. And a back. A big man’s back.

  Anyway, if we must debate things online, we might as well debate that. It’s not like we’ll ever resolve any of that other bullshit, is it?

  Click. Mine’s bigger than yours. Click. No it isn’t. Click. Yes it is. Click. Refresh, repost, repeat to fade.

  On wishing one was a punk rocker (with flowers in one’s hair)

  [9 June 2006]

  I’ve not heard that Sandi Thorn single all the way through yet, but I’ve
seen the TV ad about six billion times, and the short, poxy burst on that is more than enough to convince me that if her sudden rise to stardom wasn’t the end result of a shrewd marketing campaign, the implications are terrifying. Because to believe the official story—that thousands of people voluntarily subjected themselves to this shit online, then recommended it to their friends—is to lose your faith in mankind completely.

  There’s a simple way to setde this once and for all, and that’s for the huge crowd of people who apparently watched Thorn’s inaugural bedsit webcasts to step forward and make themselves known. Come on. Hands up. I want to see your faces. And then I want you smacked to death with brooms. You people are the enemies of fun. Your bland emissions pollute the atmosphere, threaten the environment. For the sake of humanity, you must be stopped.

  I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Sandi Thom genuinely touches some people. Whoever they are, I can’t relate to them. Woody Alien once marvelled with horror at ‘the level of a mind that watches wrestling’, and I’m the same with Sandi Thom fans. All I hear is that telltale, indefinable something that immediately marks it out as something that’s bypassed the soul completely: consumable noise for people who don’t like music but know listening to it is ‘the done thing’—like mutant imposters mimicking the behaviour of humans. I can’t relate. It doesn’t go. I’m being alienated by the replicants.

  There’s a word for this sort of thing. It’s not ‘art’, it’s ‘content’. And it’s everywhere, measured out by unseen hands, mechanically dangled over the replicants’ flapping gobholes: flavourless worms for android hatchlings.

  Sometimes I can almost see where content is coming from. Take Angels’ by Robbie Williams. It’s a massively popular piece of content, beloved by millions. If I strain really hard, I can just about make out some genuine emotion. Just a speck or two—but enough to make its huge success at least vaguely explicable. Compared with anything that has any semblance of balls whatsoever, ‘Angels’ is a bowl of cold mud—but next to most content, it’s a towering emotional epic. It almost makes you feel something. No wonder it’s become the official theme tune for thick people’s funerals.

  Anyway, back to Sandi Thorn. As luck would have it, while typing this article, I’ve just heard ‘I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (with Bollocks in My Mouth’) on the radio, and the real brain twister is the lyric, in which she yearns for a time ‘when accountants didn’t have control and the media couldn’t buy your soul’. It’s a bone-headed plea for authenticity, sung in the most Tupperware tones imaginable: a fake paean to a pre-fake era. It’s giving me vertigo.

  Wait. It gets worse. I’ve just looked it up on Napster—oh Christ. I didn’t realise how far this had gone. The B-side is a cover of ‘No More Heroes’ by the Stranglers. ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ she warbles, knowing full well she’s replaced them. She’s the musical Antichrist.

  This is too creepy to be mere coincidence. Someone’s messing with us. The replicant kings are trying to mangle our minds. Plug your ears. Block the signal. Final phase. They’re taking over.

  Plucky little England

  [16 June 2006]

  Thanks to the magic of newsprint lead times, I’m writing this yesterday, before Great Britain’s soccer match against Trinidad and Tobago in the World Trophy competition, so I’d like to take this opportunity to retrospectively wish them all the best. Good luck Britain! Here’s hoping for straight sets!

  Ha ha. I’m hilarious. Enough of the lame sarcasm. Yes, I’m a member of the apparent minority that dislikes football most of the time and grows to actively despise it during the World Cup. But this year, I’ve decided not to moan about it.

  It’s quite simple. I’ve finally realised that loudly and repeatedly complaining that the World Cup is a whopping great pain in the arse ultimately achieves nothing. Us haters can’t win. We’re either accused of adopting a contrary position for the sake of it, or told to just ignore it (which we can’t, because it’s bloody everywhere). Sometimes fans yawn and say they’re bored by us killjoys moaning about it, even though they can’t possibly be as bored as we are, bored with every flag and cheer and news report and rebranded chocolate bar: the kind of boredom that gnaws at your bones till you don’t want to live any more. They just don’t understand.

  And sometimes people look genuinely upset, and implore you to stop having a go at the World Cup on humanitarian grounds. ‘Leave it alone, it’s just a bit of fun…it’s done nothing to you,’ they whine through their disgusting football-loving faces, as though the World Cup were a defenceless nine-year-old girl you’re attacking with a hammer, instead of an overhyped money-spinning festival of tedium in which the world’s thickest millionaires kick a rubbish ball round a poxy field to the wonderment of an audience of foghorning cretins. In my pathetic opinion.

  Anyway, like I say, I’ve decided this time round I won’t gripe about it in the slightest. If it gives pleasure to millions, who are we to quibble? The fans are right: we’re killjoys. Besides, I’ve just read about an exciting development in World Cup technology that just might entice me to start taking an interest. I’ve just read about the Robot World Cup.

  RoboCup is now in its tenth year. It’s a tournament (held in Germany) in which boffins from around the world organise football matches between teams of specially designed robots. Each year, as both the mechanical designs and the artificial intelligence powering them improve, the players grow more lifelike and proficient. It even has two robotic commentators, called Sango and Ami, who narrate the proceedings in synthesised voices and pump their arms in the air when somebody scores. By 2010 the players should be turning up with an entourage of absurdly spindly robotic wives in tow. By 2014, the first act of robotic football hooliganism. And so on.

  But the really exciting bit is this: the organisers reckon by the year 2050, the robots will be good enough to compete in—and win—the ‘real’ World Cup. Now that I want to see: plucky little England taking on the might of an emotionless army of steel. The tabloid coverage would be priceless.

  I’d support the robots, obviously. Especially if they’re allowed to eviscerate their human opponents using extendable buzz-saw arms. Because they’re robots—that’s what they do. Do us proud, robolads! Come on you rivets!

  On having a nice day

  [23 June 2006]

  Greetings from America, where everyone’s so bloody friendly and laid-back and nice it makes you want to puke blood in their faces. Earlier today I found myself sharing an elevator with one of the bellboys, and, to make conversation, I asked him whether they had any celebrities staying in the hotel.

  ‘Every guest is a celebrity to us,’ he replied, without pausing. And then he smiled.

  A few minutes later I’m standing in a corridor, when an engineer walks by.

  ‘Hello there,’ says the engineer. ‘My name’s Frank.’ He taps his nametag. It is indeed. He smiles. ‘You need anything fixing, any trouble with the TV in your room, computer problems, anything—just call the front desk, ask for me.’

  ‘Um, OK,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Frank.’

  ‘You’re welcome’, says Frank.

  ‘Have a great day now.’ Then he taps his cap and ambles away, whistling.

  I almost have to pinch myself. I’ve just experienced precisely the sort of benevolent human encounter that only occurs in preschool children’s programmes, except it was real.

  In the afternoon I visit a high-street clothing store. Nothing posh; part of a chain. I examine a pullover, but I’m not sure if it’s my size. XXL appears to be the only one available. I turn to look for an assistant, and discover one’s already beside me, standing at precisely the right distance—close enough to be of use, not so near as to seem invasive.

  ‘I think we still have those in other sizes,’ he says. ‘Want me to check?’

  A few minutes later, I’m buying the pullover. While he’s folding it perfectly, the assistant (whose name is Milo) asks if there are any cool bands in England he should know abo
ut. He’d been holding out hope of seeing the Libertines, but they split up, which sucked. I rack my brains, but can’t think of any cool new bands. Not one. Lamely, I offer the Arctic Monkeys. It turns out Milo’s heard them, and thinks they’re pretty good, but something about his manner implies he’s a touch underwhelmed.

  In an excruciating bid to curry favour with my new friend, I say I hear there’s this new girl called Lily Alien who’s been getting a lot of coverage. Milo writes her name down on a piece of paper and tells me I’m awesome. I walk out of the shop feeling young and fashionable. But I’ve never heard Lily Alien. What I just did was almost unbearably pathetic; somehow Milo made it seem OK.

  Everywhere I turn, members of the service industry are smiling at me, holding doors open, straining to help. I know most of the time they’re angling for tips, but I don’t care. Sometimes they’re just being nice. In London, Frank the engineer would’ve told me to piss off. The clothes shop guy wouldn’t have said anything. I’d be nothing. I’d be less than dirt. Here I’m treated like Sir Lordship of Kings.

  Now it’s getting late. I’m in my room, typing this. There’s a problem with the TV But I don’t call reception and ask them to send Frank up. We’ve already built a rapport in the corridor. Now he’s my buddy, I’d feel uncomfortable expecting him to do chores for me. So I don’t call him. He doesn’t fix the TV. He doesn’t get the tip. Spin on that, Frank.