The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  2. Exploit the writers’ strike: The ongoing writers’ strike means we’ll have to wait longer to see new seasons of hit shows like 24, Battlestar Galactica, Ugly Betty and so on. So let’s make our own versions. Let’s save up that money we didn’t spend, and make a homegrown 24 in which Adrian Chiles (Jack Bauer) has to stop Gloucestershire flooding again by kicking individual raindrops back into the sky. Or a series of Prison Break starring the surviving cast members of Porridge. Or CSI: Droitwich, with all the CGI biology bits done on an old Amiga. Come on, Britain. Let’s make it happen.

  3. More fakery: Television spent most of 2007 with its head in its hands, whining that the audience didn’t love it any more because it had been making stuff up. But only a moron would believe anything they saw on TV in the first place – telly is the equivalent of an excitable toddler claiming to have seen fairies at the bottom of the garden, after all. Instead of vowing to bin noddy shots and solemnly promising some kind of editing year zero, show some balls and stride purposefully in the opposite direction. Fake everything. Replace George Alagiah with an animated horse and recreate breaking news stories with puppets. Produce a travel show in which Michael Palin falls through a portal in his own soul and spends six weeks exploring his dreams. Have God show up at the end of Songs of Praise. Bill in The Night Garden as a documentary. And if anyone phones up to complain, stubbornly insist you’ve broadcast nothing but the truth until they believe you.

  4. Put the late-night sign language interpreters on the red button: Simple one, this. The other day I tuned into Sky Movies to catch a post-midnight showing of Manhattan. No offence to my deaf brethren, but it would’ve worked better without the bloke in the lower-right corner flapping his arms around like a man signalling for help on a burning oil rig. He wasn’t even in black-and-white to match the film. Never mind all this interactive news nonsense – use the red button to make sign-language an optional extra at all times of day, not just in the dead of night. That way everyone’s happy.

  5. Promote quality programmes: Contrary to popular belief, the networks DO make quality programmes. They just don’t tell anyone about them. It’s like they’re embarrassed. Do you really need a break bumper every five seconds reminding you that The X Factor exists? No. Besides, crap sells itself. Rechannelling those insane marketing budgets into enthusiastically promoting the pearls among the slop might raise viewing figures, and perhaps more importantly, improve TV’s reputation. Even if no one watches, at least they know you tried.

  6. Stop squashing end credits and shouting over them: I’m going to keep banging on about this until it happens. Which it won’t. But I like a fruitless yell at the void, me.

  LOL IM BONKERZ!!! [12 January 2008]

  It must be great being a rock star. Never mind the money and the drugs, what about all the blowjobs? Fans queue up, open-mouthed, shuffling slowly forward on their knees, dumbly pointing at their own lips and pleading with their eyes, like they’ve been poisoned and your balls are full of antidote. That’s not empty conjecture – that happens. It’s happened to every rock star ever, with the possible exception of Chris De Burgh, although I dare say there’s been the odd moment when his monobrow’s arched with grubby ecstasy backstage.

  No wonder so many people try and fail to be rock stars. Once upon a time, you had to be talented or pretty or lucky to succeed. Not any more. Not since the advent of Bedroom TV – the music station that shows nothing but members of the public miming to their favourite songs in homemade videos. Like YouTube, but somehow slightly better, because it’s on proper telly. Albeit only just.

  Anyway, against the odds, it’s fascinating. I watched it for four solid hours this evening. It’s on in the background as I type these words. I can’t switch it off. I’ve laughed out loud several times. Not at the ‘wacky’ videos made by LOL IM BONKERZ!!!! types (who, naturally, are well represented), but the overtly sincere ones. You can spot these a mile off: their creators tend to shoot them in black-and-white for extra sincerity. There’s one for ‘You Lost That Lovin’ Feelin” which consists of a wide, single locked-off shot of a stocky balding bloke lip-synching in his living room wearing his best suit and sunglasses. A few minutes later, he turns up again, this time in colour, sitting at a table opening and closing his gob to ‘1973’ by James Blunt like he really means it. I can’t get enough of it.

  My favourites are the ones who love themselves to death and back and seriously believe the viewer will be impressed by their MAD SKILLZ. One mammoth idiot mimes to a sultry dance number with his shirt off, exposing his six-pack, pulling earnest cometo-bed faces and demonstrating the occasional martial arts move. Nothing Kanye West wouldn’t do, except Kanye West probably wouldn’t make a video by holding the camera in one hand and pointing vaguely toward his face, glancing awkwardly at the pop-out LCD viewfinder throughout. And he definitely wouldn’t shoot it in a cramped upstairs bedroom at his parents’ house.

  Then there are the people who’ve edited their videos in Windows Movie Maker, added a few hideous visual effects, and decided the resulting masterwork requires full opening and closing titles, replete with credits like ‘A Brian Films Presentation/ Concept: Brian/ Cameraman: Brian/ Produced and Directed by Brian’. Sometimes they even chuck a copyright notice on the end, presumably in case someone at Paramount tunes in, steals their idea, and turns it into a summer blockbuster.

  Most of the videos are simple clean fun, however: there’s loads of teenagers mucking about and giggling, performing interpretative dances to Kate Nash, and a fair few endearingly unsexy people gamely wobbling around to sexy songs. One of the more prolific contributors, a bloke called Ian, specialises in dressing up as a girl and looking moody; he’s weirdly good at it. In one video, he simply sits on the floor by a bin, disconsolately miming ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. Somehow it’s better than the original.

  And when someone nondescript comes on and mimes a nondescript song, you can simply look over their shoulder, inspect the state of their home and wonder why they bought that Shrek poster, or what’s in that binbag on top of the cupboard. Keep your eye on the background and you see a lot of things you don’t usually see in music videos, like infrared burglar alarm sensors, Firefly box sets and multi-bag sacks of Walker’s French Fries. This automatically makes it vastly superior to MTV. At least until the novelty permanently wears off, some time around March.

  – At the time of writing, Bedroom TV appears to have disappeared from the Sky EPG altogether.

  All by myself [19 January 2008]

  Hey sugar. I’m stimulating you. Right now. Can you feel it? No, really: when you’re reading, your brain’s constantly stimulated. And it’ll continue to be stimulated when you put this down and do something else. Even if all you do is gawp listlessly at a tea towel, the information keeps flowing in, and your brain keeps chewing it up.

  And that’s a good thing, because left to its own devices, the brain gets fidgety. Switch the lights off, deprive it of stimuli, and after a while it starts daydreaming. And if the lights never come back on, those daydreams become reality.

  Your brain transforms into the ultimate unreliable narrator and soon you’ll believe all manner of disjointed oddness. One minute you hear the theme from Hollyoaks playing from nowhere, then you’re INSIDE the theme from Hollyoaks, which by now is full of colours, and they’re grinning at you, and then you realise you’re one of them: you’re a grinning blob of colour that lives inside the theme from Hollyoaks. Or maybe you’re a mile-wide pool of pork-flavoured honey with a bus and a hook for a face. Either way, you’ve gone bonkers.

  That’s the basis for this week’s creepy Horizon special on sensory deprivation, in which six volunteers get slammed up in the dark for 48 hours. How creepy? Way creepy. The experiment takes place in a disused nuclear bunker; one of the men running it can’t be shown on camera ‘for security reasons’, and we’re told research like this was abandoned 40 years ago when the scientists conducting it decided it was ‘too cruel’. It’s the Fact Ents equivalent
of a horror movie.

  Three of the guinea pigs are simply kept in dark rooms, while the rest are made to wear eye masks that reduce the world to a grey blur, headphones that pump a continual white noise drone into their ears, and gigantic foam mittens so they can’t even scratch their bums for entertainment.

  Meanwhile, a psychotherapist with an unnerving omnipresent grin monitors their progress using night vision cameras, taking notes each time they pace up and down, talk to themselves, or hallucinate. One sits on the end of the bed watching snakes and cars and the occasional human visitor; another (the comedian Adam Bloom, oddly enough) strolls round a non-existent pile of empty oyster shells.

  These laugh-a-minute sequences are interspersed with talking-head testimony from former victims of sensory deprivation: a guy called Parris who was locked in solitary for years for a crime he didn’t commit, and former hostage Brian Keenan. Parris invented a fantasy world, then couldn’t escape it; Brian was tormented by imaginary music that wouldn’t stop playing unless he bashed his head against the wall.

  It took them months to go that mad, mind. I reckon I’d get there quicker. Lock me in there and within five minutes I’d be running screaming round the room, pursued by a giant version of Joe Pasquale’s face on wheels.

  Fortunately, the experiment isn’t simply being performed for entertainment. The show has a point to make.

  After their ordeal, the volunteers are tested to see how susceptible to suggestion they’ve become – and surprise, surprise, they’re highly malleable. The point being, any confession made by someone who’s spent the past few days swatting invisible monsters is likely to be worthless. Nonetheless, sensory deprivation techniques are being used around the world right now, at Guantanamo for example. It may not technically be classed as torture, but the programme leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that anyone sanctioning such treatment on a fellow human being is a hateful pig of the lowest order.

  Rumsfeld’s retired. I wonder if he sleeps at night, and if not – and I pray not – what self-made horrors he visualises as he lies in the dark? Here’s hoping they chase him through this night and the next. From now until never o’clock.

  CHAPTER FIVE

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

  1,000 Things to Ignore Before You Die [19 November 2007]

  Oh Christ. They’re back again. Those lists. Lists of Things to Do Before You Die. Fifty Movies to See Before You Die; 200 Recipes to Cook Before You Die; 908 Items of Flat-Pack Furniture to Assemble Before You Die, and so on. And so on. And so on.

  The Guardian’s currently running a list of 1,000 Albums to Hear Before You Die. Since the advent of CDs, the average album is about an hour long. So that’s 1,000 hours of my life I’ve been commanded to give up, just like that. 1,000 hours. That’s 42 whole days. Factor in sleeping time and it’s more like three months. That’s not a list. That’s a sabbatical.

  The worst ‘before you die’ lists are the ones aimed at middle-class tourists. These are infuriating for several reasons. First, the writers use them as an excuse to show off about how cultured and well-travelled they are, so there you get lots of entries like: ‘No 23: Eat Spicy Malaysian Street Food While Watching the Sun Set Over Tioman Island in the Company of Some of Your Brilliantly Successful Novelist Friends.’ The conceited worms are recounting incidents from their own lives and holding them up as aspirational examples for us all. At first this strikes you as smug. Then you realise it’s merely desperate. Who are they trying to impress, precisely? The Joneses? They’re prancing around in front of an invisible mass of readers, nonchalantly cooing about how wonderful they are. It’s 50 times more snivelling and undignified than any Z-list celebrity you care to mention stripping naked and inseminating a cow on a Bravo reality show. At least that’s unpretentious.

  Presumably the aspirational list writers are engaging in a last-ditch attempt to stave off their own gnawing sense of pointlessness. What’s that? You swam with dolphins? Hiked round Machu Picchu? Swigged cocktails in Vegas? Wow. Thanks for sharing. Now shut up and tie your noose.

  Thing is, for all their faults, the lists work. It’s hard not to get drawn in. There’s so much crud and shod surrounding us on a daily basis, so many fair-to-middling fartclouds of ‘content’ and ‘lifestyle choice’, we’re all desperate to get our hands on something actually, authentically good. And that’s what the lists promise: a handy cutout-and-keep guide to what’s worth bothering with. In practice, however, they merely inspire feelings of inadequacy. No matter how cynical or detached you are, you can’t help experiencing a pang of shame at not having seen Venice for yourself, even when the writer boasting about it is clearly a prick of the grandest magnitude.

  As a result, it’s hard not to walk around in a permanent state of guilt. Right now, I’m feeling vaguely guilty for not having seen The Sopranos beyond season two. I watched the first season, then fell behind and never caught up. The other week, as luck would have it, a PR company promoting the box sets sent me all six seasons in their entirety. Hark at me. Now they’re sitting on my shelf, making me feel bad for not having watched them yet. And what about all those books I haven’t read, meals I haven’t eaten, countries I’ve never visited? How am I going to have time to fit all this stuff in? I can scarcely get it together long enough to perform the simplest of household chores, never mind all this extracurricular homework set by our cultural arbiters.

  Besides, the more someone tells you how incredible something is, the more disappointing the reality turns out to be, largely because of the drum roll that preceded it.

  Take the Grand Canyon. I visited the Grand Canyon in my mid20s. Hark at me (again). I stood on a ridge and gazed out and waited to have my mind blown. All I experienced was yet more guilt. I’d heard that it was breathtaking. I’d read florid descriptions of its life-altering majesty. But it was these descriptions, not the canyon itself, that were at the forefront of my mind as I stared at it.

  ‘Come on, you shallow idiot,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re supposed to be feeling something here. What’s the matter with you?’

  Then I went back to the car, ate crisps and fiddled with the air-con, feeling box-empty inside. Call me shallow, but I’ve had more impressive trips to the toilet.

  March of the Pods [26 November 2007]

  Not long ago, I bought a coffee machine. You pop in a cute little metallic coffee pod, push a button and hey presto: you’ve made an espresso without having to faff around spooning coffee powder into a receptacle and banging it about and getting grit all over the sideboard and shouting like a sailor in a thunderstorm, which is what baristas do. It’s made by Nestlé. I’m dimly aware they’re supposed to be monstrously evil … but look, I hadn’t made the connection at the time, and besides, I need my coffee, OK? I’m a heartless monster.

  Annoyingly, you can’t just walk into a shop and buy the special pods. You have to order them online, via an impossibly snooty website full of blah about the ‘subtle alchemy’ of coffee and so on. On handing over your details, you’re inducted into a mysterious ‘club’, the consequences of which were lost on me until this week, when a glossy magazine plopped through my door. Turns out that by buying a coffee machine, I’d inadvertently subscribed to a ‘lifestyle’, and this magazine would regularly arrive to congratulate me.

  I like free magazines because they’re hilariously desperate, and the classier they purport to be, the more desperate they are. Nespresso magazine is the most acute example I’ve ever seen. It’s as hateful as Tatler, but with an overbearing and whorish emphasis on coffee pods bunged in for good measure. Let’s take a walk through the latest issue. The cover is a black-and-white photo of official ‘Nespresso ambassador’ George Clooney sitting at a table with a couple of coffee pods on it. They’re tastefully out of focus, so you don’t notice them at first. But they’re still there. Inside, there’s another huge photo of George balancing four coffee pods on top of each other.


  The contents page is broken up with little colour photos of coffee pods, and snapshots of the contributors, including ‘legendary star photographer Michel Comte’ (posing pretentiously with his hands on his chin). Best known for snapping superstars, Comte has recently ‘taken a humanitarian bent’ by covering ‘war-torn locations such as Iraq, Chechnya and Afghanistan’. But this week he ‘joined George Clooney for a coffee and the latest Nespresso campaign’. Beneath Comte’s photo is a bright blue coffee pod. Next, several pages showcasing the latest Nespresso coffee machines, which are intensely coloured because ‘intense colours are the rule on the catwalks of the season’. Another inspiration is ‘rock legend David Bowie, whose alter ego Ziggy Stardust defined both glam rock and its look in the 1970s’. To underline how fashionable the machines are, they’re accompanied by photos of Louis Vuitton shoes, Chanel bags, the Bilbao Guggenheim museum, and some coffee pods.

  Then, a series of full-page Q&A sessions with five ‘Nespresso Coffee Experts’, each posing with a cup of coffee and spouting bumwash. (Sample: ‘Q: What elements or setting do you need for your own personal coffee moment or ritual? A: An open mind and sharpened senses.’) Coffee pods in this section: nine. Now we’ve arrived at the George Clooney profile proper. ‘My parents brought me up to read and to ask questions, and to constantly question authority,’ he reveals. ‘Because authority unchecked, without exception, corrupts. Always.’ Something to contemplate there, while you gaze at more photos of George and the pods.

  Next, a guide to festive entertaining ‘dos and don’ts’, in which the letter o in the word dos is replaced by a photograph of a coffee pod, upended and shot from above. By now, I’m actively enjoying this relentless pod barrage.