The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Still, at least there’s a TV. I sigh and switch it on, immediately plunging headlong into a high-octane showbiz news atrocity called The Insider. It’s like being hit in the face with a pan. The hosts simultaneously smile and shout, and it’s edited so quickly you feel like you’re glimpsing events through the side window of a speeding car. The big news is that Lindsay Lohan was spotted swigging champagne from a bottle on New Year’s Eve. They have a two-second clip of this which they loop and repeat about 600 times, sometimes zooming in, sometimes zooming out, sometimes accompanying it with spinning CGI lettering and sparkles and whoosh noises. Then a man with more teeth than sense whooshes in to replace her, loudly pledging to bring us ‘all the latest Lohan updates on this developing story’ throughout the remainder of the show. Then he’s replaced by an advert for an anti-constipation pill.

  I look out of the window. Outside, New York sparkles and bustles. But without a coat, I can barely even step out of the door. I grit my teeth and return to the box.

  Time passes. The all-new celebrity edition of the US version of The Apprentice begins. It’s fronted by Donald Trump and his optical-illusion hairstyle, who’s rubbish compared with Alan Sugar. Among the cast is simpering human perineum Piers Morgan, furthering his showbiz career with another deliberately smug turn. Half the others are unrecognisable to me, partly because they’re American celebs, partly because they’ve had a bit too much plastic surgery, which always gives people a strangely generic, faintly cromagnon look, as though they’re part of a new species descended from, but not directly related to, us regular human beings. Morgan is sneering at one of them when my attention is drawn to a ticker-tape scrolling across the bottom of the screen announcing that Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucus. Then the whole thing’s replaced by an advert for lasagna rollatini with sausage, something that looks so utterly ghastly that even Iceland wouldn’t consider it.

  At some point I fall asleep, only to wake up a few hours later midway through a speech by Mike Huckabee, the Republican candidate who’s also won in Iowa. He’s worrying for several reasons: (1) he’s an ultra-religious Baptist minister who doesn’t believe in evolution, (2) he looks a bit like Charles Logan, the corrupt president from season 5 of 24, and (3) he’s quoting G. K. Chesterton: ‘A true soldier fights not because he hates those who are in front of him, but because he loves those who are behind him.’ Standing directly behind him as he says this: Chuck Norris. Then there’s a commercial for Advil. New York, meanwhile, continues to twinkle through the window, infuriatingly out-of-reach.

  By now I’m out of my mind with despair, so I call the bank again simply to vent some frustration, and end up being horrible to the man on the other end, who’s only doing his job. This makes me feel so low that I call back a few minutes later to try to apologise, but get put through to someone else, and they just think I’m weird. Now it’s the next morning and I’m still waiting to discover if the bank’s going to let me go outside. I’ve learned my lesson, OK? It’s protecting my money by stopping me getting my hands on it, just in case I’m not me. And right now I’m not me. The real me would be out seeing the sights. Muggins me is locked indoors drinking Pepsi for entertainment. I clearly deserve everything I get.

  Day of the Norovirus [14 January 2008]

  Fear stalks the land; stalks my land at any rate. I’ve landed a starring role in my own personal horror movie: Day of the Norovirus. Gastric flu, the winter vomiting bug, spewmonia: whatever you want to call it, it’s out there, somewhere, festering on every surface, waiting to infect me. Britain is diseased: a septic isle bobbing on an ocean of warm sick.

  The media have had a field day, and to an emetophobe like me (someone with an uncontrollable, inbuilt fear of puking), this merely amplifies the terror. A headline such as ‘Vomiting bug spreads across nation’ sets my pulse racing twice as effectively as ‘Mad axeman on loose’.

  Even worse are the war stories: vivid blog postings from survivors, gleefully describing the full extent of their biological meltdown. They’re trying to outdo each other.

  ‘I had to lie naked on the bathroom floor for three days, blasting hot fluid from both ends, spinning around like a Catherine wheel.’

  ‘Yeah? Well I vomited so hard, all the hair on my head got sucked inside my skull and flew out my mouth.’

  ‘Pfff – think that’s bad? At one point I spewed with such force, the jet fired me backwards through a stained-glass window, and I literally burst apart on the patio, sending a geyser of shit and vomit 600 feet into the sky.’

  And if they’re not online, they’re crawling into the office to tell you all about them. While still infectious. If I was running things, it’d be dealt with like a zombie outbreak: shoot all victims in the head at the first sign of infection, then barricade the windows till the end credits roll.

  Worse still, it apparently strikes without warning. Infection takes 12 to 28 hours to come to fruition, quietly making its way to your small intestine, and, at first, you’re none the wiser. The physical symptoms come on so suddenly, you only truly know you’ve got it when you suddenly spot a jet of vomit flying away from your face. And then you’re locked in. It’s like knowing the sun could explode at any second and being powerless to prevent it.

  Naturally I want to avoid it like the plague, because it is a plague. And I’ve become an expert. Here’s how to avoid it yourself.

  Forget those fancy anti-bacterial hand gels. They’re pointless. Don’t worry about breathing it in; unless you’re unlucky enough to inhale a fresh droplet of sick or faeces (which can happen if someone explodes right beside you), you can still get away unscathed even if someone in your immediate vicinity comes down with it. It’s not carried in saliva either. The one thing you must do is wash your hands with hot water and soap for a minimum of 15 seconds before putting them in your mouth, nose or eyes.

  Easier said than done. Once you’re aware of it, it’s incredible how often you touch a shared surface, then your mouth, without even thinking. Say you pop to the newsagents and buy a bag of crisps: that door handle could be caked in sick germs, and you’ve just slid them down your gullet along with the salt and vinegar. Or you’re in an office: you use someone else’s keyboard, then eat a sandwich. Why not lick a toilet bowl and have done with it?

  But even washing your hands is tricky. Take the workplace toilet. The door handle, the taps and the button on the automated dryer may all be infected. You have to turn the tap with your elbow, wash for 15 seconds (time it: it’s longer than you think), then turn the tap off with the other elbow. Then you’ll need two paper towels: one to dry yourself, and the other to open the door with on your way out. Unless you do all of this, you’re doomed.

  I’ve become an obsessive compulsive disorder case study, repeatedly washing my hands like Lady Macbeth on fast-forward, acutely aware of where my hands are at all times, what I’ve just touched, and where they’re heading next. It’s exhausting, like consciously counting every blink.

  Yesterday, in an attempt to prod some sanity back into my life, I went to a restaurant. Eating out is insane: even if your chef is hygienic in the first place, unless he’s devoutly following the paper-towel hand-washing routine outlined above to the letter he may as well wipe his bum on your plate. Nonetheless, I decided to risk it. Giving in to emetophobia would be like giving in to the terrorists, yeah? End result: I lay awake for hours last night, convinced that I’d start hurling any second.

  There’s one chink of sunlight for us emetophobes: we hardly ever actually vomit. There are various theories as to why, and it’s all a bit chicken-and-egg: either we’re so naturally hardy that vomiting is a rarity (and therefore more traumatic when it does occur), or we’re so psychologically averse to it, we can will ourselves to stop. In fact, if I was on Heroes, that would be my superpower. A few years ago I caught a noro-style gastric nasty that made all my friends spew like ruptured fire hydrants. I lay in bed with cramps and a fever, battling extreme nausea for four days, and somehow didn’t snap. Althoug
h what was happening at the other end of my body was another story altogether. Magic powers only stretch so far. That’s why Superman wears rubber knickers.

  Anyway, it’ll blow over soon. The media have already got new scare stories to torture us with. In the meantime, if you’re reading this on a bus, in an office, or at a shared computer, and you’re eating your lunch – God help you. Now wash your hands.

  Not enough buttons [21 January 2008]

  According to a survey, two-thirds of people think gadgets are becoming too complicated. They’re packed with features they don’t understand, and subsequently never use. One newspaper illustrated the story with a photograph of ‘a typical TV remote’ featuring ‘43 baffling buttons’, annotated with captions telling you what each of these buttons did, just to make it look even more complex and bewildering: ‘cursor up’, ‘cursor down’, ‘A/V input connector 1’, ‘device mode’, and so on.

  Thing is, there weren’t enough buttons for my liking. I love a complicated TV remote. They should have more stuff on them: dials and joysticks and flashing lights. I dream of a remote with its own mouse.

  And I don’t want a manual. I like to work out what each nubbin does through trial and error, poking it and staring at the screen. Best of all is the ‘menu’ button, which grants you access to a whole new array of onscreen options, replete with little icons and sliding scales. Sit me in front of a brand-new telly and it’s the first thing I’ll reach for, because new tellies often come with surprising and exotic new features provided by the gods of technology.

  Coo! I can design my own font for the subtitles! Wow! I can flip the picture sideways so I don’t have to lift my head if I’m lying perpendicular on the sofa! And look! There’s a slider for adjusting the level of regional accents! Now I can make the Geordie guy who narrates Big Brother sound like a Cornish fisherman.

  I’ll happily spend hours fine-tuning everything to my liking. Woe betide anyone who hits the ‘restore default settings’ button. That’s like smashing a piece of ornate pottery I’ve created. The other day, a Sky repairman turned up and breezily started playing with my settings, adjusting the contrast and colour balance as if he owned the place. I was outraged by the violation, as though he’d pulled my trousers down and nonchalantly examined my goolies.

  I tend to assume other people share my obsessive need to examine the settings until everything is just so, and get genuinely enraged when I go to someone’s house and discover, say, that they’re watching programmes in the wrong aspect ratio. People over 50 are the worst offenders: they’ll blithely sit through a Dad’s Army repeat that is unnaturally stretched across the screen so that the entire cast look as if they had difficult births that left them with flattened skulls. Faced with this, I get acute back-seat-driver anxiety, and end up hectoring them like an exasperated pilot trying to teach a four-year-old how to fly a helicopter.

  Recently, I was on a plane, sitting beside an 80-year-old woman who couldn’t comprehend how the in-flight entertainment system worked. It had a touch-screen monitor and an additional set of controls in the armrest. Thing is, she didn’t understand the difference between my armrest and hers. There I was, watching a movie in a bid to distract myself from the terror of being 30,000 feet up in the sky, when she patted cluelessly at my controls and switched it off. I started it again. Then she hit my fast-forward button.

  At this point, I politely explained what was going on and attempted to help her operate her system. She nodded and went ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’, but try as I might, she just didn’t get it. Ten minutes later, she stopped my film again, and kept doing so intermittently throughout the flight, sometimes switching my overhead light on for good measure, just to annoy me. Her screen, meanwhile, displayed nothing but the synopsis for an episode of Everybody Hates Chris, which she’d selected by accident but never played. She just sat there, staring at the synopsis for about three hours. I think she thought that was the entertainment.

  Shamefully, I found myself starting to genuinely hate her – her doddering incompetence somehow rendered her less than human. Reverse the situation – put me in a 1940s household, say, and ask me to operate a mangle, and the chances are I’d earn her contempt with an equal display of ineptitude. But it isn’t the 1940s. It’s now. So snap out of it. Hit the right buttons or get left behind, you medieval dunce. Do you want the robots to take over? Because that’s what’ll happen if we don’t all keep up. How dare you jeopardise the human race like that. How dare you.

  And if people still refuse to learn, let’s force them into it. Replace all supermarkets with complex remote-control vending machines that dispense food only if you can successfully navigate your way through a 25-tier menu system. And make it illegal to pass the food to anyone else. Before long, we’ll starve the idiots out of existence; manufacturers will never have to simplify anything ever again, and we’ll enjoy a golden age of buttons and options and adjustable sliders and A/V input connectors. Now that’s progress.

  – After writing this piece, I was reminded of something that happened to a friend of mine: he was sitting at work when his mum rang up out of the blue.

  ‘It’s your father,’ she said. ‘He’s had an accident.’

  My friend froze, steeled himself for the worst, and asked her what had happened.

  ‘Well, he’s deleted the printer icon from his desktop. How does he make it come back again?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  In which young men are the enemy, Michael Portillo hosts a warthog parade, and the Iraq war becomes a set of dizzying numbers

  Coke ’n’ cheese party [26 January 2008]

  When I was a kid, Panorama was a serious news programme consisting of grainy footage and a voiceover going ‘blah blah OPEC blah President Carter blah’ for six hundred days. To my young head, this was especially disappointing because it had such a thrilling theme tune – like an orchestra describing a hurricane – that I regularly forgot how boring I found the show itself. I’d hear the music and run for the TV, only to slink off in disgust five minutes later.

  That was then. Now Panorama’s more like Dancing on Ice than Newsnight: a ‘pop-news’ show in the vein of Tonight with Trevor McDonald. People who complain about such shows ‘dumbing down’ with celebrity ‘reporters’ miss the point by an inch. There’s nothing wrong with the news attempting to reach a wider audience – it’s the choice of subject matter that’s the problem. They shouldn’t get Denise Van Outen to investigate the Maddy mystery. They should use stars properly. Send Girls Aloud to cover genocide in Darfur. I’m not kidding. Years ago, Channel 4 were apparently planning a ‘Celebrity Guantanamo’ one-off in which famous people underwent borderline-torture methods used by the United States. It never made it to air. Panorama should’ve done it. Tonight with Trevor McDonald should’ve done it. Seriously. It’d raise awareness of a bona-fide global scandal, reaching millions of people who normally don’t give a toss about ‘the issues’.

  Since I don’t have a problem with celebrities acting as bait, gently luring the viewer toward a serious subject, I don’t mind in the slightest that this week’s Panorama stars former Blur bassist Alex James. But we’ll get onto that in a moment. First: is it really necessary to start every edition of Panorama with an opening link in which Jeremy Vine stands shivering outside the BBC’s Media Village in White City at night, with the wind and rain howling round his ears? He looks like a tramp on a pavement, mournfully gazing through the window of a fancy restaurant at the diners within, except instead of a window it’s your TV screen, and instead of staring pleadingly at a dinner-jacketed posho tucking into a plate of foie gras, he’s looking directly at you.

  Anyway, Alex James: he’s investigating cocaine. This is a subject he knows well, having famously blown £1m on booze and conk-dust during his Blur days. In fact, he did so much coke, the president of Colombia wrote him a personal letter. That’s not a joke. He reads it out at the start of the show. I’m paraphrasing slightly, but basically it says: ‘Dear Alex from Blur, I understand y
ou’re a clean-living farmer these days. And you make your own cheese. Woo hoo. Nice one. But once upon a time you were a notorious chalkhead. Why don’t you come over here with a film crew and see how much misery cocaine is wreaking in my country? PS We’ve already approached Kate Moss but she’s ignoring us.’

  The resulting film is surprisingly good. James gets into several dicey situations (including an unnerving encounter with a contract killer with a loaded gun) and openly admits to feeling scared and out of his depth. He’s also immensely saddened by the human cost of cocaine production, but realistic about the likelihood of the situation changing any time soon (and about the film’s chances of dissuading existing cokehounds in Britain: ‘They’ll probably just hate themselves a bit more,’ he says ruefully).

  The only gauche moment comes when he meets the Colombian president and is so impressed by his uniform and general mannerisms, he develops a weird schoolboy crush on him and starts cooing to the camera crew about how lovely he is. And even that’s sort of charming, in a gawky kind of way.

  It’s only half an hour long though. And then it’s back to outdoors-man Jeremy for a final goodbye link. For God’s sake, someone on the production team give the man an indoor desk. Never mind the cocaine wars – your host’s turning blue, you maniacs.

  The forgotten tortoises [2 February 2008]

  There’s far too much stuff in the world. Check Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. Hit the ‘random article’ widget on the left three times in a row, then guff your own legs off with amazement as it coughs up a trio of things you’ve never ever heard of before.

  I’ve just tried this myself, and it introduced me to (1) an Australian Aboriginal tribe called the ‘Gunwinggu’, (2) Something Wicked, a 1993 album by Nuclear Assault, and (3) former computer games designer Demis Hassabis. Infuriatingly, I’ve actually met Demis Hassabis, so that’s another theory left bleeding by the roadside.