The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Anyway, the upshot of it all was, the scan revealed my neck is older than I am. That is, a combination of bad posture, bad habits, and bad everything means part of my cervical spine appears prematurely clapped out. If I’m middle-aged, my neck’s a pensioner. This is non-reversible, which means the resultant arm pain won’t go away any time soon. Instead, I’ll have to work round it, doing neck exercises like a codger. Age comes to us all, but I’ve managed to invite some of it to the party early, simply by not sitting correctly for 37 years. It’s a humiliating birthday present, not to mention infuriating. I’d punch the wall in despair, but that’d make things worse.

  Perhaps I should hold a birthday party. After all, at my current rate of decay, next year’s will be a wake, so I’d best make the most of each remaining moment. Just don’t expect handwritten invites, okay?

  The Dead Parrot defence [10 March 2008]

  I got caught cheating once. Actually, not strictly cheating – I’d split from my girlfriend at the time, but it was pretty soon after the break and there was still some doubt as to whether we were going to get back together or not, and then I met this girl, and … long story short, my ex was in the flat we’d shared together, picking up some of her things, when she spotted a pair of alien knickers on the radiator.

  ‘Whose are these?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re yours,’ I said, shrugging nonchalantly, like it was obvious.

  ‘I’d recognise my own knickers, for Christ’s sake. Just tell me whose they are.’

  ‘Ohhhh,’ I said, like it was all coming back to me, ‘remember I told you about that work trip I went on? Where we all went to Paris? Well, on the way back, a couple of people gave me their laundry, and I washed it, and it must’ve all got jumbled up with mine.’

  The trip to Paris was real. The laundry story clearly wasn’t. I’d hoped the fact of the former would somehow obscure the lie of the latter. It didn’t work.

  ‘Why did they give you their laundry?’

  ‘Huh? Oh. They don’t have washing machines of their own, that’s all,’ I shrugged again, chucking in a quick, ‘God, you’re so suspicious!’ for good measure.

  At which point she started crying. In desperation, I’d adopted a ‘Dead Parrot Defence’ – named after Michael Palin’s lying shopkeeper in the famous Monty Python sketch. The Dead Parrot Defender is hoping that if they lie long and hard enough, reality itself will bend to accommodate them. Well, duh. It doesn’t pan out that way, genius.

  A classic Dead Parrot Defence consists of an overtly preposterous central premise cooked up in the heat of the moment (bonus points if it ignores a few well-known laws of nature), coupled with an obstinate, huffy denial of the facts. A few years ago, while trying to hide a smoking habit from a (different) girlfriend, I accidentally dropped a lighter on the bedroom floor. It rolled past her. She stared at it. And I indignantly claimed it had fallen through the ceiling, from the flat upstairs.

  Until recently, Dead Parrot Defences have been the farcical preserve of adulterers hiding in cupboards and schoolkids whose dog ate their homework. But now things are getting serious. Recently, a spate of ridiculous alibis put forward by desperate murderers in high-profile cases has raised the art of the Dead Parrot Defence to awful, heartbreaking heights.

  First, 37-year-old Mark Dixie confessed to having sex with teenage model Sally Anne Bowman’s corpse, but denied being her killer. ‘All I saw was a pair of legs,’ he explained, ‘and I took advantage of her … I thought she’d passed out drunk or fallen.’ In fact, she’d been stabbed seven times – although he claimed not to have noticed that. He only realised she was dead, he said, when she failed to react to him biting her repeatedly on the face and neck.

  And last week, 27-year-old Karl Taylor denied murdering 31-year-old businesswoman Kate Beagley during a first date. His version of events ran as follows. Earlier that day, while in a ‘suicidal and despondent’ mood, he’d borrowed a carving knife from a friend, hidden it up his sleeve and forgotten about it. That evening, he and Beagley were sitting on a bench drinking wine. The knife fell from his sleeve; he picked it up and put it on the seat. Moments later, while he was distracted by a phone call, she picked up the knife and stabbed herself 31 times in the face, neck and throat.

  When the prosecutor handed Taylor a ‘knife’ made of rolled-up paper and asked him to demonstrate precisely how Beagley took her own life, Taylor initially refused, saying he wasn’t ‘in an emotionally fit state to do that’, until the judge ordered him to do as he was told. When asked how long the incident had lasted, he replied ‘minutes’.

  ‘That’s a very long time,’ noted the prosecutor, before asking why Taylor – a fitness instructor – hadn’t attempted to stop her. The exchange that followed read like excerpts from a tasteless comic sketch.

  ‘What am I going to do, use my martial arts to get the knife out of her hand?’ complained Taylor.

  ‘Why not?’ asked the prosecutor.

  ‘But it was an unanticipated situation,’ Taylor protested. ‘How was I going to take the knife out of her hand? What am I going to do, kick her unconscious? Your ideas are so outlandish.’

  ‘What’s outlandish about suggesting you try to save her life?’

  ‘I’ve already told you what I did. I stepped forward and stuck my hand out. It was an awkward situation to be in.’

  ‘It was an awkward situation to be in’ would be a great final line if this was a sketch, not a real-life murder. By inadvertently turning their trials into jet-black farces, Dixie and Taylor added insult to injury. That’s the trouble with the Dead Parrot Defence: it makes things worse. It hurts more.

  In which case, perhaps the punishment should fit the crime. Squeeze them into a grotesquely undersized cell and when they complain, shrug and say, ‘Sorry, the building’s shrinking.’ Feed them nothing but gravel on toast, while claiming it’s the latest gourmet trend. Offer them no-strings lifelong parole, only to withdraw it at the last minute because a dog ate the concept of liberty. Let them end their days as a comic victim, trapped within a prison of absurdist lazy lies. That’ll do it.

  Because you’re not worth it [31 March 2008]

  So The Apprentice has started again, bringing with it a fresh batch of free strangers to hate. The men in particular are an especially gruesome crew this year – half have got stupid sticky-uppy designer haircuts and faintly resemble lapsed Gillette models; the other half look like face-transplant recipients queueing for a ghost train. What’s up with Raef, for instance? He’s the absolute spit of Uri Geller staring at a pin. Horrible.

  And that’s before they’ve opened their mouths. The minute they do, the usual torrent of hideous yah-boo moneyspeak comes tumbling out, reaffirming your gut objection to their every waddling molecule. Their arrogance is breathtaking. Or at least it appears to be in the eight-second soundbite I’m judging them by, and sod it, that’s enough. I’m a busy man. I don’t have time to develop long, festering grudges. Give me knee-jerk hate figures and I’m happy.

  As they stand on screen burbling away about their personal mission statements and saying things like, ‘I’m a red-shelf player; I give 120%; I’ll kick, scream and gouge my way to the top of the boardroom and no force in the universe can stop me’, it occurs to me that what these people really need is a dose of humility. Clearly, no one’s ever taken them aside and said, ‘Er, you sound like a bit of a bell-end here. Perhaps you ought to sit down and be quiet.’ What they need is a good slagging.

  Being slagged off is good for you. It thickens the skin and strengthens the backbone. And I’m no stranger to it, in part because each week this column – written originally for the lo-fi steam-powered paperware edition of the newspaper – is replicated on the Guardian’s dazzlingly futuristic Comment Is Free site, held aloft in cyberspace by pixels and sheer willpower. As the name suggests, each article on Comment Is Free is accompanied by a dangling thread in which passers-by can leave comments, observations, witticisms and – yes – capsule slaggings.

/>   And every week, without fail, various world-weary travellers will stop by to tell me I’m not as good as I used to be, or wasn’t any good to start with, or have bored them into the afterlife, or can’t write, or can’t think, or should stop typing immediately and drown myself in the bath, assuming I can manage that, which I probably can’t, what with being so rubbish and all.

  Now, when you read stuff like that, your brain does two things at once: on the one hand, it marvels at the haughty self-importance of the failing human sneer who bothered writing it. And on the other, it agrees with every word they say. Lurking deep within everyone’s brain are two interdependent creatures. One’s an insecure, quivering homunculus; the other a needy egomaniac. So long as they both take turns pulling the levers, everything works out OK. But the balance is a fine one. The homunculus thrives on negative feedback. Deprive it of a regular slagging, and it eventually withers and dies, leaving the egomaniac to take over. At which point you’re swaggering around thinking you’re it, describing yourself as a ‘red-shelf player’ and so on. Cruising for a bruising. Swerving your speedboat into the rocks with an insouciant grin on your chops.

  And there’s a surplus of arrogant titheads around because we don’t, as individuals, receive anything like enough negative feedback these days. Instead we’re all led to believe we’re somehow unique and important, that we have a destiny, that we matter in some way. But this doesn’t add up. There are billions of us. An infinite swarm of haircuts and anuses, that’s humankind for you. We can’t all be ‘special’. The vast majority of us are meaningless energy blips, and we’d do well to remember the fact. Maybe if we saw ourselves as merely part of the herd (which is, after all, what we are), we’d be more inclined to work together to solve the planet’s problems.

  But that’s not going to happen until regular, repeated personal slaggings become an important part of everyday life. Technology can help. It’s far too obsequious at present. Switch on your computer and it’s all ‘Hello’ this and ‘My Documents’ that, and ‘Would you like me to help you with that?’ Enough bumlicking already. Each time you boot it up, it should growl, ‘What do you want?’ and start tossing you stuff with a shrug. iPods could get in on the act by automatically inserting subliminal messages into your favourite album tracks – invisible voices that whisper, ‘You are despicable’ directly into your subconscious.

  TV can do its bit, too. If I were in charge, every episode of every soap would be legally obliged to include a five-minute sequence in which one of the main characters turns directly to camera and tells the viewer they’re nothing but a random assembly of atoms, of less consequence and meaning than the average fencepost, which at least has a definable purpose. The national suicide rate may rise slightly, I grant you. But overall it’d be character-building.

  Finally, I’m ready and willing to be called on as a personal ‘antilife coach’ for anyone who’s currently too pleased with themselves. I can offer energy-sapping depressitudes and personally targeted invective round the clock, for just £3,000 a month. Unless you’re an Apprentice candidate. Then it’s free.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In which The Apprentice provokes confusion, the Gladiators change their names by deed poll, and a TV show baits real-life paedophiles for chuckles

  Kiddywink Kastle [5 April 2008]

  Babies give me the jitters. The way they stare at you – I’d say ‘drunkenly’ but actually it’s like someone far, far removed from our dimension. If a stranger sat opposite you on a train and stared at you the way babies do, you’d pull the emergency cord within six seconds. I think the horror stems from the fact that since I don’t know what babies are thinking – because they have no language to think with – it feels a bit like being stared at by a pet. A dog, say. Except it’s a small, hairless dog with a quasi-human face. Brrr. It’s just not right, is it? So babies give me the jitters. They can’t possibly be natural.

  And how the hell are you meant to look after them anyway? I had to mind one for a whole afternoon once. Nightmare. It just lay in the corner of the room, gurgling and bawling and pooing like the world’s thickest employee. I sat in a chair, reading a book and trying to ignore it, like you might try to ignore rain leaking through a tent. It just wouldn’t go away.

  If babies had control panels studded with large, clearly-labelled buttons, I might be able to handle them. Just tap the button marked ‘sleep’ with a stick and walk away. But they don’t have control panels, because they’re selfish.

  In summary: I’d make an awful single mother. Which makes it somewhat hard to judge the inhabitants of Pramface Mansion. Sorry, did I say Pramface Mansion? I meant to say Young Mums’ Mansion, because that’s what they’ve changed the name to. When the title Pramface Mansion was first announced, it was immediately held up as a quintessential example of the sensation-seeking yukkiness of contemporary TV; although since you had to be a snickering, in-on-the-gag media arsehole to know what the term ‘pramface’ meant anyway, probably because you’d been using it yourself for the past six months on self-consciously sassy trash culture messageboards, it’s hard to know (or care) precisely whose sensibilities were being offended in the first place.

  Incidentally, I’m so dismal and out-of-it I had to look the word ‘pramface’ up and I still don’t think I really ‘get’ it. I mean, as terms of abuse go, isn’t it a bit weak? If you’re going to sneer at the under-class, grow some balls. Come right out with it. Call them ‘paupers’ and ‘scum’, and sit on your balcony hurling buttered rolls at them while guffawing. Buy a top hat and a monocle, and preface every ‘chav’-bashing comment with the words, ‘I say, Godfrey…’ I mean, you ARE being a snob, right? In which case, do it properly – out here, on the other side of your tissue-thin veil of irony; out here where we can see you.

  Still, two wrongs don’t make a right. Pramface Mansion was an objectionable title all round: the last-minute name-swap is a small victory for our collective human dignity. But the show itself? Whassat?

  For starters, the new title automatically makes it feel 200 times less exploitative and more like, well, like a not-entirely-unreasonable premise for a TV show, really, although I’m prepared to take that back if they start nailing the kids to the ceiling on day 28. Basically, a bunch of single mums – not all ‘young’; they range in age from 19 to 35 – and their offspring share a mansion for four weeks, taking turns to set the ‘house rules’ to see if they can learn anything new about parenting from each other. And to see if it’s entertaining. Along the way there’s a bit of moaning, some trauma, and an unbelievable amount of weeping – on the part of the mums.

  In fact, the main lesson seems to be this: put a bunch of single mums together and within six seconds they’ll be sobbing down each other’s shoulders for some kind of cathartic release. And why not? Owning a kiddywink looks like a study in stress. Let them keep the mansion, for God’s sake.

  The déjà-vu dimension [12 April 2008]

  It’s good. It’s bad. It’s gad. What is? Battlestar Galactica, that’s what – one of those shows that annoys and delights in equal measure, playfully rubbing your thigh with one hand as it jabs you in the eye with the other. The pluses outweigh the minuses overall and it’s curiously addictive … but, my God, it rubs me up the wrong way sometimes.

  If you haven’t seen it, it’s an accomplished ‘re-imagining’ of the original Battlestar Galactica – television’s answer to Star Wars, which hit bulbous old-school screens worldwide way back in 1978, when all other TV shows were made of wood. The initial excitement of the show’s deep-space dogfighting soon palled, though, when viewers realised they were effectively watching the same sequences again and again and again. Special effects were so laborious and expensive back then the makers could only afford a limited number of money shots, which were remixed each week ad nauseam until the whole thing seemed to be taking place in the Déjà-vu Dimension.

  By contrast, the new Galactica nonchalantly pisses out one state-of-the-art FX sequence after another, ma
king it look easy. Its space battles are immense, densely populated affairs that often veer into psychedelic complexity. Yet the show offers them up with a shrug because the dogfights are little more than pleasant distractions; it’s far more concerned with pursuing its complex allegorical storyline.

  And said storyline is so complex and so allegorical, there’s hardly any point in trying to sketch an explanation for newcomers, mainly because I don’t really understand it myself. There are humans and Cylons, see. The Cylons are these sort of robot things that look like people, and they’re the bad guys, except sometimes they’re not.

  The two sides are at war, with the Cylons being a bit like the terrorists and the humans being a bit like the Americans, except sometimes it’s the other way round. Oh, and it’s essentially a religious war because the humans believe in lots of old-school multiple gods, like the ancient Egyptians (who they may or may not be closely related to), while the Cylons believe in ‘the one true God’, who presumably has a microchip for a face and sits on a big throne of pixels in the sky.

  In other words: if you haven’t watched the show before but fancy tuning in this week, don’t bother. It’ll make less sense than a wool piano. Go back to the start on DVD first. It’s well worth it, although you’ll have to adjust your filter in order to overlook some glaring drawbacks: half the cast look like underwear models, there’s a lot of gung-ho Top Gun bullshit, and it often takes itself so insanely seriously you start wishing someone would bend over and blow off in a Cylon’s face or something just to lighten the mood.