The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Still, that’s just my opinion. Lots of people clearly think Brain Gym is worthwhile, or they wouldn’t be prepared to pay through the nose for it. If you’re one of them, here’s an exciting new kinesiological exercise that should dramatically increase your self-awareness – and I’m giving it away free of charge. Ready? OK. Curl the fingers of your right hand inward, meeting the thumb to form a circle. Jerk it rhythmically up and down in front of your face. Repeat for six hours. Then piss off.

  Please God not Boris [14 April 2008]

  A few years back, during the run-up to the Nathan Barley TV series, my co-author Chris Morris and I briefly kicked around a storyline about an animated MP running for election. When I say ‘animated’, I mean literally animated. He was a cartoon – the political equivalent of Gorillaz – fashioned from state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery so that he could move and talk in real time, like Max Headroom. His speech would be provided on-the-fly by a professional cartoon voice artist working in conjunction with a team of political advisers and comedy writers, so he’d have an impish personality not dissimilar to the genie in Disney’s Aladdin. Debating against him would be impossible because he’d make outrageously goonish statements one minute and trot out cunning political platitudes the next. Because he wasn’t real, he’d never age, die, or be bogged down in scandal – and huge swathes of the population would vote for him just because they found him cool or fun or different.

  Fast-forward to now. On 1 May London chooses its mayor, and I’ve got a horrible feeling it might pick Boris Johnson for similar reasons. Johnson – or to give him his full name, Boris LOL!!!! what a legernd!! Johnson!!! – is a TV character loved by millions for his cheeky, bumbling persona. Unlike the cartoon MP, he’s magnetically prone to scandal, but this somehow only makes him more adorable each time. Tee hee! Boris has had an affair! Arf! Now he’s offended the whole of Liverpool! Crumbs! He used the word ‘picaninnies’! Yuk yuk! He’s been caught on tape agreeing to give the address of a reporter to a friend who wants him beaten up! Ho ho! Look at his funny blond hair! HA HA BORIS LOL!!!! WHAT A LEGERND!!!!!!

  If butterfingers Johnson gets in, it’ll clearly be a laugh riot from beginning to end, like a series of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em in which Frank Spencer becomes mayor by mistake. Just picture him on live TV, appealing for calm after a terrorist bombing – the scope for chuckles is almost limitless.

  Assisting Boris in his run, the London Evening Standard is running an openly hostile anti-Livingstone campaign, which means every other page carries a muckraking down-with-Ken piece from crusading journalist Andrew Gilligan, played by Blinky, the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons, in his byline photo. All the articles blend into one after a while, but their central implication is that Ken’s a boozy egomaniac surrounded by a corrupt circus of cronies, so you might as well vote for a rightwing comedy pillock instead. You know, him off the telly. With the blond hair. LOL!!!! WHAT A LEGERND!!!!!

  Now, even if the Standard photographs Ken carving a swastika into a dormouse’s back, I’ll vote for him for the following reasons:

  1. I’m genetically predisposed to hate the Tories. It’s my default, hard-wired position. If Boris wins, their simpering pudge-faced smuggery is going to be unbearable. Picture the expression Piers Morgan makes when he’s especially pleased with himself, then multiply it by 10 million, and imagine it looming overhead like a Death Star. That’s what it’s going be like. Therefore I don’t care who wins provided Johnson loses, and loses hard, preferably in close-up, on the telly.

  2. Ken’s other main rival is solid-but-dull Lib Dem candidate Brian Paddick. He probably deserves a shot, but as he’s not going to win, voting for him would be a waste of a perfectly good X, which might otherwise be used to pinpoint buried treasure, indicate affection, or mark a plague victim’s door.

  3. I wouldn’t trust Boris to operate a mop, let alone a £10 billion Crossrail project.

  4. On a related note, I don’t believe in my gut that Boris gives even the faintest hint of a wisp of a glimpse of a toss about London, or indeed humanity in general. Both of which are fairly important in a job like this.

  5. But on the other hand OMFG LOOK AT HIS FUNNEEE HAIR LOL!!!! BORRIS IS A LEGERND!!!!

  Anyway, if the worst happens and Boris gets in, then provided he doesn’t obliterate the capital in some hilarious slapstick disaster, or provoke war with Portsmouth with a chance remark – provided, in short, that London still exists in some recognisable form – the rival parties should fight fire with fire by running equally popular TV characters against him in the next election.

  It doesn’t even matter if they’re real or not. Basil Brush would be a shoo-in. Churchill, the nodding dog from the car insurance ads – he’ll do. Or if we’re after the ironic vote, how about Gene Hunt from Life on Mars? Or Phil Mitchell? At least he’s a Londoner.

  They might as well. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and there’s no more desperate sign of the times than the current wave of LOL OMFG!!!! BORIS DONE A GUFF!!!! ROFL!!!!!!! THE MAN IS A LEGERND I TELL YOU LOL!!!!! I CARNT WAIT 2 SEE HIM RUNNING THE INTIRE CITTY!!! BORRIS 4 KING!!! LOL!!! LOL!!! LOLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  – In case you need reminding, Boris Johnson won.

  Morning versus night [21 April 2008]

  If the morning and the night had a fight, who’d win? My money’s on mornings. Nights may be sleeker and, on the face of it, more dangerous, but mornings are definitely harder. It’s strange that staying up late at night is somehow regarded as ‘cooler’ than getting up at the crack of dawn, when it’s the latter that truly separates the men from the boys. Any wuss can stay up until 4 a.m. swilling cocktails and jabbering, whereas queuing silently for a bus at 5.30 a.m. in the middle of winter requires a level of genuine grit normally reserved for the likes of the Ancient Mariner.

  At what point, incidentally, does the night officially turn into morning? I’d say, regardless of whether the sun has bothered rising yet or not, the morning only truly starts at the point where you wouldn’t have to apologise to your neighbours if you accidentally set off a bullhorn in your living room. Somewhere around 8 a. m., in other words. Anything earlier than that is just inhumane.

  The night/morning divide has been on my mind of late because my current circumstances have required me to become an early riser. I’m not a natural morning person. Left to my own devices, with no work commitments or sense of purpose, my sleeping pattern tends to drift into student mode, ambling further and further past the horizon until it gets to the point where I’m waking up at 1 p.m. and hitting the sack around six in the morning. I eventually become fully nocturnal – like a vampire, but more of a loser, and with markedly less capacity for transforming into a bat and flapping around a castle scaring virgins.

  Traditionally, anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves working with me discovers very quickly that there’s little point scheduling meetings first thing in the morning, because I’ll either miss the start by 45 minutes (then waste another half hour defensively explaining that my alarm didn’t go off and so on), or turn up bleary-eyed and useless, having stayed awake all night because I was so spooked by the thought of oversleeping.

  But all that’s had to change of late. I’ve somehow got into the habit of rising early and, boy, oh boy, it’s an exciting journey into a whole new world. For one thing, I’ve discovered an entire species of human being that I rarely come into contact with: London’s commuters.

  Their existence never fails to surprise me. I’d always thought of the mornings as essentially uninhabitable, like the planet Mercury. But no. I head out the door at 7 a.m. and there they are – actual live people! – making me jerk with astonishment each time. It’s like lifting a rock and seeing life unexpectedly teeming below. Although it’s not actually teeming most of the time. A lot of it is simply standing around, lined up silently at the bus stop like a sorrowful row of Antony Gormley figurines, suffering one indignity after another. Cramped conditions, busted LED signs, bursts of syncopated mar
ching interspersed with the occasional frenzied dash, freezing skies, freezing breath, freezing, pissing rain … their lives are a hilarious cycle of misery. Or rather, it would be hilarious if I didn’t have to join them each morning.

  Still, apparently that’s all on the way out. According to The Economist, thanks to the ongoing technological revolution, the commuter of yesteryear is gradually being replaced by the ‘urban nomad’ of tomorrow. A combination of burgeoning Wi-Fi access and increasingly smart-arsed gadgetry is making location increasingly irrelevant for many workers: wherever they are, they can still communicate with colleagues, access documents, and type up blisteringly dull reports.

  There’s no need to physically head into work, unless you work in a chip shop, and even then scientists are close to cracking a method for frying potatoes via broadband and emailing them direct to your customers’ stomachs.

  The upshot of all this being that the early morning commute is set to slowly dissipate from a concentrated frenzy of furrow-browed scampering into a sort of fuzzy, laid-back cloud in which worker bees drift hither and thither, sometimes staying at home, sometimes buzzing round town, touching down in a Starbucks every five minutes to stare at a BlackBerry or something modern like that. The very notion of geography has been shattered as surely as if someone had written the word ‘geography’ on a plate and hurled it to the floor in a touristy Greek restaurant. And it’ll be a bit less cramped at the bus stop as a result.

  Having conquered space, technology should now set about conquering time. It’s all very well being able to hold a video conference without leaving your own toilet, but there’s still that pesky need to communicate with people in real time, which means being awake at the same moment they are. And in my experience other people have an irritating tendency to get up early and stand around tapping their watch. What I want is a Sky+ system for all human interactions, so I can store conversations up and then play them back at a time that suits me, preferably the middle of the night, which is my natural habitat.

  But then there are all sorts of things I want that the world of science has yet to deliver. The real-world Sky+ system is just one of them. There’s still no sign of the hovercar, the robot butler, or the pill that tastes like an entire Sunday roast, and I distinctly remember ordering all three way back in 1978 when I was seven years old and capable of soaring optimism. Now I’m older, I’d settle for a lie-in. Still, that’s the way the aspiration crumbles.

  Bowl, Barack, bowl [28 April 2008]

  Is Barack Obama elitist? Will his middle name harm his campaign? Are voters turned off by his lack of bowling prowess? Did he give Hillary the finger during a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina? When he picks his nose, which digit does he use? And what does that say about him?

  The first four questions were genuinely posed by US TV news over the past few weeks. The nose-picking question wasn’t. But it’s no more puerile and pointless than the ones that were. The answers to the real questions, incidentally, run roughly as follows:

  1. Is Obama elitist? Of course he is. He’s running for president. It doesn’t get much more elitist than that. Still, in terms of privilege, he’d have to go a long way to beat the ding-dong incumbent. Bush hails from a family of oil barons, billionaires, CEOs, former presidents, Scrooge McDuck and Daddy Warbucks. He’s slept in a gigantic rustling money nest every night since the day he was born. And he’s got an uncle made of gold. But since he also looks like Alfred E. Neuman and talks like he’s ordering ribs, he’s viewed as a straighttalkin’, down-home regular Joe, albeit one with so much blood on his hands it’s surely in danger of caking and congealing and turning his fists into heavy balls of scab, each one the size of a cabbage, good for thumping against desks and doors but not much else. Although even if that did happen, even if Bush called a press conference on the White House lawn and stood there demonically beating out a funeral march with his scabby orbs on a nightmarish drum fashioned from human bones and skin – even under those circumstances, you sense he’d somehow get away with it. Because that aw-shucks grin looks good on camera.

  2. Will Obama’s middle name – Hussein – harm his campaign? Depends how often and how insidiously you pose the question, really.

  3. Are voters turned off by Obama’s lack of bowling prowess? Hard to say. While campaigning in Pennsylvania, he took part in a photo opportunity at a bowling alley. It didn’t go so well. He bowled a miserable 37; half his balls sailed into the gutter. In summary, he looked like a dick. The clip immediately entered heavy rotation on the TV news channels, becoming one of those modern snatches of footage that instantly take on iconic status by sheer dint of repetition; looping hypnotically, repeating ad nauseam against a soothing background of dull pundit birdsong, permanently stitching themselves into the fabric of your mind’s eye. And the hosts ask whether this makes him look elitist, and the pundits umm and ahh over whether it does, and the word ‘elitist’ is bandied about again and again over the image of Obama looking like a dick, an elitist dick, an elitist can’t-bowl dick, and it all starts to feel like brainwashing, albeit inadvertently, albeit only because they’ve got a simple, juicy clip and 10 billion hours of airtime to fill. So yes, voters might be turned off by Obama’s lack of bowling prowess, because it’s been shoved in their faces and smushed around like an oily rag.

  4. Did Obama give Hillary the finger during a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina? This one’s easy. The answer is no. Of course he didn’t. While discussing his opponent during a campaign speech, Obama momentarily scratched his face using his middle finger. That’s all. But hang on: we’ve still got a lot of airtime to fill, so let’s loop it again and again while we try to work out if it might’ve been 169 a deliberate gesture, or a subconscious giveaway, or nothing at all. Was it nothing at all? This. Look at this. Was this nothing at all? Here it is again. What about this time? And this time? And this?

  When you stand at a distance and survey this level of nitpicking idiocy, taking in the full landscape of stupidity and meaningless analysis, it’s hard not to conclude that 24-hour rolling news is the worst thing to befall humankind since the Manhattan Project. The focus on conjecture and analysis has reached such an insane degree that pundits are chasing some kind of meaning in the way a presidential candidate scratches his face. This is what lunatics do when they think people on television are sending them personalised messages. Where the rest of us see Vernon Kay hosting a gameshow, they see evidence of a conspiracy, and they scan every wink, nod, and eyebrow twitch for veiled threats or coded instructions.

  Except the lunatics have an excuse: they’re lunatics. Lunacy is what they do. It’s in their job description. News networks are supposed to offer news. Instead they serve up loops and chatter. They might as well show footage of passing clouds and invite their pundits to speculate on which one looks most like a kettle and which one looks most like a pony. And let the race for the presidency be settled by a bowling match.

  You are here [5 May 2008]

  There’s a characteristically brilliant Peanuts strip which opens with Linus sitting on the living-room floor, anxiously clutching his mouth. Lucy enters and asks what’s wrong. ‘I’m aware of my tongue,’ he explains. ‘It’s an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel lumped up … I can’t help it … I can’t put it out of my mind … I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren’t thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth.’

  Loudly declaring this the dumbest thing she’s ever heard, Lucy scowls away. But a few steps down the corridor, she stops dead in her tracks. She clutches her own mouth. Suddenly she’s aware of her tongue too. She runs back and chases him round the room, shouting, ‘You blockhead!’ with her gigantic booming gob.

  Occasionally, late at night, while trying to sleep and failing, I experience something similar – except instead of being aware of my tongue, I’m aware of my entire body, the entire world, and the whole of reality itself.
It’s like waking from a dream, or a light going on, or a giant ‘YOU ARE HERE’ sign appearing in the sky. The mere fact that I’m actually real and actually breathing suddenly hits me in the head with a thwack. It leaves me giddy. It causes a brief surge of clammy, bubbling anxiety, like the opening stages of a panic attack. The moment soon passes, but while it lasts it’s strangely terrifying.

  I asked around and discovered to my that relief I’m not the only one. Many of my friends have experienced something similar and have been equally spooked. One of them, a smartarse, pointed out that Jean-Paul Sartre was so rattled by the sensation that he was inspired to write an entire book about existential dread called Nausea, which became a student classic. I prefer Charles M. Schulz’s take. It’s far more succinct and comes with funny pictures.

  Anyway, what troubles me about such moments of heightened awareness isn’t the dizzying headrush that accompanies them, but the implication that the rest of the time I must be essentially asleep, cruising around on autopilot, scarcely even aware that I’m alive. Here, but not here. Like I’m watching a TV show. That’s the bulk of my life. I might as well set the video and nod off completely, catching up later while eating a takeaway dinner.

  I didn’t mention this to my smartarse friend – but if I had, they’d doubtless point out that Kurt Vonnegut was so rattled by this sensation that he was inspired to write an entire book about it. In his 1997 novel Timequake, a bizarre rift in time sends everyone on Earth back 10 years – but only in spirit. Trapped inside their own heads, mere spectators, they’re forced to watch themselves living their day-today lives for an entire decade, making the same mistakes, experiencing the same joys and heartaches – and they’re powerless to intervene. Naturally, they get bored and drift off, leaving themselves on autopilot. At the moment the timequake eventually ends, and they’re back in the present day, most of them simply drop to the floor, confused – it’s been so long since they were at the controls, they’ve forgotten how to walk and talk for themselves.