The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  That’s just one broad objection to all the bullshit theories. But try suggesting it to someone in the midst of a 9/11 fairytale reverie, and they’ll pull a face and say, ‘Yeah, but …’ and start banging on about some easily misinterpreted detail that ‘makes you think’ (when it doesn’t) or ‘contradicts the official story’ (when you misinterpret it). Like nutbag creationists, they fixate on thinly spread, cherry-picked nuggets of ‘evidence’ and ignore the thundering mass of data pointing the other way.

  And when repeatedly pressed on that one, basic, overall point – that a conspiracy this huge would be impossible to pull off – they huff and whine and claim that unless you’ve sat through every nanosecond of Loose Change (the conspiracy flick du jour) and personally refuted every one of its carefully spun ‘findings’ before their very eyes, using a spirit level and calculator, you have no right to an opinion on the subject.

  Oh yeah? So if my four-year-old nephew tells me there’s a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he’s wrong, do I?

  Look hard enough, and dementedly enough, and you can find ‘proof’ that Kevin Bacon was responsible for 9/11 – or the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, come to that. It’d certainly make for a more interesting story, which is precisely why several thousand well-meaning people would go out of their way to believe it. Throughout my twenties I earnestly believed Oliver Stone’s account of the JFK assassination. Partly because of the compelling (albeit wildly selective) way the ‘evidence’ was blended with fiction in his 1991 movie – but mainly because I WANTED to believe it. Believing it made me feel important.

  Embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you’re part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgen and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time. You’ve seen through the matrix! At last you’re alive! You ARE the Emperor of Pluto after all!

  Except – ahem – you’re only deluding yourself, your majesty. Because to believe the ‘system’ is trying to control you is to believe it considers you worth controlling in the first place. The reality – that ‘the man’ is scarcely competent enough to control his own bowels, and doesn’t give a toss about you anyway – is depressing and emasculating; just another day in the cardboard box factory. And that’s no place for an imaginary emperor, now, is it?

  Britney nude [NSFW] [21 July 2008]

  Miley Cyrus, Angelina, Israel vs Palestine, iPhone, 9/11 conspiracy, Facebook, MySpace, and Britney Spears nude. And not forgetting Second Life, Paris Hilton, YouTube, Lindsay Lohan, World of Warcraft, The Dark Knight, Radiohead and Barack Obama. Oh, and great big naked tits. In 3D.

  Let me explain. Last week, I wrote a piece on 9/11 conspiracy theories which virtually broke the Guardian website as thousands of ‘truthers’ (painfully earnest online types who sincerely believe 9/11 was an inside job) poured through the walls to unfurl their two pence worth. Some outlined alternative ‘theories’. Some mistakenly equated dismissing the conspiracy theories with endorsing the Bush administration. Some simply wailed, occasionally in CAPI-TALS. Others, correctly, identified me as a paid-off establishment shill acting under instructions from the CIA.

  Now to sit here and painstakingly rebut everything the truthers said would take three months and several hundred pages, and would be a massive waste of the world’s time, because ultimately I’m right and they’re wrong – well-meaning, but wrong. What’s more, I’ve woken up with an alarming fever and am sweating like a miner as I type these words. On the cusp of hallucinating. Consequently my brain isn’t working properly; it feels like it’s been marinaded in petrol, then wrapped in a warm towel. So I’m hardly at my sharpest. Actually, sod it: you win, truthers. I give up. You’re 100% correct. Inside job, clearly.

  Whatever. Now pass the paracetamol.

  Anyway, because it contained the words ‘9/11 conspiracy’, the article generated loads of traffic for the Guardian site, which in turn means loads of advertising revenue. And in this day and age, what with the credit crunch and the death of print journalism and everything, the use of attention-grabbing keywords is becoming standard practice. ‘Search engine optimisation’, it’s known as, and it’s the journalistic equivalent of a classified ad that starts with the word ‘SEX!’ in large lettering, and ‘Now that we’ve got your attention …’ printed below it in smaller type.

  For instance, according to the latest Private Eye, journalists writing articles for the Telegraph website are being actively encouraged to include oft-searched-for phrases in their copy. So an article about shoe sales among young women would open: ‘Young women – such as Britney Spears – are buying more shoes than ever.’

  On the one hand, you could argue this is nothing new; after all, for years newspapers have routinely jazzed up dull print articles with photographs of attractive female stars (you know the sort of thing: a giant snap of Keira Knightley doing her Atonement wet-Tshirt routine to illustrate a report about the state of Britain’s fountain manufacturers). But at least in those instances the actual text of the article itself survived unscathed. There’s something uniquely demented about slotting specific words and phrases into a piece simply to con people into reading it. Why bother writing a news article at all? Why not just scan in a few naked photos and have done with it?

  And if you do persevere with search-engine-optimised news reports, where do you draw the line? Next time a bomb goes off, are we going to read ‘Terror outrage: BRITNEY, ANGELINA and OBAMA all unaffected as hundreds die in SEXY agony’?

  And wait, it gets worse. These phrases don’t just get lobbed in willy-nilly. No. A lot of care and attention goes into their placement. Apparently the average reader quickly scans each page in an ‘F-pattern’: reading along the top first, then glancing halfway along the line below, before skimming their eye downward along the lefthand side. If there’s nothing of interest within that golden ‘F’ zone, he or she will quickly clear off elsewhere.

  Which means your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That’s an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions. Mainly, though, it’s just plain undignified: turning the journalist into the equivalent of a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed.

  And for the consumer, it’s just one more layer of distracting crud – the bane of the 21st century. Distracting crud comes in countless forms – from the onscreen clutter of 24-hour news stations to the winking, blinking ads on every other web page. These days, each separate square inch of everything is simultaneously vying for your attention, and the overall effect is to leave you feeling bewildered, distanced, feverish and slightly insane. Or maybe that’s just me, today.

  Actually, it’s definitely just me. Like I say, I’m ill, my brain’s not working. Which is why opening this piece with a slew of hot search terms probably wasn’t a brilliant wheeze.

  Perhaps if I close with a selection of the LEAST searched-for terms ever, I can redress the balance. Worth a shot. Um …

  JOHN SELWYN GUMMER … PATRICK KIELTY NUDE … UNDERWHELMING KNITTING PATTERNS … FULLY CLOTHED BABES.

  There. That should do it.

  On tonsillitis [28 July 2008]

  Regular followers of my dismal ‘existence’ may recall last week that I broke off in the middle of a thrilling piece about internet search terms to complain I had some sort of fever and boo-hoo-hoo poor me. Turns out I had tonsillitis. Now, if you’re anything like I was a fortnight ago, the mention of tonsillitis right there won’t do anything for you. I mean, what is it anyway? A kiddywink illness? Bit of a sore throat? Pah. That’s how people who’ve never had tonsillitis tend to think about it. I certainly did. Whereas now, I can confidently report that it’s worse – far worse – than int
ernational terrorism and child abuse combined.

  Why didn’t I know this before? Either there’s some sort of weird conspiracy going on that involves the general public collectively underplaying its horrors, or I just didn’t listen whenever someone recounted what happened when they had it. I suspect the latter. I suspect each time they opened their mouth I thought: ‘Boo-hoo, bit of a sore throat, yeah?’ in a loop, trying to disguise my contempt as I stared at their stupid babbling face, waiting for my turn to speak. And I think everyone’s done this. No one’s listened to the sufferers, ever. Not even their own doctors. And that’s why we all, as a nation, have failed to acknowledge how nasty tonsillitis actually is. Yup. I blame society. Now, it’s possible we never ‘got’ tonsillitis because the survivors’ descriptions weren’t lurid enough. Let’s redress the balance.

  It starts with an achy throat. One day I went ‘ahh’ in the mirror, and glimpsed some kind of mouth ulcer at the back of my throat. Urgh, I thought, reaching for the antiseptic mouthwash. That should take care of it.

  A week later, a heavy flu-like sensation suddenly descended; a sultry cloud locking itself into position over the sun. I’ve got a cold, guessed my idiot brain. I lay on my sofa, sweating and listlessly channel-surfing, until I realised I couldn’t even follow the plot of Celebrity MasterChef. I crawled into bed at 9 p.m. Next morning I had to write last Monday’s column, but the sweats and shivers were so bad I couldn’t type properly. Did I go to the doctor? No. Because I live in London, where to get a doctor’s appointment you have to consult Old Moore’s Almanack six months in advance to work out when you’re going to be ill and book an appointment accordingly. And also because that afternoon we were filming for a TV show I’ve written. We were shooting outdoors in the rain.

  During the shoot, I spent most of my time staring anxiously at a helicopter overhead, convinced it was planning to crash into us as part of some terrorist attack. I’d become feverish and paranoid, like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas minus the coke jitters. Meanwhile, my throat throbbed like a beaten stepchild.

  That night I thrashed in bed, sweating like a punctured dinghy, unsure if I was still outside watching the helicopter or not. This went on for six hours until I passed out, only to lurch awake 45 minutes later and discover I could scarcely swallow or speak. My voice had mutated beyond recognition. When I spoke, I sounded like Janet Street-Porter slowly listing vowels through a hose.

  I went to the mirror, opened wide and peered in. The back of my throat now resembled a sandblasted foetus, or an endoscopic close-up of a diseased bowel. My tonsils had been dragged down a gravel path and slammed in a car door. An emergency appointment was in order.

  Two hours later an appalled doctor was gazing into my raging, pustulated throat and bollocking me for not seeking help sooner. Prescribing antibiotics, she warned things would get worse before they got better. She was right. The fever is the easy bit. The throat itself: that’s the thing.

  It isn’t even your throat any more. It’s torment in a pipe. Swallowing feels like someone forcing a spiked kneecap down your neck, and for some reason, your mouth decides this represents a golden opportunity to generate gallons more saliva than usual, so you get to experience the joy of agonised swallowing again and again, around the clock. You can’t sleep through or ignore it. It’s a constant jabbing that slowly drives you mad. Within 48 hours I’d gone feral: staggering around my flat like a confused and angry animal, slapping the walls and howling inside my head.

  Not that there’s much energy for slapping walls. Not when you can’t eat food. Forget solids. Even a glass of water becomes a cup of shattered twigs. Ice cream or scrambled egg: that’s your lot. Gargling with warm salt water is the sole thing that buys five minutes of relief. Before you know it, the kettle and sink hold the same significance as a crack pipe. You’re constantly Winehousin’ for saline.

  And it goes on and on, until somewhere round day three, when you’re seriously contemplating suicide (anything but hanging, what with these tonsils) the drugs kick in and the cloud starts lifting. And you run out into the street (because you can run again!) and collar passers-by (because you can talk again!) and you try to tell them just how bad tonsillitis is. But they’re staring at your stupid wobbling face, waiting for their turn to speak.

  If this strikes you as a trivial subject to write about, you’re wrong. Really. Bollocks to the rest of you. I could’ve sat through live 3D news footage of some gruesome bloody war, watching starving women and children being machine gunned in the face by Terminator rebels, and I’d have just shrugged. So what. Stop crying. They’re only bullets. Try having my throat. Try some genuine suffering, you pussies.

  The worst that could happen [4 August 2008]

  Here’s a real-life nightmare for you. Late last Wednesday night, passengers on a Canadian Greyhound bus had their enjoyment of the on-board movie, Zorro, soured when one of their fellow travellers suddenly launched into an appallingly violent and apparently unprovoked attack on the stranger sitting beside him. Following a frenzied assault, the attacker decapitated his victim with a hunting knife, then held up the head for the horrified passengers (who by now were standing outside the bus, holding the doors shut) to look at.

  Every aspect of this story is terrifying. I don’t know what frightens me most. There’s the fear of suddenly falling victim to a violent killer, obviously. Then there’s the behaviour of the killer himself: according to witnesses, he’d been sitting on the bus behaving entirely normally for at least an hour before the attack. What if he’d been behaving entirely normally his entire life, then suddenly went crazy without any warning whatsoever? What if that could happen to anyone? One minute you’re sitting at home watching Cash in the Attic, the next you’re nodding in slavish agreement as a six-foot crocodile with fruit-machine reels for eyes commands you to torch the house next door. How long does it take to go irretrievably mad anyway? Is there a speed cracking-up record? It’s not a comforting thought.

  Then there’s fear number three: the thought of witnessing a lifechanging atrocity first-hand. Being hopelessly morbid, I contemplate this sort of thing all the time. For instance, when sitting in a cinema, I often get slightly distracted by the thought that a bomb might be about to go off. Once a thought like that has entered my head, I can’t shift it; I imagine the flash and the blast and the screaming. Bits of kidney landing in my popcorn, that kind of thing. You try concentrating on Mamma Mia! with a brain full of ominous foreboding. It’s impossible.

  Someone cleverer than me once described this condition as having an ‘Alfred Hitchcock mind’, in reference to the way many of Hitchcock’s movies contain a sequence in which a scene of everyday mundanity is given a macabre spin by the viewer’s certain knowledge that something terrible is about to happen (The Birds, in particular, is full of moments like this). I prefer to think of it as being perpetually stuck in the opening moments of an episode of Casualty, where every stepladder, plug socket, and loose-lidded food processor is a grinning, lurking deathtrap.

  Perhaps you normalities pity us sufferers. Wrong. You’re hardly awake. We live on the edge. Wouldn’t you prefer each of your daily activities to come imbued with this kind of nervous frisson? I can scarcely cross the street without imagining, in punishing detail, how it would feel to be run over by an oil tanker – to feel my own sense of awareness becoming distorted in new and grotesque ways as my brain is squished between the treads of its tyres. Would I hear my own skull pop open beneath the wheel? Or would I be unconscious by then? That’s the level of grisly contemplation I like to wallow in. Consequently, each time I successfully make it to the opposite pavement, I feel genuinely glad to be alive. Who needs extreme sports? Why jump from a plane for kicks? Jesus, don’t you have an imagination? Sod that trip to the airfield. Stay in the kitchen, where you could potentially slip on a floor tile and skewer your eye on a potato peeler. That’s all the excitement you need.

  A weird side-effect of this frankly dubious mindset is that, while I love gruesome ficti
onal horror (which tickles those same morbid synapses for entertainment), I can’t bear to witness real-life nastiness. Recently someone tried to show me a YouTube clip of some unfortunate yobbo having his leg crushed beneath a collapsing brick wall. But I couldn’t even listen to the damn thing, let alone look at it. Genuine violence and gore tends to leave me feeling dizzy, cold, and somewhat changed. Not everyone is the same. Apparently, said YouTube video is accompanied by all manner of ‘LOL his knee iz shattered!!!’ user comments, left by warm-hearted viewers who found the spectacle as gently amusing as a Vicar of Dibley Christmas special.

  Perhaps I should toughen up. I recently spent some time on the set of a forthcoming apocalyptic TV show involving lots of fake blood and gore. For several days on the trot, there were smashed cars, flames, smoke, corpses and exposed innards everywhere I looked. At first it’s genuinely depressing. Then you grow warmly accustomed to it. Before long I was kicking dead women and children around for a laugh. It’s probably desensitised me just enough to cope well in the immediate aftermath of a small nuclear explosion. While everyone else is screaming just because a few charred limbs are dangling from lamp posts, I’ll be calmly scouring the rubble for weapons. All the better to fight gangs of marauding bikers with.

  In fact, I’m wondering if it’s worth setting up some kind of holiday theme park specifically aimed at desensitising visitors to reallife atrocities they may encounter in the future. Basically, it would be exactly the same as Center Parcs, but with burnt trees and ultrarealistic latex corpses strewn around the place, some of them featuring state-of-the-art in-built animatronics, so they can slowly claw their way across the ground toward your kids, screaming and twitching with their eyes popping out. Hey, it’s character-building. A holiday with real purpose. Beat that.

  The great taste of risk [11 August 2008]