The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Despite the visual distractions, a few words and noises did register in my brain. Obama’s voice is so soothing, I kept thinking he was about to start advertising coffee. ‘I want to say to the American people: this is the finest, mellowest blend your money can buy.’ McCain, meanwhile, was narrating a children’s story about Joe the Plumber. Maybe it’s a back-up plan: if he doesn’t win the presidency, he’s going to launch a stop-motion animation series on Nickelodeon. There’s probably a warehouse full of Joe the Plumber action figures out there somewhere in the Arizona desert just waiting for the say-so.

  I kept waiting for Obama to counter McCain’s talk of Joe the Plumber by bringing up Boris the Spider or Dennis the Menace or something, but no. He started addressing Joe too. Before long they were both at it, appealing to Joe straight down the lens, which meant I had to keep looking behind me in case he was standing there, fixing a pipe.

  Then it was over and I went to bed. At least I think I did. Perhaps it was all a dream. Certainly felt that way. An election in Narnia. And they all lived happily ever after. The end.

  Picnicking in the despair of others [27 October 2008]

  There’s a lot of bleak and distressing news around at the moment. In fact, I’ve become so conditioned to expect bad news that if I turned on CNN tomorrow morning and saw a report saying every kitten in the world had died of leukaemia during the night, accompanied by footage of sobbing workmen bulldozing their bodies into a mass grave, I’d probably just shrug and think: ‘Yeah, that figures.’ But grim though the news is, nothing of late has haunted me quite as much as a story I read some time ago – this time last year as it happens – about a man who was jailed for urinating on a woman who’d collapsed in the street, shouting ‘This is YouTube material!’ as she lay dying.

  A reader reminded me of this last week. But only indirectly. I get a lot of emails from people asking me to read through stuff they’ve written to see if I think it’s funny, or can give them advice and so on. And I rarely do, because (a) some of the stuff they send is even worse than my own (in which case they must be really straining), and (b) my inbox is perpetually over its size limit thanks to an endless swarm of whopping great PR emails containing 10MB JPEG invites to things I’m never, ever going to go to – so half the time I can’t reply anyway.

  But during a bored moment last Thursday I bucked a trend and decided to read one such submission: a comic mock-news article a reader sent in, concerning Kerry Katona’s already-notorious appearance on This Morning. Said reader called Katona a ‘mentally hilarious ex-girl band jizz puppet’ and a ‘pram-faced shit-muncher’.

  LOL.

  I couldn’t quite work out which was worse – the fact that they’d written this in the first place, or the assumption that I, specifically, would find it funny. Having poured countless buckets of deliberately puerile abuse over people for several years, to the point where I’ve developed RSI, I figured I only had myself to blame. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps I’m mellowing in my old age, or perhaps I’ve grown 15% more human, but kicking real people when they’re down doesn’t really activate my chuckle cells.

  Sure enough, Katona’s apparent meltdown – assuming her slurring performance was a meltdown and not, as she claimed, a reaction to antidepressants – became ‘YouTube material’ within minutes of the broadcast. And although many of the comments underneath expressed concern or pity, there were plenty of cackles too. ‘Haaaaaa haaaaaa haaaaaa,’ wrote one warm-hearted chum of humanity, because a simple ‘Ha ha ha’ just wouldn’t suffice.

  Why leave it there, chuckles? Why not head down to your nearest addiction clinic and laugh yourself up a storm? Or better still, swing by the local hospice: it’s a goldmine of comic misery. Except it isn’t, because those are ‘innocent’ victims, none of whom have previously annoyed you by being famous, or courting attention with lad-mag photo shoots, which is, apparently, all it takes to convert basic human sympathy into side-splitting belly laughs.

  Of course, if you want to be on the receiving end of this kind of point-and-giggle shittery it helps if you’re a woman, and you’ve had your crotch flashed across the internet courtesy of some clammy paparazzo who held his camera at ankle-height and shoved it up your skirt as you clambered out of your car. Look! When we lie down on the pavement, utterly prostrating ourselves among the dog piss and fag butts, when we lie down here and gaze upwards … we can actually see your vagina, you repugnant! And from here on in, anything negative that happens to you has been instantly rendered hilarious. Lost your mind? Haaaaaa haaaaaa haaaaaa. Lost your children? Haaaaa haaaaa haaaaa. Here’s hoping you get drunk and stumble into a threshing machine so we can print out the pictures and stick them on the office noticeboard and laugh till our noses run. And why? Because we’re better than you.

  Asserting an unearned, wisp-thin air of superiority: that’s what it’s really about.

  The equation runs as follows: vacuous celebrities are trashy and annoying + I consider myself above them = HAAAA HAAAA HAAAA CHECK OUT THE SUFFERING LOL!!!!

  It doesn’t add up. If you look down on the genuine misery of those you consider beneath you, you’re not just being an arsehole, but a snooty one to boot. The very fact that you’re willing to get so annoyed by an irritating celebrity that you’ll gleefully jettison any notion of sympathy is surely a bright scarlet warning light indicating just how empty your spiritual gas tank has become. We’re talking about Kerry Katona here, not Jörg Haider. Do you want to end up like Carole Malone? No? Then for Christ’s sake take up a hobby or something. Fly a kite. Phone a friend. Visit a museum. Play some Guitar Hero. Anything. Just gain a little cheerful perspective.

  Because we’re all just jerks in the playpen, when it comes right down to it. And tossing insults and brickbats is all part of the fun, especially when it’s done with panache. But when anyone – no matter how annoying – stumbles and shatters their skull, you’d better be prepared to either shut up or help them. Why? Because you’re also a grown up, stupid. And that’s what they do.

  Sexual acts on a butterfly [3 November 2008]

  So it’s here at last. The dawn of the dumb has broken in earnest. Two mistakes occur – first Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross overstep the mark with an ill-advised bit of juvenilia, then someone decides to broadcast it. Two listeners complained, but that’s by the by: it shouldn’t have gone out. But then the Daily Mail – not so much a newspaper as an idiot’s guidebook issued in bite-size daily instalments – uses the incident as the starting point for a full-blown moral crusade. Suddenly everyone’s complaining, whether they heard the broadcast or not, largely on the basis of hysterical, boggle-eyed descriptions of what the pair said. Poor Andrew Sachs, who, having been wronged, graciously accepted their apologies and called for everybody to move on, looked bewildered by the sheer number of cameras stuck in his face. Because, by then, apologies weren’t enough.

  The Mail was so incensed, it printed a full transcript of the answerphone prankery under the heading ‘Lest We Forget’ – and helpfully included outtakes that weren’t even broadcast, so its readers could be enraged by things no one had heard in the first place. This was like making a point about the cruelty of fox-hunting by ripping a live fox apart with your bare hands, then poking a rabbit’s eye out with a pen for good measure.

  And now, like a lion developing a taste for human flesh after munching on a bit of discarded leg, the paper is on the hunt for fresh victims. First up: Brand’s Channel 4 comedy show Ponderland. Readers were treated to a blow-by-blow account of what kind of depravity they could expect to see if they tuned in that evening.

  ‘As his closing joke, he performs a graphic mime of sexual acts on a butterfly.’

  Funniest. Daily Mail sentence. Ever.

  Friday’s paper included a rundown of other ‘obscenities’ broadcast by the Beeb, which the paper fearlessly ‘uncovered’ by recording some TV shows and writing down some of the jokes. To protect readers’ sensibilities, all the rude words were sprinkled with asterisks, alth
ough since the Mail’s definition of ‘rude’ extends to biological terms such as ‘penis’, it was a bit like gazing at an ASCII representation of a snowstorm on a ZX Spectrum circa 1983. Perhaps next week it will produce a free sheet of asterisk stickers for readers to plaster over their own genitals, lest they catch sight of them in a mirror and indignantly vomit themselves into a coma.

  One of the shows singled out was an episode of the romcom Love Soup transmitted in April that, the Mail insisted, depicted a woman being raped by a dog. I didn’t see the show myself, but I doubt you saw it going in or anything, because I don’t recall seeing Mark Thompson hanging from a lamp post while an angry mob kicked Television Centre to pieces. Maybe we can ‘devolve’ to that point in time for Christmas.

  Still, if it’s OK to be retrospectively enraged, why stop at April? Be ambitious! Keep going! There’s an endless list of comedy shows that would qualify for the Mail’s hall of shame. How about Monty Python, which in 1970 included a gloriously tasteless sketch about a man eating his mother’s corpse, then puking the remains into a grave? If Python had been banned, we’d never have seen Fawlty Towers or heard of Andrew Sachs in the first place – problem solved. Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Porridge, Not the Nine O’Clock News, The Young Ones, Have I Got News For You, Blackadder, The Day Today, Little Britain, The Thick of It … by the Mail’s reckoning, each of those shows surely deserves a place on the list too. Hundreds of hours of laughter you’d never have had.

  The sad, likely outcome of this pitiful gitstorm is an increase in BBC jumpiness. I have a vested interest in this, of course, because I’ve just started work on the next series of my BBC4 show Screen Wipe, on which we sometimes sail close to the wind. In the past, the BBC has occasionally stepped in to nix the odd line that oversteps the mark – as it should do, when parameters aren’t out of whack.

  But when the Beeb’s under fire, those parameters can change. Last year, following the ‘fakery’ scandals, we recorded a trailer for the series in which I mocked a BBC4 ident featuring footage of seagulls, by fooling around with a plastic seagull on a stick and muttering about how you couldn’t trust anything on TV any more. Pure Crackerjack. But suddenly it couldn’t be transmitted, due to ‘the current climate’. So God knows how restrictive things might get over the coming months.

  And that’s just my basic, low-level gittery. If something as sublime and revolutionary as Python came along today, the Mail would try to kill it stone dead, and it’d rope in thousands of angry old idiots to help, all of them bravely marching to the Ofcom website to register their disgust. What a rush. Feel that pipsqueak throb of empowerment coursing through your starched and joyless veins! You’ve crushed some fun, and it feels good to be alive!

  Perhaps it’s time to put a ‘Complain to Ofcom’ button right there on the remote control: if enough viewers press it, the show gets yanked immediately, like a bad variety act being pulled off stage by a shepherd’s crook.

  Or maybe, just maybe, it’s time to establish ‘Counter-Complaints’: a method of registering your complaint about the number of kneejerk complaints. And one should cancel out the other – so if 25,000 people complain, and a further 25,000 counter-complain, the total number of complaints is zero. It might lead to a lot of fruitless button-mashing, but at least we can keep our shared national culture relatively sane. Because judging by the rest of the news, if the ship’s going down, a few unrestricted taste-free laughs now and then might make things more bearable for all of us.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In which Sachsgate rumbles on, Bagpuss goes to sleep, and MTV introduce the most vapid TV show in history

  Ofcom follies [29 November 2008]

  So there I am, preparing to spew another column abusing some unfortunate I’m A Celebrity inmate – not Timmy Mallett, because I’ve started to love him, partly because he appears to have turned into a Spitting Image puppet of Jonathan King, but mainly because he spends the whole time cackling and chanting inane songs like a four-year-old singing about doing a poo, and it’s driving the more uptight camp members out of their minds, to the point where I’m already fantasising about a follow-up show in which the producers permanently glue him to Nicola McLean’s back and make them run Drayton Manor Park and Zoo for an entire year … So anyway, there I am, preparing to pen that sack of jollies when PING! Another email arrives. From a disgruntled member of the public, still annoyed about the Brand/Ross phonecalls. Still annoyed!

  Actually, they’re not just annoyed about Sachsgate. They’re annoyed with me. What I’d done, see, both in print and on telly, was claim the resulting overreaction to the woeful calls, fuelled by an increasingly desperate press, might lead to an overall toning down of any and all potentially ‘offensive’ TV material, which in turn could deprive us of authentic gems in the future. I supported my case by citing all sorts of fantastic old bits of comedy we’d never have seen if broadcasters back yonder had been subject to the sort of kneejerk Ofcom-clocking that’s become the norm: Monty Python, Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Young Ones, and so on.

  Terrifically clear to you, me and the average cabbage. But not to the furiously hard-of-understanding, who decided I was comparing the Sachs phonecalls to such rare works of genius (which I wasn’t) and thereby defending them (which I also wasn’t). Enraged by their own misreading, they’ve been emailing me directly to point out how wrong the argument they haven’t followed is. Thanks. Your voice has been heard. Each time you click ‘Send’ it’s a fresh triumph for democracy.

  Still, this latest email also took umbrage with one other point I actually DID make. I implied that people who retrospectively complain to Ofcom about material they’ve only read about second-hand are, in essence, a bunch of sanctimonious crybabies indulging in a wretched form of masturbation. In my defence, I only implied this because it’s true.

  Anyway, to expose my crashing wrongness on this issue, the sender points to an old column I wrote recounting my shock upon reading of a real-life incident in which a drunk pissed on a dying woman. ‘Hang on,’ counters the self-appointed barrister, ‘You didn’t see it first-hand – so do you have the right to be shocked or offended? Of course.’

  He’s right. I didn’t have to witness it first-hand to be shocked. But then I didn’t feel the need to report my shock to the police either. Unless I’ve got some useful information to offer, I’d rather not hassle them. Only a cunt would do that.

  Nearly 40,000 people complained about the Sachs calls. Impressive. But a few weeks later Ofcom received a petition from 50,000 people equally pissed off about Laura White being voted off The X Factor, doubtless trying to outdo the Sachsgate mob. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood its purpose, but I don’t think Ofcom was intended to be an all-purpose repository for bandwagon protest votes. In terms of raw numbers, the Laura White incident looks like the more serious crime. So these numbers are meaningless. Why add to them? Are things that bad at home?

  And besides, if TV broadcast the kind of material you see in the press – if it paid women in lingerie to recount graphic celebrity fuck’n’tell stories, or shoved its cameras up the skirts of girls exiting taxis so viewers could wank to the sight of their knickers, or routinely broadcast grossly misleading and openly one-sided news reports designed to perpetuate fear and bigotry – if the box in the corner smeared that shit on its screen for 10 seconds a night, it’d generate a pile of complaints high enough to scrape the crust from the underside of Mars.

  In summary: this correspondence is now closed.

  Homosexualiteeheehee [6 December 2008]

  In 1975, ITV broadcast The Naked Civil Servant, a TV movie about the life of the flamboyant gay icon Quentin Crisp. I say ‘flamboyant gay icon’, although he didn’t actually become one until the programme itself was broadcast and made him famous. It made John Hurt famous too, which pretty much sums up the difference between TV drama then and TV drama now. A 90-minute primetime ITV movie about an unknown homosexual played by a relatively unknown actor? With no Martin Clunes
or Robson Green or David Jason? It’s a true story, you say? And he isn’t a serial killer? Uh, leave it on the desk and we’ll get back to you some time around, ooh, never o’clock?

  Except maybe it would happen. For one thing, they’re shooting a sequel (An Englishman in New York, starring Hurt again). And for another, ITV is something of a clandestine queer issues champion. Coronation Street has been a camp powerhouse for decades; then there’s Bob & Rose and, most recently, I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!, which this year featured a scene in which three gay people, all of them over 50, were seen crying with joy after receiving letters from their partners (and in the case of George Takei, his husband).

  OK, so it also showed them rolling around in rat shit and bickering over hammocks too, but – hey! – it’s social progress of a sort and precisely the kind of thing the Guardian normally embraces. It’s certainly hard to imagine the BBC broadcasting something similar in primetime without trying to turn it into a self-consciously noble ‘issues drama’.