The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Euro Truck Simulator: Thanks, PC Zone. You bring me back from the dead for one last review and what do you give me to look at? A game in which you drive a lorry full of tomatoes to Lyon. I thought the whole appeal of games was that they let you do things you can’t do in real life, like shooting a Nazi or jumping over a daffodil and landing on a cloud. Not so here. As glamorous exercises in escapism go, Euro Truck Simulator is on a par with fishing hair from a plughole.

  The gameplay: pick a truck, pick a cargo (Sugar! Electronics! Frozen food! It could be literally any pedestrian item you can think of!), then drive it from one location to another. Along the way, you have to fill up at petrol stations and take the occasional nap. You also have to obey red lights and avoid crashing into things. You don’t get to do any of the other things truck drivers are famous for, like wanking over pornography in lay-bys or murdering attractive 19-year-old hitchhikers, so the tedium quotient remains fairly constant. Most of the time you’re just trundling slowly down a not-very-interesting motorway. While you’re driving you can look around the cab by sliding the mouse about. That’s quite interesting, and when your eyes alight on the empty passenger seat beside you, it can get downright poignant. The road is lonely and monotonous, and there’s so little to do, you wind up staving off the boredom by holding negotiations with God in your head, just like a real truck driver.

  Then you arrive at your destination, at which point there’s an infuriatingly fiddly bit where you have to reverse your trailer into a docking bay. I left the experience feeling slightly more resentful of humankind than when I started, which would indicate that this sort of thing really isn’t aimed at me. The score reflects my personal take on the damn thing. Add 50 points if you really, really want to drive a truck through some dull sections of Europe, like a cunt, with your cuntish hands and your cuntish truck-liking head. Fuck off.

  Score: 40%

  Dictionary corner [6 August 2007]

  Don’t kick your own teeth out with excitement or anything, but I’ve been playing Scrabble. Virtual Scrabble. Or ‘Scrabulous’ as it’s known. It’s a plug-in for Facebook: you challenge a friend, then play turn-by-turn; casually, languidly, via email, which means games often last a week or more – like Test match cricket, but faintly more interesting.

  And it’s brightened my life considerably – except that there’s a glaring flaw, which is that because (a) you’re not playing in the same room, and (b) you have as much time as necessary to take your turn, it’s subsequently far too easy – and tempting – to cheat.

  Cheating comes in two main forms – ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. Soft cheating involves looking stuff up in the dictionary before placing your tiles on the board. Hard to get away with in real life, but not on Scrabulous, where it’s actively encouraged: an interactive dictionary lurks beside the board.

  Thus tempted, I became a habitual soft cheater: trying out all my letters in various combinations, tile-by-tile, desperately hoping I could ‘wish’ a word into existence; preferably one that would let me use up both the X and the J and still hit that treble-word-score square.

  How about JOGHEXY? Does that mean anything? Something medical? Please? Well, what about just JOXEY? That sounds like a proper word. Almost. Come on, you bastard dictionary. Throw me a sodding bone here.

  (Incidentally, I surely can’t be the first person to have thought of this, but isn’t it time someone released a bogus novelty dictionary containing nothing but made-up, joxey-esque words, with the definition for every entry reading ‘a word commonly used for cheating at Scrabble’?)

  Anyway, soft cheating might not be full-blown hard cheating, but it still leaves you feeling rather cheap. Who knew GIVED was a valid word? Not me, until I looked it up. As I slid the final D into position, I felt hollow inside. Numb.

  Inevitably, I soon began hard cheating. It started slowly, with an online anagram generator. I could justify this to myself: hell, if I squinted at my letters I could almost make out a proper word – it was just on the tip of my mind, and the anagram software was only giving me a gentle nudge, which isn’t really cheating, right? Besides, a deft Scrabble move is a beautiful thing, and who am I to deprive the world of beauty?

  Then I discovered scrabblesolver. co.uk, a site where you simply input the entire layout of the board, and leave it to work out the best possible options. In cheating terms, this was as hard as it gets – so just to keep things plausible, rather than use the No. 1 suggestion (generally a what-the-hell word like OREXIS), I’d scan the list and pick a suggestion I might have conceivably come up with myself. This was now the only genuine skill I was exercising – choosing a plausible lie. But what the heck? I won every time.

  But then my opponents started catching up, placing seven-letter bingos, plus plentiful two-and three-letter branching bonus words such as AA and JO – sneaky words only a computer might know.

  Then it hit me: they were using Scrabble Solver, too. We’d rendered ourselves obsolete. It was 100% uncensored computer-on-computer action, with two meat puppets pulling the levers, fooling no one but themselves.

  Worst of all, it was hard work. As a game progressed, with evermore-obscure words snaking hither and thither, it took longer each time to input the entire board layout into the Scrabble Solver engine. What had started as a fun diversion had become an arduous job in which I received regular instructions (the layout of the board), inputted them into the system (Scrabble Solver) and then fed the results back into the machine, ready for regurgitation. It was duller than working in a call centre, and I wasn’t even getting paid. I couldn’t even enjoy the dull thrill of a pathetic, ill-gotten, vicarious win any more, because with cheats prospering on every side, the outcome was entirely arbitrary.

  Eventually I rebelled. Threw off the yoke of my new robot overlords, stopped cheating and started losing honestly. Not because of some kind of ethical awakening, but because I’d discovered the ultimate truth about cheating: it’s boring. Grindingly boring.

  All those famous cheats – Milli Vanilli, the coughing Who Wants to be a Millionaire major, and about 50% of the riders in this year’s Tour de France … they must feel this hollow and despondent all the time. We shouldn’t vilify them: we should pity them.

  Anyway, I’m still crap at Scrabble. My one-man mission to redefine ineptitude continues apace. But now at least I’m honest. Or should that be SCRUPULOUS (4H across, 72 points).

  INDEX

  3D Deathchase, 1

  The A-Team, 1

  admin, to be carried out prior to death, 1

  age of author, 1, 2;

  fear of middle age, 1, 2;

  likens self to crusty military type, 1

  ailments and illnesses of author, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Aisleyne, see Horgan-Wallace, Aisleyne

  Alli (slimming pill), 1

  Alton Towers, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Andre, Peter, 1

  anhedonia, 1

  animal sex, 1

  The Apprentice: providing platform for ‘red-shelf players’, 1;

  idiotic dismissal of Simon Smith, 1;

  providing platform for twerps, 1, 2;

  providing platform for bestubbled Johnny Vegas lookalike, 1;

  providing platform for pillocks, 1;

  suggested makeover, 1

  arachnophobia, 1

  Armstrong, Neil, 1

  Arrange Me a Marriage, 1

  Ashkenazi, Goga, 1

  Asteroids, 1

  Attenborough, Sir David, 1

  Australians, 1

  babycare, 1

  Bale, Christian, 1, 2

  Bagpuss, see Postgate, Oliver

  banks, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Bannerman, Marc, 1, 2

  Barrowman, John, 1

  bastards, see monsters

  Battlestar Galactica, 1

  BBC News, 1

  beasties, see critters

  Beat the Star, 1

  Bedingfield, Daniel, 1

  Bedroom TV, 1

  Being Neil Armstrong, 1
<
br />   bibs, see orange bibs

  Big Brother, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Bird’s Eye Steakhouse Grills, 1

  bit of a bell-end really, see McLaren, Malcolm

  Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery, 1

  Blumenthal, Hester, 1, 2, 3

  BNP, 1

  body-image issues, 1, 2

  boobs: big boobs in a photograph, great big bouncing ones, 1

  Brain Gym, 1

  Brand, Russell, 1, 2

  Britain’s Got Talent, 1, 2

  British National Party, see BNP if you must

  Brown, Gordon, 1, 2, 3

  Burnout, 1

  Bush, George W., 1, 2

  butterfly, 1

  calorie-counting, 1

  Cameron, David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Capturing Mary, 1

  Casualty, 1, 2

  The Celebrity Agency, 1

  Celebrity Big Brother, 1

  celebrity deaths, 1

  Charley (Big Brother), 1, 2

  chips (let’s hope so), 1

  Christmas commercials, 1, 2

  Churchill the Nodding Dog, 1, 2, 3

  cigarettes, see smoking

  The Clangers, see Postgate, Oliver

  Clapham Junction, 1, 2

  Class of 2008, 1

  Clooney, George, slurping immense coffee-coloured dick, 1

  coffee pods, 1

  The Colour of Money, 1

  colourful epithet screeched at Portillo during final 365 days of 20th century, 1

  Community Payback, 1

  compilation tapes, 1, 2

  ‘Congraturation! You Sucsess!’, see Stop the Express

  Conservatives, see Tories

  conspiracy theories, 1, 2

  contents of author’s head, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Coolio, author’s close personal friendship with, 1

  Cook Yourself Thin, 1

  Cotton, Fearne, 1, 2

  Cowell, Simon, 1, 2

  credit card blockage, 1

  Credit Crunch Monty, 1

  critters, see nasties

  crowdsourcing, 1

  Cutting Edge: Phone Rage, 1

  daft initiatives, 1, 2, 3

  Daily Mail, 1, 2

  Dancing on Ice, 1

  Dawkins, Richard, 1

  daytime nightmares, 1

  ‘Dead Parrot’ defence, 1

  Deadliest Warrior, 1

  despair, see pointlessness of everything

  Dexter, 1

  Doherty, Pete, 1

  Dollhouse, 1

  Don’t Forget the Lyrics!, 1

  Doom, 1

  dreams, 1

  Du Beke, Anton, 1

  Dubya, see Bush, George W.

  dunderhead, see President Dunderhead

  dying alone, hilarious reference to, 1

  dying inside, 1

  ears, losing, 1

  Edge Media TV, 1

  Edmonds, Noel, 1

  eighty-second page, 1

  Elite, 1

  ejaculatory anhedonia, 1

  elections: local, 1: mayoral, 2, 3;

  presidential, 1, 2, 3

  electronic surveillance, 1, 2

  elephants, 1

  emetophobia, 1

  emotionless bukkake, see ejaculatory anhedonia

  end of the world, the, 1, 2

  ’Enery the Eighth, see Henry VIII

  Euro Truck Simulator, 1

  Eva Herzigova’s breasts, 1

  Evening Standard, 1

  excuses for murdering people, see ‘Dead Parrot’ defence

  Extreme Male Beauty, 1

  Finding Nemo, 1

  firing liquid from penis with terrifyingly impassive expression on face, 1

  Firmin, Peter, 1

  Fissions of the Vulture, see Visions of the Future although it’s not clear how you made such a weird mistake in the first place

  Flash Louis, see Louis, Flash

  flirting, 1

  Food Poker, 1

  food stylists, 1

  forgetfulness of author, 1, 2

  Fray Bentos pies, 1

  Freedom of Choice Permit, 1

  fried onion rings (will it be?), 1

  frozen peas (will it be?), 1

  Fry, Stephen, 1, 2

  Gall, Sandy, 1

  gender stereotypes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  The Genius of Darwin, 1

  Gladiators, 1

  glossary of media terms invented by author, 1

  Gormley, Antony, 1

  Grand Theft Auto, 1, 2

  Greggs the Bakers, 1, 2

  grinning homunculus, see Miliband, David

  Guilty Pleasures, 1

  Halifax playing silly buggers, 1

  Hammond, Richard, 1

  hats, author’s absurd hatred of, 1

  Heat (magazine): serves as semiotic key for unlocking esoteric ITV2 Andre/Price mystery, 1;

  inexplicably mocks blameless child on novelty sticker, 1;

  purveyor of pictorial lunchtime brainfood for unhappy underachievers, 1;

  notional desperation of notional reader, 1

  Help Me Anthea, I’m Infested!, 1

  Henry VIII, 1

  Heroes, 1, 2

  Herzigova, Eva, 1

  Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection, 1, 2

  Heston Blumenthal’s Feast, 1

  Hilton, Paris, 1

  Hitchcock, Alfred, 1

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1

  Hitler, snoozing in bed, 1

  hobbies, 1, 2

  Hole in the Wall, 1

  holidays, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Hollyoaks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Hollywood movies (not yet made), 1

  hope, expressed musically, 1

  Hopkins, Katie, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Horgan-Wallace, Aisleyne, 1;

  dissuaded from assaulting racist sunbather, 1

  Horizon, 1, 2

  hot glue spluttering from sociopath’s funpole, 1

  How can you sleep at night?, 1

  I can’t take much more of this, 1

  I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!;

  the one with Cerys Matthews, 1, 2;

  the one with Timmy Mallett, 1, 2, 3

  inaugural paragraph, 1

  infestation, see Turner, Anthea

  Inside Nature’s Giants, 1

  iPhone users, mocked during Knight Rider review, 1

  Iraq, 1, 2

  It isn’t really working, 1

  It’s a Knockout, 1

  Ivor the Engine, see Postgate, Oliver

  jacket spuds (will it be?), 1

  Jackson, Michael: used as edit-suite boobytrap for X-Factor contestants, 1;

  covered by Supergrass, 1;

  dies and becomes Glastonbury t-shirt slogan, 1

  James, Alex, 1

  Jamie at Home, 1

  Jamie Oliver’s Cookin’, 1

  jamminess of author, 1, 2, 3

  Jet Set Willy, 1

  joghexiness, 1

  Johnson, Boris, 1, 2

  Jordan, 1, 2

  Kaku, Dr Michio, 1

  Katie & Peter Unleashed, 1

  Kato-Chan and Ken-Chan, 1

  Katona, Kerry, 1, 2

  Kay, Vernon, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Kemp, Ross, 1

  The Kids Are Alright, 1

  Kilroy-Silk, Robert, 1;

  performing hideous acts in author’s imagi nation, 1

  Kinder Eggs, 1

  King Henry the Wifekiller, see Henry VIII

  Knight Rider, 1

  Lapland New Forest, 1

  Lawson, Mark, 1

  Le Grand, Julian, 1

  Ledger, Heath, 1

  letters of the alphabet, variously configured, 1

  Life in Cold Blood, 1

  life, ruined by you, 1

  The Listener, 1

  Livingstone, Ken, 1

  Louis, Flash, 1

  lying, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (one of these is a lie)

  McCann, Madeleine, 1

  McCain, John, 1,
2

  McClaren, Malcolm, 1

  McDowell, Malcolm, 1

  Make Me a Christian, 1, 2

  marketing, 1, 2, 3, 4

  Marks and Spencers, 1

  marriage arrangements, 1, 2

  mass suicide, 1, 2

  meaninglessness, see pointlessness of everything

  Meet the Natives, 1

  MILF, see Vice-President MILF

  ‘might as well …’; grin and get on with things, 1;

  construct a nuclear device, 1;

  play heads or tails with Apprentice candidates, 1;

  nihilistically scrawl an ‘X’ beside the name of a bumbling shaggy-haired pratfalling ex-Bullingdon shittleboob, 1;

  elect Mr Philip Mitchell of Albert Square, 1;

  parse clouds for coherence, 1;

  sit alone in a shed counting numbers, 1;

  (of a glamour model) ooze dogfood through unspecified holes, 1;

  curtail diners’ ardour with chilled fluid, 1;

  turn Chris Tarrant’s neck into a sort of Captain Pugwash cartoon character thing, 1;

  excrete typewritten predictions, 1;

  rebrand a blameless fitness magazine with a sarcastically direct title, 1;

  loudly describe phantoms to confuse potential suitors, 1;

  salute the British curtain rod industry, 1;

  develop an intense interest in respiration, 1

  Miliband, David, 1

  misery, see other people’s misery

  monsters, see beasties

  Monty Python, 1, 2

  Morgan, Piers, 1, 2, 3; has word named after him, 1

  mornings, 1

  MRI scans, 1

  mushroom clouds, 1, 2, 3

  mushrooms (will it be?), 1

  Naked, 1

  The Naked Civil Servant, 1

  nasties, see really nasties

  neighbours: complaining to, 1; sharing a bath with, 1

  Neuman, Alfred E., 1, 2

  Nescafe, 1