Screen Burn
Charlie Brooker
Language: English
Pages: 360
ISBN: B017PO4DJC
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'These days, watching television is like sitting in the back of Travis Bickle's taxicab, staring through the window at a world of relentless, churning shod ... '
Cruel, acerbic, impassioned, gleeful, frequently outrageous and always hilarious, Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn collects the best of the much-loved Guardian Guide columns into one easy-to-read-on-the-toilet package.
Sit back and roar as Brooker rips mercilessly into Simon Cowell, Big Brother, Trinny and Susannah, Casualty, Davina McCall, Michael Parkinson ... and almost everything elso on television.
This book will make practically anyone laugh out loud.
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in there. The rest are a motley collection whose stars glow so dimly in the showbusiness firmament, they’re 50 per cent less famous than the red laughing cow that appears on a range of dairy products. So who are they? Here’s a handy cut-out-and-keep list: 1) Antony Worrall Thompson. Fresh from his success playing the dwarf warrior in The Two Towers, Worrall Thompson has already made a mark in the Celebrity camp by smuggling in a sachet of cooking spices strapped to his inner thigh, which means
is precisely what you’ll see if for some mad reason you decide to squander half an hour of the only life you’ll ever have on Holiday Insider’s Guide (BBC1). It’s presented by a walking vacuum of a man who looks like he’s wandered straight off the set of a Gillette commercial to fill in for a couple of hours before his next assignment: appearing as a semi-naked fireman in a vaguely homoerotic Athena poster. Not sure what his name is: Craig something, and that’s about as much attention as he
undermined when I accidentally caught an episode and found myself laughing. Afterwards, shuddering, I vowed to avoid it at all costs in case it shattered my cosy misanthropic worldview. But recently, given its ubiquity in the Channel 4 schedule, I realised I’d become a fan by osmosis. I think it’s the writing. No matter how many accusations you hurl at Friends, you can’t deny it’s funny. And engaging. And tightly plotted. In fact, the way the plotting works is impressively shameless: most
was a massive waste of time. And that’s the only difference between me and the performance artists showcased in The Art Show (C4) – they haven’t bothered making the distinction between worthwhile and time-wasting. Take the man who spends hours dangling from a tree, like a piece of fruit. ‘I think I’d do it whether it was art or not,’ he explains – which is just as well, because it isn’t. It’s just a berk hanging off a tree. Nonetheless, it bemuses a few passers-by, which tickles our man no end.
of corn on the cob. To give the show its dues, this did come as a genuine surprise. So there you have it. I can’t help thinking there’s a good show to be made out of lavatories (perhaps a Scrapheap Challenge special), but sadly, this ain’t it. Rather than providing any real insight into precisely why we’re so anal about our anuses (as C4’s Anatomy of Disgust did last year), it seems content to simply reiterate obvious facts, in the manner of a particularly uninformative retrospective ‘I Love’