Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker
Feb. 22nd, 2013 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
'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 else on television.
This book will make practically anyone laugh out loud.
SCREEN BURN is the first collection of Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe columns for The Guardian and covers the period from April 2000 to September 2004. With forewords by Graham Linehan and Brooker himself, it’s as much an interesting look at English cultural history as it is a bleakly comic read. For example, during this period the sitcom institution that was FRIENDS came to an end and both BIG BROTHER and I’M A CELEBRITY began. It’s interesting to see the roots of celebrity TV charted through the reviews and Brooker is oddly prophetic and incisive about the decline of the media as every channel chased after the lowest common denominator. Depressingly, I found myself remembering a lot of the (really bad) shows that he talks about, which was a helpful reminder that I’ve totally wasted my life.
All of the trade marks of Brooker’s humour are there – the black despair, colourful rants and dark imagery. There were places that made me laugh out loud but it’s interesting to note the repetitions here, including frequent mentions of driving forks into the eyes and a peculiar obsession with Peter Sissions. Brooker himself mentions his surprise at the scatology that frequently creeps in and in his foreword he says that he’d actually removed a number of instances. All of this is to be expected given that Brooker was churning out the column week after week and it’s probably a sign that you should dip in and out of it rather than reading it cover-to-cover (although I think you get more of a sense of the whole by doing so).
Perhaps the most interesting column is the one where Brooker talks about an idea he had for a TV programme where the prime minister is forced to have sex with a pig after Princess Diana is kidnapped. As Brooker fans will know, this was the premise of an episode of BLACK MIRROR in 2012 but what makes the column particularly noteworthy is the same column mentions the late Roy Kinnear whose son, Rory Kinnear played the unfortunate prime minister in that episode. Weird how things work out.
A sharp, funny and (weirdly) historically interesting read, I’m not sure that this will convert non-Brooker fans to his warped genius but it is a satisfying book with plenty to say and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Verdict:
SCREEN BURN is the first collection of Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe columns for The Guardian and covers the period from April 2000 to September 2004. With forewords by Graham Linehan and Brooker himself, it’s as much an interesting look at English cultural history as it is a bleakly comic read. I’m not sure that this will convert non-Brooker fans to his warped genius but it is a satisfying book with plenty to say and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
'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 else on television.
This book will make practically anyone laugh out loud.
SCREEN BURN is the first collection of Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe columns for The Guardian and covers the period from April 2000 to September 2004. With forewords by Graham Linehan and Brooker himself, it’s as much an interesting look at English cultural history as it is a bleakly comic read. For example, during this period the sitcom institution that was FRIENDS came to an end and both BIG BROTHER and I’M A CELEBRITY began. It’s interesting to see the roots of celebrity TV charted through the reviews and Brooker is oddly prophetic and incisive about the decline of the media as every channel chased after the lowest common denominator. Depressingly, I found myself remembering a lot of the (really bad) shows that he talks about, which was a helpful reminder that I’ve totally wasted my life.
All of the trade marks of Brooker’s humour are there – the black despair, colourful rants and dark imagery. There were places that made me laugh out loud but it’s interesting to note the repetitions here, including frequent mentions of driving forks into the eyes and a peculiar obsession with Peter Sissions. Brooker himself mentions his surprise at the scatology that frequently creeps in and in his foreword he says that he’d actually removed a number of instances. All of this is to be expected given that Brooker was churning out the column week after week and it’s probably a sign that you should dip in and out of it rather than reading it cover-to-cover (although I think you get more of a sense of the whole by doing so).
Perhaps the most interesting column is the one where Brooker talks about an idea he had for a TV programme where the prime minister is forced to have sex with a pig after Princess Diana is kidnapped. As Brooker fans will know, this was the premise of an episode of BLACK MIRROR in 2012 but what makes the column particularly noteworthy is the same column mentions the late Roy Kinnear whose son, Rory Kinnear played the unfortunate prime minister in that episode. Weird how things work out.
A sharp, funny and (weirdly) historically interesting read, I’m not sure that this will convert non-Brooker fans to his warped genius but it is a satisfying book with plenty to say and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Verdict:
SCREEN BURN is the first collection of Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe columns for The Guardian and covers the period from April 2000 to September 2004. With forewords by Graham Linehan and Brooker himself, it’s as much an interesting look at English cultural history as it is a bleakly comic read. I’m not sure that this will convert non-Brooker fans to his warped genius but it is a satisfying book with plenty to say and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
