Screenwipe

6 May 2008, 2pm

During that rather gruesome thing I went through last year there was a lot of content piped through the Mac Mini to the fickle and aging television. The percentage of garbage was high, but in every dumpster there lies the chance to find, say, an unopened bottle of beer (which, along with the return deposit, can practically rain good fortune). By far the best and most surprising television discovery was coincidentally a show about television: Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe.

People in the UK likely already know about Brooker from his TV and video game reviews and ‘Comment is Free’ posts at The Guardian, or from the satirical TV listing web site TV Go Home, in particular its recurring item Cunt, about a loathsome stereotype of the day, which he and Chris Morris eventually turned into the infamous Nathan Barley, which didn’t quite work (was dated by the time it appeared, wrong actor in the lead, comedy and strident moral advocacy can’t and won’t mix, I could go on). 

It’s on Screenwipe, though, where he truly shines: you know how you watch Boston Legal just because it’s fun to watch Alan Shore get away with such singly dimensioned grandstanding and axe grinding in court? It’s like that, only funny. You know how, against your better judgement, you watch those shows in which talking heads crack snarky about decontextualised clips of some common theme? It’s like that, only he makes sense, and you almost always agree.

The way he deflates execrable bullshit like the various Simon Cowell franchises, or the relentlessly vacuous Lost, or the tooth-pulling UK version of Deal or No Deal, is just so bang on you want to dance around the room. His facility with cruelly sharp language seals it: doing a recap of the fiasco that was last year’s Celebrity Big Brother, he described the mother of the puzzlingly famous Jade Goody as ‘Dot Cotton reflected in the side of a dented kettle’. I laughed so hard I think something came loose.

I could quote all day, but best to enjoy them in situ. Do search around – there are quite a few episodes on Youtube, and the tenacious will find collections of all four extant series floating around torrentially.

And then, to contrast and compare, watch TV Burp. Or, rather, don’t.

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