Charlie Brooker - I Can Make You Hate

CHARLIE BROOKER

For Covey

In which the author has an out-of-body experience, is shaken to discover that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is slightly younger than he is, and decides there is too much stuff in the world.

In which Jedward are born, Dubai is revealed to be a figment of the worlds imagination, and snow falls from the sky to the amazement of Britains rolling news networks.

In which Paddy McGuinness gets flushed down a tube, the Cameron era creeps closer, crisps are eaten and newspapers are likened to a narcotic.

In which Katie Price takes on the afterlife, some white supremacists show off in prison, and cows stare at you. Just stare at you.

In which a mosque is not built at Ground Zero, everyone in the world is strangled, and Screen Burn comes to an end.

In which EastEnders is revealed to be a work of fiction, Nick Clegg worries about human beings with feet, and a teenager incurs the wrath of the internet for singing a bad song badly.

In which tabloid journalists make the world worse, Ed Miliband tumbles into a vortex, and cars are driven too quickly.

In which David Cameron is a lizard.

In which Sonic the Hedgehogs sexual orientation goes under the microscope, a man in a penguin suit proves surprisingly popular, and idiots salivate over an arse that isnt there.

This book contains a lot of words, each of which had to be typed by hand. Consider that next time youre complaining about writing not being a proper job.

All the words in this book were individually typed, letter by-letter see what I mean about the truly gargantuan level of effort involved? between August 2009 and July 2012.

And as you will soon discover, some of them werent merely typed, but were then fed into an autocue and read aloud on television. Thats an unnecessarily opaque way of saying Ive included bits of scripts from some TV shows I was on.

My previous collections of scribble have alternated chapters full of TV review columns with other, more general writings. But since I quit writing the Screen Burn column roughly halfway through this book, this time around everythings presented in chronological order, unfurling like a long, inky turd.

Not that you have to sit down and read it all in sequence. I recommend dipping in at random. Easy if youre reading this on paper: not so simple if youve chosen the snazzy and futuristic ebook edition. Unless Im mistaken, ebooks dont yet offer you the option to read books in shuffle mode, on the basis that the result would be meaningless chaos, unless youre reading The Way I See It by Sir Alan Sugar, in which case its a stunning improvement.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the book. Dont take anything in it too seriously, and dont glue it to the end of a Kalashnikov and carry out an atrocity. Apart from that, do what you want with it. Its yours now.

Charlie Brooker,
London, 2012

In which the author has an out-of-body experience, is shaken to discover that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is slightly younger than he is, and decides there is too much stuff in the world.

Try not to bellow with fear and/or excitement, but video screens are coming to magazines. Next month, thousands of copies of vapid US showbiz journal Entertainment Weekly will contain a slimline electronic display capable of showing forty minutes of video, activated when you open the magazine. As an added bonus, if you dip it in the bath while reading it, youll instantly win a free forty-minute full-body electroconvulsive therapy session (although sadly, for legal reasons, I have to point out that isnt true).

This tragic news is no surprise. Screens have us surrounded.

Last week I stood on a tube platform watching a Persil commercial being digitally projected in HD on to the opposite wall, to give me something to stare at while waiting for my delayed train. It showed gurgling kiddywinks in polar-white clothes gambolling in a field at the height of summer, tumbling and rolling and skipping and laughing, as if the sheer supernatural luminance of their outfits had somehow short-circuited their minds.

The contrast between the faces in the advert and the faces on the platform couldnt have been more marked. In the advert, all smiles. On the platform, morose expressions laminated by a thin sheen of grime and sweat; hangdog mugs smeared with London.

Theres no air-con on the underground, so on a hot day people quickly resemble clothed piglets trapped in a can waiting for the air to run out. In these circumstances, the Persil ad was downright sarcastic; not a harmless video, but a magic window showing what life could be, if only you werent stuck in a stinking, clammy pipe, jostling for space with fellow victims.

The underground also has video adverts lining the escalators. Where once stood rows of little posters with the occasional blob of dried chewing gum stuck to the nose of a beaming model, now stand rows of plasma screens displaying animated versions of movie posters and slogans for chain stores, and no one knows where to stick their gum any more because the pictures slide around.

Its impossible not to be slightly impressed, not to think, Ooh, Im in Minority Report, even as you glide by for the 10,000th time. The screens seem to belong there more than the real people trundling past them. Ad-world looks so vivid and clean, we humans are grotty streaks in a toilet pan by comparison.

They should ban us flesh-scum from using the escalators, and lovingly place glossy examples of technology on there instead: MacBooks, iPods, shiny white smoothie makers, Xbox 360s and so on; one brilliant white machine quietly perched atop each step, screens advertising Ice Age 3D mirrored in their gleaming minimalist surfaces as they scroll steadily upwards, ascending into the light. Hey, its their destiny. We can use the stairs.

At Londons Westfield shopping centre picture the Duty Free section of a twenty-second-century spaceport a series of information centres vaguely resembling giant iPhones stand dotted around the echoing floorspace.

If you want to know where to buy some jeans, simply tap the interactive touchscreen and it instantly returns 500 different store names with step-by-step directions on how to find them.

And if you want to know where to buy a radio or some comics or maybe just something with a bit of character to it, simply tap it again and itll sit there ignoring you; judging you somehow, like a mutely brooding obelisk until you cant bear the chill any longer and run screaming from the complex, passing across 2,000 CCTV screens as you go.

If a Victorian gentleman arrived in present-day London, hed think wed been invaded by glowing rectangles. The average single Londoners day runs as follows: you wake up and watch a screen until it tells you its time to leave the house, at which point you step outside (appearing on a CCTV screen the moment you do so), catch a bus (with an LED screen on the outside and an LCD screen on the inside) to the tube station (giant screens outside; screens down the escalator; projected screens on the platform), to sit on a train and fiddle with your iPod (via the screen), arrive at the office (to stare at a screen all day), then head home to split your attention between the internet (the screen on your lap) and the TV (the screen in the corner) and your mobile (a handheld screen you hold conversations with).

All we city dwellers need is a screen to have sex with and the circle is complete. Panasonic is doubtless perfecting some hideous LCD orifice technology as we speak. Probably one that makes 3D adverts appear in your head at the point of orgasm. Coco Pops are so chocolatey they even turn the milk brown. Now pass me a tissue.