Charlie Brooker
Standard Disclaimer: The videos in this article contain VERY strong language and adult concepts.
After receiving passing mention in a previous entry I thought it would be a good time to introduce another of those people who’s reasonably well-known in the UK but probably hasn’t been heard of elsewhere. This is not exactly one of WereGeek’s Comedians You Should Know posts, but then that is mostly because it’s a little harder to describe Charlie Brooker in quite such definitive terms. He won the title of Best Newcomer in 2009′s British Comedy Awards, but in the same year he also won a British Press Award for his columns in The Guardian newspaper.
He’s an author, scriptwriter, has hosted numerous TV shows, and co-fronted The Alternative Election Night coverage on Channel 4. He’s a satirical pessimist and a professional misanthrope, and I’m not entirely sure if he’s actually capable of approaching anything in this world without a certain beleaguered air of cynicism.
I should preface this by saying that I quite like Charlie Brooker’s work, however I do appreciate that his general exasperation at the stupidity of others and his continual use of strong language is possibly not to everyone’s taste. That said however, I often find that despite its comedy leanings his current-affairs-based program Newswipe is probably one of the most sane things you can watch in an ocean of otherwise hysterical media hyperbole. This is mostly because in the process of dissecting the route by which news events mutate into sensationalism, Newswipe is not afraid to do its research and root out the points where manipulation by the media has taken something otherwise mundane and blown it out of all proportion. It’s even sometimes possible to leave at the end of a show with the sneaking suspicion that you might have actually just learned something.
Of course, other times you just leave feeling like you’ve had a good, satisfying rant at everything that’s wrong with the world.
Newswipe is occasionally prone to falling into righteous outrage but then the topics it covers can be serious ones. For all its provocative skewering of melodramatic journalism, the third episode of series two intersected with the disaster in Haiti and it was a topic that was covered with a surprising level of sensitivity considering the nature of the show and that the rolling news coverage, at least in the UK, did occasionally veer towards patronising and dramatic exaggeration; a habit towards which Brooker is often openly critical.
Newswipe itself is a combination of news footage, archive material, sketches and Brooker’s narration. It’s intercut with scenes of him in his living room, usually getting angry at his TV for the nonsense it pumps out. There are also regular appearances by US comic Doug Stanhope, and occasional contributions from filmmakers such as Adam Curtis (The Century Of The Self, The Power Of Nightmares) as well as other journalists who week-by-week examine a topic that has recently been in the public awareness. It also delights in a certain amount of open mockery and, as anyone who’s ever seen a single report on BBC News 24 can attest, Brooker’s shorthand guide to filming them is actually quite devastatingly accurate.
Brooker’s previous show, Screenwipe, was very much the same in format. Not limited to news, it covered the whole spectrum of TV and film, usually by examining a particular subject each week and dissecting either how the entertainment industry works or the methods by which certain issues are portrayed. It was on the most part just as critical and cynical as its current-events counterpart, though it also frequently aimed its sights at the unthinking public’s appetite for enthusiastically consuming trite and trivial nonsense.
Both Newswipe and Screenwipe were BBC productions, but Brooker also makes regular appearances on Channel 4. His BAFTA-nominated zombie thriller Dead Set was based around C4′s enormously popular Big Brother program, and more recently he’s hosted their late-night celebrity panel quiz You Have Been Watching.
Along with fellow comedians David Mitchell, Jimmy Carr and presenter Lauren Laverne, Brooker is currently set to appear in C4′s new comedy and current events program 10 O’Clock Live, as well as returning to the BBC later in the year for new series, How TV Ruined Your Life.
Links:
- Newswipe: American news media
- Newswipe: Live broadcasts
- Screenwipe: Reality TV
- Charlie Brooker in The Guardian
- Charlie Brooker on Twitter
- 10 O’Clock Live
- Newswipe program page
Lady T
Lady T is a great lover of British TV, which is helpful as that's mostly what she gets to watch. She strongly believes that tea can't be made using a microwave, that children's programming really was better when she was a kid, and that there's nothing in the world that can't be solved with a liberal application of common sense. She very much enjoys reading but like most of the rest of the world would some day like to write a book herself. If she ever succeeds in doing so there's a pretty good chance she'll never shut up about it. She can be contacted at lady_t_220 @ yahoo.co.uk.
profile
Related posts:
I liked what I’ve seen of Newswipe and You Have Been Watching was fairly entertaining. He got some unusual panelists on that one, too. Ones you don’t normally see on panel shows, like Martin Freeman and David Baddiel.
Most of Newswipe and Screenwipe is on youtube. The user who uploaded the Haiti clip up there has the majority of them spread across a couple of channels. Which is always handy…
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TDF Pamela. TDF Pamela said: New at TDF: Who is Charlie Brooker anyway? http://ht.ly/3DzEK [...]