I can make you hate

by Charlie Brooker

  Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host ‘Windows 7 launch parties’ to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7. The idea is that you invite a group of friends – your real friends – to your home – your real home – and entertain them with a series of Windows 7 tutorials. So you show them how to burn a CD, how to make a little video, how to change the wallpaper, and how to, oh no, hang on it’s not supposed to do that, oh, I think it’s frozen, um, er, let me just, um, no that’s not it, um, er, um, er, so how’s it going with you and Kathy anyway, um, er, OK we’ll see you around I guess.

  To assist the party-hosting massive, they’ve also uploaded a series of spectacularly cringeworthy videos to YouTube, in which the four most desperate actors in the world stand around in a kitchen sharing tips on how best to indoctrinate guests in the wonder of Windows. If they were staring straight down the lens reading hints off a card it might be acceptable; instead they have been instructed to pretend to be friends. The result is the most nauseating display of artificial camaraderie since the horrific Doritos ‘Friendchips’ TV campaign (which caused 50,000 people to kill themselves in 2003, or should have done).

  It’s so terrible, it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment that I like to call ‘shitasmia’. It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It’s the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history.

  Still, bad though it is, I vaguely prefer the clumping, clueless, uncool, crappiness of Microsoft’s bland Stepford gang to the creepy assurance of the average Mac evangelist. At least the grinning dildos in the Windows video are fictional, whereas eerie replicant Mac monks really are everywhere, standing over your shoulder in their charcoal pullovers, smirking with amusement at your hopelessly inferior OS, knowing they’re better than you because they use Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard.

  Snow Leopard. SNOW LEOPARD.

  I don’t care if you’re right. I just want you to die.

  The Hookening

  02/10/2009

  When we look back at the ‘noughties’ – pausing briefly to gently vomit in protest at the hideous made-up word ‘noughties’ – we’ll realise this was a golden age for absolute bollocks. Fun bollocks, maybe… but bollocks all the same.

  Every new US show these days is fun bollocks. We’ve had the one where it’s in real time (24), the one where they’re stranded on a weird island (Lost), the one where they break out of prison (Prison Break), the one where the killer kills killers (Dexter) and the one where unfettered capitalism creates and destroys an entire underclass (The Wire).

  Everything needs a hook, the hookier the better. Before long, we’ll end up with the hookiest show possible: The Hookening – where everyone in the world suddenly passes out and wakes up 137 seconds later with a hook for a hand. Irritating for most of us; devastating for the jar industry.

  We’re not there yet, but who knows what could happen in six months’ time? For now, we’ll have to be content with FlashForward. It stars Joseph Fiennes as Mr Nice Cop with a Drink Problem, and it’s a show in which everyone in the world passes out for 137 seconds and has a vision of the future six months from now. Weirder still, it’s not strictly a vision: their consciousness has somehow raced forward in time, so they’ve experienced precisely what they’ll be doing for around two minutes on 29 April 2010. Some are performing mundane actions, like reading the paper on the bog; others are doing exciting things, like being shot at. It’s the world’s biggest spoiler.

  Having wandered off into futureworld for roughly half the length of an ad break, they’re sucked back into the present, where naturally everyone’s now a bit confused. And in some cases, dead. Because absolutely everyone blacked out simultaneously, there were countless car crashes, air disasters, chip-pan fires and so on, vividly depicted in scenes in which Joseph Fiennes wanders around a semi-destroyed LA gawping at various bits of CGI devastation. Helicopter crashes account for some of the worst damage, although several buildings appear to have burst into flames out of sheer confusion during the blackout. In one scene we get a glimpse of London; Big Ben is on fire. Presumably the bells overheated during the timequake.

  (Incidentally I call it a ‘timequake’ because it seems vaguely similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Timequake, although apparently it’s based on a different book, called, unsurprisingly, FlashForward.)

  The rest of the story revolves around solving what caused the Great Leap Forward in the first instance. That’s Fiennes’s job. He saw himself in a big room full of clues, halfway towards solving the mystery, evading some bad guys. Oh, and drinking from a hip flask, so he knows he’s going to fall off the wagon. Or does he? Yes! No! It rather depends on whether man truly has free will or not. Philosophers have wrestled with that one for centuries; this show promises to clear it up once and for all, and find room for a romantic subplot. Perhaps it was originally pitched with the working title Adventures in Compatibilism: A Determinist Thought Experiment.

  Anyway, it’s not bad: enjoyable bunkum in the manner of early Lost, although the paradox-heavy storyline easily overshadows the characters, who thus far could all be replaced by cardboard boxes with Character #1, Character #2 and so on scrawled on the front.

  The fun comes in spotting flaws in the narrative. Such as: if everyone experienced the same bit of ‘future’, how come their future selves didn’t seem aware the flash forward was going to happen? They were sitting in meetings, or running around, or watching TV. Nobody saw themselves saying ‘Ooooh, this is the bit I saw six months ago.’

  It’s not a show, it’s a puzzle. There are 10 billion other paradoxes in the storyline. How many can you find? (Answers on page 894, six months from now).

  *

  FlashForward flopped, having painted itself into a billion logistical corners.

  Bewildered by the stuff-a-lanche

  04/10/2009

  I’m fairly certain I recently passed a rather pathetic tipping point, and now own more unread books and unwatched DVDs than my remaining lifespan will be able to sustain. I can’t possibly read all these pages or watch all these movies before the grim reaper comes knocking. The bastard things are going to outlive me. It’s not fair. They can’t even breathe.

  The other day I bought a DVD box set of Carl Sagan’s astronomy epic Cosmos: by all accounts, one of the best documentary series ever made. On my way home, I made the mistake of carefully reading the back of the box, where I discovered it has a running time of 780 minutes. Thirteen hours. It’s against my religion to only watch part of it – it’s all or nothing. But thirteen hours? That’s almost a marriage. The sheer weight of commitment is daunting. So it sits on the shelf, beside similarly unwrapped and unwatched obelisks. I’m not buying these things for myself any more. I’m preserving them for future generations.

  DVD and book purchases fall into two main categories: the ones you buy because you really want to watch them, and the ones you buy because you vaguely think you should. Two years ago I bought Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, partly because I’d heard it was a good book and an easy read, but mainly because I figured reading it would make me cleverer – or at the very least, make me seem a bit cleverer to anyone sitting opposite me on the tube. I never read it. A few months ago, having forgotten I already owned a copy, I bought it again. This means I haven’t read it twice.

  And I haven’t read it (twice) because it’s got too much competition from all the other books I’ve bought but never read. Popular science books. Biographies. Classic works of fiction. Cult sci-fi and horror stories. Reference works. How-to guides. Graphic novels. I can’t buy one book at a time: I have to buy at least four. Which makes it exponentially trickier to single out one to actually read. When I buy books, all I’m really doing is buying wall insulation, like a blackbird gathering twigs to make a nest.

  Ditto DVDs. Scenes From a Marriage and The Seventh Seal – two well-regarded Ingmar Bergman
films I bought during a short-lived fit of self-improvement. I should have thrown them in a bin on my way home from the shop. It’s hard enough to choose between the two: am I in the mood for a lyrical ninety-two-minute meditation on death, or an unflinching three-hour portrayal of a dysfunctional relationship? Neither, as it turns out. They’d only be interrupted by emails and texts anyway.

  Perhaps something more lightweight? They’re sitting on the shelf in-between JCVD (a post-modern Jean-Claude Van Damme film) and season two of Entourage. I’ve never seen those either – partly because I feel guilty about not having watched the Bergman films first. Somehow I’ve purchased my way into a no-win situation.

  Clearly, some sort of cull is in order. It’s me or them. I pick them. My options need limiting. Last week I watched the first part of Electric Dreams, the 1900s house-style TV show where a family lives with old technology for several weeks. For episode one, they were stranded in the 1970s, with no internet, no DVDs or videos, and only three channels on the TV. It’s fair to say the kids weren’t massively impressed. It was all a bit Guantanamo for their liking. But to me the limited options looked blissful. You couldn’t lose yourself online, so if you didn’t want to watch Summertime Special or World in Action, you had to read a book, go for a walk, or in extreme circumstances, strike up a conversation with a fellow human being.

  But it wasn’t just the limitations of the media themselves that appealed. This was thirty years ago. Fewer things had been created for them. Every day we humans gleefully churn out yet more books and films and TV shows and videogames and websites and magazine articles and blog posts and emails and text messages, all of it hanging around, competing for attention. Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it.

  It’s too much. I’ve had it with choice. It makes my head spin.

  Here’s what I want: I want to be told what to read, watch and listen to. I want my hands tied. I want a cultural diet. I want a government employee to turn up on my doorstep once a month, carrying a single book for me to read. I want all my TV channels removed and replaced by a single electro-pipe delivering one programme or movie a day. If I don’t watch it, it gets replaced by the following day’s selection. I want all my MP3s deleted and replaced with one unskippable radio station playing one song after the other.

  And every time I think about complaining, I want a minotaur to punch me in the kidneys and remind me how it was before.

  In short: I’ve tried more. It’s awful. I want less, and I want it now.

  *

  I eventually watched Scenes From a Marriage. It was good. Still haven’t got round to The Seventh Seal though.

  The Great Inescapable Time Disaster

  11/10/2009

  George Osborne’s Tory conference speech last week left me in a state of shredded despair. Not because of anything he said, but because I’d just discovered he’s younger than me. Only by two months, but still: younger.

  In a correctly functioning universe, my advanced age would make me his superior. If I deliberately knocked a glass of milk on to the floor, he’d have to clean it up. He’d be on all fours, scrubbing desperately at the floorboards while I reclined in my chair, resting my feet on his back, reading the Financial Times, occasionally glancing over the top to harrumph at his efforts, grinding my heel into his spine to underline each criticism. You missed a bit, boy. For pity’s sake, show some gumption. Tongue, Osborne! Use your bloody tongue!

  Wild fantasy, of course: there’s no way Osborne would prostrate himself before me, lapping up my mess like a prison cell Betty. He’s of grander stock than I. He’s worth ten thousand hundred billion pounds, wipes his arse on back issues of Tatler, attended a public school so swish that even its coat of arms looks down its nose at you, and spends his weekends running around his estate, dressed like the Planters ‘Mr Peanut’ mascot, wildly thrashing at the backs of chimney sweeps’ legs with a cane. I went to a comprehensive and have the social standing of a plughole.

  But I’m resigned to the class difference. It’s the age difference that rankles. In my head, senior politicians are supposed to be older than I am – forever. No matter how much I age, part of their job is to be older and drier than me. At 38, Osborne feels too young for the world of politics. At 38, I feel too old for the world in general.

  Age has been a lingering obsession of mine since I left my teens. However old I’ve been is too old.

  At 26, I felt totally washed up.

  At 32, I regretted wasting time worrying about my age as a 26-year-old, because now I was convinced I really was totally washed up.

  At 38, I look back at my 32-year-old self and regret that he wasted time with those regrets about wasted time. Then I regret wasting my current time regretting regrets about regrets. This is pretty sophisticated regretting I’m doing. That’s the sole advantage of ageing: I can now effortlessly consolidate my regrets into one manageable block of misery. Otherwise, by the age of 44, I’d need complex database software just to keep track of precisely how many things I’m regretting at once.

  Age is an odd thing. As well as fretting about it, at every point in my life I’ve regarded those both above and below me on the age ladder with unwarranted contempt. Anyone younger was a barking idiot; anyone older, an outmoded embarrassment.

  But rather than mellowing into acceptance as I ascend the ladder, my distaste for both groups sharpens into bitter focus. The young ones are even more idiotic because they don’t appreciate how short-lived their youth will be, dammit – while the old ones are now a horrifying vision of a steadily approaching future. I’m not talking about OAPs, incidentally, but people just a few years older than I am now. To my eyes, they’re walking victims of the Great Inescapable Time Disaster.

  On a rational level, I know there’s nothing wrong with ageing. If anything, it should be taken as a sign of continued success. Congratulations! You haven’t dropped dead yet. But that doesn’t stop me seeing each individual grey hair as a tiny shoot of failure. Like millions of us, I’ve been indoctrinated into believing the ageing process somehow reeks of indignity. I’ve been conditioned to view everything from the POV of a conceited twenty-something. My brain’s lodged near the bottom of the ladder while my body clambers creakingly towards the top. Look at those silver flecks; that foul, rotting carcass: you stink of shame, you disgusting loser.

  When you’re young, anyone a decade older or more can seem like a gauche joke, tragically unaware of their own crashing irrelevance. They’re either hopelessly out-of-touch (LOL! He’s never heard of Lady Gaga!), embarrassingly immature (Ugh! He listens to Lady Gaga!) or hovering awkwardly in-between (Pff! He uses Lady Gaga as a catch-all reference for youth!). At the same time, you somehow believe that when – if – you ever grow to be so impossibly ancient yourself, you’ll be wiser and less embarrassing. How could you not be? These people are just pathetic.

  The good news is that when you get there, you are wiser – albeit only slightly. Chances are you’re still flailing around, just as clueless about What Happens Next. Slightly more terrified at what the world might have in store, but slightly more confident in your ability to pilot a way through.

  And the only real wisdom you’ve gained is a fresh understanding of just how ignorant and arrogant you were in the past: a realisation that the joke was ultimately on you. Pointing and laughing at your own destiny is futile. The harder you sneer at the old, the more uncomfortable you feel when you age.

  And unless you die, you will age. Age and age and age, to a previously unimaginable degree, to the farthest reaches of ‘age space’ and beyond. To the point where, one day, the Shadow Chancellor is younger than you. At which point you experience a subtle, cathartic little death – and thus liberated, finally start to grow up and get on with it.

  Pure blockheaded spite

  16/10/2009

  The funeral of Stephen Gately has not y
et taken place. The man hasn’t been buried yet. Nevertheless, Jan Moir of the Daily Mail has already managed to dance on his grave. For money.

  It has been twenty minutes since I’ve read her now-notorious column, and I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.

  On the Mail website, it was headlined: ‘Why there was nothing “natural” about Stephen Gately’s death’. Since the official postmortem clearly ascribed the singer’s death to natural causes, that headline contains a fairly bold claim.

  Still, who am I to judge? I’m no expert when it comes to interpreting autopsy findings, unlike Moir. Presumably she’s a leading expert in forensic science, paid huge sums of money to fly around the world lecturing coroners on her latest findings. Or maybe she just wants to gay-bash a dead man? Tragically, the only way to find out is to read the rest of her article.

  She begins by jabbering a bit about untimely celebrity deaths, especially those whose lives are ‘shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice’. Not just Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson. No: she’s eagerly looking forward to other premature snuffings.

  ‘Robbie, Amy, Kate, Whitney, Britney; we all know who they are. And we are not being ghoulish to anticipate, or to be mentally braced for, their bad end: a long night, a mysterious stranger, an odd set of circumstances that herald a sudden death.’

  Fair enough. I’m sure we all agree there’s nothing ‘ghoulish’ whatsoever about eagerly imagining the hypothetical death of someone you’ve marked out as a potential cadaver on account of your ill-informed presumptions about their lifestyle. All she’s doing is running a detailed celebrity-death sweepstake in her head. That’s not ghoulish, that’s fun. For my part, I’ve just put a tenner on Moir choking to death on her own bile by the year 2012. See? Fun!