I can make you hate

by Charlie Brooker

  Not that there was grit to spare for the pavements. The news was neurotic about dwindling grit. When they weren’t throwing live to a man with snow up to his balls, they were linking to a woman in a Puffa jacket close to tears at a gritting depot.

  Gritting depots don’t usually get this much prime-time TV exposure. There’s never been a rough-and-tumble comedy drama starring Jimmy Nail set in a gritting depot, or a ‘Live From the Gritting Depot’ variety hour. Why? Because gritting depots are unbelievably fucking boring, a fact the news did its best to prove for several thousand hours.

  At the time of writing, the Big Freeze began to thaw – or at least it did in the south, where the news lives – and consequently fell off the running order. Still, it was fun while it lasted. But only if you prefer gazing into a snow globe to actually watching the news.

  Bunny ears for all

  18/01/2010

  According to technophiles, experts, and that whispering voice in your head, 2010 will be the year that augmented reality makes a breakthrough. In case you don’t know, ‘augmented reality’ is the rather quotidian title given to a smart, gizmo-specific type of software that takes a live camera feed from the real world and superimposes stuff on to it in real time.

  Being a gadget designed for people who’d rather look at a screen than the real world, the iPhone inevitably plays host to several examples of this sort of thing. Download the relevant app, hold your iPhone aloft and gawp in astonishment as it magically displays live footage of the actual world directly in front of you – just like the real thing but smaller, and with snazzy direction signs floating over it. You might see a magic hand pointing in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, for instance – a magic hand that repositions itself as you move around. It’s incredibly useful, assuming you’d prefer to cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavement while staring into your palm than to stop and ask a fellow human being for directions.

  The Nintendo DSi has a built-in camera with a ‘fun mode’ that can recognise the shape of a human face, and superimpose pig snouts or googly eyeballs and the like over your friends’ visages when you point it at them. You can then push a button and save these images for posterity.

  For a while, it’s genuinely amusing (‘Look! It’s dad with a pair of zany computerised bunny ears sprouting from the top his head. Ha ha ha!’), until you realise there are only about six different options, two of which involve funny glasses. If you could customise the options, you could make it automatically beam a Hitler moustache on to everyone in sight, which would improve baby photos a hundredfold – but you can’t customise the options, probably for precisely that reason. You could print the picture out and draw the Hitler moustache on yourself with a marker pen, but that wouldn’t be very 2010.

  But while current examples of augmented reality might sound a tad underwhelming, the future possibilities are limitless. The moment they find a way of compressing the technology into a pair of lightweight spectacles, and the floating signs and bunny ears are layered directly over reality itself, the floodgates are open and you might as well tear your existing eyes out and flush them down the bin.

  Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of abandoned heroin addicts shivering themselves to sleep in shop doorways, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny snoozing dreamily in hammocks. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

  What’s more, the goggles could be adapted to suit whichever level of poverty you wanted to ignore: by simply twisting a dial, you could replace not just the homeless but anyone who receives benefits, or wears cheap clothes, or has a regional accent, or watches ITV, and so on, right up the scale until it had obliterated all but the most grandiose royals.

  At the time this seemed like a sick, far-off fantasy. By 2013, it’ll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.

  And don’t go thinking augmented reality is going to be content with augmenting what you see. It’s a short jump from augmented vision (your beergut’s vanished and you’ve got a nice tan), to augmented audio (constant reactive background music that makes your entire life sound more like a movie), to augmented odour (break wind and it smells like a casserole), and augmented touch (what concrete bench? It feels like a beanbag). Eventually, painful sensations such as extreme temperature and acute physical discomfort could be remixed into something more palatable. With skilful use of technology, dying in a blazing fireball could be rendered roughly half as traumatic as, say, slightly snagging a toenail while pulling off a sock.

  Some people will say there’s something sinister and wrong about all of this. They’ll claim it’s better to look at actual people and breathe actual air. But then they’ve never lived in Reading. And anyway, even if they’re right, we’ll all ignore them anyway, because the software will automatically filter them out the moment they open their mouths.

  In other words, over the coming years we’re all going to be willingly submitting to the Matrix, injecting our eyes and ears with digital hallucinogens until there’s no point even bothering to change our pants any more. Frightening? No. In fact, I’ll scarcely notice.

  PART THREE

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

  No likey, no lighty

  23/01/2010

  Anticipation is everything. If someone tells you to close your eyes and open your mouth while they feed you a slice of the most delicious chocolate mousse you’ll ever encounter, only to spoon a helping of mouldy mashed cat onto your tongue, chances are you’ll vomit. You’d vomit anyway, of course, but the contrast between what you were expecting and what you actually got would make you spew hard enough to bring up your own kidneys.

  This also works in reverse. Over the past few weeks, several people have emailed imploring me to watch Take Me Out, ITV’s new Saturday night dating show. They described it using the sort of damning language usually reserved for war crime tribunals at The Hague. I rubbed my hands together, like a sadist approaching a car crash, settled in to my sofa and watched an episode. And you know what? It’s not bad.

  Okay, it is bad, obviously, but only if you compare it to something worthy or suave or less shrieky. On its own terms, as a raucous chunk of meaningless idiocy, it succeeds.

  If you’re not familiar with the format (maybe you had harpsichord practice last Saturday), it’s a studio-based cross between Blind Date and Boots’ mortifying Here Come The Girls campaign. In fact I’m willing to bet Here Come The Girls was a working title. You know I’m right.

  It’s hosted by Paddy McGuinness, who arrives on the studio floor by descending down a huge glittery pipe, like a showbiz turd being flushed into the nation’s lap. He introduces thirty women – yes, thirty – who march in jiggling their tits and blowing kisses at the camera, cackling and screaming and winking like a hen night filling the front row at a Wham! reunion. It’s a crash course in misogyny.

  The girls line up behind a row of illuminated podiums, and the first of the men arrives, sliding down the same pipe Paddy came in earlier (if you’ll pardon the expression).

  Said bloke must impress the women by speaking, dancing, performing party tricks, and so on, like a jester desperately trying to stave off his own execution at the hands of a capricious female emperor. If he does a backflip and six of the girls didn’t like the way his buttocks shook as he landed, they switch their podium lights off, thereby whittling down his selection of available mates, and by extension, the gene pool.

  There’s an elephant in the room. Not literally, as a format point, but in the moment where each man first slithers down the tube and some of the girls immediately turn their
lights off based on appearances alone. Paddy skitters around asking what’s turned them off, and they dole out diplomatic answers about disliking the way he walked, or his shoes, rather than saying he’s too ugly or fat or that his skin’s the wrong colour for their tastes. At a push, they’ll gently mock someone’s height, but that’s about it. There’s little crushing honesty here. If they were hooked up to brainwave-reading machines, the outcome might be a little more brutal and a lot more disturbing. But probably not very ‘Saturday night’.

  Anyway, if our isolated male makes it through to the end with some girls still lit up, he picks one to take away with him. If the show was as hideous as I’d been led to believe, it’d culminate in a round where the newly paired-off couple rut like dogs in a Perspex dome while McGuinness films it on his mobile. Instead they somewhat meekly go for a drink, the results of which we get to see the following week.

  That’s it. The clever bit – in format terms at any rate – is that the girls return each week, so we get to know their ‘characters’. And they’re all ‘characters’. There are mouthy ones, stupid ones, sweet ones, gothic ones, young ones, old ones, and identical twin ones. All human life is here, apart from anyone you’d actually want to spend the rest of your days with. Or more than about an hour on a Saturday night, come to that.

  In summary: yes, it’s horrible. But that’s its job.

  Cadbury’s real ale eggs

  25/01/2010

  I’m not especially patriotic – I find the Union flag a tad garish, and the white cliffs of Dover a touch bland – but the news that the US company Kraft had bought Cadbury came as a bitter blow. It’s a very British thing, Cadbury. We’ve all got a great deal of fondness for it. It’s one of the few home comforts you miss while you’re abroad, like the BBC or Marmite or self-deprecatory humour.

  Considering how much imagination the Americans have, and how much they like food, it’s surprising we’re so much better at making chocolate than them. And we are better. I can still vividly recall trying Hershey’s chocolate for the first time. The name held a certain glitzy allure: after all, I’d heard it mentioned in countless Hollywood movies. Like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, it was one of those brands you faintly revered even though – at the time – it wasn’t available in British shops. So when I eventually got my hands on an authentic Hershey bar, it was quite an event.

  I stared at the iconic packaging for about five minutes, as though it were a prop from the set of Ghostbusters, before unwrapping it with care, breaking a bit off and preparing to savour what would surely be the most powerfully glamorous chocolate experience imaginable.

  But the moment the product itself hit my tongue I was plunged mouthwards into an entire universe of yuk. In terms of flavour, it tasted precisely like I’d swallowed a matchbox full of caster sugar five minutes earlier, then somehow regurgitated it into my own mouth. And the texture was crumbly, dusty – slightly old even, as though this was a chocolate bar that had been found in the pocket of a Civil War soldier and preserved specifically for my disenchantment.

  It was so horrible, I charitably assumed there was something wrong with it. I was eating it in England (someone had brought it back from the States), so perhaps it had gone off somehow in transit. But no. Subsequent encounters proved I’d got it right the first time. Hershey’s tastes downright bad.

  But then American mass-market snack food is downright bad in general. They can’t do crisps either. In addition to 900 varieties of Walkers, we Brits produce Frazzles and Chipsticks and Monster Munch and all manner of wacky corn shapes, in flavours ranging from pickled onion to polar bear. Virtually all American crisps – or ‘chips’, as they doggedly insist on calling them – are prosaic constructions tasting vaguely of watered-down bright orange cheese. We do bright orange cheese too, in the form of Wotsits, but we only did it once because we nailed it first time. They’ve got Cheetos in every shade of orange you could wish for (Spicy Orange! Smokey Orange!), but they’re all a bit weak; no match for the confident chemical oomph of a Wotsit.

  Anyway, the prospect of the Americans – so good at so many things, so bad at snack foods – meddling with the Cadbury formula is too much for many of us to bear. Hence the protest signs outside the factory in Bournville. We’ve been told the flavour won’t change – but that isn’t enough. Kraft needs to go one better, and reassure us that our national identity will remain intact by launching a whole new range of Cadbury’s snacks that simply couldn’t exist – or sell – anywhere else in the world. Chocolate bars with a uniquely British flavour. Here are some suggestions:

  Cadbury’s Full English Breakfast

  Walkers have had a stab at a ‘full English breakfast’ flavoured crisp, but the result was disappointing, to say the least, because it relied on various flavoured powders. Cadbury’s Full English Breakfast bar would contain the real thing: fried egg, bacon, chips and beans, mashed and compacted into a Crunchie-sized slab, covered with a layer of ketchup, then swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate. It’d look and weigh about the same as a Double Decker. And yes, it sounds disgusting – but you’d have to try it once, wouldn’t you?

  Cadbury’s Real Ale Eggs

  Creme Eggs are all well and good, but there’s something vaguely continental about them. How about promoting the real ale industry with a chocolate egg containing 2 fl. oz. of Bishop’s Finger? If that fails to catch on, how about a range of special ‘Binge Drinker’s Eggs’ – available only in ‘Happy Hour’ packs of six – filled with sugary blue alcopop swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate.

  Cadbury’s Tardis Bars

  Nothing fancy: these are just Tardis-shaped slabs of chocolate – part of a range that includes Caramel Cybermen and Toffee Daleks. But the proceeds go straight to the BBC, to help keep it afloat after Cameron gets in and sets about dismantling it to impress Rupert Murdoch. Other BBC-themed snacks could include Holby City Liquorice Bandages, Panorama Mint Crisp Curls, and a disturbing 100 per cent edible lifesize replica of Terry Wogan’s head, replete with crunchy shortbread teeth, praline eyeballs and a brain made of nougat. Swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate.

  As you may have noticed, the above suggestions work on the assumption that everything tastes nice when it’s swaddled in Dairy Milk chocolate. Which it does. A bloated corpse dredged from a polluted canal would taste nice if it was encased in a Dairy Milk shell. If it was coated in Hershey’s, you’d find yourself glumly picking the chocolate off to get at the sludgey grey flesh beneath. And that’s a FACT.

  2010: when iPads were new

  01/02/2010

  A star appears over San Francisco and a new gizmo is born. The iPad! At first glance it resembles an iPhone in unhandy, non-pocket-sized form. But look a little longer, and … No. You were right first time.

  Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee-table book and created the MacBook. Now it’s taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren’t really asking.

  It’s an iPhone for people who can’t be arsed holding an iPhone up to their face. A slightly-further-away iPhone that keeps your lap warm. A weird combination of portable and cumbersome: too small to replace your desktop, too big to fit in your pocket, unless you’re a clown. It can play video, but really – do you want to spend hours staring at a movie in your lap? Sit through Lord of the Rings and you’d need an osteopath to punch the crick out of your neck afterwards. It can also be used as an ebook, something newspapers are understandably keen to play up, but because it’s got an illuminated display rather than a fancy non-backlight ‘digital ink’ ebook screen, it’ll probably leave your eyes feeling strained, as though your pupils are wearing tight shoes.

  The iPad falls between two stools – not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it’s the spork of the el
ectronic consumer goods world. Or rather it would be, were it not for one crucial factor: it looks ideal for idly browsing the web while watching telly. And I suspect that’s what it’ll largely be used for. Millions of people watch TV while checking their emails: it’s a perfect match for them.

  Absurdly, Apple keeps trying to pretend it’ll make your life more efficient. Come off it. It’s an oblong that lights up. I’m sick of being pitched to like I’m a one-man corporation undertaking a personal productivity audit anyway. I don’t want to hear how the iPad is going to make my life simpler. I want to hear how it’ll amuse and distract me, how it plans to anaesthetise me into a numb, trancelike state. Call it the iDawdler and aggressively market it as the world’s first utterly dedicated timewasting device: an electronic sedative to rival diazepam, alcohol or television. If Apple can convince us of that, it’s got itself a hit.

  Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue to prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a fifteen-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?