2007 - Dawn of the Dumb

by Charlie Brooker

  Immediate convenience. That’s important. Not money. It’s a wonder I bend down to pick up coins I’ve dropped. And it’s nothing to do with how much money I have at any given moment. It’s always been this way. In my early twenties, when I worked in a second-hand music store for peanuts, I’d regularly take cabs to work because I’d overslept and couldn’t wait for the bus. And at the end of the day, I’d often take another cab home because I was tired, thereby blowing my entire daily wage ferrying myself to and from a job I despised. This was, admittedly, astronomically stupid, but so what? I’m still alive, thanks to dumb luck.

  As you might imagine, I’m incapable of haggling. I avoid it like beasts avoid fire, because any discussion about money depresses me into a mental coma. So my current situation is my worst nightmare—my day-to-day comfort is under direct threat, and the only way out is to plunge headlong into a protracted financial negotiation. I live in a rented flat which has just been put up for sale. The thought of moving genuinely makes me pray for death. Looking round flats, signing contracts, packing things up, lugging them around, sorting out the phones and the bills and the countless petty irritants—just crack me over the head with a paving stone and have done with it. Please. Anything but that.

  So I’m going to have to buy the place. Trouble is, I live in London, where houses are (a) satirically expensive and (b) people crawl over themselves like rats, scraping each other’s eyes out with their selfish, grasping claws at the sight of a halfway desirable property.

  And as luck wouldn’t have it, my place is slap bang in the middle of the catchment area for about ten thousand flouncey schools full of horrible, bawling little Hitlers called Josh and Jake and Jessica, every single one of whom will doubtless grow up to be as effortlessly brilliant with money as Mummy and Daddy, while I rot to mulch in the old folks’ home equivalent of a pound shop, beaten and abused by underpaid care workers who’ll film my misery on their cameraphones and upload it to the internet for chuckles because I was too financially apathetic to sort a pension out.

  I mentioned rats earlier—pertinently, since that’s how I feel. The estate agents are trying to send potential buyers round to view the place every three minutes, but I keep thwarting their plans by, like, living here and stuff. I’m not a tenant any more: I’m an infestation.

  I keep expecting them to kick the door in and chase me out with a broom.

  And I will do literally anything to make it stop, including sorting out a mortgage, but everyone I know is urging me to negotiate over prices and haggle and fuss over this and that and God knows what and make an offer, then another, then another…Dance the financial tango. Get your money’s worth. Play the game.

  But I hate the game. Hate it. It’s a boring game, of interest only to the soulless. A fool and his money are soon parted. A bastard and his money are best friends. Financial negotiation is the opposite of music, of laughter, of sunshine, of ideas, of absolutely everything that makes life worth living. It’s a blank-eyed shit in a coalhouse. It’s hell.

  Which is why I’ll probably end up paying more than the asking price, gleefully bankrupting myself just to make it all go away—especially if, as seems likely given my run of luck, the estate agents read this and the words on the page start rearranging themselves into dancing pound signs but I JUST DON’T CARE ANY MORE. Do your worst, you awful, boring, terrible world of finance, you. Then leave me alone. Forever.

  Is there no end to my ignorance?

  [26 March 2007]

  One of the most terrifying lessons I’ve learned is that, by and large, grown-ups don’t really know what they are doing. As a schoolkid, I mistook my teachers for all-knowing, infallible beings protected by an invisible forcefield of adulthood. Even as I grew older, left school, became a student, left polytechnic and became a fledgling adult myself, I laboured under the delusion that people in positions of authority were inherently more ‘adult’ than I was—that they possessed some kind of on-board mental computer that guided them towards making the right decision, even if I didn’t always agree with it.

  My overdue epiphany finally arrived in my mid-twenties, at a barbecue, when I found myself talking to a girl the same age as me who was a schoolteacher, and she described how, much of the time, she was teaching the kids things she had only read the week before in the textbook. As long as she stayed one chapter ahead, she was fine. At first I was genuinely surprised; I’d thought all that knowledge was stored in their heads. Then it got worse. I met a doctor, not much older than myself, who was (a) drunk and (b) pretty stupid. I realised that in terms of age, I had caught up with the ‘adults’, and was horrified to learn they were all just as ham-fisted as me. At least the young ones were. The older generation surely had a better handle on things, I reasoned. They had to, or the world would slide into chaos. Then I passed thirty and realised I still didn’t have a clue what was going on. Now I’m thirty-six, and if there is one thing I do know, it’s that I still don’t know that much. No one does. Everybody’s winging it. Everything is improvised.

  And the world never ‘slides into chaos’—it’s perpetually chaotic because all of us, from beggars to emperors, are crashing around trying to make the best of an unpredictable universe. We are little more than walking mistake generators. Dumb animals, essentially. Things would be just as messy if hens ruled the world. This is true, and it’s scary. But also sort of glorious.

  Consider that an extended caveat for the following humiliating confession: I don’t understand the news. Not entirely. Let me explain: I watch and read the news, not obsessively, but probably often enough to be doing my bit as a concerned citizen. But I can’t keep up with it. I follow it, but I don’t always truly follow it, if you see what I mean.

  Entertainment news aside, every story comes with a complex back story consisting of a million tiny events, of countless shades of right and wrong, of mistake piled upon mistake, successes and failures, injustices and struggles. It’s like trying to follow the plot of the most complicated and detailed soap opera ever made, one that was running for centuries before you started tuning in. To truly understand a major news story often requires real effort—more than many people are willing to give—which is why most of us know more about celebrities than, say, the Israel-Palestine situation.

  I think people who work in hard news often forget this. They are submerged in it. They know the cast, they have followed the storylines and they can’t help assuming their readers or viewers have similar knowledge. In reality, most people probably missed the crucial, earlier episodes, and subsequently can’t quite relate to the story. We can see it’s important—it’s the news!—but we don’t always feel its importance. If more of us did, there would probably be open revolt—or at least more revolt, more often.

  In my mid-twenties I wrote for video-games magazines. I was proud of my work. It was just an excuse to write jokes really, and it was great fun. But while video-game fans seemed to like what I did, it was baffling to the average Joe: peppered with terminology about polygon counts and frame rates, and gags that referenced other, older games. To the casual observer, it was a minefield of unfamiliar acronyms.

  This is fine for specialist writing but it alienates the outsider. A lot of news coverage is specialist writing. It’s news written for news fans. And the stuff that isn’t seems to consist of stories about Sienna Miller’s arse, which is easy to follow because, well, there’s not much to it. Because she is so thin.

  I can’t help thinking that what we need now, perhaps more than ever, is a populist and accessible Dummies’ Guide to Now. The BBC News website does this brilliantly, with regular bite-sized primers attached to major stories which attempt to explain the back story to newcomers clearly and concisely, without being patronising or stupid. It has simple tides such as ‘Who is Scooter libby?’, and is a rare oasis of clarity. I would like to see it launch some kind of 24-hour ‘news companion’ channel, or red-button service, that does the same thing on TV: a rolling fill-in-the-blanks service that helps you ge
t up to speed. A catch-up service for reality, if you like. Not dumbed-down news, but clear information—something that often gets lost in the 24-hour scramble of breaking developments and updated headlines.

  Maybe it’s just me who craves that. Maybe I’m thick. Maybe the rest of you understand everything and I’m alone in my ignorance. But I doubt it. I think the vast majority of us are winging it, at least eighteen chapters behind in the textbook and secretly praying no one else will notice. If we all knew more, we would do more to lend a hand, instead of shrugging and hoping the news might some day go away or submerging ourselves in comforting trivia. Don’t just tell us what is important. We might not have paid attention earlier. Toss us a bone. Tell us why.

  On David Cameron

  [2 April 2007]

  David Cameron is an idiot. A simpering, say-anything, dough-faced, preposterous waddling idiot with a feeble, insincere voice and an irritating tendency to squat near the top of opinion polls. I don’t like him. And I’ve got a terrible feeling he’ll be prime minister one day. Brrr.

  These are unthinking snap judgements, based on little more than his media profile—but since he appears to consist of little more than a media profile designed to appeal to unthinking snap judgements, that seems fair enough. On that basis, let’s stick to gut instincts, shall we?

  There is nothing to him. He is like a hollow Easter egg with no bag of sweets inside. Cameron will say absolutely anything if he thinks it might get him elected. If a shock poll was published saying 99 per cent of the British public were enthusiastic paedophiles, he would drive through the streets in an open-top bus surrounded by the Mini Pops. He’s nothing. He’s no one.

  It’s notoriously tricky to find out much about his past, in the same way that Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt found it tricky to find out much about the serial killer John Doe in the movie Se?en. He’d managed to erase his entire existence, even slicing the skin off his fingers to avoid leaving prints. Ever seen a close-up of Cameron’s fingertips? Of course not. Think about it.

  The apparently self-penned bio on Cameron’s website begins, ‘I was born in October 1966,’ and then leaps straight forward to 2001, missing out the decades he spent as a guffawing, top-hatted toff in between. The infamous photo of Dave posing alongside his posho chums from the Bullingdon Club in an expensive royal blue tailcoat is one of the few clues we have. It looks like precisely the sort of photo a detective might end up studying in a murder mystery, one where a group of Mends accidentally killed a prostitute during a drunken, stormy night, and collaborated on a cover-up. I’m not saying the Bullingdon boys kill prostitutes. I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised. And that’s his fault, not mine. He’s gone out of his way not to mention his blue-blooded carousing, because he knows it would make the average citizen puke themselves into a coma, and one side effect of this is that he seems shifty and suspicious.

  Every time I look at Cameron, I’m reminded of video-game characters: not the lovable, spiky ones like Sonic or Mario, but the bland, generic dead-eyed avatars you can ‘create’ for use in a tennis game or a tedious Tolkienesque adventure. You start with a bald clone, then add features drawn from a limited palette—eye colour, one of three noses, an optional goatee beard and so on—and invariably end up with an eerily characterless zombie straight out of the boardgame Guess Who? Simulated choice, as opposed to genuine variety. It is easy to build a Cameron lookalike. Just simulate the smuggest estate agent you can think of. Or some interchangeable braying twit in a rugby shirt, ruining a local pub just by being there. Easy.

  Naturally, I’m biased. I’ve instinctively hated the Tories since birth. If there was an election tomorrow, and the only two choices were the Nazis or the Tories, I’d vote Tory with an extremely heavy heart. In descending order of vehemence, my objections to the Tory species stem from (a) everything they do, (b) everything they say, (c) everything they stand for, (d) how they look, (e) their stupid names and (f) the noises I imagine they make in bed. I once overheard two posh people—almost certainly Tories—having sex in a hotel room. It was grim. The woman kept saying, ‘Fuck me, Gerald,’ in a cut-glass accent, which was funny, but Gerald himself soon wiped the grin off my face with his grunting, which wasn’t really grunting at all, but instead consisted of the words ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ crisply orated aloud, like Sir Laurence Olivier reading dialogue off a card at an early rehearsal. I didn’t stick around long enough to hear the climax, but I imagine the words ‘gosh’, ‘crumbs’ and ‘crikey’ probably put in an appearance.

  And here is why that’s relevant: Cameron almost certainly says ‘crikey’ at the vital moment. Go on, picture it. Right now, in your mind’s eye. You know it’s true. If nothing else in this puerile onesided hatchet job has convinced you, that’s reason enough not to elect him, right there.

  In summary, then: he’s an idiot. But you knew that anyway. In fact the only reason I’ve written this is because it is going to be printed in a newspaper, which means his advisers will have to photocopy it and include it in some official internal press file, where it will sit alongside all the unnecessarily positive coverage he has generated for himself. It gives me a pathetic, childish, self-indulgent thrill, and in today’s world of cookie-cutter choiceless-ness, that’s as good as it gets. So nyahh nyahh, Dave, you fair-weather, upper-crust guff-cloud. Nyahh nyahh.

  Safe beneath the watchful eyes

  [9 April 2007]

  In case you missed it, last week police in Middlesbrough unveiled a startling new weapon in the ongoing war against crime: CCTV cameras that shout at you whenever you do something wrong. Currently, they are chiefly used to warn drunken revellers hell-bent on stealing traffic cones, or to dish out virtual bollockings to litter-bugs. ‘Respect tsar’ Louise Casey says it ‘nips problems in the bud’, while home secretary John Reid praised the scheme on the grounds that rather than being ‘secret surveillance’ it was Very public’ and, most importantly, ‘interactive’.

  Of course, the word ‘interactive’ is regularly wheeled out to make any old bullshit sound exciting and modern. Hey, it’s not a humiliating infringement of civil liberties—it’s interactive! You know—a bit of democratic fun, just like The X-Factor or MySpacel Woo hoo! Now put that in the bin or I’ll blow your head off.

  There are two major problems with justifying the bellowing CCTV cameras on the grounds that they’re ‘interactive’. Firstly, just because something’s ‘interactive’, that doesn’t automatically make it right. Coprophilia is interactive, and that doesn’t belong in the street either.

  Secondly, they’re not interactive at all. They’re faceless electronic scrutinisers that scream when you break the rules. What John Reid has done here is confuse the word ‘interactive’ with the word ‘nightmarish’.

  And wait, it gets worse. As if the scheme wasn’t already unsettling enough, according to news reports ‘children’s voices are to be used initially to make the encounter less confrontational’.

  This would be a brilliantly disturbing twist in a dystopian sci-fi movie in which the traditional adult-child relationship has been thrown into reverse, and misbehaving grown-ups are publicly scolded by eerie, disembodied infant voices, but unfortunately it’s not happening in a dystopian sci-fi movie at all, but in Middles-borough. And, later this year, in Southwark, Barking and Dagen-ham, Reading, Harlow, Norwich, Ipswich, Plymouth, Gloucester, Derby, Northampton, Mansfield, Nottingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Wirral, Blackpool, Salford, South Tyneside and Darlington.

  Incidentally, it’s not yet clear whether the children’s voices will address miscreants using formal language (‘Attention, citizen: you are committing a felony; you have 20 seconds to desist’) or in ‘kid-speak’ (‘You’re a bad man and I’m telling on you and my dad’s going to tear your head off’). Perhaps they could also allow kids to control the cameras and decide what constitutes a crime. And rather than mounting the cameras on poles, why not make them mobile and more kid-friendly by placing them inside full-size, remote-controlled Daleks, which can
patrol the streets dishing out near-fatal electric shocks to those who disobey?

  Actually, using the Daleks would be a masterstroke. Everyone loves Doctor Who— who wouldn’t be thrilled by the sight of a real-life Dalek squadron rolling down the high street, glinting in the sun? The sheer excitement would genuinely make the accompanying loss of liberty seem worthwhile.

  To liven things up even more, our rasping pepperpot overlords could be colour-coded. Blue Daleks would deal with minor infractions, and would spend most of their time issuing warnings and administering minor shocks—but they’d also be chummy and approachable, and willing to pose for photographs with your nephew. Red Daleks, on the other hand, would be emotionless killing machines.

  Imagine the atmosphere outside a pub on a hot summer’s day: a Red Dalek trundles past, and the convivial hubbub suddenly fades to a whisper. Everyone stiffens. And then he turns the corner and a communal sigh of relief goes up, and the drinking continues and the jukebox plays louder and louder…community spirit lives again. Admit it: it’d be fantastic.

  Of course, to maximise the psychological impact of the Red Daleks, they’d have to be fewer in number than the Blues. Ten per citizen, tops.

  If anyone from the Home Office is reading this, incidentally, it’s absolutely imperative that you license the actual, 100 per cent official, BBC Daleks, as seen on TV. Don’t just try to create some sort of rip-off close-as-dammit lookalike and hope we’ll start calling them ‘Daleks’. We’re not idiots. And if you draw a blank with Terry Nation’s estate, don’t bother negotiating for the rights to the Cyber-men instead. It won’t be the same. Daleks or nothing. Pull that off and I guarantee we’ll willingly accept it. Even Shami Chakrabarti, denouncing the plan on Question Time, would have to start her complaint by saying, ‘Obviously I love the idea of Daleks as much as anyone, but…’