The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Here’s a news story guaranteed to provoke a fusillade of indignant spluttering, courtesy of your inner Clarkson: German politicians are reportedly planning to ban Kinder Surprise eggs on the grounds that they’re a safety hazard.

  In case you’re not familiar with the concept, the ‘surprise’ inside each Kinder egg is a cheapo little toy housed within a plastic shell. Anyway, the Germans are worried that hungry, gurgling kiddywinks might mistake the gifts for food and wind up choking to death. ‘Children can’t differentiate between toys and nutritional items,’ said Miriam Gruss, a member of the German parliamentary children’s committee.

  What, really? Don’t get me wrong – I think children are idiots. But even I find that statement a tad unfair and sweeping. I used to have a spud gun when I was a kid. In case you’re not familiar with that concept either, it was a small metal pistol that fired chunks of potato. Not once did I aim the potato at anyone. Or try to deep-fry the gun. And I was thick as shit. I guess it was luck.

  In fact my run of luck was pretty impressive. Other toys I failed to ingest include a Scalextric, several boxes of space Lego, the board games Operation and Mousetrap, and a complete collection of Paul Daniels’ TV Magic Tricks – even though the latter included an egg-shaped gizmo called The Magic Egg. Somehow, miraculously, my conker-sized kiddywink brain managed to differentiate it from a real egg. Thus my life was saved by a whisker.

  Gruss won’t countenance such a slapdash approach to child safety. Not on her watch. ‘It’s a sad fact,’ she said. ‘Kinder Surprise eggs have to go.’

  As you can imagine, the committee’s proclamation has already caused a fair bit of outraged huffing, not least from the manufacturer, Ferrero, which until now has perhaps been best known for providing the catering at badly dubbed ambassadors’ receptions in the late 1980s.

  ‘There is absolutely no evidence that the Kinder Surprise eggs, as a combination of toy and foodstuff, are dangerous,’ said Ferrero’s spokeswoman. Then she snatched a golden-foil-wrapped nobbly chocolate bollock from a nearby silver platter and added, ‘Monsieur, with these Rocher, you are really spoiling us.’

  Now I’m no fan of Ferrero chocolate, which vaguely tastes like regurgitated icing sugar to me, but I can’t help thinking that it would be hugely unfair on the company if an unsubstantiated link between Kinder eggs and danger began to form in parents’ minds and sales suffered accordingly. Let’s face it, even though Kinder eggs are generally bought for the gift rather than the sickly chocolate shell, and even though many of the toys are so ingeniously designed they could easily be sold on their own, munching through the outside to get at the inedible inside is half the fun.

  What’s more, jittery, neurotic parents don’t need any more false scares to piss their pants over. They’re already raising their twatty little offspring like mollycoddled prisoners: banned from playing outdoors in case a paedophile ring burrows through the pavement and eats them, locked indoors with nothing but anti-bacterial plasma screens for company, ferried to and from school in spluttering rollcaged tanks … Christ, half these kids would view choking to death as a release.

  No wonder they grow up to become tiresome whooping advocates for extreme sports. If I’d spent the first 18 years of my life doing time in a joyless cotton-wool cell, listening to some angsty bloody parent banging on about how precious and special I was every pissing day, I’d snowboard off a 300-foot cliff at the first opportunity too. Under those circumstances, tumbling down a rockface and cracking your skull open must feel like a declaration of independence crossed with an orgasm.

  How did we get to this point? Our sense of self grew too strong. We gazed up our own bums for so long, we each became the centre of the universe. We’re not mere specks of flesh, jostled by the forces of chance. We’re flawless deities, and goddammit we deny – deny! – the very existence of simple bad luck. If we trip on the pavement, someone else is to blame. Of course they are. And we’ll sue them to prove it if necessary.

  In a bid to pre-empt our self-important litigiousness, armies of risk assessors scan the horizon, dreaming of every conceivable threat. You could bang your head on that branch. Crack a rib on that teaspoon. Choke to death on that chocolate egg.

  Well, it stops here. And it stops now. Next week, I’m launching my own range of Kinder eggs. They’re called Unkinder Eggs. And they don’t contain sweets. They contain specially designed hazards. Spiked ball bearings.

  Spring-loaded razor-blade traps. Flimsy balloons filled with acid. Miniature land mines powerful enough to punch holes in your cheeks and embed your teeth in the wall. The idea is to carefully nibble away all the chocolate without incurring a serious injury. Thrills! Tension! Chocolate! It’s the confectionery equivalent of extreme sports. You’ll love it.

  And hey – that’s not just cocoa butter and milk solids you’re savouring. It’s better than that. It’s the great taste of risk.

  The imaginary Olympics [18 August 2008]

  Thank God for dishonesty. I can’t have been the only Briton to shift awkwardly in their seat throughout the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games the other week. The Chinese mounted an unprecedented spectacle. Thousands of synchronised drummers, acrobats, fireworks, impossible floating rings made of electric dust (surely alien technology, that), dancers, prancers, singers and flingers. Maybe not flingers. I just threw that in to complete the rhyme. But you get the picture. It was amazing. It cost around £50 million and was probably rehearsed at the shooty end of a machine gun. Dance, beloved populace! Miss three steps and we take out your kneecaps. Miss five and we go for the head. Dance till your homeland is the envy of the world! Stop weeping and dance!

  Yet even as my eyes took delight in the colour and magic, my spirits sank. I’m no patriot, but I feared for our national pride come the 2012 London Olympics. How the hell are we going to top a display like that? Our plans currently consist of six roman candles, Bernie Clifton riding his ostrich, and some Britain’s Got Talent prick-a-ma-boob beatboxing on a trampoline. It would be less shameful if we all marched into the arena one by one, dropped our trousers, yanked our bumcheeks apart and let the entire globe gaze right up our apertures for an hour, while the Kaiser Chiefs perform their latest single in the background. If nothing else, it would give the rest of the planet something to think about. They’d never mess with us again, that’s for damn sure.

  But my defeatism, for once, was misplaced. The ceremony wasn’t as spectacular as it seemed. An impressive swooping aerial shot of fireworks bursting in footprint-shaped constellations turned out to be a computer-generated lie. And the cute little girl singing the Chinese anthem was only miming to the voice of another girl, whom the authorities considered too hideous to warrant airtime.

  Actually, they were right. The original girl was an absolute pig, with teeth so higgledy-piggledy you could be mistaken for thinking her skull was trying to chew its way out of her face. You could possibly use her head as the basis for the lead puppet in a children’s programme set in Ugly Wood, provided you didn’t mind your kids vomiting in fear and disgust each time she wobbled on screen.

  Oh shut up. I’m joking.

  Anyway, the deception didn’t end with the opening carnival, but bled into the events themselves. Hordes of volunteers, known as ‘cheer squads’, have been been planted in the stands during underattended events, to disguise empty seats and goad the rest of the crowd into whooping on cue.

  What’s remarkable about all this trickery isn’t the trickery itself – but how ineptly it’s been maintained. Even a six-year-old knows that once you tell a lie, you stick to it. You never admit the truth. Never. And when confronted with irrefutable evidence of your guilt, you dig your heels in further still – loudly denying reality until your accusers die of exasperation. It’s a brilliant strategy that’s kept the Bush administration going for years.

  But the Chinese? A few timid queries and they admitted it all with a shrug. Yeah, they were computer-generated image (CGI) fireworks. Yeah, the kid was mimin
g. Yeah, we’re using cheer squads. So what? We’re not arsed. Stop wetting your pants. What are you going to do about it anyway? Did you know that if we all stood up and sat down at the same time, the resulting tidal wave would destroy your capital cities? Ask us again if we’re arsed. Go on. Fire away.

  They didn’t even try to cover it up properly before they were rumbled. The ‘cheer squads’, for instance, were hardly subtle – they were decked out in bright yellow shirts and huddled together in conspicuous clumps. They couldn’t have been more noticeable if they’d had searchlights for faces and foghorns for hands. All of which provides an effective blueprint for us to follow circa 2012. First up, the opening ceremony, in which a volcano rises from the Thames, spewing flaming Olympic rings into the night sky while Big Ben – or rather, a genetically enhanced version of Big Ben, one with straighter teeth and bigger tits – pirouettes in the background, miming to the Kaiser Chiefs’ latest single. This goes on for 15 hours or until the nearest superpower threatens to bomb us. Then the events themselves begin. None of them takes place in the Olympic stadium because there is no Olympic stadium. We’ve not bothered building one. Instead, we’ve got a host of exciting made-up CGI sports. Moon Snooker! Unicorn Wrestling! Quantum Deathball! Dissenter Beheading! Pac-Man with Guns! Naturally, none of the other countries has been allowed to practise any of these games, whereas we’ve had four solid years to develop and perfect them. So we’re guaranteed, ooh, at least three bronze medals. We’ll thrash Paraguay, that’s for damn sure.

  And as our virtual athletes (who aren’t really there) take their place on the podium (which isn’t really there either), thousands of specially trained spectators will loudly voice their appreciation at gunpoint. Then we’ll kick the shit out of one or two overseas journalists and claim the whole thing’s been a roaring success. Again and again, till we’re blue in the face. Bish bash bosh. Job done. As a twat might say at the end of a column.

  The black hole [1 September 2008]

  There’s a little-known and decidedly average George Romero movie called Bruiser which, despite turning rubbish and hysterical at the end, has a creepy and intriguing premise. In it, Jason Flemyng plays a successful young marketing exec who wakes up one day to discover his face has inexplicably transformed into a smooth, white, featureless mask. He stands horrified in front of the mirror, trying to remove it but failing because it’s fused to his head. He has literally become a blank.

  That’s the best bit of the film. After that it all goes a bit daft, as Flemyng’s newfound anonymity sends him doolally and he runs around Los Angeles killing people left right and centre (mainly centre) until you just don’t care any more. I’d have preferred him to stand weeping in front of the mirror for the remaining 90 minutes because I found that bit exceptionally creepy. And you know why? Because I can relate to it, that’s why. Thanks for asking.

  I could relate to it not because I’ve got a smooth, featureless face – sadly, it’s more like a lumpy relief map charting myriad disappointments – but because in the past few months I’ve grown increasingly concerned that deep inside, underneath, in my heart, at my core, in my bones, within the very centre of my soul, lurks a terrifying, all-consuming, awful, echoing blankness.

  Just to be clear, this is not the same thing as depression, which would manifest itself as an actively negative mindset. Rather it’s an absence of any definable mood whatsoever. It’s not like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-empty; more like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-full, but shrugging indifferently and staring at the wall instead of running around giggling and setting off party poppers. And to be fair, vacant indifference is the only sane reaction to a mere glass of water in the first place. It’s hard to muster much enthusiasm or despair either way. Which leaping great cretin at the Department of Psychological Metaphor decided your opinion vis-à-vis a glass of water should be the barometer of character anyhow? If you want to find out who’s a pessimist and who’s an optimist, don’t faff around filling tumblers – water’s a precious resource, for Christ’s sake. Just ask them. Or issue them a form with OPTIMIST and PESSIMIST printed on it, and see which box they tick. It’s not rocket science.

  Anyway, back to my thudding personal blankness. It’s probably a bonus. On the one hand, I take absolutely no pride whatsoever in whatever meagre professional achievements I can muster, take little interest in anything outside work and am essentially just a blinking, shuffling mannequin watching events in his life merely drift past like underwhelming prizes on the Generation Game conveyor belt. And on the other, I just don’t give a shit. It’s a win-win situation. Or it would be, if I had any concept of ‘winning’ in the first place.

  Apparently this condition is known as ‘anhedonia’ – the inability to derive any pleasure from things that would normally be considered pleasurable. Hand someone truly anhedonic a slice of chocolate cake, and at best they’ll think, ‘Hmm, my tastebuds indicate this cake is delicious,’ rather than simply enjoying it. They subject it to Spock-like analysis, swallow it, shrug, and then crap it out a few hours later, wearing a neutral, unchanging expression throughout. Well, that’s me, that is.

  And it’s hard to see what the cure might be. If you’ve fallen out of love with life – not to the point of actually disliking it, you understand, but to such a degree that you merely tolerate rather than welcome each passing day – it’s surely impossible to get the spark back. Any suggestions? Religious epiphanies and extreme sports are out. And I could do without raising a family, thanks: that looks like an almighty pain in the arse and to be honest I couldn’t be bothered. I’d immerse myself in a hobby but they all look so pointless. You might as well sit alone in a shed counting numbers. I’ve tried cultivating a passion for the arts but that didn’t work either. I mean, I quite like plays, live music, exhibitions, museums and paintings, but not enough to spend more than 25 minutes journeying to see them. Reading’s all right, but be honest – turning the pages isn’t ultimately worth the effort. Perhaps serial killing would help. Yeah. That’d give everything a welcome bit of edge. Although I’m prepared to believe even that gets boring surprisingly quickly: within two weeks I’d be yawning my way through yet another humdrum strangling.

  Still, it could be worse. Having listlessly Googled anhedonia, I see it’s related to a hilarious spin-off condition called ‘ejaculatory anhedonia’. Apparently it mainly affects men, and as the name suggests, the unfortunate few who suffer from it are incapable of deriving any pleasure whatsoever from orgasms. They squirt a nut-ful of mess while staring impassively into the middle distance, like the human equivalent of a pushdown soap-dispenser, and that’s it. Now that would be depressing.

  Hello, boys [8 September 2008]

  According to a pointless piece of eye-rolling anti-EU extrapolation that appeared in a number of newspapers, a smattering of MEPs are calling for the introduction of strict new advertising guidelines that could eventually lead to Eva Herzigova’s breasts being taken out and shot.

  At least that’s the gist of it. As far as I can ascertain, the story largely represented a brilliant excuse to print the supermodel’s infamous Wonderbra ad for the 80 millionth time, on this occasion under the headline ‘Goodbye, Boys’. Even though the Hello, Boys campaign ran 14 years ago, editors just can’t let it lie. Rather than fading into obscurity it has, if anything, grown to represent some kind of sexual Year Zero which still haunts their collective mind’s eye to this day. Just as Philip E. Marlow from Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective was obsessed by visual memories of his mum enjoying a bit of off-piste afternoon dick in a forest, so the image of a semi-naked Eva gawping with awestruck joy at her own overflowing cups is forever frozen in their consciousnesses, and they’re doomed to reproduce it again and again in a bid to help themselves and their readers come to terms with its sheer psychological impact. It wasn’t just an advert. It was the 9/11 of tits. And now some killjoy EU busybodies want to travel back in time and ban it! Or something like that! Boo! Ty
pical! Let’s bomb Brussels! Or maybe just France! Etc!

  But wait, it doesn’t end there. As the Daily Mail goes on to explain, ‘This being the EU, it is not simply raunchy advertising that is in danger … It wants anything which promotes women as sex objects or reinforces gender stereotypes to be banned … Any campaigns which are deemed sexist might have to go … [such as] the bare-chested builder with a can of Diet Coke in 1996 … Even famous adverts such as those featuring the Oxo family, with Lynda Bellingham as the housewife, might be deemed sexist.’

  Inevitably, the minuscule conker of reality at the heart of this shitcloud is markedly less interesting than all this talk of a wild banning outbreak might suggest. Once you remove all the ‘mights’ and ‘coulds’ and other weasel words from the article, you’re left with nothing but a report from the EU women’s rights committee (doubtless a barrel of laughs at parties), which merely suggests governments should use their existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to regulate advertising.

  Nonetheless, ‘The EU vote on the report is not legally binding but it could be used by governments to justify the biggest shake-up in the industry for years.’ Or it could not. Who knows? Uh-oh, we’ve accidentally printed that photo of Eva again. Argh! Only one thing for it: we’re all going to have masturbate our way back to sanity together. Right, readers? Three … two … one … go!

  It’s safe to predict this ‘shake-up’ will have as much impact as all the other quasi-fictional EU bans and regulations the press enjoys harping on about in pieces headlined ‘OXYGEN TO BE OUT-LAWED’ or ‘NOW EU BUSYBODIES SAY MILK MUST BE SERVED IN CLOGS’, and so on. Partly because all such stories ultimately turn out to be knitted from wisps of translucent flimflam, but mainly because the only way to ban advertising that ‘reinforces gender stereotypes’ is to ban all advertising whatsoever.

  What’s the alternative? Only allow commercials that actively challenge gender stereotypes? I can scarcely picture what kind of patronising hell we’d be creating for ourselves there. And what if it worked? What if all our ads were suddenly filled with ladylike men eating chocolates and butch ladettes swigging beer, and these images proved so influential that everyone started behaving that way in real life, until these brave new anti-stereotypes had become stale old actual stereotypes, so we had to start all over again by subverting our old subversions? And so on and so on. Don’t know about you, but I’d shoot myself some point around 2011. Probably while wearing a dress.