The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  And besides, anyone with more than four atoms of cranial glop in their skull already knows that adverts don’t provide a realistic field guide to the genders. In adverts, women are carefree sex kittens. In reality, they’re just annoying. Especially the ones who whine on and on about gender stereotypes through the strange flapping hole they use for expressing simple-minded notions which is apparently located somewhere above their chests. (The Guardian has asked me to point out that this is a joke. Which indeed it is. Although, cleverly, it’s also an optical illusion, because to uptight enemies of fun, it doesn’t look like a joke at all, but a heinous slur. Still, at least complaining about it will give them something to do before they all die early of joylessness, leaving the rest of us to swap off-colour gags at their spartan little gravesides.)

  When it comes to being objectified in ads, men lag way behind women, although they’re gradually inching closer thanks to the aforementioned Diet Coke hunk and the Aero Bubbles guy and so on. Mainly, though, they’re portrayed as gurgling dimwits whose sole reward in life is to be occasionally granted the opportunity to stare at a football through a pint of piss-coloured beer.

  In other words, both genders are routinely insulted in adverts, but that’s because adverts are inherently insulting to anything more sentient than a footstool. Of course they’re demeaning, dum-dum. They’re adverts. That’s what they do. And attempting to regulate them further would be as big a waste of adult time and resources as telling a four-year-old not to make giggly jokes about poo.

  Just as well that isn’t going to happen, then. Cue Eva Herzigova photograph. Article ends. Goodbye.

  The pubic consensus [15 September 2008]

  The other day I was enduring The Sex Education Show on Channel 4, in which a self-consciously ‘liberated’ presenter called Anna ran screeching around the place like a one-woman hen night, banging on about boobs and willies in a bid to ‘get Britain talking’ about sex. And the script essentially ran as follows:

  ‘Hey, Britain! Let’s all be honest and open, yeah? Penises! There! I said it! Some are big, some are small! Here’s a photo of one! Are you shocked? You mustn’t be shocked! Although it’s OK to be amused! Tee hee! Aren’t we pushing back the boundaries? Isn’t this healthy? Come on, we’re all adults. This is good for us! Celebrate it! Vulva! Wow! Can you believe I just said that? Condom! Orgasm! Clitoris! Etc!’

  Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for snickering nob gags and frank images of nudity, but I’d rather not have them accompanied by some tissue-thin justification about ‘healing the nation’ or ‘getting people talking’. Just tell us a joke, show us your bum and piss off.

  Anyway, as luck would have it, Anna did show us her bum. Sort of. In a mirror. While she was trying on lingerie, because this was a modern documentary, see? Just as in London you’re famously never more than 4 feet from a rat, so in 21st-century factual entertainment shows the presenter is never more than four minutes from a pointless TV stunt. Like trying on some frilly pants. Or getting a bikini wax.

  The bikini wax section caused me some anguish. After braving a ‘full Hollywood’ (where they suddenly rip the whole lot clean away, like DLT having his face pulled off), Anna held a little chat with a studio audience, encouraging them to help heal broken Britain by loudly discussing their pubes. Things were ticking along predictably – ie a 50/50 mix of words and chortling – when something upsetting happened. They asked the men in the studio whether they trimmed their pubic hair, and almost every single one of them put their hands up.

  Then they read out the results of a survey they’d done, which claimed that, yes, 60% of men trim their pubes. What, really? 60%? Huh? And then they asked the women in the studio if they preferred the male trimmed-pube look – and they all nodded like Churchill the car-insurance dog. First I felt woefully out of touch. Then I simply hated the world a little more. And then an uneasy thought came over me. If the majority of other men genuinely spend hours hoisting their scrotum over the bathroom sink with one hand, nail scissors in the other, meticulously snipping and pruning their man-bush into a tiny ornamental hedge, until their entire pubic region resembles a tranquil arboretum in miniature, albeit one with a cheerful bit of dick poking out of it, then maybe all my ex-girlfriends have been secretly revolted by my comparatively slovenly lower appearance. Did they think I was some sort of wild hobo? I phoned one up and asked her.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ she asked.

  I told her that according to something I’d seen on telly, most men trim their pubes.

  ‘Well, duh. It was obviously bullshit,’ she barked.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  Phew. This was a relief. Aside from the icky pubic-hair aspect of the whole thing, no one wants to feel like the odd one out. I didn’t want to be the sole dishevelled caveman in a world full of smooth, sculpted statues. I thought I’d missed a memo.

  I’ve missed memos before. For instance I never bothered with scarves for years, because I couldn’t work out how you were meant to wrap them round your neck without the dangling ends getting in the way. And then about two years ago someone showed me the method whereby you fold the scarf in half and poke the end through the loop and – hey presto – it all stays neatly in place. Wow, I thought. Everyone else has known this for years, and I’ve just found out now! I bought a couple of scarves to celebrate, and smugly paraded around in them like a child who’d just learned to tie his own laces.

  And then a few weeks later I was sitting (uncharacteristically scarfless) with a friend having a drink, when she suddenly pointed at someone walking past the window in a scarf, and scowled, ‘God! Why is everybody suddenly wearing their scarves that way, as if they’re at university? They look like such tossers.’

  I shrank in my seat, wondering how I’d missed not one, but three memos: the one that’d taught everyone else this particular method of scarf-tying, the second one that decreed it fashionable, and the third that decided it was passé.

  Fortunately, it seems no pubic-hair memo has been issued at all: on closer inspection, the ‘survey’ that threw up the 60%-trim rating had only asked 50 men, with no indication of how representative these 50 men were. They could’ve been male strippers. Or indie Camden eyeliner types whose black jeans are so tight, they have to shave their minges off just to do up their flies. I wouldn’t put anything past those twats. They probably don’t have human-size testicles anyway. But that’s an argument for another week, because we’re out of space and time. Goodbye.

  How to disappear incompletely [29 September 2008]

  Take a holiday, said literally everyone I know. You’re not being yourself. The smallest thing stresses you out. Last week you realised you’d accidentally bought some AAA batteries instead of the AA size, and instead of simply taking them back to the shop or buying a new set you ran outside and spent an hour screaming and slamming a dustbin lid against your garden wall. Try explaining that to the neighbours. Or to us. We’re literally everyone you know, remember? Rarely do we speak in unison like this. Ooh, doesn’t our collective voice sound funny? It’s like a throat organ. Or a choir, but flatter. And more judgemental and needling. Anyway, pay attention to what it’s saying. Obey. Take a holiday.

  They had a point. I’d been working flat out on two different things at the same time, both complex, both demanding of time. One was a non-broadcast pilot that required me to watch news coverage of the Russian/Georgian conflict ad nauseam – disc after disc of it, again and again, in search of funny things to say about actual footage of war and bombs and people lying around looking thoroughly killed. And there are funny things to be said – no, really there are – but finding them definitely isn’t good for your head.

  In the middle of this, I wrote a column that struck me as a bit of light-hearted schtick about the comical pointlessness of existence, but which struck almost everyone who read it as a desperate and embarrassing cry for help. Readers emailed advice. Well-meaning zealots sent religious pamphlets. A fe
w warm-hearted humanitarians explicitly urged me to commit suicide, on the basis that I was a prick and my writing was dismal, and that they were therefore owed blood. Hey, it’s nice to know they’re out there.

  But friends told me to take a holiday. So I did, and I’m on that holiday right now. Yet somehow I’m also writing this, in a ‘business centre’ and internet hole, in a hotel, at midnight. Turns out I’m not very good at being on holiday, although I can’t work out whether that’s my fault, or the fault of human progress. The internet makes it easier to communicate with the folks back home, but it also brings the folks back home on holiday with you.

  Britain doesn’t simply go away when you leave it behind any more. It used to be the case that you’d fly home after a fortnight abroad and suddenly be astonished by a newspaper headline at the airport – BROWN: WHY I RESIGNED, or the suchlike. And you’d feel like you’d really missed out: What do you mean, the world carried on without me? It felt a bit like coming back from the grave, except instead of returning to deliver a haunting message from the afterlife, you had a few boring anecdotes about that nice restaurant where you had that thing, and a sunburned neck.

  Today you can never really leave. For one thing, most of the world looks alike now anyhow. For another, if anything big happens back home, friends will text you. And not just big things either. They’ll tell you who’s been fired on The Apprentice. They’ll phone you from the toilet for help in their local pub quiz.

  Just to make things worse, shortly before leaving I bought a swanky new ‘smart phone’ aimed squarely at absolute cast-iron wankers. Go on, treat yourself, I thought. Be an unashamed cock and buy it. Turns out it does everything. Email, internet, GPS system, Google maps … there’s probably a can opener on it somewhere. If you’re standing in the middle of nowhere you can push one button to be told precisely where you are and another to find out where the nearest synagogue is. Or sauna. Or both. Punch in a query and it’ll recommend eight local restaurants, cough up their phone numbers and invite you to ring them. Then it’ll give you directions. Since I’m on a road trip, it’s proved incredibly useful, partly for finding last-minute motels and the like, but mainly because gawping and poking at a tiny electronic screen feels a lot like work. In fact it’s not a phone at all, but a pocket-sized job simulator, and this helps with the cold turkey immensely.

  Because without an uninterrupted supply of bite-size chunks of work to occupy your head, how the hell are you supposed to stay sane in this world? Even on holiday, there’s no escaping this planet or its people. BlackBerrys, iPhones and their imitators are very much tossers’ playthings, but they’re also providing a vital sociological service: they make their owners feel temporarily useful and important for just long enough to prevent mass suicides in the street. Hey! You replied to my email! For a few fleeting seconds, you really made a difference, buddy.

  Now get back to your holiday. You are actually on holiday, aren’t you? These days, it’s hard to be sure.

  INTERLUDE

  An American road trip [25 October 2008]

  The following piece originally appeared in the Guardian’s travel section.

  I have a short attention span, so short I even got bored just then, halfway through typing the word ‘span’. This means when planning a holiday, I tend to balk at the prospect of a week or two flopping on a beach. What if I get restless and walk into the sea? More to the point, and going on past experience, what if I get so sunburned on day one I spend the rest of the holiday staggering around like someone who’s just crawled their way clear of a nuclear blast? There’s only so many times you can say ‘ouch’ before you get tired of hearing yourself wince.

  That’s why my ideal holiday is a road trip. All that variety! And sitting down! It’s like watching television, but better, because every so often you get to step out into the landscape you’re watching and interact with it. And it’s in 3D! Perfect.

  Apart from one tiny problem. I can’t drive. I’ve done road trips before – in the US, obviously, because that’s the Kingdom of Road Trips – and each time, I’ve had to recruit/con (delete where applicable) licence-holding friends or girlfriends into coming. Since the ideal trip lasts around three weeks, and has a cast of more than two, arranging the details isn’t always easy, particularly when you try to do it at short notice. I don’t know many people prepared to drop everything to spend the best part of a month driving from state to state. Although it turns out I do know one: my improbable friend Aisleyne, tabloid staple and former Big Brother contestant. She, preposterous as it sounds, would be my rock, my ‘core driver’, for the duration of the trip. Others would accompany us for different sections: for the first leg, through California, my friend Urmee and an ex, Cat. For the second half, two other friends: Kelly and Ben, who’d fly out to meet us when we got to Las Vegas.

  The whole thing was organised in a blur. It was only when I got to the airport that it struck me: none of these people knew each other. Most of them had never met. And they were a fairly diverse bunch. This was like throwing a bizarre mobile birthday party.

  But I wasn’t worried about that. I was worried about the flight. I’m not a good flier. I don’t flip out on board and start hammering at the exits; I just sit there nervily envisaging a death plunge for the duration of the journey. And in the days leading up to take-off, I feel doomy and bleak, like I’m on a self-imposed death row. But this time around I had some valium. I’d never taken it before, and I’m glad I did. Neck the pill and 20 minutes later: bingo. Suddenly nothing really mattered. Instead of gripping the armrest during take-off, I lay back in my seat exhibiting the sort of blissful insouciance you’d normally associate with a man who’s just been tossed off in a massage parlour.

  We arrived in San Francisco and picked up our car: an unsexy people carrier the size and shape of an industrial refrigerator. A sports convertible may sound fun, but just try driving through the desert in one: within the hour you’d be hallucinating with sunstroke so badly, you’d swerve off the road, thinking you were traversing the rings of Saturn or driving inside Joan Collins’s face.

  Still, there was no driving at all for the first two days. There’s scarcely any point taking a car into San Francisco: it’s a collection of steep hills with no parking spaces. We explored on foot. The first day was spent aimlessly wandering around in a kind of daze as we tried to acclimatise. San Francisco is the US equivalent of Brighton. It’s quaint, it’s a gay mecca, it’s by the sea, and it’s foggy and cold.

  I’d taken the precaution of pre-booking tickets for a night tour of Alcatraz (piece of piss: you buy them online and print the tickets yourself). It’s essential to book in advance, and well worth the effort, if only for the bit on the tour where you stand in a solitary confinement cell listening to a former inmate explain how he kept himself sane in the dark by ripping a button off his shirt, throwing it in the air and spending the rest of the night searching for it on his hands and knees. If you enjoy harrowing glimpses into the dark heart of man’s inhumanity to man, you’ll have a whale of a time. I certainly did.

  The next day we wandered around Haight-Ashbury. Once the birthplace of the hippy movement, it’s now a sort of cross between Shoreditch and Camden: all trendy shops and organic cafés. Since I was accompanied by girls, I spent most of my time standing impatiently in clothes stores, listening to them coo over assorted pieces of fabric.

  Still, at least I got to eat a gigantic burrito, which, as it turned out, would be my biggest meal of the entire trip. Women don’t eat really, do they? At least, this lot didn’t. All they wanted, every night, was sushi. Sushi, sushi, sushi. Before you accuse them and me of insufferable wankery, bear in mind that sushi in the States is far cheaper and better than in Britain. By the end of the trip I’d inhaled more fish than a sperm whale, but at least I hadn’t clogged my colon with 10,000 burgers and steaks.

  Then we got in the car and headed out. First stop: Santa Cruz. Satnav has transformed road trips, skimming hours from your journey time – no
t so much on the open road, but on the fiddly bits when you’re looking for a motel. Get an address in advance and you arrive effortlessly, auto-piloted all the way to their front door.

  I’ve been to Santa Cruz before. That time it was great: a sun-drenched, laid-back surfer’s town with an old-fashioned beachfront fairground complete with wooden rollercoaster. This time it was overcast and all the girls had PMS, so we didn’t hang around. The next morning we stopped in Monterey, checked out its superb aquarium (which features a mind-mangling display of artificially lit jellyfish, hovering in space like tiny galaxies), and decided to tackle the drive down Big Sur at sunset.

  Big Sur is, as any guidebook will tell you, spectacular: all winding roads, cliffs, sheer drops, and the ocean. Being a media-saturated ponce, however, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was in an upscale car commercial, albeit a gloriously beautiful one. Television spoils everything.

  Then it got dark. Big Sur takes longer than you think, and driving around the side of cliffs in the dark is Not Fun. There was, it’s fair to say, a certain amount of screaming, especially when a spooky guy in a knackered van insisted on tailing us for a full hour. He was definitely a murderer. Definitely.

  Eventually we made it to San Luis Obispo, to stay in the apparently notorious Madonna Inn: part-motel, part design nightmare. No corner of the Earth could be more gaudy. We sat at the bar. It resembled archive footage of 60s Vegas playing on a TV with the colour cranked up to hallucinogenic levels. Every surface was Pepto-Bismol pink or electric blue. A terrifying giant doll hung overhead, lolling back and forth on a mechanical swing. This is what serial killers see in their heads when they come. I recommend it wholeheartedly.