The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  On the one hand, you had Obama (Will Smith in admittedly impressive makeup, although the ears never really convinced). He was practically walking on water. No one’s that nice. And pitched against him, the Republican campaign, which was so nakedly horrible it could only have been orchestrated by Skeletor. Nudge-wink comments about ‘the real America’, underhand attempts to link Obama with terrorism, automated robo-calls whispering desperate fibs into the ears of voters … if Obama’s grandmother had died while he was at her bedside in Hawaii, they’d have erected billboards claiming he couldn’t be trusted around white women. Jesus, guys, why not just change your name to the Bastard Party and march around in long black capes? Vote for us, we’re openly despicable.

  The scriptwriters clearly decided to balance the nastiness by introducing some satirical comic relief in the form of Sarah Palin, but she was scarcely plausible either. And they never really nailed her story arc, instead being content to have her wandering through every scene she was in, screeching inept banalities like a rightwing version of Phoebe from Friends. And what was with the whole Joe the Plumber sub-plot? I mean, c’mon, they invited him on tour and everything. As if. In the real world, no one would’ve bought that for a second. That’s precisely the sort of thing that breaks the all-important suspension of disbelief. It didn’t help that the guy they cast to play him, Michael Chiklis, is instantly recognisable from his leading role as the corrupt, brutal cop Vic Mackey in the hit TV series The Shield.

  And the ending was far too saccharine. Dancing in the streets? Tears of joy around the globe? Oh please. I give it four out of 10. A rental at best.

  On Tatler [17 November 2008]

  One drawback – or possibly advantage – of being known as an easily riled automated curmudgeon is that people tend to hurl recommendations my way. ‘Here, look at this,’ they chortle, holding something irritating under my nose. ‘You’ll hate it.’

  Usually the item in question is merely a bit disappointing. But the other day someone urged me to buy the latest copy of Tatler and read the Little Black Book section. ‘It’s absolutely unbelievable,’ they said. I was intrigued enough to pop to the newsagents and cough up my £3.80. Even though I don’t think I’ve ever read an edition of Tatler in my life, I had a general sense that being seen with it in public was a bad idea, so I turned the magazine around, hiding the cover against my chest as I left so no one could see what I was carrying. Better to let the passersby assume I’m carrying a porn mag, I figured – although the whopping great advert for Cartier diamond jewellery on the back probably gave the game away. I don’t think they advertise in Barely Legal.

  Once I was safely out of sight, I gingerly opened the magazine and started reading. Three seconds later, I was furious. Before getting to the Little Black Book section, I’d alighted on an article about a ‘sexy Holland Park billionairess and her fabulous life’. She was called Goga Ashkenazi, and she was pictured swathed in fur, diamonds dripping pendulously from her ears like shimmering globules of semen in a bukkake movie. She was clutching a miniature dog that looked like it’d been peeled; one of those scrawny upholstered canine skeleton-creatures with the facial tics of a tiny frightened bird. Given the alarming way these microdogs pant 5,000 times a second, I always think they’re about to die, that their pea-sized heart might suddenly burst like a popcorn kernel inside that rodenty little ribcage. That worries me.

  But Goga wasn’t worried. She was smiling. As well she might. If she wanted, she could buy a million dogs and spend a month hurling them into a threshing machine for chuckles. According to the article, she’s so rich she ‘summons private jets like most people hail cabs’, and once lost a ‘£500,000 piece of wrist candy’, shrugged, and simply put on another one. It describes her as ‘a sort of 21stcentury Holly Golightly’, which seems a bit harsh. Holly Golightly was a call girl. Ashkenazi is an oligarch with her own goldmine. And maybe she’s lovely, but the article was so fawningly, nauseatingly dazzled by how much money she’s got, it’d be impossible for any sane human being reading it not to thoroughly despise her by the end.

  Shaken, I turned to the Little Black Book section, which turned out to be an authoritative A–Z of overprivileged arseholes (most of them still in their early 20s), plus the occasional celeb, rated and compiled by the single biggest group of wankers in the universe.

  You’re supposed to want to sleep with these people, and the text attempts to explain why. It’s the ultimate in self-celebratory nothingness, 2,000 times worse than the worst ever article in Heat magazine. It includes five lords, six ladies, four princes, five princesses, two viscounts, three earls, a marquess, and 16 tittering poshos whose names are prefixed with the phrase ‘The Hon’ (which, I’ve just discovered, means they’re the son or daughter of a viscount or baron). Names like Cressida, Archie, Guy, Blaise and Freddie feature heavily. How annoying is it? Put it this way: James Blunt is also on the list, and he’s the least objectionable person there.

  Each entry takes the form of a chortling mini-biog guaranteed to make you want to punch the person it describes flat in the face. Thus, we learn that ‘Jakie Warren’ is ‘the heart-throb who lives in the coolest house in Edinburgh and has the initials of all his best friends tattooed on his thigh. You can touch them but he’ll make you buy shares in the racing syndicate he co-owns with Ed Sackville … Good in bed, we hear.’

  Or consider ‘The Hon Wenty Beaumont’: ‘The growl, the growl – girls go weak for the growl … Utterly divine Christie’s kid who enjoys nothing more than playing Pass the Pig during weekends at the family estate in Northumberland or in Saint-Tropez.’

  In other words, the only thing these waddling skinbags have going for them is unrestricted access to a vast and unwarranted fortune. Ignore the bank balances and it reads like a list of the most boring, horrible cunts in Britain.

  As an additional poke in the ribs, each entry is accompanied by a tiny photograph, so you can squint into the eyes of the cosseted stranger you’ve suddenly decided to hate. The girls are technically pretty in a uniform, Sloaney kind of way, while the men are more varied, falling into three main categories: dull preening James Blunt types, dull preening indie types, and simpering ruddy-cheeked oafs who look like they’re about to pull a pair of underpants over their head and run around snorting like a hog in a bid to impress a drunk debutante.

  In summary, it’s an entire alternate dimension of shit, a galaxy of eye-stinging fart gas, compressed into a few glossy pages. It will have you alternating between rage, jealousy, bewilderment and distress, before dumping you in a bottomless slough of despond. Buy a copy. No, don’t. Stand in a shop flipping through the pages, deliberately fraying each corner as you go. Drink it in. Feel your impotent anger levels peaking. The headrush is good for you. Try it. You’ll hate it. Thanks for the recommendation. I’m off for a cry.

  Hope it’s chips, it’s chips [24 November 2008]

  It’s great being a shambles. Just peachy. Rather than gliding through a staid, predictable life full of contentment and friendship, you lurch from one crisis point to the next, constantly challenged by your own ineptitude. One day I’m going to write a 24-style thriller in which the main character is under constant threat, not from terrorism, but himself. A typical episode would open with him being woken from oversleeping by having his house repossessed because he’s forgotten to fill out some forms. It might sound dull at the moment but trust me – once we’ve layered a pulsing soundtrack over the top you’ll need to sprout fingernails at an unnatural rate to keep up with the amount you’re chewing off.

  I practise incompetence at an Olympian level. It recently took me 21 days to get round to replacing the lightbulbs in my kitchen, which for several weeks had been blowing one-by-one until finally the room was plunged into darkness. For 21 days I had to feel my way into the room like a blind man, then prop open the fridge door in order to have enough light to be able to see. Your eyes get used to it after a while. So does your brain. It became a routine. Soon opening the fridge felt as n
atural as flipping the light switch. Standing there, chopping onions in the artificial gloaming, all felt well with the world. It took an incident with a broken glass on the floor and a shoeless foot to nudge me in the direction of the nearest lightbulb stockist, and even then I instinctively used the fridge as an impromptu lamp for another two days before re-acclimatising myself to the concept of ceiling-based light sources.

  Adding to the confusion, I’m tired. Strike that – exhausted. Working on a TV show might look like a parade of easy-going giggles from the outside, but on the inside it’s an endless treadmill that eats time like a sperm whale eats plankton: in immense, cavernous gulps. Yesterday I rose at 9 a.m. after three hours’ sleep, then stayed in the edit until 6 a.m. this morning. At 7 a.m. I arrived home and tried to sleep, in the knowledge that I was supposed to be up in about two hours’ time. Knowing the builders next door would start clanging scaffolding poles around like an open-air tribute to the musical Stomp at about 8 a.m., I found some wax earplugs and wedged one in each lughole. But there was another problem. Light was streaming through the windows. I searched for an eye mask and failed. But while scavenging through the bottom of an old drawer, I found a pair of black knickers belonging to an ex-girlfriend. That would have to do. I pulled them over my head like a Mexican wrestler until they covered my eyes, and lay down. I probably looked quite dashing.

  I tried to sleep. But exhaustion is a funny thing. It sends the brain haywire. Deaf and blind, I lay there with the old Birds Eye Steakhouse Grill song looping endlessly in my head. Hope it’s chips, it’s chips. We hope it’s chips, it’s chips.

  In between verses I worried that my boiler might malfunction and kill me with carbon monoxide fumes if I fell asleep. I’m not one for keeping up appearances, but even I blanched at the thought of my neighbours seeing my blue, icy cadaver being hauled out on a stretcher with a pair of knickers on its head. That’s what they’d remember me for. The fear of this kept me awake until some time around 8.30 a.m., when my bladder complained that it needed to go to the toilet. I got up, but in my confusion – hope it’s chips, it’s chips – I attempted to make my way downstairs to the loo without taking the pants off my head. I walked into a door. Now I was performing slapstick for the benefit of no one.

  I pulled them up just above my eyes, headed downstairs and drained myself. On the way out of the bathroom I caught sight of myself in the mirror, wearing the knickers like a skullcap. The other thing about exhaustion is that it encourages hysteria. I laughed, then saw myself laughing, and laughed some more. I returned to bed, still giggling, and lay there in the dark with the singing Birds Eye workmen driving their van around in my mind. Hope it’s chips, it’s chips. We hope it’s chips, it’s chips. I think I even said that aloud at one point. For a moment, I was genuinely insane. At some point I lost consciousness.

  I overslept of course, and awoke at 1.30 p.m. in a state of some confusion, stumbled downstairs and opened the fridge door so I could see the kettle – unnecessary, what with the daylight and all. I drank a coffee, phoned the Guardian, and said I was going to start writing. Then I typed the first sentence of this column. Then I wrote the rest. And then you read it. This proves I can, at least, maintain a veneer of efficiency amid the self-inflicted mundane chaos of my life, even if in doing so I end up slightly wasting your time. Other columnists write of glamorous parties and faraway lands, of politics, or romance, despair and elation and the unending mysteries of the human condition. On this page you find nothing but the fevered hope that it’s chips, it’s chips, and for that I apologise.

  It’s not so great being a shambles. But it’s the only life I know.

  Chain Gang Betties [1 December 2008]

  Petty criminals of Britain! Stop breaking into that shop for a moment and bloody well pay attention. As of today, those of you doing community service are required to wear a new uniform. It’s a high-visibility orange bib with the words COMMUNITY PAYBACK printed across the back in bold black type. How’d you like them apples? Not so carefree now, are we? Consider yourselves well and truly shamed.

  That’s right. Community Payback bibs. It might sound stupid, but this is Jack Straw’s idea and he wants it taken very seriously indeed, which is why he’s been pictured in the Daily Mirror holding one of the new bibs aloft while maintaining a preposterously solemn expression on his fizzog, staring straight through the lens like either (a) a sinister stage magician trying to stop the cameraman’s heart or (b) Droopy preparing to knock on the door of a close friend and inform them of the death of a beloved relative. Pick your favourite of those two similes and apply it to his face. That’s what he’s done. He’s thought, ‘Jesus, this is ludicrous; better look like I mean business and see if I can front it out,’ and as usual he’s pulled it off with quite brilliant aplomb. No one does a face-of-death quite like Straw. Despite possessing an inherently comic, kindly and rubbery face, which in any sane world would make him a shoo-in for the role of a goonish neighbourhood postman doing pratfalls in a broad sitcom, he’s learned to overcome this affliction and can now resemble utterly authentic doom incarnate whenever the situation demands it. Look at this latest snap and the temperature drops in the room. You’d think he’d been born without laugh muscles and raised in a civilisation that never invented the smile. Bravo.

  Pity about the bib, though. For one thing, even though it’s clearly designed to demean the rapscallion wearing it, the government’s ‘respect tsar’, whose real name is Louise Casey, says it isn’t. ‘The point of the orange jackets is not to humiliate people but to make the punishment visible,’ she claims.

  You’ve got to respect her opinion, mainly because she’s the respect tsar so she’ll definitely notice if you don’t – but really, that line of argument isn’t fooling anyone. It’s a bib, for Christ’s sake. And besides, if ‘visibility’ is key, she’s missed a few tricks. In fact the whole project is far too timid. Just be honest, announce you’re going all-out to humiliate, demean and belittle, and we, the nation, will embrace it. Ignore the carpers. They’ll never like it anyway. So don’t wuss out. Go for broke.

  Start by changing the wording. ‘Community payback’ is rubbish. ‘Community’ is pure British wonk-speak – the simpering language of milquetoasts – while the embarrassing yee-haw showboating of ‘payback’ must have been included in a half-arsed attempt to impress the tabloids. Put the two words together to make ‘community payback’ and the result just sounds lame, like the mistranslated overseas title of a below-par Schwarzenegger action movie in which he launches an all-out assault on a hardened gang of litter louts holed up in Chertsey.

  And how are we, the snickering public, supposed to refer to these recidivist saps when we spot them emptying the poop bins anyway? Do we call them ‘paybackers’ or ‘CPs’, or what? If you’re going to label them, at least come up with something populist. Something we can use. How about ‘SCUM SLAVE’? Or ‘CHAIN GANG BETTY’? That last one would definitely catch on. I might start shouting it at them in the street tomorrow. So put that on the back of the jacket. And, bearing your stated aim of ‘visibility’ in mind, don’t just stop at bold capital letters: the typeface should physically light up, like a Vegas casino hoarding. Actually, the whole jacket should light up. And it shouldn’t be a jacket. It should a fluorescent green leotard with a transparent panel located over the testicles, so you can see them squashed up against the window like depressed balding commuters and, above it, a small flashing sign with the words ‘HA HA LOOK AT MY HILARIOUS BALLS’ accompanied by an arrow pointing at them, picked out in multicoloured LEDs visible from half a mile away. Blind pedestrians who wouldn’t otherwise get to enjoy the spectacle should be catered for too, thanks to a looped iPod soundtrack consisting of assorted celebrities describing precisely how ridiculous the miscreant’s balls look, backed with comedy tuba music blasting from a heavy iron tannoy mounted on the offender’s head.

  That’s a more effective deterrent than a little orange bib. And perhaps Jack Straw could model one at the pres
s launch, doing one of his trademark sober expressions. He could probably even pull a serious face with his balls, so they looked suitably noble and statesmanlike even while flattened against the transparent pane, thereby underlining the scheme’s commitment to visibility and aversion to humiliation. If anyone can do it, he can.

  The day Santa died [8 December 2008]

  ‘Santa’s gone home. Santa’s fucking dead.’

  As theme park slogans go, it’s a winner. Sadly, it wasn’t the official tagline for Lapland New Forest, the temporary Christmas attraction that was forced to close last week after furious visitors demanded their money back. Instead, the ‘Santa’ line was shouted at a Sun reporter and a ‘handful of queuing families’ by a member of staff disconsolately closing the gates for the last time.

  Lapland New Forest sounds like a barrel of laughs. The publicity material promised a glorious winter wonderland replete with animal attractions, an ice rink, log cabins, a nativity scene, a snowy ‘tunnel of light’, and, of course, Santa’s grotto. But according to incensed visitors, it turned out to be ‘little more than a mud-covered car park’. They complained that the generator for the ice rink had malfunctioned, turning it into a pool of water, the ‘tunnel of light’ was actually a few fairy lights dangling from trees covered in artificial snow, the nativity was an amateurish billboard, the log cabins were green sheds, and the animal attraction was a handful of reindeer and several ‘thin-looking huskies chained up in a pen’. To keep the kids happy, there was apparently a four-hour queue for Santa’s grotto, at the end of which families were charged £10 for a photo with the man himself. Oh, and refreshments weren’t cheap either. Five drinks and a baguette would set you back £17.