The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Chilli and Chocolate: Excreted Battery Acid, more like. A boring lunatic with halitosis explains the smell of charred wood to your tastebuds. It’s vaguely like the smell you get when you bleed a radiator, but sharper, more disgusting, and worryingly ‘human’. They should’ve called it ‘Dirty Protest’ instead.

  So there you have it. They’re uniformly horrible. Worst of all, none are a patch on, say, standard Salt and Vinegar, which has been around since the Cro-Magnon era. Obviously, they should’ve chosen more ambitiously. Since the squirrel flavour doesn’t actually contain any squirrel, they could unleash other tastes you’re vaguely curious about, but would never actually eat, like Cyanide and Lemon, or The Late Marilyn Monroe. If they’d bitten the bullet and genuinely released a flavour called Dirty Protest, people would queue round the block to try it, provided the packet carried a prominent guarantee that it was merely a simulation, not the genuine article. (For the record, according to The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love [ISBN 0 349 10676 2], ‘faeces supposedly has a charred or sour flavour but otherwise tastes similar to whatever was consumed.’ So now you know.)

  Or maybe they could’ve worked on flavours that evoked a time and mood instead of mimicking an existing substance. Who could resist Wartime Romance (cigarettes, lipstick, and railway station)? Or Studio 54 (cocaine, sweat, and Bianca Jagger)? Even Medieval Times (mud, gibbet and wet tunic) would be worth trying.

  But no. They didn’t dare to dream. So in summary: don’t vote for any of them. Spoil your ballot paper instead. Because that’s what they’ve done to these innocent potatoes. The bastards. The absolute unconscionable bastards.

  – Builder’s Breakfast eventually won, proving once again that there is no god.

  Show us your bum for ten pence [23 February 2009]

  Feeling helpless? Hollow? Futile and joyless? Crushed? Downtrodden? Just plain lousy? I could go on, but the list would only depress you. Depressed? Of course you are. There’s an eerie calm in the air as we glide through what feels like a brief ‘phoney war’ period before the CREDIT CRUNCH (which from now on, according to official guidelines, must be capitalised each time it appears in print, just to make it even more frightening) … before the CREDIT CRUNCH starts to bite for real and your local park becomes a shantytown filled with dog-faced people in rags prostituting themselves for a thimbleful of water.

  Still, there’s no point in despairing. You may feel scared and vulnerable right now, but all that can be turned around in an instant. You have the power within you! Or rather, slightly outside you! I’m talking about your skin. Your skin isn’t simply a handy pliable coating that stops your liver plopping on to the floor like a fat red salmon: it’s a magic cloak of empowerment. I’ve learned this from television: all you have to do is whip your clothes off, show everyone your bum for a few minutes and, bingo, you’re empowered. Trinny and Susannah pioneered the idea, encouraging members of the public to pose in front of full-length mirrors in their underwear as part of the makeover process, but it wasn’t until Gok Wan began saving women from certain death each week, by making them strip completely naked before projecting their photo up the side of a building, that the idea really took off.

  Since then we’ve had a BBC3 show called, simply, Naked, in which each week people from various professions – beauticians one week, nurses the next – are picked apart by psychologists and ‘image consultants’ for several days, as though they’re being inducted into a cult. The show consists of ‘a series of challenges designed to help their self-esteem at work and at home’ – smashing things up with sledgehammers, primal screaming, bungee jumping and so on – culminating in a full-frontal strip show. It’s terribly moving, of course. Plenty of tears and inspiring music. And genitals. Because let’s face it, there’s no better way to bolster someone’s confidence than taking a good long stare at their genitals.

  Now Sky have gone one better by announcing a show called Credit Crunch Monty (sorry, CREDIT CRUNCH Monty) in which a group of jobless men will be ‘laid bare in every sense as they reveal their background stories and their emotional journeys are captured – from overcoming the setback of unemployment to building up the confidence to perform a striptease’, i.e. a grand televised performance where you’ll presumably get to see their dicks and balls jiggling about, all empowered and that. Excitingly, it’s also being broadcast in HD, so if you’re still rich enough to afford a sparkly top-of-the-range TV you might just be able to make out the individual hairs bristling on their cringing scrota, thereby empowering them further.

  It’s a refreshing measure of just how far our society has come. If, during the Great Depression, your great-grandfather had scraped together a living by running a stall at the local docks where he pulled down his trousers and manipulated his testicles in amusing ways while passersby laughed and tossed pennies at him, he’d probably have come away feeling too ashamed to talk about it, let alone give his consent to have the performance filmed for posterity. Whereas now public nudity is feelgood, confidence-boosting fun for all concerned. Provided it’s caught on tape. And backed with uplifting indie rock. And prominently displayed in the onscreen listings with a hooky word in the title, like NUDE or NAKED or STRIP or CLICK HERE FOR BUMS.

  I don’t mean to imply, incidentally, that absolutely everyone who takes their clothes off for a living is desperate, miserable or exploited. That’s the cliché, but really – can you name a profession in which there aren’t people who are desperate, miserable or exploited? Which would you rather do? Strip for a camera now and then, or work full-time in an office sitting beside a perspiring Coldplay fan who spends each lunchtime getting bits of moist cheese-and-onion crisp in his goatee and chortling over his Facebook messages?

  Anyway, these hapless one-night-only TV strippers aren’t even making a career out of burlesque performance – they’ve merely been cajoled into doing it in the name of spiritual fulfilment. There’s presumably no substantial or protracted financial reward involved, so unless they get a kick out of sheer physical exhibitionism, they’d be well advised to keep their pants on until they’re offered a share of the proceeds.

  Actually, I tell you what would be empowering: they could sell advertising space on their genitals. Get ‘CONFUSED. COM’ painted down the length of their dickers and the Iceland logo shaved into their pubes. I, for one, would stand and applaud.

  Bring on the summer of rage [2 March 2009]

  Any abusive relationship tends to end with a long, slow phase of mounting disappointment followed by a sudden, irreversible snapping point. The descent to rock bottom may take years but when you get there, the force of impact still shocks, and it’s precisely this shock that gives you the strength to walk away. Take smoking, for instance. You can light up for years, hating yourself and the habit a little bit more with each accumulated puff, yet remain hopelessly locked in nicotine’s pointless embrace, until one day you find yourself scrabbling through the kitchen bin, picking potato peelings off a dog end because it’s 11 p.m. and the shops are closed and GOD YOU NEED A FAG … when you catch sight of your sorry junkie-arsed reflection in the shiny bin lid and undergo an epiphany of self-disgust, vowing to quit there and then.

  I bring this up because I suspect that across the country, people are undergoing similar epiphanies every day. Not about cigarettes, but politicians. My personal snapping point was reached last week, at the precise moment Jack Straw announced the government was vetoing the Information Tribunal’s order for the release of cabinet minutes relating to that whole invasion-of-Iraq thing. Come on, you remember Iraq: that little foreign policy blip millions of us protested against to absolutely zero avail, because Straw and his pals figured they knew best, even though it turned out they didn’t and – oops! – hundreds of thousands of lives were lost as a result. Remember the footage of that screaming little boy with his limbs blown off? Maybe not. Maybe you felt a shiver of guilt when you saw that; guilt that you hadn’t personally done enough to prevent it; should’ve shouted louder,
marched further. Or maybe it stunned you into numbness. Because what was the point in protesting any more? These people do what they want.

  They do what they want, these people, and you and I are cut out of the conversation. I’m sure they’re dimly aware we still exist. They must spot us occasionally, through the window, jumping up and down in the cold with our funny placards … although come to think of it, they can’t even see us through the window, since they banned peaceful protest within a mile of Parliament.

  Instead they pick us up on a monitor, courtesy of one of the 15 billion CCTV cameras that scrutinise our every move in the name of security. On the screen you’re nothing but a tiny monochrome blob; two-dimensional and faceless. And that’s just how they like it.

  Straw and co blocked the release of the minutes, claiming that to actually let us know what was going on would set a dangerous precedent that would harm good government. Ministers wouldn’t speak frankly at cabinet meetings if they felt their discussions would be subjected to the sort of scrutiny that, say, our every waking move is. In other words, they’d be more worried about the press coverage they’d get than the strength of their arguments.

  Well, boo hoo. Surely craven pussies like that shouldn’t be governing anyway?

  Having pissed in the public’s face, Straw went on to shake the final drips down its nose, writing a defence of the government’s civil liberties record in this paper in which he claimed ‘talk of Britain sliding into a police state is daft scaremongering, but even were it true there is a mechanism to prevent it – democratic elections … People have the power to vote out administrations which they believe are heavy-handed.’

  Thanks, Jacksy – can I call you Jacksy? – but who the hell are we supposed to vote in? Despite a bit of grumbling, the Tories supported the veto. Because they wouldn’t want cabinet minutes published either.

  It’s all over. The politicians have finally shut us out of their game for good and we have nowhere left to turn. We’re not part of their world any more. We don’t even speak the same language. We’re the ants in their garden. The bacteria in their stools. They have nothing but contempt for us. They snivel and lie and duck questions on torture – on torture, for Christ’s sake – while demanding we respect their authority. They monitor our every belch and fart, and insist it’s all for our own good.

  Straw wrote, ‘If people were angels there would be no need for government … But sadly people are not all angels.’ That rather makes it sound as though he believes politicians aren’t mere people. Maybe they’re the gods of Olympus. Maybe that’s why they’re in charge.

  Thing is, they could get away with this bullshit while times were good, while people were comfortable enough to ignore what was happening; when people were focusing on plasma TVs and iPods and celebrity gossip instead of what the politicians were doing – not because they’re stupid, but because they know a closed shop when they see one. But now it looks as if those times are at an end, and more and more of us are pulling the dreampipes from the back of our skulls, undergoing a negative epiphany; blinking into the cold light of day.

  Consequently the police are preparing for a ‘summer of rage’. To the powers that be, that probably just means more tiny monochrome blobs jumping up and down on the long-distance monitor for their amusement. Should it turn out to be more visceral than that, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

  The book(s) I haven’t read [9 March 2009]

  Congratulations on having read this far. Reading anything whatsoever is apparently a dying art. According to a survey released last week to help promote World Book Day, 65% of respondents admitted lying about which novels they’d read in a desperate bid to impress people. The news was accompanied by a top 10 rundown of the least-read and most-lied-about books. Top of the list: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Presumably people don’t feel the need to actually read it because they can see the film adaptation taking place all around them every day, yeah? Yeah. In your FACE, Jack Straw.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four is the only entry on the list I have actually read. The others include War and Peace, Ulysses, and the Bible. Apparently people lie about having read all these books because they think it’ll make them appear sexier. Which begs the question: who the hell earnestly believes that claiming to have read the Bible from beginning to end is going to get them laid? Mention your love of the New Testament on a date and you might as well stick a fork in your face and start screaming about ghosts. Potential partners who genuinely adore reading the Bible on a daily basis traditionally don’t mention it until later, when they’ve invited you back to their place to unexpectedly nailgun your hand to the wall while loudly reciting a selection of their favourite parables from memory.

  Still, the most tragic aspect of the survey is the sheer number of people who lie about the same things. If you assume the respondents are at least vaguely representative of the nation as a whole, almost half of us have pretended to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which means when you’re lying about it to impress someone, there’s a very good chance they haven’t read it either. Both of you are hiding your true selves in order to avoid recrimination, which, ironically enough, is precisely what the citizens in Nineteen Eighty-Four wind up doing, not that you’d know. My favourite sequence in the book, incidentally, is the bit where the monkey drives the car.

  Of course, whenever two people meet, literary fibs are just the tip of the iceberg. As potential partners initially circle one another, a full 98% of their conversation consists of out-and-out falsehood. The remaining 26% is wild exaggeration. It’s an unnecessary game of bluff in which you both claim to be into the same bands, hold the same political viewpoints, harbour the same dark secrets and so on. Assuming it works and the pair of you get together, the rest of the relationship consists of either (a) both of you slowly discovering what the other one’s actually like, or (b) one of you grimly maintaining the fiction that, hey, you’re really into Bruce Springsteen, fell-walking or sex parties too, until the facade finally crumbles or you die of sheer despair.

  The secret, then, is simply to let go: to not give a toss about what anyone else wants or likes or thinks in the first place. That way you won’t paint yourself into a corner trying to impress them. In fact, the best strategy of all would be to actively put them off: confess to all your worst traits and guiltiest pleasures at the earliest opportunity. Tell them you don’t know about that James Joop and his Ulyssesso pop-up book thingy, but you reckon James Herbert’s Nazi-zombie thriller ’48 is one of the most exciting books you’ve ever read (which it is, actually). Not only will this make them feel cleverer than you, and therefore good about themselves – which, let’s face it, is a nice present to give to anyone on this cold and awful planet – you’ll have set the bar so low there’ll be no need to impress them later by packing Midnight’s Children (number seven on the list) in your carry-on luggage when you eventually zoom off on honeymoon together. Instead you can spend the flight playing Super Mario Shoe Factory on your Nintendo DS. Everyone’s happy.

  The other irony is that while people lie about having read highbrow novels in order to impress each other, a massive percentage of highbrow novels aren’t worth reading anyway because the authors are too busy trying to impress the reader (who, we now know, probably hasn’t bothered turning up). That’s why so many contemporary novels seem to largely consist of a thinly veiled version of the author discussing politics and art and quantum theory over a carefully selected bottle of wine with the devastatingly beautiful mixed-race wife of an impotent international statesman and/or gangster (delete where applicable) before whisking her off to a swish hotel room to have expert animal sex with her all weekend until a pigeon symbolising the unions or something crashes into the window and blah blah blah blah BLAH. I mean, really, who cares? Mr Tickle had 20 times the raw entertainment value – and it came with pictures – so if you can’t beat that, don’t bother.

  In summary: reading is more trouble than it’s worth, and lying about reading is even mor
e pointless. Far better to glance at the cover and skip to the end every time. In fact, if you’d done that with this article, you could’ve got on with your day a bit quicker without listening to me burble on. Sorry about that. Now go away.

  Super Mundanity World [16 March 2009]

  Stop picking your backside, you disgusting little pauper; you vile, impoverished speck with your moth-eaten trousers and your brittle, worn-out hair; stop floundering in your own muck for a moment to gawp in humble, awed astonishment at me and my jetset lifestyle.

  Last week, I spent the evening at a glittering Bafta awards ceremony in London’s glamorous West End. On the face of it, this sounds like precisely the sort of thing your average Heat reader would willingly slice a thumb off (then fry it and eat it) to attend. Except it wasn’t honouring movies or soaps or the Top 100 Baked Bean-Coloured Wags or anything like that. It was celebrating the videogames industry. At which point, your average Heat reader probably shrugs and turns the page. It might as well be celebrating the UK’s foremost curtain rod manufacturers, for all they care.

  The glitzy lifestyle mags don’t cover the games industry, because there aren’t any identifiable personalities to shake a narrative stick at. Sonic the Hedgehog and Lara Croft are never going to go through heartbreak hell together. The Tetris blocks don’t get drunk and punch photographers. The most compelling character in any videogame is you, the player. And apart from you, who ultimately gives a toss about you anyway? Even God doesn’t care. That’s why he gave you that nose.

  The resulting lack of mainstream coverage means that, despite being about 10,000 times more successful than the British film and TV industries combined, the British videogames industry continually balances a pathological inferiority complex with a wounded sense of pride. Quite why it still wants validation from these older, fading forms of media is a mystery. It’s like a powerful young warrior disgruntled at being ignored by an elderly and irrelevant dying king.