The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Recently, on holiday, I visited some ancient ruins, to shuffle around alongside some other random tourists. Everyone was being quiet and reverential, because that’s what’s expected of you by the International Thought Police. It’s quite stressful and eerie. Say you find yourself staring at an old pot. Your brain, being an incredibly sophisticated computer, immediately assesses that it’s an old pot, and that old pots are boring. It’s not going to dance, or sing heartbreaking songs of yesteryear. It won’t even rock gently in the breeze. It’s just going to sit there being a pot. Probably a broken one at that. If it was on television, they’d at least have the decency to back it with some upbeat techno while zooming in and out, and even then you’d immediately switch over. But instead, because you’ve got the misfortune of actually being there in front of it, surrounded by other people, you have to stand and look at the poxy thing for a minimum of 30 seconds before moving on to gawp at the next bit of old shit, or everyone’s going to think you’re a philistine. The same principle applies in art galleries and museums. They’re full of secretly bored people pulling falsely contemplative faces. It’s a weird mass public mime.

  Obviously I’m not saying all history and culture is rubbish, or indeed that everyone’s as shallow as me. But I strongly suspect that unless you’re a hobbyist or expert – and most of the visitors won’t be – then the average museum or gallery probably contains four or five fascinating items sprinkled among a whole lot of filler. In other words, you’ll spend 10 minutes being interested for every 50 minutes of boredom. Yet if you dare shrug or yawn, everyone’ll call you a bastard. To your face. Or at least that’s how it feels.

  All of which makes it difficult to envisage developing a deep interest in history or art, at least from a standing start. So they’re out as hobbies.

  Perhaps ‘starting a collection’ would do the trick – although I’ve never quite understood how collectors pass the time. Technology has presumably muted the thrill of the chase somewhat; thanks to eBay, I could probably assemble a championship-level thimble collection in less than a fortnight if I put my mind to it. What do you do with a collection, apart from look at it? You can clean it, I suppose. You can build a display cabinet. You can bore other people by pointing at bits of it and saying, ‘Guess how much that one’s worth, go on’. But apart from that, what’s the point? Essentially you’re just accumulating atoms. Well, whoopie doo. How pointless.

  Tell you what else I don’t get: breathing. Every day, all day. Breathing. No let-up. It’s relentless. And that’s just a load of atoms too. They go in, they come out, they go back in. Bo-ring. When you break it down, it’s as futile as collecting stamps or staring at bits of old pot.

  In which case, I might as well start nurturing it as a hobby. At least it’s one I’ll definitely stick to till the day I die.

  The King is Dead [29 June 2009]

  I was at Glastonbury when Jacko died. That’s not a factual statement, but a T-shirt slogan. The day after his death, souvenir tops with ‘I was at Glastonbury when Jacko died’ printed on them were already on sale around the site. In fact, when Jacko died, I was at home playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on a Nintendo DSi. I am 38 years old.

  Many festival-goers apparently discovered the news when DJs around the site began playing Michael Jackson records simultaneously. Music combined with word of mouth. That’s a nice way to find out. I learned it via a harsh electric beep, bringing my attention to a text message that simply proclaimed ‘Jackson’s dead’ in stark pixelated lettering. Clearly it’s the sort of information you have to mindlessly share with the rest of the herd the moment you hear about it. But first I needed confirmation. I occasionally text people to say there’s been a massive nuclear explosion in Canada, or David Cameron’s gone mad and launched his own breakfast cereal shaped like little swastikas or whatever, in the hope they’ll pass it on without checking. I didn’t want to fall for my own jape.

  I switched on the TV. Jackson was still alive on BBC News 24, where they seemed to be reporting he was in hospital following a heart attack. That wasn’t good enough, so I flicked over to Sky News, which tends to blab stuff out while the Beeb drags its feet tediously checking the facts. He was bound to be dead on Sky. But he wasn’t; he was possibly in a coma. In desperation, I turned to Fox. They would already be attempting to communicate with him via the spirit realm, surely. But they weren’t. If anything, they were being more cautious than the Beeb. Boo.

  Back to Sky, which was now reporting that a website was announcing his death. That’d do for now. I beamed a few texts out: ‘Michael Jackson apparently dead’. ‘Piss off’ came the reply. It was my own fault. I’d texted a few weeks earlier to say Huw Edwards had just vomited live on the news.

  Confirmation of his death gradually spread across the news networks, but the main terrestrial channels were still obliviously broadcasting their scheduled programmes. ITV won the newsflash race, diving straight in after Trial and Retribution. Alastair Stewart abruptly shouted ‘MICHAEL JACKSON HAS DIED’ down the lens like a man standing on the shoreline trying to get the attention of someone on the deck of a passing ferry during gale-force winds. Fair enough. Whenever I hear the phrase, ‘And now a special news report’, I automatically start scanning the room for blunt objects to club myself to death with in case they’re about to announce nuclear war. Since this wasn’t the apocalypse, but an unexpected celebrity death – sad, but not worth killing yourself with a paperweight over – Stewart was right to blurt it out as fast as he could.

  After watching the news long enough to assess that, yes, he was dead, and the circumstances all seemed rather tragic, long enough for them to play a bit of ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It’ and ‘Smooth Criminal’ and ‘Blame it on the Boogie’ and so on, reminding me that he was a bona fide musical genius, I went to bed.

  The next day he was still dead, but somehow deader than the day before. He was all over the radio and papers. The TV had clips of Thriller on heavy rotation, which seemed a tad inappropriate, what with him playing a decomposing corpse in it. If Bruce Willis died falling from a skyscraper, I doubt they’d illustrate his life story by repeatedly showing that bit from Die Hard where he ties a firehose round his waist and jumps off the building.

  Across all the networks, a million talking heads shared their thoughts and feelings on his death. They had rung everyone in the universe and invited them on the show. On This Morning, a Coronation Street actor revealed he had once had tickets for a Michael Jackson concert but couldn’t go because of the traffic. It was a sad day indeed. At 3 p.m., his death was still ‘BREAKING NEWS’ according to Sky, which has to be some kind of record. Even 9/11 didn’t ‘break’ that long.

  Next day, the news was apparently still sinking in around the globe. The BBC went live to Emily Maitlis as she stood on Hollywood Boulevard (at 1 a.m. local time) waiting for two young Latinos to perform a breakdance tribute to the King of Pop. Something went wrong with the iPod hooked up to their speakers so she had to stand there for a full two minutes, awkwardly filling in while they fiddled with the settings. Sky had flown Kay Burley out to LA too, to hear the fans’ pain and pull concerned faces. This continued into the following day. It’s probably still going on now.

  But the news is not the place to ‘celebrate’ Jackson’s music. The Glastonbury stage, the pub, the club, the office stereo, the arts documentary: that’s the place. The news should report his death, then piss off out of the way, leaving people to moonwalk and raise a toast in peace.

  If I was God, here’s what I’d do now. I’d force all the rolling networks to cover nothing but the death of Michael Jackson, 24 hours a day, for the next seven years. Glue up the studio doors and keep everyone inside, endlessly ‘reporting’ it, until they start going mad and developing their own language – not just verbal, but visual. And I’d encourage viewers to place bets on which anchor would be the first to physically end it all live on air.

  And while that was happening, I’d create some other stations t
hat covered other stuff. Current affairs type stuff. I think I’d call them ‘news channels’. They might catch on.

  ‘Crowdsourcing’ [6 July 2009]

  So there I was, a few minutes ago, all set to write about the anniversary of the moon landings when I opened the paper only to discover everyone else in the world has written about the anniversary of the moon landings. Seriously. There were articles written by Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen and women. Unending spools of text composed by Capricorns, octogenarians, sailors, bison, foetuses still in the womb, individual gas molecules, you name it. Even the odd astronaut chipped in. There hasn’t been this much talk about moonwalking since Michael Jackson died.

  Clearly I couldn’t go to the moon. Others had got there before me. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place; specifically between now and the deadline. What to do? In days of yore, I’d have been forced to use my imagination. Now I can simply crowd-source. In case you don’t know what CROWDSOURCING is, it’s a stomach-churning new media term obviously invented by a bastard made of piss. In this case, it means going online and asking passersby to suggest subjects for me to write a smattering of short pieces about, in order to fill up this page and send you away happy.

  So that’s precisely what I’ve just done: it’s like pulling random subjects from a hat, but with even less preparation. The following ‘search terms’ came from people on Twitter. I limited them to three words and no more. I’ve done my best to answer their ‘queries’, stream-of-consciousness style. I’ve done something similar on this page before, and make absolutely no apology for doing so again. Splutter all you want. Splutter till your lungs pop and run down your T-shirt. It’s my page and I’ll do what I like with it. Off we go.

  Who invented meringue? Someone bloody lucky because they got to eat the first one and come up with the name. In fact, it sounds as if they initially uttered the name during the first mouthful.

  Which would make a good blanket law: all new food inventions must be named immediately by the inventor while they’re experiencing the inaugural gobful, to give a more accurate impression of what it actually tastes and feels like. After all, ‘biscuit’ doesn’t really describe the sensation of a biscuit. In any properly run universe, a biscuit would be called an ‘umch’.

  Sky+ killed adverts: No, it changed them. Many ads now contain bold captions that you can see even on fast forward. It’s DIY subliminal blipvertising, basically. Probably causes brain haemorrhages. It’ll all come out in the wash in a few years’ time, when we’re striding about like Cybermen, reciting the URL for confused. com like a flat mantra while blood dribbles out of our ears.

  Greggs’ sausage rolls: I once mentioned them in print and the next day their PR company sent a van containing stacks of freshly baked sausage rolls to my office as a surprise gift. The following week I prominently name-dropped Blaupunkt stereos and Sony televisions. Not a sausage. HA HA. NOT A SAUSAGE HA HA. Oh sod off, you’re probably reading this column for free anyway.

  Smurf sexual reproduction: The mating rituals of Smurfs were never fully explored in any of the novelty records or cartoon serials in which they featured, because the reality of Smurf sexual activity is too sudden and ugly to lend itself easily to either amusing high-pitched songs or light-hearted animation. Their playful characteristic twinkle in the eye is quickly replaced by the dull shine of brute instinct. They go at it like foxes, jack-hammering and shrieking behind the bins for around 45 seconds, before mopping themselves clean with their distinctive hats and going their separate ways.

  God/no God?: No God. We’re all freelancers. Some of us may choose to sit in imaginary offices from time to time, pretending to receive memos from our made-up boss, or enjoying watercooler conversations about the loving/vengeful/forgiving nature of our fictional chief with our colleagues, but no matter how many hours we clock up, it doesn’t alter the fact that no one’s actually running things on the top floor. This is good news. We own the company!

  Bastard mouth ulcers: Yes, they are. The worst thing about mouth ulcers is that when you’ve got a nasty one it’s simultaneously too trivial to complain about and too annoying not to complain about. That’s why each time you open your mouth to complain about it, it hurts a little bit more, just to teach you a lesson. The CIA forced Guantánamo detainees with mouth ulcers to eat salt and vinegar crisps in order to get them to talk.

  All they could say was ‘ow’. As in ‘Ow-Qaida’, presumably. Christ, I’m spewing some gibberish today. Someone punch me in the kidneys.

  Unwise column request: Yes, OK, agreed. Maybe it was. Crowdsourcing overrated. But it was this or a continuous low hum for 850 words. Normal service resumes next week.

  National breakdown recovery [13 July 2009]

  It’s all gone wrong. Our belief in everything has been shattered by a series of shock revelations that have shaken our core to its core. You can’t move for toppling institutions. Television, the economy, the police, the House of Commons, and, most recently, the press … all revealed to be jam-packed with liars and bastards and graspers and bullies and turds.

  And we knew. We knew. But we were deep in denial, like a cuckolded partner who knows the sorry truth but tries their best to ignore it. Over the last 18 months the spotlight of truth has swung this way and that, and one institution after another was suddenly exposed as being precisely as rotten as we always thought it was. What’s that? Phone-in TV quizzes might a bit of con? The economic boom is an unsustainable fantasy? Riot police can be a little ‘handy’? MPs are greedy? The News of the World might have used underhand tactics to get a story? What next? Oxygen is flavourless? Cows stink at water polo? Children are overrated? We knew all this stuff. We just didn’t have the details.

  After all their histrionic shrieking about standards in television, it was only a matter of time before the tabloids got it in the neck. Last Monday even the Press Complaints Commission, which is generally about as much use as a Disprin canoe, finally puffed up its chest and criticised the Scottish Sunday Express for its part in the Dunblane survivors’ story scandal. You remember that, don’t you? Back in March? When the Scottish Sunday Express ran a story about survivors of the Dunblane massacre who’d just turned 18? It fearlessly investigated their Facebook profiles and discovered that some of them enjoyed going to pubs and getting off with other teenagers, then ran these startling revelations on its front page, with the headline ANNIVERSARY SHAME OF DUNBLANE SURVIVORS.

  ‘The Sunday Express can reveal how, on their social networking sites, some of them have boasted about alcoholic binges and fights,’ crowed the paper. ‘For instance, [one of them] – who was hit by a single bullet and watched in horror as his classmates died – makes rude gestures in pictures he posted on his Bebo site, and boasts of drunken nights out.’

  Nice, yeah?

  As I’m sure you recall, there was an immediate outcry, which was covered at length in all the papers. You remember their outraged front pages, right? All their cries of SICK and FOUL and VILE in huge black text? Remember that? No? Of course you don’t. Because the papers largely kept mum about the whole thing. Instead, the outrage blew up online. Bloggers kicked up a stink; 11,000 people signed a petition and delivered it to the PCC. The paper printed a mealy-mouthed apology that apologised for the general tenor of the article, while whining that they hadn’t printed anything that wasn’t publicly accessible online. All it had done was gather it up and disseminate it in the most humiliating and revolting way possible. Last Monday’s PCC ruling got next to zero coverage. Maybe if it had happened after the News of the World phone-hacking story broke it would have gathered more. Or maybe not. Either way, the spotlight of truth is, for now, pointing at the press.

  But this is just one small part of the ongoing, almighty detox of everything. There’s been such an immense purge, such an exhaustive ethical audit, no one’s come out clean. There’s muck round every arse. But if the media’s rotten and the government’s rotten and the police are rotten and the city’s rotten and the church is ro
tten – if life as we know it really is fundamentally rotten – what the hell is there left to believe in? Alton Towers? Greggs the bakers? The WI?

  The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we’ll probably discover Google’s sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There’s surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it’s suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we’re all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It’ll be set in Basingstoke and called, ‘Cuh, Typical’.

  What about each other? Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We’re probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your coworkers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven’t even got shoes, for Christ’s sake.

  As the very fabric of life breaks down around us, even language itself seems unreliable. These words don’t make sense. The vowels and consonants you’re hearing in your mind’s ear right now are being generated by mere squiggles on a page or screen. Pointless hieroglyphics. Shapes. You’re staring at shapes and hearing them in your head. When you see the word ‘trust’, can you even trust that? Why? It’s just shapes!

  Right now all our faith has poured out of the old institutions, and there’s nowhere left to put it. We need new institutions to believe in, and fast. Doesn’t matter what they’re made of. Knit them out of string, wool, anything. Quickly, quickly. Before we start worshipping insects.

  Learn, Hollywood, learn [3 August 2009]