Given that there appears to be an internet-wide consensus that this guy is Like Really Good And Junk, I know I'm gonna annoy a lot of people with the following post...but here goes.Why I Dont Get The Whole Charlie Brooker Thing
Brooker-roos dig Charlie because He Cares So Much About Stuff That Sucks, And He Totally Tells It Like It Is And Shit. The main thing Charlie really cares about is The Telly, and he made his name writing splenetic, twisted broadsides on the subject. The Brooker persona is of a man consumed by the digital age, driven to a fevered, almost hallucinatory delirium by rolling news and reality TV. He is wired, A Man On The Edge. This 'gonzo' approach to Watching Telly is at the heart of my failure to 'get' Brooker.
.1. If the 'joke' is how disproportionate his rage is in relation to the subject matter, like 'excessively passionate television criticism is inherently ridiculous because television does not matter enough to justify it', then it is a joke ultimately undermined by the fact that he has spent ten or more years writing television criticism. The parody is flawed. For the joke to work, Charlie must genuinely question the value of passionate television criticism, and if he does genuinely question the value of passionate television criticism, after a decade of producing ironically passionate television criticism I would suggest that maybe his point would be more forcibly made by just writing unironically about something he really does think is worth writing passionately about. Anything. History. Politics. That would be a brave thing to do.
.2. Alternatively, we take the gonzo shtick at face-value, and buy the idea that this guy is a dangerous insomniac loon wired 24/7 to the boob-tube. Again, I consider this to be fundamentally flawed. Gonzo is defined by interaction with the story. Watching television is defined by a lack of interaction with the story. It is the most passive, un-inolving pass time possible. You cannot be gonzo sat at home on the sofa watching telly. Or maybe you can, it's just that it's a spectacularly lame, watered-down sort of gonzo-ism, and the subject matter doesn't warrant the response, which just makes it weird. (If the gonzoness is parodic, refer back to my first point).
Either way, I find myself shrugging.
However wrongheaded I find his shtick, Brooker is undoubtedly a very talented writer. A standard of Brooker's style is the Darkly Comic Flight Of Fancy, wherein a popular mainstream television scenario is distorted into a nightmarish fantasia of disturbing sex and violence, with satirical consequences. I guess how much you dig this depends on how many times you wanna read about a fictional episode of Jeremy Kyle which ends with the host masturbating a smack-addled chimp or something, and how many times you think it's worth Brooker making the point that, "Hey, Telly Is Already Sicker And Crazier Than Anything I Come Up With Here, Right? You Think This Shit Is Weird And Twisted? You Wanna Be Offended By The Orgy Of Fucked-Up-Ness I've Imagined? If You Really Wanna Be Offended, Take A Look At The Insidious, Vacuous Amorality Endemic In The Real TV Schedules! That Shit's REALLY Fucked-Up! I'm Just Holding Up A Mirror, Buddy!"
Charlie now has the opportunity to make this point over and over again On Television, where he hosts a weekly clips show about the State Of Television. Brooker is a doughy, Mr Potato Head sorta looking dude who rocks an as-standard Kermode BBC culture critic quiff, and is an entirely charmless, almost relentlessly sneery, joy-sucking on-screen presence, whose every on-screen second undermines whatever criticism of telly he is making at that moment because he's such an unengaging presenter and he's presenting such an underwhelming show.
Anyway, my point here is just that I think Brooker's shtick is just sort of pretentious, superior and misguided. If he really wanted to piss off the Nathan Barleys of this world, he coulda just spent his time writing about how he likes Friends, or Westlife, or anything else The Alternative Mainstream, Radiohead fans, to whom Brooker is a bone fide hero, has decided isn't cool. But he couldn't do that, because his tastes are naturally pretentious and know-better. So if he has concerns about the mentality of his fan-base, if he is increasingly aware of the the depressing fact that he is essentially enjoyed by people who like Banksy and for precisely the same reasons, then he only has himself to blame. He has not been able to distance himself from that Banksy worshipping culture, and the reason he has not been able to distance himself from that culture is because there are fundamentals of his work which are sympathetic with that culture. What Brooker offers now is the hum-drummest of hum-drummery - a misanthropic old dude pointing out that a lot of mainstream popular culture is dumb and damaging, but Heroes is pretty good. Who needs it?
I'd be keen to hear what Charlie fans think of all this, 'cos I know he's a well respected writer, and I really feel like I'm missing something here.
1 comment:
Here's a thing... Brookerfanboy writing here... what I like about him is that he's not a TV critic. He's a writer who just so happens to have TV as a subject matter now and then. The only point to his work, for my money, is to get a laugh and maybe some insight that you wouldn't have had normally. 'Yeah [TV Spud X] does look like a [Insert Likeness Here].
As for unrelenting sneers and misery, that's a little wide of the mark as Brooker veers from 'This Pisses Me Off' to 'This Is Great - Stop Being A Snob About It'. There's a clear and genuine love for his subject. I mean, you wouldn't review it at all if you hated it unreservedly. If you did, you'd drive yourself mad.
I kinda look at Brooker like listening to John Lennon slag off Macca. It comes from a place of being pissed off with yourself... and in these times of people in heart-kicking jobs, calls centres scrutinising your every move on projected displays on the wall... it's easy to see why people sign up for it.
Personally speaking, I just like his jokes and his writing style and don't over-analyse it too much. There's a lot of bad writers out there. He's not one of 'em.
Mof
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