rss
- Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: Amish: The World's Squarest Teenagers24 July 2010, 12:06 am
'Rather than recoiling in horror, the Amish kids are largely perplexed by the London lads'Kids today, eh? Running through the subway necking cyan booze cola; slaying each other for their Sony PSPs; hanging round Facebook getting into trouble; eating tubfuls of meow-meow with a stolen spoon. No sense of social responsibility; no sense of nuffink. Kids today, eh?Maybe not. I suspect the image of teen life we're presented with is warped beyond all recognition. Don't know about you, but my teenage y...
- Charlie Brooker | Offensive Facebook groups such as Raoul Moat's are 10 a penny. Yet sympathy is in short supply19 July 2010, 12:04 am
Raoul Moat group is idiotic on many levels – not least for calling him a 'legend'Stupid people! Thinking of setting up a Facebook group dedicated to an inflammatory cause? Why not simply scream your views into an empty breadbin instead? All the cathartic release, none of the lingering opprobrium.One of the chief joys of the internet is the way it has liberated millions of anonymous hecklers, strikingly few of whom had hitherto risked sharing their coruscating views in public because people te...
- Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: The news17 July 2010, 12:05 am
'When it develops an obsession with a story the news turns into an idiot with an erection'Must be difficult for news teams, struggling to shed light on this immense planet peppered with stories. Where do you start? You determine which current event is most likely to affect your audience, and place that at the top of your agenda. Then you methodically explain said event, so your viewers or readers retire for the night with a clearer sense of the world, and their place in it.Unless there's a gunma...
- Charlie Brooker | Twilight's sulky vampires are less frightening than a knitted cushion12 July 2010, 12:04 am
The campaign for real monsters starts nowUntil this week the one thing I knew about the Twilight saga was that it had vampires in it, which was enough to put me off. I didn't realise it was a romantic fantasy aimed at teenage girls. Turns out it's possible to be put off something twice before you've actually seen it.The central theme, apparently, is abstinence; the heroine, Bella, is contemplating whether she wants to lose her virginity to a vampire or a werewolf. She's not allowed to try the...
- Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: Science Of The Movies10 July 2010, 12:06 am
'Nar Williams is the world's most enthusiastic nerd. I found myself curiously proud of him'I'm a geek. In 1998, while co-presenting a radio show about technology, I was loaned a Diamond Rio, one of the first commercially available MP3 players. It connected to the computer via the parallel port, had a tiny monochrome LCD display, could store 32MB worth of music (roughly an album's worth), and absolutely blew my mind. It had no moving parts! The music came from nowhere! It was clearly alien techno...
- Charlie Brooker | Just as iPhone owners were running out of apps to compare, the nice droids at Apple gifted them the iPhone 45 July 2010, 12:04 am
Even if the iPhone 4 was biting users' ears off, every iPhone 3 user will wind up buying one anywaySorry to talk about technology again, but there's really no escaping it, especially when you work in the media and spend more time gazing at screens than into the eyes of people, thank God. Furthermore, my subject is the iPhone, which demands a second apology.To sweeten the pill, I'll stop calling it the iPhone right now. Instead, for the remainder of this article, it'll be known as the Jabscre...
- Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: The Private Life Of Cows3 July 2010, 12:06 am
'If you fell in love with a cow, the lack of emotional feedback would drive you mad'Advice for anyone wanting to become a TV presenter: stop trying to become a TV presenter. Instead, become an expert in something. Anything. Ghosts. Wool. Glass-blowing. Then you've got at least a fighting chance of shoehorning your way on screen as part of a specialist programme, before eventually becoming "the face of" ghosts or wool or glass-blowing.Forget cookery, though. It's oversubscribed. Throw a rock at a...
- Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: Inside The Aryan Brotherhood26 June 2010, 12:06 am
'If only there was some sort of club I could join to celebrate my whiteness, while masturbating over paintings of Hitler'Man, I love being white. It's great. I love my fine white skin, my stretchy alabaster bodysuit. I wear it every day. Sometimes I'll be on my way to the shops, and I'll catch sight of my own pallid forearms and I can't help it; I stop dead in the street, stroking them and weeping for joy. They're so damned pearly. Hooray for whitehood!Could do without the sunburn, mind. It's ha...
- Charlie Brooker | Why talk to a computer? Surely talking to a human is traumatic enough?20 June 2010, 12:05 am
The technology behind Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox should seem impossibly magical, but I see only drawbacksAbout 10 minutes into the 21st century it became a cliche to complain that all those old Hollywood dreams of spending the year 2000 zipping about on jetpacks and playing moon golf with robots were wild works of fiction after all. Now, 10 years on, the present is actually overtaking those movies. And it needn't have bothered.Everyone remembers how astounded they were by the Nintendo Wii, rig...
- Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: Big Brother19 June 2010, 12:06 am
'In Big Brother, Shabby looks like the Artful Dodger played by an upper-class lesbian cat'They say the 60s died when the Manson Family butchered Sharon Tate and company, instantly making all the hippy folk ballads about peace and love popular at the time seem more than a little naive, and calling the mind-expanding benefits of LSD into question. Dropping acid might seem cute when you're sitting around staring at multicoloured swirls, but it's not so dandy when it also convinces you to hack rando...
