Charlie Brooker
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| Charlie Brooker | |
| Born | Charlton Brooker March 3, 1971 |
|---|---|
| Known for | Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, Screen Burn, Nathan Barley, TVGoHome |
| Occupation | Journalist/TV critic/TV presenter |
Charlie (Charlton) Brooker (born 3 March 1971) is a British comedy writer, cartoonist, reviewer and television presenter. His humour tends to be savage and profane, with some surreal elements and a consistent satirical pessimism, stretching occasionally towards outright misanthropy (frequently saying that the world is heading towards destruction, but everyone is too consumed by things like Big Brother to care). He is particularly known for his highly acclaimed TV-review columns for The Guardian newspaper and is one of four creative directors of comedy production company Zeppotron.
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[edit] Early life and education
Raised in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell and schooled in Wallingford Brooker's early work was as a writer and cartoonist for Oink!, a comic produced in the late-1980s.
Brooker attended the University of Westminster from 1989 to 1992, studying for a Bachelors degree in Media Studies and specialising in TV & Video Production. He never graduated, however, having never written his dissertation. His final piece of creative work at university was a short film called 'A Busy Day for Bob Yippee', which featured popular stand-up comedian Ian Moore. The film heavily used colour-separation overlay and all of the backgrounds featured were cartoons drawn by Brooker.
[edit] PC Zone
Brooker wrote for PC Zone magazine in the mid-1990s. Aside from games reviews, his output included the comic strip Cybertwats and a column entitled "Poo Corner", later renamed "Sick Notes", where Brooker would insult anyone who wrote in to the magazine and offered a fifty pound prize to the "best" letter.
In February 1998, one of Brooker's one-shot cartoons caused the magazine to be pulled from the shelves of many British newsagents. The cartoon was entitled "Helmut Werstler's Cruelty Zoo" and professed to be an advert for a theme park created by a Teutonic psychologist for children to take out their violent impulses on animals rather than humans. It was accompanied by photoshopped pictures of children smashing the skulls of monkeys with hammers, jumping on a badger with a pitchfork, and chainsawing an orangutan, among other things. The original joke was supposed to be at the expense of the Tomb Raider games, known at the time for the sheer number of animals you could kill. The original title, "Lara Croft's Cruelty Zoo", was changed for copyright reasons and so the cartoon's original intended object of humour was not realised.
In early December 2006 Brooker appeared in an episode of the Scottish video games show videoGaiden in which he reviewed two PC games that the show's presenters had created. Brooker slated both "efforts" but decided that he preferred Rab Florence's game as it referred to him by name, which he states he likes due to the fact that he's "an egomaniac".
[edit] SuperKaylo
A number of Charlie's doodlings used to be available to the public on his website Superkaylo.com (mirrored here) before it vanished in 2003. This incredible body of work is drawn both from the commissions of his various patrons and possibly too many Friday nights alone with crayons.
SuperKaylo began as a paper comic, that was sold to customers at Brooker's former workplace CeX. It addition to its counter presence, Brooker would also talk mail order customers into buying issues when they would call up to place orders for games.
One aspect of the SuperKaylo site was a series of recorded phone conversations, that had original started from a commissioned featured for PC Zone on technical support phonelines. Brooker took things further than this half serious investigation, when in 1999 he called up the then editor of EDGE magazine: Jason Brookes. Pretending to be an angry father, he phoned up enraged by an advert that had appeared in a previous issues for CeX; one that Brooker himself had written and drawn.
[edit] TVGoHome and writing for TV
From 1999 to 2002 he penned the satirical TVGoHome website, a regular series of mock TV schedules published in a format similar to that of the Radio Times, consisting of a combination of savage satire and surreal humour and hosted at NTK. A print adaptation of the site was published by Fourth Estate in 2001. A TV sketch show based on the site was broadcast on UK digital station E4 the same year.
In 2000, Brooker was one of the writers of the Channel 4 show The Eleven O'Clock Show and a co-host (with Gia Milinovich) on BBC Knowledge's The Kit, a low-budget programme dedicated to gadgets and technology. In 2001, he was one of several writers on Channel 4's controversial Brass Eye special on the subject of paedophilia.
Brooker was the co-writer, along with Chris Morris, of the sitcom Nathan Barley, broadcast in 2005. The same year, he was also on the writing team of the Channel 4 sketch show Spoons, produced by Zeppotron.
In 2006 Brooker wrote and presented two series of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on BBC Four, a TV-review programme in a similar style to his Guardian Screen Burn columns.
On November 3, 2006, Brooker appeared on popular BBC current affairs news quiz Have I Got News For You, teaming with Ian Hislop against Paul Merton and Ross Noble. Brooker's team was victorious by 13 points to 0, notable because Merton's team usually wins.
Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe returned for an 'Xmas Special' as well as a 'Review of the Year 2006' in December 2006 before the start of a third series in February 2007.
[edit] Screen Burn
Brooker currently writes an irreverent TV review column entitled "Screen Burn" for The Guardian newspaper's Saturday entertainment supplement The Guide. A compilation of these columns, also called Screen Burn, has also been published. From the autumn of 2005, he wrote a regular series of columns in G2 on Fridays called "Supposing", in which he free-associated on a set of vague what-if themes. Since late October 2006 this column has been expanded into a full-page section on Mondays, including samples from TVGoHome. [1]
On October 24, 2004, he wrote a column on George W. Bush and the forthcoming 2004 US Presidential Election which concluded:
- John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. - where are you now that we need you? [2]
The remark was picked up by the Drudge Report, which ran it as a headline. The matter was immediately referred to the Secret Service in Washington DC, who allegedly contacted both Drudge and Brooker over what was regarded by some to be an incitement to murder the President. The Guardian quickly withdrew the article from its website and published and endorsed Brooker's apology. [3]
He has recently commented about the remark in the column stating:
- I know this better than most because I was at the centre of one a few years ago, when I ended a Screen Burn column by recycling a very old tasteless joke (a variant of a graffiti I first saw during the Thatcher years), and within minutes half the internet seemed convinced The Guardian was officially calling for assassination. My inbox overflowed with blood-curdling death threats, and it was all very unfunny indeed - a bit like recounting a rude joke at a dinner party, only to be told you hadn't recounted a joke at all, but molested the host's children, and suddenly everyone was punching you and you weren't going to get any pudding. I've had better weekends. Incidentally, in case the entire internet is reading, it seems prudent at this point to unequivocally state that I've never wanted to see ANYONE murdered, injured, or even lightly bruised. Not even Mac owners, and frankly they're pushing it. [4]
On the 5 February 2007, on commenting on the British “Get a Mac” advertising campaign, Charlie Brooker gave his opinion on his distaste for Mac computers, He called them, “glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults” and commenting that they are designed for people using them “scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work”. [1]
[edit] Trivia
- Brooker is a strong skeptic, calling the paranormal "bullshit". He once wrote an article entitled "On psychics, my stance is hardcore: they should die alone in windowless cells."
- He once organised a mass text-in to the UK satellite TV channel Friendly TV, after he requested that readers of his Screen Burn columns text philosophical queries and other obscure things into the channel en masse at a certain date and time (an action which said readers gleefully carried out, earning Brooker an on-air phone call from the confused Friendly TV presenter in the process). He later texted an unnamed "psychic" channel requesting advice on how to be less gullible, receiving back information about chakras as a result.
[edit] Publications
- TV Go Home, Charlie Brooker, 2001 (ISBN 1-84115-675-2)
- Unnovations, Charlie Brooker, 2002 (ISBN 1-84115-730-9)
- Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker, 2004 (ISBN 0-571-22755-4)
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Tribute to Oink! comic.
- TV Go Home
- Guardian Unlimited "Screen Burn" Archive.
- Charlie Brooker's Guardian columns.
- Review of "Screen Burn" Compilation.
- Website for Nathan Barley TV series.
- Review of Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe
- Shuffle's Cue & Ehh? with Charlie Brooker
- Paedo at the school gates AKA Brooker's Myspace
