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Charlie Brooker

Charlton "Charlie" Brooker (born 3 March 1971) is a satirist, TV critic, TV presenter and columnist for the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Screenwipe

  • Hello, I'm Charlie Brooker and you're watching Screenwipe, a programme all about television.
    • Introductory message on every episode of Screenwipe, usually said in an odd way (for example, with Brooker slapping himself as he says it).

  • Well, babies are notoriously foul-mouthed. [shot of Charlie pointing at a doll] This one just called Derek a prick!
    • Screenwipe S2E2
    • On Derek Ogilvy, the "Baby Mind Reader", apparently reading a baby's mind and finding it is swearing

  • Oh good, this is hardly ever on.
    • Screenwipe S2E1
    • While watching a Frosties advert, famous for being shown almost constantly

  • While aspirational adverts serve a purpose, i.e. selling you stuff, aspirational programming doesn't. It just feeds the void, the sense of lack, the gulf between them and you. It stokes it up and up and up like a low self-esteem engine until finally where can you turn for a solution...[pointing to a homeless alcoholic (really an actor)] where d'ya think?...The solution being change yourself. Yeah! Toss your wardrobe out, wear the same uniform as the rest of us! Or look how smouldering and happy Nigella is, maybe cookery'll save you. Or saw your face off and get it remade properly! Yeah, maybe that'll help, maybe then you'll fit in! Surely it's a rum state of affairs when TV actively encourages you to hack yourself apart in the name of self-worth! I mean, hacking up a stranger, that I can understand, but this is just sick!"

  • Now, let's get something straight, ok, I love Doctor Who. It somehow bypasses the cynical, nasty, gnarled bit of my brain completely, and plugs straight into my gurgling overgrown child. I love the fact that it's a big populist drama driven by ideas. Plus, it scares kids shitless, and I hate kids, so the longer they spend cowering in terror, the better.
  • What is the point of getting an orchestra to record a great version of the Doctor Who theme tune, and then getting someone in to jabber all over the top of it? Talk about putting the c*** into continuity!
    • On the revived series of Doctor Who

  • Balls to aspiration, it's a tossers mirage.
    • Screenwipe S2E1
    • Discussing "aspirational" programming and its ill effects

  • "Ann Widdecombe versus prostitution" sounds like the world's ultimate Hobson's choice.

  • As an embittered cynic, I should be programmed to vomit all over the screen at the mere sight of this, but instead, I find it strangely moving. You see, as I stare into their happy smiling faces filled with naive joie de vivre, I know they're just blissfully unaware of the crushing despair that awaits them as they venture into adulthood. The myriad disappointments, the yawning chasms of pain, the glow gnawing descent into physical decay, the sheer unrelenting horror of it all.
    • Screenwipe S3E4
    • Discussing the High School Musical series


  • Fortunately for whining snotface, the party goes with a bang: she enters looking every inch the cosseted flesh-waste she is, and her and her irritating scumbag friends party on into the night, dancing, shrieking, acting like pillocks, and generally making you feel like getting down on your knees and praying for a nuclear holocaust.
    • Screenwipe S3E4
    • Discussing My Super Sweet Sixteen

  • The fact is that all men in advertising these days are swaggering blokey cocks.

  • "I don't know? Bobby Sands."
    • On the question "who said you can't lose weight and enjoy yourself?"

  • Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.
    • Screenwipe S4E1

Guardian columns

  • ...The result is the most nauseating display of artificial camaraderie since the horrific Doritos "Friendchips" TV campaign (which caused 50,000 people to kill themselves in 2003, or should have done).
    • The Guardian.co.uk,28 August 2009
    • On Microsoft's Windows 7 Launch Party ad campaign
  • I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
  • If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality.


  • It's a rum state of affairs when you feel like punching a jar of mayonnaise in the face.


  • You can't press a button to make Phil Mitchell jump over a turtle and land on a cloud (unless you've recently ingested a load of military-grade hallucinogens, in which case you can also make him climb inside his own face and start whistling colours).

  • If you're hell-bent on making your bank look and sound like a simpleton, a desk labelled Travel Money is still a bit too formal. Why not call it Oooh! Look at the Funny Foreign Banknotes instead? And accompany it with a doodle of a French onion-seller riding a bike, with a little black beret on his head and a baguette up his arse and a speech bubble saying, "Zut Alors! Here is where you gettez les Francs!"

  • If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass.


Screen Burn

  • 2007 is going to be the best year ever made. All wars will end. We'll cure cancer and Aids - twice. In February it'll rain banknotes for a week. In July, rabbits will learn to talk. Better still, they'll tell jokes - hilarious jokes, jokes you don't need to be a rabbit to appreciate, jokes offering a fresh, rabbity perspective on human foibles, making us unite as one, laugh at ourselves and frig each other off for the sheer joyous hell of it. In December, we'll make contact with a benevolent race of aliens who shit chocolate and piss lemonade.
    • After claiming he is "through with cynicism"

      • Right now, the theme is "Sex In The 80s", which must've been an exceptionally hard sell round Channel 4 towers. Mullets! Tits! Duran Duran! More tits! Bigger mullets! Ha ha ha! All you need is a few seconds of voiceover babble about "changing attitudes" and "social upheaval" laid over the top and hey presto: you've justified everything. It's not just a load of tit shots - it's a sociological investigation. With tit shots.
        • On Channel 4's sex-obsessed "documentaries"

          • I won't get over that in a hurry: my least favourite atrophied Hazel McWitch lookalike in the world, singing "I just want to make love to you", right there on primetime telly. She has to be the only person on Earth who can take a lyric like that and make it seem like a blood-curdling threat without changing any of the words.
            • On Gillian McKeith singing

              • A lot of people think right-wingers aren't capable of being amusing at all. Not true. Mussolini looked hilarious swinging from that lamppost.

                  • Maybe you've put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that's no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb. Buy a pillow. Don't make up a load of floaty blah about energy or destiny. This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies.

                      • You could grind a dog's head and a shoe together into a paste and spoon-feed it to me, and I'd probably think it was chicken liver pate, provided I kept my eyes closed, and provided you plucked all the dog hair out beforehand, and provided you'd managed to find a pestle and mortar big enough to mash it all up in, and provided - look, it wouldn't be worth it. I'm just saying I can't taste anything. There's no need to get carried away. What's the matter with you? You're an idiot.
                        • On his lack of tastebuds due to a bad cold.

                          • He could probably make you a cloud sandwich if you asked. Or a blancmange made of numbers.
                            • On Heston Blumenthal.

                            • Big Brother

                              • When we look at Big Brother, do we grasp what it means to be alive in the early part of the 21st century? No. It's a gaudy circus act in which apes get goaded with sticks while the public throw rocks at them. As the world floats ever closer to a third world war, TV shows like Big Brother are essentially little more than brightly-coloured, lightbulb-studded arrows, pointing away from the problem.


                              • The BB house works as a kind of twat amplifier, you see. Once harnessed within, someone who in normal life would merely strike me as a bit of a git quickly swells in negative stature, eventually coming to symbolise everything I hate about our cruel and godless universe.


                              • A man so slow he probably has to whistle before he goes to the toilet so that he knows which end to shit through.
                                • On Jack Tweed, Jade Goody's then-boyfriend from series 3 of Screenwipe, while reviewing Celebrity Big Brother 2007


                              You Have Been Watching

                              • People comment that Ronnie Biggs is the new Robin Hood. You remember Robin Hood? He gave a train driver brain damage then pissed off to Brazil.

                              Unsourced

                              • The upper classes really shouldn't open their mouths on television. Whatever it is they're saying, all your brain actually hears is "Tra la la, I live in a bubble, tra la la, murder a fox, tra la la, Conde Nast Traveller, tra la la, Kensington High Street, tra la la." They should know their place and keep quiet.
 
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