Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe (Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe)

Member Name: DavidJay

Product:	Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe
Date:	13/01/09 (41 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, insightful, occasionally sublime

Disadvantages: Too often descends into hyperbolic rabble-rousing tripe.

Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe is something of a guilty pleasure for me. Whilst I find Brooker himself to be a sharp, witty, brilliant comic writer and exceptional critic, he often - and oh so very cynically - engages in the kind of hyperbolic, short-sighted, narrow-minded, vaguely chauvinistic blather so beloved of his audience, and the lot shot through with a wholly nauseating nostalgia for an age that never existed.

During these intermittent reactionary spiels, Brooker wants us to believe that everyone is sat rapt before the Big Brother live feed 24 hours a day, wants us to believe that The X Factor or Britain's Got Talent are in any way a New Development, like Stars In Their Eyes or Opportunity Knocks never existed, wants us to believe that contemporary culture amounts to a squall of incomprehensible noise and image where once, in some fanciful telly past, every half-hour block of programming pulsated with charm and wonder.

I say he wants US to believe, but I don't think for a second HE believes it. He knows that his success depends upon the Outlaw Renegade Outsider image he has so brilliantly fashioned, and every opportunity to milk that he takes. No-one would blame him, but it's all still fairly depressing to be honest.

When he throws that aside, though (and that's not to say that those moments are anything less than sublime in so far as the writing and the word-play is concerned), what we get are a series of insightful, incisive and hilarious critiques - his take on the Celebrity Big Brother race row, or the rolling news coverage of the Madeline McCann case, for example, are absolutely flawless pieces shorn of the hysteria and the tiresome student-nattering he indulges in elsewhere.

Screenwipe is then something I enjoy immensely, but which has me chewing my knuckles with frustration as often as it has me clutching my sides. The more you buy into the Everything Is Sh*t hyperbole, the more you'll get from it, I'd imagine. But the truth is, Everything Is Not Sh*t, and even the things Brooker sees as particularly deserving of his studiously-feigned-wrath are Not Sh*t.

Summary: As much as it frustrates me, I won't miss an episode.