The Hell of it All

I once walked into HMV and walked out again clutching Dead Set on DVD and a couple of books called Screen Burn and Dawn of the Dumb. About a week later a show started called You Have Been Watching. As introductions go, it was a pretty immersive one into the world of Charlie Brooker.

Of course, by that point Brooker had been plying his trade for ages and it is, quite frankly, embarrassing, that I'd never heard of him before. Kind of par for the course with me though.

Anyway, cut to now and I am a fully paid up member of the sad case fanboys, the existence of whom no doubt causes Brooker no end of embarrassment. Not a big enough fanboy to actually read the Guardian (never could get into the habit of buying a newspaper) or pick up his latest collection in Hardcover but you know...

Collection number three of Brookers selected columns from the Guardian is much like the first two; really clever, really funny, and really galling in that what he says tallies so perfectly with my own opinions and views but I know that I could never express said views with so much as a fraction of the wit and flair that he does. It's almost enough to make you hate him the way he purports to hate the unwitting victims of his vitriol. But not quite.

The Hell of it All sees him compare The Apprentice to a gangland kangaroo court in which someone gets their knees sliced off with an angle grinder; mock the embarrassingly overblown media furore that erupted over the Ross/Brand/Sachs incident; cast his eye over the Obama/McCain election; have several pops at rolling news stations (he really doesn't like them); and have several rants about such riveting topics as noisy neighbours, old people who don't understand technology and getting old himself. All cracking stuff to be sure.

Oh, and he calls one pseudo celeb a "simpering human perineum". Guess who.

"A genius of spleen" cries out the cover. The words of the Independent, people. The Independent. You know it must be good if those lads are pimping it, so you don't need me to tell you to read it. But I'm going to anyway. Read it. Go on, you know you want to.