Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn Read Online Free PDF Page A

documentary called Gladiators – The Brutal Truth (BBC2) instead. This is proper family entertainment: enough grisly detail to shake the younger viewers up a little, dispensed with intelligence and wit. Better still, they’re showing Spartacus directly afterwards.
    Further decadence looms in One Night Stands (C5), home to a parade of odious braggarts eager to share their casual misogyny and knuckleheaded worldview with thousands of viewers, most of whom will doubtless have switched on Channel Five in the hope of encountering some casual late-night nudity to masturbate to.
    Tough luck to the porn-miners, since the programme features no naked women whatsoever. It does, however, include countless gruesome shots of alco-sodden halfwits baring their buttocks, waggling their tongues, and flashing their flaccid dicks for the camera. It’s about as arousing as a fart in a birdcage and will make you want to cry for hours.
    Much of the action centres around a duo named Simon and Lawton, both of whom claim to have enjoyed literally hundreds of one-night stands, apparently with girls too drunk to find the prospect of being violated by a gurgling imbecile in any way troubling.
    As a team, they appear unevenly matched. Simon resembles across between Jean-Claude Van Damme and the lead singer from the Stereophonics, whereas Lawton has a face like a freeze-frame snap of a frog’s head exploding. The moment they open their mouths, however, all disparities vanish: each is as boring, stupid, and hopelessly self-centred as the other. ‘I always wear a condom, usually,’ drones Ugly Lawton, while Please-Hate-Me Simon brags of bedding Daily Sport models and reveals his preferred method of dumping his one-night girlfriends: mobile-phone text message.
    We follow them on a night out, which involves wandering around a gaudy nightclub leering at cadavers. This would be depressing enough, but it’s also interspersed with explicit talking-head testimony from other one-night aficionados, mainly ugly grinning men with appalling views on pretty much every facet of anything you care to think of.
    The programme would be massively improved by the insertion of a protracted final sequence in which each participant is glued to a deckchair and kicked down a stairwell. Forty-seven million times.

The Justice League of America     [2 September]
     
    Christopher Timothy misses the good old days when he stood in damp fields with half his arm up a cow beneath the gaze of millions, according to Starstruck: Holding On (C4), which examines how celebrities cope once their star has faded.
    The former All Creatures Great and Small star is shown visiting a fête to plant a tree in front of a desultory gathering of locals, many of them kids who clearly don’t know who he is and would have been far more impressed by an appearance from any one of the following: 1) Jeremy Spake; 2) the angry money-throwing man from the Direct Line home insurance commercial; 3) a bit of old inner tube dangling off a stick; 4) a hen; 5) nothing and no one.
    Timothy’s lot looks sad and humiliating, but at least he hasn’t been reduced to earning a crust as a QVC stallholder or comically manipulating his scrotal sac for small coins inside a dockside bunco booth. Still, there’s hope.
    He says he misses his television appearances, and yearns toreturn and play a villain: not just a minor baddie, but a major bastard, ‘a real piece of work’. He should write to the producers of Manhunter (Sky One) a true-crime reconstruction show that’s unpalatably wrong in every respect – and therefore totally mesmerising.
    A sort of ‘Best of …’ companion show to America’s Most Wanted, Manhunter is hosted by a terrifying thing apparently called Jaaaahrn Walsh. Jaaaahrn’s delivery lurks halfway between John Wayne and an animatronic theme-park dummy employed to entertain queuefuls of impatient visitors by wailing outside the ghost train. He shouts, overemphasises every other word, and