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

than anything with a genuinely appropriate lyric, like ‘So Fucking What?’ by the Anti-Nowhere League.
    This being television, the stories benefit from the illustrative pictures: mainly vague visuals, such as a shot of a calendar with an ‘aged film’ filter laid over the top, or if you’re really lucky, snapshots of the luckless subjects themselves.
    The music videos are interrupted every 30 seconds by a large yellow strap informing viewers what they’re watching. Presumably this is an attempt to catch the attention of channel-hoppers who might otherwise assume they’d stumbled across a VH-1 Michael Ball retrospective, but it also detracts from any sentimental value the song might have – it’s like watching sobbing relatives burying a loved one in a coffin with a corporate logo stamped down the side.
    Now, imagine you’re a bored, lonely, loveless male, slumped in front of your television flipping aimlessly through the showshaker tinseldrift of station after station when suddenly you chance upon G-String Divas (C5), a tawdry little fleshburst lurking out there in the schedule, waiting to seize listless channel-hoppers just like you and mesmerise them into corroding their own self-esteem via a sorry act of desultory armchair onanism. Here’s what you’ll see.
    First, Cashmere, a lap-dancer. Then Brett, a pony-tailed yee-haw who pays for regular private sessions in which Cashmere bends down and grinds her hips while he glowers at her silently, like a circus bear staring at a cat on a meathook. Brett is a tragedy in Bud-streaked denim: currently enmeshed in a bitter divorce, he talks of his plans for a ‘long-term relationship’ with Cashmere, despite the fact that a) he’s a drawling overweight truck-hick who looks like the sort of goon you see getting a pool cue smashed across their skull in an especially bad Chuck Norris film, b) she’s engaged and c) he has to keep shoving banknotes into her hand so she’ll talk to him.
    Anyway, that’s the back story. The rest of the programme consistsof repetitive close-ups of Cashmere circling her buttocks into the lens as if inviting us to check whether she’s wiped properly. It’s a sorry example of that curious new TV hybrid, the masturmentary: a programme which exists solely to assist masturbation (to the point where it may as well be introduced by a stern-faced drill instructor who blows a whistle and commands everyone watching to commence jerking off immediately) yet is forced to adopt a flimsy documentary guise in order to appease the broadcast authorities – the modern-day equivalent of 1950s nudie flicks sidestepping the censor by masquerading as earnest examinations of naturism.
    The result satisfies no one: self-abusers have their mental-visual playground spoiled by the constant intrusion of fiercely anti-erotic talking-head soundbites from loserboy Brett, while anyone wanting to watch an actual documentary will have seen through the ruse by the third lingering buttock-shot.
    Perhaps C5 should employ Simon Bates to issue a generic warning at the start of shows like this. Something along the lines of: ‘The following shitcast contains no viable content whatsoever.’ Then again, they’d wear the tape out in a fortnight.

Craig Something     [21 October]
     
    Question: what’s worse than a bland, toothless BBC holiday programme featuring Trude Vets in Practice Mostue? Answer: a bland, toothless BBC holiday programme also featuring Jeremy Spake, which is precisely what you’ll see if for some mad reason you decide to squander half an hour of the only life you’ll ever have on Holiday Insider’s Guide (BBC1).
    It’s presented by a walking vacuum of a man who looks like he’s wandered straight off the set of a Gillette commercial to fill in for a couple of hours before his next assignment: appearing as a semi-naked fireman in a vaguely homoerotic Athena poster. Not sure what his name is: Craig something, and that’s about as much attention as he