Customer Reviews
"Kitchen sink" approach doesn't really do the reader many favours - By: Mr. R. Smith, 25 Sep 2008 
Brooker is currently the best-loved pop culture pundit amongst the jaded workshy internet-hogging sullen misanthrope demographic. This is an indesputable fact. He has sat aside the collective imagination of this unhappy group like a grumpy colossus since the launch of the spoof listings website TVGoHome backin what now feels like the mid-1800s, & he continues to do so with his Guardian articles & the brilliant Screenwipe show, which I'll wager most of you have seen on the Guardian website & youtube respectively rather thanin actual grubby print or on actual proper telly. This all feels very word-of-mouthy & grass-rootsy, with friends slinging URLs at you every time he says something particularly interesting or rude, & part of the reason for this popularity is that, despite his grumbling & slightly forced self-deprecation, Brooker seems like a likeable, smart guy & has an unmatched talent for a pithy little vignette.
Seriously, it's completely unmatched: I've never read anyone who can produce a one paragraph nugget that manages to be as clever, scatological, sharp, heartfelt, & funny as Brooker. When most columnists try this sort of recipe it comes out indigestible & smug, like trying to swallow a lump of self-satisfied rancid grease; Brooker pulls it off effortlessly & still manages to seem human. This is probably the reason for his enduring net popularity, asin the land of short attention spans & thousands & thousands of competing distractions short, brilliant quotes are the primary currency - & he has themin abundance.
Which is the problem with the book, really. It's like printing out an entire website to read through it page by page rather than being linked directly to the funny picture of the cat with the amusing caption. It's impossible to write the brilliant little gems mentioned above every single week, & between them his writing is either ephemeral at best or completely irrelevant at worst. For every brilliant insight & one-liner, there's pages & pages of wibbling about, say, 2006's Big Brother - perfect for a weekly column, but its inclusionin a book seems a little eyebrow-raising. The fact that its readable at all two years later on is a tribute to Brooker's skill, but still you get the feeling that you've been swindled a bit by some sort of bait-and-switch scam. Yes, I know it never claimed to be anything other than a collection of articles, but "Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline" to my mind suggested something more trim & toned & toothier. Perhaps this is just an inescapable result of taking Brooker out of his natural environment & cramming him willy-nilly into a book or perhaps they just wanted to bulk the book out some, but the "kitchen sink" approach doesn't really do the reader many favours.
A genuinely mixed bag, this: undeniably a good read, but you feel sort of like you'd rather have just googled "best Charlie Brooker quotes" instead. On the plus side, Brooker is one of the most genuinely enjoyable columnists you can read today & you get the feeling that much, much better is still to come.
Charlie Brooker is right about everything - By: Mr. Stuart Bruce, 25 Mar 2008 
This is a collection of Charlie Brooker's newspaper articles & TV reviews from 2004 to 2007. About half is television reviews, the other half is what I'd hesitantly call 'lifestyle' which can cover anything from Facebook to haircuts to Banksy.
Brooker is the best ascerbic angry writer & reviewer there is. Maintaining an almost constant level of fury throughout, underneath the sarcasm & the comedic threats of violence are reams of very interesting points about the TV we watch & the culture we're a part of it.
To really appreciate some of the TV reviews you'll be better off if you do have an idea how Big Brother works, or who Gillian McKeith is, & if you do know those things but you wish you didn't, then even better.
Personally I enjoyed reading this bookin bite-sized chunks- just the odd few pages here & there when I was feeling complacent. Reading it allin one go would put youin a seriously bad mood- or perhaps it would be a very cathartic experience for you..?
Spider Jerusalem meets Oliver Kalkofe - By: Andreas P. Rauch, 22 Mar 2008 
... the first one being the "Transmetropolitan" comic series cynic' journalist/hero, the second being a German comedian feared & loved for his witty comments on German TV rubbish.
Too obscure? That's exactly my problem with Brooker's book: Not coming from the UK, I haven't heard of half of the TV shows he refers to, & hardly ever bothered to watch the (usually: continental version of the) other half. But brainless idiocy is a world-wide phenomenon - the mindless TV formats & media goons are indeed so generic that it doesn't really matter.
Throughout most of the book, the author is busy shouting back at TV shows that would insult a six-year-old's intelligence & sense of taste. Funny, witty, & aimed at a deserving target - but tiring after some time. It's when he focusses on the retarded stuff of real life this book really gets interesting: Politics. 9/11 conspiracy nuts. Religion, asin "notoriously offended feelings" & violent fundamentalism.
Brookers unrestrained use of sarcasm is simply hilarious, even if his targets are quite often not worth the effort. If you like watching dumbness being bludgeonedin all its forms, you will probably find this book as refreshing as I did.
Puerile, mordant, genius - By: ds, 25 Feb 2008 Poor old Charlie Brooker. He's a man out of time, trappedin a world he understands little & likes even less. Here is an essentially decent, liberal man who feels the need to defenestrate himself for our reading pleasure each weekin the dear ol' Grauniad.
Reading this book is really like reading a potted social history of recent times, or at least for most of this book the televisual part of it. CB takes random & withering potshots at most of the deserving targets of our pathetic adulterated culture. Thankfully, most of the time, he manages to score direct hits. And how.
This book is not really to be read cover to cover, instead to be dippedin & out of because these columns were produced to be satisfying little gobbets; little secret missives that we read & where we knew that finally, here was someone who saw our risible so-called celeb-culture for the hollow, dead-eyed, grasping sham it all undoubtedly is. And worse, he loves TV the same we that we do (you can tell). As a result he is all the more coruscating when he thinks it falls short of what it should be. his rants about TV companies, their dalliances with premium rate phone lines & journalistic integrity were just beautiful.
And while I don't quite agree with the 'Macs are Fisher Price activity centre's for adults' line, it was was still funny enough to make me spit out hot tea through my nose as I laughed. Damn you, Charlie Brooker!
The Best Stand-Up Comic You Never Saw - By: Karl Savage, 21 Feb 2008 Many books claim to be laugh-out-loud funny. This is the Real Deal. I'm just glad I've never read itin public as there were moments when I genuinely couldn't get my breath. I've not been a Brooker fan long (I only discovered Screen Wipe during the last series, which wasn't that long ago) but, on the strength of this material, I'm now a fully-fledged convert to his brand of excoriating, sardonic, not to mention laugh-your-lungs-up-funny bile. He's like the best stand-up comic you never saw - imagine Bill Hicks doing 'Harry Hill's TV Burp'. The weaker chapters are merely inspired but there are definitely pieces that are touching genius, if only for the completely original thought processes that Brooker goes through. These are most evidentin the non-TV related chapters, which I generally enjoyed more than the TV stuff. Which is not to say that the TV stuff isn't also joyously mirthsome because it is. Imagine every other TV criticin the world (particularly the NOTW's Ian Hyland) as a scurrying cockroach...then picture a huge, black, hobnailed boot slowly descending to crush them. That's Brooker. To sum up then: Charlie Brooker takes absolutely no prisonersin perhaps the most nihilistically comedic collection of prose money can buy. And I make no apology for fawning all over this because it's utterly bloody brilliant. Buy it.
