Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe review

Charlie Brooker is like a naughty Stephen Fry, he knows loads and we love him for it but unlike meeting Fry we wouldn't want to be faced with Charlie in real life in case he cut us down to size with his usual succinct sarcasm.

Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe - Episode 1.1 review

There's something strangely endearing about the professionally angry Charlie Brooker's confrontational, half-arsed approach to making TV.

Writer and broadcaster Charlie Brooker casts his wry eye over seven days of swipe-worthy offerings on all manner of screen-based technology. From big-screen movies to internet-based entertainment picked up on small-screen devices, no transmission is safe from Brooker's lashing tongue and all-seeing eye. Contributing to the gleeful diatribes each week will be a selection of special guests, plus regular interjections from US joker Doug Stanhope.

Channel 4's ill-fated 10 O'Clock Live was an experiment worth conducting, but ultimately suffered from uncertainty over tone, material and personnel. Charlie Brooker's contributions, however, seldom let the side down, drawn as they frequently were in both style and content from his occasional Screenwipe series on BBC Four.

This six-parter incorporates a bit of both, blending archive hilarity with current affairs, TV with computer games and short films with studio interviews. Fear not, however: the latter seem more likely to involve the likes of Doug Stanhope and Barry Shitpeas than Amy Childs or Jamie Cullen. With the second series imminent of his excellent mini-series of futureshock dramas, Black Mirror, the only danger for Brooker and his relentlessly mordant wit may be overexposure.

Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe - Review

The one segment that felt odd was the film-review-with-guests section, hitting an odd sweet spot of too short to really get going, yet weirdly long as well.

Black Mirror series 2 episode 1 spoiler-free review

Charlie Brooker's sci-fi suspense series returns in style with "Be Right Back". Here's Ryan's review of the first in a new season...

Black Mirror: 'Be Right Back' spoiler-free review

Despite no love-making with pigs, Black Mirror doesn't need such porcine hyperbole to tell such engaging stories. Charlie Brooker has penned a science-fiction love tale that feels all too real. In fact, it simply feels like a bleak drama (granted, with a number of humorous moments).

In the 80s we had the eye-opening and respectfully titled Clive James on Television to clue us in on bonkers overseas ads, foreign - usually French - TV titillation and Japanese salarymen undergoing elaborately devised torture techniques on the off-chance of winning a Teasmade. Then in the 90s we had Tarrant on TV. Shorter title, friendlier nomenclature, more smut. Now it's the new millennium and - mainly thanks to Tony Blair - we're all on first name terms. So we get Paddy's TV Guide, in which Paddy McGuinness - but really, who else? - cues up errant TV clips on his Paddy-player, all to reassure us that foreigners do still talk funny and there's nothing more hilarious under the sun than tikka-tinged septuagenarian bodybuilders (actually, the Padster might be right on that last point). The Pad-man's got form with the clips format, with 2011's charity gogglebox quiz Paddy's Show and Telly and last year's mysteriously dropped ITV QI manqué Mad Mad World, but, try and try as he might, his bid to dislodge Charlie Brooker as the nation's coaxial Pilate seems doomed to eventual failure.

Charlie Brooker on the Daily Mail getting offended

This is fusty, old-school outrage, spluttered in your mind's eye by a swivel-eyed ex-colonel with dangerously high blood pressure. But because it flopped, it's actually sort of poignant, like watching an old man ineffectually waving his fist as they concrete the duckpond and put up a Nando's.

Gigglebox weekly #71

This week Ian Wolf gives his nightmare vision of the forthcoming royal birth, learns about a nude swimming pool and hears Charlie Brooker talking positively about something.