Charlie Brooker

Commencing with a cheerful explanation of how all of us are utterly alone in this world, Charlie Brooker turns to TV's treatment of love and how the "flickering fibbing machine" has misled us about romance. He skewers the myths about soul mates and the importance of the grand gesture, and shows how TV's insistence on photogenic beauty raises unrealistic expectations. A little obvious in places, but always redeemed by Brooker's verbals, which soar to inspired heights in an extended description of his own face.

Charlie Brooker's sardonic look at the gulf between television and reality continues. This week, he uses sketches, archive footage and his signature misanthropic rants to skewer TV's ability to irritate you throughout the ageing process, from creepy children's shows to patronising twaddle for pensioners.

As Charlie Brooker noted in his astute and acerbic How TV Ruined Your Life, one of the most fundamental jobs of the box in the corner is to scare us. Or, to put it in Brooker-speak, shout: "'Boo!' in your mind." Not only is that the function of a large amount of primetime entertainment, it has also been the reliable aim of public information films - sort of health and safety porn - designed to reform our behaviour. That explains why, if we're to believe the treasure trove of paranoid PIFs that Brooker's researchers unearthed, you no longer see schoolboys swinging fishing rods beneath low-lying electricity pylons.

Although, leaving absurdity aside, repeated images over a long period may inhibit our actions, it's rare that television manages to shock or scare us. We've seen too much, and most of it on TV, to be jolted by what we see on TV. But, once in a while, along comes a film that is so powerful and haunting that it seems to stop the world as you watch, leaving you struggling to re-enter the reality of unfolding life.

TV review: How TV Ruined Your Life

Charlie Brooker has become the TV that he used to warn us about. When your whole screen and print persona depends on being the outsider, the transition to being on the inside is a tricky one.

TV review: How TV Ruined Your Life

It's not TV that ruined my life, Charlie Brooker, it's you. This - the ridiculing of ridiculous television - is not new ground for him. It's what he's very, very good at.

The first episode of Charlie Brooker's series How TV Ruined Your Life advanced the proposition that television's preoccupation with disaster and death ("shouting boo in your mind," as he put it) had left us full of delusional fears about the world at large. It was something of a shotgun assault on the medium, ranging from doomy news priorities to public information films, and cutting from real archive clips to pastiches that were good enough to make you do a double-take. But it was very often funny too, particularly when reminding you of 999's appetite for the wilder fringes of human mishap. "Have you ever thought what it would be like to be stuck in the path of a runaway digger?" asked Michael Buerk gravely, with the implicit suggestion that if you hadn't you'd been living in a state of foolish denial about the looming threat of rogue excavators. There was also an excellent parody of a Horizon-style doomwatch programme - "If Pens Got Hot" - which used a global outbreak of ballpoint combustion to mock the Chicken Little aesthetics of such formats.

How TV Ruined Your Life review

It may be familiar but it's also reassuring. We're talking pretty safe ground here, recognisable in tone and subject to anyone au fait with his previous output. It's Charlie Brooker being Charlie Brooker. And that's just how we want it.

How TV Ruined Your Life seemed cobbled together

Charlie Brooker made merrily sardonic hay with the mountain of material available, stitching it all together with the caustic wit he's used to kick TV where it hurts. But, and here's the kickback, Brooker was picking on pretty easy targets.

Video - Charlie Brooker: New show is 'me being stupid'

Satirist Charlie Brooker has told BBC Breakfast his new series, How TV Ruined Your Life, is largely just him "being stupid".

The TV critic was speaking ahead of the first episode, which examines how television can induce fear and features a spoof documentary entitled When Pens Get Hot.

How TV Ruined Your Life begins at 2200GMT on BBC Two on Tuesday in England and Wales and on Wednesday in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

10 O'Clock Live is That Was The Week That Was for now, and good fun because of that show's formidable heritage, as the four presenters are all competing to avoid being cast as the new Lance Percival, he of the laugh-free "topical calypsos".

David Mitchell and Jimmy Carr are jockeying for the David Frost role; Lauren Laverne is Millicent Martin, the not-so-dumb blonde. Mitchell didn't quite know whether to ask proper questions or go for gags during a discussion on bankers' bonuses, but he fared much better when interviewing the universities minister, probably because he's passionate about education.

Best joke? That would be Charlie Brooker on the unrest in Tunisia. He described the incident where a young vegetable seller set himself on fire as "an act of tomartyrdom".