Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker's bracing cocktail of bile, wit and shocking clips is mixed to perfection tonight. His theme is the way the "flickering fibbing machine" in the corner peddles myths about love and romance. Whoever combs the archives to find his footage has played a blinder: it's almost impossible to believe the clips from a 1980s QED doc testing female sexual response with a big metal probe or a hideous reality show called Breaking Up with Shannon Doherty aren't fakes - almost, but not quite. Brooker slips into rant-o-matic occasionally, but he's angrily right on most counts, and the spoof boy-band song about settling, called Girl You'll Do, is priceless.

Just Been Dumped? Blame the TV

Charlie Brooker continues his deliciously satirical campaign against our most prized possession - the idiot box - in the fourth episode of How TV Ruined Your Life, with tonight's episode shining the spot light upon love.

Charlie Brooker's combination of real archive footage with well-crafted spoofs of the same is entertaining, if never quite delivering the killer punches that made his BBC4 shows Screenwipe and Newswipe unmissable. This week, he looks at how television has distorted love and romance.

10 O'Clock Live has seriously high levels of Laverne

I tune in to 10 O'Clock Live on a Friday in the hope of a few laughs at the hands of Charlie Brooker. But in tonight's episode this comprised only five minutes of the hour which was otherwise given over to cheap one-liners from Jimmy Carr and the always-grating Lauren Laverne waffling.

How TV Ruined Your Life: Review

Charlie Brooker's comedy is mixed with cynicism and imaginative descriptive observations that are impossible not to laugh out loud at. And the pace at which each episode runs may cause viewers to marvel at the amount of content intricately packed into each episode.

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.

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.