Charlie Brooker

The Guardian's Charlie Brooker makes a leap from BBC4 to Channel 4 and midweek primetime for a new show. Rather than watching him shouting at a camera in his front room, here he's joined in the studio by as-yet-unannounced guests to host a new comedy quiz about the week's telly highlights and, much more likely, its cavernous lowlights. We will be watching.

Television presenter Charlie Brooker (Screenwipe) brings his scathing style to bear on the best and worst the medium currently has to offer. Hosting this new comedy panel game show, Brooker grills celebrities on the week's TV highs and (mostly) lows.

After his successful series Newswipe on BBC Four, the writer and columnist Charlie Brooker has moved to on Channel 4 with a new review show about the joys and miseries of television. In each programme he will be joined by a different line-up of guests to help him to lob bricks at the screen. But the great thing about Brooker is his ability not just to hate magnificently, but to champion the best of television and highlight programmes that might otherwise slip through the cracks. No preview tapes were available because of late editing but, based on past performance, it promises to be highly entertaining.

Remember TV Go Home? Of course you do, it was one of the first great internet sites, along with Fat chicks in party hats, the stinky meat project and the tourist guy. Well, anyhow, Brooker has always been at his bitter best about television - but not really making it, as we've pointed out. So which way will this quiz go? We don't know because they film it the night before and then won't get us previews in time. Early signs point to 'better than Nathan Barley'. Any signs would do that, mind you.

A comedy panel show about TV? I'm there. Even if it's It's Only TV But I Like It. This show's likely to be head and shoulders above that, devised and hosted as it is by Charlie Brooker, creator of BBC4's Screenwipe and Newswipe. If it softens Brooker's renowned cynical edge, it'll be a disappointment, but chances are this will be the funniest thing on TV all week.

Interview: Charlie Brooker Goes Electric

Charlie Brooker is about to go mainstream. With a bespoke theme tune, celebrity guests and an ear-piece, he's about to host an entertainment show in front of a live audience. Quite possibly, in tears. You Have Been Watching sees Mr Brooker doing the most commercial thing he's ever done... but surely it isn't that big a risk?

The computer games show comeback

Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe could mark the return of the computer games show to mainstream TV. Hands up who misses GamesMaster?

Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, and Brooker's sudden, dramatic appearance in a neck brace last week, explained the end-of-series chaos, with a 'best of' running last week, and the last 'new' episode finally running this week - presumably around outpatient appointments and physiotherapy.

Newswipe has, after an oddly muted start, been like a shotgun in a field of crows - more adept at countering the 21st-century media slide into goonery, retardation and witchcraft than almost anything available, including Jeremy Paxman's sneer.

Newswipe's great gift has been to dispel the idea that current affairs is so huge, complex and about Israel that we can never hope to get a handle on it - something that even Brooker himself seemed to believe, despairingly, at the start of the series. Instead, it gently illuminated the fact that simply thinking about what you've watched, and then asking yourself what your true opinion of it is, is more than half the battle.

The other half is, of course, laughing at Newswipe, and then writing down all of Brooker's elegant, angry perspicuity in a jotter marked "Good points well made". The News, Brooker pointed out, used to be a factual programme, to which we would then have an emotional response. But, since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, this has become reversed: the news has taken to first asking us for our emotional opinion, then covering it as a "factual" event - as with Baby P "public outrage", Jade Goody "public sorrow", etc.

And that's if there are any "facts" at all: in the following show, Brooker furiously flicked between footage of bleeding Thai protesters, and then viewers' pictures of snowmen from the recent Big Snow, while shouting "News! Not news! News! Not news!", like Matthew Broderick shouting "Learn! Learn!" at the rampaging supercomputer WOPR in War Games.

Brooker is the nearest this country has to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the US programme that has single-handedly dragged the collective American IQ up ten points since the start of the recession. It's neither here nor there if Brooker's in a neck-brace and unable to put on his own trousers without help from a nurse. We just need him to crack on with another series.

TV Review: News Wipe with Charlie Brooker

There's generally three responses I have to Newswipe with Charlie Brooker. One is admiration at a piece of witty insight. Two is a belly laugh at a funny. Third, and possibly most important is a mixture of outrage and disbelief.

Spoons, a sketch show about relationships co-created by Charlie Brooker, was given the heave-ho after one series by Channel 4, despite positive clippings stretching all the way to America, where the New York Times praised its "tight thematic focus" which "captured the moments - awkward, destructive and banal - of young dating and married life".

Poor ratings were cited. Spoons scooped up around 1.7m viewers at 10pm on Friday nights, which was indeed a big drop from that slot's summer average of three million. Problem was, the fact that the slot had been bookended by Big Brother was totally ignored. With an inflated opinion of the worth of their own slot, the Channel 4 bean counters consigned Spoons to the scrapheap. And of course now that slot struggles to draw more than a million. It's almost enough to make you wish they'd made a decision by actually watching the programme.