Charlie Brooker

News waffle was the enemy on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe - the new show from the newspaper critic. Newswipe began on an odd note - tortuously spending five minutes explaining what it was, when anyone who'd seen it in the listings had simply thought: "Oh, Newswipe. That will be like Brooker's previous series - Screenwipe - but about current affairs, instead of telly." Also - and perhaps inevitably - Newswipe had the faint, cordite smell of The Day Today clinging to its hair. For half an hour it was a show that basically wanted to say, in the words of Chris Morris: "These are the headlines. I wish to God they weren't."

Still, Brooker's schtick - an intelligent, liberal man brought to the brink of despair simply by looking at the BBC's homepage - is as welcome dissecting the German high-school shootings as it is Holby; and having an ROFL Newsnight is something to cling to in the schedules.

Charlie Brooker gets a new show... I'm confused

Charlie Brooker is to write and present a new Channel 4 series in which he and a guest will dissect the week's television output. It will be called You Have Been Watching, and I'm praying that it's nothing like TV Heaven, Telly Hell.

On a good day, Charlie Brooker can make Brian Clough look like Kofi Annan. He's a kind of genius of spleen and when it's directed at the right target it can be deeply gratifying to watch him in action. But Newswipe with Charlie Brooker doesn't work quite as well as Screenwipe, the television-based series from which it has been spun off.

What Brooker promises is a "fun, snarky, weekly digest" to help less committed viewers keep up with "the world's most complicated soap opera" - the news. And when he concentrates on style it can be both funny and telling. To have the visual metaphors used to tart up news reports on "quantitive easing" dipped in acid until only the witless desperation of the endeavour was left was not only entertaining but salutary. There was also a striking contribution from Nick Davies, on how PR companies can effectively manipulate the news agenda. But elsewhere it occasionally strikes you as a one-man Have I Got News for You, and the contributions from people who aren't Charlie Brooker fall sadly short of the cutting precision of the man whose name is in the title.

TV Review: Newswipe with Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker is becoming something of a proper TV star now. He's definitely on the ascendency, not that he'd ever let on. Just look at how Newswipe became Newswipe with Charlie Brooker. You don't get your name tacked on the end unless you're making a stir.

If you saw the sublime news parodies The Day Today and Brass Eye in the 1990s, their spot-on observations of mangled English and media sensationalism of trivial stories made the news far funnier than it ought to be. Similarly, in this new series, cynical TV critic Charlie Brooker takes a pithy look at how the news is reported.

Ever wondered why we don't have a British Daily Show? Our own Jon Stewart to take on the media and Jon Snow's ties? Well that's roughly the idea behind Charlie Brooker's new show - Newswipe. A spin-off of his Screenwipe series, it aims to provide "a fun snarky weekly digest that will help keep you and hopefully me on top of the news soap opera".

As eagle-eyed readers will have spotted, it's weekly - and therefore unlikely to reach the "alternative news" status The Daily Show holds. It also lacks the US show's fast turnaround - in the opening episode we get gags about the Fritzl case, the Pope, and the school shootings in Germany - but nothing about the coverage of Jade Goody.

It's good, funny in patches, and worth watching. Too often, perhaps, Brooker points out the obvious (guess what? The media focuses on bad news!), but it's at its best when cutting between quotes to highlight media hypocrisy (something The Daily Show is particularly expert at).

A bit more of that, and a bit less directionless Brooker bellowing, and we might have a contender.

Charlie Brooker Newswipe Interview

Interviewing Charlie Brooker could be a daunting task but if you peer through the acerbic slights in Brooker's work, I always got the impression he was a really nice bloke... an approachable chap... the kind I'd get on with just fine.

Breaking news broke my mind

NEWSFLASH! Charlie Brooker's new TV show aims to take a Daily Show-style swipe at the bottomless chasm of 24-hour news. Here, he files from the abyss of 'Current Affairs Land'.

"You shouldn't criticise," says the archetypal mother figure, "If you can't do better yourself." It's a truism that boggle-eyed curmudgeon Charlie Brooker has dedicated his life to proving. The Guardianista set love his brand of anaemic satire because it never challenges their worldview; it simply articulates their own opinions in a stream of Chris Morris Lite vituperative logorrhoea. But even they have to question his poacher-turned-gamekeeper urge to make television programmes, particularly when it results in tat like Nathan Barley or Dead Set, a Swiftian satire dedicated to the coruscating proposition that Big Brother isn't very good. Screenwipe is Brooker's chance to show us what he thinks quality programming should be. So what do we get? Estuary-accented invective deliveredveryfastindeed, as if gabbling makes it somehow more trenchant, and grainy footage of Charlie sitting on his sofa shouting bleeped profanities at his television. If he were a student making videos for a media-studies course, his cheap ire might be acceptable. But this is national television, and Charlie Brooker is 37 years old.

In a recent newspaper column, Charlie Brooker hinted at a Damascene conversion to compassion as he argued against looking down 'on the genuine misery of those you consider beneath you' - something of a speciality for the Brooker of old. So, as BBC Four schedules six more parts of the critic's telly-bashing series Screenwipe (TV Burp for Chris Morris fans), can we expect it to be fronted by the pop-eyed, acerbic, ranting celebricidal Brooker, or a new touchy-feely incarnation? Thankfully, it looks like being the former, as tonight he explores what effect 'Manuelgate' could have on BBC programming, and sticks the boot into the plethora of job-based shows clogging the channels.