Charlie Brooker

It's been far too long, but finally Brooker, the master of dissecting current trends in television, returns for a new series. Expect the Ross/Brand saga, the economic meltdown, and costume dramas to come under Brooker's acerbic gaze.

Radio Times Blog Review

Watching Brooker administer corporal punishment to the stupidities and excesses of today's television can be a strange experience - mainly because the medium he is savaging has allowed him to do such a thing.

Review of Screenwipe Special

This disassembling of TV land made for fascinating AND hilarious viewing. How often do I get to write that? It showed us all just how much money goes into a TV show... from a 3 hour shoot for a 3 second segment of Brooker falling off a log, to seeing how creative an edit can really be.

Screenwipe USA Review

Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe started out with a short pilot run earlier in the year, which was watchable but somewhat confused. Thankfully, between that and the more recent five-week series, many of the earlier problems have clearly been addressed and largely ironed out.

Blog Review

Ah, Charlie Brooker. Anyone with any sense and love of TV reads his Guardian Screen Burn column every Saturday. It's usually the funniest thing you'll read that week. However, his Screen Wipe review show, which pretty much translates Screen Burn into pictures, hasn't been so compelling.

Off The Telly Review

Brooker, self-confessed rubbish presenter, seems to have the attention span of a gnat. Given a full half-hour to really get going on ridiculous text-message competitions designed to grab the viewer's money, the lamentable nature of daytime TV and the dozen or so other topics he selected just for the first episode, he still produces more or less the same few hundred words he'd use in Screen Burn.

Whether or not you find Brooker's brand of humour enjoyable, chances are the show will fall flat on its face by dint of being neither particularly funny nor particularly offensive - at least if the man's companion column in the Guardian is anything to go by, what with its obvious swearing, easy targets and plain cock-ups ("discovering" Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow on the morning of its final transmission, stating the top prize in Deal or No Deal as £200,000).

'A semi-improvised sitcom set in the back rooms of Westminster' might sound like the driest, most clever-clever, Bremner-ish bit of business imaginable, but that's precisely what this isn't: it's laugh-out-loud funny - so good, in fact, I watched the second episode on video immediately after finishing the first, then phoned up the BBC to badger them for the third.

But Nathan Barley is unfocused, both structurally and in its satire. Personally, I suspect that as Chris Morris -- along with his co-writer Charlie Brooker, who originally created the Nathan Barley character on his peerless website TVGoHome -- did their reputed three years of research on Hoxton, they found that Hoxtonites' main obsessions (new technology, unlistenable music, the boundaries of acceptability, silly slang) were, in fact, pretty close to many of their own.

Nathan Barley is not spectacular television, but neither is it appalling. It simply fails to do what it clearly set out to do. It has ended up in entirely the wrong bracket, resulting in a dull thud when it should - an indeed quite easily could - have sounded a loud fanfare.