Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe

Charlie narrows his focus from Screenwipe's take on what we're watching on general television, to how our televisual news is presented to us. And boy, do our TV news providers cop it. Here at thecustard.tv we're constantly bemoaning how news is being re-packaged as entertainment, and this is clearly bugging Brooker, too. A highly amusing, if profoundly depressing, programme ensued. We loved it.

The clear-sighted satirist and all-round voice of reason gets a new series, but what a shame it's not on terrestrial TV. Here he trains his eye on the media's unending obsession with the credit crunch.

"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.

Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe took time off from spewing cheery vitriol across the television schedules to interview writers about the craft of writing.

These were clearly writers that Brooker admired, so his interview technique was disconcertingly sympathetic. The end result was a masterclass from such luminaries as Russell T Davies, Paul Abbott, Tony Jordan and Graham Linehan. All of whom spoke wittily and winningly about the combination of prevarication, panic and perspiration that produces a television script.

Ironically, the most pertinent point of a fascinating 50 minutes was made by a writer who wasn't even present. Abbott quoted Jimmy McGovern on the ever prickly problem of presenting exposition in dialogue: 'I would rather be confused for ten minutes than bored for five seconds.'

If you've ever felt like hurling the remote control at the telly, this is the show for you. Brooker invites us into his living room to share his popeyed, brilliantly articulated frustration with soaps, ads, glossy dramas, gambling channels... nothing escapes that acid-tongued wit.

Charlie. Brooker. Dance. Routine. Four words that I never thought I would type together. However, anyone who tuned in for the return of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe last night would have got exactly that. Of course, this being Brooker, it was never going to be an ironic fanfared return, but rather, clever and crass all at the same time, with the arresting image of Brooker awkwardly grooving and wiping his strap-on arse... and that wasn't the half of it.

Producers and directors, weep and despair! Bilious but brutally funny critic Charlie Brooker is back for another series of satirical swipes at the television industry. First up in his cross-hairs, expensive but bland television dramas, property shows and the furore surrounding Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.

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.

Screenwipe is BBC4's bilious, X-rated alternative to Harry Hill's TV Burp, a digest of current television via one man's warped sensibility. Brooker returns to our screens with his reputation bolstered by Dead Set, the satirical zombie shocker he recently penned for E4. Now, though, the gamekeeper can return to poaching.

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.