Charlie Brooker's Year Wipe

Charlie Brooker battles The Canary over Corbyn jokes

Charlie Brooker has hit back in characteristic style after left-wing Corbyn conspiracy-supporting blog, The Canary, took great umbrage at his portrayal of the Labour leader in his show 2016 Wipe.

Charlie Brooker's 2016 Wipe review

Cynical metropolitan elitists such as myself have one thing to hold onto at the end of this abysmal year: Charlie Brooker tearing it to bleeding shreds.

Even as TV's foremost black sky thinker, Charlie Brooker would probably have struggled to predict the turbulent, feverish and generally dispiriting events of 2016. Suffice to say that Brooker isn't short of material for this year's rewind. However, there'll be some light relief as Philomena Cunk goes head to head with grinning pop-rave professor physicist Brian Cox, and Diane Morgans media caricature gets a spin-off show immediately afterwards in Cunk On Christmas (10pm).

No one could laugh at Charlie Brooker's 2016 Wipe

Charlie Brooker's 2016 Wipe hit TV screens on Thursday night but the normally brilliantly sarcastic programme was missing one thing this year according to fans - the humour. And it was all 2016's fault. The year has been notoriously bad.

It's almost as if everything that has happened in 2016 has been leading up to this moment.

Once again Charlie Brooker is back with his unique look back at the year and this week he looks back on the ups and downs of 2016.

Helping Charlie to make sense of the year's news, TV and online phenomena is Philomena Cunk. In her most challenging interview yet, Philomena tries to understand what it is Professor Brian Cox is actually saying.

Screenwipe 2016: When is it, and how can I watch it?

Charlie Brooker's take on a year of news and television may be the most highly-anticipated yet.

If new years didn't exist, I would want to invent them just for the joy of seeing Brooker take the piss out of the preceding 12 months. He was on top acerbic form last week, describing Ed Miliband as a "human balloon animal" and saying that Isis "make al-Qaida look like Crowded House".

He also tried to explain the whole David-Cameron-cock-in-a-pig's-head allegation (never thought I'd write that sentence, but really enjoyed doing so) with reference to Brooker's own scripted comedy Black Mirror, which first aired in 2011 and opened with an episode in which a fictional prime minister must have sexual intercourse with a pig live on national television.

"To be honest, the whole thing left me, particularly, feeling a bit weirded out," Brooker said, before pointing out that the Cameron story had come from one single, uncorroborated source and might not be true, even if everyone wanted it to be.

Brooker was ably assisted by the incredible Philomena Cunk, who was on hand to offer her insights into topical issues such as "femininism" and the refugee crisis. In fact, the human tragedy born of the Syrian conflict was sensitively handled and the satirical humour was aimed exclusively at politicians and those in the media who, after seeing the horrific photo of toddler Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach, stopped referring to those fleeing hardship as "a swarm" and came up with "a new twist of them being humans". It was all a very difficult line to tread and Screenwipe did it beautifully.

On a side note, the music used for this segment was the achingly gorgeous An Ending, a Beginning by Dustin O'Halloran, who is the man responsible for scoring the hit Amazon series Transparent.

TV review: Charlie Brooker's 2015 Wipe

Charlie Brooker's end-of-the-year Wipes have become essential viewing. They are the best way of making some kind of sense of the mess the world is in today. And this year's edition was no exception. Except there was a problem. 2015 is probably the bleakest year since Brooker has been doing these shows.

Frequent have been the calls to turn Brooker's satirical Wipe strand into a weekly venture in the vein of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. Sadly, Brooker's schedule - Netflix has ordered a dozen Black Mirrors - means that we'll have to settle for the customary six-part series and this annual end-of-year roundup. Aided by beacons of truth Philomena Cunk and Barry Shitpeas, Brooker rattles through 12 months packed almost overwhelmingly with incident - not to mention deep gloom.