Charlie Brooker's Year Wipe

Charlie Brooker's 2012 Wipe - Brief Thoughts

For what it's worth, this round-up format always seems kinda rushed to me, and I'd like to see him pick a few bigger topics and do more detailed pieces.

Armchair Paralympian to Paedosavile: my words of 2012

Never mind omnishambles - my personal dictionary tells you all you need to know about the past year.

2012's been a great year for Charlie Brooker. His satirical anthology Black Mirror (which, by the way, is coming back early next year) and cop spoof A Touch of Cloth were massive hits, he was named 'Best Comedy Entertainment Personality' at the British Comedy Awards and he welcomed his first child with wife Konnie Huq.

Despite all that though, Charlie still has tons to moan about from the last 12 months in his annual Wipe programme - like the Olympic Games, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the US presidential election. Thankfully we won't have to wait another year for our next slice of Brooker grouching - a new weekly series will follow 2012 Wipe on BBC Two.

As ever in these media-saturated times, there is plenty for Charlie Brooker to sink his satirical teeth into over the last 12 months, though for once, not all of it has been bad. He'll be reflecting on the Olympics, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, the jailing of members of Pussy Riot and, of course, the US presidential election in which the Republicans both scared us and added to the gaiety of nations. Limmy, Sharon Horgan and Peter Serafinowicz also contribute.

Charlie Brooker's 2011 Wipe interests 530,000

Charlie Brooker's end-of-year Screenwipe review appealed to just under 530,000 viewers last night (Friday).

The Black Mirror scribe looks back in disgust at a year in the worlds of news, TV and, as a special bonus for BBC4 viewers, video games. Brooker's eternal concern that most of his fellow broadcasters are hysterical, reductive prudes won't be short of grist, as he considers coverage of the August riots, the economic apocalypse and Pippa Middleton's regal glutes. Contributing are furious comic Doug Stanhope and conceptual documentarist Adam Curtis.

Video: Charlie Brooker talking on BBC Breakfast

Charlie Brooker talks to BBC Breakfast about his round up of the news in 2011.

As Brooker has observed in these pages, 2011 has been a grimly bumper cornucopia of events, what with Royal Weddings, the phonehacking enquiry and riots, to say nothing of Pippa Middleton's backside looming unseemly like a double moon over the media landscape. With the assistance of Doug Stanhope, Adam Curtis and Brian Limond, Brooker will be glancing back beneath arched eyebrow over the events, factual and fictional of 2011, dousing its overheated manias, controversies and moral panics with a cool and justly savage wit.

2011 has been like an end-of-season finale

This year, so much has happened it's impossible to remember it all in one go.

There was always a risk in Charlie Brooker marrying a celebrity, particularly one at the lower, ITV2 end of television: that it would make him less willing to slag celebrities off.

The fact that he has pulled out of his weekly television column is certainly a bad sign.

The good news, however, is that Brooker is still making Screenwipe, in which he rants from a dark room that looks like it might smell vaguely of socks and takeaway pizza.

It's poking fun at television in the same way that Harry Hill does, except that Brooker is a bad, angry version of Harry; he's Harry with a hangover.

As usual, Brooker has chosen his targets well and this year he homes in on the extraordinary The Only Way is Essex, which, despite having watched it several times, I have still not been able to work out. What is it? Spoof? Reality show? If it's scripted, then I bow down to the scriptwriter, because he or she is a genius; if it's unscripted, then I despair at the empty ignorance and pointlessness of modern culture. It's just the kind of programme that Brooker loves laying into.

Another programme Brooker takes a look at this year is Sherlock, which promised so much but did the deeply illogical thing of changing Sherlock's character into an annoying, rude, know-it-all git, when anyone who has read the books knows that Holmes, despite being of infinitely superior intellect, was always polite to his inferiors (unless they were baddies).

Seeing Brooker bare his fangs and shake his fist over these programmes is always fun but there's a comforting element to this programme, too - that however nakedly hate-filled it gets, it doesn't matter, because it's obvious the hate comes from a good place: the desire for better television.