How TV Ruined Your Life

TV review: How TV Ruined Your Life

It's not TV that ruined my life, Charlie Brooker, it's you. This - the ridiculing of ridiculous television - is not new ground for him. It's what he's very, very good at.

The first episode of Charlie Brooker's series How TV Ruined Your Life advanced the proposition that television's preoccupation with disaster and death ("shouting boo in your mind," as he put it) had left us full of delusional fears about the world at large. It was something of a shotgun assault on the medium, ranging from doomy news priorities to public information films, and cutting from real archive clips to pastiches that were good enough to make you do a double-take. But it was very often funny too, particularly when reminding you of 999's appetite for the wilder fringes of human mishap. "Have you ever thought what it would be like to be stuck in the path of a runaway digger?" asked Michael Buerk gravely, with the implicit suggestion that if you hadn't you'd been living in a state of foolish denial about the looming threat of rogue excavators. There was also an excellent parody of a Horizon-style doomwatch programme - "If Pens Got Hot" - which used a global outbreak of ballpoint combustion to mock the Chicken Little aesthetics of such formats.

How TV Ruined Your Life review

It may be familiar but it's also reassuring. We're talking pretty safe ground here, recognisable in tone and subject to anyone au fait with his previous output. It's Charlie Brooker being Charlie Brooker. And that's just how we want it.

How TV Ruined Your Life seemed cobbled together

Charlie Brooker made merrily sardonic hay with the mountain of material available, stitching it all together with the caustic wit he's used to kick TV where it hurts. But, and here's the kickback, Brooker was picking on pretty easy targets.

Charlie Brooker turns up his drollery-o-meter to 11 as he presents a history of some of TV's most jolting attempts to lull us into a false sense of insecurity, from early public information films warning against flying kites into pylons, through to dramas like Threads in the 1980s, a graphic depiction of nuclear annihilation, in which Britain is reduced to "a Plymouth-style wasteland". Between clips and sketches, Brooker's argument is that overexposure to such TV causes us to overestimate the amount of risk we actually face in everyday life.

Ruined? That can't be right, can it? Surely TV lights up, redeems and enriches our lives? Not according to shouty wit Charlie Brooker, whose Screenwipe and Newswipe series on BBC4 routinely lambast every other programme in the schedules. His elaborate rants are here sorted into themes, starting with "Fear", a look at the many ways dramas and news bulletins make the world seem more perilous than it is. He starts with the easy target of public information films ("Polish a floor and set a rug on it - you might as well set a man trap!") and moves on to wonderful clips of grisly old QED docs. It's enjoyably edgy, but next week's edition (on "Love") is much, much better.

Video - Charlie Brooker: New show is 'me being stupid'

Satirist Charlie Brooker has told BBC Breakfast his new series, How TV Ruined Your Life, is largely just him "being stupid".

The TV critic was speaking ahead of the first episode, which examines how television can induce fear and features a spoof documentary entitled When Pens Get Hot.

How TV Ruined Your Life begins at 2200GMT on BBC Two on Tuesday in England and Wales and on Wednesday in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In this new series, scabrous journalist Charlie Brooker blasts television's sensationalised vision of reality. Brooker tackles a different theme each week, kicking things off by examining how TV has used fear to keep viewers in check. It's a surreal mix of archive footage, sketches and interviews, with Brooker's savage commentary delivered at such speed it's difficult to keep up. Still, his wit cuts through, particularly when tearing into the BBC's Threads, a suitably grim Eightees drama about nuclear war.

A quick chat with Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker explains how TV sold us a dream that real life failed to deliver in his new BBC2 show How TV Ruined Your Life...

A six-part series from Charlie Brooker, exploring the fairground mirror British television holds up to reality, and how misguided it can be to treat the images you see on screen as a decent likeness.