Newswipe With Charlie Brooker

TV Review: Newswipe with Charlie Brooker

We're three episodes into Newswipe with Charlie Brooker and, if we're waiting for it to hit stride, like Mr Brooker suggested, then I'm going to have to prepare myself. You see, Newswipe is fast becoming Another Charlie Brooker Classic!

Charlie Brooker is really becoming something of a star. Just think, once upon a time, no-one had a clue what he looked like. He was just this voice... a voice of dissent accompanied by a depressed looking cartoon blob. After years hidden away from our eyes, now we've got loads of him.

Of course, mostly, we're used to seeing (and reading) Brooker taking TV to task, poking fun and offering comment. However, now he's in a new territory, looking at the world of news. Last week was the first offering, which worked very well indeed. As a show, it has started exceedingly well and, while we wait for it to really get into its stride, we can only assume it'll be getting better.

Last week Charlie Brooker's characteristically brilliant Newswipe started, taking a pin to the over-inflated lilo of news journalism. He's the only man who can make quantitative easing funny and has the gift of seeming, even after several hugely popular series, like a normal person who has invaded a studio.

News waffle was the enemy on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe - the new show from the newspaper critic. Newswipe began on an odd note - tortuously spending five minutes explaining what it was, when anyone who'd seen it in the listings had simply thought: "Oh, Newswipe. That will be like Brooker's previous series - Screenwipe - but about current affairs, instead of telly." Also - and perhaps inevitably - Newswipe had the faint, cordite smell of The Day Today clinging to its hair. For half an hour it was a show that basically wanted to say, in the words of Chris Morris: "These are the headlines. I wish to God they weren't."

Still, Brooker's schtick - an intelligent, liberal man brought to the brink of despair simply by looking at the BBC's homepage - is as welcome dissecting the German high-school shootings as it is Holby; and having an ROFL Newsnight is something to cling to in the schedules.

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.

On a good day, Charlie Brooker can make Brian Clough look like Kofi Annan. He's a kind of genius of spleen and when it's directed at the right target it can be deeply gratifying to watch him in action. But Newswipe with Charlie Brooker doesn't work quite as well as Screenwipe, the television-based series from which it has been spun off.

What Brooker promises is a "fun, snarky, weekly digest" to help less committed viewers keep up with "the world's most complicated soap opera" - the news. And when he concentrates on style it can be both funny and telling. To have the visual metaphors used to tart up news reports on "quantitive easing" dipped in acid until only the witless desperation of the endeavour was left was not only entertaining but salutary. There was also a striking contribution from Nick Davies, on how PR companies can effectively manipulate the news agenda. But elsewhere it occasionally strikes you as a one-man Have I Got News for You, and the contributions from people who aren't Charlie Brooker fall sadly short of the cutting precision of the man whose name is in the title.

Newswipe With Charlie Brooker was glorious: perceptive and rude, it showed the inanity of 24-hour news (the endless repetition, the mad montages of images) as well as how little it actually explains, as it feverishly tries to move stories forward. The ending (Brooker as the anchor burying his head disconsolately as the weight of misery he has just imparted to the nation takes hold) was particularly clever. Brooker even advanced a plausible explanation for "quantitative easing" beyond one broadcaster's use of a model railway. Sadly this succinct explanation was too piercing for a brain already turned to mush by 24-hour news. Perhaps he could use some little plastic bricks and flying pigs next time.

TV Review: Newswipe with Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker is becoming something of a proper TV star now. He's definitely on the ascendency, not that he'd ever let on. Just look at how Newswipe became Newswipe with Charlie Brooker. You don't get your name tacked on the end unless you're making a stir.

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.

If you saw the sublime news parodies The Day Today and Brass Eye in the 1990s, their spot-on observations of mangled English and media sensationalism of trivial stories made the news far funnier than it ought to be. Similarly, in this new series, cynical TV critic Charlie Brooker takes a pithy look at how the news is reported.