Charlie Brooker
Birth Name: Charlton Brooker
Birthdate: March 3, 1971
Birthplace: Reading, Berkshire, England, United Kingdom
Occupation: Author, Columnist, and TV Personality
Profile: Best known for
Screenwipe.
Website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brooker
Number of Quotes: 137
A cupcake is just a muffin with clown puke topping.
A lot of people think right-wingers aren't capable of being amusing at all. Not
true. Mussolini looked hilarious swinging from that lamppost.
All Pixar movies are heartbreaking, aren't they?
Amplifying body-image issues, profiting from anxiety, and employing virtual slaves in sweatshops are bad enough, but the fashion industry is also actively
hastening the destruction of the very Earth we walk on. It insists on launching fresh collections each season, declaring yesterday's range obsolete on a whim.
Apple excels at taking existing concepts —
computers, MP3 players, conceit — and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration.
As December arrived, the planet grappled with the notion that, despite losing the popular vote by several
million, the man who'd bragged about grabbing women by the pussy might get his finger on the red button.
On Donald Trump winning the 2016 US election.
At 16, I was drawing cartoons, and I wanted to carry on being a cartoonist.
At 38, I look back at my 32-year-old self and regret that he wasted time.
Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude
yourself into thinking you've worked out a system, or open it up when no one's looking and rig the settings so it'll pay out illegally.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National
Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.
Screenwipe
Being slagged off is good for you. It thickens the skin and strengthens the backbone.
Brexit is a harbinger for Trump, really.
Calling Batman the Dark Knight
is like calling Papa Smurf the Blue Patriarch
: you're not fooling anyone.
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping
through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.
Everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as
walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self-perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety.
Everyone's opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized
pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.
Fictional serial killers are usually more pretentious than frightening.
Forgive my pants for remaining unshitten.
Games get a bad press compared with, say, opera - even though they're obviously better, because no
opera has ever compelled an audience member to collect a giant mushroom and jump across some clouds.
Getting a moral lecture from the fashion industry is like Jeffrey Dahmer criticising your diet.
God has far
better things to do than creating self-important little species such as ours.
God, people say Black Mirror
was
horrible — it's nothing compared to the stuff that happens in Grimms' Fairy Tales.
It's mind-bending.
Hi-def is merely the latest in a string of evolutional leaps that have transformed the way we sit slumped in front of a box wishing we were dead.
Hopefully, some supervillain threat will come down, and we will have to unite as a species and fire our nukes into the sun or something.
Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can't decide whether to wear blue
socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies.
I can quickly go to a place where I worry about society spiralling out of control.
I can't imagine painting my face in a team colour and roaring with delight as a multi-millionaire kicks a ball at a net.
I can't imagine voluntarily standing beside an F1 track in the rain, watching motorised wedges plastered in corporate decals zooming past at 500mph.
I can't rank anything. I mean, how could anyone possibly say what their favourite piece of
music is? I don't have the ability or the desire to categorise things of that nature.
I didn't pass my degree due to never handing in an acceptable dissertation, and while it didn't harm me in the long run, my
failure to complete the course properly probably led me to spend the next six years or so coasting, unsure of what to do next.
I do think that it's a dysfunctional relationship between columnists and commentators, because they both seem to hate each other, like a terrible marriage.
I do worry about civil unrest, or complete collapse of society, or having to flee, or Europe falling into a war.
I don't know how, at an age when you're trying to put your identity together, how
you cope with the pressure of a performance space, which is what social media is.
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs.
I have often felt the worlds of social media and the Internet are like a weird
dreamscape. Even physically, when you are looking at your phone, you are out of it.
I haven't always been the kind of man who plays videogames. I used to be the kind of boy who played videogames.
I like technology, but Black Mirror
is more what the consequences are, and it doesn't tend to be about
technology itself: it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We've not really thought through the consequences of it.
I liked Making A Murderer, Master of None.
Stranger Things
I watched along
with everyone else in the world. Narcos,
I really liked Narcos
a lot.
I liked that sort of thing, those one-off stories like Tales of the Unexpected,
Hammer
House of Horror,
The Twilight Zone
and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
I loved Get Out.
I never really thought of myself as a TV critic. I was presenting TV before I was writing about it.
I remember I was changing to one phone from another and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to
delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and... it felt hard to delete the name.
I remember when I realised, as a child, That stuff on the TV about nuclear bombs is real! Why isn't
everyone running around shouting Aaarrgghh
? Why are people still buying bicycle clips?
I think the problem we have as apes is we're asking far bigger questions than we could possibly process.
I used to draw comics a lot. I was obsessed with The Young Ones,
and was massively into video games, although I was no good at them.
I wanna do some more goofy comedy stuff; I really enjoyed doing A Touch of Cloth.
I'm convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only
saddoes
dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled sad
-
it's like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.
I'm extremely neurotic; it's the way my brain is built.
I'm looking forward to the Twilight Zone
from Jordan Peele. If anyone's gonna reboot the Twilight Zone,
then there's the man to do it.
I'm no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is, and I'll emit
an unbroken 10-minute um
through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse.
I'm not anti-technology at all, really.
I'm quite hardcore on this. I think every psychic and medium in this country belongs in prison.
I'm quite techy and gadgety.
I'm scared about everything. I'm an anxious worrier. I worry about the downside of everything.
I'm somewhat socially inept. Slide me between two strangers at any light-hearted jamboree and I'll either
rock awkwardly and silently on my heels, or come out with a stone-cold conversation-killer like, This room's
quite rectangular, isn't it?
I glide through the social whirl with all the elegance of a dog in high heels.
I've got a phobia about throwing up.
I've got no attention span.
I've never lost that freelance mentality. You can't take a holiday because you're worried the work will dry up.
I've scaled back my involvement with Twitter; it's too easy to get dragged into an argument.
If I ran a national burger franchise — which I don't — I'd make it a rule that no two customers can be greeted with precisely the same words and that
every third customer must be grossly insulted as a matter of course. Just to keep the atmosphere nice and lively. And to keep the staff laughing.
If someone doesn't respond to a phone call, I think they've died.
If the Walkman had, by default, silently contacted your friends and told them what you were listening to, not only
would no one have bought a Walkman in the first place, its designers would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion.
If there's no point, then there's no point giving up.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that says something
about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality.
If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly
antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.
If you're living in a dystopia, you don't necessarily want to look at another one.
In summary, our world is doomed.
In the 18th century, a revolution in thought, known as the Enlightenment, dragged us away from the superstition and brutality of the Middle Ages toward
a modern age of science, reason and democracy... Which is why we're trying to bollocks it all up. Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment.
In the age of social media, everyone's a newspaper columnist, exaggerating what they think and feel.
In the early '80s, the arcade game Pac-Man was twice as popular as oxygen.
Is hacking ever acceptable? It depends on the motive.
It must be awful, being a homophobe.
It's a remarkable pace of which things change and adapt, and it's hard for us to keep up with as a species.
It's hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn't somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That's pretty much all we have left.
It's spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from
the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever's nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind.
Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they're doing for the money.
Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults.
MasterChef
delivers all the reassuring, cadenced repetition of an endless chore without any of the bothersome elbow grease.
MasterChef
s preliminary stages deliver just the right level of
almost-drama for viewers feeling shagged out after a hard day's fruitless existence.
Modern 3D cinema technology works by ensuring your left eye sees one image while your right sees another... This would make
it possible for parents to take their offspring to the cinema and watch two entirely different films at the same time.
My bookshelves chiefly function as a snapshot of what I was reading prior to the invention of the Kindle.
My brain knows best-before dates are a con; my panicky gut treats them like a nuclear countdown.
My career path is like crazy paving — it goes all over the place.
New Year's resolutions work like this: you think of something you enjoy doing and then resolve to stop doing it.
Newspapers chiefly exist to spoon-feed the opinions of their readers back to them, much like an arse-to-mouth hosepipe.
2013 Wipe
Nothing happens in cricket, ever. Even the highlights resemble a freeze frame.
On Black Mirror,
we don't tend to deal with big, powerful people, because when you
look at a Weinstein or something, you think, Is he capable of feeling anything?
Online, you play at being yourself.
Online, you're trying to appeal to everyone and people who you don't know at the
same time. So I think, as a side effect, it amplifies the desire for groupthink.
One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people.
I Can Make You Hate
Our metropolises are blighted by two problems: a lack of public transport and a lack of public loos.
Parties somehow represent the rationing of fun, and that very concept depresses me. You're allowed to act
like a tit at parties; therefore by implication, you're not allowed to act like a tit the rest of the time.
People always assume I went to public school, which I didn't, so that immediately puts me somewhere.
People bemoan the loss of watercooler chat, but I think that there's more of that than ever. It's just that it's online.
People tend to think I'm a lot more earnest than I am.
Rather than setting yourself a New Year's resolution, why not simply pick a reason for
hating yourself for the next 365 days? Takes less time, and it's easier to stick to.
Read On Writing
by Stephen King and
On Film-Making
by Alexander Mackendrick. Just try to power through the first draft. It'll be shit, you can rewrite it later.
On writing advice.
Short of finding a place on the witness protection programme, you don't get many opportunities to completely reinvent your life. Going to university changes
that. Away from home, away from parents, away from anyone who remembers you from school, you can pretend to be far cooler and more experienced than you are.
Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it.
Sport belongs in a news bulletin about as much as a mummified cat's head belongs in a Caesar salad.
Newswipe
Technology is a tool that has allowed us to swipe around like an angry toddler.
That's certainly made me think — it's made me think, I don't know if I want a television any more.
The Corporation claimed changes in technology had rendered many of TV Centre's functions
obsolete. For instance, suspicious old men now largely meet children using the Internet.
On the closure of Television Centre in 2013.
The Drone flew around with a bunch of mistletoe trying to get couples to kiss and
briefly forget the nightmarish dystopian World they were eating Onion Rings in.
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial
experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.
The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free
pass because its would-be detractors are scared it'll start criticising their haircut.
The fashion industry is the worst possible vessel for conveying an ethical message about anything.
The insomniac brain comes in various flavours; different personality types you're forced to share
your skull with for several hours. It's like being trapped in a lift with someone who won't shut up.
The logical quandaries thrown up by well-meaning systems are clearly something that I find darkly amusing.
The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping
their hides like dawdling cattle, but Planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.
The sole purpose of a crown is to make anyone not wearing one feel like an insignificant pauper. They're obscene to the point of satire.
The Twilight Zone
was sometimes shockingly cruel, far crueller than most TV drama today would dare to be.
There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a
different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor — all subtly different personas.
There's so much stuff flying around online, and it's so easy to get into arguments with people.
Tinder is the ultimate gamification of romance. It's Pokemon Go
for the heart.
Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the physical pleasure of turning actual
pages
and how ebook will never replace the real thing
. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up.
Videogames are probably my first love.
We are all alone, not as alone as a cat in a bin, but alone.
We don't sit down and look at the news pages and think, How could we do an episode about that?
We humans are great at creating tools with unforeseen consequences. For instance, when we invented the
wheel, we had no way of knowing we were also laying the foundations for the TV show Top Gear.
We take miracles for granted on a daily basis.
We're inseparable, games and I. If you cut me, I'd bleed pixels. Or blood. Probably blood, come to think of it.
What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn't the occasional snooty customer or the shop or the hours,
but the way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant — their automatic assumption that I didn't enjoy it.
What's odd about the selfie stick is that while it might faintly improve the photo you'll post on Facebook, it
definitely makes you seem like a shallow, awful clown to any bystanders in the humdrum physical space you're posing in.
When a monk takes a vow of silence, is he still allowed to post messages on the Internet?
Chances are God won't find
out. Being ancient, God
probably can't work computers. He holds the mouse gingerly, like it's made of fine china.
When it comes to something like Brexit, I am part of the liberal-media London bubble, and so, to me,
voting to leave was madness. My perspective was that it was cutting off your nose to spite your face.
When you meet people you've interacted with on social media, they are not like they are on social media.
When you're being earnest, people think you're being sarcastic, and when you're being sarcastic, they think
you're being earnest. The moral in all this, of course, is that people should never attempt to communicate.
Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots...
Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.
Screen Burn
With Boris Johnson, you don't think of him as a politician,
oddly. You think of him as a media personality because he's a comic character. He's basically Homer Simpson. That makes him strangely bullet-proof.
With Hang the DJ,
I was concerned that it was more comedic and much lighter than we normally do for Black Mirror.
Women — why aren't you running the world yet? Frankly I'm disappointed in you. Men are still far too dominant
for their own good, and consequently we've made a testosterone-sodden pig's ear of just about everything.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one.
You see, as I stare into their happy smiling faces filled with naive joie de vivre, I know they're just
blissfully unaware of the crushing despair that awaits them as they venture further into adulthood.
Your grades are not your destiny: they're just letters and numbers which rate how well you performed in one artificial arena, once.
Your beautiful password is dead. It was simply too complex and too damned exquisite to live in your humdrum world, your humdrum mind.
Youth fare aside, I have generally always been interested in what's going on culturally.
Last on Earth
