About My Disappointment in Charlie Brooker

Am I the only one thinking Charlie Brooker is losing it? I just checked Twitter and 95% of the tweets were honouring him for the “excellent” ‘How TV Ruined Your Life’ episode that went out yesterday. I’m now convinced I’ve been living and watching TV in a different Universe than those people, because I could swear I saw a lot before of what went out yesterday. Yesterday’s episode felt like a bad rehash of Screenwipe with different lines and clothes, but with the same set-up and less fresh and funny than the first time.

To be fair Brooker warned us, though he also noted it was his favourite episode of HTVRYL so far. Surely, he was joking?

Charlie Brooker: the emperor sells his clothes

Charlie Brooker is one of the most astute TV critics of the modern age. I bow at the altar of his now departed Screen Burn columns and consider Screen Wipe one of the finest television series about television to be made since Clive James turned TV criticism into a true art form. But don't look closely at the emperor of TV critics now because he's lost his clothes and got a silly haircut.

Now the problem with How TV Ruined Your Life, the latest vehicle for Brooker's rants, is not the rants themselves. Brooker is still on excellent form. The problem is that Brooker is no longer the outsider peering into the bacchanalian revelries within TV's tent and peeing into it with a scowl on his face. Now Brooker's one of the very insiders he castigates. He's doing David Frost as a hipster on 10 O'Clock Live and preparing to give Screenwipe a dust down again. And personally, he's married to Xtra Factor seat filler and auto-cutie Konnie Huq.

The emperor is still laughing at the other kings and their exposed genitals while his are swinging in the wind.

*snort*
Source: AOL Television – Scroll down till Brooker’s face comes in view

Must be said, his rants are still usually good; entertaining/funny. After hearing him going on about the same subject time and time again, and even using old jokes to try and make his point, it gets a bit tired and boring.

There’s a Screenwipe series, if I’m not mistaken series 5, in which in every episode the same commercial is being commented on. He does comically go from disconcerted and annoyed to insensitive to it; in every episode his attitude has changed a little due to the overload of seeing it. It did evoke my first angry and violent reaction at him. Actually, at a pie I was eating; I was blissfully eating a pie when the images were thrown in my face for the 4th time and I forked my pie violently.
I don’t like the recycling, but I seem to be the only one who’s bothered by that.

Another observation is that even though enlightening often, he doesn’t really do much more than stating the obvious that became so obvious we don’t notice it anymore. When he reminds us we go: “Yeah, you’re right; that’s how it is!” Of course he’s right, it’s painfully obvious he’s right, everyone can tell. It’s now that he’s running out of obvious errors to discuss and has to actually look at current affairs that he falls through. He knows nothing about politics. Gladly, he never claimed he did, but being one of the presenters of a show that has been advertised as an intelligent take on current affairs it’s only fair to expect more of him than observing someone is wearing jeans instead of a white sheet wrapped all around her body; her head included.

He keeps saying publicly the country (the UK) is in a bad state when people start looking at him for some guidance. That’s not exactly what he says; it comes more down to him not being that smart and him certainly not understanding what’s going on or how politics works. It’s safe to say he doesn’t know how politics works. I’m not so sure it has anything to do with him being stupid, because he’s obviously not. He has a good brain in that head of his, but his heart is not with politics or anything that even vaguely smells like it. And to say he doesn’t know what’s going on is not completely true either. He knows in certain cases very well what’s going on and he’s a master in explaining it to us. When it comes to politics he doesn’t as much dive into the subject, but rather into the shallow imaginary of what he can see on the surface. He’s not even attempting to analyze how it affects the country and the people in it. He’s not even attempting to understand it. If he’s not even trying to understand it, how on earth is he supposed to deliver an intelligent take on current affairs?

I’m not even touching the subject that he’s now on the inside still scowling at TV bobo’s. And his marriage to Konnie Huq and his haircut have nothing to do with anything that concerns the quality of his work.

He’s making me angry the way he used to be.