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Product Description
Product Description
'These days, watching television is like sitting in the back of Travis Bickle's taxicab, staring through the window at a world of relentless, churning shod . . .'
Cruel, acerbic, impassioned, gleeful, frequently outrageous and always hilarious, Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn collects the best of the much-loved Guardian Guide columns into one easy-to-read-on-the-toilet package.
Sit back and roar as Brooker rips mercilessly into Simon Cowell, 'Big Brother', Trinny and Susannah, 'Casualty', Davina McCall, Michael Parkinson . . . and almost everything elso on television.
This book will make practically anyone laugh out loud.
At the turn of the millennium, Charlie Brooker created the notorious website TV Go Home. More recently, he co-wrote Channel Four's Nathan Barley with Chris Morris.
Prior to become the Guardian Guide's TV critic, Brooker worked as a cartoonist, a journalist, and a TV and radio presenter.
'Charlie Brooker doesn't so much go for the jugular as decapitate his targets altogether.' Jim Shelley, Daily Mirror
'He watches these things so we don't have to. Bless him for that.' Graham 'Father Ted' Linehan
'This belongs on everyone's bookshelf. With a big spotlight pointing at it.' Julie Burchill
'The funniest newspaper columnist in the world.' Racing Post
About the Author
Charlie Brooker has worked as a writer, journalist, cartoonist and television and radio presenter. Recent television credits include: You Have Been Watching, Screenwipe, which won a Royal Television Society award, and Newswipe. Charlie also wrote and produced Dead Set, a BAFTA-nominated satirical horror drama for Channel 4. Other TV writing credits include the 11 O'Clock Show and the Brass Eye Paedophilia Special. Charlie is well-known for his weekly columns in The Guardian and recently won The Press Awards' columnist of the year 2009
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
73 of 74 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Charlie Brooker is the man behind the infamous TVGoHome site, where he invented television programmes such as Get Hen!, where contestants had to get a hen, and Daily Mail Island, where single mothers, asylum seekers and other targets of tabloid ire were torn to pieces by rabid Middle Englanders. Proving that life often imitates art - or at least, arse - even more bizarre programmes were actually broadcast, and in his new role as TV critic for the Guardian Guide, Brooker had to review such pinnacles of popular entertainment as Big Brother, I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, and the truly bizarre Touch The Truck. Screen Burn is a collection of these reviews, spanning the last three years.
Whether you'll enjoy Screen Burn depends on your attitude to life. If you're the sort of person who has a sunny outlook, believes that people are fundamentally decent and greets the dawn of a new day with a big smile, Screen Burn will make you weep hot, salty tears. If on the other hand you're a twisted misanthrope with an abiding hatred of pretty much the entire human race, the book will make you laugh until your eyes bleed. Brooker doesn't pull his punches: while other critics might suggest that a programme is below par, Brooker demands that the presenters be locked in a barbed wire cage with angry hyenas and rolled down a mountain. If - as John Lydon once sang - anger is an energy, then Charlie Brooker could power the national grid.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
You may not think reading several years' collected columns one after another could sustain itself for the entirety of this book, but somehow it manages to work. To buy it isn't just to read some extremely sharp and extremely amusing observations about television (I was in stitches at one description of Jim Davidson), but to be forced to take a step back and look at society, feeling Brooker's pain as he attempts to hold on to his sanity and intelligence in an insane world of bleating, porcelain drones. It's got to the stage where the piss-take show concepts he dreams up are actually SHOWN on television, and as a result no-one is safe from his venom if he thinks they deserve it, regardless of class, age, pastimes, nationality, wealth, fame, looks or intelligence. Jim Davidson, Simon Cowell, football fans, the Daily Mail, neo-conservatives and Middle England get a particular pasting. This isn't to say that Brooker's without a sense of fairness; perhaps unexpectedly, he sticks up for a few people commonly pilloried by both the media and the public, including John Leslie, Sharon Osbourne and Jamie Oliver, and even some marginalised groups like drug addicts and asylum seekers.
Profane, angry, venomous, heartfelt, intelligent - but above all, EXTREMELY funny. Especially considering the bargain cover price, this is a must buy.
Profane, angry, venomous, heartfelt, intelligent - but above all, EXTREMELY funny. Especially considering the bargain cover price, this is a must buy.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Charlie Brooker loves television.
He just hates the way it is now.
This book is a passionate, scathing, vicious and occasionally scabrous attack on the dumbing-down of television over the last five years or so; the rise of interminable reality programmes, lowest-common-denominator "talent" shows, and incessant downmarket soaps and violent dramas.
Put that bluntly, it could be seen as a depressing book. However, Brooker is the man who gave us TV Go Home and Unnovations, and is the creator of the odious Nathan Barley, so there's a savage, excoriating wit there - this is appallingly funny, and full of well-directed ire.
As television fragments into thousands of channels targeting ordure at the masses, Brooker's book is a powerful scream calling for sanity and some artistic integrity. It's also filthy and hilarious.
Superb.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Sample only - Quite accurately observed and gently comic
The sample to this book is an extensive one and gives a good taster of the book as a whole. I generally like Brooker's articles in the Guardian (especially today's one about the... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Andrew Ives
Funny or what?
Every bit as entertaining as the later, 'The Hell of it All' and 'Dawn of the Dumb'. Fascinating to look back through Brooker's sarcastic comedy eyes to TV shows from early in the... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Foden Wheatley
A waste of paper
This author describes himself as a z-list celebrity, he is also a z-list author, this is the worst book I have ever had the misfortune to buy, it is neither funny nor clever, how... Read more
Published 18 months ago by garythegp
Brooker at his best!
First off, OMFG! if you like watching Charlie Brooker on T.V, you'll love reading his books. dispite the fact that some of things he writes about happened about 10 years ago (how... Read more
Published on 9 May 2010 by Rainbow Dash
Highly Amusing and utterly scathing
A collection of Charlie Brooker's TV Column writings from possibly 2002 - 2004 (I'd go and look but it's over 50 metres away), this book had me in snorting fits of chuckles. Read more
Published on 2 May 2010 by S. Gilbert
Very funny, very belligerent.
I enjoyed Dawn Of The Dumb so much, I had to go back to these earlier writings to enjoy another burst of CB's scabrous take on 21st century telly and its constant inadequacies. Read more
Published on 30 April 2010 by Philoctetes
Pointless review!
What is there to add to the legion of Brooker-holics who have also put in their review-cum-hero-worship? Seems either you get this guy or you don't - I do, and loved this book. Read more
Published on 16 Feb 2010 by wintermute
An interesting look back at the TV from 2001-2
With further hindsight, Charlie Brooker will probably be able to pinpoint the beginning of a peptic ulcer at some point in this bilious journal. Read more
Published on 23 Aug 2009 by L. Hennessy
Angry, veeeeeeery angry
yep, Charlie Brooker is angry. There is no denying the fact that TV makes him downright furious.
The result is one of the funniest books I have read in a long time. Read more
The result is one of the funniest books I have read in a long time. Read more
Published on 31 July 2009 by Sir Bob
This book reminds me why I got rid of cable three years ago.
This book showed up in my recommended list from Amazon U.K., and based on the reviews from other readers, I decided to purchase it.
I am from the U.S. Read more
I am from the U.S. Read more
Published on 25 April 2009 by Sally Foster
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