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'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
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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.
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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