Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker
Born	Charlton Brooker (1971-03-03) 3 March 1971 Reading, Berkshire, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Broadcaster/writer/columnist
Known for	Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, Newswipe, Screen Burn, Nathan Barley, TVGoHome, Dead Set, You Have Been Watching Gameswipe

Charlton Brooker, commonly known as Charlie Brooker, (born (1971-03-03)3 March 1971 in Reading, Berkshire) is a British comic writer and broadcaster. His style of humour is savage and profane, with surreal elements and a consistent satirical pessimism. He appears in TV shows Screenwipe, Gameswipe and Newswipe, writes review columns for The Guardian newspaper, and is one of four creative directors of comedy production company Zeppotron. His five-part horror drama Dead Set for E4 earned him a nomination for a BAFTA and he is also the host of the Channel 4 comedy panel show You Have Been Watching.

Early life and education

Born in Reading, but raised in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire and schooled in Wallingford, Brooker first worked as a writer and cartoonist for Oink!, a comic produced in the late-1980s.

Brooker attended the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster) from 1989 to 1992, studying for a BA in Media Studies and specialising in Television and Video Production. He never graduated, however, having failed to write his dissertation. His final piece of creative work at university was a short film called "A Busy Day for Bob Bumstain", which featured stand-up comedian Ian Moore. The film included heavy use of colour-separation overlay and all of the backgrounds featured were cartoons drawn by Brooker.

Brooker is an atheist, frequently making reference to this in his writing.

Career

PC Zone

Brooker wrote for PC Zone magazine in the mid-1990s. Aside from games reviews, his output included the comic strip Cybertwats and a column entitled "Sick Notes", where Brooker would insult anyone who wrote in to the magazine and offered a £50 prize to the "best" letter.

In February 1998, one of Brooker's one-shot cartoons caused the magazine to be pulled from the shelves of many British newsagents. The cartoon was entitled "Helmut Werstler's Cruelty Zoo" and professed to be an advert for a theme park created by a Teutonic psychologist for children to take out their violent impulses on animals rather than humans. It was accompanied by photoshopped pictures of children smashing the skulls of monkeys with hammers, jumping on a badger with a pitchfork, and chainsawing an orang-utan, among other things. The original joke was supposed to be at the expense of the Tomb Raider games, known at the time for the number of animals killed, but the original title, "Lara Croft's Cruelty Zoo", was changed for copyright reasons.

In October 2008, Brooker and several other ex-writers were invited back to review a game for the 200^th issue. Brooker reviewed Euro Truck Simulator.

SuperKaylo

A number of Brooker's artworks were available to the public on his website. This body of work is drawn both from the commissions of his various patrons, and began as a paper comic that was sold to customers at Brooker's former workplace CeX. In addition to its counter presence, Brooker sold issues to mail order customers when they called up to place orders for games.

One aspect of the SuperKaylo site was a series of recorded phone conversations, that had originally started from a commissioned featured for PC Zone on technical support phonelines. Brooker took things further than this half serious investigation, when in 1999 he called up the then editor of Edge magazine, Jason Brookes. Pretending to be an angry father, he phoned up enraged by an advert that had appeared in a previous issue for CeX, one that Brooker himself had written and drawn.

TVGoHome

From 1999 to 2003 he penned the satirical TVGoHome website, a regular series of mock TV schedules published in a format similar to that of the Radio Times, consisting of a combination of savage satire and surreal humour and featured in technology newsletter Need To Know. A print adaptation of the site was published by Fourth Estate in 2001. A TV sketch show based on the site was broadcast on UK digital station E4 the same year.

Screen Burn

Brooker began writing a TV review column entitled "Screen Burn" for The Guardian newspaper's Saturday entertainment supplement The Guide in 2000, a role he has continued in to the present day. A compilation of these columns, also called Screen Burn, has also been published. From the autumn of 2005, he wrote a regular series of columns in The Guardian supplement "G2" on Fridays called "Supposing", in which he free-associated on a set of vague what-if themes. Since late October 2006 this column has been expanded into a full-page section on Mondays, including samples from TVGoHome and Ignopedia, an occasional series of pseudo-articles on topics mostly suggested by readers. The key theme behind Ignopedia was that, while Wikipedia is written and edited by thousands of users, Ignopedia would be written by a single sub-par person with little or no awareness of the facts.

On 24 October, 2004, he wrote a column on George W. Bush and the forthcoming 2004 US Presidential Election which concluded:

John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. - where are you now that we need you?

The Guardian withdrew the article from its website and published and endorsed an apology by Brooker. He has since commented about the remark in the column stating:

I ended a Screen Burn column by recycling a very old tasteless joke (a variant of a graffiti I first saw during the Thatcher years), and within minutes half the internet seemed convinced The Guardian was officially calling for assassination. My inbox overflowed with blood-curdling death threats, and it was all very unfunny indeed - a bit like recounting a rude joke at a dinner party, only to be told you hadn't recounted a joke at all, but molested the host's children, and suddenly everyone was punching you and you weren't going to get any pudding. I've had better weekends.

Television

In 2000, Brooker was one of the writers of the Channel 4 show The Eleven O'Clock Show and a co-host (with Gia Milinovich) on BBC Knowledge's The Kit, a low-budget programme dedicated to gadgets and technology (1999-2000). In 2001, he was one of several writers on Channel 4's controversial Brass Eye special on the subject of paedophilia.

Together with Brass Eye's Chris Morris, Brooker co-wrote the sitcom Nathan Barley, based on a character from one of TVGoHome's fictional programmes. The show was broadcast in 2005 and focused on the lives of a group of London media 'trendies'. The same year, he was also on the writing team of the Channel 4 sketch show Spoons, produced by Zeppotron.

In 2006 Brooker began writing and presenting his signature TV series Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on BBC Four, a TV review programme in a similar style to his Screen Burn columns in The Guardian. After an initial pilot series of three editions in April of that year, the programme returned in the autumn for a second run of four episodes plus Christmas and Review of the Year specials in December 2006. A third series followed in February 2007 with a fourth broadcast in September 2007, followed by a Review of the Year in December 2007. The fifth series started in November 2008 and was followed by another Review of the Year special. This series was also the first to be given a primetime repeat on terrestrial TV (BBC 2), in January 2009.

Screenwipe's format mostly consists of two elements. The first is the playing of clips from other TV shows - both mainstream and obscure - interspersed with shots of Brooker, sat in his living room, delivering witty critiques on them. The second is where Brooker explains, again with a slice of barbed humour, the way in which a particular area of the TV industry operates. Also occasionally present are animations made by the owners of the Fat Pie website and guest contributions, which have included the poetry of Tim Key and segments in which a celebrity (or colleague of Brooker's from elsewhere) explains their fascination with a certain TV show or genre.

Brooker has regularly experimented with Screenwipe, with some editions focusing on a specific theme. These themes have included American TV, TV news, advertising and children's TV. (The last of these involved a segment where Brooker joined the cast of Toonattik for one week, playing the character of 'Angry News Guy'.) Probably the most radical departure from the norm came with an episode focused on TV script writing, which saw several of British TV's most prominent writers sit down with Brooker for a (mostly) serious interview about their job.

As per the development of his career with The Guardian, a similar show called Newswipe, focusing on current affairs reportage by the international news media, began on BBC4 on the 25th of March.

Brooker has appeared on two episodes and one webisode of the popular BBC current affairs news quiz Have I Got News for You. Brooker also appeared on an episode of the Channel 4 panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats, and in December 2006 reviewed two games written by the presenters of VideoGaiden, on their show.

Charlie Brooker wrote for the BBC Three sketch show Rush Hour.

On 30 January, 2009 Brooker recorded a pilot for a Channel 4 panel show entitled You Have Been Watching. The show featured guests discussing television, similar to Screenwipe but with contributing guests. For the pilot episode the guests were David Mitchell, Jamelia, Rufus Hound and Terry Christian.. On Thursday 26 March 2009 You Have Been Watching was picked up by Channel 4 for a first season. It started airing on Tuesday 7 July 2009 for an 8 episode run.

Dead Set

Main article: Dead Set

Brooker wrote Dead Set, a five part zombie horror thriller for E4 set in the Big Brother house. The show was broadcast in October 2008 to coincide with Halloween and was repeated on Channel 4 in January 2009 to coincide with Celebrity Big Brother. It was produced by Zeppotron, who also produced Screenwipe.

Brooker told MediaGuardian.co.uk it comprised a "mixture of known and less well known faces" and "Dead Set is very different to anything I've done before, and I hope the end result will surprise, entertain and appall people in equal measure." He added that he has long been a fan of horror films and that his new series "could not be described as a comedy". "I couldn't really describe what it is but it will probably surprise people," Brooker said, adding that he plans to "continue as normal" with his print journalism.

Publications

• TV Go Home, Charlie Brooker, 2001 (ISBN 1-84115-675-2)
• Unnovations, Charlie Brooker, 2002 (ISBN 1-84115-730-9)
• Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker, 2004 (ISBN 0-571-22755-4)
• Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline, Charlie Brooker, 2007 (ISBN 9780571238415)
• Charlie Brooker's the Hell of it All, Charlie Brooker, 2009 (ISBN 9780571229574)

External links

• Charlie's personal Twitter
• TV Go Home
• Charlie Brooker's Guardian columns.
• Review of "Screen Burn" Compilation.
• Review of Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe
• Shuffle's Cue & Ehh? with Charlie Brooker
• Charlie Brooker's made-up film awards
• Charlie Brooker Interview about You Have Been Watching
• Charlie Brooker's page, Conville and Walsh literary agents