What's the secret of Charlie Brooker's unsuccess?

[imomus]

Charlie Brooker is my favourite columnist. His latest piece had me slumped in a continuous cackle. In it, Brooker claims to be a sad loser -- a "tragic singleton" -- who's "useless at every single aspect of holidays" and is therefore staying at home. Now, some would make this a claim to virtue -- "Save the Earth, holiday at home as I'm doing!" But that would not only be unBrookeresque, it would be unBritish. Never, ever (if you want British people to like you) present yourself as someone ethical, responsible, admirable, aspirational. Never pitch camp on high moral ground. Assume, instead, the position of a pitiful inadequate. Talk often about "my crushing sense of failure". Drop to your knees in front of your readers, weeping and swearing. Punch your head with a spike, no, two spikes. Beat your breast, shouting about your utter crapness, while spraying mace into your own face and...



Sorry, I'm getting carried away. That's how Charlie Brooker would write this piece. It would be filled with cartoon violence, either against himself or others, preferably both. Take paragraph six of his holiday piece, for instance. It's really an entire -- and extraordinary -- short story in itself, and the misanthropy it displays is hilariously psychopathic. Here it is:

"I don't want to go trekking with a bunch of disgusting strangers. What if a really annoying jabbering, bearded bloke latches on to me on the first day and decides I'm his best mate and won't leave me alone, and I'm stuck with him in some Arizonian wilderness and the sun's beating down and he's talking and talking and farting for comic effect and eating sandwiches and walking around with egg mayonnaise round his mouth until I want to grab the nearest rock and stove his skull in, and carry on smashing and smashing and roaring at the sky until the others dash over to pull me off him, but by then I've gone totally feral and start coming at them with the rock, which by now is all matted with gore and brain and beard hair, and I manage to clock one of them hard in the temple and they're flat on the ground, limbs jerking like an electrocuted dog, but as I swing for the next one some self-appointed hero rugby-tackles me, but I'm still putting up a fight so in desperation they all stamp on my neck until they're certain I'm dead, then throw my body in the river and make a lifelong pact to tell no one the truth of what happened that day? What sort of holiday is that?"

It's a rhetorical question in a piece of opinion-based commentary, Jim, but not as we know it. I call this "cartoon violence", but it would be more accurate to say it's "video game violence". Brooker used to review video games in the 90s, before he started the TV listings spoof TV Go Home, which is where I first became aware of him. My favourite part of TV Go Home was Cunt, the fly-on-the-wall documentary about a 20something trustafarian named Nathan Barley, a worthless braying would-be filmmaker who read style magazines and travelled often to Tokyo. Nathan was an aspirational character -- a 90s yuppie -- who got hammered in the small print. The producer's "we want to hear from you" note under the programme description would often feature Nathan getting what Brooker saw as his just deserts: being ejaculated on by a circle of hairy oilmen, chained to a rig in a gale, for instance, or having a hole punched in the back of his head by a waiter. Back in the 90s I enjoyed all this hugely, while essentially living Nathan Barley's London life in almost every detail. When, a few years later, Barley came to TV, the ratings were catastrophically low. Perhaps only self-hating Barley types -- creative classers like me, gadding about Clerkenwell and Shoreditch -- were watching.

But wait, I'm not self-hating. Not at all. I love myself, and I love the life I lead. This becomes particularly clear to me when I read my LiveJournal Friends Page -- or a Charlie Brooker column. Do other people really feel that negative about their lives, or is Misery Guts a persona they adopt to elicit sympathy from their readers? I don't know about my LJ friends, but Brooker is a successful and presumably well-paid writer for newspapers and television. He's a celebrity who went to Glastonbury with a glamour babe ("Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace, the "ghetto princess" from last year's Big Brother, who has, inexplicably, become a friend of mine") and still managed to describe it as a personal Waterloo.

Brooker could easily portray his life as positively as I portray my own (no lie, it really is good to be me!), but he doesn't because he's cleverer than me. This is why he has a column in The Guardian and I just have this blog (and the odd article in an art mag). We like Charlie because we never, ever sense he has a better life than us, no matter how miserable ours might be.

But it's this question of aspiration, this self-deprecation, which really marks the place I have to part company with Brooker. Temperamentally, stylistically, ideologically, in every way. I laugh along with his pieces, but actually I'm on the other side entirely. I'm with Nathan, and with aspiration. I would never piss on a peacock.

Have a look at this television essay Brooker did on aspirational television. Now, I hate the sort of bling culture he's puncturing here, but I don't hate aspiration. At all. I just hate aspiration to wealth. It's simply wrong to aspire to bling, because it doesn't make you happy. But aspiring to other things -- beauty, glamour, excitement, sex, travel, art, creativity -- can drastically improve your life. Anyway, let's watch.

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Summary: "Isn't life fantastic; you've got the looks, the clothes, the money, you are living the dream, my friend. [Charlie shouts "fuck off" very loudly into a man's face.] You know what I'm talking about -- aspirational TV. Normal life's damp and grey by comparison. No wonder everyone's miserable. [Shot of ordinary people passing on street, Charlie's voice over saying "He's miserable. She's miserable. He's a completely miserable git."] Balls to aspiration, it's a tosser's mirage. It's far better to just sit here and sneer at the lot of it, isn't it? [Screams at tramp]."

Watching Charlie's TV journalism on YouTube, I suddenly spotted something I can't get out of my head. A resemblance (it's most evident in his American reportage) to disgraced pedo Jonathan King, circa his 80s series Entertainment USA. Brooker is like King post-Tarantino, post-Doom, and post- the world falling out of love with America as, itself, the number one aspirational lifestyle template. What they have in common (apart from something around the mouth) is their absolute mastery of the kind of populist tone required in Britain. King's hysterical levels of smugness and self-justification might seem the polar opposite of Brooker's self-deprecation, but we've already decided here at Click Opera that self-deprecation is just a cunningly-disguised sort of self-love, because (in Britain at least) it never ever comes with promises of self-improvement. Narcissism, negative narcissism, same difference. In love with my virtues, in love with my vices, whatever.

His TV essay on aspiration just seems to replace one tabloid cliché (bling envy) with another (schadenfreude). But where I really part company with Brooker -- and Britain as a whole -- is on this question of the toxicity of all aspiration. It is emphatically not "far better to just sit here and sneer at the lot of it". My solution is quite the opposite. Get up and go. Go to New York, go to Paris, to Berlin, to Tokyo. Go to places where people believe in something -- art, ambition, food, magnetic levitation trains! -- places where people are doing something. Never lose your hunger for something better, and never fall out of love with yourself and your dreams. Those things will, in themselves, make you attractive. You'll find a mate. You'll never have to holiday alone again.

Of course, it may be that Brooker just wants to make people laugh -- and that's an aspiration not to be sneered at. But can he really be as miserable as he pretends? Is the secret of Charlie Brooker's unsuccess that he hasn't got any? Is his ultraviolence really ultra-friendliness, a desire to see bitter British faces creased and smiling? And is it me -- with my amazing built-in self-righting mechanism, my self-sustaining self-satisfaction -- who's the true psychopath?

Comments

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

Everyone loves Charlie Brooker, pretty much everything he touches is comedy gold. Also, I'm yet to disagree with him about anything, from Macs Vs PCs to how over-rated Banksy is... the only thing I think that failed miserably was his creation Nathan Barley...

"a few years later, Barley came to TV, the ratings were catastrophically low. Perhaps only self-hating Barley types -- creative classers like me, gadding about Clerkenwell and Shoreditch -- were watching."

The problem was that even the Nathan Barley types werent watching. The show was about ten years too late... Thats not to say that Nathan Barley types dont exist anymore, they'll always exist, it's just Nathan Barley didnt represent what Brooker was lampooning anymore. Barley was a 'self-facilitating media node' of the 90s when he should have been an American Apparel wearing Hipster of the 2000s. The intitial concept for Nathan Barley might have been accurate then, but by the time it came to TV, Nathan Barley was an outdated cliche rather than cutting edge satire. To sum it up in photos:

This is what Nathan Barley was:


This is what Nathan Barley should have been:


If you cant tell the difference, take comfort in the fact you're probably not a Nathan Barley type.

"It's simply wrong to aspire to bling, because it doesn't make you happy. But aspiring to other things -- beauty, glamour, excitement, sex, travel, art, creativity -- can drastically improve your life."

Materialism is transient. Attachment to materialism inevitably leads to grief in the wake of its demise. Happiness is found in acceptance of the nature of transience.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's you in the second picture, isn't it? I think everyone who watched Nathan Barley thought it should be them in the lead.

Happiness is found in acceptance of the nature of transience.

Shouldn't that read "Hippiness is..."?

[thenipper.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you're such a fan of Brooker - I find him representative of a modern current of, um, lumpen nihilism - a la those 'Is it me or is everything shit?' books. Culturally, he's a child of Chris Morris's hyper-media-literate disgust and Steven Wells' surreal invective - but he doesn't have the agenda or righteous idealism of either. He often seems like a pure machine for generating bile, spewed out with equal intensity at twatty politicians, fatuous media folk, cynical hacks, clueless proles, people who buy Macs etc etc. One gets the feeling there is a huge rhetorical overcompensation for the actually pretty conservative tastes of yr standard nerdy computer mag reader - the one thing he does like is Dr. Who!

[girfan.livejournal.com]

Charlie Brooker's Guardian columns and Screen Wipe series on the BBC are two of my favourite things. He is one of the people who I would love to go have a drink with.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

He interviewed me once about Japanese pop, but the tragedy is at the time I had no idea who he was. I don't think he did either.

[(Anonymous)]

I recognise what you're writing about, but I think you've just isolated one small aspect of the British persona and taken it to represent all of Britain. Also, you seem to admit the essential irony of Brooker's style of humour, and yet at the same time want to take him at face value. Of course he's aspirational, you just have to look at his career.

You can't really believe that London is a non-aspirational place even within your own terms of art, ambition, beauty, etc. We're talking about an art scene which has been centrally important internationally over the past 20 years, a centre of musical creativity second to none, a fashion scene which is far more interesting than Paris or Milan, a thriving literary scene, a renascent restaurant scene, etc etc. London is one of the great global magnet for people with aspirations of all kinds, far more than low-density Berlin which is essentially the boho equivalent of moving to the suburbs.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

London's a great place to visit these days -- like New York. But both cities (and probably Tokyo too) are simply too expensive to be able to sustain the kind of bohemia a non-bling aspirational culture requires. To quote Vanessa Grigoriadis in New York magazine (http://nymag.com/news/features/39319/):

"the current ethos of young New York... is overwhelmingly tipped toward anger, envy, and resentment at those who control the culture and apartments. “New York is a city for the rich by the rich, and all of us work at the mercy of rich people and their projects,” says Choire Sicha, Gawker’s top editor (he currently employs a staff of five full-time writers). “If you work at any publication in this town, you work for a millionaire or billionaire. In some ways, that’s functional, and it works as a feudal society. But what’s happened now, related to that, is that culture has dried up and blown away: The Weimar-resurgence baloney is hideous; the rock-band scene is completely unexciting; the young artists have a little more juice, but they’re just bleak intellectual kids; and I am really dissatisfied with young fiction writers.”

avoiding envy

[ajkandy.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

No, of course Brooker isn't as miserable as he pretends -- but that's the way people communicate in post-Protestant culture, with constant jabs instead of empathy. What he's doing isn't very new, as you say -- it's old-school tall poppies syndrome wrapped up in a bizarre form of liberal guilt and a wide swath of the auld English defeatism. Don't be aspirational because there's no point -- or as the old drama professors would say, those who are aspirational are always the tragic figures, who disturb the social order and are inevitably violently put down, or fail in some way or other.

The flipside to this -- what you do in this blog and in art mags -- is chronicling something creative and positive. Of course, to those of us living ordinary lives with day jobs, it all seems very exotic. All this jaunting around the world, living in glamourously bohemian digs etc. etc.

The few people I know who I can vaguely describe as Nathan Barley-esque (still staving off graduation by throwing DJ parties of difficult listening music), seem to do so by either having rich parents, or playing the grants and bursaries like a piano.

Maybe it's time for the Momus Papers: The Detailed Financials. (Time to get over that Protestant association of money with guilt). I believe in those positive aspirations, I just need detailed costing to see if I can afford it!

On a side note, it seems self-evident, the more you dig, that successful pop stars already come from successful families and a middle-class or upper-middle-class background. I'd say that with few exceptions, there's very little actual 'working class' pop stars. They're successful because they've grown up with a support system, education, contacts, good advice, and of course, free time (not to work) and financial backing.

or are there?

Re: avoiding envy

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The financial secret of my "success" is not actually wanting to own anything. Post-materialism, in other words. I don't have a home, a car, kids, a smoking, drinking or drugs habit, or anything that costs you money. I actually enjoy not-spending money! I feel anxious and unhappy when I have money. Actually, I've noticed the Germans have a similar psychology -- maybe that's one reason I fit here. It's undoubtedly Protestantism, and not so very post!

I disagree about there being no working class rock stars. To compare myself with an ex-labelmate, I've never had the success of Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), who's thoroughly working class. And part of the reason is that there aren't enough consumers with my levels of education.

"Lucky enough to have had my levels of eduction," I should say. But university education was free and universal when I got mine. Gillespie could've got a literature degree from Aberdeen too, but he had better things to do (like drumming for the Mary Chain).

But I think he's had a long career because of something I do too: self-preservation. Out on tour, he always used to pretend to be drinking vodka and really out of it, but if he had to sing or shag someone he'd miraculously sober up. So I began to suspect it was just water in his vodka bottle and that his drugs were all air drugs. He was saving himself for later. He still looks good in his late 40s. He knew instinctively what I knew by reading psychology texts at university: that for certain body and personality types, life really does begin at 40. So it's worth staying intact.

[(Anonymous)]

But, it's really obvious that the point of that Brooker clip is that it isn't "far better to just sit here and sneer at the lot of it". I mean, look at him at the end of the clip. He's covered in filth and ends up grabbing a tramp by the arm and laughing in a deranged manner. You're not really meant to be siding with him there.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're right, he leaves it open. And I like the way a lot of Brooker's humour is generated by the ironic gaps between "what British people seem to want to hear" (his "look! shiny penny!" TV listings betray a certain contempt for that, although it could be passed off as contempt for TV execs' contempt for the public) and "what I'm pretending to advocate" and "what I sincerely believe". He's Generation Irony in the sense that everything is a persona or in quotes, but he's also painfully honest and sincere -- in quotes. "Painfully honest and sincere" is, of course, the slipperiest pose of them all.

[(Anonymous)]

But wait, I'm not self-hating. Not at all. I love myself, and I love the life I lead.

Do I not detect a whiff of protesting too much? Rather than Momus, economic exile from his own culture, living an ultimately precarious life far from the madding crowd in the gentle slipstream of Berlin bohemia, wouldn't you in fact prefer to be someone like Charlie Brooker? With his own column in a prestigious national paper, rather than a paid-for blog on livejournal? Someone who can pitch a TV programme and actually get it made? Someone who doesn't need to relentlessly seek the approbation of his peers because he already has it?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, because Britain feels very small to me now. I'm sorry if that sounds grand, but the British psychology pinches me like a pair of too-tight shoes. And is Charlie Brooker known in New York or Tokyo? Do people come up to him in the street with offers of gratuitous sex which he graciously refuses because he's in a wonderful relationship already? I think not, mate.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

I'm going to move to Canada. Woo.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

Which is my way of saying that I have nothing valuable to contribute to this discussion, though I do aspire to a future of greater education, international livin' and time with my girlfriend of two years who I have only seen for three weeks in the last ten months. Charlie Brooker is not on my radar, though I did watch Nathan Barley when it was on, and enjoyed, and even remember trying to get someone else to watch it. I must say that your beliefs about British self-deprecation hit home with me very strongly, and that I showed them to my Canadian girlfriend as being The Truth.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Oh god what a drama queen. Yeah the world can suck. Get the hell over it.

Someone ought to draw some eyeliner on him and put him in a sparkly dress. Then maybe if he grew his hair out and put on some lipstick he´d look better.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Hey, he could be Nicky Wire!

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

One use I've had for self-deprecation: you get to exercise your sharp tongue without tempting people to exercise their sharp objects in turn.

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

Good god is that clip funny.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

My solution is quite the opposite. Get up and go. Go to New York, go to Paris, to Berlin, to Tokyo. Go to places where people believe in something -- art, ambition, food, magnetic levitation trains! -- places where people are doing something. Never lose your hunger for something better, and never fall out of love with yourself and your dreams. Those things will, in themselves, make you attractive. You'll find a mate. You'll never have to holiday alone again.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I AM NOW INSPIRED! MY LIFE IS TAKING ON A NEW MEANING! THANK YOU MOMUS, FOR BRINGING ME LIGHT!

[(Anonymous)]

Surely it is the ultra-British divisionism of Click Opera that lets the ethos down. 'Better', 'higher', linking problems to locations (and groups of people). It's proto-colonial. Perhaps you haven't left the worst elements of Britishness behind, just put them at a physical distance.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Did you see the youtube piece where Charlie Brooker declares that The Wire is the best thing on TV in the past 30 years. Perhaps ever. I was kind of stunned he liked something and recommended it. The fact it was The Wire surprised me more.
I like the guy I find him charming. I think he is for the quality of aspiration and not sneering at everything. His questioning of current British cultural values is healthy. Also, in his favour he does preface most of his rants with suggestions and hopes for something good. He can spot a missed opportunity at a hundred yards.
Why should we aspire to go anywhere, when the real fight is right here?

[(Anonymous)]

"Never pitch camp on high moral ground." Because the world has enough hypocrites? You, for example.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I prefer to call it "dialectics".

[craig-torso.livejournal.com]

It's worth pointing out that Brooker is one of the founders and creative director of Zeppotron, the production company responsible for the following programmes.

http://www.zeppotron.com/shows/index.html

Brooker's arguments about the poor state of television are slightly undermined considering the largely awful output of his own production company. And let's not forget Space Cadets, tricking people into thinking they're going to space for the amusement of the viewing public.

It's no surprise that whenever Big Brother comes on the television his column is surprisingly devoid of any criticism of the format but is filled every week with commentary on the contestants. Why would Brooker criticise Endemol's big hit when they own Zeppotron?

Brooker has carved an excellent niche as the angry television critic without having to actually offend anybody or say anything really worthwhile.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> It's no surprise that whenever Big Brother comes on the television his column is surprisingly devoid of any criticism of the format but is filled every week with commentary on the contestants.

He *has* criticised the format of Big Brother - there was an excellent section in one of his shows a while back, where he explained how different narratives are constructed through editing (which is how he got to meet Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace), and the other week he devoted an entire programme to the 'reality' format, going so far as to create his own reality elimination game show to illustrate how it's done.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe I'm disconnected from American media but somehow even Brooker's sneering seems like a step up from what I'd consider the level of consciousness in current American media. A sense of togetherness, even if it's against aspiration? Criticism instead of rejiggered parody? Maybe the methods of Jackass, Family Guy and South Park weigh too heavily on my mind but I actually find this refreshing.
-Robyn

[caoilte.livejournal.com]

He's trapped by his success, you're liberated by yours. But does that make you a monster unleashed by society? Probably not.

In a time when nepotism knows no bounds and quote whoring is de rigeur he's found a sympathetic spot in (our Middle Class) public consciousness by fighting back against the celebrity establishment. Lately his persona is maintained by mellifluous projections of his tattered and unfashionably unshaven bloated hulk, but only because he got so successful they gave him a TV show.

And it's not that I don't approve. Like all good critics he still knows something good when he sees it (and yes The Wire _is_ the best TV show since I don't know when).

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I like Charlie Brooker, too. Great, isn't it?

By the way, I shamelessly mention you in my latest blog post:

http://my.opera.com/quentinscrisp/blog/2007/11/05/fate-has-just-handed-it-to-me

Re: Zeppotron

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I had no idea Zeppotron was responsible for so much shit. Looks like I'm gonna need to retract my "everything he touches turns to comedy gold" statement now that I've seen his production company are the source of such atrocities as "Space Cadets" and "The People's Book Of Records".

I have to admit, When I think of Charlie Brooker I think of his well written pessimistic satire for the Guardian, Brass Eye, and of course his TV Go Home website, all of which are his best work.

Charlie Brooker's cynical, profane style of humor could easily be written off as derisively puerile (much like Maddox (http://maddox.xmission.net/)) but the difference between Brooker and the rockist cynicism of so called "retro necro" is Brooker merely presents a constructed persona for the sake of humor. Its not supposed to be taken seriously. Its a overblown caricature of all your pets hates and cynicism, and it makes you laugh.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

[harveyjames.livejournal.com]

Great post. I laughed out loud at "And is it me -- with my amazing built-in self-righting mechanism..." you're the last person I expected to make a reference to Robot Wars.