Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe
I’ve always enjoyed Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn columns in the Guardian, so I was interested to see that he’d got a TV show on BBC Four called ‘Screen Wipe’. It’s broadcast well past my bedtime, so we’ve been recording it and watching it at some later date while eating dinner. His Screen Burn column often made me spray coffee all over the table when a funny phrase caught me unawares, but now Screen Wipe results in the considerably more painful (and messy) snorting of pasta out through the nose.
Brooker is fabulously venomous about TV that he finds ridiculous, but also enthusiastic about programmes that he likes. There was a segment on the last programme about breakfast TV which was absolutely hilarious, including some clips from some dreadfully saccharine Australian TV programme for kids that appears to be his favoured early morning viewing.
He also did a bit on Noel Edmonds’ ‘Deal Or No Deal’—-a game show that I’m glad to say I’ve never seen. However, his description of it as the first game show based on quantum mechanics (more or less replicated in print here) was so funny that I’m tempted to watch it to see what he’s on about. Well, maybe not.
