Ambitions for the day

Today will be successful if I stay awake in this afternoon's lecture. Not so tough, you may think, but I nodded off once or twice last week while my esteemed friend and colleague gave a fascinating case study of India's media history. In my defence, I was exhausted, it was stiflingly hot and the chair was comfortable. I thought I'd got away with it until Steve said something and my students tweeted it. Judging by the seminar though, I'd absorbed more than them…

Today should be easier: I'm actually giving the lecture. I'll forgive the kids if they sleep, perchance to dream but I should probably try to stay conscious. It's a lecture on genre and narratology, which is one of my favourite subjects, but it's for media/cultural studies students rather than literature students, so I'm wrestling with Police! Camera! Action! and Homes Under The Hammer. For light relief, I'm giving them this bit of Charlie Brooker in between Propp, Barthes and Genette.



What other excitement do I have planned? Well, I have some RAM to instal (thanks Crucial - cheap and very quick delivery) and a book has arrived: Tom Phillips experimental A Humument, which takes a bad Victorian novel and produces a new, weird one by blocking out most of the original text with art.

Here's a sample of the original book next to the same, treated page.

Mallock's A Human Document, weirdly, is now only known at all because of what Phillips did to it - original copies are worth hundreds of pounds.

Poetry corner…

Channel 4's The 10 O'Clock Show is - like its father The Daily Show - not quite as good as it thinks it is, but Charlie Brooker's poem about the Sun's habitual targets was sublime. It's the joy of a headlong, impassioned rant tied to a sense of form and structure:



It reminds me of Marcus Brigstocke's soliloquy on the subject of religious intolerance. Not 'fair' perhaps but satire doesn't do nuance:



PS: If you can't see the Brooker rant, it's because C4 have done something weird. They gave out the embed code, but it's not very reliable.

Dealing with the oiks

Charlie Brooker's column today is about the awful ways in which people treat shop assistants:

 I did spend several years working as a shop assistant – and during that time I learned, as anyone who spends their week standing behind a counter quickly learns, that the worst kind of customers are the ones who think they're automatically superior to you just because you're serving them. The ones who pop into Debenhams and suddenly think they're Henry VIII inspecting the serfs.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one. The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.

The first surprise is that when it comes to arrogant customers, class isn't as big a factor as you might assume. True, I'd occasionally get a stereotypical ex-public-schoolboy blurting requests in my direction as though addressing a programmable service droid, or openly scolding me as if I was a failing member of his personal waiting staff – but the most overtly boorish behaviour came courtesy of people who weren't posh at all, but seemed to want to increase their own social standing by treating the person serving them like scum.

Then there were the people for whom even basic civility was an alien concept.

Damn, he's right. I've worked in several awful places: the Jungle Bungle Children's Indoor Adventure Playground attached to a horrible pub stands out for misery - spending the days explaining to drunk dads why taking their pints into the ball pool wasn't a good idea, spending the evenings wiping pooh and vomit off each ball in the pool. I've taken my share of abuse from the Great British Public, and from employers. 


Hello Transco, thanks for sacking the slowest member of the workforce each Friday afternoon just to scare everybody else while insisting on 100% accuracy, for banning 'speaking' and 'reading' even when there was literally no work to do some nights: I bet your database was riddled with flaws. 


Hello too Brewers' Fayre pubs: after a customer complained about maggots in the salad, two of us were detailed - instead of throwing it away - go through the big dustbin of prepared salad (I think the container was symbolic), picking the maggots out before continuing to serve it up. In an entirely unrelated accident, the manager's brand new Vespa fell onto a bonfire that night. 


What I really don't get on a very basic level is why people think it's OK to be so rude. Sure, there are surly and unpleasant shop assistants (I don't like the hand out for money while looking elsewhere), but there are at all levels. On a really selfish level: be nice to the support staff, or they will ruin your life. I know all the secretaries, catering and security staff here, by name. We chat most days. When I need something, I can wander in, look confused, and they'll take pity on me. I had one colleague though who would royally abuse anyone in a uniform or 'menial' job: strangely enough, he had a lot of difficulty getting admin done. Serves him right: he failed to see through the job description to the person, and got punished. 


What's the worst you've been treated? Or the worst thing you've done to such people? Confess!

Love

If you didn't have a great Valentine's Day - or if you did - you need to watch the inimitable Charlie Brooker's How TV Ruined Your Life, episode 4: Love.

Without doubt, this is one of the bitterest, funniest shows I've ever seen. Clearly filmed before he married an ex-children's TV presenter. Wonder what she thought of it. Settle down and be glad you're not him.

Readers in high places

I don't just dole out this stuff for you proles, you know. The Quality are avid followers of The Plashing Vole.

Check this out:

193.82.117.# (Historic Royal Palces)

That's right. The Queen hearts me. (She can't spell palaces because English is her second language, after German). What was she looking for?

charlie brooker

Oh yes. She hearts him too.

Plashing Vole. By Royal Appointment.

The new impartiality

Having been driven to restrict myself to uncontroversial nostrums by the fear of The Dole Queue, I have decided to strive for balance in all things, which will - allegedly - lead to serenity.

The effects are fearsome. I just read Charlie Brooker's latest missive, in which he condemns Christmas advertising ('Jamie Oliver tours Britain handing out free vol-au-vents to greedy members of the public, like a zookeeper throwing sprats to a load of barking seals'). Horrified to find my new self agreeing with him, my internal organs began to mutiny. They were placated only by extended exposure to the Anti-Brooker, despite my neurons pleading for sweet release.

Who could the Anti-Brooker be? Watch the video… if you dare. Poor Cynical will be sawing his ears from his head with whatever implement is nearest, and who could blame him? How long do you think this serene, calm me is going to last?

Brooker vs. Moir!

The evil, homophobic, slimy 'story' about Gateley by Jan Moir has been annoying pretty much everybody in the country today - now Charlie Brooker's weighed in. He can be a bit too 'look at me' at times, but this piece is a cracker. As a taster, this is his experience of reading the article:

It's like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.

Which pretty much sums up my feelings every time the Mail is mentioned. The Mail was, of course, too cowardly to publish the piece in the Irish edition - perhaps they thought nobody over here would mention it to the family.

Don't forget, everybody: this paper supported the Nazis, Mosley and Enoch Powell. Its editor 'feels our pain' about the rich staying rich through the recession but just bought a 15,000 acre (yes, fifteen thousand) Scottish estate for £3.5m.

Mitchell isn't the only one eavesdropping on my thoughts

Charlie Brooker's up to it too, in a column that will seem painfully familiar to Mark too:

I'm fairly certain I recently passed a rather pathetic tipping point, and now own more unread books and unwatched DVDs than my remaining lifespan will be able to sustain. I can't possibly read all these pages, watch all these movies, before the grim reaper comes knocking. The bastard things are going to outlive me. It's not fair. They can't even breathe.

DVD and book purchases fall into two main categories: the ones you buy because you really want to watch them, and the ones you buy because you vaguely think you should. Two years ago I bought Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, partly because I'd heard it was a good book and an easy read, but mainly because I figured reading it would make me cleverer – or at the very least, make me seem a bit cleverer to anyone sitting opposite me on the tube. I never read it. A few months ago, having forgotten I already owned a copy, I bought it again. This means I haven't read it twice.

And I haven't read it (twice) because it's got too much competition from all the other books I've bought but never read. Popular science books. Biographies. Classic works of fiction. Cult sci-fi and horror stories. Reference works. How-to guides. Graphic novels. I can't buy one book at a time: I have to buy at least four. Which makes it exponentially trickier to single out one to actually read. When I buy books, all I'm really doing is buying wall insulation, like a blackbird gathering twigs to make a nest.

Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it. It's too much. I've had it with choice. It makes my head spin.

Michael Jackson: the final word

Not from me, from Charlie Brooker, who makes fine points when he isn't showing off:

But the news is not the place to "celebrate" Jackson's music. The Glastonbury stage, the pub, the club, the office stereo, the arts documentary: that's the place. The news should report his death, then piss off out of the way, leaving people to moonwalk and raise a toast in peace.

If I was God, here's what I'd do now. I'd force all the rolling networks to cover nothing but the death of Michael Jackson, 24 hours a day, for the next seven years. Glue up the studio doors and keep everyone inside, endlessly "reporting" it, until they start going mad and developing their own language – not just verbal, but visual. And I'd encourage viewers to place bets on which anchor would be the first to physically end it all live on air.

And while that was happening, I'd create some other stations that covered other stuff. Current affairs type stuff. I think I'd call them "news channels". They might catch on.

Never mind Michael bloody Jackson

Swells is dead! Steven Wells, the wonderful, angry, witty, committed music writer from the days when NME did more than print bands' press releases. He died of the seemingly inevitable cancer: his final column (for the Philadelphia Weekly) treats cancer pretty much the same way as he treated all the bands I liked - with total contempt.

How I loved buying NME on Wednesday morning to see what fresh torture he'd inflicted on the English language to express his true feelings towards Slowdive, the Field Mice or anyone else who wasn't absolutely bloody furious every single day. Charlie Brooker learned everything he knows from Swells, though he as yet hasn't managed to write an anarcho-Trotskyist novel entitled Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty.

Jack Straw: more evil than Hazel Blears?

I've thought recently that Charlie Brooker's column in the Guardian has become a little self-parodic in recent times.

I was wrong. This week's column is brilliant because he's angry with Jack Straw and nails that little turd for his contempt for democracy. Read it for yourself. However, the bit that makes me boil with anger is Straw's statement of his political beliefs:

"If people were angels there would be no need for government . . . But sadly people are not all angels."

Never mind that this is purest bollocks: people will still need disaster relief, and health care, and old age care, and environmental protection and everything else that isn't law'n'order.

Brooker points out that Straw therefore elevates politicians above the people, which is bad enough. What gets me though is that this is Straw coming out as a philosophical Tory. At the heart of the socialist (and liberal) project is a fundamental belief in the essential goodness of humanity. Toryism believes that people are inherently bad and need restraining. This is the fundamental philosophical divide - and Straw clearly believes that government exists for the purpose of repressing the atavistic qualities of the people. I think I prefer the American 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' to his profoundly depressing vision. No wonder the cover of my copy of The Demon Headmaster takes Straw as its inspiration. (I can't find a scan of it, but here's one that looks almost as chilling):