TVGoHome - remember that?

[BritishHobo]

I stumbled across the book recently in a pile in my spare room and had a great time flicking through and reading snippets at random. The sheer relentless rhythm of the bile really is still something special, even now. I still think it's probably one of the biggest influences on my writing voice.

There does seem something oddly quaint now about setting up your own website to post your own content. As has been said, for the most part now, you have to develop stuff on an existing platform, and rely on their goodwill, and userbase.

[hamfist]

A few years earlier than that, wasn't it?

I seem to remember absolutely fucking hyperventilating over TVGH in front of SGI O2 workstations at uni. That was late 1990s, and some of my first experiences with the internet.

[Small Man Big Horse]

According to archive.org the first issue was 19th March 1999 - https://web.archive.org/web/20000229174309/http://www.tvgohome.com/archive.html

[shiftwork2]

According to archive.org the first issue was 19th March 1999 - https://web.archive.org/web/20000229174309/http://www.tvgohome.com/archive.html

Thanks.  And from that 'TVGH is supported by Need To Know'.  I'd completely forgotten about NTK!

[pigamus]

It's annoying the way he's sort of tried to row back on all that anger in recent years - kind of like, oh, I've got a sense of proportion you know, I wasn't that angry really, don't think I'm mental. The anger was the whole point!

[Uncle TechTip]

Thanks.  And from that 'TVGH is supported by Need To Know'.  I'd completely forgotten about NTK!

I think that's where I first clocked TVGH. All issues of NTK are still available - proper window into another time. Randomly http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/28/

[dissolute ocelot]

I loved it, and it's still great. You can say that TV now is so hard to satirise, but TV Go Home was beyond just satire, with great absurdism and even character-based humour.

I think if you did it now, you'd do individual listings posted on Instagram or Twitter, like Reductress or Clickhole. Or else you'd do an ironic-retro paper magazine sold via Kickstarter.

The Radio Times does still exist, and I'm sure some grandfathers still buy it, but would the kids recognise a TV listing if you shoved it in their face and yelled "What's on BBC2 at 8:30?"

[canadagoose]

I don't think I discovered TvGoHome until quite late - 2007 or so - but I thought it was genius. The Cunt sections were the best bits, just ferocious in tone. I have no idea what a modern equivalent would be like either.

[Milo]

"the Son of God pushes pipe supreme to a righteous line-up of cherry-red disciple pussy" is an incredible bit of writing.

[thenoise]

For years I kept buying the Christmas edition of the Radio Times, and would circle programmes i liked with a blue biro for extra nostalgic vibes. But it must have been ten years ago I even stopped that, fifteen even. Anyone under 25 probably doesn't even recognise what it is parodying.
But a fond memory of the "dangerous" days of the Internet. Shock sites, jolly Roger text files and laughing at "cunt". Good Times.

[H-O-W-L]

Reading TVGH excerpts also really does make me miss the earlier, Grauniad-column Brooker and his constantly venomous but relatable misery. There's one of his Guardian columns about him being unable to sleep and having to don a pair of his ex girlfriend's pants over his head as a makeshift eyemask because it's the only wholly black item he owns that has stuck with me for ages. He catches sight of himself in the mirror while having a piss and breaks down in insane laughter, then goes to sleep laughing at the thought of it. A weird mixture of relatable deso and childlike joy in that one.

People point to "How TV Ruined Your Life" as his last best work but I think even that is weak shit; he was well ensconced in The Culture by then, and all the venom is watered-down duplicate ideas from his Graudian columns, with all the truly insidious almost-unprintable shit removed. I still have a physical copy of The Hell Of It All somewhere that has unprinted columns and game reviews where he basically just calls the editor a cunt for making him play or talk about absolute shit.

At 7am I arrived home and tried to sleep, in the knowledge that I was supposed to be up in about two hours' time. Knowing the builders next door would start clanging scaffolding poles around like an open-air tribute to the musical Stomp at about 8am, I found some wax earplugs and wedged one in each lughole. But there was another problem. Light was streaming through the windows. I searched for an eye mask and failed. But while scavenging through the bottom of an old drawer, I found a pair of black knickers belonging to an ex-girlfriend. That would have to do. I pulled them over my head like a Mexican wrestler until they covered my eyes, and lay down. I probably looked quite dashing.

I tried to sleep. But exhaustion is a funny thing. It sends the brain haywire. Deaf and blind, I lay there with the old Birds Eye Steakhouse Grill song looping endlessly in my head. Hope it's chips, it's chips. We hope it's chips, it's chips.

In between verses I worried that my boiler might malfunction and kill me with carbon monoxide fumes if I fell asleep. I'm not one for keeping up appearances, but even I blanched at the thought of my neighbours seeing my blue, icy cadaver being hauled out on a stretcher with a pair of knickers on its head. That's what they'd remember me for. The fear of this kept me awake until some time around 8.30am, when my bladder complained that it needed to go to the toilet. I got up, but in my confusion - hope it's chips, it's chips - I attempted to make my way downstairs to the loo without taking the pants off my head. I walked into a door. Now I was performing slapstick for the benefit of no one.

I pulled them up just above my eyes, headed downstairs and drained myself. On the way out of the bathroom I caught sight of myself in the mirror, wearing the knickers like a skullcap. The other thing about exhaustion is that it encourages hysteria. I laughed, then saw myself laughing, and laughed some more. I returned to bed, still giggling, and lay there in the dark with the singing Birds Eye workmen driving their van around in my mind. Hope it's chips, it's chips. We hope it's chips, it's chips. I think I even said that aloud at one point. For a moment, I was genuinely insane. At some point I lost consciousness.

I overslept of course, and awoke at 1.30pm in a state of some confusion, stumbled downstairs and opened the fridge door so I could see the kettle - unnecessary, what with the daylight and all. I drank a coffee, phoned the Guardian, and said I was going to start writing. Then I typed the first sentence of this column. Then I wrote the rest. And then you read it. This proves I can, at least, maintain a veneer of efficiency amid the self-inflicted mundane chaos of my life, even if in doing so I end up slightly wasting your time. Other columnists write of glamorous parties and faraway lands, of politics, or romance, despair and elation and the unending mysteries of the human condition. On this page you find nothing but the fevered hope that it's chips, it's chips, and for that I apologise.

It's not so great being a shambles. But it's the only life I know.

Extremely relatable if you've ever truly reached this point of exhaustion, IMO.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Brooker was notoriously unfunny in PC gaming mags for years. He did those extremely cringey edgelord comic strips for gamer mags and to advertise CEX. Then he got hilarious out of the blue, he either stopped or started caring and his reviews and articles all got that dry over the top vicious style. I remember reading some management sim review that sent me into hysterics, just total venom at an anonymous and pointless product. Unbelievably, it was the same guy who was drawing nutters shooting bimbos heads off a year or so earlier.

"Lara Croft's Cruelty Zoo" was a direct precursor of TV Go Home.

I felt bad for him when he said his articles in the Guardian used to get comments that emulated his style but ranting about "pramfaces" and all that shit, I think in response to some review he'd done of a Kerry Katona program. I think that's probably why he stopped being funny, its must be hard to keep the rage up when you know that whatever you write and how explicit your targets are, a huge chunk of responses are just going to be hurr hurr chavs or hurr hurr women.

[H-O-W-L]

Yeah, his prank calls from PCZone where he's just putting on a Funny Voice and pretending to be One Of The Gays are cringeworthy as fuck. There is one that I found mildly funny where he pretends to be some sort of East End Gangster who's very upset that his incredibly sensitive son was "defiled" by a defective game. It was like, halfway to a Morris bit but ultimately he was just shouting at a poor customer service rep so the end result was only funny in sound rather than content.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

The Brooker line that never leaves me is him describing Les Dawson having the perfect face for comedy: "like Shrek opening a court summons"

[Ambient Sheep]

Yes, very fondly!  From a time before I even had the internet at home (that was c. Oct 1999).  Once I did, I saved them all out to my home PC, quite a use of resources on a 500MB(?) hard drive.  Should still have it boxed away in this very room.

I too was about to namecheck NTK as my route into it, God, both that and TVGH were much needed relief from the horrible pressure of my job at the time.

Two TVGH entries in particular stick in my mind, one was an incredibly bitter relationship break-up rant (possibly done for a Valentine's Day edition) that left me genuinely fearful for his sanity; the other, likewise, was a whole page of nothing but "Allworkandnoplaymakesjackadullboy" repeated over and over again, not long before the whole thing came to an end.  Both got removed shortly after they were posted.

[Johnny Yesno]

This clearly tickled me in 2004:

Do you think you're some kind of fucking Renaissance man just because you've got a few ostensibly creative applications and a shitload of money to spend on high-tech gadgetry? Do you have any idea how many other fuckheads all over the world are, right at this very minute, using precisely the same technology to produce precisely the same pedestrian results as you? Why don't you just take all your software, all your gadgets, all your pointless overpriced digital fuckery-foo and hurl the lot of it right into the fucking sea? You're using it to churn out shit. Get a fucking grip. You're a cunt; you always HAVE been a cunt, and you always WILL be a cunt - a useless, artless, soulless, worthless, hateful, sickening, handful-of-your-own-shit-fucking cunt-chewing cunt-eyed cunt. And your lazy, delusional stabs at creativity aren't fooling anyone, so stop trying. Prick.

The Kilroy team would like to speak to you: call now on 07966 23591.

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,5797.msg157344.html#msg157344

[BeardFaceMan]

I felt bad for him when he said his articles in the Guardian used to get comments that emulated his style but ranting about "pramfaces" and all that shit, I think in response to some review he'd done of a Kerry Katona program. I think that's probably why he stopped being funny, its must be hard to keep the rage up when you know that whatever you write and how explicit your targets are, a huge chunk of responses are just going to be hurr hurr chavs or hurr hurr women.

I'm sure I've heard him talk about how when he started everyone he was slagging off in his columns was basically an anonymous figure to him, he didn't know them at all, but then as he got more famous he started meeting the people he was writing about and started feeling bad about the awful things he was writing about them and he toned his style down. He's really not the same without his bile.

[Johnny Yesno]

I'm sure I've heard him talk about how when he started everyone he was slagging off in his columns was basically an anonymous figure to him, he didn't know them at all, but then as he got more famous he started meeting the people he was writing about and started feeling bad about the awful things he was writing about them and he toned his style down. He's really not the same without his bile.

Yes, I read/heard that too.

[H-O-W-L]

Then he got hilarious out of the blue, he either stopped or started caring and his reviews and articles all got that dry over the top vicious style.

I honestly think he stopped caring now I've dwelled on it -- there's a period from like... I dunno, '98 to '09 where he visibly was fed up with how shit was going and was a miserable, bitter, angry bastard in a very entertaining way. I think despite being a part of the UK Endemol (?) he really felt like he'd fucked it and was spinning the wheels/turning the gears mindlessly. Even the first nibbles of Screenwipe, weak as they may seem nowadays, had this real undercurrent of genuine misery.

It sounds negative as fuck to describe such palpable scorn/anger/bile as being positive but it really was relatable. As a teen (and I bet I make you fuckers feel old) on the outside, left outside this exceptionalist, aspirationalist hellhole society that was the late nineties into the tens, a lot of Screenwipe's segments and his Greundiend rants were very relatable. All this soft-focus glass-and-marble watch-wearing bitter bullshit, and it felt like the only things that connected with the grim reality of the life I was leading was shit like Bottom or The Young Ones, which were already a decade or more old by the time I saw them as a wee mite.

For me these sorts of things captured and validated the existence of the world I lived in, where a Sunday might involve Birds' Eye Chicken Dippers, laying with me wee back against the fridge because it was the warmest thing in the house, and maybe a bit of Grand Theft Auto if I could get away with it without getting bollocked. Unlike the feel-good happy bullshit on a lot of telly or in a lot of the glam celeb print shit it was very gratifying to see people who would openly go "No, this is shit -- it's actually genuinely shit. You aren't broken, it's shit, and I feel this way too". Misery loves company, as they say.

I suppose that's why I went off him as sharply and steeply as I did, when Black Mirror started and he seemed to be "in" with the crowd, finally. I'm glad his work paid off for him but it repels people like me who endeared to him for this reason.

[H-O-W-L]

Speaking of, was the telly version of TVGH any good? I suppose the lack of commentary here speaks volumes in answer of that but still.

[Johnny Yesno]

Speaking of, was the telly version of TVGH any good? I suppose the lack of commentary here speaks volumes in answer of that but still.

As far as I remember, it was total crap but you can judge for yourself, as someone has put the whole series up on YouTube:

TV Go Home: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7HNXi57YT9lqw894srbVYTIMPv8aNwVP

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Yeah, its got nothing of the spirit of TGH, its terrible. More a like really, really weak The Day Today knock-off. Kind of misses the point to actual make the terrible shit?

Something about it reminds me of that abhorent ITV Monty Python/absurd humour sketch show that used to get mentioned a lot around here in "worst comedy programs" discussions. Forget the name of it.

[H-O-W-L]

Yeah, its got nothing of the spirit of TGH, its terrible. More a like really, really weak The Day Today knock-off.

Something about it reminds me of that abhorent ITV Monty Python/absurd humour sketch show that used to get mentioned a lot around here in "worst comedy programs" discussions. Forget the name of it.

The one that had the "What's that?" "Bread." "What's that?" "Bread." sketch? Fucking awful.

[McChesney Duntz]

Dare to Believe. Yeah, those two are about equally bad.

[Rizla]

TV Go Home: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7HNXi57YT9lqw894srbVYTIMPv8aNwVP

Wow, worse than I remember! The Flailers bits were quite good I suppose, a couple of other bits had potential, but incredibly ill-conceived. Forgot Mr Bennet from Take Hart was in it. And Tristam Shapeero directing.

[Johnny Yesno]

Dare to Believe. Yeah, those two are about equally bad.

I don't think TVGH is as bad as Dare to Believe but I've just rewatched the first episode again and it is gash apart from the Now Biter sketch at the end.

Heh! If I ever get famous, the post they'll use to cancel me will be the one where I'd been flicking through the channels late at night and come across the first episode of DtB on ITV and breathlessly asked here if anyone else had seen it. Boy, did I feel like a total numpty when it turned out every subsequent episode was almost exactly the same.

'Be the small bookcase.' 'Sweet as a moose.' Could be out of HS Art.

[Avril Lavigne]

I don't think TVGH is as bad as Dare to Believe but I've just rewatched the first episode again and it is gash apart from the Now Biter sketch at the end.

Heh! If I ever get famous, the post they'll use to cancel me will be the one where I'd been flicking through the channels late at night and come across the first episode of DtB on ITV and breathlessly asked here if anyone else had seen it. Boy, did I feel like a total numpty when it turned out every subsequent episode was almost exactly the same.

'Be the small bookcase.' 'Sweet as a moose.' Could be out of HS Art.

I think I might be the only person in the country who owns Dare to Believe on DVD, apart from the people who worked on it.

[Pink Gregory]

The Brooker line that never leaves me is him describing Les Dawson having the perfect face for comedy: "like Shrek opening a court summons"

"Like a warthog on 40 Rothman's a day"

[McChesney Duntz]

To be fair, I like the idea of Dare to Believe - a really bizarre, dada-esque show designed to be watched at 2 in the morning after a night of drug- and drink-filled carousing - but others have taken that remit and run much farther (and generally more successfully) with it, which is to say [adult swim].

[Avril Lavigne]

To be fair, I like the idea of Dare to Believe - a really bizarre, dada-esque show designed to be watched at 2 in the morning after a night of drug- and drink-filled carousing - but others have taken that remit and run much farther (and generally more successfully) with it, which is to say [adult swim].

I was the kinda scrub who didn't have access to Adult Swim so had to settle for getting my fix of early morning dada-esque shows from ITV...  Desolation