Charlie Brooker's new G2 column

[Go With The Flow]

The feller seems to have gotten himself a full page of the G2 now. with a TVGoHome section. an Ignopedia, and a Five Things list.

So far so crap, but did anyone else read/enjoy this?

[Egyptian Feast]

Which day of the week is it out? I've liked some of his stuff in the past, but that column he used to have in G2 was dreadful. Every one of them made me wish he was with me so I could throw boiling coffee in his smug face. I can't believe people can make a living out of such lazy, smug cuntery.

[Pseudopath]

His column now appears in Monday's G2 (they had a bit of revamp last week and moved all the columns round).

You can read it online here. I agree with the Cool Penguin...it did seem very back-of-a-fag-packet-esque.

[BJB]

Doese anyone on this forum like charlie brookers screenwipe on BBC 4. Discoverd it on youtube couple of weeks back. It was alright. Better then i expected it to be. Not brilliant though.

[Go With The Flow]

It was out today, so presumably it's going to be a Monday thing.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

Doese anyone on this forum like charlie brookers screenwipe on BBC 4. Discoverd it on youtube couple of weeks back. It was alright. Better then i expected it to be. Not brilliant though.

See that little button up at the top called 'Search'? Give it a whirl and see what comes up.

[BJB]

Thanks. Guess i won't be metioning that again.

[Mister Cairo]

Well you can in the screenwipe thread.


His TV Go Home is running out of steam

Five as-yet-unused titles for Indiana Jones movies

Oh, please. I found the TV Go Home book funny and with just the right amount of turds (Widdleplop Farm!)

You can e-mail in ideas

[rudi]

I can't believe people can make a living out of such lazy, smug cuntery.

You've just described EVERY column in G2/Guardian Weekend magazine.

I'm sure it didn't use to be so bad, or was I just younger and more easliy pleased?

Jon Ronson makes me homicidal, never mind Williams or fucking Shrigley's 'cartoons'...

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

G2's problem is it puts itself above 'the media' when it's as bad as anything else. The problem page sections are unbelievably smug as is 'the ethical consumer'. Not to mention the fact it involves people like Tim Dowling, Lucy Mangan and Sam Wollaston.

I still like Screen Burn and the guide is still really good- probably the best weekly guide you can get (particularly if you're a Londoner) but Charlie's G2 contributions are really, really bad.

Of course once you've finished complaining about G2 there's the awful Observer Magazine, and the monthly Women magazine that make me dance in spirals of hatred. And Music Monthly...fuck. The Guardian on The Observer seem quite shit if you don't like sport really. However the main newspapers are still actually quite good- it's the supplements that suck arse.

[rudi]

Of course once you've finished complaining about G2 there's the awful Observer Magazine, and the monthly Women magazine that make me dance in spirals of hatred. And Music Monthly...fuck. The Guardian on The Observer seem quite shit if you don't like sport really. However the main newspapers are still actually quite good- it's the supplements that suck arse.

Wow - can I just copy and paste all your writing. SS?

It'll save me time and effort.  :)

[Garam]

G2 brings Perry Bible to those that don't have the internet. That's about all I can think of, really.


Some student at my college is constantly reading G2 and insists on laughing out loud constantly, so he can irritate the Sun/Mirror plebs. PRICK. I have recurring dreams of him spouting out the G2 articles verbatim to his uninterested work mates.

[mothman]

I see he's now got comments back on his pieces - went through a period when there weren't any allowed, presumably because of the types of comments he was getting from people like, er, me.

[clareQuilty]

Jon Ronson makes me homicidal...

He's like a weird British George Costanza though. I loved the piece he had on  appeaing to mime a blowjob to a 14 year old girl who has imitating the way he ate soup.
When a friend of mine went to an appearance of Ronsons to get his copy of The Men Who Stare At Goats signed he also bought a copy of Them (which he'd borrowed from me previously).
He went to get it signed and told Ronson he'd read it before and thought it was great (in a fanboyish attempt to strike up some conversation). Ronson got very unsettled about why he was buying a copy if he'd already read it and apparently gave my friend a full on Larry David 'suspicious' face.

Anyhow, he's great.

[GetTheeBehindMeStan]

Anyhow, he's great

And if half of what he describes in "Them" actually happened, he's also astonishingly brave, esp. given how physically weedy he is.

[Godzilla Bankrolls]

Ronson's TV work is fantastic. I think I rate the music edition of Crazy Rulers Of The World as one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.

[rupert pupkin]

I like Ronson's column a lot – he seems to revel in the fact that he's such a maladroit twit. I like the fact his wife seems to think he is, too.

[ccbaxter]

I love Ronson's full-on features, but his diluted Guardian Weekend columns just seem so insubstantial and unnecessary.

Most of the all-too-ubiquitous G2 writers these days are just so much more unbearable, though - Lucy Mangan had a cute turn of phrase until she got turned/churned into everyday ironicisms, and Marina Snyde (copyright Private Eye... perhaps) sums up the very worst of the Guardian's supposed superiority towards (ugh) celeb-dom while obsessing over-much with it all anyway. That horrible "Lost In Showbiz" column especially, now interred from some deep Saturday broadsheet page and splurged across pages 2 and 3 of Monday's G2... Ah, lovely...

Ah, but there'll be a spot-on Tim Dowling spoof of Cookdandbombd along any day now...

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

What's irritating about Zoe Williams? I've been trying to put my finger on it for years and I can't work it out. Is it just her bloggy tone, or something else? Lucy Mangan's worse though.

For a while, I thought Hadley Freeman's fashion column was a spoof, since she's so hideous. Part of me still thinks/hopes it's a spoof.

The best Guardian column is surely Jeremy Bullmore's problem page in Saturday's Work section. 'Dear me, your boss does seem a prize prune. But allow me the impudence to ask you a rather awkward question...' I love it.

They've dropped Tom Hodgkinson's column though. Wonder why that was.

[Morgan]

They've fucking dropped Nigel Short too, which was one of only a few reasons I pick up the Guardian these days.

[Mr. Analytical]

Doese anyone on this forum like charlie brookers screenwipe on BBC 4. Discoverd it on youtube couple of weeks back. It was alright. Better then i expected it to be. Not brilliant though.

 I really liked it actually.  Less so the last episode on America but on the whole I thought it was a good piece of TV.  I hope they do another series.

 His columns have gone to shit in recent years though.  I bought the Screenwipe book and you can really feel the decay of quality.  In the early pre-screenwipe columns he's the angry and foul-mouthed guy who produced TVGoHome, but apart from the occasional great turn of phrase by the end of the book he's just an "angry" comedy columnist who picks on easy targets and makes easy jokes about them.

 His old G2 columns were shockingly banal as they usually amounted to little more than bad "angry" observational humour about something he quite clearly wasn't really angry about.  I think that he's mellowed with age, is spread more thinly than he used to be and frankly, is richer and more succesful than he was when his only regular job was writing for a PC magazine.  Being quite wealthy, famous and getting to work with people like Chris Morris isn't really a good place to be when you're trying to be professionally angry.

 The fact that he now has a FULL page plus Screenburn PLUS all of his writing and production gigs doesn't sound good as he's spreading himself even MORE thinly.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Gah. After reading G2 it's clear everyone associated with it is a closet Cameron supporter.

'I don't like the fact he's a Tory but I do like the fact he has more cuddly ways of locking up young offenders!'

Perhaps I just think that young successful urbanite 'liberals' are all tossers and it's a problem I need to address with myself.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Examples of Lucy Mangan annoying me, Fig 5765b:

The pain of modern art

I was enjoying a quiet game of Scrabble with Dad at my parents' house this week when I was stricken with vomiting and a pain in my chest that made it almost impossible to breathe. Eventually, an ambulance took me to Lewisham hospital to discern, after six hours of agony and hyperventilation, that I had trapped wind. More as a sop to respectability than a palliative, I think, they gave me a syringeful of what was basically liquid Kwells and sent me on my way.

Looking back on those six hours, I cannot help but notice that not once did I call for some modern art. Not for the giant £70,000 pebble by sculptor John Aiken purchased by UCL last year or anything acquired by NHS South West during a recent £400,000 spending spree. It turns out that when you are ill, frightened, or in pain - even if it does slightly anticlimactically turn out to be the result of thwarted burping - your mental vista shrinks to a tiny window obscured by a heavy scrawl saying "Where is a doctor who can take away my illness, fright or pain, and could I have him soon, please? (PS While I am aware that men and women are doctors and unquestionably equally adept in the job, I am in sufficient distress not to bother with politically correct double pronouns.)"

I try to greet the bubbles that often rise to the surface of this world of boiling insanity with equanimity. But there is something about the existence not just of people willing to pay this sort of money but of enough of them to form the committees, sign off on the infinite mass of paperwork the NHS purchase of anything bigger than a Biro generates, and then face down the patients who stare in dismay at the aesthetically pleasing but medically useless object before them.

I always want to ask - did nobody, nobody at all in the long chain of decision-makers that must surely stretch out behind the existence of this cripplingly expensive rock ever think to stop and ask whether there was not some way that this cash, or the energies - the well-intentioned though hopelessly misguided energies - that went into raising it could have been diverted into researching the causes of leukaemia, say, or into raising awareness of the fact that the NHS is about to break under the strain of imbecilities like this?

Of course, my reaction is aggravated by the fact that I have a plebeian, simplistic and - oh, what's the word - yes, normal take on modern art. Namely, that anything that requires you to take a chainsaw to a carcass, piss into a mould or build a giant slide might be a valuable asset when you are attempting to stage the kind of stag weekend that will live in the minds of later Nuts generations fulfils only half of the brief.

It's modern, but if you're not painting misty lilies and bridges in dots (rather than arranging them in geometric patterns like overpriced Twister games) or sculpting entwined human forms that bring forth eternal passions out of a solid block of marble, it's not art. Although this is hardly as important when it's sitting outside a hospital, at the price of a departmental research head, as the fact that it's not science.

This reminds me of Germaine Greer's astute comment the other week that 'modern art' is, in itself, a philistine term.

[Brutus Beefcake]

Why?  Is it that different from the way you describe "modern comedy"?

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Well, there's a difference between arguing that art hasn't been much cop since year x (which involves actual arguments why that's the case), and using the term 'Modern Art' as a shorthand for 'It's rubbish because it's modern'.

I take your point that I'm guilty of using terms like 'typical 00s comedy attitude' or whatever. Generally, though, I'm talking about something specific - I'm not implying modernity itself is a bad thing.

[Brutus Beefcake]

Fair enough.  I have trouble thinking of any good modern art but then I don't really follow art.  I suppose Banksy can be entertaining.

[rudi]

I love Ronson's full-on features, but his diluted Guardian Weekend columns just seem so insubstantial and unnecessary.

His docs and features are just fine; it's his horribly solipsistic G2 columns that make me incandescent with rage. If I heard somkebody on a train describing their day in the same way it'd be all I could do not to strangle them with the ear-phone cord on my Zen.

As with the large majority of G2 it comes down to seven words: What Was The Fucking Point Of THAT??

[Bean Is A Carrot]

Re the term "modern art", the modernist movement ended in the 60s (or thereabouts) and it was followed by the "post-modern" and various other movements. So calling contemporary art "modern" is technically incorrect.

[Brutus Beefcake]

But it's modern, therefore it's modern.

[rudi]

Indeed.

If something's described as "from the modern school of art" or " modernist" I know that's not the same as recent, therefore modern, art.