Charlie Brooker
Satirist, TV critic, TV presenter and columnist for the UK's Guardian newspaper.
As an embittered cynic, I should be programmed to vomit all over the screen at the mere sight of this, but instead, I find it strangely moving. You see, as I stare into their happy smiling faces filled with naive joie de vivre, I know they're just blissfully unaware of the crushing despair that awaits them as they venture into adulthood. The myriad disappointments, the yawning chasms of pain, the glow gnawing descent into physical decay, the sheer unrelenting horror of it all.
On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?
If this strikes you as a trivial subject to write about, you're wrong. Really. Bollocks to the rest of you. I could've sat through live 3D news footage of some gruesome bloody war, watching starving women and children being machine gunned in the face by Terminator rebels, and I'd have just shrugged. So what. Stop crying. They're only bullets. Try having my throat. Try some genuine suffering, you pussies.
Right now, the theme is "Sex In The 80s", which must've been an exceptionally hard sell round Channel 4 towers. Mullets! Tits! Duran Duran! More tits! Bigger mullets! Ha ha ha! All you need is a few seconds of voiceover babble about "changing attitudes" and "social upheaval" laid over the top and hey presto: you've justified everything. It's not just a load of tit shots - it's a sociological investigation. With tit shots.
President Barack Obama. President Barack Obama. Nope, still can't get used to it. It's literally too good to be true. I must've died in my sleep and am now having an insane fantasy pumped into my head by the Matrix. Any minute now Salma Hayek is going to float through the door with a tray of biscuits and I'll know the game's up.
That's certainly made me think. It's made me think I don't want a television any more.
Each episode follows an unbelievably spoiled rich and tiny sod as they prepare to throw a despicably opulent coming of age party for themselves and their squealing shitcake friends.
I'll stop calling it the iPhone right now. Instead, for the remainder of this article, it'll be known as the Jabscreen. A better name in any case.
It's a rum state of affairs when you feel like punching a jar of mayonnaise in the face.
The second Transformers movie came out this year. I didn't fight for a ticket. I'd caught the first one by accident. It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours. Any human dumb enough to voluntarily sit through a second helping of that unremitting fecal spew really ought to just get up and leave the planet via the nearest window before their continued presence does lasting damage to the gene pool.
One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email me asking for advice on how to break into writing, presumably figuring that if a drooling gum-brain like me can scrape a living witlessly pawing at a keyboard, there's hope for anyone.
God has far better things to do than creating self-important little species such as ours. He's got wars, deaths, disasters and diseases to ignore for starters. And a fair bit of not-exist-ing-at-all to be getting on with.
Sport belongs in a news bulletin about as much as a mummified cat's head belongs in a Caesar salad.
Hello, I'm Charlie Brooker and you're watching Screenwipe, a programme all about television.
As for me, I'm stuck in a loveless relationship with myself, the backseat driver who can't stop tutting and nagging. There's no escape from me's relentless criticism. Me even knows what I'm thinking, and routinely has a pop at Me for that. "You're worrying about your obsessive degree of self-criticism again," whines Me. "How pathetically solipsistic." And then it complains about its own bleating tone of voice and starts petulantly kicking the back of the seat, asking if we're there yet.
Even if the Jabscreen 4 was reportedly biting users' ears off and spitting them into a ditch, every Jabscreen 3 user is going to wind up buying one anyway.
...the news might be single-handedly trying to bring about an environmental catastrophe, which it will then report on.
...The result is the most nauseating display of artificial camaraderie since the horrific Doritos "Friendchips" TV campaign (which caused 50,000 people to kill themselves in 2003, or should have done).
Fortunately for whining snotface, the party itself goes with a bang. She enters looking every inch the cosseted flesh-waste she is, and her and her nauseating idiot scumbag friends celebrate into the night: dancing, shrieking, acting like pillocks, and generally making you feel like getting down on your knees and praying for a nuclear holocaust.
Early on, presenter Mark Evans observes that a snake is essentially just "one massive tube with a head at the end", which, coincidentally, is also how he might describe his genitals to an audience of blind women in a hypothetical situation I've just invented in which hen nights for the visually impaired are held in special strip clubs where naked men describe their bodies in time to disco music. For what it's worth, I don't know what I'm going on about, either