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Published: 22 November 2007

The unhinged marksman

Dawn of the Dumb. By Charlie Brooker. Faber £9.99.

FIRST, an admission: I’m scared of Charlie Brooker.
It’s not the physical threat the squat thirty-something presents, or the unhinged threats which he likes to make in print to the subjects of his spleen; it’s that Mr Brooker hates a lot of things and does so with great aplomb, and I’m scared he might hate me. For the uninitiated, Charlie Brooker is the acerbic Guardian pundit who pillories anything that rouses his ire from the frequently banal and
horrific sphere of public culture.
Dawn of the Dumb, a collection of his vitriol, gathers together the best of his recent “Screen Burn” TV writing (a quantum physics reading of Deal or No Deal, his highly criticised attack on the 2004 US Presidential election) with more general musings on hair (“the living dead”), your death being eclipsed by the presence of a celebrity, and the importance of telling lies.
Brooker has a particular relish for programming which most of the so-called civilised world desperately try to ignore in the belief that it will reduce them to dribbling idiots. But Brooker has a gift for making shows like I’m A Celebrity..., Big Brother and Jeremy Kyle seem topical,
hilarious and even
perversely uplifting.
Best of all, perhaps, are his descriptive powers. Adrian Brody resembles a “disappointed sundial”, Alan Sugar “wears the face of a man who’s just stubbed his toe on the gravestone of a close relative”, and based on sight alone he describes Richard LittleJohn’s face as smelling like “someone breaking wind in a pair of cheap nylon trousers while eating a Scotch egg in a hot car passing the Tilsworth Golf and Conference Centre on the A5 outside Dunstable. But worse.”
It’s frequently brilliant stuff, though Mr Brooker would probably hate me for saying so.
SIMON WROE

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