Charlie Brooker on Literature: "Apparently 65% of us have lied about reading the great works of literature. We needn't have bothered"

"The other irony is that while people lie about having read highbrow novels in order to impress each other, a massive percentage of highbrow novels aren't worth reading anyway because the authors are too busy trying to impress the reader (who, we now know, probably hasn't bothered turning up). That's why so many contemporary novels seem to largely consist of a thinly veiled version of the author discussing politics and art and quantum theory over a carefully selected bottle of wine with the devastatingly beautiful mixed-race wife of an impotent international statesman and/or gangster (delete where applicable) before whisking her off to a swish hotel room to have expert animal sex with her all weekend until a pigeon symbolising the unions or something crashes into the window and blah blah blah blah BLAH. I mean, really, who cares? Mr Tickle had 20 times the raw entertainment value - and it came with pictures - so if you can't beat that, don't bother."

Full article here.

LOL.

Cue dullards calling him 'anti-intellectual'. There's nothing particularly 'intellectual' or worthy about stuck-up, elitist bullshit. I think Brooker's seen through the Emperor's New Clothes..

Charlie Brooker on 'Heston Blumenthal's Victorian Feast'

"This really is one of the most creative shows I've seen in quite a while; not in the construction of the programme itself (which takes the familiar "mission" format to provide a fairly spurious narrative), but in Blumenthal's inventive craziness. It's basically a bloke deliberately dicking around to extreme effect for an hour, dabbling in a weird form of art, seeing how far he can go. Halfway through, I realised why this was so refreshing: you very rarely see such genuinely ingenious and imaginative processes being followed this clearly on TV. Each course Blumenthal serves is like an edible Python sketch: meticulously constructed and very, very silly."

The full article from The Guardian can be found here.

Brooker's great - always funny, frequently (and deservedly) scathing, and absolutely one hundred percent on the money most of the time. For all the apparent grumpiness he seems like One Of The Good Guys.

I watched the programme last night and I have to say I agree. It was good fun. I'm looking forward to the next installment which I fervently hope is called 'Heston's Jurassic Feast' and in which he clones a velociraptor and uses it to make a very fine consomme.