Charlie says... please laugh

This post will discuss Charlie Brooker, Ed and Oucho and a certain website and attempt to link them in a vaguely coherent manner.

Charlie Brooker has built up a genuine cult following over the years, starting with the brilliant TV Go Home (the book of which apparently changes hands for huge sums on Ebay, though I’m certainly not selling mine) and steadily gaining more fans via his Guardian Screen Burn and Monday G2 columns and then from Screen Burn’s televised equivalent Screenwipe and its Newswipe spinoff. He’s now become a bona fide mainstream presenter, if you can call a 10pm weeknight slot on Channel 4 mainstream.

I’ve been watching the first few episodes of You Have Been Watching and something about the whole enterprise doesn’t sit quite right. Brooker’s appeal has always been that of the outsider, a rational man flailing and lashing out amidst the waves of ridiculous media bullshit. But maybe this is just the latest phase of a gradual drift towards the heart of the TV establishment - he’s never *only* been a critic after all, and had a hand in writing several comedies (most notably the divisive Nathan Barley) before he got to go it alone with Dead Set last year.

If his long-term goal is to be a mainstream star though, perhaps he needs to re-evaluate. YHBW seems to be frantically squirming to break free from C4’s rigid light-entertainment straightjacket. Brooker’s trademark acerbic narration and lurid wordplay are evident at times, but everything has to be shoehorned into the tired old “wacky” celebrity quiz format. He used the word "fey" in the first show and it clearly went over 99% of the studio audience's heads. This is simply not a deserving vehicle for his talents, and if it spells the death of Screenwipe a lot of people will be disappointed.

Charlie B is one of many sacred cows to be given something of a kicking on the quite awe-inspiring Some of the Corpses Are Amusing (SOTCAA) website. This site was recently relaunched and recommended in the Guardian Guide and specialises in savage critiques of modern comedy, although much of the material is several years old. I’m reluctant to talk at all about a site which is so incredibly well-written, as it makes my writing look even more irrelevant. Suffice to say their arguments are made with such passion and erudition that they force you to rethink your own long-held opinions. Thanks to them, I’m now thinking yeah, I’m Alan Partridge wasn’t all that funny but I was too afraid to ever say so, and that maybe The Office isn’t so great after all. And I really like Ricky Gervais!

The Corpses, as they refer to themselves, mention Brooker in passing as somebody who has found his particular niche in which he is perfectly good, but not good enough to set the wider world alight - which may be fair comment. One of the best pieces on SOTCAA rails against plebbed-down “People’s Comedy” - the gradual blurring of old-fashioned working-class comedy and erudite middle-class shows that ends in a soggy mass of mediocre shows that aim for the widest possible audience and end up genuinely loved by nobody. Once again, compare and contrast YHBW and Screenwipe. Rants written around 2000 are scarily prescient when you consider the current state of C4’s late night affairs, although even they would never have predicted the full horrors of the Friday/Sunday Night Project.


Which brings me to Ed and Oucho. One summer Saturday morning, with no football to watch, I stumbled upon Transmission Impossible and was immediately hooked. The premise is, Ed (human) and his friend Oucho (talking cactus with Noel Gallagher monobrow) float around in an airship while hijacking the airwaves, and are joined each week by “stowaways” (random kids) who they play daft games with. It’s immensely entertaining. Oucho, who speaks in cactus-language which sounds a bit like English but not quite (“lossoli” means “lovely”, I think), is right up there with Sooty’s mate Sweep in the pantheon of heroic puppet characters whose utterances are completely unintelligible yet somehow hysterical. Ed is fine in what would normally be the straight man role, he does some comic stuff too but crucially it’s never done in a knowing or ironically detached way - they are there to make you laugh on a pure, basic level.

The Sunday version of TI features Sorry, I’ve Got No Head, a sketch show for kids starring Marcus Brigstocke, Mel Giedroyc and Anna Crilly (Magda from Lead Balloon) amongst others, and it’s also brilliant. Characters include: The Secret Negotiator, who tells kids to throw massive tantrums in various situations so they can get their own way, but the kids always end up losing out; the Witchfinder General, who accuses saleswomen or receptionists of being witches and gets his friends to carry them away so that he can jump the queue, or whatever; and many other incompetent/stupid/headless people.

Ok so it sounds crap on paper, and it’s easy to give too much leeway to shows or books just because they’re for kids. But just think of every godawful “edgy” sketch show from the last few years you’ve tried to sit through, then imagine the same thing but with bags more charm and a genuine desire to entertain. Now consider what might happen if the same traits were applied to “grown-up” comedy. It’s certainly food for thought. (Now go and read the whole of SOTCAA, which makes the same points, only better.)