Sweet Nothings

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 establishme...

Stewart Lee gets a certain amount of preferential treatment in some quarters, and I can see why - he’s probably the closest thing we have these days to an “alternative” comedian in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and a ferociously intelligent performer. Unfortunately this makes him as infuriating as he is interesting. While positioning himself as a cut above your average comic (he’s spoken out quite strongly against brainless Jongleurs hen/stag-night type stand-up), Lee is as venomous in the abuse he metes out at his chosen targets as anyone else, however much this vitriol is adorned with clever wordplay and delivered in a deadpan, offbeat style. In the first show of his new Comedy Vehicle, Lee had a go at Chris Moyles. Now I’ve always found Moyles to be amusing, but at the same time he clearly is a boorish egotist. That second book of his which Lee picked apart does sound horrendous, and of course just because you admit something is a cheap, lazy cash-in doesn’t in any way excuse...

They're currently repeating Early Doors on BBC4, Tuesday nights at 9:30pm, just before Mad Men, in fact. You'd be forgiven for not knowing the first thing about Early Doors , because unlike Mad Men it's a series that existed almost completely without hype. Originally, 'Doors (as nobody calls it) was set to be Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne's follow-up to the multi-award-winning, insanely popular Royle Family , with the writing duo playing the landlord and landlady of a northern watering hole. That idea was scuppered when Aherne's well-documented "issues" got the better of her, and she buggered off to Australia and wrote a near-identical Aussie version of the Royles while she was there. Undeterred, Cash drafted in Phil Mealey as his new partner and carried on writing the new show, which can fairly be described as the Royle Family in a pub. Perhaps BBC bigwigs perceived the show to be too derivative and lacking in star power after Aherne's departure,...