Charlie Brooker
Charlton Brooker is an English screenwriter, producer, presenter, author, cartoonist, and social critic. He first became known for creating and presenting satirical television shows that featured criticism of modern society and the media, such as Screenwipe, Gameswipe, Newswipe, and Weekly Wipe.
Brooker came to wider prominence as the creator, writer, and executive producer of the dystopian anthology series Black Mirror. His other work includes writing for comedy series such as Brass Eye, Cunk on Earth, The 11 O'Clock Show, and Nathan Barley, creating the horror drama series Dead Set, writing social criticism pieces for The Guardian, co-founding and designing the logo for second-hand retailer CeX, and serving as a creative director for the production company Zeppotron.
Early life
Charlton Brooker was born on 3 March 1971 in Reading, Berkshire. He grew up in a "relaxed" Quaker household in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire. His parents, who were fans of the sitcom Bewitched, named him Charlton after a character featured in one episode and his sister Samantha after the show's main character. As a teenager, he first worked as a writer and cartoonist for Oink!After attending Wallingford School, Brooker attended the University of Westminster to study for a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies; he later revealed that he did not graduate because he wrote his dissertation on video games, considered an unacceptable topic for a dissertation. He has listed his comedic influences as Monty Python, The Young Ones, Blackadder, Chris Morris, and Vic Reeves.
Brooker did some early work as a cartoonist and worked in the video game department of Music and Video Exchange, a retailer in Notting Hill Gate. He and some other employees left to co-found the second-hand retailer CeX. Brooker worked in their first shop and produced cartoon advertisements, and designed their logo.
Career
One of Brooker's one-shot cartoons caused the magazine to be pulled from the shelves of many British newsagents. The cartoon was titled "Helmut Werstler's Cruelty Zoo" and professed to be an advert for a theme park created by a Teutonic psychologist for children to take out their violent impulses on animals rather than humans. It was accompanied by photoshopped pictures of children smashing the skulls of monkeys with hammers, jumping on a badger with a pitchfork, and chainsawing an orang-utan, among other things. The original joke was supposed to be at the expense of the Tomb Raider games, known at the time for the number of animals killed, but the original title, "Lara Croft's Cruelty Zoo", was changed for legal reasons. In October 2008, Brooker and several other ex-writers were invited back to review a game for the 200th issue. Brooker reviewed Euro Truck Simulator.
Brooker began writing a TV review column titled "Screen Burn" for The Guardian newspaper's Saturday entertainment supplement The Guide in 2000, a role he continued until October 2010.
From late 2005, he wrote a regular series of columns in The Guardian supplement "G2" on Fridays called "Supposing", in which he free-associated on a set of vague what-if themes. From October 2006 this column was expanded into a full-page section on Mondays, including samples from TVGoHome and Ignopedia, an occasional series of pseudo-articles on topics mostly suggested by readers. The key theme behind Ignopedia was that, while Wikipedia is written and edited by thousands of users, Ignopedia would be written by a single sub-par person with little or no awareness of the facts.
On 24 October 2004, he wrote a column on George W. Bush and the forthcoming 2004 US presidential election which concluded, "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. – where are you now that we need you?" that was criticised for Brooker's apparent encouragement of the assassination of the American president. The Guardian withdrew the article from its website and published and endorsed an apology by Brooker. He has since commented about the remark in the column stating:
Brooker left the "Screen Burn" column in 2010. In the final column, he noted how increasingly difficult he found it to reconcile his role in mainstream media and TV production with his writing as a scabrous critic or to objectively criticise those he increasingly worked and socialised with. Longtime covering contributor Grace Dent took over the column. He continued to contribute other articles to The Guardian on a regular basis, his most recent comment column appearing in May 2015.
In 2012, he contributed to the book Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who.
In 2014, an article he wrote for The Guardian—"Too much talk for one planet: why I'm reducing my word emissions"—was published in the A-Level anthology Voices in Speech and Writing: An Anthology.
Online
From 1999 to 2003, Brooker wrote the satirical TVGoHome website, a regular series of mock TV schedules published in a format similar to that of the Radio Times, consisting of a combination of savage satire and surreal humour and featured in technology newsletter Need To Know. A print adaptation of the site was published by Fourth Estate in 2001. A TV sketch show based on the site was broadcast on UK digital station E4 the same year.In May 2012, Brooker was interviewed for Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast series. In 2019, he made a second appearance on the podcast, which was released during March 2020.
Television
Brooker's television presenting debut was with Gia Milinovich on BBC Knowledge's The Kit, a programme that reviewed gadgets and technology. From 1999 to 2000, Brooker played the hooded expert 'the Pundit' in the short-lived show Games Republic, hosted by Trevor and Simon on BSkyB.In 2000, Brooker was one of the writers of the Channel 4 show The 11 O'Clock Show. In 2001, he was one of several writers on "Paedogeddon", Channel 4's Brass Eye special on the subject of paedophilia. In 2003, Brooker wrote an episode entitled "How to Watch Television" for Channel 4's The Art Show. The episode was presented in the style of a public information film and was partly animated.
Together with Brass Eye's Chris Morris, Brooker co-wrote the sitcom Nathan Barley, based on a character from one of TVGoHome's fictional programmes. The show was broadcast in 2005 and focused on the lives of a group of London media 'trendies'. The same year, he was also on the writing team of the Channel 4 sketch show Spoons, produced by Zeppotron.
''Wipe'' series
In 2006, Brooker began writing and presenting the television series Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on BBC Four, a TV review programme in a similar style to his Screen Burn columns in The Guardian. After an initial pilot series of three editions in April, the programme returned later in the year for a second run of four episodes plus Christmas and Review of the Year specials in December 2006. A third series followed in February 2007 with a fourth broadcast in September 2007, followed by a Review of the Year in December 2007. The fifth series started in November 2008 and was followed by another Review of the Year special. This series was also the first to be given a primetime repeat on terrestrial television, in January 2009.Screenwipe editions have had themes including American television, TV news, advertising and children's programmes. The last of these involved a segment where Brooker joined the cast of Toonattik for one week, playing the character of "Angry News Guy". An episode on scriptwriting saw several of British television's most prominent writers interviewed by Brooker.
Newswipe with Charlie Brooker, a similar show concerned with current affairs reporting by the international news media, began on BBC Four on 25 March 2009. A second series began on 19 January 2010. He has also written and presented the one-off special Gameswipe on video games and aired on BBC Four on 29 September 2009.
Brooker's 2010 Wipe, a review of 2010, was broadcast in December 2010. The end-of-year Wipe specials continued annually, the last one to date broadcast on 29 December 2016. Due to Brooker's commitments to Black Mirror and other projects, the annual Wipe went on hiatus beginning in 2017.
Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe was first broadcast on BBC Two on 31 January 2013. It was an amalgam of Screenwipe and Newswipe, with sections that dealt with recent news, television shows and films. Along with the regular cast, it also featured guests who discuss recent events. Two more series followed in 2014 and 2015. A 60-minute special, Election Wipe, aired on 6 May 2015, examined events running up to the 2015 general election.
A 45-minute BBC Two special, Charlie Brooker's Antiviral Wipe, aired on 14 May 2020. It concerned life during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. It was produced during the UK lockdown, which had caused a series starring Wipe character Philomena Cunk to be postponed. Most of the crew from the series transferred to work on Antiviral Wipe. Brooker initially turned down the offer to make the special but accepted when it was clear that production would be largely unchanged, as the format of the series required few characters to appear on screen together and made extensive use of archive footage. The editing process was the most affected aspect of production.
Brooker often signs off his programmes by saying "Thank you for watching. Now go away."