Charlie Brooker

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2018

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Charlie Brooker is a satirist, broadcaster and writer. He created the Emmy-award winning series, Black Mirror, and presents Screenwipe and Newswipe which won Best Comedy Entertainment Show award at the British Comedy Awards in 2011. Born in 1971, his career has been influenced both by his early love of technology - he was a keen computer gamer - and by his passion for the anarchic, surreal and experimental comedy of Monty Python and The Young Ones. After creating his own comic while at school, he went on to provide cartoons for the magazine Oink! at the age of 15. He cultivated his acerbic style and satirical pessimism as a writer of games reviews and features for PC Zone magazine. His online creation TVGoHome, an often caustic parody of television listings in the style of Radio Times, brought him to the attention of the Guardian newspaper where he began writing a TV review column entitled Screen Burn in 2000. This was adapted into a BBC Four television series, and various spin-offs, including Gameswipe and Newswipe, followed. The first two series of Black Mirror, an anthology of unrelated dramas focused around the unexpected consequences of new technologies, aired on Channel 4. The third series was released on Netflix in 2016, followed by a fourth at the end of 2017. Charlie is married to former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq and they have two young sons. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:31.0	Music
0:48.0	My castaway this week is the satirist Charlie Brooker, Sardonic, Dead Pans, Scabris and Snarky.
0:55.0	His forte is scuring the vacuity of so much of modern life, brutally and brilliantly, dissecting everything from the hackney tropes of TV rolling news to the dystopian possibilities of our techno dependent lives,
1:09.0	oh and politicians, he's really got it in for politicians.
1:13.0	His innate pessimism must surely feel a tad string these days, what with all those glittering awards, best selling books and happy family life to have to deal with, but he soldiers on,
1:23.0	beautifully plowing his relentlessly misanthropic furrow in pursuit of laughs and truth.
1:29.0	He was just 16 when he started, working back then as a cartoonist and writer for a kid's comic, but for a long time success seemed far from certain.
1:39.0	With much of his 20s spent lying on the sofa, watching TV and bitterly shouting, I could have done that.
1:46.0	And these days he says there's still a lot to be angry about, but you get tired rather than mellowed.
1:53.0	And instead of clenching your fists and throwing plates, you just get slightly weepy and despairing.
1:59.0	Welcome Charlie Brooker, what in the world particularly is making you weep right now?
2:04.0	Oh, I have quite a lot of things I think. I mean, I can vacillate between being despairing about the state of the world and being
2:14.0	prayerily optimistic. I think there's something in me that I tend to worry about the state of the world, then when everyone is worrying about the state of the world, I sort of think I can put my feet up.
2:24.0	I described you in the introduction there as a satirist. There is a school of thoughts that what's happening currently in the world specifically geopolitically is sort of beyond satire right now. What do you think?
2:36.0	I think that's possibly true. I don't know that I like the term satirist. I don't really know what you've liked.
2:43.0	I really don't know.
	...

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