Book review: I Can Make You Hate, by Charlie Brooker

By CRAIG NAPLES
Published on 21/10/2012 00:00

CHARLIE Brooker’s TvGoHome has pride of place, often thumbed, in my toilet collection, but his paperback collections of TV reviews have been as ephemeral as the programmes he wrote about.

I Can Make You Hate

Charlie Brooker

Guardian Books/Faber, £16.99

To publish them in hardback seems like hubris, but given the success of books by reactionary trolls like Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Littlejohn, perhaps it’s only fair that one of the good guys gets a crack at the Christmas market.

Brooker has matured hugely in the past decade: where once he would gleefully, mercilessly rip to shreds a bad programme or fairly irritating celebrity, there’s now a more considered tone and a growing awareness that what he writes has an impact on real people. Unless he’s talking about the foal-devouring habits of the lizard David Cameron, which is fair game.

One of the most arresting things about this collection of articles, and a few 10 O’Clock Live scripts, is that the subjects frequently brought me up short: being reminded of, say, Alarm Clock Britain or the birth of Jedward. The past few years have been a rolling tide of political desperation, nonsense and scandal, where each new wave of stupidity broke, ebbed, and was forgotten ­within hours.

That’s not new, but in a world where we depend so much on the internet, from which papers disappear behind paywalls and corporations lose and change articles en masse without so much as a shrug, here is a hilarious, accurate and durable chronology of what actually happened. Nowhere is this more striking than the way every “expert” agreed the Norwegian massacre was an “al-Qaeda” attack before claiming they’d known it was a white extremist ­maniac all along.

Brooker’s style is clean and incisive, and his arguments 
are sound, reasonable and ­accurate; which makes it all the funnier when his spleen gets taken for a frothing gallop to trample the forces of stu­pidity and evil. Even the book’s index has a childish sense of fun, so don’t stop at the ­acknowledgements.