You can stick your Screen Wipes and your Time Trumpets

"Darwin was struggling with resolving his religion with his scientific discovery. It's a bit like a rock star being bought up on big guitars, suddenly realising that classical music requires a higher degree of playing skill!" - cut to Darwin in a wig with a big electric guitar rocking out.

Maybe it's just me, but when I watch these I feel like I'm being talked down to. Not informative enough to be informative and not funny enough to be funny.

Time Trumpet and Screen Wipe are good, tho.

But I find Charlie Brooker perfectly hateful. Armando wins by default.

Sunday 03 September

7:00 pm Dog Borstal
8:00 pm Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife
9:00 pm Little Britain
9:30 pm The Catherine Tate Show
10:00 pm Little Miss Jocelyn
10:30 pm F*** Off, I'm Fat
11:30 pm Too Ugly for Love
12:25 am Little Miss Jocelyn
12:55 am Dog Borstal
1:50 am F*** Off, I'm Fat
2:50 am Too Ugly for Love
3:50 am Welcome to BBC THREE

Tomorrow: My Small Breasts And I, Trauma Uncut, Spendaholics Saved My Life.

Tuesday 05 September
19:30 Meetings with Remarkable Trees
A look at Britain's largest broad leaf lime tree, which boasts a magnificent rococo-style tree house. [S]

It seems I have little in common with JtN these days...I like his lectures (Pam loves 'em) and would cite the visual gag in his Marx prog (regarding his insensitivity towards Engels' bereavement - shot of Marx in internet cafe typing email, Subject: Re: Dead wife) as one of my top 36 telly lolz of the twenny-oh-ohs. I think the fact that he's local means we forgive the things that annoy JtN.

And Brooker! I find Screen Wipe quite funny! Especially the US edition! Yes, he is quite hateful. He reminds me of a few people round here.

Ally C and RJG and I were watching Bruiser with Mitchell & Webb the other day. It was as funny as Ally C remembered, in places.

(I've never actually watched it, I was trying to maintain the lack of common ground).

But if I dl them all myself I'm happy to post a DVD-R of them all to you. Email me your address.

I probably was a bit more into these until I saw his dig at John Cage in his Beethoven programme.

I misread this as: "Just watched the one on Dawsons"

OTM. i found the marx one funny *at the time* but thinking about steel, he is a bit of a choad.

on the other hand, 'screen wipe' was aces.

i am following 'time trumpet' but it's wildly uneven, often shit. dubya singing u2 was a career low for ianucci, surely?

it is funny, that alba has just discovered this two-year-old programme!

started on the radio so fine with no visuals, possibly better, shame no one will be able to hear it beyond the first couple of rows then (when is it? can you blag me in)

*not that i'm suggesting that my barracking resulted directly in bbc capitulation, but y'know...

are available at www.o b s c u r e d t v.com

i'll keep me time trumpets and screen wipes except for those bits where brooker just screams the same phrase over and over again in an increasingly shrill voice

He reminds me of Dom P, Grimly F and dadaismus, a bit

ha! i open this thread because i can't find the "proper" screenwipe one (we did have one ... didn't we?) and the first thing i see is this. i'm very flattered. thank you, alba. nobody has ever compared me to dom passantino before.

ANYWAY. just wanted to say that the second ep of this series of screenwipe was genius on a grand scale. "it's my anus"/"amy winehouse has really let herself go" ... fuck, there was another bit that was equally brilliant. perhaps just the well-timed use of the phrase "bell-end".

mark steel is ace, yeh, but brooker is close to godliness.

there was too much of the anus last night. he makes really good points about the way tv executives are their own worst enemies and then fucks himself over with the teenage humour and waniking actions. (and wasn't the titleless end a bit of a mindbender, straight into something else.)

lol moment last night - calling nadine 'hardly an executive price tag' bagget a terrahawk. (amy winehouse a close second)

i haven't lolled that much at a brit tv show in a looong time. well, not since the last 'tv burp'. the billie phone call was very harry hill.

only ruder obv.

Oh. When is this on? Digital? UKnova?

bbc4 -- it gets repeated.

mark steel is too politically biased to be funny. see also: mark thomas, michael moore. not saying i disagree with everything they've said, it's just that it seems like a left wing version of jim davidson telling immigrant jokes his audience.

*to his

is it 2 eps in? didn't know it had started again.

bloody good job it's repeated seeing as it's not on THC replay (death to whoever is denying me this).

2nd last night, yes.

i missed the first :(

i will get them, along with Diary Of A Call Girl.

Thought the "Doctor, it's my anus" stuff was slightly overplayed but the rest was sheer genius. Nice to see the return of The Biggest Cocks (and She-Cocks) In Advertising.

A History Of Corners, with Victoria Coren.

I don't usually watch Screen Wipe but did last night. I didn't think it was very good, though I agree the Terrahawk was funny. And the Billie Piper stuff.

Didn't think the anus thing was funny once, and it didn't become more so as a running gag.

i tuned in during the 'closing credits' and was very, very close to believing the victoria coren thing.

I think I need to grab Billie Piper.

Charlie Brooker's disgusted persona just doesn't have legs enough in it for me to work anymore. He's still doing TV Go Home exploitation-TV titles, after all these years. It's like finding out Viz is still going!

Maybe judging whether such things are tired or a classic seam of humour is just an irreducible matter of taste. Still, the title "A History of Corners" was good, even if the execution of the programme was a bit rub (you can't get Victoria Coren et al on board to be in on the joke). But then I think taking the piss out of trends in high-brow programming is much less played-out than doing it for Celebrity Spew On My Widow and what have you.

any of the new sketches on youtube?

He's still doing TV Go Home exploitation-TV titles, after all these years.

hells yes. no sell-out.

the 'so you want a job in tv?' thing was a virtual repeat from last season as well.

corners, yes, funny.

Didn't think the anus thing was funny once, and it didn't become more so as a running gag

heh. i thought it got funnier each time.

mind: i think i've missed only two issues of viz since 1988.

i actually wasn't so taken with the "corners" bit, mainly because i remember alexei sayle beginning his show with five minutes of juliet bravo, which was way less obvious and way ahead of the curve.

actually: that's who brooker reminds me of -- the swearing/anger/beating up stooges etc. it's alexei sayle. who is also a god amongst men.

the adam curtis segment was awes.

Yeah, I thought that was possibly the best Screen Wipe yet. (although criticising the 70s news for being too slow while attacking the modern news for being too exciting = happy for about 5 minutes in 1986?)

Brooker is never happy is he? I'm getting bored with his schtick - it seems to me to be along the lines of "is it me or is everything shite?" which i'm really bored with too.

He likes Billie Piper and The Wire.

I like how many of his main pieces to camera are done while he's on his couch, perched above his computer, as if at any moment he's going to go, I don't know, Google something. And then I see the candles he's got on the table and I'm like hang on, have I somehow just gone "back to mine" with Charlie Brooker? Is he going to put the moves on me?

at one point he was fetching a cup of tea which was lol-y.

i liked his rant in last week's about 'the death of the credits' altho can't make up my mind whether or not i agree (breather or cast members hamming it up over credits vs who gives a shit who the associate producer is anyway)

i notice his series seem to be immune from credit death, ie the bbc isn't putting him in a box and/or talking over.

Oh yes they are! A week or so ago they did it, and he put gaffer tape over his mouth. The continuity woman apologised, wryly.

it's perhaps not that credit death is particularly bad in itself (although i think it is) it's the fact that it once the credits did go out of the window it led to trailers for what's coming next encroaching into the programme itself. 5 or so minutes from the end (at the stage) there's a pop up telling you what's coming on after, which is really very very annoying if your watching "tribe", for example, but probably less so if you're watching ant and dec's saturday night takeaway. if you watch a lot of US TV the what's coming next bit occupies the bottom third of the screen for most of the show.

I have been on the internets for too long, I spent far too long just now trying to work out what word wryly was a contraction of.

i liked his rant in last week's about 'the death of the credits' altho can't make up my mind whether or not i agree

I'll tell you what I did not like was how he appeared doing a jokey "shout over the squeezed credits" trail for his own programme over the end of the last episode of Tribe, which had ended the series on an extremely sombre note, being about logging destroying the way of life of the Penan in Borneo.

I realise that the puncturing of space and time for reflection is part of what Brooker is complaning about, but this seemed an unnecessarily crass way of proving the point. If I were a member of the Tribe production team (or the Penan), I'd wonder who volunteered me to be the butt of Brooker's "cruel to be kind" point-proving.

That Penan episode was totally amazing (despite my intense loathing for the presenter).

yes, the adam curtis bit was fantastic (even though i thought the "berlin wall coming down changed everything" hypothesis a little shaky). really liked the whole episode, but that's hardly surprising. his less-than-ten-second dismissal of sport was fucking joyous.