Screen Wipe, Tuesday 10pm, BBC Four

Posted by Helen Jennings

Preview rating:
The telly gods finally answered my prayers last night and returned Screen Wipe to BBC4. For the first in Charlie Brooker’s new series, the TV critic and all round misanthrope took recent media scandals – the BBC apologising for editing footage of the Queen to make it look like she stormed out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, various TV phone-in competitions that have defrauded viewers – as a spring board to expose the production trickery and outright lies that go into today’s TV. Exhibit A - Big Brother’s cleverly cut diary room confessionals. 

And once he was done revealing the emperor’s lack of clothes, he took his own off, too, by admitting that footage from the last series of Screen Wipe that was supposedly shot in Los Angeles was actually mocked up in London. Naughty old Charlie.

He then actually dropped his trousers during a skit mocking the hit series Heroes and generally got stuck into the business of shouting, screaming and stomping his feet about Newsnight, Richard & Judy, The X Factor, road safety infomercials and, erm, squirrels.

Brooker’s venomous, sarcastic humour is so puerile I can’t read his Guardian column on public transport any more because I begin to weep and snort with laughter and people look at me funny. Yet he avoids coming across like Points of View-with-swear-words because of his disarming derision of himself along with the programmes he loves to hate.

He needs them as much as they don’t need him. And I need Charlie Brooker to continue to viciously bite the hand that feeds him like a grumpy dog left out in the rain.