Makara Beach

Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe

Several years ago I attended a BBC TV recording session for Charlie Brooker's 'You Have Been Watching' and found myself in the front row of the audience having to avert my eyes to avoid viewing the trailer for video nasty Human Centipede. (Don't Google it). Brooker is a rare treat in a TV commentator, in that he knows the medium intimately, but unlike most other apparatchiks who buy into the notion that it's all a marvellous realm of tinsel and dreams, he is fully aware that most of what is produced is unbearable crap perpetrated by flagrantly mendacious narcissists. Even when he married the sparklingly Konnie Huq, Brooker failed to lose his mordant, grotesque fascination with picking the scabs off our declining civilisation and holding up the suppurating sores for the camera and the delectation of his relentlessly bleak worldview. (I'm selling this really well!)

His annual gazetteer Wipe programme - the title being derived from his weekly Newswipe half-hour programme - summarise the entire year's media news with a now-traditional lack of reverence for decorum and good taste, but with a healthy contempt for the self-important, puffed-up world of news and current affairs. Plus endlessly entertaining clips of stupid people trying to make instant snow by flinging boiling water into the wintery air and ending up burning themselves and going 'ow-ow-ow-ow!' He also really really doesn't like Pharrell's stupid hat and annoying song. Which I'm delighted to say I'd never heard before watching this programme.

Aside from Brooker's hilariously scabrous commentary, the Wipe also benefits from judiciously selected guest contributors. This year's highlights included a short film by Adam Curtis discussing the modern political management technique of engineering constant chaos and confusion in society as a strategy to derail political opposition to established regimes. The technique has been most successfully applied in Russia, but Curtis makes the case that it has also been successful in Britain - although this is a satirical programme, so you should never take anything strictly at face value.

There's also the recurrent commentary throughout the Wipe from Brooker's regular contributors, 'Philomena Cunk' and 'Barry Shitpeas', whose modus operandi is a level of profound stupidity that is almost operatic in scope. Witness the monologue by Cunk (actor and comedian Diane Morgan) on the ubiquity in 2014 (in Britain, at least) of Messianic comedian and bearded social revolutionary, Russell Brand:

Then he brought out a book called Revolution about how unfair everything is, and so you'd know he meant it, he pulled a serious face on the front. It was about how catapultism is naughty, and how we could build a better world if we were nice to each other instead of spending all our time thinking about coins. He'd talk about how the status quo keeps the working classes enslaved, which I found sort of boring compared to the stuff he used to do about putting his dinkle into granddaughters. What he's saying might actually be stupid, but it's hard to tell because he says it with clever words. [Clip of Brand on Newsnight: 'We don't want pedagogic figures coming in and didactically shouting at us!'] So the only people who can actually tell if he's stupid are clever themselves, and they think everyone's stupid compared to them anyway. Basically, the only way to find out if he's clever or stupid will be to do everything he says, and see if society totally collapses and hundreds of thousands of people die.

For more of this arrant nonsense, see the 2014 Wipe below, as broadcast by the BBC on 30 December. (They seem to make an exception to their no-uploads policy for the Wipe, for some reason).



See also:
Comedy: Charlie Brooker & the Blockheads - Reasons to be Fearful '14
Comedy: The death spiral of news, 17 March 2014
Comedy: "I'm actually an atheist", 7 January 2014

Great criminal masterminds of our time

Bandits dressed in full-length, hooded onesies, bashed their way into a Geelong West hotel and attacked an ATM with a sledgehammer before escaping in a stolen milk truck. When police closed in, two men burst from the truck on a small stolen motorbike and continued their getaway. But visions of an Italian Job-style movie heist appear to have come to a halt when two men were caught empty-handed a short time later on an overloaded motorcycle. To add to the fiasco, police say the ATM attacked at the Barking Dog hotel about 4am on Saturday wasn't holding any money [...]

- Greg Dundas & Bethany Tyler, Geelong Advertiser, 5 January 2015, via @faganjosh

2nd test vs Sri Lanka, Basin Reserve, Day 1

Despite one of my chilliest days at the cricket since that day shivering under the Compton Stand at Lord's in 2008, I still managed to enjoy Day 1 of the 2nd test against Sri Lanka yesterday at Wellington's Basin Reserve yesterday. Here's some photos from the day.

Little chucker

Williamson & Taylor emerge from lunch

Williamson & Taylor

Drone technology (circled)

From the boundary

Marcel Proust writes an action thriller

There came a shot, or rather the memory of the sound made by the metal tapping of the striker as it was released from tension by the action of the trigger, and driven into the rear end of the cartridge, causing the ejection of the bullet from the barrel and the empty casing from the breach, while the trace of cordite lingered like the smell of my grandmother's fresh baked bread of a Sunday morning before Mass, and the sensation of the trembling recoil of the stock on the skin of my palm recalled my mother's transient good night kiss, so what had started as an act of violence offered in the shallow flux of present time, devoid of memory and its handmaid, the imagination, became with the reverberation of the sound about the station platform an unexpected gateway into permanence, where, like the church bells that signalled the approach of old Francois with a pail of fresh milk from the village dairy, the echo of the brief explosion reverberated in the gulf of time past, and what had been manipulated by the violent hands of the present, as intended termination of a human life, became in the sudden clasp of involuntary memory the means by which the moment was transfigured as that in which a shot rang, with whatsoever repercussions, out.

- as imagined by Sebastian Faulks, The Write Stuff, BBC Radio 4, 19 October 2010

Bring out the big guns

A Singaporean Army 155mm self-propelled howitzer stops traffic as it crosses the narrow Manawatu River bridge just south of Foxton, on the way north from the port of Wellington to Waiouru for artillery practice, 1 January 2015.

See also:

Military: Cadets at Parliament, 9 November 2014

Military: Commemorating the 100th anniversary of WW1, 4 August 2014

Military: Royal Marines Band, 30 September 2013