Read Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn for Free Online

deserves.
    Yeah, yeah: in real life he’s undoubtedly a really super guy, but on screen he demonstrates all the personality of Microsoft Excel, simpering around delivering trite links with his nice hair and his nice non-threatening blarney-lite patter, so screw him. Why don’t they go the whole hog and hire a doily to front the show instead? They could tie it to a bit of string and dangle it in front of picturesque locations, accompanied by captions and a nice bit of Julian Bream on the soundtrack. Far cheaper, less insulting.
    Anyway. This new incarnation of Holiday purports to offer a true ‘insider’s guide’ to its featured destinations, thanks to the genius ruse of sending a bunch of nano-celebrity no-marks out to cover locations they’re already familiar with, through having lived or worked in them at some point in their lives. Hosting boy Craig Wotsit opens the show with an uninspiring gawp round his home town of Dublin (being an expert on the city, the first thing he does is wander into a tourist information centre).
    Then we get Marie Helvin lording around Hawaii, in perhaps the single least informative travel report ever shot. All we really learn is a) that Marie Helvin likes the landscape, b) that Marie Helvin likes hula dancing, c) that Marie Helvin likes everything else about Hawaii as well. The one decent piece of advice she dishes out is this: bring a riding hat with you if you’re considering an afternoon’s pony trekking. Hands up everyone affected by that piece of essential guidance. Considering the towering wisdom of these experts, it’s surprising none of them manage to pack more information into their reports – there’s little you couldn’t discover by scan-reading two paragraphs of an average travel guide.
    To prove the point, before you can scream ‘This programme is rubbish’, dull blonde vet Trude Mostue bounds onto the screen, to tell us the shops in Oslo are good but expensive, quickly followed by Sean Maguire in the Algarve (who reckons the beaches are nice), and finally, spoiling your view of St Petersburg, woo-hoo! it’s Jeremy Spake – the only man in existence who can sound overly enthusiastic and embarrassingly wooden at the same time.
    During Spake’s piece, repeated cutaways to apparently bemused Russian onlookers watching him camp it up are used in an attempt to underline his loveable quirkiness – instead they appear to be thinking, correctly, that he’s a bothersome prick.

    Really, what’s the point of this infuriating half-hour wrongcast? While these gurning chimps swan around the world on behalf of your licence fee, you’re sitting at home in front of a box, a motionless black plastic box with a huge glass screen, pissing this sanitised marionette’s pageant into your bloated little eyeballs, while you pork out on Jaffa Cakes, wishing you were dead or at the very least too wounded to see.
    Still, if you binge on too many biscuits, tune in to the disturbing Witness: Living on Light (C4), which examines the idiotic charms of Jamuheen, a deluded Australian woman (a sort of evil, blonde Sian Lloyd) who claims to have mastered the art of existence without food.
    Three people have died trying to follow her ‘21-day process’, which consists of a merciless starvation regime, at the end of which you’re supposedly able to take leave of food for good. The documentary crew visits a group of would-be fasters: the sight of them lying on the floor, barely able to move after four days without food or drink, smiling weakly even as their kidneys start to fail is hands-down the most upsetting image of the week.
    Oh, all right, apart from Jeremy Spake.

All the Fun of a Slow-Motion Hanging     [28 October]
     
    Confessions: several years ago, I had a brief spell as a TV news ‘expert’; specifically, I was a high-tech pundit, occasionally called upon to pass comment on computer-related current affairs even though my qualifications were shaky, to say the least. I was