Potty-mouthed misanthrope Charlie Brooker has carved himself out a rather attractive niche of the last few years, as a sort of thinking man’s Alf Garnett. Imagine the bastard offspring of Jeremy Clarkson and Stephen Fry – full of hatred and disdain for the majority of things in the world, but with a withering wit and turn of phrase that few are able to rival – and you’re part of the way there.

The Hell Of It All picks up where Brooker’s last book, Dawn of the Dumb, left off, and is essentially a collection of his Screen Burn and G2 columns written for The Guardian between August 2007 and August 2009. Also included in this volume is a never before published piece intended for The Guardian entitled ‘Why don’t you blow your own head off?’ which was spiked at the time as it was deemed too dreary for a Monday morning.

Brooker’s writing is at times nothing short of inspired – his targets range from Big Brother and diet pills to Las Vegas and Gordon Brown and everything in between. A typically Booker-esque thought is: ‘Mankind clearly peaked about 40 years ago. It’s been downhill ever since. For all this talk of our dazzling modern age, the two biggest advances of the past decade are Wi-Fi and Nando’s. That’s the best we can do.’

And it times, painful though it is, we have to acknowledge that he’s making a valid point. More often than not, he’s worth reading just to marvel at the amount of spleen he seems capable of venting over the most mundane of things.

Needless to say, the rent-a-curmudgeon act does obscure one thing: Booker really can write and he’s no slacker, loafing around guffawing at the end of civilisation as his columns pretend he does. His output over the last few years has been prodigious. So despite his bluster, Brooker is actually a very articulate, extremely hard-working writer with a gift for a deft turn of phrase and a withering put-down.

A book such as this will only ever appeal to the those who are already converted to the church of Charlie, and will be manna from heaven to those converts.If you haven’t already been baptised, then repent brothers and sisters and pray for absolution. Amen.

Reviewed by Scott Morris

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