Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline
by Charlie Brooker
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List Price: ££9.99
Our Price: ££1.10
Your Save: £ 0.00 ( % )
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780571238415
ISBN: 0571238416
Label: Faber and Faber
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2007-11-01
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Studio: Faber and Faber
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: laugh out loud funny
Comment: As a devoted fan of Brooker's weekly column in the Guardian weekend supplement I knew I would have seen some of these columns however that didn't put me off buying it. Often his cutting use of sarcasm will still make you spit out your tea on the 4th or 5th read. No target is off limits - 9/11 conspirators, Reality TV (especially Reality TV), minor celebrities, major celebrities - no one is safe from Brooker's rage!
Not just for fans - he will make you laugh...unless you seriously think Big Brother is a fantastic TV program :)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: "Kitchen sink" approach doesn't really do the reader many favours
Comment: Brooker is currently the best-loved pop culture pundit amongst the jaded workshy internet-hogging sullen misanthrope demographic. This is an indesputable fact. He has sat aside the collective imagination of this unhappy group like a grumpy colossus since the launch of the spoof listings website TVGoHome back in what now feels like the mid-1800s, and he continues to do so with his Guardian articles and the brilliant Screenwipe show, which I'll wager most of you have seen on the Guardian website and youtube respectively rather than in actual grubby print or on actual proper telly. This all feels very word-of-mouthy and grass-rootsy, with friends slinging URLs at you every time he says something particularly interesting or rude, and part of the reason for this popularity is that, despite his grumbling and slightly forced self-deprecation, Brooker seems like a likeable, smart guy and has an unmatched talent for a pithy little vignette.
Seriously, it's completely unmatched: I've never read anyone who can produce a one paragraph nugget that manages to be as clever, scatological, sharp, heartfelt, and funny as Brooker. When most columnists try this sort of recipe it comes out indigestible and smug, like trying to swallow a lump of self-satisfied rancid grease; Brooker pulls it off effortlessly and still manages to seem human. This is probably the reason for his enduring net popularity, as in the land of short attention spans and thousands and thousands of competing distractions short, brilliant quotes are the primary currency - and he has them in abundance.
Which is the problem with the book, really. It's like printing out an entire website to read through it page by page rather than being linked directly to the funny picture of the cat with the amusing caption. It's impossible to write the brilliant little gems mentioned above every single week, and between them his writing is either ephemeral at best or completely irrelevant at worst. For every brilliant insight and one-liner, there's pages and pages of wibbling about, say, 2006's Big Brother - perfect for a weekly column, but its inclusion in a book seems a little eyebrow-raising. The fact that its readable at all two years later on is a tribute to Brooker's skill, but still you get the feeling that you've been swindled a bit by some sort of bait-and-switch scam. Yes, I know it never claimed to be anything other than a collection of articles, but "Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline" to my mind suggested something more trim and toned and toothier. Perhaps this is just an inescapable result of taking Brooker out of his natural environment and cramming him willy-nilly into a book or perhaps they just wanted to bulk the book out some, but the "kitchen sink" approach doesn't really do the reader many favours.
A genuinely mixed bag, this: undeniably a good read, but you feel sort of like you'd rather have just googled "best Charlie Brooker quotes" instead. On the plus side, Brooker is one of the most genuinely enjoyable columnists you can read today and you get the feeling that much, much better is still to come.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Charlie Brooker is right about everything
Comment: This is a collection of Charlie Brooker's newspaper articles and TV reviews from 2004 to 2007. About half is television reviews, the other half is what I'd hesitantly call 'lifestyle' which can cover anything from Facebook to haircuts to Banksy.
Brooker is the best ascerbic angry writer and reviewer there is. Maintaining an almost constant level of fury throughout, underneath the sarcasm and the comedic threats of violence are reams of very interesting points about the TV we watch and the culture we're a part of it.
To really appreciate some of the TV reviews you'll be better off if you do have an idea how Big Brother works, or who Gillian McKeith is, and if you do know those things but you wish you didn't, then even better.
Personally I enjoyed reading this book in bite-sized chunks- just the odd few pages here and there when I was feeling complacent. Reading it all in one go would put you in a seriously bad mood- or perhaps it would be a very cathartic experience for you..?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Puerile, mordant, genius
Comment: Poor old Charlie Brooker. He's a man out of time, trapped in a world he understands little and likes even less. Here is an essentially decent, liberal man who feels the need to defenestrate himself for our reading pleasure each week in the dear ol' Grauniad.
Reading this book is really like reading a potted social history of recent times, or at least for most of this book the televisual part of it. CB takes random and withering potshots at most of the deserving targets of our pathetic adulterated culture. Thankfully, most of the time, he manages to score direct hits. And how.
This book is not really to be read cover to cover, instead to be dipped in and out of because these columns were produced to be satisfying little gobbets; little secret missives that we read and where we knew that finally, here was someone who saw our risible so-called celeb-culture for the hollow, dead-eyed, grasping sham it all undoubtedly is. And worse, he loves TV the same we that we do (you can tell). As a result he is all the more coruscating when he thinks it falls short of what it should be. his rants about TV companies, their dalliances with premium rate phone lines and journalistic integrity were just beautiful.
And while I don't quite agree with the 'Macs are Fisher Price activity centre's for adults' line, it was was still funny enough to make me spit out hot tea through my nose as I laughed. Damn you, Charlie Brooker!
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Best Stand-Up Comic You Never Saw
Comment: Many books claim to be laugh-out-loud funny. This is the Real Deal. I'm just glad I've never read it in public as there were moments when I genuinely couldn't get my breath. I've not been a Brooker fan long (I only discovered Screen Wipe during the last series, which wasn't that long ago) but, on the strength of this material, I'm now a fully-fledged convert to his brand of excoriating, sardonic, not to mention laugh-your-lungs-up-funny bile. He's like the best stand-up comic you never saw - imagine Bill Hicks doing 'Harry Hill's TV Burp'. The weaker chapters are merely inspired but there are definitely pieces that are touching genius, if only for the completely original thought processes that Brooker goes through. These are most evident in the non-TV related chapters, which I generally enjoyed more than the TV stuff. Which is not to say that the TV stuff isn't also joyously mirthsome because it is. Imagine every other TV critic in the world (particularly the NOTW's Ian Hyland) as a scurrying cockroach...then picture a huge, black, hobnailed boot slowly descending to crush them. That's Brooker. To sum up then: Charlie Brooker takes absolutely no prisoners in perhaps the most nihilistically comedic collection of prose money can buy. And I make no apology for fawning all over this because it's utterly bloody brilliant. Buy it.
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