5. The Guardian Columns
"The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke." That's the sort of thing Brooker's been writing for well over a decade in The Guardian. Whether it's your paper of choice or not (Torquay's Herald Express takes some beating), the sheer output of the man has to be applauded. His original Saturday TV pieces, Screenburn, disected the weekly TV in a manner so savagely mental, they still stand out (the column hasn't been remotely the same since he left) Where else would you find a review of a Jamie Oliver TV show that stated "Oliver is ultimately harmless. His idea of a coke-fuelled threesome is a glass of cola followed by a bacon, brie and avocado sandwich, and the only time you hear him growling 'You know you want it' is when he's holding a steaming roast lamb up to camera." He also correctly coined the phrase "TV's village idiot" for Vernon Kay, and for that I'm eternally thankful. A Monday column, covering anything that annoys him (that's a long list, due to be finished by sometime in 2312), has also been supplemented by jaunts abroad and the odd music festival: "Imagine forcing the cast of Emmerdale to hurriedly construct Las Vegas at gunpoint in the rain. That's Glastonbury." His pieces on America politics ranged from the uncanny description of presidential hopeful John Kerry as "having a face like a haunted tree" to investigation from the authorities, and death threats, when he asked where all the presidential assassins were when we needed them, when George Bush was elected again. A lot of the best stuff has been put into various books, but you can still enjoy his work without him getting his filthy hands on a stinking penny via the Guardian website.
Genius Moment: When Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote an unsavoury piece around gay lifestyles and the death of Stephen Gateley, an enraged
Brooker dashed off one of the finest newspaper columns in history. As perfect a right to reply as you could ever hope to read, and something that articulated what millions were thinking at the time.