Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe

This week I’ve been watching Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe.

Make no mistake British television satire is in the doldrums. Whether it’s Paul Merton pulling a face for cash or Hugh Dennis substituting penetrative thought for hackneyed impressions, we’re in trouble. Fortunately, Charlie Brooker on his caustic steed is galloping in once more to rescue us from ignorance.

Brooker has been producing and writing insightful, irreverent comedy for the last 15 years. He began behind the scenes, writing on the 11 o’clock show (a televisual college that Ricky Gervais and Sasha Baron Cohen learnt and graduated from). From there, he along with Chris Morris wrote Nathan Barley, a sitcom that prophetically saw the coming of the post-ironic hipster age. After this, he became an established fixture on our screens: first, lampooning television in Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe; then the news in Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, and now any cultural phenomena that pisses him off in Weekly Wipe.

Over the course of the show, Brooker’s spleen is thrown at television news, adverts and programmes. Given the demands of writing a weekly show, he enlists guest contributors who add a whimsical yin to his angry yang. Uniformly, the comedians he gets on are brilliant, which makes the show a unique platform for fresh voices. My favourite is Philomena Cunk, played by the brilliant Diana Morgan, less well-known for being in sketch double act, Two Episodes of Mash. Her role on Wipe is to parody the empty talking heads we see on so many countdown lists. This week she was trying to get her head around BBC’s lavish historical drama, Wolf Hall, describing it as ‘British people in hats sort of talking.’ Another role she plays is that of Grand Inquisitor, lampooning the type of arts shows presented by Melvyn Bragg. In the episode she interviewed an academic on the legacy of Winston Churchill, asking him why he is celebrated as a war hero when he just ‘sat in a hole, directing people what to do like a mini-cab driver.’ She is a more subversive interviewer than say Ali G because with his loud shell suit and glaucoma glasses guests saw him coming; but Morgan’s Cunk is played with such sleight of hand they miss the deceit.

        So turn off the panel shows and turn on Charlie Brooker for comedy with brains, bile and bite.

The first episode aired yesterday and is available here on iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05173ym/charlie-brookers-weekly-wipe-series-3-episode-1