posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 1:38 AM
by
Endie
TV Go Home
Oh, sweet, After several years of absence, the TV Go Home archives are back online. I cannot swear enough to do them justice. But start with the early 1999 ones and read forward, watching Charlie Brooker turn from hilarious, through biting, to scathing. Each issue is presented as a jpg, which makes them safe for every work filter I've every been subjected to.
I honestly believe that TV Go Home was the finest example of popular satire in the 90's. Appearing, at first, to be a fun mickey-take of the old British Radio Times tv listings magazine, it evolved into the vehicle for attack after attack on the state of populist entertainment, on the media, on the idle young rich, on the newspapers of both left and right and more.
And yet most weeks would have a scattering of hilariously geeky in-jokes as well, as befits a production with ties not just to Chris "Brass Eye" Morris but also the wacky, free-software-loving, techno-libertarian funsters at http://www.ntk.net (irregular providers of high-tech inside info since they got a bit bored of it). So we have (woth December 1999):
8:15 Film Premiere Ken Loach's Tron - Science fiction thriller starring Peter Mullan. When hacker Kevin Flynn violates the ENCOM mainframe, a laser blast transports his body inside a computer simulation of a Glasgow housing estate in which he must battle heartless council officials and his own alcohol addiction while maintaining a sense of working-class dignity throughout.
...
02.30 LOOK Box GET Key - Solutions to old-school computer text adventures read by Brian Blessed. Week 4: a walkthrough of The Hobbit
These appeared in the same issue as the ongoing series "Sting Cares", where Sting would visit an African village "to be filmed playing football with a lovable little black boy". Other films included "Bad Lieutenant 2: Worse Lieutenant", not one word of the description of which can I repeat here. Which is slightly better than the long-running program following Nathan Barley - later to get his own (real) TV Series on Channel 4 - the very name of which is unrepeatable.