139 Quotes by Charlie Brooker

In many ways, Big Brother is the present day equivalent of a 1980s Club 18-30 Holiday – flirting, sunbathing, silly little organised games, and lots of people you’d like to remove from the genepool with a cricket bat.

Here’s a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he’s often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that’ll do.

Cupcakes are for people who can’t handle reality.

At the other end of the spectrum, George Gideon Oliver King Rameses Osborne, the fourteen-year-old novelty Chancellor and future baronet of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon – a man so posh he probably weeps champagne.

At 38, I look back at my 32-year-old self and regret that he wasted time. Then I regret wasting my current time regretting regrets about regrets. This is pretty sophisticated regretting I’m doing. That’s the sole advantage of ageing: I can now effortlessly consolidate my regrets into one manageable block of misery. Otherwise, by the age of 44, I’d need complex database software just to keep track of precisely how many things I’m regretting at once.

If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that “says something” about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe – but not a personality.

The problem: affordable housing has to be subsidised, if the ‘affordable’ bit of the phrase is going to work. The solution: replace every wall, ceiling and floor with a gigantic plasma screen and charge for advertising space. The affordable living room of tomorrow is a futuristic cube with a perpetually looping Go Compare commercial in place of carpets and wallpaper.

In my eyes, PE was a twice-weekly period of anarchy during which the school’s most aggressive pupils were formally permitted to dominate and torment those they considered physically inferior. Perhaps if the whole thing had been pitched as an exercise in interactive drama intended to simulate how it might feel to live in a fascist state run by thick schoolboys – an episodic, improvised adaptation of Lord of the Flies in uniform sportswear – I’d have appreciated it more.

Wait, it gets duller.