Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker Read Free Book Online

course I might be making that bit up, and am.
    Anyway, overall Never, Never fulfils its quota admirably. Oh, and it’s also a reasonably good piece of television drama, despite a lot of padding in the form of pointless slow-motion sequences of John Simm wandering around the squalor pit while a long piano chord chimes mournfully in the distance.
    They can be let off for that. What can’t be forgiven is not having the guts to call it ‘Concrete and Piss’. Cowards.

A Momentary Adrenaline Rush     [11 November]
     
    I’m a coward. I’m scared of everything. Last night I got up to fetch myself a drink of water and, while filling a glass in the darkened kitchen, briefly glimpsed a scrumpled-up carrier bag that looked a bit like a grinning skull. Terrified, I leapt on the sideboard and screamed for the neighbours to call the police, but instead they just hammered a shoe against the wall for 28 minutes before venturing outside to hurl rocks at my window – which failed to scare the bag away.
    In fact I’m still up on the sideboard now, tapping away on a laptop, with a tea towel draped over one side of my head as a kind ofmakeshift sightscreen that prevents both me from seeing the skullbag, and the skullbag from sensing my fear.
    Whimsy aside, cowardice is one of my driving characteristics, which is why I’ve always regarded anyone engaged in ‘extreme sports’ as inherently alien and untrustworthy. Skateboard, snowboard and BMX aficionados all seem to lack the fear of a snapped ankle or shattered pelvis, while anyone prepared to climb rock faces or take part in a street-luge event is clearly just insane. (For the uninitiated, a street luge is a kind of gigantic skateboard for maniacs to lie down on and race through steep city streets in the most precarious and vulnerable manner possible. It’s a sport that raises questions, namely: 1) How do you casually ‘get into’ it? 2) Where do you practise? And most baffling of all, 3) where do you actually buy a street luge? Halfords?)
    All of the above explains why I found this week’s Cutting Edge: Seconds To Impact (C4) so terrifying. It takes a hideously involved look at the world of BASE jumping – a pastime in which eerily calm men and women climb high objects, leap off, plummet toward the ground and release a tiny parachute at the very last possible second. Unsurprisingly, it’s illegal in the UK. As sports go, this is as perilous and extreme as it gets, short of wolf-raping.
    The programme follows three jumpers called Rob, Jon and Greg, as they spend the summer hopping off a variety of vertigo-magnets, including the Cheddar Gorge, the Park Lane Hilton, various Norwegian mountains, and in one especially shiversome sequence shot with tiny helmet-mounted digicams, an impossibly tall and exposed chimney stack slap bang in the middle of nowhere.
    For a bunch of fearless lunatics, the trio are pleasant and normal enough, although I wouldn’t invite them round for dinner on the grounds that anyone prepared to leap off the Cheddar Gorge for kicks is probably equally prepared to unexpectedly lunge forward and poke a fork through your eye for the sake of a momentary adrenaline rush.
    Few viewers will doubt the macho credentials of anyone about to hurl themselves from the top of the Park Lane Hilton, yet duringthe preparations for just such an event, Rob is curiously at pains to inform us just how heterosexual he is.
    He squints accusingly at the camera: ‘Normally I’d never cuddle a bloke in a million years,’ he grunts, going on to explain, almost apologetically, that he and his fellow jumpers occasionally share a vaguely tender slap on the back and a few kind words in the moments before a jump – restrained behaviour under the circumstances, yet Rob appears genuinely more troubled by the thought of viewers at home laughing and ‘calling us faggots or whatever’ than by the immediate prospect of the potential death plunge.
    In the event, Rob and Jon survive to