Charlie Brooker is a columnist, blogger, TV presenter and indefatigable tweeter (@charltonbrooker) whose writing is the purest essence of sarcastic English schoolboy. I love him unabashedly. In his column in today's Guardian he spends several paragraphs making bizarre allegations about the Prime Minister including:
It was a pleasant yet unremarkable evening for Cameron; bathed in the warm light of glowing book embers, he had already shed that day's temporary humanlike epidermis as part of his nightly skin-sloughing ritual, and was preparing to dislocate his lower jaw, all the better to ingest the live sacrificial foal the terrified local farmers had left tied outside his cave in a desperate bid to stop him preying on their herds at night.Like a great caricaturist, Brooker produces a monstrous picture of the Prime Minister but one which somehow, on a subliminal level, rings true.
This caused Graeme Archer, this year's winner of the George Orwell Prize for political blogging, to have a sense of humour failure of truly gargantuan proportions. Producing a piece on the Daily Telegraph's website entitled: "Charlie Brooker and tragedy of the modern left" Archer takes Brooker to task:
Overlooking the quite repellent imagery, deliberately deployed in order to de-humanise a perfectly reasonable Conservative with whom he happens, in general, to disagree, I think we see not only of the tragedy of the modern Left; but more, intriguingly, a sign of cognitive dissonance. For all that imagery about blood sacrifices and lizards masquerading as humans is a preamble to a piece which calls for… cuts in BBC expenditure. It’s OK to favour cuts in some forms of spending, apparently, so long as you’re not a lizard-person.Archer's objections have been taken as a challenge by Brooker's followers to invent increasingly bizarre allegations to fling at the PM.
If your evening is dragging, I can warmly recommend the comments section of Archer's article or @charltonbrooker's twitter stream for winningly original suggestions. My current favourite (from @KDDoran) is: "I heard Cameron is actually C3P0 covered in wafer thin ham".
NOTE FROM JOHN: You gotta love that in Britain it's considered heinous to simply call a political leader a lizard. Oh the good old days...
