My First Style Model

My first style model for my second piece is an article written by Charlie Brooker for his column in The Guardian newspaper, Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn. It was published on 16th January 2010 and was titled That's Snow Business, a play-on-words from the well known quote 'That's show business'. I chose this because i liked the attitude and presence that Brooker manages to express in his articles and i also liked the way he mocks and creates humour at the expense of others. He plays on words a lot and and his use of long to short sentence structure makes some phrases seem blunt and no-nonsense. His lexical choice is very entertaining and it is the main contributer to the humour found in this people of writing. I also like the hypothetical situations and the ridiculousness that he expresses in the outcomes of these hypothetical stories.

Charlie Brooker's Screen burn

This week Charlie's been watching the endless rolling snow-news

Guardian Saturday 16 January 2010

 

 

That's snow business.

Oh, how it snowed. It snowed like a bitch. It snowed so hard you could be forgiven for thinking God had decided planet Earth was naught but an embarrassing celestial typo and was desperately trying to Tipp-Ex it out of existence. The build-up was unrelenting: everywhere you looked a compacted strata of white powder looked back at you. It was like being trapped in one of Shaun Ryder's nostrils circa 1992. But colder. Much colder. It was so cold your breath hung in the air before you, then froze, plummeted and broke your foot. And icy. Did I mention it was icy? It was so icy that if you lived in a south-facing house in Edinburgh and slipped outside your front door, you'd slide all the way to Plymouth and fly off the edge of Britain without passing a single frictional surface along the way. Not that you'd drown: the sea was frozen too, so you'd simply carry on skidding, all the way around the entire circumference of the globe, eventually ending up back where you started. Where you'd find a news crew waiting to interview you.

 

You may think I'm exaggerating. So do I. But I've been watching the saturation news coverage of Britain's cold snap and consequently it's hard not to view the snowfall through apocalyptic eyes. The thick layer of snow received, quite literally, blanket coverage. As far as the 24-hour rolling networks were concerned, this wasn't a freak weather condition. This was war. Death from the skies. Earth versus the Ice Warriors. Snowmageddon.

Actually, "Snowmageddon" would've been a good name for it. Every news crisis needs a snappy name. The BBC initially christened it "Frozen Britain". Sky opted for "The Big Freeze", and everyone else eventually fell into line. The minute the government started issuing guidance about not making journeys unless strictly necessary, the reporters hit the road. Every five minutes we had to go live to some poor sod standing outdoors in Benson or Brome or Bromsgrove or Birmingham, shivering like a man with a vibrator in his pocket, telling us how cold it was through his chattering teeth. Not that you could actually see him: chances are he was obliterated by an alabaster flurry.

Presumably at some point the British climate had promised to behave and then unceremoniously reneged on the deal, because everyone kept referring to the weather as "treacherous". The phrase "treacherous conditions" was repeated like a mantra, like a catchy tune the news couldn't shift.

Every witch-hunt has its victims, and before long the accusing finger pointed at roads and pavements: the reporters screamed that these too were "treacherous", and presumably had been in cahoots with the weather all along. Icy patches on pathways provided the news with chucklesome footage of people falling over and agitated soundbites in which aggrieved pratfallers complained about the lack of grit on pavements. You can't please some people. One minute they're whining about the mollycoddling nanny state, the next they're insisting the council employs a man to walk directly in front of them, shovelling grit beneath each potential footfall.

 

Not that there was grit to spare for the pavements. The news was neurotic about dwindling grit. When they weren't throwing live to a man with snow up to his armpits they were linking to a woman in a Puffa jacket close to tears at a gritting depot.

 

Gritting depots don't usually get this much prime-time TV exposure. There's never been a rough-and-tumble comedy drama starring Jimmy Nail set in a gritting depot, or a Live From the Gritting Depot variety hour. Why? Because gritting depots are unbelievably boring, a fact the news did its best to prove for several thousand hours.

 

At the time of writing, the Big Freeze began to thaw – or at least it did in the south, where the news is – and consequently fell off the running order. Still, it was fun while it lasted. But only if you prefer gazing into a snow globe to actually watching the news.