Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Dawn of the Dumb

Rate this book
Polite, pensive, mature, reserved ...Charlie Brooker is none of these things and less. Picking up where his hilarious Screen Burn left off, Dawn of the Dumb collects the best of Charlie Brooker's recent TV writing, together with uproarious spleen-venting diatribes on a range of non-televisual subjects - tackling everything from David Cameron to human hair. Rude, unhinged, outrageous, and above all funny, Dawn of the Dumb is essential reading for anyone with a brain and a spinal cord. And hands for turning the pages.

421 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2007

51 people are currently reading
1129 people want to read

About the author

Charlie Brooker

20 books549 followers
Charlton "Charlie" Brooker is a British journalist, comic writer and broadcaster. His style of humour is savage and profane, with surreal elements and a consistent satirical pessimism.

He presents TV shows Screenwipe, Gameswipe and Newswipe, wrote a review column for The Guardian newspaper, and is one of four creative directors of comedy production company Zeppotron.

His five-part horror drama Dead Set for E4 earned him a nomination for a BAFTA and he is also the host of the Channel 4 comedy panel show You Have Been Watching. Brooker won Columnist of the Year at the 2009 British Press Awards for his column, and the Best Newcomer at the British Comedy Awards 2009.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
814 (27%)
4 stars
1,322 (45%)
3 stars
641 (22%)
2 stars
108 (3%)
1 star
25 (<1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 106 reviews
Profile Image for MJ Nicholls.
2,274 reviews4,848 followers
June 4, 2011
It is incredible the amount of column inches Brooker has devoted to napalming reality television. This collection consists largely of endless attacks on the preening twits who participate in this witless gonk. Why, you may ask? Well, if we stop voicing our disgust for this drivel, the alternative is lying down and accepting it, as we’ve done with so many second-rate television abortions aimed at lobotomised squirrels. We need Brooker sparring against this sludge, even if he takes a morbid pleasure in watching it.

Brooker’s howls of pain add to the great tradition of existential literature—Sartre, Camus and co—only using Celebrity Love Island to illustrate man’s gradual regression back into tetrapods. Fun hate.
Profile Image for Lee.
226 reviews63 followers
July 29, 2012
When I left home to start University there were many things I missed. But the combined heartache of all these things was outweighed by the joy I felt at the realisation that no longer would my residence's newspaper of choice be The Sun.

The word newspaper in modern English often gets shortened to just ’paper. This appellation is particularly apt for The Sun since it is undeniably full of paper and just as undeniably devoid of news. Being free of the odious tabloid was liberating. No more would every science article I read start with the phrase “Boffins at the University of…”. No more would the day's biggest news event be commented on by Jo, 19, from Wolverhampton, who was happy to expose both her views on world events and her bosom.

Since I'm a limp-wristed bleeding-hearted hairy-toed liberal the first newspaper I bought for myself was The Guardian. And immediately I started buying it I was in love. Not with the paper itself, whose more liberal stances on every single news story were refreshing at first but soon gave me the impression that if it leaned any more to the left it would fall over. No, the object of my affection was the splenetic Charlie Brooker. His column was often the highlight of each Monday, a day filled with dragging myself through lectures wondering where the weekend had popped off to and when it would be back.

Long after I had a falling out with The Guardian (they compared Boris Johnson to Hitler; I expect Godwin's law to hold in Youtube comments, not in my broadsheet newspaper) and switched allegiances to a different newspaper I would still buy a copy of Monday's Guardian just to read through his often hilarious pieces. The theme was generally self-loathing, although not being a selfish sort of man Charlie Brooker would happily dish out his loathing to anyone or anything else that had irked him that week.

This collection is a combination of Brooker's Monday articles from the G2 supplement that are him just moaning for a page or two and his Screenburn articles that review the week's television. Reading these angry rants once a week usually left me eager for the following week's article, but like some TV shows I worried that reading them all in a row in this collection would rob them of their charm. Thus, despite it being eminently pick-up-able, I practised putting the book down a lot. The individual articles are all rather short, a couple of pages at most. This makes them perfect for filling in those annoying little two minute breaks we have a dozen times a day. A few reviews have called it perfect toilet-time reading, and it is, but I mostly read it while waiting for my creaky old laptop to start up, while waiting for my flatmate to get ready to go out, while waiting in a coffee shop for my friend to arrive, while letting my dinner simmer for five minutes, and many other pauses in my day that wouldn't normally be long enough for any serious reading.

Serious reading is not what this book is about. Charlie Brooker is not a seething cauldron of discontent all the way through, and can be touchingly poignant, as best seen in his tribute to Oliver Postgate. The articles in this collection, though, are witty, acerbic rage through and through, with the arguable exception of the penultimate one—his report from Glastonbury. That's acerbic rage for only half the article.

If you like Charlie Brooker and haven't memorised everything he's ever written then this collection is a great one to dip into. It passed the six-laugh test with flying laugh-flavoured colours and, from a social history perspective, gives a nice overview of the changes in television during the three year period it covers. Charlie Brooker isn't everyone's cup of tea, but if you like your tea with a splash of milk and a teaspoon of relentless pessimistic fury, then you might want to give him a sip.
Profile Image for Betawolf.
390 reviews1,481 followers
September 17, 2018

I know Brooker mostly from his TV shows -- I'm not one of those sacred few who've followed him from TV Go Home -- and so my point of reference for most of this collection of articles is Brooker's image on Screenwipe. You know, where he sits in a darkened room, cheerfully spewing puerile vitriol at the telly while wanking himself off. Not that I'm criticising. In fact, I find it kind of cathartic, letting him shout and overact his disgust at the stupids so that I can just sit back and smile. The major problem with Screenwipe, which also applies to these articles from 2004-2007, is that a lot of the time you end up watching Brooker insult people you don't know on TV shows you'd never watch. Brooker is constantly slagging off the non-celebs on shows like Big Brother, I'm a Celebrity, The Apprentice and X-Factor, all of which sound about as fun to watch as the medieval equivalent -- a sack full of live cats thrown onto a fire. There's a sort of relationship here like that boy pushing the girls on the playground -- he's only picking on them because he's sort of fascinated with them.

That's why I always preferred Newswipe. It's still the relaxing image of Brooker insulting things while he masturbates into his cornflakes, but the things he's angry at are current events, some of which actually matter, and he intersperses segments of genuinely enlightening media studies, about how the news media operate, and how little this has to do with the notions of journalistic integrity that they try to flog you in the cinema. Thankfully, these articles contain both approaches, along with more general misanthropy.

Some US readers might be confused, because Brooker's major claim to fame at the moment is his sci-fi series Black Mirror, which unexpectedly shot into international awareness for some reason with its 2014 Christmas special, nearly two years after its second season, and has since been picked up by Netflix (and seems to still be doing pretty well). Most of Brooker's material isn't like that. However, that said, in his pseudo-psychotic rants through these pages, you see hints of the ideas that led to Black Mirror episodes, and evidence of Brooker's attention to technology and its effects on culture. Most importantly, though, you get to see Brooker unknowingly describe the series he would go on to create, in one of his rare surges of authentic human emotion, as he talks about British sci-fi:


Actually, no. Not Buck Rogers. It's far too gee whizz. Give me something British. Something depressing and dystopian. Something angry and idealistic and imaginative and scary


Few raving media commentators can claim to have actually made something which so genuinely fits a description they admired.

There are other echoes of the future in these pages, too. Brooker's Dead Set is foreshadowed both generally by Brooker's love-to-hate relationship with Big Brother, and specifically by an article he wrote describing its plot. A much more chilling fusion of popularised idiocy and brainless hordes is also predicted in a 2007 article, when Brooker gives a list of advice to George W. Bush which describes Donald Trump's presidency. No, seriously, read the article, the correspondence is really uncanny, I half wonder if he's responsible for the whole campaign. Brooker seems to have so contorted his mind trying to predict the activities of reality TV idiots around his article publication dates that he's actually developed precognitive abilities, which have unfortunately been tuned to the wrong timeframe. If my calculations are right, he should be picking up 2029 about now.

It's been a while since I've read stuff that could genuinely get me chuckling, rather than just smiling in a self-satisfied way, and so I have to award Brooker with stars for that. So what if it's sometimes juvenile, sometimes overly personal? You have to live a little. Sometimes you need something a little bit unbalanced to remind you that it's worth getting out of bed.

PS: Okay, so one more negative comment. That prologue: What? You took this already sort of weak, hot-off-the-blogs nothing-piece and you neutered it. I mean, sure, give the context, and I appreciated the letters-from-loons a little, but really, you snip off the ending that was the only reason anyone talked about it, and then instead simper away about how lovely every single American is? Come on.

Profile Image for Hannah Eiseman-Renyard.
Author 1 book76 followers
September 24, 2009
Angry, Puerile and Brilliant - Perfect Toilet Reading

This is the collected works of Charlie Brooker since his equally good collected articles in Screen Burn. I have loved Charlie Brooker ever since I was old enough to take an interest in the newspapers my parents bought. Dawn of the Dumb is a combination of Charlie Brooker's more recent Screenburn reviews in the Guardian newspaper's Guide section and the longer weekly editorial column he got given on the Guardian's G2 supplement.

Charlie Brooker is angry, hyper-critical and disdaining about all the right things, and both columns are a joy to read. Even when you haven't seen or heard about the thing he's laying into - the writing is definitely strong and funny enough to carry it.

This is the perfect toilet book - formed from short, jagged articles which are best savoured in small doses. A bit like a bag of particularly sour pick n' mix - don't devour these all at once. Share it around - read some out to your friends. The only downside is that there's at least one point in each article where you'll find yourself laughing too hard to keep reading aloud.

Some of these I'd read when they came out, but they weren't dimmed by this repetition. You don't read Charlie Brooker articles for plot, or anything which can be ruined by a second reading. Charlie Brooker's forte is some brilliant (often violent and sweary) flights of the imagination, woe and fury at seeing what some broadcasting has come to, and some neat summations of the faces of this 'revolution' (Victoria Beckham: an "irradiated mantis" - etc.)

The only downside, I'd say, is as this is so contemporary I don't know how well these will age - once the TV shows, personalities and social trends which he writes about are well out of memory - so get it while it's hot. Also, the focus pretty localised to the UK.

The problem with the toilet book format is that (taking this literally) I left my copy in the bathroom of my student house - and when my housemates had a load of friends over: some turd went and nicked it. So, can't vouch for every single article as I only got about three quarters of the way through it, but the fact that someone liked this book enough to steal it is probably a recommendation of sorts.

The arsewipe.
Profile Image for Ewan.
265 reviews14 followers
March 31, 2020
It's fine. Brooker has written a lot better than this and his TV work is a lot more focused. Brief glimmers of genuinely enjoyable stuff, some strong anecdotes and generally funny stuff mixed in with a majority of articles that do nothing more than pass the time.

A nice book to dip in and out of, but I'd only recommend it for those that have read Brooker's other, later, better books.
Profile Image for Gina.
126 reviews2 followers
June 3, 2013
I think it helps if you're a fan of Charlie Brooker. I find the guy hilariously honest and admire the way in which he speaks his mind without fear of what others will think.

This book is a collection of some of his best articles, he covers everything from Political Satire, George Bush and Rush Limbaugh to the latest inhabitants of the Big Brother house. There are some genuinely funny laugh out loud moments in the book and the way he describes some people is spot on. If you fancy something intelligent, honest and funny this is one to read.
Profile Image for Lisa.
1,177 reviews64 followers
September 10, 2008
Bought on a whim due to liking Charlie Brooker's weekly columns in the Guide, this was slightly disappointing being made up of those exact columns. To be expected I suppose, and to be fair those columns are pretty funny, but marginally less so when whichever programme he's poking fun at is no longer on the box.
Profile Image for Leebs.
277 reviews22 followers
March 24, 2015
I must admit I didn't finish this book. I adore Charlie Brooker and I think if I had read this book at the time it was written I would have been able to finish it, but reading about Big Brother contestants from over 5 years ago just got tedious and I couldn't go on.

I don't think this is a book that dates well.
Profile Image for Peter.
4 reviews2 followers
August 20, 2012
As much as I love Charlie's vitriolic column, this compilation suffers quite badly duebto the temporal distance to its subject matter. Many of the entries were highly topical and re-reading them now is akin to reading a soap gossip mag from last year.
Profile Image for Jenn.
50 reviews4 followers
August 21, 2024
It's good, but obviously of its time. I remember all of the series of Big Brother he's talking about and I'd have loved this book at the time, but I'm too old and real life is too crap for his misery unless it's in weekly doses.
Profile Image for Tasha.
617 reviews7 followers
October 8, 2016
Reading so many rantings in a row is a little over the top and depressing. They're also outdated now and since I've never been a fan of any of the popular shows he's reviewing I have no idea what some of the pieces are about. Some, however, are spot on today.
Profile Image for Chris Neale.
7 reviews2 followers
September 8, 2022
Probably just good fun at the time it was released.
In hindsight 15/16 years on and Trump and Johnson and most of his Black Mirror stuff is now happening for real in politics...it almost verges on a horror story in parts.

The main thrust of it being Brooker's well crafted wordy reviews of the madness of what is on television that week are great and funny.
There's a different angle for the last chapter of the book where it's more of a diary of thing's he's doing instead of the TV reviews. Still funny (I would loathe going to Glastonbury too).

Definitely worth a read, especially if you like Screenwipe/Newswipe or Black Mirror
27 reviews
November 2, 2017
It's hard to know how to comment on this book. On the one hand, I thought it was screamingly funny when I started reading it. Charlie Brooker is the master of the insult and he's prepared to describe segments of society as stupid, boring, useless and generally give voice to all the frustrations we feel with the rubbish we face every day and say the things that we would love (but simply wouldn't dare) to have said ourselves. He does it very well. Extremely well, in fact. I can't think of anyone who does it better.

The problem is that that's pretty well all he does and by the time I got halfway through this collection of articles I was desperately willing him to say something new rather than simply come up with another outrageous metaphor for how stupid Big Brother contestants are. So I really enjoyed the first half of the book but the second half was a real struggle. With hindsight, it would have been a good book to dip into. As it is, I ended up feeling that it was very samey — you don't notice this in a weekly newspaper column as you have seven days to reset yourself but presented all at once there feels like there's a distinct lack of variety.
Profile Image for Mike Steven.
489 reviews9 followers
May 27, 2020
I'm a teacher and was looking for some interesting non-fiction pieces to use with my GCSE classes.

I'm also a massive fan of Charlie Brooker.

I'm also a fan of remembering popular culture from the recent past.

If you want to read a collection of Guardian articles from an irritated man that span 2005 to 2007 and talk about Big Brother, The Apprentice, computer games, shopfront signs, David Tennent as Doctor Who, fashion (how it's not needed), mobile phones and an account of a trip to Glastonbury with Aisleyne from Big Brother then this is perfect for you. It's fun on three levels. Firstly, Brooker has a great sardonic turn of phrase. Secondly, you get to remember things from 15 years ago - you'll remember them fondly but Brooker will remind you that they were a load of rubbish after all. Thirdly, it's funny how he's grumpy about things - that's his comedic angle.

It's probably easier just to look up some old Screen Wipes on YouTube and watch those instead, but I enjoyed it.
Profile Image for Fiona.
181 reviews
February 18, 2018
It's funny to imagine that now there are people who only know about Charlie Brooker through Black Mirror and not through his rage at terrible TV (and if that is how you know him then please do yourself a favour and watch Screenwipe and Newswipe, I'm sure most of both of them is on Youtube). This collection of his articles is old enough that now even the terrible stuff on TV and going on in the world seems slightly nostalgic. Overall it's more worth reading for the articles which are general musings on life and his issues with it than the TV reviews, as they are all very out of date and for things which are mostly terrible. You can see exactly why he ended up giving up writing these columns to focus on other things.
Profile Image for George.
129 reviews
October 31, 2025
A mix of tv reviews & Charlie’s meanderings about life. The TV are an interesting capsule of life 20 years ago with at-the-time reviews of brand new shows like The Apprentice, Dragons Den & Deal Or New Deal. All dealt with his caustic whimsy.
The think pieces are less interesting, with some having an Adrian Chiles “will this do” feel. Actually that’s unfair, they’re all well written, just less essential.
That said, the spot on kicking given to a pre-PM / car crash referendum David Cameron, is still as pertinent 18 years later.
13 reviews
May 9, 2020
Like reading the world’s funniest history book

So many quotes in this. Brooker is the master of the short, sharp, beautifully constructed sentence and of pointing out the flaws of society and humanity.
It’s great reading it again 20 years on and getting Brooker’s take on Facebook etc.
364 reviews2 followers
August 3, 2021
It is definitely much harder reading this roughly 15 years removed - I barely remembered a lot of the TV shows Charlie is talking about. Still, I burst out laughing many times, just from his turn of phrase.

The other part is seeing his disbelief at the state of the world in 2005-7. Dear god, what that era Charlie Brooker would think of the last 5 years...
Profile Image for Richard Kemp.
79 reviews2 followers
April 3, 2018
Less angry and shouty than its predecessor, 'Screen Burn', and instead more thoughtful, with stronger arguments. (Unless I'm becoming immune to the shards of glass in Charlie Brooker's acerbically witty commentary.)
Profile Image for Lisa Stevens.
16 reviews
June 2, 2017
Great book. Lots of "writing to argue" examples tabbed for teaching GCSE: The National Excuse Hotline; The Smoking Gun; Lies, all Lies; There's no Iranian Bobsleigh Team; Plan Z; to name a few.
Profile Image for Hannah.
827 reviews8 followers
March 13, 2018
I didn't bother finishing this as it's compiled of old articles and posts made by Charlie Brooker back in like 2005. Not worth it.
23 reviews1 follower
February 26, 2019
Another genuine laugh-out-loud rant from my favourite misanthrope. Regularly feel at odds with a lot of humankind? Read this book!
Profile Image for Stacey Woods.
355 reviews20 followers
August 15, 2019
While this book was enjoyable and funny, I was a bit jaded by the end - perhaps his columns play better on a weekly basis, and not all the venom, all at once!
Profile Image for Mark Suffern.
148 reviews1 follower
March 16, 2020
Exactly the same as the other books that I've read by him,which is still enough to make me smile.
1,185 reviews8 followers
May 4, 2020
The man who brought us Black Mirror compiles his Guardian columns. Bitesized ire.
Profile Image for Robert Bagnall.
Author 65 books9 followers
September 25, 2021
Acerbic, frequently hilarious, but often straying into bitter coke-fuelled—or so it sounds—nastiness.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 106 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.