Free The Hell of It All by Charlie Brooker

night I was entertaining a friend by describing an imaginary scenario in which he was forced at gunpoint to have sex with an incontinent horse. I got quite into it, and my voice grew louder and louder, the details more explicit and unnecessary, until suddenly I was interrupted by a plaintive, disgusted cry from downstairs. In my head, I snorted at the small-minded sniveltude of my fusty, boring neighbour, because I knew with 100% conviction that I was right and he was wrong; that I was cool and brilliant, and I’d never be like him. Ever.
    That’s the sort of thing I reminisce about sometimes. Late at night. When I can’t sleep. Can’t sleep because she pays rent there, and she’s got a right to talk.
Mood music [22 October 2007]
    If I was compiling a list of things I wouldn’t want to happen to me, ‘losing my ears in an accident’ would rank pretty highly, just below ‘accidentally coating my own eyeballs with hot melted cheese’ and three slots above ‘sharing a sleeping bag with Piers Morgan’ (which comes one place higher than ‘being force-fed live mice’).
    I don’t know what you’d have to do in order to actually lose both ears – over-enthusiastically push your face through some railings to gawp at a nudist, perhaps – and I’m not sure it would actually affect your hearing that much, what with most of the listening mechanisms being housed deep inside your head. But I’m guessing that since the external ear-shaped part catches all the sounds and funnels them toward your brain, removing it would drastically reduce your field of hearing, so you’d have to twist your head sideways until the exposed hole was directly facing whatever it was you wanted to listen to, which would turn any attempt at conducting a romantic conversation over dinner into a bleak farce.
    And obviously you’d stand out, especially if you also needed glasses, and the only way to keep them in place was to continually press them against the bridge of your nose with your knee (because you’d also lost your hands in the accident – I forgot to mention that earlier). And local kids would torment you by runningup from behind (where you couldn’t hear them) and suddenly blowing across the hole, so your head whistled like an ocarina.
    Anyway, all things considered, I’d miss my ears, partly because it’d rob me of my favourite pastime, which is trudging through London with a Walkman on. (It isn’t a Walkman, OK – I’m not 500 years old – but it isn’t an iPod either: it’s another brand of MP3 player, but calling it ‘an MP3 player’ is an awkward mouthful and, besides, you know what I mean).
    Pounding along in a musical bubble is fantastic for the following reasons: (1) you get to ignore everybody else; (2) you feel like you’re in a movie so if you, say, tread in some dogshit, it seems less like the everyday misery of treading in dogshit and more like a magical interlude from an epic adventure; (3) you’re oblivious to the car horns and screaming and intermittent volleys of gunfire that make city life more stressful than it need be.
    Your choice of soundtrack is vital. I was reminded of this the other day. One of the most overtly ‘fun’ (and deceptively vital) aspects of making a TV show is choosing the accompanying music, and I often download potential backing tracks almost at random from Napster, then walk around listening to them on headphones, thinking about which bits of the show they’d go well with. Which is all well and good until you find yourself trying to choose the music for a ‘suspenseful’ scene, as I was the other day. In practice, this meant sitting alone on my sofa at 3 a.m. with a load of horror-movie music on heavy rotation.
    It was terrifying. In fact, I’d recommend it to thrill-junkies: fuck the latest Alton Towers terror-coaster – just whack the Halloween soundtrack on to your iPod and listen to it while walking around your own house in the dead of night. Try it tonight. It’s