Free Dawn of the Dumb by Charlie Brooker Page A

celestial light around with his hands, knitting them into patterns and plugging them together as though they were Scart leads. He looks like a god. An impish little god who, facially speaking, is vaguely reminiscent of Brian the snail from The Magic Roundabout— but a god nonetheless. And the rest of the programme does little to dissuade you.
    Using a curious blend of hypnotherapy and general psychological tomfoolery, McKenna sets about curing the ills of members of the general public. How does it work? The human mind is like a computer,’ he claims. ‘When someone has a problem, I can help them reprogram themselves.’ Great. That’s cleared that up.
    Paul’s ‘reprogramming’ generally seems to consist of getting, say, an obsessive chocoholic to imagine eating a chocolate cake smothered in dogshit, over and over again, until they start looking like they’ll never eat anything again. It all looks pretty straightforward, and (unless his subjects are lying, which I doubt) it seems to work. The problem is Paul sometimes bites off a little more than he can chew. Such as when he attempts to cure the blind.
    Yes, last week, Paul McKenna set about healing a blind man. Initially, this didn’t seem quite as absurd as it sounds, since Ray, the man in question, had been diagnosed with ‘hysterical blindness’, a condition in which the cause of sightlessness is entirely psychological. Following intensive hypnosis, Paul encouraged Ray some way down the road to full vision, to the point where, incredibly, he could make out light, shapes and perspective.
    So far, so miraculous, but Paul was aiming higher still. To speed the treatment, he sent Ray to ‘a healer’, who, we were told, could help ‘clear the energy blocks’ around Ray’s eyes (simply by waggling her fingers around, by the looks of it). It was around this point I began to have my doubts about Paul.
    And then the bad news arrived: a doctor (a real one) re-examined Ray’s case and decided the cause of blindness was physical after all. No amount of finger-waggling was going to let him see again. The relentlessly positive Paul took this in his stride.
    ‘I don’t think I would’ve taken this case on if I’d known it was a physiological problem, because I’d have thought that was out of the realm of what I could treat/ he said, modestly. ‘It just goes to show: when you don’t know something’s impossible—look what you can do!’
    Er, yeah. So what exactly did he do? There seemed little doubt the subject himself felt his vision had improved—not returned, but improved. Had Paul helped him make more sense of the impaired images he’d always been seeing? Or had he literally worked a miracle and returned some of the man’s sight? The show was frustratingly ambiguous.
    This is entertainment, not science, of course, but I can’t help finding it a little unsettling that a large part of the Sky One audience is walking around right now convinced that Paul McKenna can heal the blind (although I suppose we should just be grateful he’s using his hypnotic powers for good—ever seen Omen IIP . We don’t want him pulling that kind of stunt, thanks very much).
    Speaking of science, before I go, can I just say: Big Brother 6 (C4)—Science to win. I know I said he was a prick in week one but he’s also the most deserving winner by a long chalk. Even a blind man can see that. With or without the assistance of Our Lord McKenna Almighty.

The no-pity-for-toffs rule
    [23 My 2005]
    H ard scientific fact: unless you’re a member of the gentry yourself, it’s neurologically impossible to feel in the slightest bit sorry for posh people under any circumstances whatsoever. It’s true. A team of researchers proved it in a laboratory. They took a random bunch of proles, wired them to some electro-magnificent brain-scanner widgets, and showed them footage of top-hatted aristocrats falling from buildings, tumbling into threshing machines and inadvertently poisoning their own