The Filtnib’s Progress

I pretty much love Charlie Brooker. Something in his Guardian columns nearly always make me laugh. But when the media get hold of a personality they know people like, someone who can trade on his name alone, there’s always a risk of saturating the market. That’s why I was excited to read two excellently acerbic columns by a writer I’d previously never heard of, Tanya Gold.

The first was a scathing attack on the general public for their assumptions about Susan Boyle, the 46-year old woman who’s become a youtube phenomenon after her performance on Britain’s Got Talent. I didn’t agree with everything Gold said, but I agreed with a lot of it, and more importantly, it felt invigorating to read: like a splash of cold water on the brain. Gold pins down and interrogates our social mores, and she does it in such fearless fashion that you can’t help but admire her guts.

The second, also in the Guardian’s Comment is Free, is about the multitude of Nazi references in popular culture. It starts off and it’s kind of jokey, like one of those rants about something that doesn’t really matter, just a rant for the sake of it. But half way through, Gold makes a really perceptive point, and it’s all the more powerful because it’s couched in comedy.

There is a point to all this Hitler porn, you may say. Snoopy Versus the Red Baron has a valuable lesson to teach us about tyranny. Cats Who Look Like Hitler have something to meow about the dangers of genocide. Bollocks, I say. There are genocides happening today, and they are being shot off the front pages by Nazi cows – Nazi cows! – and interviews with Mortensen talking about playing a depressed Nazi: “I spent a lot of time in Germany just looking at people.” Really? Five million have died in the Congo in the last 10 years, in a war for the minerals that we use. And Heil Honey I’m Home! has nothing to say about that.

On doing a bit of research (i.e. looking at her profile page on the Guardian) I discovered Ms Gold’s not new at all – she’s been writing for them since 2004. She does a nice line in experience features – going on the cheapest package holiday she could find (£99); speed dating; a series where she tries to give up smoking; taking diet pills (“I swallowed the small blue pill. It was like waiting for war to start“) and learning how to survive an apocalypse. I also found a hilarious if chilling piece she wrote for the Daily Mail, about auditioning and getting to the last rounds for Big Brother.

It says on the Guardian website that she’s freelance, and maybe that’s a personal choice which allows her to write for loads of different publications and cover a wider range of subjects. But regardless, the Guardian should snap her up while they can and commission her to write about all sorts of things in her inimitable style. Maybe even the five million dead in the Congo.