TVGoHome

» see tvgohome.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard the name tvgohome was after black mirror landed on uk channel 4 in 2011 and the brooker biography pieces started naming his late-90s satire site as the kernel that everything later came from. honestly, by then the site had already been dormant for about eight years. i never visited it live. what i know about it comes from screenshots in retrospectives and the wayback captures most fans of the show eventually go and dig up.

brooker started the site in september 1999. the format was a one-week listings page laid out to look like the british radio times print magazine, with completely fictional shows. each show had a synopsis written in brooker's style, mean and surreal with a heavy load of strong language, plus public figures named and humiliated by invented programming credits. chris morris occasionally contributed under a pseudonym. the technology newsletter need to know recommended it early and that word of mouth carried the site through 2000 and 2001.

by 2001 the site was running about 400,000 visits a fortnight. brooker himself said later that the project had run out of road because real television had caught up with the satire. a show called touch the truck aired on channel 4 in 2001, in which contestants tried to keep one hand on a truck for 24 hours to win the truck. brooker had been pitching that kind of premise as a joke for two years. when reality got there first the parody could not function. the site went fortnightly through 2001 and sporadic afterwards, finally stopping in april 2003.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

need to know was a small uk tech newsletter that recommended weird internet things to a few thousand readers. it picked up tvgohome early and a generation of british online comedy writers read the listings through that link. by 2001 the site had a cult following inside the british tv industry itself. a 2001 e4 sketch show borrowed the format. some of the regular characters from the listings, including the now infamous nathan barley, walked off the page and into other brooker projects later.

~ the cracks ~

the format had two structural problems. one was that brooker did almost all of it himself, with morris contributing rarely. two was that the satire depended on british tv being more conservative than the show ideas brooker invented. by 2001 that premise was breaking. once it broke the joke stopped working.

~ what it became ~

the nathan barley character from the listings became a 2005 channel 4 sitcom that brooker co-wrote with chris morris. brooker's guardian screen burn column ran from 2000 and pulled the same satirical voice into a print form. by 2011 black mirror landed on channel 4 as the closest thing to a tvgohome that worked as actual television. the site itself was not preserved as a live archive, but the influence is the part that survived.

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