Internet - Henry Miller on the searing satire of TVGoHome.com

Internet comedy's stock has remained high despite lean times for the new media. Authentic 21st-century folk culture, or the lonesome product of too much spare time? Whatever, it's clogging your inbox. That only about 4 per cent of it is worth opening isn't going to stop publishers and TV schedulers jumping on board - just witness last year's Dotcomedy, Channel 4's weekly rundown of the "hot" new sites, fronted by Gail Porter. Here was a half- hour show that warranted at best the slot between Channel 4 News and Brookside.

So it makes sense that one of the best works of comedy on the web is dedicated to nailing the medium that has bestowed fame and riches on Porter and others like her. Just as the satirical newspaper the Onion, with headlines such as "NBC News reverses earlier report of Gore's death", is the only trustworthy news source left, TVGoHome.com - with a font-perfect spoof of the Radio Times - provides our only accurate television listings.

Shunning the bland evasions of the mainstream listings press, the site documents what's really on our screens - the reality TV show Daily Mail Island, for example, in which volunteers are left as castaways without access to any form of media except the titular newspaper. (Week 24: "The villagers queue up to spit on a duck accused of flying in from a neighbouring island in order to beg for scraps of bread beside the pond.") Other familiar-sounding programmes include Police! Press Conference! Breakdown! and the pop history show Fuck! You Mean That Actually Happened?.

The most celebrated "show" in TVGoHome's fortnightly schedule is called Cunt. A docudrama centred on the life of one Nathan Barley, a moneyed, twentysomething, "upper-middle-class London media pissant", it is a minutely observed account of the people responsible for the daily bread of pop culture: insight-free clip shows, mockney gangster movies and, indeed, unfunny web comedy. Barley, the creation of Char- lie Brooker, a disgruntled Guardian writer, is an oblique attempt to account for these audiovisual atrocities, the sort of person the last boss of C4, Michael "Big Brother" Jackson, would applaud as the future of broadcasting - an overpriced skate shoe stamping on the face of humanity, for ever.

The site has been made popular by word of mouth (or, at least, by its more sophisticated web equivalent), and has now turned into a spin-off book and, "ironically", a TV show.

The book comes under the vexed bookshop sign of "Humour", not entirely comfortable among the volumes of side-splitting George Dubbya quotes and sundry copies of Colemanballs. There was a promise on the original website for a volume to place alongside other pop-satirical masterpieces such as 1066 and All That and Molesworth, but this edition doesn't quite keep it. The problem is not the consistently excellent material - it's the generic, humour-section format.

As with the TV show, the site's viscous anger towards new Labour television, and the coked-up knob-hounds who make it (concentrated into fortnightly angry loner bulletins in the original format), is dissipated by the new moulds into which it has been poured. An astute media commentator, Brooker has long been amusingly wary of the perils of the mainstream - the recent inclusion of "blatant spams" in his e-mails to subscribers have been accompanied with knowingly needless apologies. And while the book and the show add little to his achievement on the web, it would be churlish to deny TVGoHome its time in the sun.

www.tvgohome.com

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