2000: Nasty Nick

Charlie Brooker's first Screen Burn "Hate your job? Weep yourself awake each Monday morning? Spend the working day toying with your desktop icons while nonchalantly contemplating suicide? Ever considered doing something – anything – else? Then whatever you do, don't look to the coming week's television for inspiration. Tucked away in the schedules are four glaring examples of the very worst careers imaginable this side of "oil-rig bitch". First up servile pandering, or "being a butler", as it's commonly known..."

Macy Mania Macy Gray has a (fleeting) moment. "The latest craze is precisely what Macy Gray has become. The first bona-fide pop phenomenon of the new millennium. Right now, the world and its uncle appear infatuated with her. She's bigger than big. And getting bigger all the time."

2020 vision Danny Leigh speculates on which of 2000's best films will look dated by 2020: "I know that digital jiggery-pokery in The Matrix rocks, but I've got one word for you: Tron. Following in the scuzz-horror, no budget footsteps of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project still looks every bit as cogent as it did last Halloween."

SPOTTED! Queens Of The Stone Age "For anyone who's interested, Queens Of The Stone Age are currently wearing gossamer, flesh coloured panties, matching bras and taking the world by storm with a song almost entirely crafted from seven nouns repeated to fade. Those nouns are, both for and on the record 'Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol... c-c-c-c-cocaine.'" Bill Borrows

Flop stock "Lock Stock... (the TV spin-off) features four more neo-mod cheeky mockney hustlers, called things like Bacon and Moon, wheeling and dealing with other "faces on the manor" with equally realistic names (Firebug, Miami Vice and Three Feet). And no Vinnie Jones." Richard Vine

SPOTTED! Muse "Fatuous torch balladry from a group destined for medium-sized hugeness thanks to the arbitrary gift of bone structure and the fact that a lot of impressionable youths suspect this is how Radiohead must have sounded, only they can't remember." Keith Cameron

2001: My precious

Questions to which the answer is no 'Is rap ready for a gay superstar?' We ask in a 25 August profile of 'out' rapper Caushun. It later emerges that Caushun was a media creation/prank that got out of control.

Is this it? The Strokes are heavily hyped after only one single. The Guide, though, isn't entirely sold. "Forgive us if, for the moment, we simply call the Strokes the Most Exciting Band For 25 Days … Similar acclaim was awarded to Starsailor. Shortly before that …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. And Queens Of The Stone Age. And At The Drive-In."

EastEnders has its 'JR moment' "And so Phil Mitchell – the human baked potato, the love potato of Walford – has been shot. Well and truly baked ... 'Phil, are you all right?' Inspector Beppe asked, ingeniously ignoring the red gunshot wounds on his white shirt, presumably assuming that Phil was lying there pissed (as is his wont) or that he was just tired… Luckily, Phil was anaesthetised by the huge amounts of vodka he had been consuming, although we must brace ourselves for the possibility of him drawing soap's short straw and ending up in a wheelchair." Jim Shelley

Childish humour One of the worst films in history, Freddy Got Fingered, the creation of comedian Tom Green, is released. Jonathan Bernstein has the plum job of reviewing it. "At one point he attempts to bring a libidinous paraplegic to orgasm by repeatedly whacking her legs with bamboo canes, or the one where he breaks into a hospital delivery room, delivers a baby and then whirls the newborn over his head, using the umbilical cord as a lasso while blood spatters the medical staff."

2002: Garlic bread?

Do you want fries with that? Charlie Brooker hails Brit espionage drama Spooks as a game-changer. "Spooks demonstrated astonishing nerve by signing Lisa Faulkner as a regular character, then killing her off in spectacularly grisly fashion in episode two. The moment her head was forced into the deep fat fryer, viewers reared on the it'll-be-alright-in-the-end blandness of cookie-cutter populist dramas like Casualty and Merseybeat sat up and blinked in disbelief: here was a major BBC drama series that actually had the nerve to confound expectation."

SPOTTED! I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here I'm A Celeb arrives on our screens, and Julia Raeside rejoices. "We get to vote what happens to them? Fine. Make them watch a video of Ant and Dec cheerfully explaining how there is no gameshow, it's all been a hoax and they'll never see England or their families again."

Pre-hipster hipster bashing In 2002 there's a new byword for everything that is fashionable and also objectionable. That word is 'Shoreditch'. A man who calls himself the Shoreditch Twat spells it all out for us – and it still sounds about right today.

"Home: Originally from the suburbs or home counties, the Shoreditch Twat moved to Shoreditch two years ago and now gripes about "outsiders" as if they were born within the sound of Bow Bells themselves.

Career: Jarrow-style unemployment swept through STs during the dot-com crash. Most STs are products of public schooling, which convinces thick people that they are capable of greatness.

What they're listening to: Girls – gay pop and rubbish urban music to prove that they're not just bourgeois pigs. Boys – bad garage punk bands (MC5), homophobic dancehall ("Right Charles, I'm off – peace, nigga"), ironic 1980s pop.

Ambitions: To have their line of T-shirts sold in Selfridges, meet Bobby Gillespie, collect the entire range of whatever Japanese toys are in that week, get paid for the job they did for Dazed And Confused three years ago."

Mulholland Drive: Approved Joe Queenan knows a future cult classic when he sees one: "David Lynch's new film is an enigma wrapped in a mystery concealed in a conundrum ensconced in a chimera."

Ad enough The first Hard Sell column is published on 3 August. Pete Paphides is the author and his subject is Pot Noodle. It contains lots of off-colour jokes about Hugh Grant and Divine Brown that we won't repeat here.

2003: Wardrobe malfunction

Charlie Brooker picks his least favourite television shows

LATE-NIGHT HOLLYOAKS "Ever watched EastEnders and thought, 'Wouldn't it be funny if, like, Phil got his winky out, or Dot said "bollocks" or something?' Late-night Hollyoaks proved the answer is 'no'."

GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART "You can't relate to a man who cheats on his wife with a woman who's probably dead by now. It's just stupid."

TRISHA "The most depressing programme on Earth. They should brick up the exits and fill the room full of killer bees."

JIM DAVIDSON'S GENERATION GAME "Made Chucklevision look like Frasier."

Den comes again In the biggest soap storyline of the year, Dirty Den returns from the grave. Grace Dent bears witness: "And then, lo! He came! Out of the shadows (or off a one-hour, 40-minute EasyJet flight from Malaga to Luton), Leslie Grantham, a messianic presence in soap! And as a nation we were verily thankful, because the Square was crying out for another brooding villain (Keith Allen and Steven Berkoff must be booked for panto)… Quickly, the Mitchells and the Watts were at war over… OK, I'm not really sure about this as I fell asleep. It could have been a stolen goat or something, but Phil Mitchell was really jolly angry about it."

Pop gets pervy "We haven't heard a male singer this unapologetically sleazy since Controversy-era Prince." Simon Price on "small man with a beer belly" Har Mar Superstar