Hat's off to Charlie

Charlie Brooker on hats at Royal Ascot
Every year it's the same thing: a 200-year-old countess you've never heard of, who closely resembles a Cruella De Vil mannequin assembled entirely from heavily wrinkled scrotal tissue that's been soaked in tea for the past eight decades, attempts to draw attention away from her sagging neck - a droopy curtain of skin that hangs so low she has to repeatedly kick it out of her path as she crosses the royal compound - by balancing the millinery equivalent of Bilbao's Guggenheim museum on her head, and winds up forming the centrepiece of a light-hearted photomontage in the centre of whatever newspaper you happen to be reading that day, accompanied by a picture of Princess Eugenie in a headdress, and some milky underfed heiress with the physique of a violin-playing mantis, wearing nothing but a diamante cornflake on each nipple and a hat made out of second-hand dentures or something equally avant-garde.