Derrick Beckles

Derrick Beckles is a Canadian writer, director, actor, and comedian. He is the creator and host of the Adult Swim television show Hot Package, creator of the ""TV Carnage"" compilations, and helped found Vice TV. He is from Scarborough, Ontario.

Beckles spent the majority of his teenage years in Toronto punk bands including Black Jello, who were well known for being banned from every possible live venue in Toronto. He began experimenting with film making with two high school friends, which included the filming of him visiting white supremacists in their home. These early filming endeavors led to him studying film at Concordia University. Soon after, Beckles began working with and shaping what was then a ten-page weekly called The Voice of Montreal, which grew into VICE Magazine.

Buckles became a familiar face on Canadian TV while occasionally doing stand-up in Toronto and New York. He produced and directed a hit festival documentary called Strip Club DJs and was a reporter on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.

Beckles recognized the appeal of poor programming in 1994 when he began releasing VHS mashups of spray-on-hair infomercials, squirrel cooking shows, and public access freaks performing like no one’s watching. These compilations led to the creation of TV Carnage, a bootleg home-video series in which Beckles distills all the strangest clips from late-night informercials, local-access programs, and found videos into hour-long DVDs.

While Beckles had been editing together Tex Avery cartoons with Stooges songs to entertain his friends while in high school, the TV Carnage format didn't evolve into its current form until 1996. While bedridden and doped up on painkillers, Beckles began to assemble mashups with themes. In these mashups, Beckles treats well-known and unknown footage alike, sewing the scenes and moments together to create an absurd alternate entertainment universe.

A self-described, “slutty distributor of heavenly crap," Beckles calls the creation of TV Carnage his “way of screaming at the world." Though the compilations' original format was VHS, Beckles soon began producing DVDs. The format allowed for a wider audience and soon TV Carnage began to gain a cult following. It has been heralded by the likes of The New York Times, VICE Magazine, Wired, Spike Jonze, Tim and Eric, Brett Gelman, Mike Lazzo (Head of Adult Swim), Jonathan Krisel, Johnny Knoxville, Anne Heche, Crystal Castles, and Michael Cera. Cera has claimed, "TV Carnage is some of the most brilliant stuff out there right now."

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