At a very young adult age I found myself disillusioned with the whole concept of New Year’s Eve. At 19, I spent the night in The Fox in Palmers Green, drinking lager, bumping into current and past friends, chatting shit, enjoying the atmosphere. But at about a quarter to midnight, I decided that I’d had enough. You could sense that everyone was gearing up to kisses and hugs and a Woodstock-style exchange of love in a euphoric celebration of the New Year.
And the point? Absolutely none at all. The date changes and people indulge in a sham festival of pointlessness, exposing themselves to a plague of bullshit pleasantries, swapping trite remarks about their hopes for the New Year. I escaped The Fox that night, ate a pizza on a garden wall in Green Lanes and vowed to avoid such falseness and bollocks every December 31st to come.
Which brings me to the subject of this post. The personification of everything that is diseased and rotten about New Year’s Eve, the embodiment of all that falseness and vacuity in one short, dumpy, smug, greasy-haired package…
Jools Holland. The New Year’s Eve Bastard.
Now the whole concept of a “Hootenanny” is perfect for New Year’s Eve if you buy into the idea of actually celebrating it. The meaning of the word (having evolved from Appalachian slang meaning a “thingy-me-jig”) is a party at which various members of the gathering perform music. Even if you don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve, it ‘s still the perfect choice of entertainment on TV as you and a couple of friends - who are equally ill-disposed towards going out for the aforementioned bullshit – spend the night carving arse-shapes into a sofa and consuming some leftover Xmas booze.
So, when the BBC hit on the perfect night-in for December 31st, why did they insist on polluting the entertainment with the Wank in Black, Jools “Sarky-voice” Holland?
There appears to be some illusion that Jools is the champion of eclecticism in music, that his mission is to introduce the public to a wide range of popular genres and styles, disparate artists united by their creativity and artistry. Fuck off Holland! The producers choose the guests. You just turn up, introduce them with an insincere claim that you like all of them (impossible in music) in a manner indicative of how you’d describe someone else’s turd and then occasionally play piano with the ones you do like.
Holland’s hypocrisy is evident in his own musical taste. Rhythm and Blues, particularly Boogie Woogie, is not only a narrow genre to stick slavishly to over decades of outdoor-concerts to the picnicking-classes, but it is a style of music totally lacking in emotion, depth or humanity. It is jaunty and dance-a-long, admittedly, but it is technical and shallow and as vacuous as the very idea of swapping hugs at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Doesn’t it just piss you off every time Jools accompanies a singer or band on his programme with the same style of plonky-plonky boogie-fucking-woogie piano-playing?
Elevating the sham-ness of the Hootenanny show beyond reasonable limits is the well-known fact that it is filmed in November. Therefore, the whole audience conspire with Jools to indulge in a disgusting display of deception when they countdown to midnight and wank each other off in mock-celebration of the future date-change. Particularly shmultzy and showbizzy about the whole escapade is the fallacy that these people are all Jools’s friends. With the exception of his one sole friend, the ubiquitous Rowland Rivron - famous for fuck-all and devoid of talent except for sounding as smug and as much of an arsewipe as Jools – the celebrities in the audience are very unlikely to be mates with him. They are mere decoration; some recognisable faces enticed by the offer of a free drink, the music and an opportunity to enhance their profile by answering one ridiculously spurious question posed by Jools with an annoyingly fatuous answer of their own. In the case of a pissed Al Murray, that answer is always just the word “Hootenanny” in a Scottish accent, because the pillock must confuse it with “Hogmanay” after all that free Bolly.
Of course, all the associated bollocks of Jools, his fake-mates, his insincerity and the sham celebrations is bearable when the line-up is good. Three years ago, he had McCartney, Madness, Seasick Steve, Kylie, Duffy, Kate Nash and half-a-dozen other well-known acts. Fair enough, this won’t tick everyone’s boxes, but it does the business for many of us. By the standards of “Later…” knowing what you might expect, this is a good show.
This year’s Hootenanny has the following bill: Roger Daltry, Cee Lo Green, Plan B, Rumer, Toots Hibbert, Wanda Jackson, Bellowhead and Vampire Weekend. Oh and Jools will be accompanying Kylie on a Blossom Dearie tune.
I think I shall be seeking out the nearest take-away pizza outlet and greeting the chimes of Big Ben with that most honest and reliable of friends, my own garden wall.
Wednesday 29 December 2010
Tuesday 21 December 2010
A Christmas Bastard
It is a fallacy to think that Ebenezer Scrooge deserves his reputation as one of the most heartless bastards associated with Christmas in our popular culture. Scratch away at this tale and you will discover that a far more deserving recipient of such an accolade is that insidious pariah of pitiful manipulation, Tiny Tim.
When I say, “scratch away,” I don’t actually mean you should “read” the tale carefully. I tried that once and found that Dickens was too carried away with having thought up such an imaginative storyline that he couldn’t be arsed writing it particularly well. If “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Hard Times” are Dickens’s “Band on the Run” and “Blackbird,” then “A Christmas Carol” is his “Pipes of Peace.” Essentially a good tune, but executed with inept shitness.
Therefore, I have based my re-assessment of Tiny Tim not on the book, but on the1970 musical film version, “Scrooge.” Why read a rubbish book, when you can watch the film? This adage is even more applicable when the film has songs, thanks very much!
Perhaps the most sickeningly cringe-worthy scene from this film is when Tiny Tim stands on a chair in the Cratchit home and starts singing, “On this beautiful winter's morning, if my wish could come true somehow…” What an attention-seeking little prick! If this film was authentic, then surely any self-respecting Victorian parent would have administered a swift, firm slap to the back of his head and reiterated the principle that children should be seen and not heard.
You might surmise that Tiny Tim’s disability afforded him some amnesty from such ill treatment. Granted, his parents were crap, wet as pair of pissed-in knickers and totally indulgent of their one blonde-haired son amidst a litter of gingers. But Tim was a manipulative little bastard. He knew how to pull their strings. He knew he’d get away with singing that fucking horrible song, stood at the dinner table, while his brothers and sisters searched the skirting boards for mice to roast for Christmas dinner. He knew this, because he played the disability card better than anyone.
This was a city in Industrial Revolution Britain. ALL children would have been disabled, if they had in fact not already died from chlorera, typhoid or TB. They worked in factories with machines that tore off limbs, or down chimneys and mines, where they soiled their lungs with coal-dust or ash. Tiny Tim was no exception to his peers, except for the fact that he chose to highlight his plight with a hastily nailed together crutch and a supercilious expression of pathetic suffering designed to elicit pity from anyone soft enough to find his angelic Aryan looks endearing rather than galling. In essence, he thought he was untouchable.
Further evidence of this lies in the scene where he and his sister are gazing longingly through the window of a toyshop, making their poor Dad feel guilty as fuck for not being able to afford to buy them presents. But it’s not just a present, is it Tim? No. What he wanted was some fuck-off big carousel, that would set you back at least £200 from a specialist shop in Guildford High Street nowadays. Greedy little shit!
Worse still, when Scrooge buys the carousel and gives it to him, does he even say thank you? Does he fuck! Watch the film if you don’t believe me and listen. Tiny Tim’s actual words are, “You didn’t steal it did you?” The ungrateful bastard.
Tiny Tim played on everyone’s fear that he would soon die, so that he could shirk employment in the local textile mill, thus heaping more economic pressure on his parents. Bollocks Tim, most other kids were going to die young anyway, why the fuck are you special? Lose the crutch, stop singing, get a job and stop acting like you’re special. You complete bastard.
When I say, “scratch away,” I don’t actually mean you should “read” the tale carefully. I tried that once and found that Dickens was too carried away with having thought up such an imaginative storyline that he couldn’t be arsed writing it particularly well. If “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Hard Times” are Dickens’s “Band on the Run” and “Blackbird,” then “A Christmas Carol” is his “Pipes of Peace.” Essentially a good tune, but executed with inept shitness.
Therefore, I have based my re-assessment of Tiny Tim not on the book, but on the1970 musical film version, “Scrooge.” Why read a rubbish book, when you can watch the film? This adage is even more applicable when the film has songs, thanks very much!
Perhaps the most sickeningly cringe-worthy scene from this film is when Tiny Tim stands on a chair in the Cratchit home and starts singing, “On this beautiful winter's morning, if my wish could come true somehow…” What an attention-seeking little prick! If this film was authentic, then surely any self-respecting Victorian parent would have administered a swift, firm slap to the back of his head and reiterated the principle that children should be seen and not heard.
You might surmise that Tiny Tim’s disability afforded him some amnesty from such ill treatment. Granted, his parents were crap, wet as pair of pissed-in knickers and totally indulgent of their one blonde-haired son amidst a litter of gingers. But Tim was a manipulative little bastard. He knew how to pull their strings. He knew he’d get away with singing that fucking horrible song, stood at the dinner table, while his brothers and sisters searched the skirting boards for mice to roast for Christmas dinner. He knew this, because he played the disability card better than anyone.
This was a city in Industrial Revolution Britain. ALL children would have been disabled, if they had in fact not already died from chlorera, typhoid or TB. They worked in factories with machines that tore off limbs, or down chimneys and mines, where they soiled their lungs with coal-dust or ash. Tiny Tim was no exception to his peers, except for the fact that he chose to highlight his plight with a hastily nailed together crutch and a supercilious expression of pathetic suffering designed to elicit pity from anyone soft enough to find his angelic Aryan looks endearing rather than galling. In essence, he thought he was untouchable.
Further evidence of this lies in the scene where he and his sister are gazing longingly through the window of a toyshop, making their poor Dad feel guilty as fuck for not being able to afford to buy them presents. But it’s not just a present, is it Tim? No. What he wanted was some fuck-off big carousel, that would set you back at least £200 from a specialist shop in Guildford High Street nowadays. Greedy little shit!
Worse still, when Scrooge buys the carousel and gives it to him, does he even say thank you? Does he fuck! Watch the film if you don’t believe me and listen. Tiny Tim’s actual words are, “You didn’t steal it did you?” The ungrateful bastard.
Tiny Tim played on everyone’s fear that he would soon die, so that he could shirk employment in the local textile mill, thus heaping more economic pressure on his parents. Bollocks Tim, most other kids were going to die young anyway, why the fuck are you special? Lose the crutch, stop singing, get a job and stop acting like you’re special. You complete bastard.
Sunday 19 December 2010
A Mushroom-cloud of Bastardness
As this is my first blog, I might as well confess to my magnum opus of bastardness. This was my Sgt. Pepper’s. The time I made my little brother believe that he was about to die.
It was 1984. I was 14 and my brother was 3 years younger. We’d watched the TV drama “Threads” about a nuclear attack on Sheffield and quite frankly it scared us fucking shitless. The Cold War, I now know in retrospect, was reaching a new height, pre-Gorbachev, with that gun-slinging cowboy Reagan at the White House, declaring the USSR an “Evil Empire.”
The moment that stuck in both our minds from “Threads” was when everyone freezes at the sight of the mushroom cloud and there’s a shot of a woman’s leg with a trickle of piss running down it. That seemed to encapsulate the fear that I was soon to exploit for my own amusement.
If you were around then, you’ll remember that the music world was highly aware of the nuclear threat. Sting was a year away from releasing “Russians” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood had topped the 1984 charts with “Two Tribes”, the accompanying video showing a brutal hand-to-hand fight between Reagan and the Soviet leader Chernenko. I bought the extended version of this single on cassette. It began, before any music commenced, with the air-raid siren, the 4-minute warning that signalled a nuclear attack.
My brother was quite aware, thanks partly to “Threads”, what that noise meant. And I had a new portable stereo, you know, the old 80’s ghetto blaster. While he played in the garden one afternoon, I put the stereo on the window sill of our bedroom, concealed by the net curtain, and turned the volume up to full.
The tape went in. I pressed play. The air-raid warning screamed Banshee-like out across the garden, signalling the imminent explosion of a nuclear bomb and the end of all of us.
“MUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!”
My poor brother had never run so fast. How he didn’t emulate the woman from “Threads” I don’t know. Maybe he did. Maybe he did worse. I nearly did just through laughing.
That, my friends, is a truly cruel and unforgivable act of pure bastardness.
It was 1984. I was 14 and my brother was 3 years younger. We’d watched the TV drama “Threads” about a nuclear attack on Sheffield and quite frankly it scared us fucking shitless. The Cold War, I now know in retrospect, was reaching a new height, pre-Gorbachev, with that gun-slinging cowboy Reagan at the White House, declaring the USSR an “Evil Empire.”
The moment that stuck in both our minds from “Threads” was when everyone freezes at the sight of the mushroom cloud and there’s a shot of a woman’s leg with a trickle of piss running down it. That seemed to encapsulate the fear that I was soon to exploit for my own amusement.
If you were around then, you’ll remember that the music world was highly aware of the nuclear threat. Sting was a year away from releasing “Russians” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood had topped the 1984 charts with “Two Tribes”, the accompanying video showing a brutal hand-to-hand fight between Reagan and the Soviet leader Chernenko. I bought the extended version of this single on cassette. It began, before any music commenced, with the air-raid siren, the 4-minute warning that signalled a nuclear attack.
My brother was quite aware, thanks partly to “Threads”, what that noise meant. And I had a new portable stereo, you know, the old 80’s ghetto blaster. While he played in the garden one afternoon, I put the stereo on the window sill of our bedroom, concealed by the net curtain, and turned the volume up to full.
The tape went in. I pressed play. The air-raid warning screamed Banshee-like out across the garden, signalling the imminent explosion of a nuclear bomb and the end of all of us.
“MUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!”
My poor brother had never run so fast. How he didn’t emulate the woman from “Threads” I don’t know. Maybe he did. Maybe he did worse. I nearly did just through laughing.
That, my friends, is a truly cruel and unforgivable act of pure bastardness.
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