So, there I am last night, sitting in Alban Arena, the Mecca of light entertainment for St Albans and it’s leafy satellite villages, nursing an aching jaw for one hour 40 minutes, because when I’m not laughing out loud I am at least subject to the alien sensation of a unwavering broad smile; and the reason for this is that I have gone “out out” to see Micky Flanagan’s stand-up show.
If you don’t know him, Micky Flanagan is a 40-something, working-class Londoner now coping with all the foibles of the middle-class world in which he resides (a consequence of marriage and higher education) and this forms the basis for his observational humour. In other words, the cleverly humorous bastard has made my intended blog today almost fucking redundant. The best I can do now is fill in the gaps with the bits he left out and present them to you with humility from a darkened corner of the immense shadow that this man has cast.
I am sure many thousands of us middle-aged, middle-class men from working-class backgrounds exist. We bought Nick Hornby’s books and will one day be called upon as historical eyewitnesses to the gentrification of football and the feminisation and domestication of the British male. We’ve grimly held on to as many of the manly attitudes of our roots as our new middle-class lifestyle has failed to strip away. But for the most part, all that’s left is nostalgia, a tendency to want to fight people and a toleration of smokers and tinned fruit.
My children, now growing up in a semi in St Albans and going to a comprehensive (but nonetheless middle-class) school, are experiencing a childhood that will sadly deny them future justification for colouring their stories of youth with the same half-embarrassed, self-deprecating cynicism that I will lace this blog with. They have never trodden barefoot on pavements littered with dog shit, miles from home on summer evenings. They have been trained from an early age in post-toilet hygiene, rather than going through childhood in the belief that shaking the piss off your hands counted as washing them. And they will never have to rise to the challenge of surviving a whole day in a park playground with more health and safety risks than a ball-pit full of broken glass in a Tripoli leisure centre.
Playgrounds are defining images of many people’s childhoods. Back in the 70s and 80s playgrounds looked like playgrounds, but nowadays, near where I live, playgrounds look like woods. Everything is made of timber to blend in with the surroundings and thus avoid spoiling the ambience of the park with garish bright colours. And rather than building these child-friendly mini-assault courses on some good old-fashioned flesh-ripping, bone-breaking concrete, they use this artificial softened springy duvet-like sponge and STILL parents follow their kids round the playground with anxious outspread arms in case they fall. Fuck me, what would they have made of the medieval-designed, threat to life and limb that was a Witch’s Hat? These parents (and yes, I am one of them) would piss their pants with terror to see little Oliver or Jemima (NOT my kids names) graze their knees from carpet burn falling half a foot from a car-tyre swing onto the sponge-floor. (Sometimes its woodchip. Where I’m from the only place you’d find woodchip was in the wallpaper and the hamster’s cage.) Whereas, my mum was happy to wait for us to get home after dark and splash Dettol on our gaping wounds before picking the larger stones out of our flesh with her fingernails.
Another thing my children never experience is a complete void of ideas when they have to buy birthday or Christmas presents for a parent. Because these days, parents have “interests”. We like music and films and books and football and clothes and just about anything you can pick up from the supermarket for under a tenner. But I was never spoilt for ideas. I never knew what the fuck my mum and dad would want. Parents didn’t have “interests” in the 70s. What did they DO? Well, my mum smoked and cooked and did housework, so invariably she’d get something to aid her in these pastimes, including ashtrays, lighters and one time a drying-up rack to put next to the sink for the plates and cutlery. I got that from Argos. All on my own. I was very proud of myself. Dad liked smoking and betting on horses, so he got the same as mum but without any kitchen utensils. When we were old enough we might go into a bookies and buy him a six-horse accumulator.
To be fair, both my parents read a lot of books, but for some reason we never bought books. (Libraries gave them away for free and reminded you of that fact with 5-year overdue letters.) Being working-class didn’t mean you never read books. We weren’t fucking chavs. We might have watched a lot more ITV than what today’s middle-class parents would allow their kids (because it’s the TV channel equivalent of The Sun… which we also used to read, or at least look at.) I was a big fan of Enid Blyton, from “Noddy” when I was very young to “The Secret Seven” and “Famous Five” when I was older. I tried reading the “Famous Five” once to my own kids, but had to stop when Julian or Dick or someone started to talk about a boy at their school that they’d nicknamed “Sooty” because his skin was so black.
The casual racism of the average 1970’s working-class household tends to be swept under the carpet when people nowadays look back at that time. You’d never see “Love Thy Neighbour” on UK Gold, but even re-runs of “The Sweeney” have lines cut that I clearly remember, particularly one about a certain crook called Lee-Roy Brown. A rite of passage for us children of that time was the first time we turned round to our Dad and said, “That’s a bit racist,” after he’d told a joke about corner-shops or “blacks” (to use a milder word than most you might hear.) As a succeeding generation you have to take a higher moral ground and challenge your parents. But then your own children will do it to you. I get accused by mine of being homophobic just for suggesting that Louis Walsh might have more than a professional interest in some of the boy bands that come on X Factor. I’m only saying.
Sometimes I wonder if I am denying my children some of the joys of life that I fondly recall from my own youth. I feel that I should turf them out of the house today, without their phones or shoes on their feet (because the sun’s out) and then go to the corner shop to buy spaghetti bolognaise in a tin for dinner. We could even have it on toast.
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Sunday, 20 February 2011
Where's that Bastard Wally?
If ever there was a more intentionally sadistic attempt to cause stress to the more cerebrally challenged children of the UK, then it must have been even more insidious than the “Where’s Wally?” series of books. The concept of lulling society’s more seratonin-starved youth into believing that its easy to spot a conspicuously identifiable boy in a highly detailed picture containing several hundred other people is just plain fucking cruel. Because it’s not easy. It should be, but its not. And the realisation that such an easy task cannot be negotiated in the few seconds that you’d expect to spend trying, can cause frustration, stress, long-term feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem and psychological trauma; all of which manifest themselves into an inability to form stable relationships or assume the responsibility of parenthood, an unwillingness to undertake simple employment and a lasting suppressed rage which will occasional flare up and lead to criminal assault and probably incarceration.
Wally, you bastard, you have a lot to answer for.
So, which wanker came up with this idea? Whoever it was, the likelihood is that this person, as with most creators of children’s fiction, based Wally on his or her own son. You might lean towards being slightly sympathetic to any parents who found that every time they took their child out somewhere, the gormless little fucker would wander off and get himself lost. You’d even credit these unfortunate parents with some initiative for then dressing their child in a distinctive red and white top and matching woolly hat in order to be capable of finding them in a large crowd. And you would surely feel your heart go out to them when, after the 150th occasion of contacting the police to report their son missing, they had Social Services knocking on their door and the media turning them into the worst parenting pariahs since the McCann’s.
But then you’d think, why not just buy a high-viz jacket for the errant child? Buy some drugs that would induce agoraphobia. Stick a fucking lead on him like you do the dog. Whatever you do though, don’t turn your mishap into a series of iconic children’s books that could potentially cause society to collapse under its own frustrated sense of failure.
Perhaps I am over-reacting a little. The “Where’s Wally?” books should of course be lauded for their popularity, particularly as the spin off films and TV series have proved to be global successes. In case you’re not quite up to speed, I am referring to Harry Potter, Big Brother and Glee.
J K Rowling was commissioned to turn Wally into a literary and film icon by placing him in a situation where you’d never expect to find him: A boarding school for freaks, which was periodically attacked by some bastard with no nose and his right wing, gothic-looking cronies. If you didn’t know that Harry was an incarnation of Wally, then think about the usual reaction he gets when someone comes across him for the very first time. There’s always that look of awe and surprise as they slowly utter his name in prolonged syllables – “Har….ry….Pot…..ter!!!” Clearly, they’d spent ages trying to find him in a detailed drawing of a crowded fairground and now, here he was!
Adapting the concept of “Where’s Wally?” to television marked the start of the reality TV revolution. Hardening the humour somewhat, Channel 4 put a large crowd of people into a confined space and challenged us to play “Where’s the Arsehole?” With the same modus operandi as the original books, there were just too many to choose from and so, as with the books, it usually took about 3 months to single it down to one arsehole or wally. I am of course talking about Big Brother, “Where’s Wally?” for the small screen. And ironically, every housemate seemed to have suffered the same childhood affliction of struggling to find Wally on a page, because they each nursed the sort of fragile self-esteem that leads to over-compensating through self-promotion and affectation. In other words, they were a bunch of annoying c**ts. (And perhaps the worst was the one who looked the most like the original Wally - Sam Pepper.)
And so, “Where’s Wally?” evolved via Harry Potter into “Where’s the Arsehole?” aka “Big Brother” and then, like all good ideas, crossed the Atlantic where the Americans dumbed it down, glossed it over, sprinkled some sugar-coated moralising on top and made it a song-and-dance show that is now well-known to all of us as “Glee.”
“Glee” has a cast full of wallies or as our exiled cousins like to say, jerks. But in order not to tax their citizens of too much neuron activity, anyone you choose from the show can count as the jerk that you’re trying to find. Metaphorically, they all have red and white striped jumpers and hats. So, in case you can’t tell the difference, the programme makers have given each of them an obvious distinctive identify. Glee is a melting pot of stereotypes, but the message is clear. Celebrate diversity! You might be Christian or Jewish, disabled or able-bodied, Chinese or Hispanic, Black or White, Gay or Heterosexual, but you can still be a spoilt, self-centred, irritating show-off with the capacity to bastardise any popular song from the last four decades. You can’t however be any of that and be a Muslim. “Glee” shies away from having an obvious Muslim character, because that might just challenge a few innate prejudices too much. After all, between a red and white striped top and a red and a white striped hat is a white face and a red neck.
Finally, having started with Wally and ended with a totally unrelated diatribe against American redneck prejudices, I will return to base and reveal one more piece of useless fact. On page 11 of the 4th Wally book in the series, the prequel to the original, known as “The Phantom Wally,” it is actually impossible to find our chief protagonist, because in this beach scene he has been buried alive by violently neurotic bystanders who grew up reading the original books. Revenge is sweet.
Wally, you bastard, you have a lot to answer for.
So, which wanker came up with this idea? Whoever it was, the likelihood is that this person, as with most creators of children’s fiction, based Wally on his or her own son. You might lean towards being slightly sympathetic to any parents who found that every time they took their child out somewhere, the gormless little fucker would wander off and get himself lost. You’d even credit these unfortunate parents with some initiative for then dressing their child in a distinctive red and white top and matching woolly hat in order to be capable of finding them in a large crowd. And you would surely feel your heart go out to them when, after the 150th occasion of contacting the police to report their son missing, they had Social Services knocking on their door and the media turning them into the worst parenting pariahs since the McCann’s.
But then you’d think, why not just buy a high-viz jacket for the errant child? Buy some drugs that would induce agoraphobia. Stick a fucking lead on him like you do the dog. Whatever you do though, don’t turn your mishap into a series of iconic children’s books that could potentially cause society to collapse under its own frustrated sense of failure.
Perhaps I am over-reacting a little. The “Where’s Wally?” books should of course be lauded for their popularity, particularly as the spin off films and TV series have proved to be global successes. In case you’re not quite up to speed, I am referring to Harry Potter, Big Brother and Glee.
J K Rowling was commissioned to turn Wally into a literary and film icon by placing him in a situation where you’d never expect to find him: A boarding school for freaks, which was periodically attacked by some bastard with no nose and his right wing, gothic-looking cronies. If you didn’t know that Harry was an incarnation of Wally, then think about the usual reaction he gets when someone comes across him for the very first time. There’s always that look of awe and surprise as they slowly utter his name in prolonged syllables – “Har….ry….Pot…..ter!!!” Clearly, they’d spent ages trying to find him in a detailed drawing of a crowded fairground and now, here he was!
Adapting the concept of “Where’s Wally?” to television marked the start of the reality TV revolution. Hardening the humour somewhat, Channel 4 put a large crowd of people into a confined space and challenged us to play “Where’s the Arsehole?” With the same modus operandi as the original books, there were just too many to choose from and so, as with the books, it usually took about 3 months to single it down to one arsehole or wally. I am of course talking about Big Brother, “Where’s Wally?” for the small screen. And ironically, every housemate seemed to have suffered the same childhood affliction of struggling to find Wally on a page, because they each nursed the sort of fragile self-esteem that leads to over-compensating through self-promotion and affectation. In other words, they were a bunch of annoying c**ts. (And perhaps the worst was the one who looked the most like the original Wally - Sam Pepper.)
And so, “Where’s Wally?” evolved via Harry Potter into “Where’s the Arsehole?” aka “Big Brother” and then, like all good ideas, crossed the Atlantic where the Americans dumbed it down, glossed it over, sprinkled some sugar-coated moralising on top and made it a song-and-dance show that is now well-known to all of us as “Glee.”
“Glee” has a cast full of wallies or as our exiled cousins like to say, jerks. But in order not to tax their citizens of too much neuron activity, anyone you choose from the show can count as the jerk that you’re trying to find. Metaphorically, they all have red and white striped jumpers and hats. So, in case you can’t tell the difference, the programme makers have given each of them an obvious distinctive identify. Glee is a melting pot of stereotypes, but the message is clear. Celebrate diversity! You might be Christian or Jewish, disabled or able-bodied, Chinese or Hispanic, Black or White, Gay or Heterosexual, but you can still be a spoilt, self-centred, irritating show-off with the capacity to bastardise any popular song from the last four decades. You can’t however be any of that and be a Muslim. “Glee” shies away from having an obvious Muslim character, because that might just challenge a few innate prejudices too much. After all, between a red and white striped top and a red and a white striped hat is a white face and a red neck.
Finally, having started with Wally and ended with a totally unrelated diatribe against American redneck prejudices, I will return to base and reveal one more piece of useless fact. On page 11 of the 4th Wally book in the series, the prequel to the original, known as “The Phantom Wally,” it is actually impossible to find our chief protagonist, because in this beach scene he has been buried alive by violently neurotic bystanders who grew up reading the original books. Revenge is sweet.
Saturday, 5 February 2011
How I became a Middle-Class Bastard
Actually, it’s more than that. I’m a Middle-AGED, Middle-class bastard now, which is twice as worse and means that I am poisonously laced with all the invidious attitudes that go with both stereotypes. For starters, I just used the word invidious. Only a paradigm of turpitude would employ such terminology. And I am that paradigm, which more or less means (before you feel the need to check the dictionary app on your phone like I just did) that I am a prime example of nasty self-righteous prejudice, housed in a liberal-socialist humanitarian-sequined overcoat of slightly narked politeness; or to be more precise - actually technically and basically my friends - a right bleeding middle-class bastard.
I wasn’t always this way.
I used to be young. And before that I used to be working class.
Before the amateur sociologists begin unpicking my blasé bandying about of class labels and accuse me of employing such unsuitably vague and over-generalised misnomers, let me just say one thing. I am deliberately stereotyping. Like pissing your pants in a supermarket queue, stereotyping is anti-social, offensive and just plain wrong, but from a non-protagonist’s viewpoint, it is highly amusing.
What turned me into this Middle-class bastard then? And what damage has it caused?
I believe that everything hinged on going to university, where I was rewarded for my half-efforts with a degree in Classical Studies. Here I surrounded myself with similar working-class people and poked fun at all the jumper-wearing, Sloane-accented veterans of multiple ski-holidays. But it was like walking into the sea and trying to shake yourself dry as you went along. I had begun to turn to the dark side and yet I would forever try to exert my working-class sensibilities by attacking those who were now my peers.
For example, the gentrification of football has meant that my £1000 a year season ticket provides me with a seat surrounded by some right middle-class tossers. In other words, they are more middle-class than I am and for that reason I despise them. I despise how they live down to their stereotypes, by pontificating in well-spoken accents about the game at loud volume, breaking off to discuss matters of economics, law and finance, being polite to each other and yet thoughtlessly ill mannered to everyone else around them. They all leave early and Stuart rings a taxi to take him home to Notting Hill, so that he doesn’t have to queue for the tube. Wanker.
Another example of raging against the middle-class machine from the inside was to do with that degree. I went on to do teacher training and there were 15 of us doing a PGCE in Classics. 13 had studied Ancient Greek or Latin at university and these “linguistic” Classicists were destined for jobs available only in the private sector or some grammar schools. 3 of us were non-linguistic Classicists, because we’d only taken one of those two ancient languages as a minor part of a degree that was more about the history and culture of Greece and Rome. It meant we could go on and teach History or English in state education and therefore we were able to revel in our non-elitism.
This didn’t help. I met my wife at university. She comes from Surrey and her family eat lots of vegetables. Not normal vegetables that you’d get from a tin, peas and carrots and the such like, but exotic vegetables like aubergines and courgettes and other stuff that looks like it comes out the ground rather than a shop. But now I eat all that shit and harbour a snobbish disregard for tinned veg, tinned fruit, microwave meals and wine costing less than £4. These are the measures of my middle-classness. Especially with regard to wine. I could have started this blog with a thesis about what exactly I mean by middle-class, but that would have been a middle-class thing to do; so to save trouble, let’s just assume that middle-class means that the ratio of wine to beer that you’d drink as a man is heavily weighted towards the former. I reckon I’m about 3:1, thus am I condemned.
So, what are the other factors in making me this way?
I live in St Albans. When I get into debt I remortgage, because my house is disgustingly overpriced on account of being near an excellent school to which I send my kids. It is of course a comprehensive school – I am against any other kind, in principle – but the intake of students is only comprehensive insofar as you have to be able to afford one of the semi-detached properties in the surrounding streets to be able to get in.
When it’s raining hard or excessively windy I worry about damage to the roof extension, rather than how shit it would be to have to get a bus to work.
When something goes wrong with my car, I stress about the cost and inconvenience of getting it fixed, because then we’d be down to just my wife’s car. Again, no bus worries.
Had I booked tickets for a holiday in Egypt this year, I’d have been cursing the locals for not being able to tolerate another year of tyrannical freedom-curbing government, because I might have lost my deposit to Thomson.
And I have just started playing squash. With a bloke called Tim.
That, my friends, is how I have turned to the Dark Side. I will leave you with one final example that best encapsulates the Russian Doll sense of being a middle-class bastard with a working-class one raging inside. My wife picked me up in her car from somewhere or other, because I had been drinking. Some dickhead driving behind us was too close, something I consider to be the height of macho intimidation and bad fucking manners. So, as we pulled away into another lane, he passed on our inside and I opened my window to spit a big grolly of phlegm at him. Sadly, it never have hit him in the face as his window was closed and he was going too fast, but if it had done then I am sure he would’ve noticed that my spit tasted of white wine. Probably Pinot Grigio and definitely from a £6 bottle.
I wasn’t always this way.
I used to be young. And before that I used to be working class.
Before the amateur sociologists begin unpicking my blasé bandying about of class labels and accuse me of employing such unsuitably vague and over-generalised misnomers, let me just say one thing. I am deliberately stereotyping. Like pissing your pants in a supermarket queue, stereotyping is anti-social, offensive and just plain wrong, but from a non-protagonist’s viewpoint, it is highly amusing.
What turned me into this Middle-class bastard then? And what damage has it caused?
I believe that everything hinged on going to university, where I was rewarded for my half-efforts with a degree in Classical Studies. Here I surrounded myself with similar working-class people and poked fun at all the jumper-wearing, Sloane-accented veterans of multiple ski-holidays. But it was like walking into the sea and trying to shake yourself dry as you went along. I had begun to turn to the dark side and yet I would forever try to exert my working-class sensibilities by attacking those who were now my peers.
For example, the gentrification of football has meant that my £1000 a year season ticket provides me with a seat surrounded by some right middle-class tossers. In other words, they are more middle-class than I am and for that reason I despise them. I despise how they live down to their stereotypes, by pontificating in well-spoken accents about the game at loud volume, breaking off to discuss matters of economics, law and finance, being polite to each other and yet thoughtlessly ill mannered to everyone else around them. They all leave early and Stuart rings a taxi to take him home to Notting Hill, so that he doesn’t have to queue for the tube. Wanker.
Another example of raging against the middle-class machine from the inside was to do with that degree. I went on to do teacher training and there were 15 of us doing a PGCE in Classics. 13 had studied Ancient Greek or Latin at university and these “linguistic” Classicists were destined for jobs available only in the private sector or some grammar schools. 3 of us were non-linguistic Classicists, because we’d only taken one of those two ancient languages as a minor part of a degree that was more about the history and culture of Greece and Rome. It meant we could go on and teach History or English in state education and therefore we were able to revel in our non-elitism.
This didn’t help. I met my wife at university. She comes from Surrey and her family eat lots of vegetables. Not normal vegetables that you’d get from a tin, peas and carrots and the such like, but exotic vegetables like aubergines and courgettes and other stuff that looks like it comes out the ground rather than a shop. But now I eat all that shit and harbour a snobbish disregard for tinned veg, tinned fruit, microwave meals and wine costing less than £4. These are the measures of my middle-classness. Especially with regard to wine. I could have started this blog with a thesis about what exactly I mean by middle-class, but that would have been a middle-class thing to do; so to save trouble, let’s just assume that middle-class means that the ratio of wine to beer that you’d drink as a man is heavily weighted towards the former. I reckon I’m about 3:1, thus am I condemned.
So, what are the other factors in making me this way?
I live in St Albans. When I get into debt I remortgage, because my house is disgustingly overpriced on account of being near an excellent school to which I send my kids. It is of course a comprehensive school – I am against any other kind, in principle – but the intake of students is only comprehensive insofar as you have to be able to afford one of the semi-detached properties in the surrounding streets to be able to get in.
When it’s raining hard or excessively windy I worry about damage to the roof extension, rather than how shit it would be to have to get a bus to work.
When something goes wrong with my car, I stress about the cost and inconvenience of getting it fixed, because then we’d be down to just my wife’s car. Again, no bus worries.
Had I booked tickets for a holiday in Egypt this year, I’d have been cursing the locals for not being able to tolerate another year of tyrannical freedom-curbing government, because I might have lost my deposit to Thomson.
And I have just started playing squash. With a bloke called Tim.
That, my friends, is how I have turned to the Dark Side. I will leave you with one final example that best encapsulates the Russian Doll sense of being a middle-class bastard with a working-class one raging inside. My wife picked me up in her car from somewhere or other, because I had been drinking. Some dickhead driving behind us was too close, something I consider to be the height of macho intimidation and bad fucking manners. So, as we pulled away into another lane, he passed on our inside and I opened my window to spit a big grolly of phlegm at him. Sadly, it never have hit him in the face as his window was closed and he was going too fast, but if it had done then I am sure he would’ve noticed that my spit tasted of white wine. Probably Pinot Grigio and definitely from a £6 bottle.
Sunday, 23 January 2011
True Tales of Bastardness involving Poo (and related smells)
Should I ever have cause to write an autobiography, I would expect the opening chapter to be all about poo.
It seems that my childhood (and parts of my adult life) can be measured out in poo anecdotes. In most cases, the pleasure gleaned from these episodes centres upon the impact of the faecal matter on other people. Few things have caused me more mirth than the sheer nausea, violent retching or offended horror experienced by the victims of these acts of bastardness.
And so I would like to document for your delight (or disgust) my top ten turd-related true tales, in reverse order, because it’s apt to begin at the bottom:
10. Shit-stained pants behind the sink
My mother insisted that my brother and I wear plain white y-fronts while we were growing up. This was a shockingly shortsighted decision on her part. Our response was to leave skid marks along the gusset which would have required a chisel and blow-torch to remove once she’d discovered them dried-out and tucked behind the bathroom sink, where we erroneously believed she’d never find them. Perhaps if she had taught us to wipe our bottoms properly, she would not have fallen victim to this practice.
9. A Human Poo behind the Garages
Whilst playing out in a narrow alleyway of bushes behind the garages near our house, I lazily decided to spare myself the walk home (about 100 metres) and so dropped my pants to have a shit there and then. Foliage in the vicinity was not the most robust, but what the hell, I could always tuck that day’s pants behind the bathroom sink.
Our neighbour, who’d been playing out with us (yes, there was an audience for this base act) grassed me up to his mum, who then told my mum. When accused, I naturally denied the crime; but our neighbour’s mum had been round behind the garages to verify the accusation. I suggested that the evidence she had discovered was probably a dog’s poo, but she claimed that she knew the difference between dog and human poo.
What was she? A fucking shit expert? My mum must have thought so, because on her testimony I was banged to rights.
8. Stinkbomb in a Phone Box
Straying slightly away from poo, this was my favourite prank played on total strangers. There was a phone box outside our house, so we took the number, waited next to it until someone happened to be walking up the hill towards us and then smashed a stink bomb inside. Then we’d run back inside the house, ring the number and look mischievously out of the window at the poor passer-by stepping inside to answer the phone, being subjected to that most foul of manufactured smells.
7. Shat in My Shorts
At first glance this sounds like a run-of-the-mill occurrence. However, the shorts in question cost me £20 in 1990 from a Rolling Stones concert at Wembley stadium. Bermuda shorts (all the rage in 1990) emblazoned with the Stone’s Tongue design. And the shitter who shat in my shorts was my brother.
Self-conscious about his narrow waist, he would wear several layers beneath his jeans and on this occasion he chose to make my very special expensive Stones Bermuda shorts the bottom layer. He was in a club in Manor House called The Catacombs, dancing to The Doors, when he felt a fart brewing. As it turned out, there was a lot more to it and he shit himself. In my fucking shorts. He disposed of them in the gents (down the loo rather than behind any sink) and returned to the dancefloor.
Bastard.
6. Exploding Poo
Back in the 1970’s, before dog owners were ordered to scoop up their pets’ plops, you really couldn’t go anywhere as a kid without stepping in shit. If we spotted one in advance, we’d often lance the canine waste matter with a stick and throw it at each other.
Come the 1980’s, there was less opportunity for such bastardness in the UK – but no less in France. On an exchange trip, me and my mate Wayne bought the obligatory pack of bangers and had the idea of sliding one inside a dog’s turd. We lit it and ran. The effect was all that we’d hoped for, but for the fact that some of the fall-out hit Wayne. Ironically, he was the fastest sprinter in our year at school, but even he couldn’t outrun exploding dog shit.
5. Fartspray: the brainchild of a bastard
Joke shops were well stocked with Fartspray back in the 80’s. Not that it smelt of fart. It was far worse than that. My brother was used to me farting on his head (sometimes bare-arsed for maximum effect) but he and our cousin were totally unprepared for being locked in our coal-shed and having me liberally spraying it through the gap above the door. Sadly, I had to let them out quickly, because they were close to taking the door off its hinges in their desperation to escape.
4. Floater in the Bath
I’m sure I was still made to share a bath with my younger brother until I was at least 6 or maybe 7 or 8 at best. Perhaps the trigger for ending this slightly unsavoury practice was the growing frequency of one or other of us to either piss in the bath, or on a few occasions, to squeeze a nugget of poo out and see if it could float towards the other before he had a chance to spot it and jump out. Mum must have got tired of the resultant screaming on these joint bath nights and let us have our own baths from then on.
3. Enacting the Chinese Proverb
Do you remember, as a kid, someone saying: Old Chinese proverb say, He who goes to bed with itchy bum, wakes up with smelly finger? Well that gave me an idea. (I’ll apologise to the reader now, because as we hit the top 3, the anecdotes become increasingly impossible to stomach.) I would deliberately itch my bum until my finger was so potently smelly that I couldn’t bear to move it within a foot of my nose. Then I’d grab my little brother in a headlock with one arm and with my free hand – the one with the offensive arse-residue on its index finger – I’d cover his mouth and make sure that the finger was wedged against his nostrils.
I put my hands up to this – it was abuse. People who criticise the Americans for Guantanamo Bay, really need to question whether I should be on trial for Human Rights violations before the US government is.
2. Nutella
I’m not getting paid for the advertisement, but I would like to thank Nutella for this number 2 prank. Chocolate spread, out of context (i.e. not in a jar or on bread) looks exactly like poo. Exploiting this fact, I played this prank on someone – I can’t even remember who – and I would encourage everyone to try it, because the effect was worth recording and sending to You’ve Been Framed.
I smeared chocolate spread quite thickly onto a scrunched up bundle of toilet paper and placed it on the floor next to the loo. Then I called the victim in and accused that person of being responsible for the shitty tissue missing the pan. As they were denying involvement in this apparent act of carelessness, I picked up the tissue and shoved it all into my mouth.
The look of horror and immediate retching of my victim meant that I had to swiftly unplug my mouth, because I was laughing so hard I nearly choked on it.
(You know what, now that I think about it, for this prank I was an adult and the victim may have been my own son. Is that bad?)
1. Why the fuck did I do this?
My favourite poo-related prank of all time tops the list for two reasons. Firstly, the impact of this action on the victim was the most extreme; and secondly, it was never intended as a prank and it was a completely illogical thing for me to do.
Again, thinking about the house in which I did this, I was at least 6 years old, but couldn’t have been much older, because it was so incomprehensively dumb.
I went into the bathroom to use the toilet and I decided that for a change I would poo in the bath instead. FOR A CHANGE? I recall my decision clearly. I wanted variety in my life. I asked myself, why should we always have to poo in the toilet? Let’s try something different.
So, I pooed in the bath. Not like I did when my brother was in the bath with me, when the poo would float a while on the surface of the water and you could offer a defence to your mum that it was an accident. NO! This was a shit in a dry bath. I had the foresight to dispose of the subsequent tissue in the actual toilet, but then I was confronted by the inevitable and horrifying realisation that you can’t flush a bath.
There’s something about the water in a toilet that minimises the smell of poo. This I concluded as I reaped the reward of witnessing a turd hit the dry surface of the bath. I also have a theory that much of the smell is contained within a poo and is released when it breaks. Well this one certainly had its surface crack on impact.
I knew what to do next, though. I shouted to my little brother to come and see. Innocently he responded to my call and walked straight in. Hit by the stark image of that misplaced poo and the wave of stink emanating from its pores, my brother immediately turned back into the hall and vomited all over the floor.
My mum, called into action to deal with both the poo and the vomit, plus her eldest son’s sheer brainlessness, was far too furious with me to allow me to enjoy the moment straight away. But I’ve dined out on the memory for almost 35 years since and for that reason as well this is my number one number two tale.
It seems that my childhood (and parts of my adult life) can be measured out in poo anecdotes. In most cases, the pleasure gleaned from these episodes centres upon the impact of the faecal matter on other people. Few things have caused me more mirth than the sheer nausea, violent retching or offended horror experienced by the victims of these acts of bastardness.
And so I would like to document for your delight (or disgust) my top ten turd-related true tales, in reverse order, because it’s apt to begin at the bottom:
10. Shit-stained pants behind the sink
My mother insisted that my brother and I wear plain white y-fronts while we were growing up. This was a shockingly shortsighted decision on her part. Our response was to leave skid marks along the gusset which would have required a chisel and blow-torch to remove once she’d discovered them dried-out and tucked behind the bathroom sink, where we erroneously believed she’d never find them. Perhaps if she had taught us to wipe our bottoms properly, she would not have fallen victim to this practice.
9. A Human Poo behind the Garages
Whilst playing out in a narrow alleyway of bushes behind the garages near our house, I lazily decided to spare myself the walk home (about 100 metres) and so dropped my pants to have a shit there and then. Foliage in the vicinity was not the most robust, but what the hell, I could always tuck that day’s pants behind the bathroom sink.
Our neighbour, who’d been playing out with us (yes, there was an audience for this base act) grassed me up to his mum, who then told my mum. When accused, I naturally denied the crime; but our neighbour’s mum had been round behind the garages to verify the accusation. I suggested that the evidence she had discovered was probably a dog’s poo, but she claimed that she knew the difference between dog and human poo.
What was she? A fucking shit expert? My mum must have thought so, because on her testimony I was banged to rights.
8. Stinkbomb in a Phone Box
Straying slightly away from poo, this was my favourite prank played on total strangers. There was a phone box outside our house, so we took the number, waited next to it until someone happened to be walking up the hill towards us and then smashed a stink bomb inside. Then we’d run back inside the house, ring the number and look mischievously out of the window at the poor passer-by stepping inside to answer the phone, being subjected to that most foul of manufactured smells.
7. Shat in My Shorts
At first glance this sounds like a run-of-the-mill occurrence. However, the shorts in question cost me £20 in 1990 from a Rolling Stones concert at Wembley stadium. Bermuda shorts (all the rage in 1990) emblazoned with the Stone’s Tongue design. And the shitter who shat in my shorts was my brother.
Self-conscious about his narrow waist, he would wear several layers beneath his jeans and on this occasion he chose to make my very special expensive Stones Bermuda shorts the bottom layer. He was in a club in Manor House called The Catacombs, dancing to The Doors, when he felt a fart brewing. As it turned out, there was a lot more to it and he shit himself. In my fucking shorts. He disposed of them in the gents (down the loo rather than behind any sink) and returned to the dancefloor.
Bastard.
6. Exploding Poo
Back in the 1970’s, before dog owners were ordered to scoop up their pets’ plops, you really couldn’t go anywhere as a kid without stepping in shit. If we spotted one in advance, we’d often lance the canine waste matter with a stick and throw it at each other.
Come the 1980’s, there was less opportunity for such bastardness in the UK – but no less in France. On an exchange trip, me and my mate Wayne bought the obligatory pack of bangers and had the idea of sliding one inside a dog’s turd. We lit it and ran. The effect was all that we’d hoped for, but for the fact that some of the fall-out hit Wayne. Ironically, he was the fastest sprinter in our year at school, but even he couldn’t outrun exploding dog shit.
5. Fartspray: the brainchild of a bastard
Joke shops were well stocked with Fartspray back in the 80’s. Not that it smelt of fart. It was far worse than that. My brother was used to me farting on his head (sometimes bare-arsed for maximum effect) but he and our cousin were totally unprepared for being locked in our coal-shed and having me liberally spraying it through the gap above the door. Sadly, I had to let them out quickly, because they were close to taking the door off its hinges in their desperation to escape.
4. Floater in the Bath
I’m sure I was still made to share a bath with my younger brother until I was at least 6 or maybe 7 or 8 at best. Perhaps the trigger for ending this slightly unsavoury practice was the growing frequency of one or other of us to either piss in the bath, or on a few occasions, to squeeze a nugget of poo out and see if it could float towards the other before he had a chance to spot it and jump out. Mum must have got tired of the resultant screaming on these joint bath nights and let us have our own baths from then on.
3. Enacting the Chinese Proverb
Do you remember, as a kid, someone saying: Old Chinese proverb say, He who goes to bed with itchy bum, wakes up with smelly finger? Well that gave me an idea. (I’ll apologise to the reader now, because as we hit the top 3, the anecdotes become increasingly impossible to stomach.) I would deliberately itch my bum until my finger was so potently smelly that I couldn’t bear to move it within a foot of my nose. Then I’d grab my little brother in a headlock with one arm and with my free hand – the one with the offensive arse-residue on its index finger – I’d cover his mouth and make sure that the finger was wedged against his nostrils.
I put my hands up to this – it was abuse. People who criticise the Americans for Guantanamo Bay, really need to question whether I should be on trial for Human Rights violations before the US government is.
2. Nutella
I’m not getting paid for the advertisement, but I would like to thank Nutella for this number 2 prank. Chocolate spread, out of context (i.e. not in a jar or on bread) looks exactly like poo. Exploiting this fact, I played this prank on someone – I can’t even remember who – and I would encourage everyone to try it, because the effect was worth recording and sending to You’ve Been Framed.
I smeared chocolate spread quite thickly onto a scrunched up bundle of toilet paper and placed it on the floor next to the loo. Then I called the victim in and accused that person of being responsible for the shitty tissue missing the pan. As they were denying involvement in this apparent act of carelessness, I picked up the tissue and shoved it all into my mouth.
The look of horror and immediate retching of my victim meant that I had to swiftly unplug my mouth, because I was laughing so hard I nearly choked on it.
(You know what, now that I think about it, for this prank I was an adult and the victim may have been my own son. Is that bad?)
1. Why the fuck did I do this?
My favourite poo-related prank of all time tops the list for two reasons. Firstly, the impact of this action on the victim was the most extreme; and secondly, it was never intended as a prank and it was a completely illogical thing for me to do.
Again, thinking about the house in which I did this, I was at least 6 years old, but couldn’t have been much older, because it was so incomprehensively dumb.
I went into the bathroom to use the toilet and I decided that for a change I would poo in the bath instead. FOR A CHANGE? I recall my decision clearly. I wanted variety in my life. I asked myself, why should we always have to poo in the toilet? Let’s try something different.
So, I pooed in the bath. Not like I did when my brother was in the bath with me, when the poo would float a while on the surface of the water and you could offer a defence to your mum that it was an accident. NO! This was a shit in a dry bath. I had the foresight to dispose of the subsequent tissue in the actual toilet, but then I was confronted by the inevitable and horrifying realisation that you can’t flush a bath.
There’s something about the water in a toilet that minimises the smell of poo. This I concluded as I reaped the reward of witnessing a turd hit the dry surface of the bath. I also have a theory that much of the smell is contained within a poo and is released when it breaks. Well this one certainly had its surface crack on impact.
I knew what to do next, though. I shouted to my little brother to come and see. Innocently he responded to my call and walked straight in. Hit by the stark image of that misplaced poo and the wave of stink emanating from its pores, my brother immediately turned back into the hall and vomited all over the floor.
My mum, called into action to deal with both the poo and the vomit, plus her eldest son’s sheer brainlessness, was far too furious with me to allow me to enjoy the moment straight away. But I’ve dined out on the memory for almost 35 years since and for that reason as well this is my number one number two tale.
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Bastards on Kids' TV
Kids’ TV shows over the last few decades have been as much a breeding ground for bastards as my boxer shorts are for bacteria. We may well feel nostalgic for the halcyon days of our youth, spent arse-to-carpet, inches from a TV screen that baked the irises in our dead-looking eyes; but did we ever consider just how vile and cruel some of our idols were?
Easily the worst was Mr Benn. Here was a man whose face would have been a regular feature on Crimewatch had it been on telly in the early 70’s. If the police were searching for a serial killer, then Mr Benn ticked every box on the profile. He was approaching middle age, lived alone, was unemployed, had no friends or close relatives, loved dressing up and was a complete fantasist. Who knows who was buried under the paving slabs in the back yard of 52 Festive Road? Even more unsavoury was the fact that he lived in a street full of children. I’m sure their parents told them never to accept sweets from the funny man in the bowler hat and pinstripe suit. But I bet he offered; the nonce.
The fact that Mr Benn undertook some form of moralistically saccharin good deed on every adventure behind that changing room door should not fool you into believing that he was totally altruistic. The thieving bastard usually nicked something to stick on his mantelpiece back home. And he never told the shopkeeper what had happened to him. If he had any concern for other people’s health and safety, he’d have reported the risk - any other customer could easily wander into a different world and be eaten by a dinosaur or attacked by a dragon. All he had to say was, “You want to get that door fixed mate,” but he never did, the selfish git.
Another bastard from that time was that fat sloth Bagpuss. Look, he’s the only fucker in the shop who gets to go outdoors, but all he does is lie on his saggy arse and sleep. And then, when Bagpuss wakes up, all the other toys in the shop wake up, discover something that’s broken, discuss what to do and then work together to fix it. Does Bagpuss help? No fucking way. Lazy shyster. Imagine if Gabriel the Frog fell off his shelf and suffered internal haemorrhaging; Bagpuss would just sit there and let him die. If the frog was close enough, Bagpuss would probably then eat him. If he wasn’t such a sack of inertia he’d have attacked and eaten all the mice on the mouse organ and Professor Yaffle ages ago.
But Emily loved him. And I bet she was an obese, slothful and spoilt little cow as well.
I think I don’t trust quiet people very much. Mr Benn said very little, and the same with Bagpuss. Add to that list Bod. Yes, Bod, that androgynous agent for the Khmer Rouge, the silent assassin of Middle-English agricultural folk, the inspiration for Chucky, the cold-blooded evil-faced matchstick-legged bastard. He made Damian from The Omen look like Jake from Tweenies. Here comes Bod… quick, shoot the fucker in the head before he harms us, he’s the bastard son of Pol Pot and a jackal.
Mind you, the worst of all the silent bastards was Sooty. The fact that ITV refused to transmit the things he whispered in Matthew Corbett’s ear suggests that it was pure hatred and filth. Corbett had to play this charade that Sooty was saying something nice and innocuous rather than some obscenity regarding his deviant carnal desires for Sue or a remark about how he wanted to torture Sweep, medieval-style.
“Oh really Sooty? He says he’d like to play a game with you Sweep.”
Meaning that he wanted to stab Sweep in the head with infected syringes, set fire to his squeaker and force him up a cow’s arse with a broom-handle.
This epidemic of bastards in kids’ TV shows was not consigned to my childhood in the 70’s. When my own children were young, I was once more confronted with bastardness in sheep’s clothing, particularly in Teletubbies and Balamory.
It wasn’t any particular Teletubby, nor was it even Noo-Noo that made me uncomfortable and afraid for the safety of my children. It was the weird woman who had tea parties in the woods – Funny Lady. Fuck me, she was a bunny-boiler and a half! You suspected that her motive was to ingratiate herself with children in order to gain access to one of the Dads, initiate an affair, murder the wife and sell the kid into slavery in a Mumbai shanty town. Not very funny, Funny Lady!
As for Balamory, well, where do you start? Miss Hoolie the nursery teacher - whose teeth originally belonged to someone with a much larger head - was clearly suffering the usual mental tribulations of a stereotypical single, friendless, bullied-at-school, emotionally retarded, mildly unattractive women in her 20’s. You knew something was going to snap one day and she’d drive a bus-load of her pupils off the edge of a cliff after being sexually spurned by the dribblingly inept PC Plum.
Balamory is full of bastards. Even worse than Miss Hoolie is Suzie Sweet who runs the shop. She has Paul Daniels’s expression, cold-eyes with over-compensating grin, the face that tells you she is the Scottish coastal village sweet shop version of Voldemort. And don’t be fooled by Archie, pink jumper-wearing aristocratic inhabitant of the pink castle (literally, not figuratively.) Between them you can imagine a plot whereby they racially purify the village by fooling PC Plum into arresting Josie Jump and Spencer the painter and then get Edie McRedie to set up Balamory’s own Guantanamo Bay in which Jump and Spence are tortured as terror suspects because they are black and therefore must be Muslims.
Easily the worst was Mr Benn. Here was a man whose face would have been a regular feature on Crimewatch had it been on telly in the early 70’s. If the police were searching for a serial killer, then Mr Benn ticked every box on the profile. He was approaching middle age, lived alone, was unemployed, had no friends or close relatives, loved dressing up and was a complete fantasist. Who knows who was buried under the paving slabs in the back yard of 52 Festive Road? Even more unsavoury was the fact that he lived in a street full of children. I’m sure their parents told them never to accept sweets from the funny man in the bowler hat and pinstripe suit. But I bet he offered; the nonce.
The fact that Mr Benn undertook some form of moralistically saccharin good deed on every adventure behind that changing room door should not fool you into believing that he was totally altruistic. The thieving bastard usually nicked something to stick on his mantelpiece back home. And he never told the shopkeeper what had happened to him. If he had any concern for other people’s health and safety, he’d have reported the risk - any other customer could easily wander into a different world and be eaten by a dinosaur or attacked by a dragon. All he had to say was, “You want to get that door fixed mate,” but he never did, the selfish git.
Another bastard from that time was that fat sloth Bagpuss. Look, he’s the only fucker in the shop who gets to go outdoors, but all he does is lie on his saggy arse and sleep. And then, when Bagpuss wakes up, all the other toys in the shop wake up, discover something that’s broken, discuss what to do and then work together to fix it. Does Bagpuss help? No fucking way. Lazy shyster. Imagine if Gabriel the Frog fell off his shelf and suffered internal haemorrhaging; Bagpuss would just sit there and let him die. If the frog was close enough, Bagpuss would probably then eat him. If he wasn’t such a sack of inertia he’d have attacked and eaten all the mice on the mouse organ and Professor Yaffle ages ago.
But Emily loved him. And I bet she was an obese, slothful and spoilt little cow as well.
I think I don’t trust quiet people very much. Mr Benn said very little, and the same with Bagpuss. Add to that list Bod. Yes, Bod, that androgynous agent for the Khmer Rouge, the silent assassin of Middle-English agricultural folk, the inspiration for Chucky, the cold-blooded evil-faced matchstick-legged bastard. He made Damian from The Omen look like Jake from Tweenies. Here comes Bod… quick, shoot the fucker in the head before he harms us, he’s the bastard son of Pol Pot and a jackal.
Mind you, the worst of all the silent bastards was Sooty. The fact that ITV refused to transmit the things he whispered in Matthew Corbett’s ear suggests that it was pure hatred and filth. Corbett had to play this charade that Sooty was saying something nice and innocuous rather than some obscenity regarding his deviant carnal desires for Sue or a remark about how he wanted to torture Sweep, medieval-style.
“Oh really Sooty? He says he’d like to play a game with you Sweep.”
Meaning that he wanted to stab Sweep in the head with infected syringes, set fire to his squeaker and force him up a cow’s arse with a broom-handle.
This epidemic of bastards in kids’ TV shows was not consigned to my childhood in the 70’s. When my own children were young, I was once more confronted with bastardness in sheep’s clothing, particularly in Teletubbies and Balamory.
It wasn’t any particular Teletubby, nor was it even Noo-Noo that made me uncomfortable and afraid for the safety of my children. It was the weird woman who had tea parties in the woods – Funny Lady. Fuck me, she was a bunny-boiler and a half! You suspected that her motive was to ingratiate herself with children in order to gain access to one of the Dads, initiate an affair, murder the wife and sell the kid into slavery in a Mumbai shanty town. Not very funny, Funny Lady!
As for Balamory, well, where do you start? Miss Hoolie the nursery teacher - whose teeth originally belonged to someone with a much larger head - was clearly suffering the usual mental tribulations of a stereotypical single, friendless, bullied-at-school, emotionally retarded, mildly unattractive women in her 20’s. You knew something was going to snap one day and she’d drive a bus-load of her pupils off the edge of a cliff after being sexually spurned by the dribblingly inept PC Plum.
Balamory is full of bastards. Even worse than Miss Hoolie is Suzie Sweet who runs the shop. She has Paul Daniels’s expression, cold-eyes with over-compensating grin, the face that tells you she is the Scottish coastal village sweet shop version of Voldemort. And don’t be fooled by Archie, pink jumper-wearing aristocratic inhabitant of the pink castle (literally, not figuratively.) Between them you can imagine a plot whereby they racially purify the village by fooling PC Plum into arresting Josie Jump and Spencer the painter and then get Edie McRedie to set up Balamory’s own Guantanamo Bay in which Jump and Spence are tortured as terror suspects because they are black and therefore must be Muslims.
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
The New Year's Eve Bastard
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.
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.
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.
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