When you’re a kid, there’s nothing likely to make you more intolerant of other human beings than the fact that your neighbours are unacceptably DIFFERENT to you. Their houses smell different - and not in a nice way -and they have different habits and beliefs that can only be seen by you as ODD, simply because they are unlike YOUR family’s.
Suburban North London was never a hotbed of sectarianism and my parents were not the most devout of Catholics, but I found myself unable to refrain from a sanctimonious gushing of disdain towards the people who lived either side of us simply because they were Protestants and therefore WRONG. In one case, the dad Alan, had married a Jewish woman and this confused me as to what the hell their two daughters were. Did they believe that Jesus was God’s son or not? With naïve boldness, I once asked him that, and he gave me some liberal and reasoned response that was far too flimsy and vague for an indoctrinated fundamentalist papist like myself. Given that they had white walls and white cushiony furniture in their lounge and he was a softly-spoken articulate and bespectacled corduroy-trousers-wearing pseudo-intellectual, I decided that he must just be a WEIRDO. A hippy version of Graeme Garden from The Goodies with decidedly misguided beliefs.
On the other side of us, Les and Margaret’s family were Methodists. Which wasn’t even proper Protestants as far as I was concerned. Particularly as they got their kids Christened when they were about ten years old, instead of babies. They could have died any time before that and ended up in Hell, due to this lax procrastination, assuming that St Peter even LETS Methodists into Heaven. I supposed they might have had a less salubrious section to themselves, with not-so-comfortable clouds and less to eat.
Les and Margaret were also NORTHERN so they talked funny. They holidayed in Skegness, which sounded quite grim, even though I think Kevin Keegan was born there or played for them (or was that Scunthorpe?) Les drove a brown Princess and also owned an A-Team style van (this was before the A-Team, I should add) which he used to transport JUMBLE. As a generally annoying DO-GOODER, Les helped the local Cub-Scout Pack by collecting crap from local residents for the annual Jumble Sale. We reckoned that he kept the decent stuff himself and this was his sole motivation. Once a year their dining room would be a TETRIS-style maze (before Tetris of course) of boxes and old tat and you couldn’t see where you were putting your feet. I once trod in their dog’s freshly crimped-out plop, while wearing my new tassled-loafers, because it was hidden between boxes of Bric-a-Brac. I hated Les for that, just that one fact, that one poo that went all over my nice new shoes and was an arse to clean off; and I hate Jumble sales to this day as a consequence.
They had two dogs. Muffin, some kind of yappy little mutt, should have been called Guffin. We had to look after him in our house one weekend and he spent the whole time farting really stinky dog farts that smelt like gaseous dog shit, just as you’d expect. Their other dog was an Afghan with more bounce in it than sack of rubber balls. It was totally out of control and after a while slipped its lead and ran off, never to be seen again. Not that I blame it. We had smaller pets, like a hamster and a tortoise, but Les killed our tortoise. It was put into hibernation in his garage with their tortoise and he took ours out first to see if it was time for it to wake up. It wasn’t and it died. Because of Les. The cunt.
Les and Margaret had 4 sons with skinheads, tattoos, a penchant for mild criminal activity and an inability to sleep with the light off. When me and my brother had to sleep round, apart from having to share beds with the sons who were our age – beds which smelt disgustingly different to our own – this refusal to turn out the light at bedtime was pathetic and annoying. And ODD. Bloody odd people.
And so it is that you grow up thinking this of your neighbours: Urgh, why have you got that in your house? Urgh, why do you eat that? Urgh, why do you smell funny? Urgh, why do you think that? I’m all for embracing diversity nowadays and I have Alan’s liberal tolerance and reasoned mind (but not his corduroy trousers). But to be honest, despite all that, I still think you’re all ODD fuckers for being different to me, whether you live next door or not.
Monday, 26 March 2012
Monday, 30 January 2012
That Bastard Place Outside of Towns
Do you remember that Joni Mitchell song, when she’s moaning about people paving Paradise to put up a parking lot? By Paradise, I’m assuming she means the countryside. She probably is. It’s not just clever alliteration. It’s a social comment. A social comment about the need for more car-parks in the countryside.
I see her point, because I hate trying to park on mud and slopes and in awkward places ill-designed for cars. In fact, that whole bastard place outside of towns, that whole Nature area that fills the spaces between where we all live, that’s a bit of a fucking irritation sometimes, isn’t it?
The Bible started it, all this bias for Nature. The Garden of Eden is meant to be all beautiful and wonderful, but I bet if Adam and Eve had a proper house they’d’ve gone inside it for most of the day. I’ve got a garden and I only go in it every so often between April and August; to cut the lawn once a fortnight or to indiscriminately cut off all the growing bits that get in the way of where I might want to walk to fetch beers from the shed. The rest of the time I’m indoors, because it’s either cold and typically English-damp outside or it’s warm but full of insects and flying buzzing annoyances that land on you or come near your drink.
I live in South-East England. All the Nature areas here are just flat, charmless, green splodges of nothingness; spider-webbed by motorways and A-roads that sprawl uncontrollably from London’s fringes like an unkempt forest of 1970’s pubic growth sticking out of a pair of pants. There are few wondrous views that don’t involve a line of lorries and cars housing anguished commuters glued to their steering wheels by either hatred or apathy. Really, there’s no point visiting Nature where I’m from, that’s why I’ve never owned a pair of wellies.
Of course, wellies would be extraordinarily sensible and irritation-preventing if I went for walks out in Nature. Because, not having them means that when I do have to leave the domestic comfort of my house and surrounding concrete cosiness, I end up with mud all over my fucking nice footwear and jeans.
Not wanting to go and walk around in Nature makes you some kind of social leper. You’d face less intolerant disdain if you just told people that you were a paedophile. They go on about “getting some fresh air in your lungs,” but everywhere you go in Nature there are animals shitting on everything. If I stay at home, there’s only one room that constantly smells of shit; but out there, out in the uncivilised and wild spaces between our local A-roads, there’s shit everywhere.
And twats.
See, in the old days, the people who lived out there in Nature were harmless. Nature used to be for stinky people who married their siblings, shot rabbits and had never seen black people. Nowadays, rich bastards just drive their 4by4’s at 80mph through all the twisty turny narrow lanes; and if you happen to be poodling along at 40, not knowing where the fuck you are or whether the road straightens or bends again round the next blind bloody curve, or if in fact there’s some huge ditch or cliff or lump of dead animal carcass in the road, then some twat who knows the road inside out drives his Chelsea tractor up your arse with all the thrust and intrusion of George Michael in a Hampstead toilet.
I wonder if these bastards are just unconsciously irritated by the fact that they have a 5 mile drive to go to a shop that doesn’t deliver what they want. I wouldn’t fucking deliver anything to them. I’d love to own a Chinese takeaway in some village out in Nature and take phone calls from some bastard who wants you to find his converted barn in the pitch dark down some 3 inch wide track, which in the winter looks no more like a road than where someone’s pissed in the snow, just so I can say, “Fuck off and eat some mud or animal crap from all that Nature outside your house you bloody fleece-wearing middle-class hippy.”
And once all these Nature-loving town-haters have abandoned us soul-less rat-race heathens for their spacious squares of mud, they start soiling their corduroys in indignation when we build more houses on the bits of Nature on the edges of towns. Where else should we build houses? In the fucking sea?
But of course houses mean people and people mean crime and litter and noise. I fear crime much more out in Nature than I do in towns, because I can’t bloody see anything when I’m there. With no street lights anywhere, I fear crime and ghosts and monsters and crazed shot-gun wielding maniacs. As for litter, at least we have bins in towns. And as for noise, what’s noisier than your neighbour tearing up his 200 meter long un-made gravel drive at 50 mph in his fucking Range Rover? And that’s your next door neighbour half a mile away.
I guess it’s the huge defecation of concrete and metal on England’s formerly green and pleasant corner that has slowly turned us South-East-Englanders into such a breed of Nature-haters. We might pretend to LOVE Nature, because our educated, philosophical and cosmopolitan sensibilities decree that we SHOULD love it. But really, once we get out into it, we discover that it’s bloody inconvenient and irritating and packed with all the beauty and romance of dried shit hanging off a cow’s arse.
Therefore, I suspect that I have been townified to the point of utter bastardness. I do sometimes go for a countryside ramble (that’s the word they use for “aimless walk”, right?) but I have to overcome some deep-seated prejudices to get any enjoyment out of it.
At the end of the day, if there’s a dog poo on the pavement outside my house, at least I’ll be able to see it, so I say pave Paradise Joni, pave it!
I see her point, because I hate trying to park on mud and slopes and in awkward places ill-designed for cars. In fact, that whole bastard place outside of towns, that whole Nature area that fills the spaces between where we all live, that’s a bit of a fucking irritation sometimes, isn’t it?
The Bible started it, all this bias for Nature. The Garden of Eden is meant to be all beautiful and wonderful, but I bet if Adam and Eve had a proper house they’d’ve gone inside it for most of the day. I’ve got a garden and I only go in it every so often between April and August; to cut the lawn once a fortnight or to indiscriminately cut off all the growing bits that get in the way of where I might want to walk to fetch beers from the shed. The rest of the time I’m indoors, because it’s either cold and typically English-damp outside or it’s warm but full of insects and flying buzzing annoyances that land on you or come near your drink.
I live in South-East England. All the Nature areas here are just flat, charmless, green splodges of nothingness; spider-webbed by motorways and A-roads that sprawl uncontrollably from London’s fringes like an unkempt forest of 1970’s pubic growth sticking out of a pair of pants. There are few wondrous views that don’t involve a line of lorries and cars housing anguished commuters glued to their steering wheels by either hatred or apathy. Really, there’s no point visiting Nature where I’m from, that’s why I’ve never owned a pair of wellies.
Of course, wellies would be extraordinarily sensible and irritation-preventing if I went for walks out in Nature. Because, not having them means that when I do have to leave the domestic comfort of my house and surrounding concrete cosiness, I end up with mud all over my fucking nice footwear and jeans.
Not wanting to go and walk around in Nature makes you some kind of social leper. You’d face less intolerant disdain if you just told people that you were a paedophile. They go on about “getting some fresh air in your lungs,” but everywhere you go in Nature there are animals shitting on everything. If I stay at home, there’s only one room that constantly smells of shit; but out there, out in the uncivilised and wild spaces between our local A-roads, there’s shit everywhere.
And twats.
See, in the old days, the people who lived out there in Nature were harmless. Nature used to be for stinky people who married their siblings, shot rabbits and had never seen black people. Nowadays, rich bastards just drive their 4by4’s at 80mph through all the twisty turny narrow lanes; and if you happen to be poodling along at 40, not knowing where the fuck you are or whether the road straightens or bends again round the next blind bloody curve, or if in fact there’s some huge ditch or cliff or lump of dead animal carcass in the road, then some twat who knows the road inside out drives his Chelsea tractor up your arse with all the thrust and intrusion of George Michael in a Hampstead toilet.
I wonder if these bastards are just unconsciously irritated by the fact that they have a 5 mile drive to go to a shop that doesn’t deliver what they want. I wouldn’t fucking deliver anything to them. I’d love to own a Chinese takeaway in some village out in Nature and take phone calls from some bastard who wants you to find his converted barn in the pitch dark down some 3 inch wide track, which in the winter looks no more like a road than where someone’s pissed in the snow, just so I can say, “Fuck off and eat some mud or animal crap from all that Nature outside your house you bloody fleece-wearing middle-class hippy.”
And once all these Nature-loving town-haters have abandoned us soul-less rat-race heathens for their spacious squares of mud, they start soiling their corduroys in indignation when we build more houses on the bits of Nature on the edges of towns. Where else should we build houses? In the fucking sea?
But of course houses mean people and people mean crime and litter and noise. I fear crime much more out in Nature than I do in towns, because I can’t bloody see anything when I’m there. With no street lights anywhere, I fear crime and ghosts and monsters and crazed shot-gun wielding maniacs. As for litter, at least we have bins in towns. And as for noise, what’s noisier than your neighbour tearing up his 200 meter long un-made gravel drive at 50 mph in his fucking Range Rover? And that’s your next door neighbour half a mile away.
I guess it’s the huge defecation of concrete and metal on England’s formerly green and pleasant corner that has slowly turned us South-East-Englanders into such a breed of Nature-haters. We might pretend to LOVE Nature, because our educated, philosophical and cosmopolitan sensibilities decree that we SHOULD love it. But really, once we get out into it, we discover that it’s bloody inconvenient and irritating and packed with all the beauty and romance of dried shit hanging off a cow’s arse.
Therefore, I suspect that I have been townified to the point of utter bastardness. I do sometimes go for a countryside ramble (that’s the word they use for “aimless walk”, right?) but I have to overcome some deep-seated prejudices to get any enjoyment out of it.
At the end of the day, if there’s a dog poo on the pavement outside my house, at least I’ll be able to see it, so I say pave Paradise Joni, pave it!
Monday, 19 December 2011
12 Days of (a Right Bastard *British) Xmas
On the 12th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:An arrogant, parochial assumption that the following blog post is a justifiable parody of some wondrously shitty British attitudes towards the festive period, when really I’m writing about South-East of England prejudices and idiosyncrasies. Down here we’re far less friendly than the rest of the UK. Although liberal-minded enough to abhor racism, we’re Nazi-like in how regionalist we are. And worse of all, like I said, we erroneously believe that our failings are common to the rest of the UK. (Or maybe they are. You be the judges.)
On the 11th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Eleven charity cards. Costing ten times more than ordinary cards, but worth it because some of that goes to charity? No. Have you ever noticed how much? About 30p per pack. Not even 30p per card. You might as well buy cheap cards and just give 30p to charity. Or 40p. Or fuck it, why not a tenner and make all the charity card buyers look ridiculous in their smug do-good mistake of allowing themselves to be fisted by a card company that used the word CHARITY to sell you over-priced cards.
On the 10th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Ten Christmas programmes written by Richard Curtis. Now, in your heart you know that Christmas is also a tragic time. It polarises people’s emotions. While the lucky have families and feasts and presents, others have no one and nothing and feel that separation more acutely than at any other time of the year. And did you see what I did there? In the middle of a (hopefully) witty blog, I have disarmed you by the juxtaposition of this token mention of something SAD. Well, Richard Curtis does this all the fucking time. If I’m watching Love Actually or Vicar of Dibley, I don’t want my escapist enjoyment soiled by Curtis sneaking up on me and throwing in a random sad scene to make me feel guilty, the sanctimonious, twee, middle-class bastard.
On the 9th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Nine pantomime dames. As a veteran of numerous fatuous and frivolous festive performances at Radlett Theatre, I can honestly say that being a Dad at a Christmas panto is the loneliest place in the whole world. Notwithstanding the occasional sexy witch, the whole experience induces a manic desire to scratch at your eyeballs with holly and then impale your head, ear-first, onto a reindeer’s antler. That moment when a 50 year old transvestite with no social parameters notices that you’re the only one not stood up to join in the Macarena, feels like the moment of death itself.
On the 8th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Eight Christmas sales. There’s nothing quite like seeing all the presents you bought the week BEFORE Christmas on sale at half the price two days AFTER Christmas. Thankfully, the current economic climate has brought us sales before Christmas this year, thus eliminating the need to lie to family members about having “ordered your present a week ago but it still hasn’t come,” knowing full well it’s still in the shop getting its price tag changed as you speak.
On the 7th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:The ITV premier of a film that came out seven years ago.
On the 6th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Six greedy people who have a birthday within a fortnight of Christmas Day. Just when you’ve written and posted off all your Christmas cards, and you’re literally sitting in the warm piss of your own satisfaction at how well-organised you are, you suddenly recall that you have to send BIRTHDAY cards as well. Each costing more than the £1.99 you paid for 30 Christmas cards and in some cases requiring an accompanying present; but your abused imagination has already been beaten lifeless with all the thinking needed to choose a Christmas present for these people. Bloody freaks. Have a birthday like the rest of us between February and November please!
On the 5th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Five Christmas cards for the neighbours. Three of which you never talk to. Two of which you can’t spell their names. And one of which, you’re not even sure which house they live in. You might have sent a 6th card, because you received one from “All at number 68” but as they can’t be arsed to write their fucking names (or yours), bollocks to them.
On the 4th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Four witty church signs. You know the type. Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas. Or some other such pun. Some effort by the church to show it is moving with the times. Give it a couple of years and they’ll be even more up to date with something like COME TO CHURCH AT CHRISTMAS FOR GUARANTEED CLUNGE.
On the 3rd day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Three days of the bin-men not collecting any rubbish at the one time of year when you have three times more than normal. OK, OK, so they deserve a holiday as well, our “refuse technicians.” Lucky for them, they (and the postmen, speeding around like the A-Team in their vans) don’t ask for a “Christmas box” like they used to, because I’d fucking oblige... after they knocked a slab off the top of my front wall with the bin last year and left it there, the careless cunts.
On the 2nd day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Two Christmas songs I find bearable out of about 200 that I keep having to listen to. My theory is that we all have our two. Mine are Fairytale of New York and Happy Xmas (War is over.) The rest are Jingle Hell. The one that sends me into a homicidal frenzy is not so much the song, but the video of Kim Wilde and Mel Smith singing Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. I want to take that tree and beat Mel Smith around his flabby fucking gurning face with it. And then do the same with a large rock, just to be totally in keeping with the song title.
On the 1st day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:All the money back that I spent on presents for people that they didn’t want, so I can spend it on things that I want, but which no one bought for me. I bet even Jesus thought that.
Merry Christmas.
On the 11th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Eleven charity cards. Costing ten times more than ordinary cards, but worth it because some of that goes to charity? No. Have you ever noticed how much? About 30p per pack. Not even 30p per card. You might as well buy cheap cards and just give 30p to charity. Or 40p. Or fuck it, why not a tenner and make all the charity card buyers look ridiculous in their smug do-good mistake of allowing themselves to be fisted by a card company that used the word CHARITY to sell you over-priced cards.
On the 10th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Ten Christmas programmes written by Richard Curtis. Now, in your heart you know that Christmas is also a tragic time. It polarises people’s emotions. While the lucky have families and feasts and presents, others have no one and nothing and feel that separation more acutely than at any other time of the year. And did you see what I did there? In the middle of a (hopefully) witty blog, I have disarmed you by the juxtaposition of this token mention of something SAD. Well, Richard Curtis does this all the fucking time. If I’m watching Love Actually or Vicar of Dibley, I don’t want my escapist enjoyment soiled by Curtis sneaking up on me and throwing in a random sad scene to make me feel guilty, the sanctimonious, twee, middle-class bastard.
On the 9th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Nine pantomime dames. As a veteran of numerous fatuous and frivolous festive performances at Radlett Theatre, I can honestly say that being a Dad at a Christmas panto is the loneliest place in the whole world. Notwithstanding the occasional sexy witch, the whole experience induces a manic desire to scratch at your eyeballs with holly and then impale your head, ear-first, onto a reindeer’s antler. That moment when a 50 year old transvestite with no social parameters notices that you’re the only one not stood up to join in the Macarena, feels like the moment of death itself.
On the 8th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Eight Christmas sales. There’s nothing quite like seeing all the presents you bought the week BEFORE Christmas on sale at half the price two days AFTER Christmas. Thankfully, the current economic climate has brought us sales before Christmas this year, thus eliminating the need to lie to family members about having “ordered your present a week ago but it still hasn’t come,” knowing full well it’s still in the shop getting its price tag changed as you speak.
On the 7th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:The ITV premier of a film that came out seven years ago.
On the 6th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Six greedy people who have a birthday within a fortnight of Christmas Day. Just when you’ve written and posted off all your Christmas cards, and you’re literally sitting in the warm piss of your own satisfaction at how well-organised you are, you suddenly recall that you have to send BIRTHDAY cards as well. Each costing more than the £1.99 you paid for 30 Christmas cards and in some cases requiring an accompanying present; but your abused imagination has already been beaten lifeless with all the thinking needed to choose a Christmas present for these people. Bloody freaks. Have a birthday like the rest of us between February and November please!
On the 5th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Five Christmas cards for the neighbours. Three of which you never talk to. Two of which you can’t spell their names. And one of which, you’re not even sure which house they live in. You might have sent a 6th card, because you received one from “All at number 68” but as they can’t be arsed to write their fucking names (or yours), bollocks to them.
On the 4th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Four witty church signs. You know the type. Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas. Or some other such pun. Some effort by the church to show it is moving with the times. Give it a couple of years and they’ll be even more up to date with something like COME TO CHURCH AT CHRISTMAS FOR GUARANTEED CLUNGE.
On the 3rd day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Three days of the bin-men not collecting any rubbish at the one time of year when you have three times more than normal. OK, OK, so they deserve a holiday as well, our “refuse technicians.” Lucky for them, they (and the postmen, speeding around like the A-Team in their vans) don’t ask for a “Christmas box” like they used to, because I’d fucking oblige... after they knocked a slab off the top of my front wall with the bin last year and left it there, the careless cunts.
On the 2nd day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Two Christmas songs I find bearable out of about 200 that I keep having to listen to. My theory is that we all have our two. Mine are Fairytale of New York and Happy Xmas (War is over.) The rest are Jingle Hell. The one that sends me into a homicidal frenzy is not so much the song, but the video of Kim Wilde and Mel Smith singing Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. I want to take that tree and beat Mel Smith around his flabby fucking gurning face with it. And then do the same with a large rock, just to be totally in keeping with the song title.
On the 1st day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:All the money back that I spent on presents for people that they didn’t want, so I can spend it on things that I want, but which no one bought for me. I bet even Jesus thought that.
Merry Christmas.
Saturday, 17 December 2011
The Toys of Christmas Past
It’s the late 70’s and I’m not yet ten years old and it’s Christmas Day and I’ve just pulled the appendage of a man wearing only a skimpy pair of pants.
No one ever questioned the absolute WRONGNESS of giving a young child STRETCH ARMSTRONG as a toy. In case you’re wondering, the concept of Stretch Armstrong was that you pulled his limbs and they stretched to about three feet long, because he was made of some kind of tough jelly-like polymer (Wikipedia says “gelled corn syrup.”) The stretching necessitated an almost total absence of clothes, but in those innocent days before gays were discovered a decade later (even camp TV celebrities like John Inman and Larry Grayson were considered no more than just “disinterested in women”) no one could accuse Stretch Armstrong of being any more homo-erotic than Mick McManus, the similarly skimpily-panted wrestler with the slicked-back, dyed-black Dracula hairstyle, who was a mainstay of World of Sport and another to appear on the “We-never-knew-he-was-gay” list of 70’s closet dwellers.
It made more sense when they developed a STRETCH HULK, so we got one of those another Xmas and threw darts at it to MAKE HULK MAD and watch the gel seep from his wounds before clotting.
Another favourite toy was the Six Million Dollar Man and his arch-enemy Maskatron (who never appeared in the series as I remember.) You could roll back the Bionic Man’s skin. On his arm, that is, to reveal his bionics. Not his willy. Like Stretch Armstrong and Action Man, Steve Austin had no willy, not even a bionic one. In the 80’s they started adding pants with a subtle bulge to these sorts of Action figures, thus making it worthwhile to have them dry-hump Barbie. So, I’m told.
Moving on...
But amongst my vast array of boys’ toys, I was once given my own Nookie Bear ventriloquist’s dummy. You could pull a string to make him go cross-eyed and you could make him talk without moving your lips any more than his real-life side-kick, Roger de Courcey. Because, as you’ll know if you ever saw him, Roger de Courcey perfected all the attributes of an excellent ventriloquist act except for one: The ability to speak without moving his lips. So, he had a huge Dutch porn-star’s moustache to try and hide this fact; but when he spoke, this wriggled around like the Magic Roundabout’s Dougal with epilepsy. Nookie Bear wasn’t the sort of toy you could have much fun with, though. Far better was my brother’s toy version of Rod Hull’s Emu, which made for many a great fight between us. (Emu always went for the face as well, the nasty bastard.)
Then there was Fuzzy Felt. This wasn’t a reference to the first time you got to 2nd base with a girl; it was a Velcro board on which you arranged shaped pieces of felt to make a themed scene. Equally (un)creative, was Etch-a-Sketch, with its famed design fault, an inability to draw diagonal lines without them looking like uncurled pubes.
Possibly the most disappointing toy was Scalextric. Absolute shit. I value the lesson it teaches you for later life, which is to slow down as you approach a corner. I do this in real-life perhaps too excessively, but my decision has been validated by the fact that I have yet to find myself spinning through the air after trying to take a corner in 4th gear at 30mph.
A close 2nd to Scalextric for disappointment was Mouse Trap. Once you set it up and set it off, then what the fuck were you supposed to do? Apparently you had to throw dice and move round the board before you were allowed to set it off. How shit is that? How was that marketed? “Buy Mousetrap – half a minute of fun for all ages.”
That was something that irked me as an adult, that sign on the packaging that read “Ages 7-70.” What; do you need a fucking license to play after you’ve turned 70 then? Do you have to re-apply to Waddington’s version of the DVLA for permission to be Professor Plum for another 5 years?
My third-place toy of disappointment would have to be a mini-snooker table. It was like playing snooker when you’re pissed. Any skill you might have had was negated by the crappy quality of the balls and baize and cue, which was great if you wanted HOURS of fun, because you’d never fucking pot anything and someone always knocked it and sent the balls all one inch sideways, so you’d have to restart anyway.
One for the real nostalgia-lovers amongst you, something that just hasn’t ever appeared since, is a board game called Buccaneer. The theme was pirates and buried treasure and I once took one of the game pieces, a plastic ruby, and put it up my nostril. I was probably about nine when I did this. Ignorant of the anatomy of the nose and throat, when I then lost that ruby completely, I believed that I was going to die. For days I was hoping it would reappear, just fall out my nostril, or I’d pick it out while rooting for a bogey. But it never reappeared and as the days turned into weeks, I suspected that perhaps it would be a long slow death that I’d suffer.
Right, I’m off to get the Argos catalogue to choose my favourite toy on each page and draw a biro circle around each one. Merry Toymas.
No one ever questioned the absolute WRONGNESS of giving a young child STRETCH ARMSTRONG as a toy. In case you’re wondering, the concept of Stretch Armstrong was that you pulled his limbs and they stretched to about three feet long, because he was made of some kind of tough jelly-like polymer (Wikipedia says “gelled corn syrup.”) The stretching necessitated an almost total absence of clothes, but in those innocent days before gays were discovered a decade later (even camp TV celebrities like John Inman and Larry Grayson were considered no more than just “disinterested in women”) no one could accuse Stretch Armstrong of being any more homo-erotic than Mick McManus, the similarly skimpily-panted wrestler with the slicked-back, dyed-black Dracula hairstyle, who was a mainstay of World of Sport and another to appear on the “We-never-knew-he-was-gay” list of 70’s closet dwellers.
It made more sense when they developed a STRETCH HULK, so we got one of those another Xmas and threw darts at it to MAKE HULK MAD and watch the gel seep from his wounds before clotting.
Another favourite toy was the Six Million Dollar Man and his arch-enemy Maskatron (who never appeared in the series as I remember.) You could roll back the Bionic Man’s skin. On his arm, that is, to reveal his bionics. Not his willy. Like Stretch Armstrong and Action Man, Steve Austin had no willy, not even a bionic one. In the 80’s they started adding pants with a subtle bulge to these sorts of Action figures, thus making it worthwhile to have them dry-hump Barbie. So, I’m told.
Moving on...
But amongst my vast array of boys’ toys, I was once given my own Nookie Bear ventriloquist’s dummy. You could pull a string to make him go cross-eyed and you could make him talk without moving your lips any more than his real-life side-kick, Roger de Courcey. Because, as you’ll know if you ever saw him, Roger de Courcey perfected all the attributes of an excellent ventriloquist act except for one: The ability to speak without moving his lips. So, he had a huge Dutch porn-star’s moustache to try and hide this fact; but when he spoke, this wriggled around like the Magic Roundabout’s Dougal with epilepsy. Nookie Bear wasn’t the sort of toy you could have much fun with, though. Far better was my brother’s toy version of Rod Hull’s Emu, which made for many a great fight between us. (Emu always went for the face as well, the nasty bastard.)
Then there was Fuzzy Felt. This wasn’t a reference to the first time you got to 2nd base with a girl; it was a Velcro board on which you arranged shaped pieces of felt to make a themed scene. Equally (un)creative, was Etch-a-Sketch, with its famed design fault, an inability to draw diagonal lines without them looking like uncurled pubes.
Possibly the most disappointing toy was Scalextric. Absolute shit. I value the lesson it teaches you for later life, which is to slow down as you approach a corner. I do this in real-life perhaps too excessively, but my decision has been validated by the fact that I have yet to find myself spinning through the air after trying to take a corner in 4th gear at 30mph.
A close 2nd to Scalextric for disappointment was Mouse Trap. Once you set it up and set it off, then what the fuck were you supposed to do? Apparently you had to throw dice and move round the board before you were allowed to set it off. How shit is that? How was that marketed? “Buy Mousetrap – half a minute of fun for all ages.”
That was something that irked me as an adult, that sign on the packaging that read “Ages 7-70.” What; do you need a fucking license to play after you’ve turned 70 then? Do you have to re-apply to Waddington’s version of the DVLA for permission to be Professor Plum for another 5 years?
My third-place toy of disappointment would have to be a mini-snooker table. It was like playing snooker when you’re pissed. Any skill you might have had was negated by the crappy quality of the balls and baize and cue, which was great if you wanted HOURS of fun, because you’d never fucking pot anything and someone always knocked it and sent the balls all one inch sideways, so you’d have to restart anyway.
One for the real nostalgia-lovers amongst you, something that just hasn’t ever appeared since, is a board game called Buccaneer. The theme was pirates and buried treasure and I once took one of the game pieces, a plastic ruby, and put it up my nostril. I was probably about nine when I did this. Ignorant of the anatomy of the nose and throat, when I then lost that ruby completely, I believed that I was going to die. For days I was hoping it would reappear, just fall out my nostril, or I’d pick it out while rooting for a bogey. But it never reappeared and as the days turned into weeks, I suspected that perhaps it would be a long slow death that I’d suffer.
Right, I’m off to get the Argos catalogue to choose my favourite toy on each page and draw a biro circle around each one. Merry Toymas.
Sunday, 27 November 2011
The Bastardness of All-boys Religious Schools and the consequent crapness with girls
My parents made few fundamental errors in their youthful efforts to raise me, and I’m happy to say that I survived them all. Just.
The haze of cigarette smoke from womb to living room to dinner table failed to inflict lung disease or even asthma on me. The subjection at an early age to the “The Omen” and subsequent psychological trauma of being told that Damien was hiding in the dark in our house ensured that I was permanently one broken light-bulb away from shitting in my pants. But the decision to send me to an all-boys Catholic school may well have bestowed on me a useful academic education, but it made me hopelessly socially retarded when it came to talking to girls.
I was rubbish.
Not that the kindly, altruistic Jesuit priests of St ******** College were adverse to sex education. After embarrassingly but excitingly cringing while my parents signed a consent form to allow me to receive my first taste of sex education, our decrepit corpse of a biology teacher showed a video about sweating. Therefore, it was left to my peers to fill in the gaps, via the media of biro penises on every page in every textbook and the more worldly comedians in our year group telling jokes about prostitutes (which I heard as Protestants, naturally) and nob-nibbling.
It didn’t help that the school was 3 miles out of town, where our sister school (the convent which produced Mandy Smith, consenting bride of paedophile Stones bassist Bill Wyman) was situated. By a cruel twist of fate the timings of departure at the two schools precluded any opportunity to mingle with our female compatriots, except for the three gutter-mouthed and very obvious slappers who hung about the bus terminal and knew the hard lads from my year group.
By this stage I was living on the North Circular Road, six lanes of traffic three metres from the front gate and nowhere to hang around and meet local girls. So my first futile attempt to get a girlfriend was laughable in the extreme.
At this stage, let me point out that it wasn’t until I was 18 and at university that a female friend advised me that you don’t just “get a girlfriend” but instead you meet someone, you say hello, you get to know them and then you ask them out. At 13, I thought that you skip all of that and just ask them out.
So after idolising Dawn B***** on the bus for months I puffed up the courage to do just that. The whole conversation, as we passed in the street was as follows:
Me (mumbling too fast): Excuse me, do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her: What?
Me: Do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her (frowning incredulously): No.
This run of form continued for several years. Had I been a football team, I’d’ve been relegated on an annual basis until I was playing in the conference south with double-figure crowds and administration and ground-selling on the horizon. To meet girls, we’d walk around the local park at the wrong times or go into central London and stare out of the window like starving hyenas at anyone with boobs.
But eventually I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs and ACTUALLY meet more than one woman at a time. All you needed, I was conditioned to believe from popular culture (probably just crap sit-coms) was a clever and witty chat-up line.
Fucking hell! Which total bastard invented the concept of a chat-up line? Again, it was only later that I was told that the best chat-up line was “hello.” Not “my brother and I work in biscuit design and were wondering if you’d like to do some modelling work as part of our advertising campaign.”
Me and my equally crap droogs would sit at a table in a bar for hours mustering up the courage (meaning getting drunk enough to make an arse of ourselves) and striving to invent the one killer line that was needed in total isolation to get us some luck. This was on the back of meticulous pre-night-out routines, such as spending the afternoon in a pub, shaving just before going out and thereby cutting my face to ribbons and necessitating a cheap cologne-facial dip, and then sticking on the Led Zep while adorning myself in my “pulling” (Hawaiian) shirt and “pulling” (cowboy) boots.
I was rubbish.
My son is 15, has had a girlfriend for over a year (and others willing to take her place), a supremely laid-back competence in how to socialise with girls and he never, NEVER feels like shitting in his pants when we turn the lights out at home.
The haze of cigarette smoke from womb to living room to dinner table failed to inflict lung disease or even asthma on me. The subjection at an early age to the “The Omen” and subsequent psychological trauma of being told that Damien was hiding in the dark in our house ensured that I was permanently one broken light-bulb away from shitting in my pants. But the decision to send me to an all-boys Catholic school may well have bestowed on me a useful academic education, but it made me hopelessly socially retarded when it came to talking to girls.
I was rubbish.
Not that the kindly, altruistic Jesuit priests of St ******** College were adverse to sex education. After embarrassingly but excitingly cringing while my parents signed a consent form to allow me to receive my first taste of sex education, our decrepit corpse of a biology teacher showed a video about sweating. Therefore, it was left to my peers to fill in the gaps, via the media of biro penises on every page in every textbook and the more worldly comedians in our year group telling jokes about prostitutes (which I heard as Protestants, naturally) and nob-nibbling.
It didn’t help that the school was 3 miles out of town, where our sister school (the convent which produced Mandy Smith, consenting bride of paedophile Stones bassist Bill Wyman) was situated. By a cruel twist of fate the timings of departure at the two schools precluded any opportunity to mingle with our female compatriots, except for the three gutter-mouthed and very obvious slappers who hung about the bus terminal and knew the hard lads from my year group.
By this stage I was living on the North Circular Road, six lanes of traffic three metres from the front gate and nowhere to hang around and meet local girls. So my first futile attempt to get a girlfriend was laughable in the extreme.
At this stage, let me point out that it wasn’t until I was 18 and at university that a female friend advised me that you don’t just “get a girlfriend” but instead you meet someone, you say hello, you get to know them and then you ask them out. At 13, I thought that you skip all of that and just ask them out.
So after idolising Dawn B***** on the bus for months I puffed up the courage to do just that. The whole conversation, as we passed in the street was as follows:
Me (mumbling too fast): Excuse me, do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her: What?
Me: Do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her (frowning incredulously): No.
This run of form continued for several years. Had I been a football team, I’d’ve been relegated on an annual basis until I was playing in the conference south with double-figure crowds and administration and ground-selling on the horizon. To meet girls, we’d walk around the local park at the wrong times or go into central London and stare out of the window like starving hyenas at anyone with boobs.
But eventually I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs and ACTUALLY meet more than one woman at a time. All you needed, I was conditioned to believe from popular culture (probably just crap sit-coms) was a clever and witty chat-up line.
Fucking hell! Which total bastard invented the concept of a chat-up line? Again, it was only later that I was told that the best chat-up line was “hello.” Not “my brother and I work in biscuit design and were wondering if you’d like to do some modelling work as part of our advertising campaign.”
Me and my equally crap droogs would sit at a table in a bar for hours mustering up the courage (meaning getting drunk enough to make an arse of ourselves) and striving to invent the one killer line that was needed in total isolation to get us some luck. This was on the back of meticulous pre-night-out routines, such as spending the afternoon in a pub, shaving just before going out and thereby cutting my face to ribbons and necessitating a cheap cologne-facial dip, and then sticking on the Led Zep while adorning myself in my “pulling” (Hawaiian) shirt and “pulling” (cowboy) boots.
I was rubbish.
My son is 15, has had a girlfriend for over a year (and others willing to take her place), a supremely laid-back competence in how to socialise with girls and he never, NEVER feels like shitting in his pants when we turn the lights out at home.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Fun Fascists
EVERYBODY PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND SAY “YEAH!”
I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.
As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.
This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.
Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.
Fucking Fun Fascists.
They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.
For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.
The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)
Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.
Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:
“Cheer up!”
“Smile!”
“Come on, let your hair down!”
You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.
OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.
Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!
I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.
As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.
This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.
Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.
Fucking Fun Fascists.
They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.
For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.
The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)
Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.
Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:
“Cheer up!”
“Smile!”
“Come on, let your hair down!”
You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.
OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.
Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Star Wars: Another Bastardised Version
Stop reading now if (a) you hate Star Wars, (b) you’ve never seen Star Wars or (c) you’ve had a bellyful of Star Wars parody and satire these last 34 years.
The rest of you, strap on your Millennium Falcon seat beats and prepare to be taken into Hyper-farce. Both of you.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but coincidentally one with humanoid life forms, the same political concepts as Earth and common use of the English language (my God those Victorian missionaries got everywhere didn’t they)...
(cue music)
Star Wars opens with these two robots being shot at by laser guns. Your first thought is that the technology is pretty bloody advanced for 1977, until you realise that the guns don’t shoot straight. C-3PO and R2-D2 walk through the cross-fire and don’t even get hit. C-3PO commences his bleating and belly-aching, a galling habit he maintains without respite for 6 films. Clearly he is homosexual but his circuitry refuses to acknowledge this (it recognises binary though) and consequently he is suffering from a crisis of sexual identity, which makes him socially awkward and generally uptight. R2-D2 just beeps. The original novel was written in the first person singular from R2’s perspective, which is why it didn’t sell very well.
Princess Leia is now seen downloading some tunes from her USB into R2-D2, before running away at the sight of C-3PO (like he’s actually scary) and then getting captured by the film’s ultimate bastard, Darth Vader.
Now here’s a complex character amongst all the 2-dimensional ones. So complex in fact that 5 actors have to play him over the two trilogies of films, including a creepy brat of a kid, Hayden Christensen (so wooden he uses Pledge as a deodorant), the Green Cross Code Man, the Lion King’s dad and finally some innocuously avuncular-looking Johnny Morriss type who’d make a great Worther’s Original advert star if it wasn’t for the horror-film scarring to his head.
The scene shifts to Tunisia, where the two robot droids have landed and are captured by some of the dirtiest children you’ve ever seen, even smellier-looking than a kid I went to school with who we called Flump. This parentless band of shabby juveniles is named after the film which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been planning to work on together previous to this, called Jaw-Wars. (Artistic differences caused a rift and they went their separate ways until teaming up later to write the script for a Han Solo spin-off sit-com.)
The droids are then sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle. They live on a moisture farm, which is like a real farm but without trampled cow shit and a suspicion of incest. Water is a rare commodity in this part of Tunisia, although you wouldn’t think it from the amount Aunt Beru uses to boil her vegetables in the next scene.
Luke discovers Princess Leia’s music downloads inside R2-D2, who then runs off (as far as that is possible with wheels that go a top speed of 2 mph) to find his favourite English actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier. Instead, he has to make do with Alec Guinness who suggests that they all go and rescue this Princess because she sounds hot. She isn’t, but that’s not the point; Luke is pissed off living on a moisture farm in the arse end of beyond, as you would be, and thinks fuck it, why not?
They drive into town, play a trick on some dumb Stormtroopers and find a pub. Luke gets ID’d as he looks about 17 and acts even younger, so Alec Guinness take out one of those fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and burns off some ugly bastard’s arm. He then persuades a mini-cab driver called Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet. Obviously, he should have rung a proper cab firm, because there’s no guarantee that this Han Solo is even insured to drive a spaceship. Furthermore and rather disconcertingly, Han’s BFF is a growling bear (or a bare growler, one or the other) named Chewie, a bit like the sweets. Chewbacca (his full name) really challenges the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief, because in reality an animal that hairy would either have a prominent pair of pink buttocks protruding from beneath its fur or it’d have dry, hardened clagnets of shit stuck to the back of its thighs.
This motley crew of misfits then fly out of Tunisia’s main airport towards what remains of Alderaan. The government had actually blown up the planet earlier in the film as an austerity measure and tortured Princess Leia with one of those old globe-shaped security cameras you used to get in Boots, only with needles sticking out of it.
On the flight, Alec Guinness converts the impressionable young Luke to the same religious cult of which he and Luke’s dad were members. He basically tells some lies to Luke about the father he never knew, because it’s Darth Vader and well, how do you tell a kid his Dad’s such a horrible cunt?
Anyway, they get sucked into the government’s huge sports complex, the Death Star, which was built for the Galactic Olympics and cost a bloody fortune, but at least its huge planet-destroying laser gun works. Once inside our band of heroes split up to look for Princess Leia, thinking that the first to find her gets to ask her out. C-3PO is not interested, for several reasons, but Luke is. Luckily he never ends up shagging her; although with that farming background he probably wouldn’t have flinched to discover later that she’s his sister.
After some running around and shooting lasers they manage to get her back to the spaceship, but Alec Guinness has wandered away to turn off the Death Star’s sucky device and finds himself confronted by Darth Vader. They both take out their fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and have a sword fight. By the standards of any such contest, this would never have been worth the £15 SKY charged for Pay-per-view. Audley Harrison dances better than this. In the end, Darth Vader wins because Alec Guinness lets him, but clearly disappears down a trap door in the floor-tiles. In his place, wearing his brown hoody and holding his bulb is Debbie McGee. Darth Vader thinks to himself WTF?
The others escape and fly off to the rebel base. The rebels are essentially an anti-government organisation, a bit like UK Uncut, but with X-Wing fighters. They have a space battle with government troops in Thai-fighters, which are smaller and a little spicey. In the end, Luke blows up the Death Star and Darth Vader escapes vowing to build an even bigger one once they’ve raised enough taxes to do so.
The film ends with everyone getting a pat on the back, except Chewbacca, who has a pat on his arse. A dry, hardened Wookie pat.
The rest of you, strap on your Millennium Falcon seat beats and prepare to be taken into Hyper-farce. Both of you.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but coincidentally one with humanoid life forms, the same political concepts as Earth and common use of the English language (my God those Victorian missionaries got everywhere didn’t they)...
(cue music)
Star Wars opens with these two robots being shot at by laser guns. Your first thought is that the technology is pretty bloody advanced for 1977, until you realise that the guns don’t shoot straight. C-3PO and R2-D2 walk through the cross-fire and don’t even get hit. C-3PO commences his bleating and belly-aching, a galling habit he maintains without respite for 6 films. Clearly he is homosexual but his circuitry refuses to acknowledge this (it recognises binary though) and consequently he is suffering from a crisis of sexual identity, which makes him socially awkward and generally uptight. R2-D2 just beeps. The original novel was written in the first person singular from R2’s perspective, which is why it didn’t sell very well.
Princess Leia is now seen downloading some tunes from her USB into R2-D2, before running away at the sight of C-3PO (like he’s actually scary) and then getting captured by the film’s ultimate bastard, Darth Vader.
Now here’s a complex character amongst all the 2-dimensional ones. So complex in fact that 5 actors have to play him over the two trilogies of films, including a creepy brat of a kid, Hayden Christensen (so wooden he uses Pledge as a deodorant), the Green Cross Code Man, the Lion King’s dad and finally some innocuously avuncular-looking Johnny Morriss type who’d make a great Worther’s Original advert star if it wasn’t for the horror-film scarring to his head.
The scene shifts to Tunisia, where the two robot droids have landed and are captured by some of the dirtiest children you’ve ever seen, even smellier-looking than a kid I went to school with who we called Flump. This parentless band of shabby juveniles is named after the film which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been planning to work on together previous to this, called Jaw-Wars. (Artistic differences caused a rift and they went their separate ways until teaming up later to write the script for a Han Solo spin-off sit-com.)
The droids are then sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle. They live on a moisture farm, which is like a real farm but without trampled cow shit and a suspicion of incest. Water is a rare commodity in this part of Tunisia, although you wouldn’t think it from the amount Aunt Beru uses to boil her vegetables in the next scene.
Luke discovers Princess Leia’s music downloads inside R2-D2, who then runs off (as far as that is possible with wheels that go a top speed of 2 mph) to find his favourite English actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier. Instead, he has to make do with Alec Guinness who suggests that they all go and rescue this Princess because she sounds hot. She isn’t, but that’s not the point; Luke is pissed off living on a moisture farm in the arse end of beyond, as you would be, and thinks fuck it, why not?
They drive into town, play a trick on some dumb Stormtroopers and find a pub. Luke gets ID’d as he looks about 17 and acts even younger, so Alec Guinness take out one of those fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and burns off some ugly bastard’s arm. He then persuades a mini-cab driver called Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet. Obviously, he should have rung a proper cab firm, because there’s no guarantee that this Han Solo is even insured to drive a spaceship. Furthermore and rather disconcertingly, Han’s BFF is a growling bear (or a bare growler, one or the other) named Chewie, a bit like the sweets. Chewbacca (his full name) really challenges the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief, because in reality an animal that hairy would either have a prominent pair of pink buttocks protruding from beneath its fur or it’d have dry, hardened clagnets of shit stuck to the back of its thighs.
This motley crew of misfits then fly out of Tunisia’s main airport towards what remains of Alderaan. The government had actually blown up the planet earlier in the film as an austerity measure and tortured Princess Leia with one of those old globe-shaped security cameras you used to get in Boots, only with needles sticking out of it.
On the flight, Alec Guinness converts the impressionable young Luke to the same religious cult of which he and Luke’s dad were members. He basically tells some lies to Luke about the father he never knew, because it’s Darth Vader and well, how do you tell a kid his Dad’s such a horrible cunt?
Anyway, they get sucked into the government’s huge sports complex, the Death Star, which was built for the Galactic Olympics and cost a bloody fortune, but at least its huge planet-destroying laser gun works. Once inside our band of heroes split up to look for Princess Leia, thinking that the first to find her gets to ask her out. C-3PO is not interested, for several reasons, but Luke is. Luckily he never ends up shagging her; although with that farming background he probably wouldn’t have flinched to discover later that she’s his sister.
After some running around and shooting lasers they manage to get her back to the spaceship, but Alec Guinness has wandered away to turn off the Death Star’s sucky device and finds himself confronted by Darth Vader. They both take out their fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and have a sword fight. By the standards of any such contest, this would never have been worth the £15 SKY charged for Pay-per-view. Audley Harrison dances better than this. In the end, Darth Vader wins because Alec Guinness lets him, but clearly disappears down a trap door in the floor-tiles. In his place, wearing his brown hoody and holding his bulb is Debbie McGee. Darth Vader thinks to himself WTF?
The others escape and fly off to the rebel base. The rebels are essentially an anti-government organisation, a bit like UK Uncut, but with X-Wing fighters. They have a space battle with government troops in Thai-fighters, which are smaller and a little spicey. In the end, Luke blows up the Death Star and Darth Vader escapes vowing to build an even bigger one once they’ve raised enough taxes to do so.
The film ends with everyone getting a pat on the back, except Chewbacca, who has a pat on his arse. A dry, hardened Wookie pat.
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