The World According to Gogglebox
Page 13
ED MILIBAND
THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON
LOUIS: Kermit the Frog with a red tie.
CAROLYNE: I wouldn’t vote for him because I wouldn’t trust him. If he could do that to his own brother …
ANDREW: It was open and democratic.
LOUIS: He’s a talking nose.
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
DOM: Wishy-washy.
STEPH: Knob.
DOM: Would not command respect anywhere.
THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON
NIKKI: He doesn’t know how to speak.
JONATHAN: Silly bollocks.
THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY
UMAR: We’re warming to him.
BAASIT: His face is too flat. If you look at his side profile, he looks a bit Lego-ish. I think he’s fallen over one time too many, to be honest with you.
THE MOFFATTS, COUNTY DURHAM
SCARLETT: Which one’s that though? With the flat nose?
MARK: He’ll never be prime minister as long as I’ve got a hole in my bottom.
STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON
CHRIS: He looks like a Wallace and Gromit character. He is all Creature Comforts, isn’t he? You know when they do their bloody party political broadcasts? He should do it as a Creature Comforts thing.
STEPHEN: They’ve all got something wrong with their mushes. Cameron’s got no lips.
CHRIS: And they’ve all got dodgy hair.
REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
KATE: If I ever meet him, I’m going to go, ‘Are you David’s brother?’
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
STEPH: If you look at half his face, the top half’s quite nice – bottom half’s absolutely disastrous. Top half I could do. Bottom half, no fucking way.
THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL
RALF: ‘Oh, we couldn’t do this, oh, we tried so hard.’ Fucking hell. They must really think we are donkeys, we’re living on the tree or something with nuts under the arms. It’s ridiculous.
STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON
STEPHEN: He don’t look like he could run a mile, let alone a country.
MICHAEL GOVE
LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL
LEON: I would shoot him if I ever saw him.
BORIS JOHNSON
THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL
EVE: He’s an amazing nutter.
THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY
BAASIT: He’s just a piss-take waiting to happen.
THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON
ANDREW: Aren’t they ghastly, these posh kids? They really turn my stomach.
CAROLYNE: He’s a twat, he’s a toff, he’s a fool and he’s a buffoon, and it’s obviously a fake … but I still like him.
STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON
STEPHEN: I love him.
CHRIS: He’s an idiot. Well, he comes across as an idiot, but I think he’s quite conniving.
STEPHEN: His family all look like each other. Have you seen his mum?
CHRIS: She’s been trimming her own fringe.
STEPHEN: She’s got teeth like a racehorse. And they’ve all got them thick cankles, ain’t they? I reckon underneath it all he’s a conniving little bastard and he’s got his eyes set on that job. Smarmy pillock.
REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
GRAHAM: Loveable rogue.
KATE: Cock end.
THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY
UMAR: Big, pale and powerful.
BAASIT: He’s a bit like Igor’s stunt double in some sort of horror film.
SID: Or a badly dressed Tarzan.
THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON
CAROLYNE: Love him. He’s a guilty pleasure. Like chocolate. You love it but you know you shouldn’t be eating it. And it’s the same with him: you love him, but you know you shouldn’t. But he’s just so likeable. I know it’s an act, but it’s clever of him because it means that people don’t take him seriously.
LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL
LEON: A rich buffoon. Can’t stand the man.
JUNE: He’ll do anything for publicity.
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
STEPH: Love him.
DOM: Fabulous. He’d make a great PM. There are the odd occasions when I think there’s so much waffle that even he doesn’t know what he’s saying.
THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL
VIV: Oh, he’s a nelly.
RALF: I love him.
EVE: Boris for prime minister! I want to go on a night out with him. It’d be like The Hangover.
VIV: He’s bonkers. He’s absolutely bonkers.
EVE: Yeah, but, Mum all the best people are. How do you think I survived high school?
NIGEL FARAGE
STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON
STEPHEN: One foot in the grave and the other one on a bar of soap.
REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
KATE: It’s important to have somebody who is the voice of dissent, somebody who is going to hold a mirror up to it all and force people to ask questions. It’s just the person that does that should be balanced and vaguely sane. He’s like a naughty toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket. Stop playing to him and giving him attention, just walk away. If you just ignore him, he might stop it. Anyway, I reckon he’s got a suit that he unzips and he’s actually a gay woman inside with one leg.
THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON
CAROLYNE: I love him.
LOUIS: Oh, please. Don’t!
CAROLYNE: I think we feel disenfranchised and don’t believe anything that any of the other politicians have told us. I don’t believe that they understand what it’s like to be a normal person living in today’s society. I don’t think they have got their finger on the pulse. And I just feel when I listen to what Nigel Farage says, it chimes.
LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA
PETE: That Farage drives me nuts. He’s like a pantomime dame. ‘Watch out! He’s behind you!’ I can’t take him serious. You know what I’m saying? He’s obviously far more intelligent than I am, but he just reminds me of a berk.
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
DOM: I’ve found what he’s doing very interesting; refreshing, in that his approach is: ‘Well, let’s get on with this, do it now. What are we waiting for? Why do we have to put it off fifteen years?’ I’m not suggesting for a minute I would vote for him. I’ve not actually read his manifesto – in fact, I’ve never read anybody’s manifesto. But people vote based on what they see on the telly and what they read in the paper. People are voting for people; they’re not voting for policies or manifestos, they’re voting … because they like him.
STEPH: Toad of Toad Hall.
STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON
CHRIS: Farage? Bastard.
STEPHEN: Gobby bastard.
SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON
SANDY: UKIP? He’s a dickhead. Don’t like him. I don’t like anybody who has anything to do with the National Front. I’m sorry, it doesn’t work. Not now. Not in 2014. Come on! We’re a multicultural country now. We should all get on with each other.
I don’t mean to be funny, but all he’s doing is these cakes. With raisins, you know? When he has meetings, he always has scones on the table. For the old generation. People with cups of tea. So obviously he’s not looking for the younger ones. He’s aiming at the older generation. Because the older people are set in their ways, so what he says they will understand.
LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL
JUNE: He’s just got one tune. And he keeps on playing it, over and over again. And he never answers any straight question, does he? A lot of his followers are our age, and are still fighting the last war. People who say, ‘Our England,’ and hate going to London, because ‘It’s not our capital any more … ’ And it’s not helped by the way some of the media are. You look at the rubbish on the front of the tabloids and think, ‘Excuse me. Where’s the news?’
LEON: A dickhead. A dangerous dickhead. ‘The whole of Bulgaria and Romania are coming.’ Yeah. My grandparents were immigrants. Fled the pogroms in Rus
sia. My father fought in the last war with the 8th Army. He was wounded in Sicily. ‘They’re all right, Indians and West Indians, they’re all right to fight for us in the war, but you mustn’t have them living here.’ Oh, it annoys me. Terrible racist country, we are.
THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY
UMAR: I don’t know what it is about Nigel Farage, but I just can’t take him seriously. I don’t know whether it’s his policies or his face.
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
STEPH: Enoch Powell by another name.
THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY
UMAR: Our future king.
NICK CLEGG
THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY
UMAR: Is that Nick Clegg, or an actor playing Nick Clegg?
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
STEPH: He looks like he’s got bad breath.
SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON
SANDRA: He’s a dickhead trier.
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
STEPH: Imagine that lily-livered little bloody thing running the country.
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
DOM: How would you use an extra £600 a year?
STEPH: Two pairs of shoes, darling.
ALEX SALMOND
THE MOFFATTS, COUNTY DURHAM
SCARLETT: He’s not going to get that many votes though, because he’s limiting himself, isn’t he, calling himself the Scotland party? Because only Scottish people are going to vote for him.
LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA
PETE: What’s the matter with you, you pillock?
PENSIONS
STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH
DOM: They’ve sort of screwed the whole thing up and they’ve got a major problem on their hands. We’re all living a lot longer, there are more of us, we’re not dying, we’re not allowed to die, you’re not allowed to kill yourself, and now they’ve banned smoking, they’ve done all that so we live a lot longer. You know, at some stage they’ve got to start lifting a few of the laws to enable us to die off a bit quicker.
THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON
CAROLYNE: If they stopped putting all their money into Trident, if they stopped putting all their money into these phoney wars, I’d love to know how much money we would have then. I reckon we’d have plenty.
THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL
RALF: I want Danny Alexander to work a week on the construction. And then, after the week I say to him, ‘Listen, you little twat, come here. So, you want to do this fifty years from now? You want to do this when you’re sixty-five and seventy? So go in your fucking office and think about it again.’
IMMIGRATION
LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL
LEON: We know Romanians, we know Albanians, we know Polish people who work their socks off. And my grandparents were immigrants. And worked hard.
THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY
RAZA: How would you sneak in?
BAASIT: I’d swim the Channel. I’d get to France and swim the Channel and then creep in.
RAZA: How did we sneak in last time, Dad?
Linda, Pete & George
CLACTON-ON-SEA
Linda and Pete, both 64, have been married for
seventeen years. George, 30, moved back in with
his mum and stepdad after separating from his
long-term partner. Ex-publicans Linda and Pete are
both foster carers, having looked after 157 children.
George is known to his friends as ‘Squeaky George’
due to his high-pitched voice.
HOW DID YOU MEET?
PETE: I used to drink in her first pub, the Woolpack in Witham. I used to go with my late wife. Linda was going through a rough patch with her husband.
LINDA: We got divorced. I’ve been married three times.
PETE: And unfortunately, my lovely Sue, she died. She had cancer. And that was it, really. You took another pub on, didn’t you, Lin? In Braintree. And I sort of went over there one day. And never come home again.
LINDA: I wouldn’t let him go home.
PETE: I sort of disappeared. I just paid the mortgage on my house and that was it.
HOW DID YOU GET ON GOGGLEBOX?
GEORGE: My friend James used to work behind the bar at the social club in St Osyth, near Clacton. And he phoned me up and said, ‘I’m working on this programme, and you should do it because it would be perfect for you.’ I’d gone through a really bad break-up a couple of years previous. And he said, ‘George, you sat at the bar, even though you were depressed, mate, and you were funny. You cheered me up.’ I was going to do it with my mate, but halfway through doing the try-out, my mum came in. And she was really funny.
LINDA: George (for some unknown reason) told the Worm Story. Because when he was a little boy, he said, ‘How was I born, Mummy?’ and I said, ‘Well, this worm kept crawling in my kitchen and I kept throwing it out, and one day I picked it up and it had this cute little George-y face and I thought, “Oh, I’ll start feeding this.” And that’s how you come.’ So George told the story: ‘So I was seven years old and thought I was a worm,’ and I went, ‘Wanker!’ and all the film crew were laughing. So they wanted me. And then we bullied Pete into it. He’s quieter than us.
GEORGE: Pete is a BFG: a big friendly giant. And I don’t know why but he goes along with whatever my mum says.
LINDA: We didn’t really know what we were getting into, because we’d never seen the show. Even when we were filming, we still didn’t know what it was about. We didn’t get it.
Like a lot of people, I thought, ‘Ooh, what a weird programme. A bit boring, this.’ But I think it’s very, very contagious.
After about three times, you get your favourite characters, and you want to see what they have to say. People insist that they don’t like it. I say, ‘I don’t expect you to, but you really have got to watch it three times to get it.’
PETE: We did it for George.
LINDA: He’s got such a personality. He’s wasted. And although he’s an electrician, I said to him, ‘If you could get paid for entertaining … if you could do something like this, it’d be fantastic rather than getting up in lofts.’ You know – when he’s got all that talent.
PETE: I want him to get on. So he leaves me a load of money.
WHAT DO YOU THINK
OF YOURSELVES ON SCREEN?
GEORGE: When I saw myself, I thought, ‘What a cock.’
PETE: I didn’t like watching myself at first. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, haven’t I put weight on? I can’t be in this show.’ I thought we were all slim really. I mean, look at that handsome bastard up there, in the wedding photo. Once you get through that stage, it is funny. You’re not just cringing at yourself, you’re laughing at some of the others. Perversely, you start to enjoy it after a while.
LINDA: I have to go in my own bedroom and sit all quiet and watch it all on my own. To be embarrassed. One time, I was crying, watching myself crying on television. I made myself cry again because I got so emotional.
PETE: When she goes in there, George goes off and watches it on his own, and I’m sitting in here.
LINDA: We all have to watch it on different tellies.
GEORGE: I’ve got a friend, Gerald, and he talks like Dom, from Steph and Dom, you know? He’s very well spoken.
PETE: Gerald is posher than Prince Charles.
LINDA: He’s going to teach George to sail.
PETE: That will be a calamity. I can’t see George being Captain Kipper.
GEORGE: Anyway, believe it or not, I was planning to sail round, what is it, the Sea of Biscuits? The Bay of Biscay, that’s it. With Gerry. And he saw me on the television. And he said, ‘Dear boy, you’re funny enough as it is. You don’t need to accentuate your vocabulary with swear words.’ And he made me look at it, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh my gawd, I do swear a lot.’ But I can’t help it. There’s a lot of wine in that cup.
BEING RECOGNISED
LINDA: Do you know what we like about this the most? We’ve met absolutely lovely people. People coming up bec
ause we’ve been on telly. We haven’t done it to be famous. But, like, solicitors come up, people you wouldn’t think. And they’ve come up to me in Marks & Spencer’s and gone, ‘You’re brilliant on that show.’ They can tell you’re not acting.
GEORGE: Mum likes it. She deserves it, to be honest. The other day, she came out the back of Williams & Griffin in Colchester, and this lady went, ‘Lin! Lin!’ And me mum went, ‘Yeah,’ as if to say, ‘Yes, it is me, off the telly … ’ And the lady went, ‘Can you move your car?’