There was one financial train wreck after another. We had Ireland, Portugal, and of course Greece …
Footage of Greece aflame.
CHARLIE: Greece was the Enron of Europe and things there looked far from good – which was great from a TV news perspective, because it turned a complex economic story into something with panic and fire in it.
To be fair, Greece does catch fire easily. Just ask anyone who’s made chips. Anyway, after we’d worried about Greece it was time to worry about Italy.
Footage of Italy and Silvio Berlusconi.
CHARLIE: Yes, Italy, that leggy brunette of a nation, had a liquidity problem – possibly because it was headed by a leader who’d spent years doing his level best to spurt all the liquid out of his body.
Berlusconi had been in the spotlight for much of the year thanks to murmurings about his ‘Bunga Bunga’ parties. But now he was in a hole he hadn’t cheerfully lubricated first, and before long he had to go.
Yes, while throughout the Arab world leaders were being ousted by the people, in Europe they were being ousted by cold hard numbers. And the financial mess keeps deepening.
Money’s knackered, basically. Try withdrawing banknotes from a cashpoint now and God knows what’ll happen – a sort of gas will probably come out.
Soon we’ll have to adopt a medieval bartering system, in which we pay for food with sexual favours. Sainsbury’s is going to be horrible on a Saturday morning: everyone standing at the checkout, tearfully masturbating for orange juice.
Mind you, at least Berlusconi will be in his element. I doubt it’d be the first time he’s jerked off over an Innocent Smoothie.
Keep Calm and Oh Just Stop It
08/01/2012
New Year’s resolutions work like this: you think of something you enjoy doing, and then resolve to stop doing it. Smoking, for instance, or drinking, or shunting fistfuls of salted butter down your ravenous maw each morning. By denying yourself some of your few remaining pleasures, you hope to extend your lifespan, so you can spend extra decades forlornly wishing you were smoking or drinking or gorging on butter instead of slowly withering to death in a self-imposed prison of abstinence.
Stop being lazy, you tell yourself. And as you lace up your running shoes with the enthusiasm of a man condemned to eat damp cardboard for ever, you know you will fail, and you will dislike yourself for failing.
Rather than setting yourself a New Year’s resolution, why not simply pick a reason for hating yourself for the next 365 days? Takes less time, and it’s easier to stick to.
Or you could do what I’m doing this year: setting New Year’s resolutions for everyone in the world except me. These are the things I want humankind to stop doing immediately, on the grounds they’ve been doing them too long. They won’t listen, but that’s OK, because as I’ve already established, resolutions are doomed to fail.
Oh, and I’ve chosen the really huge bugbears, obviously, not the little ones like global economic justice or racial intolerance. We won’t change those till the Martians land and command us to sort that shit out. Anyway, the list:
1. Stop creating ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ variants
The original wartime ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster, rediscovered more than ten years ago by the owner of Alnwick’s Barter Books and digitally touched up by Chris Donald, erstwhile editor of Viz, is an amusing yet poignant instant design classic. It belongs on a poster, or a mug, or a tea towel sold by Barter Books. But not on a packet of condoms or a soft drink. Or a cushion. Or engraved on your baby’s face.
Every bastard’s churning out ‘Keep Calm’ merchandise these days. Check your attic. Someone’s probably up there screen printing it on to a hammock right now. Moneygrabbers with no right to the ‘Keep Calm’ phrase (and no connection to Barter Books) have attempted to trademark it. And at the time of writing, Britain’s bestselling iPhone app is a widget that lets you create your own zany version of the poster, so it reads ‘Keep Calm and LOL Kittens!!!!’ or something similarly anti-hilarious. It doesn’t even use the right font.
It’s time we, as a species, ceased to be impressed by this sort of thing. We’re better than that. We are.
2. Stop pretending cupcakes are brilliant
Of all the irritating ‘Keep Calm’ bastardisations, the most irritating of all is the one that reads ‘Keep Calm and Eat a Cupcake’.
Cupcakes used to be known as fairy cakes, until something happened a few years ago. I don’t know what the thing was, because I wasn’t paying attention. All I know is that suddenly middle-class tosspoles everywhere were holding artisan cupcakes aloft and looking at them and pointing and making cooing sounds and going on and bloody on about how much they loved them.
I wouldn’t mind, but cupcakes are bullshit. And everyone knows it. A cupcake is just a muffin with clown puke topping. And once you’ve got through the clown puke there’s nothing but a fistful of quotidian sponge nestling in a depressing, soggy ‘cup’ that feels like a pair of paper knickers a fat man has been sitting in throughout a long, hot coach journey between two disappointing market towns.
Actual slices of cake are infinitely superior, as are moist chocolate brownies, warm chocolate-chip cookies and virtually any other dessert you can think of. Cupcakes are for people who can’t handle reality.
3. Stop pretending Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are endlessly fascinating
Look, it’s not that I don’t see their appeal. I just can’t fathom the apparently infinite depth of it. I appreciate they’re both polished entertainers with a neat line in music videos and some very catchy songs, but beyond that – what are you all seeing, precisely?
I mean, it’s nice that the openly kooky Lady Gaga inspires her fans not to give in to bullies and suchlike, but she also inspires them to ‘put their paws up’ and be a bit annoying, which kind of balances it out, really.
Neither Lady Gaga nor Beyoncé are Mayan gods. And if their central message is one of personal empowerment and proud individuality you shouldn’t be worshipping or emulating them anyway. Let them sing and leave it at that. Keep Calm and Carry On, if you like.
4. Stop making superhero movies
Kick-Ass, that was a good one. Iron Man, fair enough. But now we don’t need any more superhero films. Especially not pretentious ones.
There’s a new Dark Knight film out this year. Calling Batman ‘the Dark Knight’ is like calling Papa Smurf ‘the Blue Patriarch’: you’re not fooling anyone. It’s a children’s story about a billionaire who dresses up as a bat to punch criminals on the nose. No normal adult can possibly relate to that, which makes his story inherently boring, unless you’re a child, in which case you can enjoy the bits where he rides his super-bike around with his cape flapping behind him like a tit.
The scenes where some improbable clown-like supervillain delivers a quasi-philosophical speech are even worse, incidentally.
Tip: if you want to make your bad guy interesting and menacing and exotic, don’t waste hours gluing prosthetic dice to his eyelids and giving him a name like ‘the Quizzlestick’. Just show him masturbating into an oven glove while watching earthquake footage on CNN. Then you’ve got my attention. And made a film worth watching.
DVD Dave
15/01/2012
British filmmakers! Put down those clapperboards and pay attention because David Cameron, who happens to be a huge fan of your work – assuming you’re making The King’s Speech II – wants you to focus on films likely to be a ‘commercial success’. Which presumably is the last thing you want.
Cynics say Cameron knows squit about British films. When that photo of SamCam and Michelle Obama having a coffee morning in the Downing Street flat was released, there didn’t seem to be many British films in the Cameron DVD collection. Not even Carry On Screaming. Mainly US TV box sets. Oh, and he owns the film Armageddon on DVD. It’s hard not to judge him for that.
To be fair, the photo was taken before The King’s Speech had come out on DVD. Apparently he bought twenty-si
x copies of that. Not deliberately – he thought the disc was sticking so he kept buying it again and again, until he realised the lead character had a stutter.
Anyway, Cameron’s advice for filmmakers runs as follows: go mainstream. For years, you’ve held audiences in contempt, deliberately making your works obtuse. You even have to be cajoled into taking the lens cap off because you’d rather the repellent ‘viewers’ sat there in pitch-blackness, trying to piece together the story from the soundtrack alone.
Not that there’s a ‘story’ anyway. The notion of a coherent plot offends your snooty arts-hole sensibilities. No one’s saying you have to signpost everything, but for God’s sake attach some clear labels.
Look at The King’s Speech. For one thing, you can look at it: no lens caps left on there. What’s more, the story is simple. The world’s most important man can’t speak properly, so he gets taught to speak properly. But then disaster strikes! It looks like he might not be able to speak properly after all. Finally, in a triumphant climax, he speaks properly. It’s a feelgood ending for everybody, apart from the 450,000 Britons killed in the war he just announced on the radio.
Feelgood endings are another mainstream necessity. Why go to the cinema to watch a film about desperate, blighted lives, when thanks to Cameron you’re already living one – in cutting-edge 3D.
Not that directors shouldn’t make films about ordinary paupers, provided they’re left smiling at the end. One of the main reasons David Cameron enjoyed The King’s Speech is that it showed him how a man less privileged than himself overcame his lowly breeding and learned how to conquer a stammer. Compare that with a film like Fish Tank. People said Fish Tank was brilliant but it didn’t outperform Transformers: Dark of the Moon, because they neglected to put any 200-foot robots in it, and because none of the cast victoriously punched the air at the end.
The British film industry needs to have the courage to think inside the box, sinking its money into guaranteed box-office hits such as Absolute Beginners and that Alien Autopsy comedy starring Ant and Dec. If you want commercial success, look at what’s packing them in down the multiplex, and give them more of the same – only morer and samer. People hate variety. They don’t want anything ‘new’.
Superhero films are guaranteed box-office gold – so let’s make a British one: a Dark Knight facsimile about a vigilante Beefeater in a rubberised outfit who lives in the Tower of London with an army of ravens.
Also, how about Paddington Bear as a wisecracking CGI hero? The marmalade sandwiches he enjoys won’t ‘read’ overseas, so we’ll replace those with peanut butter and jelly, but otherwise he’s exactly the same loveable British Paddington Bear, minus the bit about him being an immigrant from darkest Peru. Also, he wears sunglasses and says ‘woah, THAT’s godda hurt!’ and is voiced by Ashton Kutcher.
Actually, Cameron isn’t an utter philistine. He approvingly referenced the Lindsay Anderson film if …. on the Today programme. Which is odd because if …. is precisely the sort of film that would never, ever get made if his advice were heeded.
No one sets out to make a box-office flop. The problem with British films isn’t a failure of ambition – it’s the challenge of getting the damn things seen in a world filled with chain multiplexes programmed by monolithic distributors. Without distribution, no one sees your film. And without a huge marketing engine behind you, without a cookie-cutter similarity to the last big thing, the distributors often ain’t interested.
The King’s Speech was a good film, but it’s essentially Rocky for stammerers. Patriotic, yes: but we’ve made other, more forward-looking British films by ignoring the box office and taking risks.
This Is England was a big British hit after years of low-budget risks from Shane Meadows. Kidulthood was a big British hit because Noel Clarke risked a film resembling nothing else in the multiplex. Four Lions, Shaun of the Dead and The Inbetweeners Movie were big British hits, the success of which can be traced back to risks taken on television: Chris Morris, Spaced, and the original Inbetweeners sitcom – niche comedies on minority channels. The mainstream came to them. Not the other way round.
If Cameron is serious about wanting our film industry to make more money, he should leave the ball-breaking yap about profits to Glengarry Glen Ross, and instead take the long view: nurture the creative talent of tomorrow – from filmmakers to games designers.
The upcoming generation is being squeezed harder and has fewer choices than ever. Unleashed, they could create things neither Cameron nor myself could possibly begin to imagine.
Give them a playground, let them make mistakes, and give them time: they’ll generate glorious failures and unprecedented moneyspinners. British ones. Which Cameron can proudly display on his shelf. If there’s room between Armageddon and his twenty-six copies of The King’s Speech.
In Tokyo
22/01/2012
I’m currently on another planet, namely Japan, which for the average Westerner is an experience tantamount to recovering from a serious head injury, in that while the world around you is largely recognisable, it somehow makes little sense. Incredibly minor example: they sell green Kit Kats here (not the wrapper – I’m not that easily impressed – I mean the chocolate itself is green).
Furthermore, just like someone struggling to reacquaint themselves with everyday life, you have to continually re-learn how to perform previously straightforward tasks such as going to the toilet. In Japan you either crap into a bluntly utilitarian hole in the ground (reverse squat-toilet style) or, increasingly, into one of their famous hi-tech Toto superbogs with a heated seat and a remote-controlled bum-washing jet.
The first toilet I encountered in Japan was so advanced it automatically lifted the seat itself the moment it sensed my approach, like it just couldn’t wait for me to crap down its throat. It’s disconcerting, shitting into a robot’s mouth.
In five years’ time that toilet won’t merely cock its lid when you enter the room, it’ll be programmed to hum lullabies as it swallows your droppings. If the machines ever rise up and kill us, we’ll only have our own smug sense of mastery to blame.
But I’m not in Japan to sit on toilets. I’m here to write some travel pieces for this newspaper, which will appear later in the year. As a result I’ve been zipping all over the place. But every now and then, when the sheer sensory overload gets too much, I retire to the hotel room to stare at the television.
Westerners have been confounded by Japanese TV for decades, ever since Clive James amused millions in the eighties with clips from a gameshow called Endurance, in which contestants had to undergo a series of increasingly painful and humiliating ordeals. For British viewers, much of the fun came from sheer outraged disbelief that watching people being physically tormented and degraded was considered entertainment.
But of course that was 100 years ago, before I’m a Celebrity transformed low-level torture into mainstream British fare. Nonetheless, you don’t have to watch Japanese TV for long until you see something shocking. The other evening I watched a programme in which a man was shown spooning boiling molten metal into his mouth. This was followed by footage of a man being mauled by a tiger and a rib-tickling sequence in which a studio guest was deliberately poisoned by some kind of sea creature.
Generally though, the TV here is surprisingly dull. The vast majority of programmes consist of several seriously overexcited people sitting in an overlit studio decorated like a novelty grotto made from regurgitated Dolly Mixture, endlessly babbling about food.
Seriously, it’s all food, food, food. People eating food, answering questions about food, sometimes even just pointing at food and laughing. It’s as if they’ve only just discovered food and are perpetually astonished by its very existence. Imagine watching an endless episode of The One Show with the colour and brightness turned up to 11, where all the guests have been given amphetamines, the screen is peppered with random subtitles, and every ten seconds it cuts to a close-up shot of a bowl of noodles for no apparent reason.
That’s 90 per cent of Japanese TV right there.
For a nation so preposterously hi-tech, it’s a curiously old-fashioned approach to television. People talking in studios. Forever. Like it’s the fifties. And yet it’s insanely agitated: as though the participants are simply too wired to make a proper TV show, and have subsequently just switched the cameras on and started yelping.
The adverts continue this vaguely old-school theme. There are plenty of super-sophisticated ones starring giant CGI cats and the like, but there’s also a rather charming emphasis on dancing: people unpretentiously dancing and singing about the product on offer (generally a foodstuff, which presumably explains their terrifying level of excitement). It makes the Go Compare tenor seem subtle. Sedate, even.
But while onscreen Japan offers up old-fashioned fodder with an unhinged, frantic glee bordering on malevolence, the moment you step outside, the population itself seems incredibly calm, as though faintly mesmerised by the screaming technology surrounding them.
The cliché about the Japanese being unbelievably polite also holds true. At times they’re so helpful it’s almost a pain in the arse.
Ask a passing stranger if they know where the nearest branch of Mos Burger is and, if they don’t immediately know the answer, they’ll often start researching the subject on your behalf, whipping out their smartphones to locate it using Google maps or calling up their friends for advice.
And if after several minutes of peering at maps, placing phone calls, and umming and ahhing and apologising, they still can’t provide a detailed set of directions, they appear to take it as a personal blow. In London, you’d get a smile and a shrug. Here they almost run away in disgrace. You actually feel guilty having inflicted that level of shame on them.
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