But it’s not just footballers who are at it. In the depth of his troubles Tiger Woods claims he seriously considered leaving golf to become a US Navy SEAL. He’d quickly have become one of their top snipers using nothing more than a three-wood. Imagine Osama bin Laden looking out of his window on to what’s essentially the world’s biggest sand bunker only to see Tiger Woods taking a backswing and then a tiny white projectile getting exponentially larger until, thwack!, it smashed his fucking face off. Navy SEALs are experts in covert operations. Tiger wouldn’t have even needed any training. All he’d have had to have done was imagine he was in a strip club and the enemy combatant was his wife.
Maybe golf is just so fucking boring that Woods’s behaviour was unavoidable catharsis. Maybe all sport requires so much repetition that some form of sociopathy is inevitable. And most of these guys don’t even get to be winners. Most of them are just training to be fast enough to photobomb the back of a shot of Usain Bolt as he goes over the finishing line.
Golf might be boring but it’s not as bad as tennis. Lots of people camped outside the entrance to Wimbledon, as that was much more interesting than actually going inside. Wimbledon was first held in 1877 when someone had a glut of strawberries they needed to get rid of. Andy Murray cried after winning the final. It’s lovely to see a Scotsman crying where the scene doesn’t involve handcuffs, an empty bottle of flavoured vodka and his ex-wife’s recently kicked-to-death dog. I’m trying to remember the last time I cried. Coincidentally, it was also the last time I masturbated. To pinpoint it more precisely, it was this evening when The One Show did a feature on breast cancer. A British man hadn’t won Wimbledon for seventy-seven years but we have to remember that’s only because it was seventy-six years ago that people from other countries started playing tennis.
It can’t be easy for English people to know that Wimbledon has been won by the first Scotsman ever to pick up a tennis racket. Gerard Butler was there, smiling like somebody had deleted every film he’s made since 300 from his IMDb profile. Even Victoria Beckham was smiling, as if she’d just broken out of Arkham Asylum and was about to kill Robin. Having a Scottish tennis champion has certainly given us something big to live up to; we only had the discovery of penicillin and the invention of TV till now.
Andy’s been awarded the Freedom of Stirling. That’s like on your eighteenth birthday finding out your parents have had a key cut especially for you that opens the bin cupboard. People are calling for him to be knighted because he’s done something no other Brit has done for the past seventy-six years. But that could set a precedent. They’d have to knight the next person who was funny on Radio 1 and the next person to finger Susan Boyle.
Andy is set to earn £100 million. If I were in his position I’d buy up every tennis ball in the world, incinerate them and then enjoy my money safe in the knowledge that I’d never have to play that fucking stupid game ever again. For the first few years I’d be celebrating so hard that I’d turn up for every match dressed as a pirate and at the end of every set I’d lay my knob out on the baseline and demand Hawkeye took a picture.
Did you watch the Virgin London Marathon? Anyone who’s got Virgin broadband or used their trains will know that a marathon is the quickest way of reaching someone twenty-six miles away. How about those elite runners from Kenya? Their time was a little slower than usual as they were repeatedly stopped and searched by the Metropolitan Police. It’s weird to see people running through the streets of London without plasmas. I grew up in a place where if you saw a guy running in a Mickey Mouse costume he was a paedophile. We were sponsoring him to buy a vibrator.
Still, I think my favourite sports story of the year was that Sharran Alexander, the thirty-two-stone, six-foot mum from West London, is the entire British sumo wrestling team by herself. She’s hoping to fight in Japan this month but it depends on funding – and whether they’ve got biscuits over there. She says there’s not much that sportswomen of her size can do – it’s pretty much just sumo and allowing pole vaulters to land on you. She’s got to be the only top sports star who uses Stacey Soloman as their nutritionist. Apparently, the rest of the sumo team quit but brave Sharran has made sure they haven’t been missed, and the food budget remains as high as ever. I’d love to see her Rocky-style training montage – ‘Eye of the Tiger’ ringing out and sweat pouring down her face as she picks up her fourteenth Cherry Bakewell.
7
TV
The best TV show ever would be a programme where really fat people were made to live in a house with a really thin door, and the winner would be whoever got thin enough to get out first. And all the furniture was made of cake. But we can’t even have that because it wouldn’t be quite deadening enough.
I find it incredibly odd that TV, a terrible succession of images of ever-increasing meanness and bankruptcy, holds such a fascinating appeal for people. Even those like me, who believe they reject it, watch and tweet about it. Maybe we kid ourselves that we’re talking about the death of culture or something. Really, we’re just sprinkling the salt that helps people shovel this shit into themselves. Sometimes, when I found myself on TV crucifying some celeb or game show, I wondered if I wasn’t just filling the role of the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in 1984.
I actually think that being viewed ironically is the only way much of our culture can survive. How could Louis Walsh be viewed with sincere feeling? If we view Louis Walsh as a text, there’s no reading of him that suggests he is supposed to be interpreted as anything other than the very arseflute we feel so superior about viewing him as.
Indeed, it’s possible that sincerity would destroy capitalism, as none of its products are really supposed to inspire sincere feeling. There’s a singer called Daniel Johnston, who was a big influence on Nirvana, and a great documentary was made about his mental illness called The Devil and Daniel Johnston. At one point he’s in an asylum, really struggling, and he asks his manager to try to get him a job writing jingles for Mountain Dew, the fizzy drink. He’s an amazing artist who’s just obsessed with writing this jingle, for some reason. They play the song he wrote over a shot of the Mountain Dew vending machine in the asylum. It’s just this heartbreakingly beautiful thing crafted from love and disappointment and regret and it’s all about Mountain Dew. And, of course, it’s hard not to sit there and think what a stupid fucking thing Mountain Dew is to sing that about. In the face of his sincerity, the triviality and crassness of cans of sugary water seems obvious. So instead, Mountain Dew get (previously) credible rappers to do ironic promos and there’s a general air of ‘Hey, we all know what this is, right? This is the bit where I’ve got to sell you the drink’, and it sure sells a lot of fizzy pop.
As a comedian, I find it odd that people imagine a comedian is better because they’ve seen them on TV. When I see a comic on TV it’s . . . well . . . it’s kind of like when I see a doctor on TV. Someone good at presenting themselves without necessarily being technically competent. A haircut. A cunt. It’s almost fun that something as banal as telly has this hold over people. Like everybody sat down of an evening and stared at a ball of coloured wool. A nurse actually stabbed her boyfriend to death because he didn’t want to watch Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Well, there was only one way to decide . . . FIGHT!
Being a comedian gives you an interesting view of how the media works. Most people whom I’ve read writing media columns for papers seem barely above the level of punters. I wonder if maybe this is because there’s a lot of money in TV, and if you had any understanding of how programmes worked you’d go and make some yourself.
One thing you notice is the increasing depoliticisation of TV shows. Obviously, there’s still a huge political agenda at work, but much less overt politics. The main satire show in Britain, Have I Got News for You, begins with picture jokes so forced and dispiriting they act as a kind of ideological security scan. If you can smile and nod your way through that shit then they know you won’t flip out during the shrieking cognitive dissonance of playing guessing games
against a backdrop of worldwide war and financial meltdown.
I was on there once when they showed a picture of a girl being captured by police as she tried to steal a leg of frozen lamb. She was pictured attempting to climb a fence as several police officers dragged her down from below. Everyone made jokes like, you know, maybe she should have stolen three more legs and ridden off on them. I dimly knew I was supposed to join in with a ‘I suppose if you saw enough lamb thieves jumping over a fence you’d fall asleep!’ or whatever, but all I could think was how hungry do you have to be to steal a leg of frozen lamb. I can’t imagine what any decent human being could possibly have interjected. ‘She looks frightened’, perhaps.
There’s always a terror on these shows that someone will say something offensive, but there’s a bigger fear of someone saying something relevant. In a world where we fly remote-control bombs into civilians and rip out our planet’s lungs to fund our appetite for shiny gee-gaws, I find the idea of being offended at a joke vaguely decadent. I don’t wish any harm on such people, except perhaps that they suddenly develop a sense of irony as they tweet their moral outrage on a phone made by a suicidal slave.
I think if someone announced that the whole of the last couple of decades of telly had actually been a huge overarching art project about banality and worthlessness, a deliberately clumsy shadow play of exhausted memes, I would stand up and applaud. Perhaps you can just view it that way, anyway. I mean, the only interpretation that really matters for you is your own. I always enjoy The Matrix a lot more by pretending that Morpheus is the spiritually enlightened version of Laurence Fishburne’s character in King of New York.*
Perhaps our media output is an enormous subconscious defence mechanism. You know how radio waves and TV signals travel off through space? Perhaps we know that we’re not ready for first contact and fear the malevolence of a race advanced enough to travel easily among the stars. So that’s what our culture is for. No technocratic alien race will willingly visit the world that produces Take Me Out.
Look at the sheer creative morbidity of our top-rating shows. Strictly gets 11.5 million viewers – I never even realised there were so many people in the country going through the menopause. The show lost viewers with Bruce’s return – which shocked me. I thought the only point in watching was the grim anticipation of seeing him collapse, develop a cocoon, then fly off like a giant moth.
Alan Sugar says that The Apprentice has not been sexed-up for ratings. It must be for more sinister reasons, then. It was the sexiest series so far, yet still presented by a man who looks like he’s been cleaned out of someone’s belly button.
I have to accept some responsibility for The X Factor’s reappearance this year. The sloppy calibration of my flux capacitor meant I failed to go back to 1924 as planned, and beat John Logie Baird to death with a replica TV Quick Best Entertainment Show Award. I overshot by a full decade, the one consolation being that, thanks to my efforts, we’ve at least been spared the empty hypnotic indulgence of Professor Hugo Moffat’s clockwork mesmetron.
I confess I lost a big X Factor bet at the bookies this time round. I’d got 4 to 1 on me taking my own life before the end of the series. Every week we’ve heard who was the bookies’ favourite. Is that much of a guide? Can the best judge of the nation’s mainstream musical tastes really be someone whose perfect sound is a chorus of divorced men coughing and sobbing as they try to light tear-stained roll-ups?
In 2012 The X Factor lost two million viewers. Perhaps it’s simply becoming harder to operate a remote control when you’ve got cloven hooves and a twitch. I think ‘viewers’ is the wrong word. It’s too active. Still, I suppose there’s just not the space to write ‘This Saturday two million fewer people had the deluded shuffling of sterile karaoke puppets reflected in the glaze that coats their lifeless eyes.’ I’ve started to wonder whether ratings are down because people have absorbed all the crap they can take. Maybe it’s literally brimming up to their eyeballs and when they next chop an onion their face will shit itself. Are there too many ad breaks on it now? I’m glad of them. At least it’s a relative break from the relentless commercialism.
But these declining viewing figures are a concern. Experts estimate if they don’t stop falling, by 2032 the show will be forced to travel door-to-door, contestants trying to win viewers over by singing through their letterboxes. It will constitute a sorry procession, forced to trundle its way from town to town in cages set upon little wooden carts, Simon’s brain atop in a nutrient-filled jar, the whole affair pulled along by a team of blinded stray dogs, relentlessly driven forward by a cackling hooded driver dangling an Asda Smart Price sausage from a fishing rod.
I’m enjoying the X Factor iPhone app where you can hit a button to clap or boo the acts. To get a rat in a lab to do that they’d have to give it some kind of reward – perhaps by making the singing stop. A lot of the show seems to involve cutting back to the judges’ faces as they run through the three or four emotions available to them. Except Louis, who always has the startled look of a sleeping pensioner who’s just heard a noise downstairs.
Louis always says ‘You deserve to be on that stage’ to everyone he sees, when realistically that would only be true if he were standing in front of a gallows. Simon needs to find a way of getting better judges on the show – perhaps with some sort of televised judging contest. Gary Barlow’s performance is utterly compelling. His voice has a faraway, hollow quality, as if during a séance his body’s been seized by some blasphemous entity. I keep expecting him to interrupt someone covering ‘Valerie’ with a haunting monologue about the indignities his soul is suffering in hell. Perhaps his ghost can only rest if he uses boot camp to get the bands to solve his own murder. When the triumphant spirit explodes as incandescent light from a screaming Gary’s nose, mouth and eyes, we can all tap the clap button.
I’m surprised Britney Spears managed to get a job on the US X Factor. The last time she went near a judging panel they took her kids away. Britney is pumping weights, and doing yoga and kick-boxing. She will soon hold the title of fittest woman alive that no one wants to fuck. Her fans vented their anger about her lacklustre UK shows. I saw a bit of Britney’s dance routines on the news – in fairness, I thought I was watching Libyan rebels dispose of Gaddafi’s corpse. It’s hardly surprised that Britney doesn’t look totally focused – in fairness, she’s probably trying to work out where she is, who she is and why a voice is telling her to kill. I wonder why famous people even get mental disorders. What tips them over the edge from their usual happy setting of just wanting the whole world to worship them?
Nicole Scherzinger says she’s been feeling lonely since her split from Lewis Hamilton. She confessed that she has no friends in London and has been reduced to dining out with her own staff – as if they were real human beings! Nicole had to fork out thousands for a flight upgrade after X Factor bosses booked her into economy. Luckily, she could put it on her card. If she’d had to busk for it in departures she’d still be there when plate tectonics had solved the problem. Of course, these days former X Factor winner Steve Brookstein travels for free. Simon’s had his skin made into a natty set of matching luggage. To this day he swears that when he opens the shoulder bag he sometimes hears a plaintive ‘We’ll make another album soon, won’t we Si?’ drifting up from features a casual glance might assume were just blemishes in the leather.
You remember Steve Brookstein? ‘What’s the time?’ ‘Steve Brookstein time.’ That one.
I had my fingers crossed that James Arthur would win The X Factor, so that we’d never hear of him again. Do be careful, James. It appears that Simon’s tucked a clause in your contract that should your album flop he can hang your ornately inked pelt from the wall of his walk-in humidor. Fans queued overnight to meet James. I’d queue up overnight to see him, the same way I would have done if I’d been alive in Victorian times and had the chance to see Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. James can now enjoy what being an X Factor winner means. Constant Twitt
er abuse, one failed album and a brief part in a shit West End musical. James said, ‘I’m probably going to get my teeth fixed. It’s not a vanity thing.’ Well, it is, and it will be like putting twenty-six-inch rims on a wheelie bin.
Fellow X Factor champions Little Mix say they’re bidding to crack America. Shouldn’t they start by trying to crack Britain first? Little Mix show just how little you can achieve without any talent or hard work. Little Mix. Less a band name, more a description of the group’s gene pool. They look so young I just don’t feel comfortable playing the usual girl-band ‘In which order would you?’ game. OK, if you insist. I suppose I’d behead the blonde one first, then beat the other three to death with her corpse. The girls are proud to say they’re teetotal and never touch drugs. They get high on life! And suffer from a desperate addiction to the approval of total strangers. They want to inspire their fans. Good! About time little girls had some proper role models. I can’t be the only parent getting fed up of all that ‘I want to be a vet, I want to be a nurse’ bullshit.
Presumably the first inspirational message of empowerment for their legion of young fans will be, ‘Yes, you too can endorse goods or products as directed by your management.’ Simon wants them to focus on the music. Apparently, in their contract he’s even decreed their vaginas be covered in hot wax before receiving the seal of his holy ring.
Clean-living Little Mix have adopted ‘We won’t steal your boyfriend’ as their motto. It’s a self-help mantra that’s been used unsuccessfully by the members of Westlife, Boyzone and in the adapted form, ‘I won’t steal your boy’, by none other than Michael Jackson. They’ve been described as so likeable they could sell coals to Newcastle. That expression should be updated – how about, ‘They could sell a Federico Fellini boxed set in Newcastle’?
The girls were slammed for using an autocue. An autocue machine, yes, like they have down those autocue bars where hen nights sing ‘I Will Survive’. I hear that they were told not to learn the lyrics to their songs as Simon considers it essential to dull the winners’ powers of recall, so family and past friends don’t hinder reprogramming.
Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian Page 8