Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian

by Frankie Boyle

  We all have our ways of picking the numbers. I tend to write numbers on forty-four eggs then place them in a giant incubator. When they’ve hatched and matured, I ride the biggest ostrich at the head of all the rest, tether it up outside the newsagents and ask for a Lucky Dip. Though of late I’ve swallowed forty-four numbered ping pong balls, then jotted down the first six that I reflexively regurgitate when played the Loose Women theme tune.

  A high proportion of lottery players are older women. So an easy way to guarantee some pretty vigorous action with over-fifties divorcees is just to get your cock coated in scratchcard foil. I think if I won it’d be important to share that kind of wealth. I’d have a hundred grand changed into 2p coins, put in a tip-up truck, then I’d drive round looking for buskers. I’d also get a penis extension. Nothing too big, just a room big enough to display them all in.

  Some of the sums being won are ridiculous. What would I do with that kind of money? It’s a cliché but I’d have one forearm replaced with an outboard motor. Then I could commit a crime near any body of water and skilfully avoid detection by tipping Fairy Liquid from my hollow top hat and thrashing the surface with the propeller, before disappearing into the spume.

  Ray Winstone says he’ll leave this country as he’s being ‘raped’ by high taxes. I hope he moves to a country where they have no taxes. And he’s then raped. Most people would happily pay more tax if they thought it was going towards raping Ray Winstone. That could be the new television advert for HMRC come self-assessment time: the little tax collector cartoon character in a pinstripe suit and bowler hat raping Ray Winstone. I reckon you’d get people earning seven grand a year offering to pay 40 per cent tax.

  Stamps are to rise by a staggering 30 per cent. Maybe the Post Office should try to appease public anger by at least having the Queen lower her top to expose a nipple. If you’ve little kids you can save money; they’ll think it’s a real adventure del-ivering the easier ones for you. Which reminds me, I must phone the Congolese embassy again. I know, I’ll never forgive myself; if I hadn’t treated him to all those extra crusts he’d have been able to squeeze out through the bars like normal.

  Research shows there’s a ‘fine line between being willing to pay more and walking away from the service’ – a line that was crossed about eight years ago. In their defence, the Royal Mail have had to raise prices because there’s less birthday money in cards for their postmen to steal nowadays. The postal service is to be sold off, with staff receiving £2,000 in shares. Not all employees will receive them, as they’ll be sent out by post. The government has been warned there could be striking at the Royal Mail, but sadly for the unions people thought they already were.

  Ed Miliband called for all UK goods to display ‘Made in Britain’ stickers. Aren’t our exports suffering enough as it is? We might shift a bit more with ones that say ‘Made in Germany’ (or Japan). It’s a good idea for electrical stuff. Then I could cancel my Which? subscription as I wouldn’t need them to tell me the worst buys. Surely we’re in enough trouble with the likes of al-Qaeda as it is without their operatives glancing at a tiny Union flag on the clamps being fastened to their testicles by the Saudi police?

  It seems there are now four hundred and ten different UK gas tariffs. The cheapest way to keep warm must be to get hold of all the different companies’ promotional literature. Burning it should see you through till spring. David Cameron has promised to reduce gas and electricity bills. He’s planning to do this by making as many people as possible homeless. No, he actually made energy companies send a letter to their customers. He denies that’s all he’s done to help people heat their houses, pointing out that they can always put the letter on a saucer and burn it. It’s a particularly helpful development for all those many internet-savvy eighty-year-olds who like to research what the cost of freezing to death this winter will be. An advisory letter? If I’m going to stay I at least want some petrol-station flowers and a huge card with an embossed puppy on it.

  Dave says insulation is essential. That’s true. If there’s any hint of heat escaping from your house local pensioners will surround it like in Dawn of the Dead. Do keep an eye on your local elderly during the cold weather. Remember, all it takes to sneak into some people’s wills is a couple of trips to the Co-op.

  The Energy Saving Trust has found out that overfilling our kettles wastes £68 million per year. Which is nothing compared with the amount of energy wasted by the Energy Saving Trust coming up with that fucking useless statistic. If the Trust really wanted to save some energy the first thing they should do is sack the team of scientists who were boiling kettles 9 to 5, seven days a week for a year, turn off the website and board up the office. They recommend that by cutting just one minute from our showering time we’d save £215 million a year. Life’s tough enough. Which would you rather: spending an extra minute in the shower every day getting away from your problems or once every three months not even noticing that you’d saved forty pence? Here’s an easy way to cut energy usage – imprint ‘Do you really need to?’ on all light switches in braille.

  Ofgem criticised the big six gas and electricity firms for their lack of transparency. Which is odd, because they can’t be more transparently a bunch of money-grabbing bastards. Research shows 70 per cent of people pay too much to their energy supplier because they’re on the wrong tariff. The other 30 per cent pay too much to their energy supplier because they’re on the right tariff.

  How nice of them to freeze prices this winter. It explains why they were continually putting them up over the summer. So we have to continually search for a better deal. Basically, the energy firms are like an abusive spouse: the more loyal we are, the more we get punished. Ministers have vowed to fine energy firms that fiddle gas and electricity prices. However, will they think of a way of paying such fines?

  Energy prices are rising at such a rate that many people will have to go back to the traditional method of heating their home on a cold winter’s night. Getting pissed and setting fire to it with the chip pan.

  The elderly are, of course, particularly vulnerable, as nobody gives a fuck about them. Scottish Gas has put heating prices out of reach for so many pensioners they’re thinking of rebranding themselves as ‘DigniGas’. The government won’t act, as the projected springtime surge in the number of estate agents after the hypothermia cull is its only current plan to cut unemployment figures.

  David Cameron says he wants to restart the Right to Buy scheme so council tenants can share the same dreams as home-owners. I wonder if he means the one where you’re eating shredded newspaper so you can pay the mortgage or the one where you’re trapped in a loveless marriage by negative equity. The UK has the smallest new homes in Europe. Many new homes are only as big as a London tube carriage. A good comparison. In my experience both often contain at least one woman who can’t bring herself to make eye contact.

  House prices are continuing to drop. Experts fear that if the trend continues property might soon only be worth something close to its actual value. A house in Wales is on sale for zero pounds. It’s so dilapidated you’d have to be mad to live there. And yet three million people do. The poor have nothing to fear from the recession. It’s just about being resourceful. Simply pop into a branch of Millets just before 6pm and when the assistant’s not looking sneak into one of the display tents.

  High-street sales fell over Christmas for the first time in four years as millions of shoppers switched to the internet. After all, why go out shopping in the cold and rain, and be jostled by crowds of strangers, when you can stay at home and watch porn? Let’s face it, Tesco would go bust if someone could email us a sandwich. People now do preliminary research in the real world but inevitably finish up online – a vision of the decline of the UK high street . . . and of the sex life of most men over thirty.

  The big high-street chains are really suffering, which is a shame considering the amount of effort they’ve made over the last twenty-five years to force local shops out of busin
ess. It’s a real pity that so many HMVs have gone. Now where will I go when I want to ignore a World Music section? HMV is ninety-two years old, which probably explains why it doesn’t know anything about downloading music or films from the internet. I actually preferred going into HMV than buying things from Amazon – mainly because when I was in a shop I was much less likely to get distracted and have a wank instead.

  And poor Jessops. Such a cruel irony that the high street’s leading seller of telescopes failed to see it coming. It’s unfortunate, but maybe they should have considered opening branches of their camera shop somewhere that people would use them – like the 80s.

  Blockbuster went block bust. This was a real shock, as most people thought it had closed down years ago. A Blockbuster spokesman said, ‘The core business is still profitable.’ What, films? Yes, they are. But renting out an old DVD copy of Dances with Wolves for two days? Not so much. It’s certainly a shock to me. Who would have thought clicking a mouse could ever replace trudging through the sleet to be told you need three not two forms of ID?

  And Little Chef is up for sale. You know you’re in trouble when even truckers turn their noses up at your food. Who could forget that illuminated sign? Even now I reflexively salivate if my headlamps swing across a fat man while I’m parking at a dogging site. We used to get taken there on birthdays. This might have been more of a treat if Dad had had a car. They are pricey, though. I prefer to gaffer-tape a shrimp net on to a three-metre pole and stick it vertically through the sun roof. Before long you’re stuffing your face with engine-warmed starling.

  Tesco scrapped plans for hypermarkets and will instead open another 830 smaller convenience stores. They realised that after they’d killed off the high street with out-of-town shopping centres there was now plenty of town-centre retail space going cheap. They’re opening up so many smaller shops that eventually they will all link up with each other, forming one huge, long, snakelike convenience store that will then dislocate its jaw and eat Britain.

  There was a storm when a graduate, Cait Reilly, was backed by the courts for saying stacking shelves violated her human rights. She said stacking shelves in Poundland was ‘slave labour’. I don’t remember the bit in Amistad when Cinqué was flogged for not replenishing the Simply Fruity Apple and Blackcurrant four-packs. Cait has a degree in geology so it’s surprising she can’t find work – I thought the ability to recognise a rock would be recession-proof. Judging by the staff in my local branch she might have more luck getting the RSPCA involved. To be honest, I’m more a fan of the 99p Stores. It gives me the chance to play the big shot at the tills with a cheeky wink and a ‘keep the change’.

  Still, I completely agreed with her. How cruel is it to make someone work in a shop with the name Poundland and then not give them any pounds? It’s worse than sending a homeless person with no shoes to work in Boots. It’s worse than sending a victim of floods to work in Monsoon. It’s worse than sending a dyslexic man called Austin to work in Austin Reed.

  Europe’s largest shopping centre opened its doors in East London. In ten years’ time it will have a Cash for Gold supermarket and in twenty years it will be Europe’s largest zombie-containment centre. Leading economist Douglas McWilliams has suggested the economy could be boosted just by axing all bank holidays. Why stop there? Can you imagine how much the economy would benefit from having us strapped to desks and lathes as Mr McWilliams milks us or extracts our viable eggs with a Dyson crevice tool to mix in a huge breeding pond to create the next generation of wage slaves?

  Maybe the Occupy movement was the last glimmer of hope, a chance to generate a few stories to tell in the sex camps. Two hundred and fifty people took part in the Occupy London protest. Sadly, they’d have needed a few more bodies before they could have occupied London. With those sort of numbers they could barely occupy screen six at Cineworld. Protestors said we’ve internalised the attitudes of capitalism – I thought, ‘I’ll buy that.’ It was amazing to read the protestors’ demands – common-sense measures like equality, less money to bankers, more to health services. Soon, we’ll have to camp out for three months just to ask not to be shot in the face. I find it incredible that people should have to protest against giving the bankers – who fucked us – money. It’s like asking prostitutes to pay their clients, and as I know from bitter experience that almost never works.

  10

  CELEBS

  I wonder if the whole celebrity world isn’t just a group of people displacing their need for parental attention. They’re remarkably like children: the tears; the sibling-like rivalries; their bodies changing in front of us. That makes us the parents, and really bad ones at that: living vicariously through them; judging their life choices; fancying some of them.

  There are nearly seven billion people on planet earth. Which makes it all the more baffling that we know Danny Dyer’s name. If anyone deserves to be famous shouldn’t it be the woman who walks a fifteen-mile round trip to collect fresh drinking water for her family? I’d love for her to become a celebrity. Her dieting video would be a no-brainer. It would be great to see her in the green room on The Jonathan Ross Show, bantering with Louie Spence and David Walliams, exchanging anecdotes about deadly diseases they’ve had and what it’s like to be raped. Eventually, fame would change her and we’d see her falling out of China White, balancing a jeroboam of vintage Perrier-Jouët champagne on her head. Although the papers will of course ‘conveniently’ fail to report that although she was in Soho, she’d kept it real and walked from Plymouth.

  Researchers have found that being famous shortens your lifespan. I suppose that’s the only consolation we have when Piers Morgan’s TV show gets another series. Katy Perry is sick of fame. At least, that’s what she tweeted to her 4.3 million followers. She says fame is a ‘disgusting by-product’ of what she does. I thought the disgusting by-product of what she does was her music.

  TOWIE’s Kirk Norcross says fame left him feeling depressed and suffering from paranoia and panic attacks. Another way of phrasing that might be depression left him fantasising that he was famous.

  For the genuinely famous, it’s true there are dangers. Hugh Jackman was attacked by a stalker, who was arrested for throwing an electric razor filled with her pubic hair at him while screaming, ‘I love you!’ Well, if she did love him she’s got a funny way of showing it. No, genuinely. It was a very funny way of showing it.

  The Joss Stone samurai-sword trial was certainly a security wake-up call for me. From now on I’m only dressing up as a white female soul singer in my mid-twenties with the curtains drawn. The men accused of plotting to kill her also wanted to kill Craig David, R. Kelly and Chris Brown. To be fair, they’ve got a point. It’s absolutely crazy that these men wanted to kill Joss Stone because of her connections with the royal family and not because of her music. I suspect they’ll try and win the sympathy of the jury by claiming they planned to use that sword to cut off her tongue. The judge decided to jail them, despite calls from the public gallery to release them after giving them One Direction’s home addresses.

  A divorced dad of two threatened to kidnap Tamara Ecclestone unless he was paid £900,000. He’d have been more likely to have got the money if he’d threatened to not kidnap her. There’s no point in kidnappers taking Tamara hostage as they’d never be able to meet her demands.

  She also received anonymous threats from someone who said they’d reveal details about her personal life. She’s horrified that someone could do that to her without paying her for them. I just hope she’s been getting my threats about what I’ll do if she doesn’t stop revealing details of her private life.

  She was photographed lying naked, spread-eagled on a million pounds in cash. I saw something very similar this weekend in Glasgow. Although, in fairness, the guy wasn’t totally naked. His pants and trousers were around his ankles, and the cash he was sprawled across added up to less than three quid in change. And the photographer wasn’t from a tabloid but worked for the coroner’s office.
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  Tamara is getting a £1 million crystal bath. Her life would make a good docusoap. She lights some scented candles, runs a lemongrass and jasmine bubble bath, and puts on some relaxing whale music. But who’s this at the door? Why, it’s Ian Huntley with his dog Sadie. Let’s leave everybody together for fifteen minutes and see what they get up to.

  Taylor Swift received death threats on Twitter after it was revealed she was dating Harry Styles. Hearing that young girls are so obsessed with Harry they want to murder whoever dates him makes me so sad. So sad he isn’t dating Jessie J. I heard Taylor couldn’t match Harry’s previous partners in the bedroom, as she often tucked him in way too tight.

  Harry was also linked with the considerably older Caroline Flack. Apparently, he’s really good in bed – he can get straight off to sleep without needing a story. There can be many benefits to dating a woman twice your age. Never underestimate the benefits of removable teeth. Terrific for edging pastry.

  The papers described Harry as ‘Randy Styles’. He’s eighteen. You show me a non-randy eighteen-year-old boy and I will show you someone lying to their girlfriend’s dad.

  One Direction remind me of hospital superbugs. You know there’s quite a few, but no one can name more than two of them. Like any great boy band you can tell who is which by their personality traits: the quiet one, the quiet one, the quiet one, the quiet one and the gerontophile. They made history as the first UK pop group to début at number one on the US Billboard album chart. So if you have that on ‘This is a dead planet’ bingo, cross it out and then shout ‘House!’ as you lay your head on the line and the freight train barrels towards you.