Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

  Nearly 40 teenagers are admitted to hospital daily due to alcohol. At least it’s keeping class sizes down, and gives doctors a chance to check up on how their pregnancies are progressing.

  A 50-year-old mum from Cambridge is teaching her 7-year-old daughter to pole dance. Her mother says she’s teaching the child pole dancing to lay the groundwork for her future career, as one of England’s biggest heroin addicts. Her mum says it’s good fitness, but then so is being chased by Gary Glitter. The worrying thing is that when the little girl forgets to bring her kit she’s made to pole dance in her vest, pants and junior nipple tassels. Seven years old? That breaks the golden rule: never sexualise a child small enough to fit under a cardinal’s mitre. It’s asking for trouble.

  Parents of children at a school in Glasgow have been advised not to dress their kids in short skirts and tight trousers in order to deter paedophiles. From now on, if pupils don’t go to school in baggy clothes they’ll be made to attend classes in their vest and pants. Of course, it’s Glasgow. Keep them on till 16 and many can’t concentrate on their studies as they’re wrapped up in a mid-life crisis.

  The government plans to introduce legislation to ban inappropriately sexy clothing for kids. That’s all very well, but what are kinky midgets supposed to do? Only morons would let their children wear padded bras. Which is why in this country they sold millions.

  I refuse to put any of these sexualised clothes on my children; they look much hotter when they’re naked. If they ban sexy T-shirts for children, how will we know which ones are going to grow up to be future porn stars? Unless we actually witness their dads violently beating them? Thing is, little girls will always want to dress like their mums, and a large proportion of British mums are 18-year-old slags.

  SlutWalkers marched in London in their bras and pants. Unless they forgot them, in which case the organisers made them march in full PE kit. It’s a wonderful message. I just think it might be lost on the men turning up to view all the sluts. I applaud the principle. I just can’t help thinking the title could have had a little more gravitas. After all Gay Pride wouldn’t have achieved so much if it had been called ‘PoofMarch’. Those banners have important messages – let’s hope they always hold them in front of their tits or no one will read them.

  It’s a shame, though. This pressured sexualisation of teenagers is not how I remember that beautiful flowering of girl-to-woman from my youth. Returning to school after the summer holidays to notice her new curves and flawless skin … every boy straining to revise for their highers as she effortlessly and unknowingly drew our eye … then her suddenly having to leave. Then Mr Clark the gym teacher going, too. Me returning home six or seven years later and catching a glimpse of her in the precinct at Cumbernauld, wheeling a triple-seat buggy, her once-bright complexion spent and grey, dropping her Lambert & Butlers as she slapped her toddler … Mr Clark shambling up and, as they exchanged resent-laden greetings … me catching in his eyes the desperate regret for the life-long price he must pay for following his urge that balmy autumn evening all those years ago … Still, it was nice to catch up with them.

  A 25-year-old man on benefits in Tyne and Wear has been found to have ten kids by ten different mothers. Terrifying to think how many he’d have if he lived somewhere where the women were lookers. Because of Tory tax and benefit changes, families with three children have lost £1,700, though their houses are so messy it will probably turn up stuffed inside a Fisher-Price garage.

  David Cameron’s hit out at absent dads. He said his own left early and got back late every day to support his family. Dave, maybe that’s just because you were as tedious as a kid as you are now. It’s easy to generalise. Even in the toughest areas here in Glasgow, most absent dads will visit their kids at least once a week. Sometimes more if they forget what day the child benefit arrives.

  Cameron has said families shouldn’t have children if they can’t afford to maintain them. Cameron just started a war he can’t afford to maintain! There’s no more child benefit for people earning more than 40 grand. Which I find a little upsetting. These last few years I’ve become quite attached to my little boy. But … if he can’t pay his way … A single mother will be worse off than a couple with these new rules. Of course, single mothers can make up their missing child-benefit payments, as the paedophiles that start dating them usually bring lots of presents.

  Thousands of school kids are to be given £10 in a Dragons’ Den-style drive to create Britain’s next generation of entrepreneurs. Some have already doubled their money, using a system called bullying. News surely greeted by the weary sighs of parents country-wide as they realise they’re going to have to pay out for some shit their kids bring home. It sounds like a way of shifting the blame for our failing economy to the next generation. In a decade’s time, I can just see bitter families forced to work fighting giant rats in the sewers while Dad shouts at his 20-year-old son, ‘Yeah, well maybe we wouldn’t have to do this if you’d shifted a few million more of your stupid popcorn necklaces.’

  If you have no condoms, remember this – it takes an hour and half to talk her into anal and 18 years to raise a fucking kid. Kids have got so expensive now that, if it wasn’t for my basement sweatshop, it would be barely worth having them.

  On Mother’s Day I wanted to show my mother how much she means to me, so I did nothing. I’m joking, of course. I planned something really special. I took the phone off the hook and watched a box set of The Sopranos. Mother’s Day is the day when children everywhere show their appreciation for their mothers by saying, ‘What, it’s this Sunday? Oh shit, I’d better hope the garage hasn’t sold out of flowers or she’ll be getting a box of Jaffa Cakes again.’

  Canoe fraudster Anne Darwin’s sons say they forgave their mother once their wives got pregnant – there’s nothing like the fear of having to pay for babysitters to cure family rifts. Wait till they find out the whole trial and prison sentence was just one more elaborate hoax and Dad has been living in the DVD cabinet for three years laughing at them – hahahahahahaha!

  J. G. Ballard had this idea that we had built up a deliberately unsustainable world because we wanted it to fuck up. Our little shoebox homes destroyed and our careful, rectangular lawns on fire, so that in the rubble we can go back to being our primal selves, enjoying the struggle for survival. And perhaps the domestic unit is that idea in microcosm – mother, father and children can’t possibly provide complete stimulation for each other and we know that one day soon we can relax as the kids finally run away and we get sympathy handjobs from our co-workers.

  I think it’s more likely that we just enjoy struggle and heroic failure. Struggle, because it’s where we came from, and failure, because it’s our inevitable destination. In Glasgow, junkies used to take Temazepam (jellies), a powerful sedative, and the whole joy was to fight against the sleep urge, putting yourself in an exciting place of struggle. Relationships are maybe that too, a fight against powerful odds, anaesthetising and enervating.

  ‘Enya is playing under the water’

  I’m on the train back to London eating a panini. That’s capitalism for you. Nobody likes paninis, nobody ever says they could murder a panini, yet we all end up eating fucking paninis and they burn the fucking roofs of our cunting mouths. I restlessly try to focus on the fleeing fields of sheep. Eventually I feel a little better and watch a movie Paul has put on the laptop for me: Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal. After trying to hold onto my optimism for half an hour, my mind starts to spasm. A train blew up and they went and searched the wreckage for some teacher’s brain? If this is the signal from a dying brain then all the people on the train are only what he would imagine them to be. Why doesn’t the conductor ever check the woman’s ticket? Why doesn’t he ever CHECK HER FUCKING TICKET? People like this movie. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH EVERYBODY? WHAT IS THIS?

  ‘Beleaguered Castle’; that’s how Americans see themselves. There hasn’t been a bombing in a decade. The US spends that decade bombing other pe
ople. It’s not that hard to make a bomb. One conclusion is that terrorists aren’t that keen on bombing civilians any more. The US government fucking loves it.

  There’s a story that the band Slayer were always trying to get the bass at their gigs tuned so they could deliver some mythical note so deep that it would make everybody shit themselves. Hollywood is pretty much the same: the naked manipulation, the swelling minor-key music, the actor’s eyes filling in the sudden close-up.

  I arrive at my hotel in London, where everyone is ridiculously nice. If I ever tried to leave without paying, if I was even a pound short, they would call the police. Perhaps they even have special staff there that would beat me, but I enjoy the enthusiasm they put into the illusion of friendship. The staff always remember me, as Mr Boyd. I have a long swim in an empty spa. It’s a businesspersons’ hotel and they never have time to use the pool but they like the idea of it. Enya is playing under the water.

  I automatically stick the TV on in my room and find myself wanking in a half-hearted fashion to what might be The One Show. Monkeys in captivity will start to masturbate after months of boredom, and TV is so concentratedly boring it immediately induces the level of ennui associated with a long period of loneliness and abuse. Someone is on because he’s got into the Guinness Book of Records, the place where we celebrate obsessive-compulsive disorders. Some cunt will have the record for counting to the highest number, I think numbly. It’ll be fucking millions.

  My agent has left a message. Looks like I’m going to get to pitch my idea for an Adam Sandler movie to Adam Sandler’s people! The highest I’ve felt for weeks and a new low.

  I watch Frank Skinner’s Opinionated. He asks the audience what they want to talk about. The first punter says, ‘Integrating paedophiles into the community,’ and Frank says, ‘Two words, mate. Comedy show.’ The second punter wants to talk about the nuclear-reactor problems in Japan. The panel laugh it off and go straight into their scheduled items. People who wear glasses and how to be happy. Tonight the TV is not even pretending to care what we think, like a bored magician pulling rabbits from a clear Perspex top hat. Is this really what people want? Nothing? Do people want to just die out without a fight? We can’t let them, I decide, before watching an hour of porn on my hard drive.

  The film is titled Fuck It You Japanese Fuck. Titles on porn are often badly spelled or totally illiterate. Porn addiction is like being addicted to food when the only restaurant is McDonald’s. I think I look at Japanese stuff because the cultural difference makes it hard to tell how bad the acting is. Unexpectedly, a bunch of extra guys run in at the end of the scene and the woman ends up looking like a candlestick from a Hammer Horror movie. Who’s into this? There should be a wide-ranging reclassification of what it means to be gay.

  In bed I check the BBC News page. The most popular story is ‘Spanish gym offers naked workouts’, ahead of ‘US flies armed drones over Libya’. I write a story for my son. A proud feeling warms me like a whisky that I’m doing this instead of working. He likes to hear little stupid events from his life so I have started writing this thing called ‘Funny Stories’ in a big black notebook. Tonight’s is:

  When you were three we took a shower together. I came out of the shower and stood staring at myself in the mirror. I asked you why I always looked better when I came out of the shower than when I had put my clothes on. You said,‘It’s because you’re not wearing your glasses.’

  ‘Are we gonna kill the kid?’ Peter asks, looking jumpy and nervous, rubbing his arms, his eyes wide, a huge belly sticking out beneath a BRYAN METRO T-shirt and he’s sitting in a ripped-up green armchair in front of the TV, watching cartoons.

  Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers

  Chapter 04

  Television wants to get the biggest audiences possible, so it ends up being pretty crass. The things about people that make them interesting – hopefully, you yourself are into Jack Kirby comics or practising Chinese spear forms – are quite varied. The things that people have in common are basic and dull, really. If you want 11 million viewers on a Saturday night you’d better have some morons kick a ball between two sticks or a muscular guy outrun a fireball or hold a fucking karaoke competition. That’s just the socially acceptable options. You could stick a porno on and it would out-rate EastEnders.

  Television is just a distraction, really, a jangling set of keys hoisted nightly in front of our stupid, drooling faces. Marshall McLuhan said, ‘The medium is the message,’ meaning that the way TV makes us think – the shorter attention span, the dullness to sensation – is more important than its content. Railways changed the Wild West and it didn’t really matter if the trains were carrying wood or marshmallows. We don’t even retain the information. Think about how many TV shows you’ve seen in your life about Ancient Egypt. Now think about what you actually know about Ancient Egypt. Fuck all.

  Don’t go away thinking that you’re not part of the herd because you don’t watch The X Factor. There’s distraction for all, it’s just got different reading ages. Did watching The Wire really help you understand inner-city life? More than having a conversation with someone who lives in your own inner city?

  In comedy, you might have Michael McIntyre talking about all-inclusive holidays* for the lower-middle classes but, if you feel above all that, you can watch Stewart Lee talk about Chris Moyles’s autobiography not being very good, or Adrian Chiles being ugly or whatever. A rule of thumb for recognising a critically successful show is the same as the one for a commercially successful show. You can watch the whole series without knowing there’s a war on.

  I think punk was the last time they let anything happen. After that, they decided to tighten the fuck up with what was allowed into the culture. Maybe if you work in some marginal area, like comics or sci-fi or dance, maybe you are doing something interesting, but the mainstream of culture has got a whole lot more policed.

  Take The X Factor, TV’s very own tumour – it just keeps on growing. When The X Factor comes back, I thank God. I get tired of re-creating its effect by bending over in front of a mirror and pulling out the cork I’d wedged between my buttocks the week before. Every year the show has dozens of acts who all have something to prove. That modern psychiatry doesn’t work.

  The only moment on that show that ever had any resonance for me was when the contestants had a drunken brawl and destroyed Cowell’s villa. Their drunken antics woke Simon up from his sleep. Champagne corks kept bouncing off his coffin lid. Cowell was furious. As we know, he won’t stand for anyone on the show behaving like actual rock musicians. It was unprecedented – there was no drunken violence with Jedward, unless you count their conception.

  Astounding. How could a group of teenagers go to someone’s house and treat that person with no respect? It’s almost like they’ve grown up watching some sort of programme where the ugly and mentally infirm are publicly ridiculed for money. Of course, the reason this violent behaviour has never happened before is that The X Factor has now auditioned everyone in the whole country and is having to rely solely on entrants that were in prison during the last six series.

  ITV has a contract for three more years of The X Factor. I’ll believe it when I see it. They said the First World War would be over by Christmas. But without that show, there’s a real danger that in a dozen or so years’ time a jaded karaoke-level singer might not return to their tatty, windowless cruise-ship cabin after straining their way through the Motown back catalogue, and curse the day they were plucked from blissful obscurity before washing down 62 paracetamol with a half bottle of Scotch and slipping out of consciousness to the sound of a propeller shaft spinning but yards below their sweat-stained acrylic pillow.

  Sometimes when I watch that programme I feel a connection with a darker Frankie, and can momentarily understand how one might feel distinct from humanity, that they are all but ants, doing nothing more than occupying space and converting food into shit … that it would mean nothing to cleanse the streets by smashing a claw hammer i
nto their gormless faces. Maybe I shouldn’t watch it in future, and perhaps I’ll switch to decaffeinated coffee. At least on Saturdays.

  There were claims that the last series of The X Factor was faked and set up. Why, it’s almost as if TV and music executives want to make their own decisions about whom they sign and not leave the future of their industry to the amoebas who watch Saturday-night television.

  This year, Cowell turned up on Britain’s Got Talent with a left eye that wouldn’t open properly. Looks like he made the mistake of blacking up to give Cheryl the bad news about America. Cheryl was sacked from the US X Factor because nobody in the US could understand her. They must have been playing her miming tape too fast. People were asking how The X Factor could possibly replace Cheryl with Nicole Scherzinger. Apparently, it’s a straightforward procedure. They just replace the face panel and make minor adjustments to the processor.

  Nicole’s new job means the Pussycat Dolls have lost two of their members. I expect to see a tattered photocopy of their faces taped to a lamp post with the offer of a £10 reward. Hopefully, they’ll be found safe and well, but in all likelihood they’re currently in some maniac’s cellar having a banger shoved up their arse.

  The fiasco with Cheryl can’t be allowed to happen next year. Some viewers even threatened to boycott The X Factor. Well, what they actually said was, ‘Me angry. Me no watch sing song show.’ There needs to be some better way of picking the judges, like a competition where a panel of judges are auditioned by a panel of judges and then the audience can vote for the best judges.

  My television announced that Simon is back in the country and my newspaper announced that Cheryl is back in the country. What about Gamu? Is she still in the country? Or have the Zimbabwean horse militia beheaded her yet? Anyone care?