Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

  If you’re worried about missing the Formula 1 now the BBC don’t want it, just ask your neighbour to flymo his lawn while you look at something utterly pointless. The plan is to stop screening Formula 1 so they can keep BBC Four. Radio 5 Live has already worked out a back-up plan – trapping two wasps in an upturned paper cup.

  But despite the cutbacks, the Blue Peter garden has been saved. It’ll be moved to a rooftop garden at the BBC’s new home in Salford. Spare a thought for the poor runner whose first job in television will be to dig up Shep and Goldie, and post their bones to Manchester. And then spare a thought for whoever has an office on the top floor of the building, where they are putting the rooftop garden. To conform with local bylaws, the famous dogs must be buried six feet underground, which means they’ll have to be kept on the desk of a researcher on the top floor who’ll probably use their bones as paperweights and Bonnie’s skull as an ashtray.

  The BBC revealed how many of its stars earn more than £500,000. They say ‘earn’. I suppose in most cases they actually mean ‘get’. Chris Moyles gets £600,000. People slag him off but maybe he’s just not yet found the right vehicle for his talents. I’d suggest a hearse. ITV’s The Marriage Ref got stuffed in the ratings. I can’t imagine why. The idea of couples in relationship trouble getting guidance from celebrities – how could that not work?

  The Only Way Is Essex star Amy Childs got her own beauty slot on ITV’s This Morning. I can’t see much vajazzling going on. Broadcasting rules mean the only cunt they can show at that time is Adrian Chiles. It’s easy to criticise, but there is an easy way to raise the quality of what appears on your TV. Simply wipe damp slices of bread across a toilet floor and stick them to your screen. The emerging mould patterns can be pretty BAFTA-winning.

  There’s a James Kelman essay in which he talks about why he doesn’t write for television anymore. That it’s asking the writer to describe the lives of people using language different from the language they use themselves. I find it hard to get away from that, that even words themselves are censored, and that this goes all the way up through the process, to the concepts, situations and set designs. Exerting control over language is classic colonial behaviour, and that of course is what television is, herald of a colonising ideology, bringing us new terms that are actually ideas like benefit cheat, reality television, celebrity chef, worthy cause.

  I picked my daughter up from school one day and she had a poem to deliver at a recital. It was the Scots poem ‘Twa Craws Sat upon a Wa’, but they’d taught her it as ‘Two Crows Sat upon a Wall’. Even though ‘crow’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘wall’. That’s what so much of television seems to me. Two crows sat upon a wall.

  * * *

  * I tried to watch some of his act to get an example of something he actually does, but my brain made me hold my breath in an attempt to suffocate itself.

  ‘The line-up is strictly Justice League Europe’

  I shave my beard off for the show. The first big patch I shave out of it reminds me of when you see a cat that’s had an operation.

  I turn up early to rehearse in the dressing room. I ask a runner to bring me a chicken sandwich and he brings me a chicken sandwich and a Red Bull. Why aren’t there tests of this shit that have killed rats? Probably because it smashed them through Time. Then killed them. I wonder blankly about a time machine that would only transport the severely disabled. A guy with cerebral palsy being trained to stop the Kennedy assassination, with a finale where he tries to wiggle up the stairs to the book depository. Writing this idea down I am struck by my desperation.

  It’s a panel show called It Was the Best of Weeks, It Was the Worst of Weeks. It’s a pilot for BBC Two, hosted by Mark Watson. He’s stopped pretending to be Welsh but is still pretending to be a hunchback. Hosting some BBC Four pish, he knows his name is on the list. I can almost see it myself, double underlined and surrounded by doodles, maybe notes about his movements. His hands shake every time he raises a cue card and, after his opening monologue, he just gives a laugh so hysterical I’m afraid he’s going to start crying, openly sobbing like a child.

  The idea is that one side says, ‘This is the worst of weeks because …’, and lists three terrible things that have happened on this week in history. The line-up is strictly Justice League Europe, with the other team captained by some cunt I’ve never heard of doing an Essex wide-boy character in a baseball cap. Their actual opener is that this is the worst week because it was the week of the 7/7 London tube bombings. The Essex dude takes the angle that now you can’t get on a plane without hassle anymore and does a load of shit about air travel. I share a look with Watson that says ‘This idiot will get us both raped.’

  Of course, we question the other team about their shit. I go low and start saying that this is indeed the worst of weeks because it’s the week this show was piloted. Things are already so dismal that this gets big yuks. I’m losing interest so I crack the Red Bull they always leave under your desk. It’s the only way we can all look interested. I surf an overwhelming caffeine rush and prepare to talk myself into the edit of a show that will never be shown.

  Our team say, ‘Ah, no, this is the best of weeks because …’, and we all give some light-hearted reason. Josie Long is on my team doing her ‘Hello trees, hello sky’ retard thing. She does some bit about how this is a great week because it’s the week that Tiswas started. Drifting off, I imagine pretending to be her long-lost brother, drugging her parents on a cruise and making them actually believe it in the freebasing MK-ULTRA camp I’d turn their cabin into. A couple of years later, when Josie had come to terms with this seemingly unbelievable news and noticed all these little similarities between us, I would start coming on to her. She’d become an alcoholic and fall face first onto a three-bar fire on Christmas Day. Weeks later, she would be found with a blackened stump of a face on top of a homemade T-shirt saying ‘Use Your Local Library!’

  At the morgue her autopsy would be performed by a third-generation descendant of Dr Josef Mengele. He would be a key figure in some underground Nazi New World Order. He’d remove her brain and she would awake in a cage in the body of a tiny monkey, her brain stitched in painfully and amateurishly. Sharing the cage would be the monkey host that Mengele had used to save the brain of his Führer. For a long time Josie’s life would consist of being fucked endlessly by this shrieking and insane Monkey Hitler. Members of the Nazi hierarchy would turn up to masturbate over the scene. There would be an amateurish sign scrawled on A4 and sellotaped to the side of the cage. Reading would be difficult for Monkey Josie – especially backwards – but eventually she would decipher the words ‘CAREFULNESS! JISM ON EXPOSED BRAINES (sic) CAN CAUSE AIDS.’

  The other occupant of the lab, naked in a cage no bigger than a large suitcase, would be Dr David Kelly. Eventually he and Monkey Josie would escape into a nearby wood. Never understanding that Monkey Josie was able to speak because she was a scientific chimera, Dr David Kelly would think he had developed a magical ability to talk to animals. This would lead to him being badly gored in the groin by a bull. Monkey Josie would die from a mixture of exposure and depression.

  Dr David Kelly would eat her, unaware that the chemicals used to bind her brain to her monkey body made her flesh highly toxic. He would die, poisoned on the self-same spot where he was once said to have committed suicide. The tiny skeleton of Monkey Josie clutched to his breast, the proud Iraq War whistleblower would thereafter be remembered as a cannibalistic paedophile. As they both die, they would see primitive computer lettering floating in front of them saying ‘YOU HAVE MASTERED 3% OF THIS ADVENTURE.’

  Is this really me? Is this the Red Bull? I dimly wonder if I might be gay. Then I think about how this woman used to be a little kid, and it makes me sad enough to laugh and clap when she finishes.

  The second round is straightforward celebrity bashing, where Watson will ask a question like, ‘Who had a bad week sexually?’ And we guess it, then do some shit off the back of it. I guess Colonel Gaddafi o
n that one, but am quickly closed down.

  I can see that I am going to have nothing in the edit of this whole round. Watson makes some quip about how it’s supposed to be a light-hearted comedy show and I do the story about being in the shower with my son.

  Watson says, ‘You should tell more stories, it humanises you.’

  I reply, ‘I have never felt less human,’ which gets a good laugh, and will probably go in.

  The green room has the relaxed atmosphere of a failure. Watson is having a beer and spluttering something about some fucking charity gig he’s doing. It’s televised on Channel 4, but I doubt the two minutes of ‘What’s all that about?’ they’ll cut him down to will save his arsehole. He’s terrified that I’ll mention the rapist and gabbles on about how he’s wheat intolerant. Why is it that these self-diagnosers never read an article that makes them think that they’re an attention-hungry bullshit artist?

  In the corner of the room, all the researchers and runners are watching The Game. The Essex character guy is trying to engage some of the females in the group but they’re holding him off like a tightly drilled herd of buffalo. One of them glares at him and snaps, ‘Don’t you watch The Game?’

  I wonder whether some people have no embarrassment, or if they are simply aware that in terms of human degradation there is a long way to fall. Someone somewhere will have fucked a snowman. Definitely they have. Hopefully drunkenly they will have tried to look for some glimmer of response in its stone eyes, perhaps have wet its makeshift vagina so they could slide against ice, their child’s scarf being blown up into their eyes like a final plea from some despairing God. It’s not the moment of ejaculation that I pity, but the first time that they do something normal afterwards. How do you eat a mince pie or make a phone call or shave after having fucked a snowman?

  As always at these things there’s the weirdly sexual atmosphere of a journalists’ hotel bar in a war zone. There are some young and attractive people around. A tall black girl is listening to one of the comics. He’s still high from the show and blowing it. Thank God I am 38 and now invisible to women. If I were to approach one of these girls it would be like a piece of furniture had started talking, like a trestle table had turned round and said, ‘Hey, do you work on the show?’

  I am drawn into The Game and sit with the group who are watching in silence as the people behind us gradually leave. It’s a one-off episode, featuring a guy called Adam living the perfect suburban life. He has a beautiful wife and a beautiful little boy, and he’s throwing a ball around with the boy when he notices puncture marks on his own wrists. At home his wife finds him sitting on the end of the bed and we know he’s staring at these brown, rusty marks. She misunderstands and massages his neck, trying not to show she’s a little upset. ‘Are you happy, Adam?’ she asks, and then we see that he’s really hooked up to a drip in a cellar somewhere. A doctor with a moustache leans over him while a man in a suit stands in the shadows.

  ‘It’s not enough for him!’ the doctor exclaims, shocked. ‘Then give him more,’ murmurs the shadow.

  Adam is back in his wonderful life, enjoying days out in the park with his family, but now he has a mistress. We see him experiment with drugs and open up sexually. One night he comes home and checks in on his sleeping boy, kissing him gently on the forehead. Then he checks himself for bites and scratches in the bathroom mirror and sees the big brown punctures on his chest, on his neck, on his wrists. As he looks in the mirror there is a slight distort, like the film is playing at the wrong speed.

  The doctor is panicking now. ‘It’s still not enough!’ he shrieks. The body on the trolley is convulsing with wet, gasping noises. The suit in the shadows says, ‘He can take it, give him more.’

  We see Adam sitting on a table at a conference. He has a beard now and everyone seems in awe of him. From the questions he fields we learn that he has written a book, now a film, that hints at the unreality of the world, that makes people question the robotic nature of their actions.

  We see him in his palatial hotel room with a groupie. She’s sitting in bed smoking a joint, enthusing about a comic book she’s read but the camera gradually closes on Adam’s face.

  ‘Didn’t you think it was brilliant?’

  ‘Somebody waking up from a dream? It’s the worst cliché in storytelling.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. It was genius.’

  He smiles, but the actor is really good and you can tell he’s hiding a bitter rage. We start to lose her dialogue as he turns inward.

  He works hard, we see his wife, older now but still beautiful, and you feel somehow she knows and forgives everything about him. His new books are as big as Harry Potter. They’re about two little Viking boys taken as hostages by a rival clan. As they grow up, one assimilates into his new life, the other pretends to, but always plans his revenge and tries to keep his brother mindful of their lost family.

  By the last book, Adam is drained and jaded by success. The world anticipates the final instalment but as he knocks it out, he knows that, written while negotiating the talk-show circuit, book tours and status-based friendships, it can only be a brutal disappointment. As he writes he starts to get into the alienation of the book. The younger boy realises he can never break the spell their new life has cast on his brother and flees. The brother, happy in his position at the Viking court, is summarily executed to secure a trade agreement. We realise gradually that the ship the other little Viking has stowed away on belongs to sexual slavers, bound for Haiti. The final scene is of an archaeologist from our time digging up the boy’s trademark throat chain beside some wall manacles and a huge floor-mounted dildo.

  Someone we recognise as Neil visits Adam and tells him that he can’t publish the book; there is too much expectation in the culture and this is not something that can happen. To illustrate his point he places three photographs in front of Adam and says they are ‘from the future’. We assume this is some kind of threat, and Adam seems distraught.

  The final shots are of Adam in his vest watching TV late at night. He says, ‘I rewrote the book to make it as unrealistically, satirically happy as possible. What I wrote didn’t even make sense. And yet everybody was happy.’ He opens a can of beer and continues watching numbly. ‘Now that I’ve done that, I wonder how many other people that young man showed his photos to, because I see that everywhere.’ We see the TV light washing brightly across his face as we hear some canned laughter. ‘I see it everywhere.’

  On the trolley, the body has ceased to struggle. The torturer looks relieved. ‘Disappointment, angst, that’ll keep them under when nothing else will,’ the voice in the shadows intones. An uneasy look passes over the torturer’s face, and we see him surreptitiously check his own arms for marks. ‘Everyone’s a bit disappointed …,’ he offers.

  Suddenly, we see the torturer from the shadow’s point of view. Looking through the shadow’s eyes we see that the torturer is covered in rusty brown marks on his arms, his hands, his temples. A drip we’ve been unaware of connects from above to his neck, and the trolley is empty. ‘Yes,’ agrees the shadow, chuckling. ‘I like that.’

  I have a car to take me back to the hotel. My driver is Turkish and explains that he killed two people during his military service, then went insane. ‘One of them I kill with electricity.’ It seems he was sent to some re-education centre, where they told him this was OK. He’s in his mid-20s. He asks me what I’ve been doing and I have a go at explaining the concept of the panel show to him. Eventually, there is a big enough silence for me to put my earphones in.

  When I get back to my room I go to the living-room bit and there’s an empty beer bottle on the table. I can hear music. I go through to the bedroom and there on the bed a figure has been made from my clothes. A jumper stuffed with blankets, a yellow balloon for my head. My jeans are hitched down to reveal two white pillow buttocks. There are traces on them of what looks like dried blood, or possibly jam. I pick the balloon up and it h
as a sad face drawn on the underside. A CD is playing in the music centre. It takes me a moment to identify the theme tune from A Question of Sport.

  In many North American indigenous cultures, generosity is a central behaviour in a broader social and economic system. One anecdotal account examined what happened when boys from white and Lakota communities received a pair of lollipops each. The white boys put the second one in their pockets, while the Native American boys presented it to the nearest boy who didn’t have one.

  Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing

  Chapter 05

  Capitalism is a religion. Acolytes believe in its principles even when these are proved wrong. Business people, in case you haven’t noticed, dress in costume, go off on retreats together, and speak with the same glassy-eyed passion about their orthodoxy as Christians.

  The market is our new God. It’s everywhere. It can turn into a bull and it can turn into a bear. Sometimes its priests will tell us it’s ‘expectant’, other times it’s ‘gloomy’. We quiver in our huts and wait to see what it will do. When the market is angry, ‘sacrifices’ have to be made. Market research is the new confessional, a perverse quantifying of desire. You could view Jesus attacking the money changers in the Temple as the Judeo-Christian God having a fairly astute idea of who the competition was going to be. Likewise, it’s no coincidence that Muslims have strong views on the lending of money at interest. Any religion looking at money must have seen in its wing mirrors a hungry new deity.