David Cameron says they’ll be keeping patient choice at the heart of the revised health reforms. He says everyone should be free to decide which hospital they want to be neglected in. It’s been suggested to charge drunks £50 if they go to A&E. That’s not fair. How will they then afford a ticket to my show?
The NHS is under pressure to withdraw pornography from patients who need to give sperm samples. I think it’s a terrible idea to remove pornography from hospitals. It’s pretty much the only reason I visited Dad after his bypass operation.
Wales is to introduce presumed consent for organ donation. This should greatly improve patient survival rates … as doctors there offer still-beating hearts as gifts to call upon the healing powers of their many gods. And a hospital in Cardiff gave its elderly patients tambourines and maracas to summon medical help. Not sure that’ll work. Bez from the Happy Mondays has been trying it for years.
It’s sad, as we consistently undervalue the contribution the old can make to society. For example, stick a load of jigsaws in your loft and you can’t keep them out – and with all those coats their insulation value is triple that of fibreglass.
A proposed rise in university tuition fees could leave students with debts of over £100,000. Forget going to university. If you want to make some money, start a university. If students have to pay these fees, then watching Countdown in your pants will become a more expensive experience than space tourism. Apparently, some hard-up students have turned to prostitution. If you meet a fellow student in this situation, then remember – you should get a 10 per cent discount with your NUS card. The only people who can afford to go to university will be the massively wealthy and the girls who’re putting themselves through by stripping. If they marry, we’ll have a whole generation with no chins and massive tits. Some universities may even close. The University of Bedfordshire in Luton has already said it might go back to being a bus depot. The good news is students now won’t have to start paying their loans back till they earn more than £21,000 a year. Which means if you choose media studies, it’s basically free.
Travelodge are offering school leavers a chance to manage a hotel rather than go to university. When you’re standing in a tiny room at 3 am looking at an unchanging computer screen while you suspect people all around you are having sex, you’ll find it’s much the same as university. And you’ll learn all you need to know about adult working life from watching strangers in suits desperate for sleep try to ignore human contact.
Ireland is in such a crisis that 25 per cent of its population is in the gutter. It harks back to the glory days at the height of its economic boom when 100 per cent of the population was in the gutter. Osborne pledged £10 billion to help bail out Ireland. I just hope they don’t do anything risky with the money, like put it in a bank. Osborne is heir to the Baronetcy of Ballentaylor, County Tipperary. Do you think he will be giving Ireland the money by bank transfer or by his family’s traditional method of a sackcloth bag of pennies and a lump of coal being handed to each farm worker at the back door on Boxing Day? Osborne has said he can’t name City fat-cat bankers – mainly because he only knows them as Bunty, Slasher and Bulldog.
Ireland being criticised by Britain is like a man dying of kidney failure being slagged off by the blokes on dialysis. There’s a lot of British money in Ireland – as well as a lot of our illegitimate children, stolen land and murder victims. Of course we want to help the only country we share a border with, but if we really wanted to help, we possibly could have resisted putting that border there in the first place.
How can the Irish have nothing? An Irish firm are building the Olympic village. Can’t we just move the whole country into there? Come 2012, we can post them outside every tube station for a couple of weeks. After all, that’s the only way tourists are going to get a warm welcome to London.
It’s now suggested that we also give money to Portugal. We have a similar relationship to Portugal as we do to Ireland, except in Ireland’s case it was us who abducted their children.
And Greece needs another bailout. The Greek protest movement is called Aganaktismenoi, meaning ‘outrage’. It’s unclear whether most of the anger is directed towards the police or the bloke who shouts ‘Give us an A.’ The austerity measures are so harsh, many people are already living off tinned taramosalata or moussaka on toast. David Cameron said he would fight to ensure UK money isn’t used in the bailout. So, rest assured, UK money will definitely be used in the bailout. But if we lend them more, will they bother repaying? Let’s face it, most of their decent collateral’s in the British Museum. If Greece doesn’t get the bailout it’ll be unable to pay public employees’ wages. Which means when you say, ‘Excuse me, the ferry’s going in five minutes, please could you sell me a ticket,’ there might be nobody in the booth to nod dismissively and go off into the back office for a smoke.
Of course, ‘bailout’ is a complete misnomer. Banks lend the money to Greece at a rate of interest. Greece then has to decide how much of its public services to privatise in order to pay interest on these loans. The banks are largely French and German. Many are insured in the UK, so we do alright, too. Greece is being asked to live through a decade of austerity so that French and German banks make profits, money that they then lend out to things like German manufacturers, who make large amounts of goods that get bought in places that don’t manufacture much, like Greece.
Obviously, with the whole system being weighted towards large, wealthy economies such as Germany, the Greeces of this world will occasionally go tits up. Lending to Greece is not a ‘bailout’. It’s the equivalent of a company subbing their toilet cleaner a week’s wages so they don’t fuck off and get another job.
Soon Italy might need to be bailed out, too. An out-of-control, morally bankrupt, multi-millionaire media baron having so much influence on government? Makes you glad to live in the UK, doesn’t it?
The Tories are proposing that people earn recycling points that can be spent on the high street. Yeah, that’s just what I need – more nebulous points to keep track of. I’m looking forward to lots of council admin workers being made redundant, as then I can employ some to keep track of all my fucking points and pay them in meals at Beefeater.
And motorists are to get bigger fines for littering. Of course, littering’s not always as it seems. Just the other night I was out driving … nothing on the road apart from one car, a little way in front. Suddenly, out the passenger window came a bag of crisps. Normally, I’d let it go, but for some reason I thought, ‘Not tonight’. So I put my foot down and overtook. But when I drew alongside and looked over, in the front seats were two giant bags of crisps and one was screaming, ‘John! John! The baby’s fallen out of the window!’
There was a lot of talk about fuel duty in the last budget. I thought ‘fuel duty’ was how to describe the time spent by anyone in the British military who’s seen active service in Iraq or Libya. Truckers are furious about the record high price of diesel. Thousands may lose their jobs. Which is a serious worry, as most only have fat reserves to last a couple of months. It’s the biggest crisis for long-distance lorry drivers since the 1970s, when they took industrial action to stop their wives continually answering the door in their negligees to randy, buck-toothed milkmen. The only region coping well with petrol price rises is the North-East, where you can squeeze an acceptable high-octane substitute from out of Paul Gascoigne’s nipples for the price of a Wagon Wheel and a whisky miniature.
Protesters tried a ‘go slow’ on the Dartford Crossing – though they were disappointed at not being able to reach the hoped-for 8 mph. They’re considering measures to help truckers, dropping duty on Yorkie bars, Razzle and those big knives for dismembering hitchhikers.
With petrol prices soaring and the VAT rise putting up the price of booze, people are now going to have to choose between drinking and driving. We’ll feel it the most come the summer when we won’t be able to afford enough petrol to get the barbecue going. The AA’s warned that the jump
in petrol prices will keep the poor off the roads. Nonsense. People will always need their windscreens washed at traffic lights.
It’s a timely reminder of how much of what we use comes from such a long way away … That we could all source more locally. I get everything from the big Tesco on the ring road, so I’m covered.
I have a tremendous hope for the future of mankind, because what other way is there to go? Yes, it will be difficult breaking free from our reliance on fossil fuels. You know what’d be more difficult? Breathing without any fucking oxygen. Yes, it will be difficult turning our back on war. You know what’d be more difficult? Teaching your child to survive by showing them how to deliver the perfect blowjob onto the forked penis of a Chinese warlord.
Of course, it’ll be a hard path to paradise. In a few years’ time, we’ll go through a phase where the news stories that fill us with horror now will be used as mood lightening items at the end of a news bulletin. ‘… And finally, a man went berserk in Birmingham today, killing 20 people with an automatic rifle. And now over to the weather from Hannah, and her rapist.’
What strikes me about the state of the world is the bullshit idea we used to hear that people were doing everything for their kids. Now, at least we know they drive about in their 4x4s and fly to their pointless meetings and vote for their sham governments for themselves. We’re not trying to build a future for our kids; we’re trying to build status and wealth for ourselves. The only thing we’ll be leaving our kids is a dying fucking world. You travelled into your kid’s future, and used the fuel and bulldozed the trees and poisoned the sea. You choked him with your skiing holidays, your iPhones and your lifestyle supplements. When your child was born, you straddled a grave and shat him into it. Did I just write that? Glad I got out of comedy when I did …
The international banking system thinks of itself as the pinnacle of human achievement. The markets are so intricate and complicated and yet, when you look at it, all they’re doing is trading shiny beads and feathers. They might trade 100 tonnes of gold for $5 billion. But all that’s happening is they’re swapping some soft yellow metal for some neatly cut sheets of paper. It’s no different to a kid on the beach swapping a handful of sea shells for a crab shell. Except the kids on the beach at least know it’s just a game.
It’s bizarre that humans have decided that gold is the most valuable thing in our society. A metal that, until recently, had very few useful functions whatsoever. You’d have thought bread, or bricks, or ceramics would be far more valuable. But we all decided on gold, because of its rarity. It could have been very different. We could have chosen literally any other substance in the universe. Right now, underneath the Bank of England, there could be huge reserves of the skeletons of conjoined twins.
The commodities market includes the buying and selling of diamonds, gold, silver and orange juice. Orange juice? Trading in orange juice? What is this, a fucking tuck shop? Are there guys in champagne bars boasting to their mates, ‘Yeah, just made a million trading Pokémon cards for Coca-Cola bottles’? I suspect the trade in orange juice is at its peak from about 9 am to noon, and then demand falls away.
Perhaps, some day, people will look at the metal and paper in their pockets and realise it means nothing, and if they all agreed to agree that it meant nothing, we could all just head to the beach and watch the waves come in.
‘Garlic bread? Garlic bread? We’re fighting three fucking wars here, mate!’
I have to write up sketches for what I thought was going to be a pilot for Channel 4. Then it turns out it’s going to be a ‘taster tape’. Then it’s actually just one sketch they want. I get really fucking wound up about this, even though I haven’t got any sketches. I get a bunch of Diet Cokes from the wee shop at the bottom of the building and try to write, sitting in the ledge bit of one of the stateroom portholes.
It’s sunny outside, which always makes working difficult. I slide down off the ledge and sit in the glowing circle the sunshine has made on the carpet, like an ant under a magnifying glass. I take the wax model of the scheme down onto the floor and lie there, moving people into unlikely scenarios – wee shopkeepers forming drinking gangs outside the houses of teenagers, all the heroin addicts going down the swimming baths en masse to baptise each other into a new religion, the toddlers gathering in the boozer underneath me.
My sketch idea is about Peter Kay taking a heroic dose of magic mushrooms and becoming a politically conscious comedian. He then has to do his stand-up to huge stadiums of folk expecting jokes about the types of biscuits your nan buys, but feels compelled to deliver groundbreaking anarchist routines. He berates Cameron for Libya.
‘No fly zone? We’re targeting people who clearly can’t fly and blowing them 15 feet into the air!’ he yells with trademark camp exasperation. The punters get bored and heckle helpfully with stuff like:
‘Garlic bread, Peter! Come on, pal! Garlic bread!’
‘Garlic bread? Garlic bread? We’re fighting three fucking wars here, mate!’
Peter persuades Michael McIntyre to take acid with him after the Royal Variety Performance and McIntyre starts ‘noticing’ more things than ever before. ‘Have you noticed … the control matrix of our society with the media at its core?’ he will ask Graham Norton during an ill-fated interview.
We finish with the video for Peter’s Christmas single, a nine-minute hymn to frontal-lobe epilepsy. The lyrics are a verbal Jackson Pollock, a heap of broken images, with themes of sexual totalitarianism and prosthesis, and always ending with the refrain: ‘MY SPINE FLIES PETROL AND ALSO GOES BEYOND ME. SPIIINE.’
Animal-faced dancers in peach military uniforms with medals for racism chipped from anthracite stamp across the melting screen like the pernicious progress of a virus. What at first seems to be a conventional tap-dance sequence becomes the majestic depiction of a semantic war between the months of the Gregorian calendar; all-conquering January vowing to set Time against Numbers as he leaps from a shattered altar into an episode of Miami Vice. A pair of ballerinas jerk like machine-gunned marionettes, leaving the viewer believing they’re watching a porn mpeg called Gay Interview and Fuck 1 while running flatfooted through their own childhood.
There’s a moment of silence when we see Peter in a 1970s classroom filled with pupils of sculpted garbage. He turns directly to the camera and gives the knowing and amateurish smile of a porn star as his head opens slowly like a meat flower and out of it dance the sports stars of an unknown race. The ‘ball’ in all their games is a half-sized and particularly haunted-looking Harvey Keitel. In the bottom left of the picture, former Dundee United and Scotland forward Paul Sturrock tries to communicate the song in sign language, despite having no knowledge of sign language. What he actually signs is, ‘I have been chosen to play the Chinese Dr Who. As Who is a common family name in China, the show there is a fairly conventional medical drama.’
We see a baffled, very old Tony Christie, with a bruised and bleeding face, buried up to his neck in the ground, while an enormous, villainous carrot screams obscenities at him in some unknowable language. He mumbles that he thought they were going to be doing ‘It’s Not Unusual’ before singing the words ‘BITTER STASIS’ in the powerful and beautiful voice of a German woman, while Peter Kay, reading aloud from a grotesquely sexualised and inaccurate novelisation of Ghostbusters, his face swollen with rage, spins and leaps impossibly across the set of Newsnight like the choreographer of William Burroughs’s Nuremberg. We are aware that on Newsnight David Cameron is speaking firmly to Jeremy Paxman.
‘I tell you right now,’ he asserts with a clipped hand gesture, ‘that I could hold open my arsehole and out would pour a Tarot of bestial imagery.’
It ends with Peter saying, ‘Welcome to the Culture Wars!’ over a picture of a can of John Smith’s bitter.
I have my boy that night and he’s supposed to go to bed at half seven but the Man U game’s on and it’s a European semi-final. I tell him he can watch the first half. He’s sitting there in his
pyjamas really excited and, as the whistle goes, he asks me which side we’re controlling. He’s only ever seen football on the PlayStation (he played once – he scored and shouted, ‘I boofed it!’). Any time there’s a shot on goal he asks if he did that or if I did that. I take him to bed at half-time but he comes back through at the start of the second half. He’s got a dragon puppet that for some reason I always have to make sing about its day – a long, improvised song in a Welsh accent. We miss every goal, laughing. Eventually he tells me to stop and he sings a wee song about his day, going from nursery right up until now. ‘And I heard the people yelling on the telly and I just came through!’ he trills.
After I get him to sleep I try to look at porn but can’t get interested. I only like it when the actress is really into it, so it’s hard to find anything nowadays. I have another Facebook threat from the same goober. In his profile picture he has his arm round an impatient-looking Noel Gallagher. I’m also friends with him on the page where I’m pretending to be Alan Hansen, the former Liverpool player. He’s a Man U fan, but after a few direct messages from Hansen he’s cravenly admitting his admiration for Liverpool’s European glory days and bemoaning United’s ability to shut up shop in the same fashion as those boring bastards did. He’s sent Alan Hansen a message just after he’s threatened to run me over:
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