The Hell of it All
Page 18
That’s the stuff of science fiction, but it increasingly applies to our everyday lives. The gap between your stupid face and cold hard reality is increasing all the time. We plod down the street holding remote conversations with voices in little plastic boxes. We slump in front of hi-def panels watching processed, graded, synchronised imagery. We wander through made-up online worlds, pausing occasionally to chew the fat with some blue-skinned tit in a jester’s hat. We watch time and space collapse on a daily basis. Our world is now running an enhanced, expanded version of reality’s vanilla operating system.
As a result, it’s all too easy to feel like a viewer of – rather than a participant in – your own life. And living at one remove can be crippling. You spend more time internally criticising your own actions, like a snarky stoner ripping the piss out of a bad movie, than actually knuckling down and doing stuff.
All of which means that those late-night moments of lurching fear, of existential nausea, of basic ‘I’m alive!’ horror, now feel more extreme than ever. The gap has widened. Our sleep is deeper. We’re like mesmerised rabbits. That explains why we fail to do anything in the face of mounting dangers. We’ve done piss-all about global warming, the Bush administration, and Piers Morgan’s rising media profile – each of which has the potential to destroy us all – because we hardly know we’re born.
That’s my theory anyway. Clearly, the only solution is for us to set about smashing up every single machine in the world, before we nod off completely. Yeah. That’s the best conclusion I can draw at present. Because I didn’t set out to write a weird existential column this morning, but hey: I’m fast asleep myself. Sue me when you wake up.
The return of selfishism [26 May 2008]
You’re a passenger in a car that someone else is driving, and your hands are tied, and up ahead is a container lorry full of hot liquid manure that you’re definitely going to run into the back of, but your driver’s deaf and blind and not slowing down, so there’s nothing you can do except writhe in your seat and brace yourself for the impact.
That’s roughly how I feel following the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Thanks to a 900% swing to the right (or thereabouts), a Cameron-fronted Tory government now looks like not just an alarming possibility, but an awful, grinding, inescapable certainty – yet another preordained slice of doomsday, like climate change or the War Against the Machines. The countdown has already begun.
Clearly some kind of self-defence is in order, which is why I’ve already started mentally withdrawing from the real world. It’s easy: all you have to do is imagine that the whole of life itself is just a low-budget daytime TV show, one you’re watching uninterestedly from the sofa with one eye while reading a magazine with the other. You know: Cash in the Attic, something like that. To help sustain the illusion, imagine a cheapo theme tune playing each morning when you wake up, and again each night before you go to bed. Before long, the day in between will feel like zero-consequence schedule-filling fluff, thereby lifting an almighty weight from your shoulders.
With practice it’s possible to become so psychologically distanced from issues that affect you, you could comfortably watch your own leg being sawn off by an unhinged bearded intruder, without doing more than raising an eyebrow and muttering, ‘That looks painful,’ before returning to an article you were reading on the history of mashed potato. That’s the state of mind I intend to be in the day Prime Minister Cameron gives his victory speech from the front steps of No. 10.
Perhaps I needn’t bother. Perhaps there’s no need to insulate myself against the Tories at all. What am I scared of, precisely? During the London mayoral election, I had two main fears. The first, obviously, was that Boris was going to win. For weeks I repeatedly voiced that fear to everyone I met – to no avail as it turned out. But the second fear, the one I kept tucked away somewhere near the back of my head, was far more sinister. It was this: what if Boris won – and then turned out to be really good at his job? That might force me to question my cherished anti-Tory prejudice, which is so ingrained and instinctive it feels like something hand-stamped on my DNA.
That flouncy genetic analogy may not be far from the truth, incidentally: in recent years, scientists have begun exploring the notion that your political leaning may be hardwired into your biology, invisibly imprinted on your cells. This would explain a lot. For instance, I know in my bones that rightwing policies are wrong. Obviously wrong. They just are. It’s Selfishism, pure and simple. Nasty stuff. Consequently I don’t ‘get’ Tories, never have and never will. We don’t gel. There’s something missing in their eyes and voices; they’re the same yet different; bodysnatchers running on alien software. Yet that’s precisely how I must seem to them: an inherently misguided and ultimately unknowable idiot. (I’m right and they’re wrong, of course – but they can be forgiven for not working that out. They can’t help it. They were blighted at birth.)
According to tradition, you’re supposed to get more rightwing as you grow older, as wide-eyed youthful idealism is gradually replaced with growling, frightened, fat-arsed self-interest. I say ‘gradually’, but what worries me is the thought that such a transformation could occur with terrifying speed, a real Damascene conversion. I came close once after glimpsing David Miliband on TV: I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but something about his face – just his sodding face – revolted me on a deep and primal level. It was chilling, unsettling – like watching a haunted ventriloquist’s dummy slowly turn its head through 360 degrees. ‘Who is this grinning homunculus,’ I thought, ‘and what does he want from me?’
This either means my genes are shifting, or Miliband is a rightwing imposter. Or maybe he’s simply not of this world. Perhaps I merely behaved like a farm animal reacting to an extraterrestrial intruder – howling in distress without knowing why.
Ghastly and nightmarish though Miliband may be, he’s got nothing on gloomy Gordon Brown, who increasingly resembles a humourless, imposing old butler slowly creaking the mansion door open in a Frankenstein movie. Prime Minister Igor, the shuffling fun-free zone. No wonder the nation’s fallen out of love with him. Imagine playing a carefree game of frisbee with Brown at a summer barbeque. You can’t. That’s why the poor bastard’s doomed.
And why we’re doomed along with him. Because here comes Cameron and the Bullingdon massive, swept to power by default on a wave of resentment, surliness and festering boredom. Selfishism returns. I’m weaving my cocoon early. Wake me in 2018 when the New Tory revival is over.
Hardcore animal sex [2 June 2008]
Not that it’s a slow news day or anything, but Bill Oddie is in trouble with viewers for providing unnecessarily racy commentary on Springwatch. According to reports, the former Goodie backed footage of two sparrows mating with the words: ‘The female is asking for it – and getting it, basically … She’s doing that wing-fluttering thing as if to say: “I am a baby, feed me now” … and is getting quite the opposite … That’s a wing-trembler she’s just had there.’
Later, while watching two beetles having sex, he proclaimed: ‘One thing’s for sure – this boy is horny,’ before going on to role-play the part of the female: ‘Come on, big boy, come and get it … Oh, be gentle with me!’
Now this is bloody sexy stuff. No one could hear that without getting dangerously turned on. In fact, according to the state-of-the-art Raunch Gauge based at Wookey Hole in Somerset (founded in 1978 to monitor fluctuating levels of steaminess in network broadcasts), that particular edition of Springwatch was the second most arousing broadcast since records began – eclipsed only by the notorious 1984 edition of News at Ten in which a trouserless Sandy Gall vaulted the desk and violently rubbed his crotch against the lens for 10 whole minutes in a desperate bid to perk up a report on Sealink ferries.*
Gall’s shenanigans took place 24 years ago – a long time in broadcasting, where memories are so short that even top TV executives regularly forget where their own mouths are while eating, which is why The Ivy is full of grown men and
women smearing food all over their faces like babies and slapping the table in a panic. The horror had long since faded. Consequently Oddie’s XXX-rated outburst caught the population unawares. Within minutes, millions of viewers nationwide found themselves driven into an uncontrollable frenzy of slavering lust, grinding themselves against the nearest person or object in a desperate bid to satiate their desires. The carnage was indescribable, hence the glaring lack of newspaper reports about it.
Once they’d finished mopping up, viewers picked up the phone to complain. Stop making animals sexy, they screamed. It’s freaking us right out.
And they’re right. Animals aren’t sexy, especially when they’re having sex. Let’s list the reasons why.
Reason One: the lack of experimentation. It’s all rut, rut, rut as far as the animal kingdom’s concerned. You never see goats giving blowjobs or a pair of foxes trying out the reverse cowgirl position. Two dogs banging away in a shop doorway won’t even look round to check out their own reflections. They’ll sniff each other’s bums, but that’s about as warped as they get. There’s a crushing lack of imagination in animals’ sex lives … which might go some way to explaining reason two …
Reason Two: the lack of facial expressions. Human beings perform all manner of crazy facial distortions during intercourse – Peter Sissons one minute, Marty Feldman the next. It’s all part of the fun. Sometimes it’s tempting to break off in the middle just to point and laugh, especially when your partner pulls a face like someone who’s recently dropped a piano on their foot but is trying to conceal their agony.
Animals, on the other hand, don’t pull any expression at all – or at least nothing we humans can interpret. They look the same as always, i.e. glazed and bored and impossibly dumb. Concentrate on their faces and it’s like watching furry handymen changing a plug. There’s no passion there. Not even any kissing.
Reason Three: their genitals are all over the shop. Animal penises, in particular, are the stuff of nightmares. Kangaroos have a bifurcated penis – and ‘bifurcated’, for those of you watching in plain English, means ‘forked’. The echidna pushes the envelope even further: its penis has four distinct heads. Dolphins have retractable prehensile cocks which snake about like monkey’s tails, grabbing passing objects and throwing them into the air. Fun at parties? Yes. But sexy? No.
Anyway, while it’s legal for humans to watch animals having sex, it’s illegal if we decide to join in. God knows why, since the act of bestiality itself is surely punishment enough. It certainly doesn’t look like a barrel of laughs. Years ago, while I was working in a second-hand record shop on a quiet day, a fellow staff member surreptitiously passed me a gaudy A5 magazine called something like Zoo Fun or Farmyard Hunger, filled with depressing photographs of humans and animals locked in congress. One image, in particular, burned itself into my mind: a man standing on a tree stump having sex with a cow. Both he and the cow appeared bored out of their minds; two colleagues begrudgingly completing a chore on a cold, cloudy day in Denmark. That’s not sexy. That’s a bad day at work.
In summary then: animals are rubbish in bed, and you shouldn’t have wayward thoughts about them. No matter what Bill Oddie says.
* This is absolutely not true.
CHAPTER TEN
In which ethnicity is admired for the sake of it, Christianity is misrepresented, and Dale Winton threatens to bring on the wall
They’re, like, totally ethnic [14 June 2008]
Hands up everyone who thinks they’re the most important person in the world. Come on. Stop lying. You all do, you pampered, egocentric worms. And you’re wrong. In the grand scheme of things, none of us mean jack squat. No matter what you think, say, or achieve during your lifetime, however you strive to make some kind of impact, you’ll have absolutely zero influence on the overall course of the universe. You’re a drop in a bathtub. A tile in a mosaic. A solitary pixel on an immense and frightening LCD monitor.
If reading these words sent you temporarily crazy, and you ran outside and stripped naked and pressed your bum cheeks against the nearest Starbucks window – really pushed them apart so everyone inside got a gruesome view up your rear aperture – and then started defecating against the glass to a backdrop of tumbling lattes and horrified screams … if you did THAT, it might irrevocably alter your life, what with the ensuing court case and all, but it would make absolutely no difference to the trajectory of history. In summary: you’re pointless.
This is a terrifying thought, of course, which is why we in the West tend to overcompensate by convincing ourselves that we’re actually all massively interesting and special and unique. At its simplest, you can see this trait reflected in advertising slogans like ‘Because You’re Worth It’ – and at its most insidiously offensive in shows like Tribal Wives.
Here’s the premise: in each episode, a different British woman is flown across the world to spend some time living among a charmingly authentic tribe of some description in order to see what life-affirming message she can glean from their humble hut-dwelling existence. This week, our volunteer is Sass Willis, an unmarried 34-year-old from Oxford. Sass feels like she’s missing out on something but isn’t quite sure what it is. Perhaps a week with the Kuna Indians of Panama will help?
Guess what? It does. Within about 10 minutes they’re painting her face with henna and grinning at her with endearing, gappy mouths in which half the teeth are missing. They have wooden bowls and hammocks and brightly coloured robes. They carve statuettes and hold ceremonies and travel around in canoes. They’re, like, totally ethnic.
Naturally this means that (a) we get a load of panpipe music farted down our earholes for an hour while (b) the narration implies the Kuna possess a simple spiritual wisdom which Sass can both learn from and heal herself with. It helps that they appear to speak in simply worded, easily translatable platitudes, and spend much of their time telling her to settle down and get married when she returns to the UK. Cue plenty of video diary entries in which Sass tearfully discusses how the Kuna have changed her life forever and made her see what’s really important and how from now on she’ll have a new perspective on things and blah blah blah … because she’s worth it.
Well pardon me. Not to single out Sass or the Kuna or anything, but why does every other programme about exotic tribes have to spend the entire duration of its running time making out that every single one of them is massively, inherently wise? Statistically, half of them are going to be idiots, for Christ’s sake. Those simple chuckles and gap-toothed smiles you’re so enamoured with? That unvarnished, basically worded advice? What if they are just signs of stupidity? What if you’ve travelled halfway round the world and sought spiritual insight from a bunch of cretins? After all, a berk is still a berk, whether they’re eating chips in Rhyl or dancing round a fire in the rainforest.
Once, just once, can’t we have a travel show in which the presenter lives with a remote tribe for a week and comes away shrugging and calling them a bunch of boring, backward arseholes? Even if it isn’t true. In fact, especially if it isn’t. Can’t we? Please?
‘I feel so terribly sad after watching it’ [21 June 2008]
Ping! An email arrives. From a reader. Called simply Matthew. And he writes: ‘Please, please, please write something publicly in your Screen Burn column about Class of 2008. I feel so terribly sad after watching it. I feel your evaluation of it would somehow help me live with myself for a bit longer. Sorry if you think I am asking for a request or anything. It’s just that they are all such complete cunts.’
Plaintive. But I don’t do requests. Although luckily for Matthew, I’d resolved to write about Class of 2008 anyway. In case you haven’t seen it, it’s an aspirational youth-oriented docu-soap that follows a group of sickeningly privileged, jumped-up little pissdrips as they embark on various glittering careers in music, modelling, and clubland. It’s like watching a roomful of monocled adolescent toffs loudly applauding their own farts. Only worse. Because farts can sometimes be funny.
He’s also a DJ and aspiring promoter and possibly the most emptily self-satisfied person ever to grace a television screen. Across the series he’s shown attempting to arrange a glittering club night, and for some mad reason we’re expected to give a toss without ever being told why.
Anyway, Louis is merely our narrator, our anchor, our foothold in a dizzying whirlpool of bottomless shittery starring his privileged chums. Chief among his pals are a gangly ginger posho called Will, who plays in a band (the bass player’s called Rory, which is all you need to know), and apparently famous international supermodel Daisy Lowe. Last week much of the action centred on Will and Daisy flying off to swank around at Milan Fashion Week as guests of Dolce & Gabbana. Cue footage of them receiving free clothes and slap-up meals, swaggering round their luxurious hotel suite, blithely wiping their bums on the world’s face. At no point are we given any indication of what they’ve done to deserve all of this, other than being in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right constellation of absolute twats.
Throughout the programme, my body reacted in unusual ways. First, the lyrics to ‘Common People’ by Pulp began swirling in my mind. Then I became dimly aware of a low grinding noise on the soundtrack, which turned out to be my teeth. This was followed by a strange blurring effect in the visuals, which turned out to be me gouging one of my own eyes out with my thumb just so I’d see 50 per cent less of their awful grinning gobs.