Monthly Archives: August 2012

Cunt of the Week (28 August 2012) by Peter Wood

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It’s a new season for the singing competition that has every wanker who has ever picked up a hairbrush travelling to London, Newcastle and Glasgow to audition for this tripe.

X-Factor: living the dream. All I have to do is wangle it through the live auditions, then listen to the judges’ bullshit about how I’m an artist – strange, how do they know that I paint? Same comments, every fucking year: ‘You’re born to sing’, ‘You’re a star’, ‘I can see your album in the bargain bin in Asda…em, I mean HMV’.

I can sing, I have a nice, cute face, a floppy hairstyle. I’ll maybe wear that quirky hat that I’ve always wanted to wear. UK today: where if you have a voice, you have a future. McVicar, Rose West and Ian Brady are all practising with a hairbrush for the 2016 auditions.

PETER: ‘I can’t give good head, but check out my new tattoo.’ (That’s what Peter wanted to say about the photo; it’s not a cyber-based admission of his own poor gobbling technique, which I can confirm is excellent – Jamie)

New season, same shit judges. You have Louis Walsh, the gimpfucknugget, then you have Gary ‘I have a personality that could make paint dry’ Barlow. Then there is the blowjob queen that can give head as good as Paris Hilton, and the mystery judge, ooooohhhh… what cunt will it be this time? They did have the forgettable Kelly Rowland that can sing, unlike Tulisa Constatvillas… Constanvialla… constonant, please, Carol. However, have you tried singing along to her songs? It’s like trying to sing along with Usher, heaps of hmmmmms and uuuuuhhhh, and then some rambling pish, and thank fuck there’s a chorus.

Back in the competition, the producers have paid for their botox, and made them wear a white t-shirt to show off their abs! Sing a cover, and they’re off through to boot camp, where you have to pretend to be all nice to the other hopefuls. Which is a bit like a comedy competition; secretly it’s all high 5’s, and ‘You go, girl/boy’, but secretly you’re like, ‘I hope this bastard dies on his/her arse.’ Then into the room, which is like Scotland/England/Wales/Ireland at school. Have I made it through? Wait a minute, this could be the room that goes through: we’re all cute and got killer abs and perfect hair and teeth! No, wait, there are 4 gingers in this room and 4 fat guys and a guy that seems to be just banging his head off the wall. Mind you there was that woman that was telling me she was on smack for 5 years and lost her whole family, including a leg through a combine harvester accident, and then of course her dad died and she left the keys next to note that said I should enter X-Factor.

Next stop, the judges’ houses. Oooohhhh, will I be going to sunny Spain, America… what? Where? Ireland with Louis Walsh and some dick from Boyzone; no, sorry, Getalife. Oh, this is life changing.

‘So if I spank you in the gimp mask I’ll get a place in the live shows?’

What, Louis, you want me to put my cock where for a shot at the big time? Could I not just give you a light paddling? I know if I put my cock there that I could get the record contract, but I am not that way inclined. So will a paddling while you wear your gimp mask get me a place on the live shows?

The live shows, I’ll have to make up some bullshit story about being abused by my granddad, but it’s not been done. That should make up for the fact that I don’t have children. I have just read through the first song choice: what the fuck, Bon Jovi? Ah, well, I’m boned.

So when it comes to the ring for me, and I am going to become more desperate than a fat girl on Babestation? So I never made it through to the final. And so what? The winner will have less fame than One True Voice. I mean, where are the winners? What happened to Leon Jackson; what happened to the first bloke and Cheryl Cole? 14 million people will pick up a phone to vote for two abortions called Jedward. Also, all we do is increase Satan Cowell’s bank balance, to cause more wars and conflict and deaths. To paraphrase the late Bill Hicks: ‘If it’s a choice between eternal Hell and good tunes, and eternal Heaven and X-Factor… I’m gonna be surfin’ on the lake of fire, rockin’ out.’ X-Factor = Cunts.

Peter Wood

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Peter Wood has been doing comedy for the last 4 years, and is currently producing sets for next year’s Glasgow Comedy Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Peter has placed in the semi-finals of the Scottish Comedian of the Year competition in 2009 and 2011, and describes his sets as fresh, original and funny. His favourite comedians are Mark Nelson, Paul Sneddon (aka Vladimir McTavish) and Raymond Mearns. Peter used to run a successful comedy night in Aberdeen, called ‘Best in the Field’, which literally took place in a field on the outskirts of Johnshaven. No human beings attended, but he seemed to have a good rapport with the cows who formed his audience. Unfortunately, they failed to adhere to Peter’s strict ‘No Trainers’ rule one too many times, and he stabbed three of them in the face with a spade. Peter then spent three weeks secured to a post, dressed as a scarecrow and drenched in bovine blood, shouting ‘KAISER SOZE!’ before he was shipped off to Thailand by the government. Peter has BPD, which means, by his own rules, if he got himself a floppy hairstyle and auditioned for the X-Factor he’d win it hands-down. There’s some confusion here, though. I’ve only ever seen Peter mention the acronym, so either Peter is bi-polar, or he works for the Boston Police Department.

FOLLOW PETER ON TWITTER: @peterpolishwood

 

Countdown to Destruction

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spy{A news story, written in 2006, that was suppressed for security reasons, now declassified and safe to disseminate}

The aftershocks from a government inquiry into the sinister world of light-entertainment quiz shows will be felt around the world for some years to come, intelligence analysts have predicted. The scandal – dubbed ‘Points Make Spy-sies’ in some circles – has prompted ministers to ask questions in parliament, and forced MI5 and MI6 to question all aspects of national security.

Initially, the inquiry’s remit was narrow, investigating only the Channel 4 mid-afternoon words-and-numbers show, Countdown, after credible intelligence from MI6 suggested that the quiz had been compromised by foreign agitators.

Their fears proved justified. The late Richard Whitely was revealed to have been a Soviet sympathiser who used his TV platform to send coded messages to the KGB.

‘Whitely’s shit gags were actually signals to undercover Russian operatives, ordering them to attack British and American industrial and military targets,’ said an MI6 contact. ‘On one edition of Countdown, a contestant managed to get the word GARDENER. Whitely then quipped, “Oh, gardener. Gardener. Yes… em… well, we… eh… are certainly seeing the … ha ha … green shoots of recovery in this game. Really … ha ha… pruning out the weeds from the roses, aren’t we?” This terrible series of puns was actually the green light for a Russian-built car bomb to detonate outside of an American embassy in Bombay, which resulted in the deaths of forty men.’

She used ‘Mathema-tits’ to lure her prey.

Carol Vorderman – real name Kremlin Vordenovich – was also implicated. Her ‘numbers game’ was rigged so that the board would reveal the IP addresses of MI6 officials. A Kremlin listening station would then note them down and use them to hack into sensitive data files held on British agents operating within Russia. Vorderman is believed to have been indirectly responsible for the deaths of 63 British agents, and to have committed one cold-blooded murder: that of a British agent who had been posing as a studio boom operator, whose neck Vorderman snapped with her thighs at that bit just before the ad break when the audience was suitably distracted by a dreary anecdote given by a D-list has-been stage actor who clearly thinks he’s as hilarious as he is charming.

Susie Dent was cleared of all connection to the conspiracy when it was revealed that many of the men on the panel had had ‘their first wank’ over her in the 80’s.

When the investigation was widened to include other light-entertainment quiz shows it was discovered that Deal or No Deal has less to do with Noel Edmonds’ infamous Cosmic Ordering and more to do with all of the contestants – and Edmonds – being on the payroll of the North Korean government. Actually, they’re not too sure about this one, but Edmonds was shot ‘just to be safe’, said a top brass contact.

In a separate investigation, the concept of ITV’s Goldenballs was said to be so complex that each episode ‘punched holes through time, conceivably allowing German dinosaurs to rampage through the portals and eat our WWII soldiers’.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ‘ICKE DON’T BELIEVE IT’ MAIN MENU, and more bizarre news stories.

Jackson’s Brain on Insane Child Sex Rampage

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jackoDozens of LA police strike teams were mobilised yesterday in a bid to neutralise Michael Jackson’s reanimated brain, which had escaped captivity and gone on a horrifying 12-hour child sex-attack marathon.

Police were first alerted to the atrocity by kindergarten teacher Jizzia Johnston, 36, who was teaching her class when Jackson’s brain struck.

‘I heard thumps on the class window, and all of the kids screamed,’ said Johnston. ‘I looked round, and saw why they were screaming. There was a chimp banging a brain on the pane. And the brain was going crazy, sucking on the glass like one of those facehuggers from the Alien films. The chimp was whacking off. ‘

Scientists had been conducting tests on Jackson’s brain at a secure facility in the north of LA, in a two-prong bid to ‘resurrect’ the drug-addled child-abuser and to isolate and remove those parts of his brain responsible for his deeply naughty behaviour, before finding him a new host body and sending him back through time in order to stop himself from abusing.

Big-shot scientist that thinks he’s better than the rest of us, Tony Cawziecowolski, explained: ‘Re-animation of a dead junky’s brain?: easy. Engineering his brain so that it had the power of independent movement?: piece of piss. The hard part was stopping Jackson from shagging DVD box-sets of Home Alone.’

Cawziecowolski believes that Jackson called on Bubbles the Chimp to help rescue him from captivity.

‘I wish I’d recognised the signs,’ he continued. ‘Jackson would sit on my desk and pulsate manically for hours on end. I just assumed he was engaging in some sort of ingenious ‘brain wank’. In reality he was harnessing his evil in order to telepathically summon his pet monkey to break him out of jail. But hindsight’s 20/20.’

Bubbles breached lab security at approximately 0645, and incapacitated 17 members of staff during the mission to liberate his former master. ‘It was like something out of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but obviously with a heavier plot emphasis on the theft of a famous paedophile’s brain.’

Bubbles’ last stand.

There was a stand-off with armed police in the playground of the kindergarten school, which culminated in Bubbles being gunned down by rapid assault fire just as he was at the point of masturbatory climax. One of the armed officers who participated in the take-down, Gerry Mazterphucker, was visibly shaken by events.

‘I dunno, man,’ he said, tears snaking down his face. ‘What can I say, I just shot a monkey. Every time I think about that glistening monkey jizz, like morning dew, hardening to crust on its dead little paw, I start to cry. Game over, man. Game over.’

Another officer, ‘Crazy’ Charlie Ramirez, said: ‘Holy shit, son, last month I was on traffic, and this month I get to shoot motherfucking monkeys? This is the kind of shit I signed up for. Fuck you, monkeys, fuck you! Next time I want to beat a tapir to death! WOOHOO! America rules ass, son!’

During the gun-fight, Jackson managed to squidge off into the undergrowth. All that was left of his horrifying attack were the words ‘MMM CHIDREN’ scrawled on the windowpane with brain goo. Pretty good spelling for a disembodied brain.

Over the course of the afternoon Jackson’s brain was spotted moonwalking provocatively past a child’s picnic, gazing menacingly at a school bus, and in one terrifying instance was caught on CCTV palpating the face of a sleeping child. But, for horror, nothing tops the moment at 1615 when Jackson leapt past a line of kids at a road crossing and slapped each and every one of them in the face with his throbbing cerebellum.

Police strategists managed to lure Jackson to Macaulay Culkin’s house, within which Culkin had set up a series of ingenious traps, like swinging paint cans and doorbells with makeshift flame throwers in them and that. Jackson was only – and finally – apprehended after he was startled by the sounds of what he believed to be machine gun fire coming from the living room, and slipped on a pile of bouncy balls. Jackson’s brain was returned to the scientists.

“It’s the kids, Marty. Something has got to be done about the kids.”

‘Actually, we kind of fucked up,’ admitted Cawziec… Caws… Cocacol… the scientist, ‘As soon as we got Jackson back, we were so keen to make lemonade from these lemons that we maybe acted a bit hastily. We immediately fitted his brain into a new host body and sent him back to his own past. The trouble was, we sent him back a bit too far. And, unfortunately, instead of acting to alter the course of his tragic life for the better, Jackson decided to sexually molest his own boyhood self. thereby causing all of this shit in the first place. Still, Beat It‘s a great song, right?’

‘Whoops,’ he added.

Undeterred, the same team will be sending Rolf Harris into space in 2015: dead or alive.

‘There’s no scientific benefit this time,’ the scientist admits. ‘It’ll just be for a laugh.’

CLICK HERE FOR THE ‘ICKE DON’T BELIEVE IT’ MAIN MENU, and more bizarre news stories.

The Fresh Prince of Jihad

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I came up with this odd, rather disturbing version of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air‘s theme tune a good few years ago now, but I was never wholly satisfied with the ending, so I shoved it away in a drawer beneath a mountain of old pants. I’ve unearthed said song, and tweaked it a little, because, quite frankly, I’m a sad, sad little man with no ambition. Never-the-less, it’s finished now. Who would have thought that the tune could have lended itself so well to the theme of Palestinian jihad? Uncle Phil would be livid!

I dedicate this re-worked song to two people. Firstly, to Speggy (aka Craig Evenden), who performed a rough-cut of this song at a drunken party years ago. He did this to see if the words worked with the tune – he also did it because he was pissed and I handed him the piece of paper. Secondly, I dedicate this to the very first Vivienne of Fresh Prince, the one who was dropped from the show for being ‘a bit too African’.

The Fresh Prince of Jihad

Now this is my story all about how,
My life got flipped turned upside down,
And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there,
I’ll tell you how I became some mince that got mauled in mid-air.

It was Palestinia,
Born and raised.
In the compound, that’s where I spent most of my days.
Killin’, anthraxin’, and eatin’ my mule,
And shootin’ some people outside a’ the school.
When a couple of Jews,
They were up to no good:
Started rolling tanks through my neighbourhood.

I shot one little kyke, and Allah was there,
He said, ‘You’re joining with your aunt and uncle up here in my lair.”

I missiled up a lab and when the flames cleared, the
Science rate was threshed, and I had mice in my ear.
If anything I could say that these Abs were rare,
But I thought, nah, forget it, pre-pare for war-fare!

I got to the guardhouse about seven or eight,
And yelled to the Abbies, ‘No homes! Hell is greater!’
Looked at my kingdom, I was finally dead,
I sat on a bomb, that’s the price of Jihad.

@ Jamie Andrew 2012

(Unless you’re a lawyer, in which case it was Speggy. I can tell you his address and everything.)

The Show Must Stop: TV Finales – 24

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24’s ending, unlike Lost’s, was pitch-perfect, as was its final season – admittedly after a slightly wobbly beginning. Season 8 showed us Jack Bauer with the safety off; a vengeful, brutal, half-mad slayer of wicked men; a man whose moral ambiguities about torture and killing had been flash-bombed from his soul following the execution of his girlfriend and the realisation of the extent to which evil and corruption had tainted the Oval Office – the hitherto incorruptible Alison Taylor included.

Jack went absolutely fucking ape-shit, and in his fury – and my imperfect use of English  – seemed even more indestructible and unstoppable than usual. His ass-kicking abilities were almost supernatural. In one scene, a few episodes from the end, he single-handedly ambushed a secret service convoy in a tunnel. Decked out in head-to-toe black body armour, complete with sinister black face-mask, he advanced on his enemies with the eerie, murderous calm of Jason Voorhees, spraying machine-gun fire this way and that, absorbing and ignoring their return bullets as if they were nothing more substantial than dust motes. It was a joy to behold. Genuinely thrilling and exciting, like 24 used to be.

Yes, 24 in its own way was just as preposterous as Lost; 24’s writers loved their nonsensical, character-destroying curve-balls, too. But we forgive 24 because we don’t – and were never encouraged to – take it too seriously. We let ourselves get swept away in the viciously fast current of its plot, our logic centres battered into submission by the insane rhythm of its non-stop, high-octane excitement. 24 has never had high or lofty ideals, or wished to stir our souls; all it’s ever wanted to do is to go to town on our adrenal glands.

Day 1 was great. Day 2 was good. Day 3 was a bit iffy, although the multi-episode arc with the hotel and the bio-weapon was thrilling. Day 4 was a bit shitty. Day 5, featuring our first taste of President Logan’s evil, was one of the best. Day 6 was one of the most preposterous and abominable outings for Jack, during which the series didn’t so much jump the shark as secure it to a space-rocket with a length of chain and tow it to Mars. 24:Redemption was pant-shittingly bad. Day 7 had its moments, but collapsed under the weight of its own ’double-double-double-double-agent’ ridiculousness: a certain someone should have stayed dead. Day 8, the last day, restored all of the series’ starting quota of intrigue, fun, thrills, scares, shocks and brutality, ensuring that past transgressions into illogic and shoddiness will be forgotten, and only the good times remembered. What a way to go.

In 24‘s final scene, Jack and Chloe share a goodbye. Chloe is in New York’s CTU, watching Jack on the screen, his image relayed by a CTU drone. They know this is probably the last time they’ll speak to each other. Because of the enormity of the scheme Jack has helped to expose, and the uncompromising brutality he’s visited upon its architects, he will forever be on the run from both the Russian and American governments. The peaceful retirement he was promised in the season’s opening episodes is now an impossible dream.

As Chloe deactivates CTU’s systems to aid Jack’s dash to anonymity and freedom, we catch one more glimpse of his face on the view-screen, looking searchingly into Chloe’s eyes.

I half-expected Jack to quote Jim Carrey at the end of The Truman Show: ‘Good morning. And in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening and good night!’ Then he‘s gone. Jack Bauer: the man whose chase will never be over. Tortured. Hunted. Haunted.

We’ll miss him.

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Read all about the finale of Lost here.

The Doctor Wants To See Your Box Filled

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A few years ago, as part of my then-job, I accompanied a guy to an appointment with a consultant at the local hospital. The consultant was your classic, staid, stuffy, be-spectacled, salt-and-pepper-haired, dead-eyed psychopath of a clinician. Which made it all the more strange when he entered ‘BANTER MODE’, like some android clicking a switch in its positronic brain.

‘Yes, and who’s this with you? Marvellous. Where are you living now? Is it nice there? Good. Good. Is that OK with you? Are you happy with that? Yes, and have you had a good day?’

The doc seemed unused to, and uneasy about, chatting like this with people like us. It made me imagine Frasier Crane being trapped in an elevator with the cast of Still Game. The ‘conversation’ was stilted and forced, like small-talk by check-list. There was a good reason for this:

He had a check-list.

This he presented at the end of the consultation, complete with pen and clip-board. One of the questions was – and I paraphrase slightly due to lack of a photographic memory – ‘Did the doctor have a friendly demeanour and seem interested in you as a human being rather than just treating you like a number?’

Poor prick. On top of having to remember thousands of facts about the part of the human body in which he specialises, and trying really hard not to accidentally murder people, some little pen-pushing, number-crunching bureaucrat is forcing him to be jolly and natural with people according to a very strict set of criteria in order to satisfy government friendliness targets. That explains his banter, which I admit was perfectly natural – but ‘natural’ in the same sense that floods, turds and strokes are natural. How much are these surveys costing? And who really cares? I don’t want my doctor to be nice to me. I just want him not to kill me.

‘Ah, so good to see you. Ha ha ha, charming, charming. So, how’s your sister? Is she? Oh, marvellous, marvellous… by the way, you’ve got AIDS.’

Doctors have a gruelling enough job without having to contend with customer satisfaction surveys. Especially GPs. Imagine how horrible it must be for them to have had to listen to 16,000 old ladies per day wittering on about their sons’ new jobs; the weather; their ancient, battered and leaking prolapsed arseholes; how their daughters-in-law don’t cook properly for their sons; how ungrateful their sisters are; how it ‘wisnae like that’ in their day, and generally droning on and on and on and on and on, with neither pause nor end, because they’ve fuck all else to do on a Tuesday afternoon and all of their friends are dead. And now the old incessant, piss-scented yammerers have been handed check-lists? Jesus, that’s like handing Jason Vorhees a chainsaw seconds after calling him ugly. Heaven help our GPs.

‘I got the feeling that the doctor just wasn’t interested in the work history of my son Johnny, the electrician. He’s in that Gibraltar, you know. But I’m not keen on that wife of his, oh no. Thinks she knows it all. Never listens to what I tell her, well, she’ll learn the hard way, so she will, it’s like I’ve been saying to my friend, Jeannie, she’s the one with the bad foot, she lives doon that road that’s filled with the gays and the junkies. Well, it’s no fur the likes of me to be spreading the gossip and that, but she wiz in that corner shop the other day and she saw that yin and that other yin coming in and buying a…’

ENOUGH! No checklist, OK, NHS? What I want from my doctors is simple. If I’ve cancer, catch it. If I’ve chlamydia, get riddae it. If I’ve a dicky heart, help make it start. OK? I don’t want to be my doctor’s BFF, lol oh doccy you be my bestest pal ever pinky swear you will be lol. Right? So let’s help end this madness.

By taking part in my 87 page ‘Should the NHS conduct customer satisfaction surveys?’ survey.

Cunt of the Week (6 August 2012) by James Walker

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Hello. Before I start properly, let me say this. Unlike what I’ve seen from the other writers of this feature, I feel very uncomfortable using the word ‘cunt’. It’s not a natural thing for me to use that word, and in my head, the fact I’m putting quotes around the word means that I’m not really saying it, and the quotes sort of cancel the word out, which is of course inaccurate, but will help me sleep at night.

But maybe it should be a word that I’m a bit more comfortable with. For that reason, I am picking not one, but two of them. That’s right. I’m going to write about two of the fucks (I am very happy to use ‘fucks’ all day long.)

Now I like Ant & Dec. They’re fine. I’ve not been harmed by them in any way. I do not have a beef with them. My beef is with their smaller counterparts, Little Ant & Dec. If you watched Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway,you’ll probably be aware of Little Ant and Dec. It was a segment of the show where A & D introduced these two kids, who were the child versions of them and they went off and interviewed celebrities and whatnot. They seemed very nice, and quite funny. I enjoyed them up until when the show finished.

‘Then why on earth are they your ‘cunts’ of the week?’ you might be thinking, in italics.

Well what I said at the end there. That’s exactly it. The show finished, and after that, nothing. Little Ant & Dec were no more. I both thought, and hoped, that it was going to last forever. It’s not as if they’d been going since the PJ & Duncan days, but I personally think the parents of Lil’ A & D should’ve had the foresight to get together and conceive a good few years earlier so that such a thing could have happened; I know that I’m going out in a few nights, so have just washed my best top, so looking forward is always a good thing to do. They were on one TV show and that was it.

Three for the price of two.

It’s just a shame that they’re not still around now, doing the same things as Ant & Dec, but a bit smaller, that’s all. It’s almost as if they were just shoved on to Saturday Night Takeaway as part of a recurring segment, and their future as Little Ant & Dec after the show wasn’t even considered. Little Ant & Dec are no longer together, and that’s why they are my ‘cunts’ of the week.

And finally, some people might be thinking ‘oh, well Little Ant & Dec actually aren’t that little anymore and are very possibly taller than the actual, properly aged Ant & Dec, and would no doubt have different interests and generally wouldn’t want to be known as a smaller version of other men for the rest of their lives. So it wouldn’t really work now, anyway’. I have decided to ignore those people entirely.

The enigmatic James Walker, who wishes to remain faceless for security reasons. Either that, or he’s incredibly fucking ugly.

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER James Walker is a guy who is not very good at writing in third person and I, being him, can attest to that. Both he and I have done a bit of stand-up before as the same man and he has not won any awards (and neither have I.) I live in a flat together with him and they, and we have two hands between us. She has decided that this bio bit has already gone on a bit too long, and he and me and them would have to agree.

ALL OF US ARE ON TWITTER HERE: @jameswalkerguy.

 

Beauty Pageant: Scotland Style

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The Miss Falkirk beauty pageant was held at the Inchyra Grange hotel last night. Usually when we hear the words Miss Falkirk they’re included in the sentence: ‘Geez, there’s an asteroid heading for Scotland. I hope it doesn’t miss Falkirk.’

Beauty pageants like Miss Falkirk can trace their ancestry back to America, beginning with a modelling event hosted by huckster and showman P.T Barnum in 1854 (the man who coined the phrase, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’) and culminating in the all-singing-all-dancing Miss America contests.

But we Scots embrace American culture somewhat awkwardly; whenever we attempt to emulate the glitz and glamour of their big show-stopping events it inevitably feels like the act of trying to squeeze an angry, shit-covered rhino into a tiny Gucci prom dress.

Anyway, I was at the inaugural Miss Falkirk last year, during which there was a wonderful culture-collision moment. When America met Falkirk.

It happened at the end of the night. The evening’s host, Steve Courtney, from local radio station Central FM, was about to announce the winners. There were many people to thank, and much excitement and anticipation to be wrung from the moment, which Steve was clearly relishing. Or maybe he was stalling for time until everything was ready. Whatever: he got his talk on.

‘Ladies and gents, it’s been a wonderful evening, I’m sure you’ll agree. But there can be only one winner, and I can tell you’re all eagerly awaiting the announcement. And so, without any further ado, it falls to me to tell you that the winner… the Queen who will be crowned…. of this…. the first Miss Falkirk… and what a contest it’s been, folks, they’ve all been great. Haven’t they all been great?’

Miss Falkirk 2012 finalists

The audience – which comprised the contestants’ immaculately dressed and coiffured mums, grannies and little sisters, and a large helping of cognitively-challenged, heavily drunk, knuckle-scraping car-park brawlers – was growing restless. Seats could be heard shuffling over the hard-wood floors; the odd nervous cough. Children were fiddling and fidgeting with their hands. The girls on stage were frozen like the last ten seconds of a Police Squad episode.

‘It truly has been a great one, ladies and gents, a competition and a night right up there with the best this town, and country, has to offer. So without any ado, no further ado at all… I’m just about to announce…. the winner…. the winner of Miss Falkirk 2011…. held here… in this lovely venue… and so the winner is… wait for it folks… here it comes… of this year’s competition…’

And then, in the silence of one of Steve Courtney’s lingering pauses, amidst a quiet crowd of hundreds, it came: the Falkirk-ification of this most American of nights.

‘…yes, it’s time. The winner… of Miss Falkirk… in the year of our Lord two thousand and ele…’

‘GET ON WITH IT, YOU CUNT!’

Followed by shocked silence. Which in turn was followed by one solitary burst of laughter: from my mouth. Not one single other person was laughing, or even smiling. Welcome to Falkirk, folks. It’s beautiful and terrible.

Good old Steve just stammered a little and moved on, completely ignoring the ‘cunt’, which was very professional of him. Especially considering that he probably wanted to pluck the little bastard out of the crowd and hurl him through the nearest wall.

Falkirk: sometimes I love you.