The (Mostly Awful) People You Meet in Facebook Local Community Groups

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Local community groups on Facebook seem to want to be affirming, aspirational spaces where people stoke joy and goodwill, keep each other up to date on fetes and bring-and-buy-sales, and share uplifting nuggets of news about small businesses and local heroes. In reality, though, these groups are like small online wars, each post a Howitzer waiting to go off. And, by God, that’s not an insult. Who wants a saccharine space run by the ‘Aw, that’s nice’ crowd when you could have a non-stop barrage of insults, rants and smack-downs designed to make people cry, and re-ignite potentially violent neighbourhood blood-feuds? No-one, for Christ’s sake. Would women’s magazines still be popular if they jettisoned all the murder and sexual assault and just stuck to recipes and keep-fit tips? Of course they bloody wouldn’t. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to see a picture of an impossibly beautiful, blandly smiling woman dressed in pastel-coloured spring-wear unless it’s accompanied by a caption that reads ‘MY NAKED, BUS-DRIVER UNCLE RITUALLY SACRIFICED MY DOG ON CHRISTMAS DAY – THEN HAD SEX WITH THE TURKEY’. Accompanied in turn, naturally, by a caption that reads: ‘TEN PATHS TO A HAPPIER YOU’.

Anyway, here are the types of people who make our local community pages great.

Or at least typical.

The person who doesn’t seem to be aware of the existence of the internet despite having a Facebook account

Every community group contains at least one person who hasn’t quite cottoned on to how the internet works, and will invariably, sometimes daily, ask things like, “Does anyone know what time the Garden Centre opens today?” As if they couldn’t just Google it and have the answer within 0.003 seconds. Instead, they prefer to cast their net wide and trust in the local townsfolks’ almost divine knowledge of the operations of ‘Cherry Blossom Garden Centre’. And they’ll wait, piecing together the truth of the Garden Centre’s secrets over many hours, like a detective in a murder enquiry. What would these people do if the internet were to suddenly break? Spread some cat guts over their dining table and jangle magic runes over it while chanting backwards in Bulgarian until the devil himself appeared in a cloud of smoke to say, “Sorry, Brenda, love, the Garden Centre’s closed for refurbishment, information for which you’ve now forfeit your mortal soul. Come along with me, dear. I’m quite looking forward to jabbing you up the toffee-tunnel with my flaming-hot trident as you hunch over a table replying to an infinite stream of social media commenters, who are all asking ‘Does anyone know how long Brenda’s arse is going to be open for flaming-hot tridents?’ and you reply, ‘Oh, forever and ever. My arse is going to be like a caved-in burnt blancmange.”

Just google it, you fannies. If you’re lonely, just phone someone, eh?

The Permanently Obnoxious Woman

It doesn’t matter what topic is raised, what manner of debate is entered into, this stern-faced, contrary and compassionless woman will always be on hand to sprinkle a hessian sack’s worth of self-righteous horse-shit all over it. You’ve lost your dog? “Not been funny but shd you no have been more carefool? Shouldnae huv a dog if ye cannae look efter it.” Rabid teens smashed up your local park, shat in the duck pond, or trussed up a vicar on the swing set and set fire to him? “Honestly, folk just need something tae moan aboot!!! Aff yer high horse, we were aw young once, it’s no like the kids have got onyhing else tae dae! Ratbag!!!” You’ve just been violently murdered? “Whit an attention seeker!!! In ma day ye just got murdered and got on wi’ it, none oh this ‘look at me’ shit! SNOWFLAKE!!!”

The Permanently Obnoxious Woman can be something of a lesser-spotted creature in the annals of the community group thread. This is because, at any given moment, she is incredibly likely to be on a Facebook ban for calling someone who suggests she’s being less than kind ‘a dick’.

That’s another way to identify her. Somewhere in her personal profile is a picture of her smiling proudly over the words ‘BE KIND’.

The Gollywog Controversist

These people tend to crop up most often on ‘Do you remember?’ community groups but, really, they can strike anywhere. “Who remembers having one of these?” the question comes, beneath a picture of the jollily smiling little racist caricature. “Of course, the snowflakes have banned them because THEY say they’re racist. Then I guess my GRAN was racist then, wasn’t she???”

Yes. Yes she probably was.

It’s always befuddling to watch white people try to defend the innocence and honour of a toy that literally has the word ‘wog’ in it.

I understand that people might warmly connect a Gollywog with memories of their childhood. That, as a child, they might not have thought of their toy as anything other than a treasured night-time companion. How can the gollywog be racist if I loved that little offensive stereotype? Come on, though. Sometimes new information comes along that recontextualises how you should feel about something from your past, and that’s not a bad thing. For instance, I grew up watching, and enjoying, various singers and entertainers of the 1970s and 1980s but, believe me, my kids aren’t going to come home from school to hear Gary Glitter booming out of the kitchen inviting them to join his gang, as I treat them to classic episodes of Jim’ll Fix It and afterwards a thumping rendition of ‘Two Little Boys’ on the wobble board. It was okay to have enjoyed those things back when you literally didn’t know any better, but for fuck sake don’t enjoy them now!

“My budgie is missing. Has anyone seen it?”

Fair enough, if your dog or cat goes missing, spread the word. But your budgie?

Do you know who’s seen your budgie? A kestrel. Or a wee boy with a fishing net, a roll of selotape and a box of fireworks. That’s who’s seen your budgie. Your budgie is never coming home. It’s currently a pile of bloodied feathers topped off with a lopped-off beak, like an entrée at a psycho’s dinner party. You might as well use its empty cage to store biscuits, or magnetise it and use it to steal people’s car keys out of their pockets. What did you expect? This is a timid, shrunken parrot adapted to the dry climes of Australia. It’s got all the hardiness of a dead jellyfish, and all the defensive capabilities of a crisp packet. Out there in the Scottish urban jungle – with its landscape of bams, freezing rain and evil seagulls – that little ripper is a goner. Get a real parrot next time, you skinflint.

The humble-bragger

“Does anyone have a power-washer I could hire or borrow? It’s just I’ve had my massive garden re-landscaped and I’ve now got a trellis-fringed slab-feature in between the Japanese ornamental rock-garden and the bespoke designer garden furniture, and I just want to make sure that it’s spick and span in time for the summer garden party season,” they announce, alongside a series of photos, in one of which you can clearly see a power-washer.

Roughly translated: “LOOK AT MY FUCKING GARDEN AND WEEP, YOU CLASSLESS PLEBS!”

The dog-shit photographer

It’s not enough simply to tell you about the dog shit problem in Graham Street. You have to be made to gaze upon those dog eggs, sometimes in stomach-churning, extreme close-up detail, the photographer stopping just short of posting a video of themselves chomping on a particularly sausage-like example of canine piping, while shouting through an excremental moustache, ‘IS THIS THE WORLD YOU WANT TO LIVE IN?’

Jesus Christ, we get it!

No wonder the dogs are all shitting themselves with all of those fireworks going off all the time, though, eh?

Fireworks probably make up about 96 per cent of all chat on community groups. The other four per cent is people trying to give away their old Tupperware.

Sociopathic Men’s Men with Zero Compassion

Wherever you see a laughing face emoji on a post warning of danger or telling of misfortune, you’re bound to see these dead-eyed devils at work.

You’re worried about your grandmother dying of Covid? HAHAHAHA! You’re angry because some local youths are injecting heroin into their eyeballs as your three-year-old plays on the swings? HAHAHAHA! You’re scared because you’re a woman and you were followed home by a man with an axe who was loudly shouting the lyrics to Bizarre Inc’s 1992 hit ‘I’m Gonna Get You’? HAHAHAHA!

They just can’t get enough of it. Because they go through life not giving a shit about anything or anyone, and not experiencing discomfort or danger on account of them being mildly violent men, they regard most of the rest of the world as unreconstituted pussies, and aren’t shy about asserting their sociopathic selfishness dressed up as masculinity. If you see an inappropriate laugh-face, click on the person’s profile, and you’ll detect some or all of these things in their photos:

  • Haircuts from a barber-shop that only offers two styles: ‘Peaky Blinders’ or ‘Vikings’
  • An aggressive, dead-eyed grin from behind a bottle of booze
  • A sports car
  • A Union Jack
  • A meme about Greta Thunberg being a wee bitch

Movie Review – Greenland

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When I first watched the trailer for Amazon’s new, end-of-the-world disaster-flick Greenland I assumed it was a series, because so much action was crammed into those two electric minutes, spread over such a multitude of locations, that my unconscious brain must have doubted that two hours or less could do it proper justice. Unbeknownst to me, I was right about that.

Gerard Butler is John Garrity, a shit-the-bed husband desperately trying to get back into his wife’s good graces and keep his little, semi-nuclear family together. Unfortunately for him, just when things are looking good, a comet decides to pay a visit to earth. It quickly becomes apparent that the government’s official line about the fragments harmlessly burning up on entry are about as water-tight as the assurances he made to his wife about never cheating on her. In a couple of days’ time mankind faces an extinction-level event, a headline act that will be ably supported by various city-pulverising practice strikes.

John receives a presidential alert on his phone informing him that he, his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and diabetic son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) have been selected for extraction to a place of safety: a skills lottery the aim of which is to ensure that what’s left of mankind has the knowledge and resources to rebuild some semblance of civilisation in the wake of the disaster. As John inexplicably proceeds to enjoy a suburban get-together in the wake of this ominous message, the alert arrives again, this time appearing on his synched TV-screen for all his guests and neighbours to see. None of them have received an alert.

This is a delicious predicament in which to place our heroes. Will their hitherto mild-mannered neighbours run the scale from panicked to hostile to murderous? Will they try to block their escape, steal their place? Will John have to hurt or kill one of his former friends? The conflict is burned through in moments. It’s a pattern that’s repeated throughout the movie. This rise-and-burn of the movie’s plot points simultaneously encapsulates both the best and the worst thing about Greenland: namely that the dizzying array of moral quandaries and perilous scenarios thrown at the audience keep the film zooming along at a fast, furious and exciting pace, but the lack of time in which to explore and unpack the more interesting questions raised by these predicaments leaves the film occasionally feeling shallow. Again, a series format would have allowed for this, but maybe I’m just more of a TV guy.

The connective tissue that speeds these finger-click-fast scenarios along is made up of coincidences, cliché, and plot-holes so big you could steer a comet through them. Some of them you can excuse as being the inevitable consequence of a world held in panic’s grip, as with the couple who – after the Garrity family becomes separated thanks to a rather heartless government policy – steal Allison’s wrist-band and abduct Nathan, thinking they can gain access to an evacuation flight in the Garritys’ stead. Yes, it’s preposterous that the couple would believe their plan had a chance of succeeding, but people in the real world do much more blindingly dumb, desperate and delusional things under much less strenuous and apocalyptic conditions, so the plot-point doesn’t seem all that jarring. Much less forgivable is Allison managing to find Nathan again with relative ease, ditto with family’s separate journeys back to Allison’s father’s house. Everyone John meets in the chaos-stricken city in which he’s trapped is conveniently heading in almost precisely the direction he needs to go.

The family’s ultimate destination is Greenland, the location of the US government’s gargantuan fall-out shelters (I wonder if the denizens of Greenland had any say in the matter). John first learns about the location of these shelters from a kindly young man he shares a truck with on his way north; this man also tells him about alternative means of reaching Greenland by way of a civilian airfield in southern Canada. Greenland, then, is one of those rare movies that gives away the ending in its title. Not quite as egregious an offence as The Sixth Sense being called Bruce Willis is a Ghost, instead lying somewhere in severity between Jaws being called They Eventually Manage to Kill the Shark, and 10 Cloverfield Lane being called John Goodman is Right.

The hardest plot-hole to swallow is that the military, who have been mercilessly enforcing both a strict survivor quota and a screening program to keep out the chronically ill, would welcome a series of civilian flights arriving from Greenland with open arms, and not just instantly shoot them out of the sky.

Egregious implausibilities notwithstanding, listening to your inner-cynic and –critic simply isn’t the way to enjoy this movie.  Who in their right mind would select a disaster movie starring Gerard Butler, and then think to themselves, ‘I’m really looking forward to all of the realism and nuance in this one.’ The movie is a blockbuster, albeit one with a more modest budget than most, and seeks not to tinkle the intellect, but to thrill with spectacle, and entertain with edge-of-the-seat peril, providing just enough emotional heart and human stakes to make you care about the characters. Greenland ,then, meets its aims. Who cares if it’s occasionally schmaltzy or sometimes runs roughshod over reality? The performances are believable, the direction is tight and effective. It makes you feel panic, empathy, dread, hope, horror and happiness, and feel them big, sometimes in one short scene. No blockbuster in recent memory has made me involuntarily verbalise my feelings, in some cases incredibly loudly, quite as much as this one.

It’s also refreshing to find a modern movie that isn’t crushingly nihilistic (beyond the core premise of global annihilation itself, of course); bad people do bad things in times of duress, as do good people, and they certainly do here, but Greenland also showcases its fair share of quietly noble people content to go gently into that good night, because, after all, kindness and self-sacrifice is as much a marker of humanity as savage self-interest.

Though the ending is two-parts bleak to one-part hopeful, at least it doesn’t leave you facing the grim inevitability of a husband and wife having to fuck their own kids and grandkids in order to perpetuate the human race, like some other recent, extinction-themed movies we could mention. Looking at you, The Midnight Sky, you filthy animal.

Greenland is a good film – though I still think it would have made a genuinely great Limited Series. Perhaps it still will one day.

THREE AND A HALF STARS

The Most Disappointing TV of 2020

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2020 will be remembered for a great many things, few of them sanguine. The year began with Australia burning, and ended with Donald Trump trying to smash democracy using other people’s money and temper tantrums. Wedged between those two terrifying totems was the coronavirus, an invisible and deadly assailant that first inexplicably robbed us of our toilet paper, then our freedom, then our collective sense of objective reality. That spectre of lost lives and lockdowns is still with us, and the virus itself only seems to be getting stronger, more deadly and more widespread, like some hideous airborne variant of Mrs Brown’s Boys. As a consequence of the endless upheaval, there wasn’t much to do in 2020 except panic, and watch TV. Thankfully, there was plenty of panic to go around, and a veritable smorgasbord of terrific TV to be sampled.

But that’s not why we’re here today.

Today, I want to talk to you about the shows that made me wish for some kind of retroactive coronavirus-related production disruption that would wipe from existence whole seasons of said shows, and, most mercifully of all, expunge them from my memory. I’m talking about the shows that felt fittingly 2020, in that they were a heinous assault on mankind itself.

The Middle

First, let’s look at a handful of shows that for one reason or another teetered on the cusp of entertainment oblivion, but never quite plummeted, or else started to nose-dive but managed to pull the stick back to achieve if not quite a loop-the-loop then at least a level flight.

Early in the year, Armando Ianucci’s hotly anticipated, space-based comedy Avenue 5 certainly elicited more bangs than whimpers; unfortunately, the bangs came as a result of people slamming their heads off of the nearest solid object in pained bewilderment that an Armando Ianucci project could be so insipid. I think much of the problem lay with the uncharted territory being explored, by creator and audience both. Ianucci usually satirises existing institutions and power structures for which we have countless frames of reference, even if we find ourselves ignorant of the minutiae of their functions. Without much foreknowledge we can get what he’s trying to do and trying to say, and who he’s trying to say it about. We understand the archetypes.

In Avenue 5, set aboard a futuristic luxury space-liner, the institution and target was more opaque, and it took some time for the pieces to fall into place, more time than many viewers were willing to extend. Which is a shame, really, because after a somewhat shaky start – initially, the characters felt oddly broad, and the humour fell a little flat – the show unfolded into a delicious, hilarious farce. Its message on the madness of crowds was moulded, I would guess, with the rise of bumbling populist power-mongers and their slavishly devoted minions in mind, but the year’s events transformed the show into a prescient, scathing, very timely satire on how societies behaved, and continue to behave, during the coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully the second season can hit the ground running… if the coronavirus doesn’t stop them from filming it, that is.

Red Dwarf could easily have ended up slap-bang in the middle of 2020’s dreck list, but it managed to dodge that fate largely thanks to low expectations. Few expected it to be good, even – perhaps especially – childhood fans like me. It still pains me to say it, but Red Dwarf hasn’t been truly noteworthy since its sixth season. Every few years it returns with just enough nuggets of what made it beloved in the first place to justify its continued existence. It’s like a slightly shambolic, age-faded uncle whose hoary old jokes you tolerate because he used to tell you funny stories when you were young. And so it proved with Red Dwarf: The Promised Land, a feature-length special that largely squandered the long-anticipated return of the cat people, especially with its damp squib of a generic villain, but squeezed a lot of laughs out of Lister’s reluctant ascension to godhood (and Rimmer’s reaction to it). There were also a few stellar scenes the dialogue from which wouldn’t have felt out of place in the show’s golden era. Red Dwarf needs to re-learn that it’s always at its best when it trucks in pathos, and lets the laughs flow from character rather than trying to force them through innuendo and crudity.

And now, as promised, the year’s biggest failures and most crushing disappointments.

How the West was Lost

Westworld season one was a brilliant piece of story-telling: dense, rich, mysterious, confounding, thought-provoking. Its second season took a few stutter-steps and stumbles – adding fuel to the fire of those who’d derided the show for over-staying its welcome rather than taking a one-and-done approach – but still turned in powerful, and emotionally resonant sequences and episodes. Then came the third season. Gone were the slow-burns and puzzles, here to stay were the whizz-bangs and non-stop robot ass-kicking. The difference in tone and quality was as pronounced as the difference between Alien and Alien vs Predator 2; Terminator 2 and Terminator: Genysis; and a kiss on the cheek and a thunderous kick in the balls. Westworld has become more like a bad, generic Terminator sequel than the inventive and reflective mind-bender it was when it began. In mulling things over before writing this article, I realised I’d completely forgotten Aaron Paul’s prominent role in season 3; I only remembered once I started grabbing screenshots. This highlights the season’s worst, most unforgiveable, crime: it’s forgettable.

Star Drekking

I was accompanied on my voyages through adolescence by the starships Enterprise, Defiant and Voyager, a triumvirate of overlapping Trek shows (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager respectively) that got me hooked on televised science fiction, and opened my mind to the richness and possibilities of its story-telling.

Sci-fi these days, though, can’t be allowed to revel in its cult status. It’s a multi-billion-pound industry thanks to the likes of Star Wars and Marvel and Disney. Sci-fi is now for the masses, and they want blockbusters, all of the time, whether the screen is small or cinema-sized: big explosions, big emotions, big lens flares, and loud and manipulative musical scores.

Star Trek: Discovery is a case in point. It looks great. Some of the visual effects, particularly in its third season, have been breath-taking. But I can’t help but feel that the aesthetics have been dialled up at the expense of the writing, and somewhere along the line the show has lost its grip on what makes Star Trek ‘Star Trek’. I know times change, and with them budgets, attitudes, audience habits and technology. What might have worked in the 60s (even the 80s) wouldn’t necessarily work today; a lot of it definitely wouldn’t. I know Star Trek has evolved, and has to evolve, to stay relevant. I just wonder if the show has changed too much, to the point where Star Trek: Discovery isn’t just a bad Star Trek show, but a bad (or, if I’m being generous, a mediocre) show, full-stop.

I say this not only as a borderline fuddy-duddy who looks back fondly and perhaps with a sense of protectiveness on the halcyon days of Jean Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko, but also as someone who watches, and often critiques, an unhealthy amount of television. I’m not operating in a vacuum here. I know what a good Star Trek or, more broadly, a good sci-fi series looks like, and I know what a good TV show looks like. And Discovery doesn’t look like any of it.

Season three saw our plucky crew following Michael through a wormhole into the far-future, acting as custodians of data that a malevolent AI had tried to use to end all sentient, organic life in the universe.

The season started well, with an opener that was entertaining and luscious to look at, if a little vacuous and whizz-bang, followed by an effective episode that saw the crew having to extract the ship from a tomb of fast-replicating ice. Things quickly went downhill after that. The season’s premise, that the Federation of the future was a spent and rag-tag force, a shadow of its former self only kept alive by hope and goodwill, was a strong one, though, as usual, Michael Burnham’s habit of instantly saving the universe just because she’s Michael Burnham rather robbed the story, and the new universe, of its chance to grow in depth and complexity.

Myriad complications face the crew in this new far-future universe, chief among them the cataclysmic event that occurred 120 years before the Discovery’s arrival. This was ‘the burn’, an unexplained phenomenon that caused all dilithium in the galaxy to spontaneously combust, killing untold thousands and rendering most spaceships incapable of fast interstellar travel. Again, fantastical and implausible as this notion was (and I clearly say that in my capacity as a qualified astro-physicist…) there was great potential here for complex conflict and drama that was unfortunately side-lined in favour of slick and shiny whizz-bang, and the sacrificing of all ancillary characters and themes on the altar of Michael Burnham.

You could lay some of the blame for Discovery’s problems on its serialised format – the shift away from the standalone episodes that were once Star Trek’s bread-and-butter – but that would be to deny Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s phenomenally successful forays into that type of long-form story-telling. Even when dealing with war and hopelessness and loss DS9 never lost its essence, its hope, its intrinsic sense of the wider canvas – and franchise – in which it existed.

It helped that DS9 had layered, flawed and fully-fleshed-out characters. Discovery has, at its core, Michael Burnham and Saru (I loved Georgiou, but she’s been spun off into her own spin-off series now), maybe, at a push, Book, Stamets, and Culver, and I wouldn’t include any of them, barring Saru and Georgiou, in the top 50 of Trek’s best characters. I’m still not entirely sure of the names of most of the bridge crew. Very few supporting characters enjoy much in the way of development in this show, and if they do it’s either to service the plot, or service the universal constant that is Michael Burnham – usually the latter. This is not an ensemble show: this is the Michael Burnham show, with occasional not-so-special guest stars.

Season three had so many cynically manufactured emotional beats it was almost a percussive symphony, a dirge scored to the background wail of crying. Jesus, they cry a lot on this show, a lot more than any group of people I’ve ever encountered in life or fiction. And they affirm each other a lot, too, whether it’s earned or not. There were so many bullshit inspirational speeches that I started to think I was watching The Walking Dead In Space. Hugging and crying, crying and hugging, feeling and being in touch with feelings. Signalling to the audience, ‘You should feel this NOW and now you should feel THIS’: telling not showing; shouting not whispering.

Whereas Trek spin-offs like The Next Generation had consultants on hand to advise on the plausibility and logistics of the scripts’ speculative science, Discovery is content to cleave closer to mood and magic. The emphasis is always on feeling over thinking. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the revelation that ‘the burn’ was caused by a sad and angry Kelpien child reacting to the death of his mother under extraordinary (and extraordinarily stupid) circumstances. I’m afraid so. This is no longer a science-fiction show. It’s like something written for the CW by someone who used to write fantasy for children, and doesn’t really like Star Trek, or science-fiction, all that much. I never get the sense, like I did with previous incarnations of the show, that the characters live on the ship. The ship doesn’t feel like a home to them; more like a spaceborne feelings’ factory, or a mobile exposition unit. When the characters appear on-screen – usually running, frequently crying – it’s as though they’ve just entered stage left. Not real people but actors, ciphers. Surface. It’s all just surface.

If you want good small-screen sci-fi, watch The Expanse; if you want good Star Trek, watch 80s and 90s Star Trek, or even watch The Orville, a gem of a show that’s managed to capture the ethos and feel of a modern Star Trek show while remaining resolutely its own thing.

Whatever my interpretation of (or ‘feelings about’ if you want a little sliver of irony) Discovery, a crime hasn’t been committed here. It’s just a TV show, and if people enjoy it or take comfort from it, then who am I to judge them? In any case, I’d take Discovery over Star Trek: Picard any (and every) day of the week.

Christ, Picard felt like a kick in the nuts; a kick so hard it sent my nuts thundering up my body like two errant pinballs, which then ping-ponged between my skull and amygdala until my brain died. Sometimes, as Fred Gwynne said in Pet Sematary, dead is better, and that’s certainly the case here, both in relation to the show itself, and to the fate of Jean Luc Picard at the season’s end.

On reflection, all of the things I enjoyed about Picard season one were rooted in nostalgia. I liked the opening dream sequence aboard the NCC-1701; I liked Picard reuniting with Riker and Troi; I liked seeing Hugh and Seven of Nine again; I liked Data’s (now second) final death scene. But I only liked them in the same way that I would like the sudden waft of a smell that reminded me of being a kid and visiting my dearly-departed grandparents. Running with that memory-sparking theme, then, I would have to say that the experience of watching season one of Picard is like someone reanimating your dead grandparents and having those hitherto sweet, wise and gentle figures hurl foul abuse at you, screaming until they’re hoarse that the world is an irredeemably ugly place and we all deserve death, before beating you senseless and attempting to extract one of your eyes with a dessert spoon (unless your grandparents were like that when they were alive, in which case please pick another analogy from the pile). Gone, also, is the Picard we remember from active duty; here instead we have a walking fan-fic who’s presumably been written by an overly sentimental sado-masochist. The Picard of this show is just a broken old man who seems to spend most of his time being told to fuck off.

I know genre shows like The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica have upped the ante, opening the door to dealing with adult themes and content in a commercially successful way, but Star Trek shouldn’t try to compete with them on that battleground. They’re their own thing, and Star Trek is its own thing. By all means re-invigorate Star Trek, but, again, don’t lose sight of the sort of show it is and always has been, and don’t transmogrify it into ‘Quentin Tarantino in Space’.

Star Trek: Picard is gritty, dark, spectacularly and incongruously violent, full of swearing (people say fuck in Star Trek now), sombre and miserable. It falls light-years short of the success and quality of The Expanse, and in so courting that audience-base at the expense of its life-long fans fails at being a Star Trek show. The worst of both worlds, if you like.

Oh, Doctor Who. What’s happened to you? I was never a huge fan of the show as a child. I was aware of its place in the cultural consciousness, knew the contemporary doctors of my era, and enjoyed it whenever I watched it. I was too young to deduce the death throes the show had entered into under the helm of controversial show-runner Johnathan Nathan-Turner, and didn’t particularly mourn its passing when the original run ended in 1989. As an adult, I enjoyed the show’s new iteration, starting with Christopher Eccleston and running all the way up to Peter Capaldi. As I had started writing for Den of Geek I thought it criminal I wasn’t fully au fait with the show’s long history, geek behemoth that it is, so took to bingeing it from the very beginning. My kids came along for the ride, and fell in love with Doctor Who, almost to the point of fanaticism. They now know every era, every doctor and companion, and almost every story from the Classic series to the present day, up to and including the 13th Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.

And this era is the one they’re least enthusiastic about. I feel the same. Again, the special effects are, in most cases, better than they’ve ever been, but everything just feels a bit flat, from the performance of the central character to the villains to the alien worlds and wonders we’re invited to explore. It’s like the showrunner Chris Chibnall, despite being a fan of the show since childhood, has forgotten the essence of what Doctor Who is. The show has become more like a series of facile morality plays with sprinklings of Quantum Leap than a show about a space cowboy rolling into town in his rusty blue wagon, righting wrongs, fighting evil and trying to leave the universe a better place than when he found it.

This latest season was an improvement on last year’s season 11, but that’s like saying Jeffrey Epstein was an improvement on Jimmy Savile. In fairness, the opening two-parter, Spyfall, was actually a lot of fun, and I loved the new, wild-eyed, scenery-chewing Master (Sacha Dahwan). The Haunting of Villa Diodati, too, was a strong outing, with an intriguing premise and a commendably eerie atmosphere. Graham, played by Bradley Walsh, was, as always, a rare chink of light in the darkness, a warm and engaging companion. Jo Martin’s incarnation of the Doctor, pursued to rural England by the Judoon, was a similar joy to watch, proving that the Doctor’s gender isn’t the real, or at least the greatest, problem with the current manifestation of the character. But, despite little flashes of competency here and there, the season got bogged down in boredom, preachiness, and insipid story-telling, very much wearing its politics on its sleeve, shaped like a giant mutated fist. There was also Orphan 55, one of the worst ever episodes of Doctor Who, perhaps one of the worst ever episodes of anything ever. And that’s before we even consider the canon-smashing sledgehammer of the season’s closing two-parter that makes Jodie Whittaker’s version of the character not the 13th, but approximately the 1,000,013th.

This show is dying, despite its occasional grand gestures and increasing attempts at fan service, and I don’t think I care anymore. And my kids don’t either. Which should be a little worrying for the BBC, given that my kids, and thousands like them, are the show’s primary target market.

Spitting Image is the spitting image of a very bad show. I used to love the series when I was younger, and now find myself wondering if the ‘satire’ was always this broad, the jokes always so cheap. Much of the problem lies with many of the show’s targets being beyond parody, especially Donald Trump, who is already a malevolent puppet. Elsewhere in the show, though, the writers seemed content to take lazy, tabloid-style pops at their targets, most notably Harry and Megan, a duo, and a representation of them, sure to please the Daily Mail crowd. Just leave them alone, for Christ’s sake. The characterisation of Joe Biden, too, could have been ripped from tweets written by Trump himself. And as much as I loathe Prince Andrew, having the punchlines to his appearances be literal punches and head-battings rather lowered the satirical tone to sub-Punch-and-Judy levels.

I liked Dominic Cummings’ pulsating-headed alien, and, contrary to my comments on Prince Andrew, it’s always a joy to see James Corden being viciously beaten, but beyond that the show either punched down, or couched its punches in soft velvet gloves. Puerile, unfunny and a wasted opportunity for some political satire with some real heft.

What shows do you think missed the mark in 2020? Or do you disagree with my sh*t-list? Tell me in the comments below this article.

Everything I Watched and Read in 2020

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Another year, another pointless list of the media I’ve consumed that no-one really cares about, but that I’m foisting on you nevertheless. I started keeping these lists as of the beginning of 2019, and give a lengthier account of my motivations HERE. Suffice to say, I’m really rather anal. Without any further ado, then, here are my lists, with a little blurb at the end of each to spraff about some of the entries and crown my favourites.

Books

The Strange Death of Europe – Douglas Murray Beloved – Toni Morrison Abandon – Blake Crouch
The Art of the Deal – Donald Trump The Radleys – Matt Haig The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
The Secret Life of Cows  – Rosamund Young Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All – Jonas Jonasson The Long Utopia – Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett
The Long Cosmos – Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett The Death of Expertise – Tom Nichols Storm of Steel – Ernst Junger
Slapstick or Lonesome No More – Kurt Vonnegut Captive State – George Monbiot Hastened to the Grave – Jack Olsen
The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney Monday Begins on Saturday – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Everything She Ever Wanted – Ann Rule
On Palestine – Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappe The Institute – Stephen King Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
The Fault in Our Stars – John Green In the Still of the Night – Ann Rule Love in the Present Tense – Catherine Ryan Hyde
The Caves of Steel – Isaac Asimov Occupation Diaries – Raja Shehadeh Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
Scratchman – Tom Baker (AUDIO) Winter Moon – Dean Koontz Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen – Brian Masters
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

I absolutely adored Girl, Woman, Other. Unsentimental, unpreachy, utterly convincing. It’s astounding how well Bernardine Evaristo embodies such a wide cross-section of female characters, of all different ages, classes and ethnicities, managing to pull together their (seemingly) disparate stories – powerful enough as vignettes in their own right – and interlock them into a strong and hopeful coda. A real eye-opener.

If we’re talking powerful, what a punch Beloved packed. Toni Morrison tells a visceral, haunting story that makes you sick to your stomach then sick to your soul; a tale of brutality and escape and birth and death and sacrifice and stolen humanity, the horror of it all wrapped in language so incongruously eloquent and beautiful that it serves to amplify the agony and accentuate the senselessness. It always astounds me that people dismiss slavery as if it weresome biblical indiscretion, when its horror is achingly recent. If some Scots still carry the faint scars of Culloden, then I think African Americans are entitled to their pain, given that the path from slavery to the civil rights movement to last year’s BLM has given the wound plenty of chances to re-open and bleed afresh.

The Fault in Our Stars … what an unexpected delight. It’s funny, raw, honest, real, and tragic, and laced through with almost molten layers of humanity. Five stars out of five. No faults there. Very few books have made me cry, and this was one of them, and then some.

Now, on to sci-fi, a genre of which I’m exceedingly fond. Monday Begins on Saturday is a strikingly novel work of the imagination, but it was rather too dense for my liking. Better were the simpler stories and stripped down prose to be found in Finney’s seminal sci-fi classic The Body Snatchers – a real paranoia-filled page turner – and Asimov’s The Caves of Steel – some real thoughtful, engaging, golden age sci-fi.

The funnies? The Radleys is a blast. It’s a sometimes funny, sometimes poignant tale about discontented suburban vampires reckoning with their pasts, that has a lot to say about teenage kicks, mid-life crises and the ticking time-bomb of truth that sits at the hearts of even the most seemingly mundane of middle-class families. Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All is a brilliant, laugh-out-loud farce, peopled with fascinating and frustrating characters. If you like swipes at organised religion and the gullibility of the masses served with copious amounts of booze and underworld hitmen in rural Sweden, then this is the book for you.

The best book I read this year, though, was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m in awe of her prose. Every page is a delight. At least once every few phrases or passages I found myself muttering internally that it was time to quit writing, because I’d never be able to conjure such rich images or evoke such real and strong feelings as Margaret Atwood. Plus, the chilling world she conjures, and the small degrees by which we’re separated from worlds like it, seems all too frighteningly plausible in 2020/1. The book is as much a work of peerless literary genius as it is a stark warning.

Graphic Novels 

Zenith: Phase Four – Grant Morrison/Steven Yeowell Pussey – Daniel Clowes
Rumble – Volume 1: What Colour Darkness – John Arcudi/James Harren/Dave Stewart Deadpool: Volume 6 – Duggan/Posehn/Lucas
The X-Files/30 Days of Night – Niles/Jones/Mandrake I Hate Fairyland – Volume 2: Fluff My Life – Skottie Young
I Hate Fairyland – Volume 3: Good Girl – Skottie Young AD: After Death – Scott Snyder & Jeff Lemire
Doctor Who: Third Doctor: Heralds of Destruction – Paul Cornell/Christopher Jones Postal: Volume 4 – Matt Hawkins/Bryan Hill/Isaac Goodhart/K. Michael Russell
Preacher: Volume 1 – Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon Preacher: Volume 2 – Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon
The Boys Omnibus: Volume 1 – Garth Ennis/Darick Robertson Doctor Who/Star Trek: The Next Generation: Assimilation2 Volume 2 – Tipton/Woodward/Purcell
Infidel – Pichetshote/Campbell/Villarrubia/Powell Chew: Volume 1: Taster’s Choice – John Layman/Rob Guillory
Chew: Volume 2: International Flavor – John Layman/Rob Guillory Transmetropolitan Vol 1: Back on the Street – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan Vol 2: Lust for Life – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson Transmetropolitan Vol 3: Year of the Bastard – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson
Transmetropolitan Vol 4: The New Scum – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson Transmetropolitan Vol 5: Lonely City – Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson
Avengers vs X-Men – Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis et al Southern Bastards Vol 1: Here Lies a Man – Jason Aaron/Jason Latour
Southern Bastards Vol 2: Grid Iron – Jason Aaron/Jason Latour Southern Bastards Vol 3: Homecoming – Jason Aaron/Jason Latour

There’s an embarrassment of riches out there in comic-land and I’m still very much playing catch up with compendiums from years gone by. What I can say is that I picked up some volumes of Preacher and I bloody love it, more so than it’s TV adaptation. Ditto, so far, with The Boys, although the TV version of Homelander still reigns supreme.

The seedy, grubby, gory, all-out bonkers future world depicted in Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, in which half-mad gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem plies his trade with the help of rivers of raging bile  and a steady supply of narcotics is a non-stop thrill-ride of invention, heart, hilarity, caustic commentary on contemporary ills, and some truly disgusting shit. It’s like 2000AD meets George Orwell on methamphetamine.

The best graphic novel I read in 2020, though, was Southern Bastards. I didn’t want it to end. It’s what Elmore Leonard would’ve produced if he’d written graphic novels. It cleaves just close enough to cliche to make you think you know what it’s all about, and what’s coming next, but it’s resolutely its own, very modern, beast. Compelling; compulsive; cinematic; dark and deliciously morally grey; it’s both an earnest love-letter to and a big fuck you to the deep south of America. Read it.

TV Shows

Old (watched in 2020 but older shows that didn’t debut in 2020)

The Man in the High Castle S4 Documentary Now S3 Outlander S4
Schitt’s Creek S1 Schitt’s Creek S2 Schitt’s Creek S3
Schitt’s Creek S4 Schitt’s Creek S5 The Expanse S4
The Marvellous Mrs Maisel S2 The Marvellous Mrs Maisel S3 The Purge S1
The Purge S2 Limmy’s Show S2 Don’t F*** With Cats S1
Final Space S1 Final Space S2 The Boys S1
The Umbrella Academy S1 You S1 You S2
The Witcher S1 What We Do in the Shadows S1 Derry Girls S2
The Confession Killer S1 Good Omens S1 Love on the Spectrum S1
Cobra Kai S1 Cobra Kai S2 Good Girls S1
Good Girls S2 Doom Patrol S1 Making a Murderer P1

It’s all about Cobra Kai, right? A show that on paper looked like a sure-fire dud, but defied expectations to become one of the best and most popular new shows of recent years. Who would have thought that the Karate Kid had so much mileage in it, and that Johnny Lawrence – a walking 1980s time capsule – would become a hero for our times? Elsewhere, I gorged on, and loved, The Boys, kicking myself for not having watched it sooner. Likewise Schitt’s Creek, which quickly became one of my favourite comedies and possibly one of my favourite shows, full-stop, of all time. I also disappeared down the Making a Murderer rabbit-hole a few years later than everyone else. I’ve since watched the second season, too, and while I believe that the police and the prosecution team are hiding something, and there are gaps a mile-wide in the evidence and the timeline, I’m not sure I believe that Avery is innocent. That trailer park of his is like The Hills Have Eyes. Is it possible he did it, covered his tracks and then the police moved the ‘evidence’ into place, planting a few bits and bobs along the way, to secure conviction?

New TV Shows 2020

The Good Place S4 Vikings S6 Part 1 Doctor Who S12 The Outsider S1
Bojack Horseman S6 Avenue 5 S1 Curb Your Enthusiasm S10 Star Trek: Picard S1
Tiger King S1 Modern Family S11 Red Dwarf S13 Better Call Saul S5
Ozark S3 Brooklyn Nine Nine S7 The Conners S2 After Life S2
Future Man S3 Westworld S3 The Simpsons S31 Bob’s Burgers S10
Locke & Key S1 Rick and Morty S4 Space Force S1 Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich S1
Schitt’s Creek S6 Floor is Lava S1 Fear City: New York vs The Mafia S1 What We Do in the Shadows S2
The Midnight Gospel S1 I May Destroy You S1 Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD S7 The Umbrella Academy S2
Muppets Now S1 Mrs America S1 Des S1 Jurassic Park: Camp Cretaceous S1
South Park Pandemic Special American Murder: The Family Next Door The Boys S2 Star Trek: Lower Decks S1
The Walking Dead Season 10 Part 2 Ratched S1 Lovecraft Country S1 Archer S11
The Haunting of Bly Manor S1 Last Week Tonight S7 Good Girls S3 Real Time with Bill Maher S18
Spitting Image 2020 S1 Fear the Walking Dead S6 Part 1 Truth Seekers S1 Vikings S6B
The Mandalorian S2 Big Mouth S4

I’m not going to say too much about 2020’s new shows, because I’m going to be covering these in more depth in the next week or so. Make up your own mind for now.

Movies (all movies, not just those new in 2020)

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019) The Money Pit (1986) The Birds (1963) The Addams Family (2019)
Sponge Bob Square Pants: Sponge Out of Water (2015) Ready Player One (2018) The Death of Stalin (2017) Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Playmobil: The Movie (2019) Pacific Rim: Uprising (2017) Modern Times (1936) Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)
The Lion King (2019) Knives Out (2019) Terminator Dark Fate (2019) Sonic the Hedgehog (2019)
City Lights (1931) The Mummy (1931) The Gold Rush (1925) Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002)
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) Star Wars: Episode VII – The Last Jedi (2017) The Boy Who Would Be King (2019) The Circus (1928)
Blackfish (2013) Jo Jo Rabbit (2019) Abducted in Plain Sight (2017) Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
Onward (2020) Megamind (2010) My Neighbour Totoro (1988) Doctor Sleep (2019)
Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) Mean Streets (1973) Scoob (2020) Crawl (2019)
Train to Busan (2016) Teen Titans Go To The Movies (2018) Two by Two (2015) The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)
I See You (2019) Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill (2004) The Conjuring (2013) Curse of the Scarecrow (2018)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Rampage (2018) Annabelle (2014) Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)
Johnny Gruesome (2018) Coraline (2009) Venom (2018) Spongebob Squarepants: Sponge on the Run (2020)
The Platform (2019) His House (2020) The Silence (2019) Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
Alien Xmas (2020) Soul (2020)

A lot of disappointments for me this year. Zombieland 2 was more like a hollow amateur cover album than a continuation of the fun, kinetic spirit of the original. Star Wars continues to tank on the big screen, at least in the opinion of this former goggle-eyed kid of the 80s (thank Christ for The Mandalorian). Borat 2 had some funny moments, and a good pay-off, but felt, overall, a bit inconsequential, which is something I never thought I’d say about a Sacha Baron Cohen project. Thank God, then, for Train to Busan, a movie I missed the first time around, and which was every bit as good as I’d been led to expect. Just when you think the zombie genre has had its day, along comes this nightmarish motherfucker to reawaken parts of your adrenal gland you’d long thought were shut off. Netflix’s His House was really good, a highly effective, well-acted horror with powerful messages about love, loss and identity along the way. Jo Jo Rabbit, of course, was fantastic, but you probably already know that. Hitler has never been so much fun; although the trailer belies the tragedy and pathos that form the spine of the film – as well as being funny, it’s also deep and richly moving. For feel-good laughs and a strong performance from Shia LaBeouf that reminds you he’s so much more than the dude from Indiana Jones 4 and Transformers, I entreat you to seek out The Peanut Butter Falcon, even if it does have an implausibly saccharine ending (maybe I’m just an old cynic).

I watched a lot of old(er) movies with my young kids, including a raft of Charlie Chaplin flicks I’d never seen before. Modern Times is the one that made them laugh the hardest, especially the scenes in the factory at the beginning. It’s nice that some things really are timeless. We also watched Rabbit Proof Fence early in the year, and even today, without prompt, my eldest son, Jack, asked me how many miles the girls walked in the movie. It’s obviously stuck with him, just as it’s stuck with me. It’s a beautiful movie that provides a happy, hopeful ending that wasn’t really matched by the reality that followed its events. Even still, inspirational stuff, and bravura performances from the mostly young cast.

Movies watched before/again

Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015) Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)
The Fifth Element (1997) Avengers Endgame (2019)
Ghostbusters (1984) Ghostbusters 2 (1989)
Back to the Future (1985) Back to the Future 2 (1989)
Back to the Future 3 (1990) The Muppets (2011)
The Karate Kid (1984) Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) Groundhog Day (1993)
A Muppet’s Christmas Carol (1992)

I watched most of the above with my kids. I can’t tell you the joy it brought me to see them start spouting catchphrases like ‘Great Scott!’, ‘He slimed me’, ‘Wax on, wax off’, ‘Party on, dudes’ and ‘Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own URINE?’ Okay, I probably shouldn’t have let them watch Dodgeball, but there you go.

Groundhog Day is one of my favourite movies of all time. Again, it felt nice to see my eldest son so enraptured by it, and so receptive to its message of always trying to better yourself as a person.

Jamie’s Special Festive Message…Em, About Haircuts?

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I always like to mark Christmas on this site with a nice festive message. Except instead of ‘nice’, ‘festive’ and ‘message’ imagine I said ‘hearty’, ‘fuck’ and ‘you’. Come on, you surely aren’t coming to me expecting a merry glug from the milk of human kindness, and if you are then – if I may inexplicably lapse into southern US patois for a moment – there’s masochism in them thar bones o’ yours, boy.

I’ve thought about what festive topics I could cover. I usually give Jesus a swift kick in the ghoulies this time of year, but where’s the fun in that when he’s only going to turn the other testicle? Shame, really, because I had the germs of a few good ideas (probably the wrong choice of cliché given the year we’ve just had). For instance, I was thinking about how religious scholars and priests of all stripes are like literary critics who keep reviewing the same book again and again and again. Imagine if you tried that if you were on a newspaper.

“Nice column in last week’s edition reviewing ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’. What have you got for us this week?”

“Well, I liked it so much I’ve reviewed ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ again, to be honest.”

“But… there are hundreds of thousands of books out there. You can’t just… you can’t just review the same one again.”

“It’s just so good though. I’ll be honest, I’m just not interested in any other book, not when ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ is so fucking good.”

That person would be sacked, wouldn’t they? On the spot. Unless their father happened to own the newspaper, in which case the editor would be forced to publish a review of ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ every single bloody week. A few years of that and the editor would be ready to garrotte himself with a garland of tinsel.

“I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised by the 2,647th book review I’ll be turning in today.”

“Is it ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’?”

“Yeah. Yeah it is….”

“So where’s the fucking surprise?”

“Well, I tie it in with the coronavirus, and I finish with this absolutely killer line, you’ll love it, it goes like this: ‘And, in a way… isn’t the coronavirus a little bit like Emu?’”

But I’m not going to do that one, or any of the other ideas that were swirling around inside my head. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my haircut today. And what could be more festive than that?

I always seem to go for a haircut at the same time as approximately 98 per cent of the rest of the male population. Each time that door chimes to announce my arrival into the barbers’ I utter a silent ‘fuck’ under my breath as I process the sight of twenty other guys crammed along the wall-length couch. They always look up at me, half-apologetically, half-indifferently, and then we all sit there together in uncomfortable silence, like inmates waiting to be processed.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Christmas Eve’s Eve, just prior to a recently announced national coronavirus lockdown, isn’t a great time to mosey in hoping for a quick hair-cut. I would’ve been quicker putting myself on a waiting list for a new kidney.

I see haircuts as an evil necessity. I only tend to go for one once I start looking like a hobo that’s just crawled out of a bin, and admittedly it’s hard to decide when to draw that line, given that this is arguably my base-line. I’m always amazed by the multitude of men who turn up at the barbers with only a mere dusting of hair on their bonces. Why are they bothering?

Sometimes they’re old men. In their defence, they probably don’t have all that much to occupy them from now until they cark it, so being able to knock ‘HAVE THREE HAIRS SNIPPED FROM HEAD’ off their daily to-do list must give them an enormous sense of achievement and self-worth. Most of the time, though, the culprits are young men: guys who look like they’ve only just had their hair cut yesterday. What the hell has happened to men? It used to be you’d go to the barbers, an old guy in a white coat would run an electric razor over your head exactly twice like you were a fucking sheep, and then chuck you out the door with a lollypop or a slap of aftershave. Bish bash bosh. In and out.

A single men’s haircut doesn’t cost all that much per unit, much cheaper than a woman’s haircut, but women only go to the hairdressers about four times a year; some of these fuckers must be going to get their precious, metro-sexual crowns re-styled four times a month. How can they afford it? Is there a special ‘men’s hair-cut grant’ no one has told me about that I can apply for through the Scottish government?

Guys under thirty these days all want to look like the cast of Peaky Blinders or the Only Way is Essex, or whichever coke-addled, madam-manhandling footballer happens to be the tabloid press’s pick of the month. And what’s more amazing than the fact that these quasi-bald men actually go to the barbers in the first place, is how long the barber spends on them once they’re in there. They seem to agonise over every bit of stubble, like they’re sculpting a privet hedge into the shape of a boat, or shaving Michaelangelo’s David into the back of Big Tam from the Scheme’s heid. Jesus Christ, there aren’t any scouts for Vidal Sassoon in here: just get the fuck on with it!

That’s not to denigrate the work. Hairdressing is one of those things that looks and seems simple, but really isn’t, as any unskilled parent who’s ever picked up a pair of scissors can attest. My youngest boy, Chris, needed a haircut earlier this year. His fringe was so long it was dive-bombing his eyes. OK, I thought, no need to rush for an appointment, I can buy some extra time with a few precision snips. Dear reader, I left that poor little boy looking like a Franciscan monk who’d just auditioned for a 60s boy band. He was more cartoon character than boy. It gave me a new-found respect for that brother-and-sister-hood of the blade. From now on, I’ll leave it to the professionals.

Back to the shop. Waiting in that couch-based queue always necessitates a lot of mental arithmetic and weighing up the odds. You sit there trying to put together the Da Vinci Code in your mind: “Right, three seats, ten guys, one of the hairdressers is probably going to have to go for a break half-way through, so if that next guy takes twenty minutes – actually he looks like he’ll take about forty minutes cause he’s hardly got any hair which doesn’t make any sense but there it is – and then the next guy, well, he’ll be quick, he’ll go on that seat, they’ll be finished first, which means he’ll get that hairdresser, the next guy will get that hairdresser, which means that I… right, all I really want to know is, am I going to get my hair cut by the really attractive woman, or the troll? Or the guy who’s literally got a tattoo of a pair of scissors on his face?” (Last year I really did have my haircut by a man with a tattoo of a pair of scissors on his face. He must really love his job. Lucky he never trained to be a gynaecologist) “Please, please let it be the attractive woman…”

Yes, I know I’m shallow, as are most of my fellow willy-wearers, but what can you do? There’s no sexual component to it, of course. Nobody goes to the hairdressers for kicks (unless they’re a massive pervert); it’s too weird and anti-septic an environment for that – like getting a lap-dance in a disused hospital while you’re off your tits on heroin. Truth be told, I usually end up falling asleep, or almost falling asleep. It’s relaxing to the point of being soporific. Same with a visit to the optician. My optician usually has to X-Ray me through my eyelids, and then wake me up by bashing me across the skull with a pair of heavy NHS specs. But, anyway, shallowness dictates that you would always prefer an attractive person to be cutting your hair, even if the task at hand is disconnected from any predatory or sexual impulse. It’s aesthetics, pure and simple.

The odds are usually against me on that one, though.

It’s the same on the bus. Long time since I’ve been on one, mind you, but I’m sure the dynamics remain the same. When you’ve got an empty seat next to you, you always imagine that some gorgeous starlet will sashay up the aisle, flicking her hair back and forth like something out of a Timotei advert, before sliding in next to you with a purring ‘hiiii’. But they never do. It’s always an enormous man who smells of shit and fish. Every. Single. Time.

It got to the point where I considered just surrendering to fate, putting down a piece of cardboard on any empty patch of seat next to me that said: ‘RESERVED FOR THE MAN WITH HALF HIS DINNER DOWN HIS FACE AND THE MUSTY AROMA OF A BLACK PUDDING SUPPER THAT’S BEEN SHAT OUT BY A RHINO.’

Anyway, it barely matters who I get to cut my hair, because I’m a little hard of hearing, so I can’t normally engage with them all that well. I usually find myself nodding like an imbecile, not hearing or understanding anything all that well, and hoping that I haven’t just given my seal of approval to something truly awful. Or that I haven’t accidentally just missed the hairdresser saying: “So you want me to make you look like a Peaky Blinder, huh?”

Merry Christmas everyone.

Father Christmas’s Covid Countdown

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Santa lumbered towards the gantry. The platform jolted and quivered as his fat frame thumped down onto it, one tree-trunk-like leg at a time. His head elf, Grogu, jumped. Not because he was scared, which he certainly was, but because of physics. The jump was entirely involuntarily. Each one of Santa’s crashing steps sent him flying into the air and back down again, the world’s most reluctant astronaut. Santa suddenly stopped. Once the aftershocks had settled Grogu bowed his tiny head, scrunched up his face, and braced himself for impact. Santa usually liked to announce his arrival with a swift, open-handed slap. This time he didn’t. He simply ignored Grogu. Either that or he’d decided to leave the violence until the end of their exchange for once. After all, versatility is the key to good management.

Santa looked down over the half-empty factory floor below, a wave of steadily mounting disgust ruffling the corners of his nicotine-tinged moustache. He gripped the railings as if they were elf necks.

“What in the name of sixteen sodomised snowmen is going on down there, Grogu?” he boomed. “There’s next to fuck-all elves on that shop floor! What am I paying them for?”

Grogu shuffled uncomfortably. “You, eh…” he mumbled, “You aren’t paying them, Mr Claus.”

“And they still get too much!”

Santa looked down at Grogu. Well, there wasn’t really any other way for Santa to look at him. A thoroughly contemptuous sneer fanned its way through Santa’s moustache. “What sort of a f***ing name is Grogu anyway?”

Grogu kept still and quiet, like you would if there was a T Rex in the vicinity.

“Well?” asked Santa. “Where are they all?”

“I think Covid is to blame, sir.”

“Covid? Is he the little one with the warty face and the funny eye? I’ll f***ing swing him by the ears into a polar bear’s arsehole, by Christ. Called a strike has he?”

“Covid is a disease, sir.”

“You’re f***ing right he is, Grogu, and my boot’s the cure.”

“No, no, no. Covid isn’t an elf. It’s an infectious virus. We’ve been issued with directives insisting that we socially distance while on the shop floor.”

Santa’s face twisted into the furious sort of shape you’d normally associate with people who’d just had an arse fart directly into their face. “WHO ISSUED THESE DIRECTIVES?” he roared.

“Em… Elf and Safety.”

Santa thumped the railing with a giant pink fist, the clang reverberating across the entire factory. It sounded like the tolling of a bell calling the elves to execution, which perhaps it was. Grogu’s heart started hammering so quickly that if you’d seen his bare chest you’d have sworn there was a woodpecker trapped inside it. The elves below all looked up in unison, the collective cricking-snap of their up-thrust necks plainly audible. Santa went a deep sheen of ruddy pink as he noticed the coverings over the elves mouths.

“IF THAT’S MRS CLAUS’S KNICKERS YOU’VE GOT STRAPPED TO YOUR F***ING FACES I’LL THUMP EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU INTO THE SNOW WITH A FROZEN DEAD WALRUS! DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW THEY’VE BEEN GOING MISSING FROM HER DRAWER!”

“Sir, they’re masks,” said Grogu, half-apologetically, half-terrified. “To… to make it less likely the infection will spread if one of the elves contracts it.’ Grogu squinted down into the sparsely dotted collection of his fellow elves. ‘Em, except for Yulper and Chimrick in the far corner there, they actually do seem to have pairs of your wife’s skiffs stretched over their lips.’”

Santa’s face turned as red as his suit. He reached deep into a pocket of his coat, and in a finger-click of a second pulled out and threw a hard, green Christmas bauble. It zapped across the room like a comet, making an ominous thunk-clunk noise at it struck first Yulper’s skull and then Chimrick’s, ping-ponging between them and knocking them both to the floor, where they sprawled like chalk outlines.

“I WANT THEM BURNED IMMEDIATELY!”

Grogu nodded and leaned over the railing. He shouted down in his loudest voice, which admittedly wasn’t all that loud. ‘BURN THE PANTS!’

“NOT THE F***ING PANTS!’ corrected Santa. ‘THOSE TWO FILTHY, CROTCH-SNIFFING, TRIANGLE-EARED C***S WHO SWIPED MY WIFE’S LIP-LOADERS!”

A couple of burly gnomes in leather jackets jogged onto the factory floor , grabbed Yulper’s and Chimrick’s legs and dragged their unconscious bodies out of sight. The elves continued to stand there, gazing up at Santa with bulging, unblinking eyes.

“How did this happen, Grogu?”

“Well, best guess, she left some of her sexier undies drying on the radiator by an unlocked window and the temptation was just too…”

Grogu raised his head from the cold steel that was pressing against his cheek. It took him a few seconds to realise he’d just been punched half-way across the gantry.

“I MEAN THE VIRUS, YOU UNSHAKEABLE DANGLEBERRY!”

Grogu staggered to his feet like a reanimated corpse and shambled up the gantry to Santa. “Well, the scientists, em, aren’t sure, sir, but there’s a popular theory that all this started when a gnome in the South Pole ate a penguin. Or fucked it. No-one’s quite sure.”

Santa stamped a foot and sent Grogu flipping over onto his bum. “OF COURSE THEY FUCKED IT, THOSE FILTHY, FISHING-POLE MOTHER-F***ERS! THEY’D ROUST A MALE WHALE’S BLOW-HOLE IF THEY THOUGHT NO-ONE WAS LOOKING! AND I’VE GOT ABOUT FIFTY OF THE VIRUS-RIDDLED BASTARDS RIGHT HERE IN THE NORTH POLE!”

Santa again grasped the railing. He leaned over the top of it like he was going to be sick, but only angry words vomited out onto the elves below, who were all still staring up at him.

“WHAT ARE YOU ALL STILL GAWPING AT, YOU DIMINUTIVE DICKBAGS? GET SOME BLOODY WORK DONE!”

There was a momentary silence during which the elves were either too brave or too stupid to move. Santa’s eyes bored into them all with the strength of a superhero’s laser-beam. One of the elves coughed, and then one of them said:

“Fat c**t.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Santa was far too furious to react. His system was overloaded with rage to the point of impotence. His head twitched from mask to mask, mask to mask, in the vain hope of detecting some minute disturbance in the fabric suggestive of recent speech. Those jaggy-eared rats! He turned to Grogu, who’d just managed to get back on his feet, ordering him calmly:

“Grogu, I want standard issue masks issued to each of the elves on duty, with North Pole branding. Every elf must wear one, supplied by me, no exceptions, from now on, a fresh one each day. Bring a box of them to my office first though, just before my 12 o’clock shit. I’ll teach those mouthy little f***ers to gob off.”

***

Santa thundered to his office and called an urgent Zoom meeting with corporate. He sat at his desk, feet up, eating tubes of Pringles like they were Smarties, and intermittently scratching his balls. The oily, smarmy, eminently punchable head of the Head of North Pole Corporate Strategy flashed onto the large screen mounted on the office wall in-front of him. Santa reached into one of the desk drawers and fished out a bottle of whiskey; started glugging it straight.

“Claus, you old son of a gun, you!” schmoozed the Head, an obscene grin bisecting his face.

“Graham, you fucking c***!” Santa growled back, with no trace of a smile at all. “Question: I’ve only got about a third of the workforce on the shop floor because of this stupid virus thing, productivity is down 300 per cent and I’m way behind on quota. What am I supposed to do? Move Christmas to f***ing April? Cause that’s the only way I’ll be able to pull this shit off.”

“I know it’s a challenging time for you,” said Graham, and then nothing further. He just stood smiling. Santa thought for a second that the connection had frozen.

“Anything else?”

“We’re behind you one hundred per cent.”

“No help though? No ideas, no suggestions?”

The waxy-skinned corporate statue grinned at him for another few seconds more. “We’ve got one hundred per cent faith in you.”

“Graham, I’ve got to make toys for every little c*** in the world and then deliver them to every little c*** in the world. These are impossible circumstances.”

“Not the Muslim world.”

“What?”

“Well, you said the whole world. It’s not the whole world, though, is it? Barely one per cent of China, almost none of Africa. The majority of your work goes to the English-speaking ‘A’s: Australia, America and the Arseholes Who Still Think They Rule the World. Tell you what, if you think it’ll help, you can cut out Switzerland. No one really likes Switzerland anyway.”

“Oh great, so I can knock some chocolate and cuckoo clocks off the f***ing list. That still leaves countless hundreds of millions of houses!”

Graham’s smile cracked, quivered, went flat, then returned to normal. “You’re being outperformed by Amazon, do you know that? They’re making your operation look like the amateur cluster-copulation that it is. They’re doing what you do once a year, once a day, and they’re doing it perfectly. And let’s put something in perspective here. You’re living in a shack in a snowy wilderness surrounded by your wife’s underwear and dying polar bears, while Jeff Bezos is living in a billion dollar fortress on the moon. The moon! All your sponsors, Coca Cola, Mattell, every single one of them would pull out today if not for the high Santa brand recognition and the advertising revenue that comes from it, and the fact that you maximise their profits by using slave labour. Sorry… zero pay contracts.”

Santa slammed his whiskey bottle down on the desk. Not to make any dramatic point. Just because it was finished. “Exactly: we use slave labour. So we bring back those lazy ass elves from furlough and we make them all work together, harder than ever, round the clock, and who gives a f*** if they get sick. I’ll put the gnomes on a plane to the South Pole and they can bring in the New Year gang-banging penguins. Problem solved.”

Graham winced. “Ooooh, bad PR, Mr Claus, bad PR.”

Santa leaned back in his chair. “So people don’t care if the little f***ers are being worked to death, just so long as they don’t get sick from a virus while they’re doing it?”

“Absolutely,” smiled Graham. “The market research confirms it.”

Santa leaned back in his seat and smiled thinly. “Jesus Christ, and I thought I was the evil bastard. So, in summary, Graham, you’ve been absolutely and completely f*** all help.”

“Always here for you, Mr Claus.”

“Always here to do f*** all, you mean.”

“I feel this has been a most productive meeting. Oh, before I go, just one more thing: you can’t go into any houses this year.”

Santa shot upright. “Come again?”

“Covid restrictions. We can’t risk the spread of infection, especially since you’ll be flitting between hundreds of millions of homes.”

Santa laughed. “So what the f*** am I supposed to do? Drop a payload of presents from the sky like I’m a drone above Fallujah? Shout ‘HEIDS’ as I rain down animatronic puppies over Paisley?”

Graham smiled his widest smile. This was the smile finale. The big one he’d been working up to. “I trust your judgement, Mr Claus.”

And with that, he was gone, smile and all.

“We’ll see about that, you grinning plastic prick,” growled Santa mischievously.

***

Grogu was a little surprised to find himself standing in-front of a mounted camera dressed as a slutty nun, complete with crotchless panties and blood-red lipstick.

“Em, remind me how this is going to help save Christmas again, Mr Claus?”

Santa stood tweaking the camera and laughing. “Well, now that all of you workshy little twerps have got OnlyFans accounts set up, you’re going to be raking in money from all the world’s perverts, money that I’m going to use to order all the world’s presents through f***ing Amazon. Let Jeff Bezos take the strain, the swotting, bald, Bond-villain c***.”

What a fantastic idea of Santa’s. Even better that he’d stopped the gnomes from burning Yulper and Chimrick. Their OnlyFans account featured them parading around in his wife’s pants while wearing shit-covered face masks, intermittently kissing each other, and it was his biggest earner. There really was a frightful amount of perverts out there, and between them and their deep pockets they were saving Christmas for a generation of hopeful, cherubic children.

“And, em, what’s this?” asked Grogu, holding up a bendy latex implement that possessed the dimensions of a large poloni sausage.

“That’s a double-ended dildo, son.”

“And…em… what am I supposed to do with it?”

“I trust your judgement, Grogu,” said Santa, as he lumbered from the room.

“SANTA?” wailed Grogu, “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT?”

“Go f*** yourself, Grogu!” he called back.

It was the best Xmas Eve ever. Santa didn’t have any presents to deliver, so he spent the evening flying through the skies, from Coatbridge to Copenhagen, Berlin to Brisbane, halting the reindeer every now and then to hover over a FedEx or DPD van and take a great big curly shit on it from the air.

At precisely 5am on Christmas morning, Santa snapped the reins and called to Rudolph: “Make haste for the moon, you red-nosed nobber. I’ve saved a bit of supper for that shiny-headed son of a bitch, Bezos, and it’ll soon be time for my six o’clock shit.”

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

2020’s Plenty: It’s Been a Lung Year

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How we laughed at the turn of the year.

“Some mad wee Chinese guy has eaten a bat, and now the Chinese are cutting about looking like tribute acts to Michael Jackson and the Chemical Brothers. That’ll teach them for eating weird shit.” It could never happen to us, right?

How smug we were. How we gorged on schadenfreude. All the while comically blind to the fact that our diet consists mainly of terrified chickens bathed in the shits of their caged friends; cows fed on sheep’s brains; horses that have been secretly mulched into beef mince; turkeys tenderised by the baseball bats of bored Bernard Matthews’ workers, and – I wouldn’t be surprised to learn – the genetically modified arse cheeks of some vile abomination like the croco-penguin. Even still we heaved the wrecked, diabetes-ridden husks of our bodies from pub to pub, takeaway to takeaway, chewing chocolate bars through one side of our mouths while smoking three fags out the other, just managing to say, ‘I dunno, the shit those people put in their bodies’ before pouring a carafe of vodka down our throats.

And, while we were lost in our completely unwarranted sense of western superiority, we forgot about something else: planes. The Great Wall of China doesn’t encircle the entire population, hemming them all in. Millions of people from all over the world fly to thousands of places each and every day, doubtless many hundreds of thousands of them Chinese. [Side fact: if you got all of the Chinese people who travelled by air each day and got them to link hands along the Welsh coast, it would be completely and utterly pointless] Maybe we didn’t forget. Maybe we just sort of figured that if there was a highly infectious disease with the potential to bloom into a pandemic rampaging around the continent of Asia that the UK government would do something to block or control entry from those countries that had been affected. That was a bit silly of us, wasn’t it? Even though we didn’t really trust our beloved Boris all that much to begin with, I dare say we trust him now about as much as I trust a fart after a surprise horse vindaloo.

For the first few months of the outbreak we decided to play a nationwide game of Supermarket Sweep, with the ghost of Dale Winton shouting encouragement at us from the clouds: “Fasta fasta, grab all the pasta!”

And, of course, booming out the show’s famous slogan: “Next time you’re at the checkout and you hear the beep, think of the old woman who now can’t wipe her arse, you inconsiderate freak.” Why toilet paper? In case we needed to wipe our lungs? What would we have stockpiled if the WHO had warned us of an impending diarrhoea outbreak? Halls Soothers?

The first lockdown confined most of us to our homes with the option of one hour’s outdoor exercise per day. We were essentially prisoners, but with worse diets and even greater substance-abuse problems. Subsequent lockdowns kept some shops and amenities open but essentially stopped people from socialising, prevented them from going to pubs and for nights out, and pretty much compelled them to stay at home feeling miserable and grumpy, thereby turning large sections of the population into, well… me before the coronavirus.

Refuses to wear a mask, but for some reason he’s down with safety specs.

The arrival of the Track and Trace system made rebels and doomsayers of a large swathe of the country’s intellectually challenged. ‘Slip siding into a fascist state, are we?’ they cried, though perhaps not as articulately as that. ‘We’ll see about that! If those hired goons at McDonalds think they’re going to write down MY name and address at the door, like the fucking Stazi, they’ve got another thing coming… oh, McDonalds is doing an on-line promotion where you can win free Big Macs for a year?! Hold on, I’ll just type in my name and address…’

I understand being wary of governments and corporations in our digital age. It’s perfectly possible that the ostensibly innocent gathering of information in our – thus far – only mildly corrupt society (see Analytica, Cambridge et al) could one day be turned against us should the right (or possibly wrong) person or organisation take the reins. That’s why I admire that rare breed of zealot who dedicates himself to a life off the grid, living in a shack, or up a tree, in the wilderness, roaming naked or in rags, eating wild potatoes (much more dangerous than the domesticated version), shitting in a hole in the ground, and teaching badgers how to do basic CPR should they one day go down from a heart attack. But as for the rank and file? Those who participate in modern life while at the same time decrying it? If you’re going to holler ‘Invasion of privacy! Infringement of civil liberties! What’s next: a microchip??’ it’s best not to walk around all day with a hand-held device that contains an actual micro-chip. Your phone knows where you are and what you’re doing at all times of the day and night, and any gaps in its knowledge can be helpfully filled in by you voluntarily narrating every movement of your excruciatingly pointless existence – even your bowel movements. If this technology had been around in the 30s and 40s we’d all be reading ‘Anne Frank’s Instagram Feed’ instead of her diary, and it would feature just one picture: a selfie of her in the loft with a caption reading, ‘I’m in this loft, but, shhhhh, don’t tell the Germans #secretloft #loftnights #letmebeFrank’.’

Masks, too, were another source of upset, with angry people – whose only source of news was the digestion of headlines on anonymous blogs posted in a Facebook group called WE’RE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, SHEEPLE – spluttering that masks had no proven track record of preventing harmful microbes or virus-laden effluent from passing through them, much to the shock of surgeons and SARS-blighted Asians everywhere, who’d happily worn the efficacious face-panties for years.

On a side note, the Tories have appointed a ‘Minister for Loneliness’. The Tories. The party of ‘every man for himself, pip pip, if you slack or fall it’s your fault, bally ho, no such thing as society’. This is like finding out that Ted Bundy was once appointed the minister for ‘Making Sure People Don’t Get Brutally Murdered by a Stranger’.

It’s got to the point now where millions of people would rather get their advice on the virus from David Icke, an ex-goalkeeper with big fish lips who believes that the Queen is quite literally a shape-shifting lizard from outer space, than from thousands of epidemiologists and scientists who’ve spent their lives studying and combating viruses.

It is, however, understandable that people have grown weary of restrictions and lockdowns, given that the guidelines sometimes seem like they’ve been made up by a bunch of heavy drug-users with type-writers.

“You can’t go into a textile shop wearing blue, unless it’s only on one leg, and you can’t go to the butchers’ unless your aunty Beryl is there with you, but only if she’s wearing her glasses down on the tip of her nose, and even then she’s only permitted to speak if she’s doing a David Attenborough impression. You can go swimming, but only in puddles, you can go to the cinema, but only if you’re blindfolded, you can go to the gym, but only if it’s on the roof of a council estate tower block, but, remember, Tuesday is opposites day, and every second Wednesday gives priority to Chihuahuas. In summary, then, don’t cross the streams, don’t feed them after midnight, don’t you forget about me, don’t blame it on the good times blame it on the boogie, don’t cry for me Argentina, and don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me. Don’t you.”

At core, though, if you read behind and between the lines of official communications, you’ll find this simple message: don’t be a dick. This is something that doesn’t appear to come naturally to us, in the same way as it does to people in South East Asian countries like Taiwan, who’ve pretty much got the virus licked. It’s a tragedy that we can’t bring ourselves to care more, because people are dying. Celebrities are dying, for Christ sake, this is serious! At the rate comedy double-acts were halved this year you’d have thought Thanos had snapped his fingers. Bobby Ball, Eddie Large, Barry Chuckle. All sadly gone. Perhaps the surviving members could form a triple act and call themselves ‘Little Chuckle Cannon’. I’ll just have to find a new nickname for my penis.

Regrettably, both Krankies have thus far survived.

And now, of course, we’ll be hoping that it’s all over by Christmas. Just like the Great War… You know, the one that lasted four years and was followed by the two-year-long Spanish Flu outbreak?

Happy Pandemukkah.

 

All Our Lives. Watching America.

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What has the US Presidential Election got to do with us here in the UK? Why should we care as much as we undoubtedly do? We seem better informed and more animated about the minutiae of our transatlantic cousins’ glitzy political battles than we do our own. Perhaps that glitziness has a lot to do with it. Our elections are quite drab in comparison. As Scottish comedian Joe Heenan so memorably put it: ‘You wouldn’t get this shite if the Americans did it the British way. Right now the President would be on a stage in a sports centre with a guy dressed as a squirrel standing behind him.’

In the US, politicians stroll out into vast arenas in the manner of WWE stars, with their own walk-on music booming unironically in their wake. One only needs to watch a highlight video of former PM Theresa May’s bizarre attempts to connect with the people of Great Britain through ‘dance’ to understand why we should never, ever, under any circumstances, abandon our reserved political discourse for the ratings-chasing, reality-TV-show grandstanding of the states. Whenever Theresa May – woman of the people – danced on camera she looked either like a drunk stork pretending to be a bear, or a shy Al Jolson trying his best to perform his act during an earthquake. Let’s stick to the drab, and let the Americans worry about the fab.

Donald Trump, of course, has turned the pomp and circumstance up to eleven. Even if the world had any choice in the matter, which it doesn’t thanks to Trump’s depressing ubiquity, it wouldn’t dare turn away from that fat car-crash in a suit for even a second: he’s got more plots than Stephen King, less shame than a back-street flasher in a face-mask, less scruples than Ted Bundy after Happy Hour, and more bullshit than a farmer’s field in spring-time. Some people out there have been watching too much television, and think they want a fictional character in charge of their country. But the qualities it’s easy to admire in an unpolished, rebellious, blue collar, tells-it-like-it-is character like Happy Gilmore, or an alpha-strongman like TV’s Tony Soprano, don’t necessarily make for a good president. Trump is a cartoon; a buffoon; a shark with legs; a great big bag of narcissistic contradictions; a circus ringmaster in Hell, who uses Twitter in place of a whip.

All of that, then, goes some way towards explaining why America has always been so grimly fascinating and strangely compelling to us, especially now, with yet another ‘celebrity’ in the hot-seat. But it doesn’t explain why we do – and why on earth we should – care so much. After all, Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden weren’t, aren’t and won’t be our presidents.

Perhaps it’s down to the Butterfly Effect. America is the heir to the British Empire’s dead hegemony. Its existence and actions have always affected us, and the world. But it’s definitely the case that how the US comports itself, and who it chooses as its figurehead, affects us now in a much more impactful, instant and targeted way than ever before, thanks to the unsleeping, unfiltered portal of the worldwide web. And what a wicked web we weave.

I remember from my youth a well-used refrain about America. It used to be said that whenever a societal trend, change or calamity took root across the pond, we should expect it to sweep our shores within six months or less. Fashions, pop-culture crazes, political skulduggery, crime-waves. We all watched the news with a sense of foreboding, wondering what would be expected of us in the seasons to come. We were powerless to prevent this tidal wave of transformation, even though we could see it coming. America was us, and we were America, bound by our shared history and language.

“Everyone in California is wearing assless chaps!” my grandmother shouted from her TV-chair one balmy summer evening*. My grandfather sighed and wandered into the kitchen to find a pair of scissors. “I’ll go get started on all my trousers,” he shouted back, before muttering to himself, “It’s going to be one cold ass winter.” But what could he do? America had spoken. *[that may or may not have actually happened]

I wonder how much of that misguided belief of ours was connected with how we felt about movies. There used to be a significant lag between a movie premiering in the states and it finally debuting here in the UK. About six months. While we waited we’d pine, speculate, get swept up in the hype and longing, before eventually – finally – getting a taste of the action.

Over the course of my lifetime the western world has become more dream-like, more cinematic, and more cravenly consumerist than it ever was; it therefore makes sense that back in the 80s and 90s we would readily conflate a six-month wait for a movie with the idea that six months after watching news reports from the US we’d be ushering in those same societal changes. American movies contained reflections of American life and thought and ideology, in which we, in turn, saw reflections of ourselves. And since all life was a movie, and we its stars, ipso facto movies and reality were interchangeable. The US electing an actor as its president went some way towards reinforcing that feeling.

Ultimately, though, we never imported all that much from America, besides the cosmetic. With the exception of the horror of Dunblane we never became a nation of school shooters. Our cities didn’t ring out with gun fire. We never abandoned our welfare state to private equity and insurance – at least not completely. In time we realised that as much as we admired and venerated and sought to emulate America, we would never be America – and that was okay. We didn’t want to be America. We didn’t need to be.

And then along came the internet, ushering in a new era of hyper-connectivity, and a new and immediate sense of round-the-clock globalism. The internet brings us together at the same time as it splinters us apart. We’re united in our disunity as never before. While the internet was initially a liberating and unifying force, it was soon weaponised by social media. Whatever power was displaced by the common man or woman having access to the world at their fingertips was soon clawed back by authoritarian governments like those of China and North Korea, or subtly redirected by shadowy organisations like Cambridge Analytica. Governments could interfere in the elections of other countries not by mobilising for war or sending spies on long-term undercover missions, but by employing a group of sun-shy tech experts to sit in a darkened room all day posing as zealots, or patriotic movers and shakers on Twitter and Facebook. Political rivals could sink an opponent not by setting a honey-trap, or paying a PI to rake through their bins looking for compromising letters and receipts, but by flooding the internet with memes of wildly fluctuating veracity, ranging from the sort-of-true-but-skewed to the risibly fantastical. The truth didn’t matter. Memes became missiles. And when you’re hit by one, the truth is a moot point.

The shadow Donald Trump casts across America falls over our land, too. His rallies and rantings and ravings don’t happen in a Stars-and-Stripes emblazoned vacuum. His opinions on race, his opposition to truth and reality, his economically-motivated scepticism on climate change and epidemiology, his aversion to culpability and compassion, have all seeped into and permeated our national discourse, and infected our cultural consciousness.

A great many of the memes we see spreading on-line – on Black Lives Matters, on the poor, on coronavirus, on the environment – carry Republican and pro-Trump stamps, and millions of Brits share them without knowing or caring that they’ve been infected by the political and ideological tussles of another country. A disturbing minority of Brits long for Trump, or someone more like him, to be our Prime Minister. Our politicians, too, have adopted the Teflon Don’s tactics of holding firm and denying objective reality just long enough for the news cycle to sweep past them onto something and someone else. Thanks to Trump’s leadership style of cult-leader cum CEO cum mad king, it’s harder than ever to hold people in power to account. We can see the effects of that even here in Scotland with the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier, a Westminster MP, who by all rights should’ve resigned after flouting coronavirus restrictions, the virtues of which she’d been busy extolling on behalf of her constituents. Ten, or even five, years ago she probably would have stood down immediately, but the lesson from America is clear: don’t listen to the media, don’t listen to the people. Tell them to go fuck themselves. Do what you like.

We care about the US Election, then, because it has consequences for us, even if we’re entirely powerless to control their direction. Like a meteor about to strike the earth. Hopefully when Joe Biden takes office a more measured ethos will radiate from the US, and spread some much needed calm across cyberspace and the world. We just have to hope that the fat, orange genie isn’t already too far out of the bottle.

Horrible Horrors – “Curse of the Scarecrow”

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A vengeful scarecrow returns to life once every twenty years to kill anyone who happens to be in very, very close proximity to it. Never before has a horror movie antagonist been so fucking lazy.

Twenty years ago, June (Kate Lister) witnessed her parents being murdered in their family home. She’s still receiving therapy for it, from Karen (Cassandra French), the most condescending and arsey therapist ever to pick up a notepad and dispense chill pills. Karen’s therapeutic techniques appear to consist of pulling faces at June, implying that she’s a mental case, and drinking all of her wine. Not a bad gig if you can get it.

June no longer believes that a scarecrow killed her parents, reasoning that the trauma of what she witnessed created a false narrative designed to insulate her from the idea that a real, flesh-and-blood person could have done something so heinous. Karen senses that June is almost completely recovered, so comes up with a great idea: “Hey, why don’t you go back to your family home in time for the twentieth anniversary of your parents’ brutal murder? Tell you what, I’ll come with you. Hey, your brother lives there, doesn’t he? … He’ll have wine, right?”

Karen the therapist: the Karen-est of all Karens

That’s not the real dialogue, which is somehow actually worse than anything I could have come up with in jest. This is the sort of movie where everyone talks in exposition.

“Is that the coffee cup that holds enormous emotional resonance for you?”

“Yeah, it’s the cup I was drinking out of when my parents were murdered.”

“Wasn’t that 20 years ago?”

“Yes, to the day.”

“It’s funny I should be bringing all of this up given that we’ve been friends since we were kids.”

“That’s okay, Alice Jones of Number 35 Acacia Avenue, whom I met at the roller-skating rink on a windy Thursday in October when we were both seven.”

The doomed June. Kate Lister is actually a decent actress, doing her best with abysmal material.

The director, Louisa Warren (who also has a starring role as one of June’s friends), doesn’t like to innovate or interrogate a sequence, preferring instead – during indoor scenes, at least – to leave the camera static and cut between whomever is talking. This gives the movie the feel of a corporate training video, which I suppose is horrifying enough in its own right. It’s obvious, though, from the handful of aerial shots peppered throughout the movie that she’s got a mate with a helicopter.

By the time June and co. roll into town, June’s brother is already dead, killed by the scarecrow whose macabre legend with which he was so obsessed. Why he turned his back on the creature long enough for it to kill him when he believed wholeheartedly in its supernatural powers is anyone’s guess, but this decision is just one of many dumb decisions that come to taint the entire movie, decisions made by the characters, the production ‘team’ and the director.

Chanel (Tiffany-Ellen Robinson), a soon-to-be-doomed piece of scarecrow-fodder, chats with the duo of wine-drinking misery-hunters by the side of the road, and warns them not to go back to that farmhouse: June’s farmhouse. On a more affluent production the farmhouse would probably have looked suitably run-down, rustic and terrifying, but here it looks very expensive, with a brightly-lit, tastefully decorated interior. “Ooooh, I wouldn’t go prowling around that modern-looking, very spacious and immaculately kept building in a desirably affluent rural area if I were you! You’re asking for trouble, so you are!” Of course, many horror stories – I’m particularly thinking of MR James’ stories – have successfully subverted the safety of daytime to produce some of the most spine-tingling, sun-lit scares of the genre, but that isn’t the route this movie goes down. It more seems to be a case of, “This is my/my mother’s/my friend’s house. Fuck it, this’ll do.”

It’s here that I start to feel a little guilty for doing a hatchet job on the movie. This is a passion project that’s been conceived, executed and distributed on a tight budget, with only a small team behind and in-front of the camera. Why am I being such a dick about this? Well, there’s a simple answer to that:

I am a dick.

My favourite parts of the movie are, without question, Chanel’s death scene and Karen’s hypno-therapy session. In the former, Chanel is chased across a field by the scarecrow after it kills her boyfriend post-coitus (he was having sex with Chanel, obviously, not being pumped by the scarecrow), when she climbs over a small fence and cuts her knee. She proceeds to rock and writhe on the ground like a landmine victim. As the scarecrow closes in on her she holds a hysterical cry-face for literally twenty-five seconds, during which I laughed like a jolly, bearded lumberjack. Robinson’s performance was so unrestrained it made Moira Rose look like John Wick.

Karen shines again in the hypnosis scene, where she carries the tone of the woman in the TV studio on a treasure-hunt style TV game-show, whose job it is to berate the contestant for being so shite. Again I laughed. A lot. That my favourite parts of this horror movie are the two most unintentionally hilarious probably signals that the project has fallen rather short of its aim. Most of the dialogue in this movie feels ad-libbed – very badly, I may add – and is characterised by the kind of infuriating repetition your parents fall prey to in their twilight years.

And the scarecrow himself? It’s hard to work up a cold sweat of dread about a baddie whose presence is signalled by the sound of a bell on a little girl’s bike. Plus, he’s about as scary as a lumpy, middle-aged man crammed into a bargain-bin scarecrow costume, which is exactly what he is. I again defy you not to laugh when he finishes off a victim by shoving straw into her mouth.

The most terrifying thing about this movie comes in the final few seconds, where things are clearly being set up for a sequel. People of the UK, I implore you: hide, ideally burn, all of the scarecrow costumes. If you have a helicopter, do NOT lend it to the director. Let’s pray this particular cursed scarecrow never makes a comeback. Not in twenty years. Not in a hundred years.

Still, if you’re looking for a few daft laughs as you’re working your way through a batch of herbal, I suppose you could do worse than Sleepers Creepers here.

Year: 2018

Run-time: 84 mins

Studio: Proportion Productions

Director: Louisa Warren

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit: Good Bad Shit (sub-category: Funny Bad Shit)

Trump Campaign US Election 2020 Timetable

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Oct 26

Trump arrives at a WOMEN FOR TRUMP rally with Mike Pence, and looks genuinely happy.

“How did you manage to arrange this, Mikey? There’s a lot of them to get through. I’d better get started.”

“They’re here to support you, Donald. To support you.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, they’ll need to. I’m gonna be exhausted after fucking all these women.”

“Donald, I…”

“I knew I was right to have that fifth burger at breakfast this morning.”

“Donald, look, I really want you to start focusing on the election…”

“Don’t worry about that, Pencey, I’ll be fine. I scrunched up some Viagra into my burgers.”

“Donald, I said election, not….”

“OUTTA MY WAY! MAGA SHAGGA COMING THROUGH!”

Oct 27

  • Trump attends a rally in Wisconsin dressed as Jesus, and tells his supporters he’s got a lot in common with the Son of God, except he wouldn’t have been pussy enough to get himself crucified. Besides, Jesus wasn’t that great, because how many casinos did he manage to build? Yeah, exactly, you see? Loser. “Never trust a man who can’t afford proper shoes,” he tells the crowd.
  • Kanye West is hired to dress like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn and play the flute outside inner-city polling stations. He leads all black people not wearing MAGA hats into a holding area, whereupon an angry, hysterical white lady calls the police on them.
  • Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court. Six out of nine seats on the court are now occupied by hard-line Republican judges. Trump vows to kill the three Democrat judges by the end of the year and replace them with Dracula, Rasputin and a golden effigy of himself.

Oct 28

  • The Pope issues a rebuke to Trump following his previous day’s comments about Jesus. Various Republican and conservative Catholic organisations are furious with the President. Trump reminds them that Jesus is a total loser – who never even had his own condo in Palm Springs, can you believe it? – and they should have no Trump but Trump. If they vote for him he’ll ban abortion, keep allowing churches to flagrantly disregard coronavirus restrictions, and put as many Mexican kids in cages as he possibly can. The organisations release a joint statement that simply says: “USA, USA, USA!” eighteen-hundred times.
  • Trump holds a Super Spreader event on Jeffrey Epstein’s old island. Hopes to make it a regular thing. Mike Pence points out that, a) a super spreader isn’t a good thing and, b) that’s not the kind of spreading it refers to anyway. Trump responds by pointing out that, a) shut up Mike Pence and, b) when are we stopping for burgers?

Oct 29

  • A flotilla of screaming and naked Eastern European teenagers is discovered off the coast of Epstein Island. Trump orders a napalm strike to make sure there’s no risk of coronavirus contamination, and definitely not to ensure their silence. Trump says he’s just doing his bit to keep the country safe, and shouldn’t be considered a hero.
  • Trump orders 6,000,000 hats with HERO written on them.
  • Mail trucks carrying ballots are pulled over by Proud Boys soldiers. All ballots that smell  even a little bit socialist are destroyed.

Oct 30

  • Melania escapes.
  • Trump reveals that Elon Musk is building a space station for him and Vladimir Putin in orbit of the earth. Mike Pence apologises and says Trump stayed up all night watching Elysium. Trump orders surveillance on Matt Damon, “just in case that leftie bastard ruins everything.”

Oct 31

  • At a late-night rally, on the stroke of midnight, lightning explodes across the sky’s dark canvas, and a swarm of flies erupts from Mike Pence’s mouth. A disembodied voice can be heard shrieking ‘THE TIME OF THE EVIL ONE IS UPON US!’ as Pence shakes like a turkey on a washing machine. He later blames it on a combination of technical faults, the Democrats and the gays. “I’m definitely not Satan’s representative on Earth,” he tells Fox News. “We wouldn’t have minded, to be honest,” they admit.

Trump tells 15,000 supporters at a mega-rally in Virginia that coronavirus has been cured, and is angry when they don’t cheer.

“Why aren’t they cheering, Mikey?”

“They’re all dead from coronavirus, Donald.”

Nov 1

  • Melania is recaptured.
  • Trump is asked about his record on the environment. He says he’ll probably release it in time for Christmas. “And it’s gonna be the best song you ever heard,” he tells them.

Joe Biden takes the concept of social distancing at rallies to its logical conclusion and holds a rally on the moon. Trump orders NASA to deploy Neil Armstrong to capture him.

“Sir, Neil Armstrong died in 2012.”

“I said now, goddammit!”

Nov 2

  • Walls are built around polling stations in all southern states with high Latinx populations. Trump makes John Leguizamo pay for it.
  • Trump realises Melania hasn’t been recaptured at all, and he’s been having breakfast and attending rallies with a terrified Gloria from Modern Family. With some reluctance, Gloria is released.

Trump has projectiles hurled at him while attending a rally for all three of his black supporters.

“You shouldn’t have gone on stage wearing that, Donald,” Pence tells him.

“You told me to! You said I should do a rally in the hood!”

“DA hood, Donald. In DA hood.”

Nov 3

ELECTION DAY – All indications are that Donald Trump is the next President of the United States. Biden refuses to concede, because there are still millions of votes to count. Trump whips his cock out live on TV and says, “Count that, commie!” “Zero,” says Biden.

Nov 7

Mike Pence explodes into a fireball live on-stage during a press conference. When the flames die down everyone can see that his skin is a mottled red, and a tail now droops between his legs.

“Janice Grappily, CBNFHGS News. Mr Pence, are you the anti-Christ?”

Pence thinks for a moment, and then says, ‘No comment’, as a swarm of flesh-eating flies shoots out from his penis, and strips the flesh from Janice Grappily’s bones.

Nov 21

There are various legal challenges to counting in Republican-majority states, to which Trump responds angrily. “How can you challenge counting? One, two, five… see, it’s easy.”

Dec 8

Trump buys the Electoral College and renames it Trump University 2.

Dec 9

Trump University 2 goes bankrupt.

Dec 10

US government bails out Trump University 2 and changes its name back to the Electoral College

Dec 11

Mike Pence tries to explain to Trump that the Electoral College isn’t an actual college, and he shouldn’t really have been able to buy it.

Dec 12

Trump tries to buy the Electoral College again

Dec 13

Trump gives a joint press conference to address the issue of Mike Pence being the devil.

“I just want to say that I give Mike Pence my full support, and so should you. Why didn’t you tell me you were Beelzebub in disguise, Pencey?”

Pence looks down at his shoes. Well, at his cloven feet. “I thought you’d feel threatened by my dark lineage and powers.”

“Jealous of you, Pencey? There’s no-one more evil than me. I’m the evilest. I eat cats, for Christ’s sake.”

“Brad Fanachuk, FKWSG News. Mr President, did you just say that you’re evil and you eat cats?”

Trump points a finger. “You’re toxic.”

“Mr President, I heard you say it.”

“Get this guy out of here. Pence, squirt some flies out of your evil dick at this joker.”

“Carver Sweetchuck, CBBC News. We all heard you say it, sir.”

“Well maybe you’ll hear this: JOE BIDEN IS A PAEDOPHILE AND HE’S WORKING FOR IRAN. OKAY?”

Dec 14

  • Joe Biden is officially elected President, with Kamala Harris as his VP.
  • Trump changes the locks on the White House door.

Jan 3

  • Joe Biden knocks on the front door of the White House, and hears someone shouting, “No speaka de English, senor”, then a gunshot, then Trump screaming, “GODDAMIT, WHY DID YOU SHOOT ME?” and then someone saying, “Sorry, Mr President, I heard a Mexican voice and just acted instinctually.”

Jan 4

The Proud Boys take up fortifying positions around Trump buildings all across the US. Trump tower is engulfed by violence, gunfire, gambling, raucous noise, biker gangs and sleaze. Marty McFly arrives in the De Lorean to retrieve the Sports Almanac from Trump.

Jan 5

Civil War in America. It’s swiftly brought to an end when Ant Man shrinks himself down, flies up Donald Trump’s arsehole and disconnects his brain.

Jan 8

With the help of Mike Pence’s evil, Trump turns himself into the Lawnmower Man and takes over Twitter from the inside.

Jan 20

Donald Trump pretends to be Joe Biden at the inauguration and hopes nobody will notice. He gives himself away when he pats a woman on the pussy rather than her ass.

Feb 4

  • The White House gains a mysterious new and exceptionally ugly old dinner-lady called Desdemona Crump, who says she makes “the best rice pudding, world class, they don’t make rice pudding like I do.”
  • Joe Biden chokes to death on some rice pudding.

Feb 7

Mike Pence returns to Hell ‘for a bit of peace’.

Feb 8 

Melania becomes the 47th President of the United States

 

Horrible Horrors – “Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill”

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Like westerns? Like zombie movies? Like slashers? Well, you’re going to absolutely hate this. Even if you like zombie-western-slashers you’ll probably hate this.

It’s like a succession of shlock-horror vignettes alternating with mini music-videos, with the only real consistency in the movie being the panto-esque acting and excruciating (though occasionally unintentionally hilarious) dialogue.

The movie begins in the desert with a drug dealer being pursued in a low octane car chase by a police woman, who of course breaks off pursuit when the dealer hurls a mound of coke from his car and it bursts all over her windscreen.  A little tip for you killers out there: this also works with murder weapons. Just throw your bloody knife or smoking gun at the pursuing law enforcement vehicle and, BINGO, you’ve got away with it. Most of the movie’s landscapes are bleached, much like the atmospheric Mexican vistas in the movie Traffic, while the movie itself is about as entertaining as being stuck in actual traffic.

The dealer’s car breaks down and he finds himself at Sunset Valley, a mysterious ghost town that, unfortunately for Mr No-Blow Escobar, is filled to the gunnels with zombies, who waste no time in, well, wasting him. Their leader is the vengeful Bloody Bill, a Confederate soldier consumed with eternal wrath following his long-ago execution.

A little later, a mini-bus containing a debate team is hijacked by Earl, the earlier drug dealer’s pissed-off partner. They, too, end up in Sunset Valley, and proceed to be picked off by the undead. Beyond the principals’ broad character types – hick; screaming beauty; bad-ass babe; mouthy smart arse; preachy do-gooder; angry black drug dealer – there isn’t much to commend them as actual people that you might bring yourself to give a single, solitary shit about: Earl, the dealer, shouts about drugs, money and killing people; and the debate team spend a fair amount of time actually debating things, which doesn’t make for a particularly arresting zombie-slasher flick.

‘So you’re saying the beliefs of the world’s three major religions are invalid?’ asks one of the unfortunates, seeming genuinely upset.

‘No, I’m saying they’re unsubstantiated. There’s a difference.’

The writers obviously thought to themselves: ‘Well, we’ve made these guys debate champions. We’d better have them randomly debate things every once in a while.’ I guess we can be thankful that they weren’t written as champion Morris Dancers, although at least that would’ve been funny.

The not-quite-yet-fully-zombified dealer from the start of the movie shows up at one point, screaming at the doomed congregation: ‘Bloody Bill! He’ll find you!’ Of course he’ll find you, I thought to myself. The town’s only got about seven buildings in it. It wouldn’t exactly take a hide-and-seek champion.

It’s clear that the director, Byron Werner, wants to show off the toolkit of techniques he learned in film school – bleaching, colour filters, jerky cuts – without ever marrying them to mood or effect. The zombies appearances are mostly scored to goth rock, which really helps capture that old timey, Civil War feel. I should have felt dread at the zombies’ arrival, not get the sense that my six-year-old son had just accidentally flicked the channel to a 24-hour station specialising in German heavy-metal music. In fairness, Werner shows himself to be a very capable and inventive cinematographer, and adept at crafting effective sequences, he just doesn’t appear to care much about threading it all together to achieve consistency of tone or vision. It wasn’t much of a surprise to discover that Byron Werner has indeed gone on to enjoy a lucrative career directing the music videos of some very well known artists. So, in a way, this movie was his audition reel. And good luck to the guy. He’s obviously got talent.

Not so the editor or the people in charge of continuity. Not only do we see a two-lane track suddenly become a one-track lane during a crucial (almost) collision, but at one point Earl is caught mouthing the line of one of the other characters as they’re speaking it (that’s probably my favourite bit of the movie).

Earl’s death is also my favourite, for reasons both good and bad. Good, because he goes to his reasonably noble death with a face-full of crack daubed on his face like war-paint, and live grenades in his clutches. And bad, because the special effects budget couldn’t supply Earl with a worthy, flashy enough send-off. We should’ve seen a slow-mo blow-out, as a fireball smashed through the building and engulfed the first floor, sending fiery debris and shards of glass shooting after the screaming women. What we saw was, em, sort of close to that: a wee puff of black smoke slowly drifting out of a window, like a freshly-released genie just couldn’t be arsed making a grand entrance.

Bloody Bill himself doesn’t look too bad, as far as straight-to-video villains go. He’s like a low-budget Leatherface, or the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers, but without much of the creepiness, or indeed jeeperiness. I won’t tell you how the film’s lone survivor manages to bring down Bloody Bill. Not because I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s just that I don’t really care enough to tell you.

Some of the gore is commendable, some of the film’s sequences undeniably are well shot, and there are a few unmeant but magical laughs, but even if you’re a connoisseur of shit movies like me you might still want to give this one a miss.

Year: 2004

Run-time: 88 Minutes

Studio: The Asylum

Director: Byron Werner

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit? Bad Bad Shit.

Halloween, and the Art of Psychologically Scarring Your Children

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We love to be scared. It’s why we love horror movies, roller-coasters and day-trips to Alloa. It’s thrilling to experience the excitement of peril without the threat of consequences (with the exception of a day-trip to Alloa, which really can be fatal).

There’s a long tradition of horror-based pranks in my family, most of them emanating from my older cousins. I say pranks. Many of them skirted the edges of full-blown psychological torture, but I guess they were character-building in their own way: people dressed as vampires, complete with cloak and fangs, waking you up in the dark of night; legends of a creature living beneath the bottom step of my aunt’s and uncle’s staircase, ready to grab you and drag you down into the sub-dimensional depths of the universe that lurked just beneath the carpet; being locked in a room with a particularly gruesome horror movie playing on the TV without any means to turn it off.

Later in life, my older brother-in-law took up the mischievous mantle. Once when I was at his house, when my nephew was a baby, he tied a string to a bedroom door and tugged on it hard, delighted to see me vault my nephew’s baby-gate in terror at the sight of the suddenly and inexplicably animate door. Another time he collaborated with my sister to make it seem like my mother’s house was encircled by intruders then took me out round the garden with an air rifle in the pitch black, organising a few jump scares along the way.  It was family time with a sprinkling of Guantanamo Bay and a garnish of Resident Evil.

Still, possibly as a consequence of all this, I became a life-long horror fan. As a young teenager I watched movies like Hellraiser and Candyman with my older cousin; gorged on his brutal and bloody 2000AD comics. I started collecting horror posters from video rental places like Blockbuster and my local shop to put on my bedroom wall (Dannii Minogue and Pinhead made strange wall-fellows indeed). I’m not as prolific a fan of horror as I used to be, but I appreciate a bit of gore-bite-bleed-kersplat as much as the next man, especially if the next man is Freddy Krueger.

Being scared is cathartic. It sparks the mind and the imagination. It reminds you a little of what it is to be alive. I couldn’t wait to pass the torch on to my kids, albeit not in such a way that would risk leaving them quivering mental wrecks.

Or so I thought…

It’s apt that I should have used a torch-based analogy, because a torch was at the root of the misjudgement to come.

We visited my mother and father (he’s my step-dad, but I’m going to call him father, because it’s less clunky, and there’s something reductive about the ‘step’ prefix) in their cottage in the countryside. The kids were messing about with a torch. They eventually found themselves in the only room in my mother’s house capable of encapsulating day-time darkness, a little box room with no windows that was at one time a bedroom, then a wine cupboard (my father always called it a ‘cellar’ in a bid to lend it some sophistication), and now a pantry and general junk-room. Swinging a ray of light around a wee dark room apropos of nothing holds enough fascination on its own to enrapture a child for weeks at a time, but I thought I’d help diversify and enrich their beam-based shenanigans, starting with shadow puppetry. After a few minutes of rabbits and raptors – about the only creatures we were capable of conjuring, besides hands – we moved on to ghost stories, each taking turns with the torch held under our chins, illuminating our faces like haunted pumpkins.

I went first, spinning a simple but atmospheric yarn about a concerned neighbour chapping on the door of a musty old house. The house’s equally musty old occupant hadn’t been seen around the village for a while, and people were worried. So the man knocks, shouts, and gets no answer, so he moves around the house trying to peer through the windows. He notes the grime on the insides of the windows, so thick he can hardly see through them. He notices a flicker through the gloom on the pane, figures it’s the old lady. Goes back to the front door, tries it, and discovers it’s unlocked, though there’s something blocking the way forwards. He barges it and it gives, ripping through thick swirls and strands of cobwebs. How long has she been stuck in here? he wonders. It’s dark in the house, suffocatingly dark, so he brings out a torch, swinging it this way and that through the murk. Gets to the door that leads into the lady’s living room, pushes it open. Calls her name again. Uses the torch beam to survey the dank and dingy room, finds the old lady. She’s stuck up on the wall, her mouth hanging open, quite dead, her body wrapped in place with spider webs. Before he can even scream, a giant spider – much bigger than a man – emerges from the shadows in the corner of the room, and barrels towards him as fast as a jungle cat. He realises it’s too late to run. More than that, he can’t move. The torch drops from his hand into the springy, clinging carpet of cobwebs woven at his feet.

They were spooked, but smiling. I’d given them the general idea of how to build tension in a scary story; how to weaponise the ordinary; use the tone and pitch of your voice to lull, unnerve and shock. Little Chris, 3, took the next turn. He nailed the tense poise and grave whisper, peppered his story with lots of husky ‘and thennnnn’s. His plot also revolved around a seemingly deserted house, but lacked an ending. Or a middle. People – a daddy and two boys – crept into a cottage, reacting to noises, sensing danger all around them, and thennnnn, and thennnnn, AND THENNNNN… a monster came and ate them all up. It was an amusingly perfunctory ending, one that had me chuckling. At least it was decisive. None of this ambiguous, ‘you write your own ending’ shit. BOOM. Eaten by a monster. THE END.

I had another turn, inadvertently ripping off the basic plot of Jeepers Creepers 2. Then Jack used the abandoned house template to tell a tale of toys that came to life – animatronic Santas, toy soldiers – and pursued the plucky protagonists through and out of the house, and down deserted country roads in a spooky night-time chase. Both boys were good at this, and seemed to really enjoy our time telling terrifying tales around the virtual campfire we’d created inside the tiny room. But I wanted the session to go out with a bang. So I started a new story, a story within a story, a meta story, about a dad and his two sons who were swapping spooky stories in a darkened box room by torch-light, while above them, through the open loft-hatch, sat a swarm of hungry creatures just waiting for their chance to jump down and feast. But they couldn’t. Because they were allergic to light. So as long as the torch stayed on, so long as the batteries held, they were safe. But at any moment… if their torch was to run out of batteries… if that light was to go of….

Click.

You see what I did there, right? This was a miscalculation on my part. I knew it as soon as my eldest son, Jack, threw open the door behind him and fled for his life down the bright corridor, screaming in terror. My youngest, brave little Chris, looked up at me in the half-light cast from the suddenly opened door with a look on his face that seemed to say, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ Jack had locked himself in the bathroom, and wouldn’t let me in. His fright had given way to anger. A flood of Diet Adrenalin was thundering its way through his little circulatory system, breaking his rational thoughts against the rocks of his temper. I kept knocking. ‘Come on, buddy, I’m sorry, if I’d known it would scare you that much I would never have told that story. I thought you’d laugh!’

I felt as I’d felt when my nephew was a nipper and I’d granted a piece of burnt toast sentience before dropping it into the fiery clutches of my mum’s coal-fuelled central heating system. ‘Noooo, please don’t burn me, mister, I’m burnt enough, I don’t deserve this!’ I thought he’d laugh. Instead he’d screamed.

After a few minutes Jack padded through to the kitchen and sat down at the table, completely recovered from his traumatic experience. Since the little fella has evidenced a burgeoning talent for both creative writing and thinking I decided to turn his terror into a teachable moment.

‘You know ghosts and monsters and things like that aren’t real, right?’

I’ve always stressed this, because I know how much kids worry about ghosts and monsters even when they’re sure they don’t exist, never mind where there’s doubt.

‘Yeah.’

‘And you know the creatures I created in the story weren’t real either, right? They were just words out of my mouth.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you were still scared of them, right?’

He nodded.

‘That’s the power of stories,’ I told him. ‘You can use stories to make people think and feel real things about things that aren’t real. And you can’t just make them scared. You can make them happy, you can make them laugh, you can change their minds about things. Stories are powerful.’

He nodded sagely.

It must have got through to him, because later that day, back at home, he started writing his magnum opus, The Abandoned House, its front cover dotted with monsters and spider-webs.

It’ll assuage my guilt at terrifying him somewhat if he becomes the next Stephen King.

Plus, a premium retirement home would be nice, too.

Alcohol is a Bigger Problem Than the Coronavirus

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This country in the iron grip of a pandemic; one that strikes down the young and the old alike with little regard for social strata or circumstance; one that our lawmakers, doctors and social scientists are doing their best to strategise against in pursuit of the greater public good.

I’m not talking about the coronavirus (although the two have become connected): I’m talking about alcoholism – specifically the pervasive cultural alcoholism in which we’ve all been drowning for most of the last century. Possibly even since time immemorial.

It isn’t until you break the spell of alcohol by ceasing or reducing your intake that you realise its ubiquity; how it’s stitched into the very fabric and rhythms of your life and conversation; how you’re likely to be viewed with suspicion or derision if your social life doesn’t revolve around some description of flavoursome, mind-altering douche-soup.

I defy you to scroll through an average thread on social media and not find at least one classic shot of a manicured hand gripped around the stem of a wine glass. Perhaps it’s ‘wine o’clock’. Maybe it’s been a ‘hell of a week’. You might even see a group-shot of some perfectly coiffured, elegantly dressed women huddling on a couch or around a cocktail-laden table, raising a toast to their own self-satisfied sophistication. Men are just as guilty of normalising problem drinking on-line and in person, although generally they don’t tend to put such a soft, Instagrammic sheen on things – cravat-wearing city slickers and snooty whiskey onanists being the clear exceptions.

Then – here in Scotland at least – there’s the cultural component. A Scotsman not taking a drink is like a Texan not standing for the US National Anthem. Or a Parisian not setting fire to things in response to a mild civic restriction.

So what’s this got to do with the coronavirus?

Well, as you’ve doubtless noticed, by government decree all pubs, clubs and restaurants must close their doors at 10pm, a decision that has precipitated a flood of memes and sarcastic comments along the lines of, ‘Aye, Covid only comes out after dark, right enough’. I must admit, there is indeed, on the surface of it, something comical about the thought of the virus donning a cowboy hat, kicking in the saloon doors at 22:01, firing its guns in the air and shouting, ‘Ye’v bin warned, varmits, this here is a Covid bar now! YEEHAW!’ Or the thought of the Purge alarm blaring into the night sky as bands of terrified drunken revellers try to dodge past legions of heavily-armed Covids on every street corner.

But, really, if you think about the curfew, it makes perfect sense.

Imagine what impact a 10pm curfew would have had on pre-corona Britain, never mind our present reality: fewer numbers of booze-ravaged men and women roaming the streets between 10pm and 6am, rubbing shoulders and various other body parts with friends and strangers alike, getting into arguments, getting into fights; sharing saliva and semen and sexual regret as if they were office Christmas cards.

If you’re looking to curb the excesses of human contact, both positive and negative, that prolonged exposure to alcohol brings, and to free up the hospitals from the depressing cavalcade of head-wounds and bleeding knuckles and alcoholic collapse that characterise an average weekend in this country – wholly preventative medical scenarios that  divert attention and resources from more serious medical cases, or make hospital-based transmissions of the virus more likely – then a curfew for licensed premises is a no-brainer.

I get that pubs are more than just places to get drunk. Pubs in small villages and towns can double up as social centres, places for people to meet, play cards, read the paper, sing and dance – the real life-blood of the community. My question would be, great: but why do we have to be pissed to do this?

Cultural Contrasts

Social media can be a cesspit of unsolicited opinions, simmering violence and half-baked half-truths (often helped along by the cyber-agents of other countries), but it’s still occasionally capable of smuggling hard nuggets of sense and reason into a debate. I suppose the cesspittyness of any given corner of the internet at least partly depends upon the people whose virtual call-signs you surround yourself with.

In any case, I stumbled onto a debate on Covid, masks and civil disobedience on a friend’s Facebook page the other week, and found it to be interesting and enlightening. A good chunk of it was about the difference between mask-wearing habits in the west and the east; how community spirit, compliance and cohesion appear to be hard-wired into, for example, south east Asians, perhaps on account of their long history of rice-cultivation for food and export, a field (forgive me) in which the key to success and survival was, and still is, co-operation.

Here in the UK we’ve a long tradition of embracing the malignant, mutant sense of individualism that has sprung, no doubt, from centuries of industrialisation, unfettered free-market capitalism and consumerism. It appears to be challenging for many people in the UK to imagine a world bigger than their own individual drives and desires. It wasn’t always thus, but it’s certainly thus now. We reject unity, nuance and sacrifice in favour of doing, well, whatever the fuck we want.

Ah’m no daein that!

There’s a sub-section of male society that regards the exercise of caution as tantamount to effeminancy. For example, Health and Safety exists and is enshrined in law – and upper management usually pay lip service to it – but in male-dominated industries, especially down at the literal or figurative coal-face, it exists in the same way that Norse legends do. Complaining about a ten-metre-long spike sticking out of a wall at head-height is less likely to lead to a change in company policy, and more likely to result in you being labelled ‘a wee cry-baby poof’.

A similar thing is happening with Covid. There’s a widespread feeling that the prissy egg-heads and boffins – with their glasses and their little dorky white coats – are a bunch of pussy-whipped scaredy cats who don’t have a bloody clue about how the real world works, and have no right to tell real men how to live their lives. Load ay shite aw that science, anyway. Ah saw a video on YouTube and it’s aw bollocks. Mair chance ae bein’ hit by a bus than getting’ that Covid, CAUSE IT DISNAE EXIST!

These are men who are distrustful of and resistant to authority as a baseline, whose reaction to most obstacles or restrictions, or even their own feelings, is a dismissive wave and a ‘FUCK OFF’. Just add more rules and try to subtract alcohol and witness the results.

Back in 2018 the World Health Organisation noted that Scottish alcohol consumption is among the highest in the world, with Scots guzzling more than 13 litres of pure alcohol a year. When considering alcohol unit pricing The Scottish government was even moved to concede that ‘alcohol is an integral part of Scottish life’, a rather depressing, and sobering, thought. Although it qualified this by saying that there is ‘clear evidence that for a large section of the Scottish population their relationship with alcohol is damaging and harmful – to individuals, communities and to Scotland as a nation’.

It is these people – many of whom are locked in a cycle of physiological, psychological or cultural dependency – that are perhaps strongly to blame for the further corona-curbing restrictions we’re facing: the problem drinkers souring the city streets; the students and younger people having raucous, jam-packed house parties; the chattering classes brazenly hosting large dinner parties.

It’s madness that our right to drink appears to be trumping the rights of vulnerable people to live their lives without fear; libraries and sports centres and community hubs to re-open; schools to remain operational. Granted, there are myriad other issues connected with this issue, from income disparity to institutionalised poverty to trauma to addiction, but still, the reality remains.

The biggest mistake the government could have made, in times like these, was to forgo legislation in favour of trusting the great and thirsty British public to police themselves.  Many of us can’t be trusted to think – and especially to drink – for ourselves. And we drink therefore we are

… selfish and disgraceful.

We need to have a long, hard look at ourselves and our relationship with alcohol, and get our priorities straight. And not just for the sake of halting the spread of the coronavirus.

A Tale of Two Bedtimes: Peaceful and P***ed Off

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I smell.

That’s not news to some, I’m sure. But I’m not talking about the smell of sweat or failure. I’m talking about my particular scent, that reassuring mix of aftershave, lotions and pheromones that’s as unique an identifier to those who love me as the dangly hairs that sprout from my nose, my rapidly receding hairline or my incredibly disappointing penis.

Smell is an overlooked and perhaps under-rated sense, especially given how intimately associated it is with memory. One whiff of a gently-boiling pan of lentil soup, or a long-ago loved perfume on the neck of a passer-by, or the reassuring aroma of a house loaded with the wet tang of dogs can be enough to whisk us away on a nostril-based leap through time, to a place where we were happy; to a place where we felt loved.

My scent is apparently music to my eldest son’s ears  – or a freshly-baked cookie to his nose, if you’d prefer. The other week at bedtime – after a) the stories had been read, b) his younger brother was asleep and c) we’d exhausted our pre-sleep chit-chat – Jack, 6, asked me to leave my jumper behind so he could sleep with it next to his face. He wanted to be able to smell me.

It’s perhaps the sweetest request I’ve ever received. In few other spheres of life could another human being ask to smell your clothes without you calling the police or backing away really, really slowly. I took it off and handed it to him, and he pulled it close to his face and huffed it like it was a bag of glue. He lay there for a second, the jumper pressed against his cheek, his eyes closed and a dreamy little smile resting on his features. Then he put my jumper on, sitting there half-buried in it, two long trunks dangling from his shoulders where arms should be. And he went to sleep like that, too. I checked on him later in the night. He’d thrown the covers off himself, content to lie there wrapped in the warmth of my massively over-sized jumper.  I walked away in the half-darkness with a lump in my throat and a swelling in my breast.

What a difference a day makes.

Remember that old song? I think it was meant to convey the wonderful capacity of time to change things for the better. Well, I’m not using it in that sense. Think of the difference a day makes to a forest fire during a windy drought season. That’s where I’m coming from.

Here comes bedtime number two. The scene, this time, is rather less inspirational.

Intergenerational relations were already strained from the twenty-odd minutes it took for me to convince (see also; harangue) the kids to change into their pyjamas; lots of glassy stares, sudden attention shifts, oodles of wilful defiance, brotherly scrapping and hyperactive mayhem had overthrown what weak little slip of sanity still reigned over my war-torn brain.  Negotiations finally broke down over tooth-brushing timescales, although to describe them as negotiations rather over-estimates my status as an equal partner in them.

I was in a miffed sort of a mood anyway. It wasn’t supposed to be my night doing their stories, and they were both supposed to have been pre-occupied earlier that evening with a family visit. Thus, I’d portioned my evening into productive/recreational segments, which began with an hour of tidying (mostly tackling the cluttered hell-hole of the children’s toy-room), which I duly completed, then an hour of TV, then a couple of hours of writing. Half-way through my hour of TV, the kids ran into the bedroom and bounced on me like I was an airbed, signalling that my R&R was RIP. I didn’t mind. Happy kids trump TV every time. But when the story time flipped to accommodate an unexpected supermarket trip their mother was taking, my writing time – with a deadline looming – was DOA.

I carried that irritation with me, amplified by the reality of co-existing in a house with a person from whom I’m in the process of separating, and it seeped into my interactions with the kids.

And they were already being plenty objectively irritating independently of my soured mood.

Inevitably, they rebelled against brushing their teeth. They dithered, dallied, dillied and defied. I’d already knocked their story allocation down from three to one (they love story time, as do I, so it hurt us all) as punishment for their tardiness and cheek-tongued ebullience.

For his next trick, Jack stood in the hallway with his toothbrush clamped between his teeth like one of Hannibal’s cigars, readying himself to snark off like Murdoch (if you’re too old or too young to share my pop culture references here, feel free to google the A-Team – I pity the fool who doesn’t).

‘I’m going to sleep in the big bed tonight,’ he garbled. That’s the big double-bed his mum currently sleeps in.

‘No you’re not.’

‘Yes I am.’

‘Then you won’t be playing Spiderman on the PS4 tomorrow.’

‘We won’t be home tomorrow, so that’s okay, I’ll play it the next day.’

‘Then you won’t be playing it the next day…’

The tit for tat continued like this until a crucial keystone of my patience suddenly plummeted earthwards.

Though I stood three metres or more away from him, the force with which my temper broke free might’ve caused an earthquake. ‘Then I’ll take your Spiderman game and smash it into a million pieces, how would you like that?’ I instantly regretted saying it, but sometimes you start dancing to your anger before you’ve even had time to hear its song.

It was a very tense and emotionally fraught bedroom to which we retired. Christopher was in his bed – his mood really rather chirpy – I sat in the reclining chair between the two beds, and Jack was on his bed, sufficiently recovered from his bollocking to lobby for the reinstatement of at least one of the discontinued stories.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you I’m going to do something then go back on it. That won’t teach you a lesson.’

‘But you told mummy you’d sit with us and watch Star Trek with us until she got back from the shops.’

‘I said maybe I would, Jack, and at that point I didn’t know exactly when she’d be going or when she’d be back.’

‘I heard you say it.’

Maybe that’s why he’d been pushing for the big bed. Because he’d overheard me debating whether or not I should just cuddle up watching TV with them until their mum got back from the shops. I had to be a man of my word. Plus, I relished an opportunity to do something nice for them that wouldn’t look like a capitulation, even though it most definitely was.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’re right, I did say that. Let’s go to the big bed and watch Star Trek for a wee bit. OK?’

I’d no sooner pushed my arse half-a-foot above the chair than Jack decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

‘Well, I’ll tell you this, I’ll never sit next to you again, not on the couch, not anywhere, for the rest of my life.’

My arse clattered back down on the chair. A frayed and bitter part of me was close to spitting back: ‘Well you’ll get the chance when your mum moves out, then we’ll see how much you like it’, but I snuffed it out. It’s never wise or right to respond to your child’s molten anger with further hurt or anger.

He’s said hurtful things before, ‘I hate you’, ‘You’re not my friend any more’ etc. and I have always, without fail, recognised the outbursts as being the byproduct of the big feelings that kids sometimes feel. I usually just smile, shake my head, and say something like, ‘No you don’t. You’re just angry. You won’t feel that way when the anger leaves. You love me and I love you.’ And I always get an ‘I’m sorry’ cuddle very soon afterwards.

I realised that I was just extra tired and pissed off that night, and it was frazzling my judgement.

Jack’s outburst called for consequences, certainly, but above it called all a cool head. So I sat back in the seat – nice and aloof – and said: ‘Congratulations, son, you’ve just blown it.’

This – perhaps predictably – provoked a partial meltdown. Jack sat up in bed, tears of frustration clouding his eyes. He waved his hands around, bringing them together and then stretching them apart as though he were playing an accordion. ‘THIS is how unfair this is. THIS MUCH.’

‘Jack, how can you say you want to snuggle next to me in the big bed when you’ve just told me you don’t ever want to sit next to me again?’

‘THIS MUCH!’ he screamed.

‘You did this to yourself, son,’ I said, coolly staring ahead. His tear-soaked temper eventually abated, and he curled up on the bed. By this point Christopher was restless, so I slid in next to him in his bed. After a minute or so, I pulled the lever on the reclining chair. It popped up and sprang out, revealing a boy-shaped space, if only the little boy in question wasn’t too defiant to occupy it. I slapped the leather.

‘Come on, Jack, let’s be pals again. Come sit next to me.’

He hesitated for a moment, perhaps contemplating digging in, but he quickly relented. He skulked over to lie on the outstretched seat, but kept himself as far away from me as possible, and with his back turned to me. He was playing hard to get. I knew he wanted more than anything to come in for a cuddle, but he didn’t want to lose face, or let go of the righteous anger that swirled in his belly. I could relate.

‘Come into the bed with me and your brother,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s not be silly, let’s just say sorry and be pals again.’

He clambered over the seat, quick as a flash. I budged up and somehow, miraculously, we sat three abreast in that tiny single bed, me with my toes almost bursting through the bookcase at the foot of it.

‘Sometimes, Jack,’ I said as he snuggled into me, ‘when people are angry, they say things that they don’t mean. Like when I said I would smash Spiderman.’

He looked up at me. ‘Or when I said I’d never sit next to you again.’

‘Exactly. I never have and never would break any of your toys or games. I was just really frustrated that you weren’t listening to me and I got desperate. I didn’t know what else to do. Plus I was already annoyed about something else and I took a little of that out on you. So I’m not sorry about being cross when you wouldn’t listen to me – you did wrong, and I hope you know that – but I’m sorry for losing my temper and saying that nasty thing. That was wrong of me.’

I used to be a lot more hot-headed in my younger days, to the point of psychopathology. I think a combination of time, dwindling testosterone, self-improvement and bitter experience has taught me the folly of that kind of stinking thinking.

Jack cuddled into me more tightly.

As a parent, I’ve got a very loud bark but a very soft bite. More of a nuzzle than a bite, really. Most of my anger comes from frustration at not being listened to, which only really serves to make me angry with myself for getting so angry. It’s quite the feedback loop.

But when I do fuck up or do something wrong, I always apologise for it, and try to explain why it happened. The parents of my mother’s generation were better at letting their kids peak behind the curtain of their supposed perfection than their own parents, but sorry was still a word largely absent from the Boomers’ lexicon. I’m bucking that trend: this Generation X’er is one sorry motherfucker.

‘No big person does the right thing all of the time, Jack. Not me, not your mum, not your teachers, not policemen, not doctors, not strangers in the street. We all make mistakes, son, sometimes we do things wrong, even as adults. None of us is perfect.’

What Jack said next is one of those things that’s bound to illicit the reaction, ‘Yeah, did he fuck say that, you liar.’ And if you do say that, I can certainly see where you’re coming from. We’ve all seen posts on-line where a parent will say something like, “I was discussing the situation in Palestine with my two-year-old daughter the other day, and do you know what, she fixed me with such a knowing little look, and she said, ‘Mummy? Sometimes I think humanity is locked in a perpetual, spiralling cycle of blindness, rage and violence from which it will never escape.”

But Jack did say this next line, word for word. And it made me smile.

‘There’s one thing you are perfect at, dad… Being yourself.’

I tousled his hair, and landed a kiss on that wise wee bonce of his. ‘I guess you’re right.’

What a lad. What a perfect boy.

‘Now go to sleep,’ I told him, ‘Or I’ll smash that fucking bed to pieces.’

 

…I didn’t say that.

It’s Time TV Went to the Right

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Erroneous, or at least exaggerated, reports recently circulated claiming that the incoming Director General of the BBC was going to correct the BBC’s supposed long-standing left-wing bias. So let’s just imagine what it would be like if all of British TV shifted to the right. What sort of programmes could we look forward to?

The Radio Times

Pensioners in England reminisce about the better times when the only entertainment in the home was the radio. Bill in Surrey remembers: ‘My mam would listen to seven ‘ahs of Vera Lynn, then anover twelve ‘ahs of ‘er Majesty the Queen, and we never even ‘ad a fakking radio. She was just nuts, san. Still betta than all these bladdy TV shows full of foreigners and bladdy pooftahs these days.’ To be followed by our nostalgic look back at Thatcher’s glorious economic reign in the 1980s, The Only Way is A-Fax.

The Sooty Show

Britain’s most loveable bear makes a snowflake-defying comeback after his cancellation last year on the grounds that the word ‘sooty’ was‘a bit racist’. Sue’s out: there’s no room in our precious children’s minds for backdoor Chinese propaganda, thank you. And Sweep now speaks proper English. Focus groups felt that, you know, he’s been here long enough, he should speak the fucking language. Watch in delight as Sooty uses his magic wand to do things like remove free school meals and ‘get Brexit done’.

Come Whine With Me

A group of Brexit voters take turns to host each other for a fish and chip dinner, while having illuminating conversations about the Britain they remember.

‘Of course, in my day you could call them ***** ***** ******* without any of this PC nonsense.’

‘Yes, I remember that, you’d just shout, ‘***** ****** *******’ at one of them, and do you know what? They’d shoot you back a big happy smile.’

‘Oh, I know, I know. But never mind that, these days you can’t even call them a ******* ******* ****** ******, or a **** ******* ***** ****** ***** ****** ****** ******* ****** ***** without some leftie do-gooder jumping down your throat.’

‘I heard the other day they were going to ban flags. Or was it lettuce?’

‘They banned Wednesday last week. Too white apparently.’

‘Who banned it? Was it the *****, the ******, or the ******? I’ll bet it was the fucking *****s?’

‘I went into work the other week dressed like Geri Halliwell from the Spice Girls movie, you know, with that Union Jack dress? And do you know what they did? Bloody sent me home.’

‘You don’t really have the hips for that though, Clive.’

‘Quick question on that subject: which toilet would you have used?’

‘Don’t get me started on that caper, I’ll choke on me bloody takeaway. Perverts.’

‘Course, you’re not allowed to say ‘takeaway’ anymore…’

 It’ll Be All White on the Reich

A studio audience, dressed in ‘All Lives Matter’ T-shirts, erupts with riotus laughter as they watch hilarious outtakes of unarmed black people in America being shot dead by police. Followed by a bit of old school comedy genius, with Matt Hancock’s Half Hour. This week, that classic episode, The Press Conference.

Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway

An hour of Ant and Dec watching repeats of themselves on TV as they enjoy a Chinese takeaway, which they repeatedly and unapologetically refer to as a ‘ch*nky’. Followed by another episode of White Van Man Der Valk in which the famous working-class British detective tracks down rogue immigrants by pointing at every non-white person he passes in his van and going, ‘There’s another one.’.

Undercover Racist

The white owner of a factory secretly joins his ethnic work-force on the shop-floor for a week, sharing their hardships and agonies, before tearfully announcing to them all on day seven how much he’d gladly send them all back home, if only he didn’t rely on their cheap labour so much.

‘But we’re all from Dudley,’ says the foreman.

‘I’m sorry, I just can’t understand anything you people say,’ he replies.

Followed by Corona Nation Street. Tonight the residents tear down a 5G mast and have an illegal street party to celebrate.

The BreX Factor

Simon Cowell introduces the singing talent show where every contestant has to sing the British national anthem, even though not a single one of them actually knows the words.

Doctor Red-White-and-Blue

This week the Doctor takes the Tardis on holiday to Benidorm, and decries the lack of any decent Bovril.

When Your Parents Read The Daily Mail

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The Daily Mail and its alternately salacious and harrumphing Sunday counterpart The Mail on Sunday are Orwell’s five minutes’ hate morphed and expanded into tabloid form.

They are to the brain what a mallet is, em, also to the brain – a big, sturdy mallet painted red, white and blue, with each side of its face carrying conservative slogans, ranging from ‘We should bally well help our own first’ to ‘Help our own? They should bally well help themselves, you know, like I had to, by God!’.

The people who read The Mail have been bashed with this hammer so many times they don’t even realise they’re concussed any more, nor that they’re in danger of their brains leaking out from their ears to be smushed underfoot by their own wingtips or fluffy tartan slippers. It’s a comfort to them, that hammer. If it ever stopped thudding they might have to think for themselves, or possibly even be forced to give a shit about someone out-with the green and pleasant lands of their own, nostalgia-flooded recollections.

I’m possibly judging readers of The Mail too harshly, especially since my own parents count among that much-maligned readership. My parents’ reason for buying the paper in the first place doesn’t appear to have been ideological, though long exposure to its contents inevitably has certainly helped to shape their ideology. Whether The Mail planted right-wing sentiments in the egalitarian gardens of their minds or merely provided the necessary nutrients to allow certain long-buried seeds to grow is a matter of conjecture. I do know that when I was a teenager ‘The Independent’ was the family newspaper. Then it was The Times. And now it’s The Mail. A sort of steady slide from left to right. What comes next? A subscription to Breitbart? A signed photo of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins?

Their reason for becoming Mail readers was simply this: price. They don’t like things like The Sun or The Star, and beyond those tub-thumping, shit-and-tit-covered dish-rags, it’s the cheapest newspaper option out there. Beautiful, right? Bargain bigotry.

Each time I visit them I never pass up the opportunity to offer withering comments on their choice of ‘news’ – remembering always to pronounce those inverted commas around the word ‘news’. My mum tends to get angry when I chastise her, claiming that her choice of newspaper in no way informs her outlook on life, even though for many years now her mouth has been filled only with false teeth and Daily Mail headlines.

On my last visit I gave her a guided tour of the edition she had sitting on her kitchen counter-top.

Page three was taken up by a full-page splash about Ewan McGregor’s divorce, complete with corny Star Wars headline. So far, so Express. Next up, the Royal Family. Whereas The Express is still hung up on the ghost of Princess Diana, the Mail is pursuing an endless, obsessive vendetta against Meghan and Harry.

Now, I’m no fan of The Royal Family – I’m  something of a republican in that regard – but the vitriol handed out to those two turns one’s stomach. Mail readers are a curious breed. Many of them like to get the bunting out, and buy cups and saucers emblazoned with the visage of old Lizzy Lizard. Most of them probably own a tonne-weight of commemorative coins encapsulating such epoch-defining moments as Prince Phillip scratching his arse with a gilded shoe-horn or the Queen staring witheringly at a foreign dignitary.

These people clearly harbour a desire to go back in time, not to the knees-up-Mother-Brown, Blitz-tinged days of the 40s and 50s, but way, way back – five or six hundred years back – to experience the sheer joy of living as serfs under the boot of some tyrannical, maid-murdering, family-fucking monarch of the true dynastic golden age. ‘Be a priv’lige to have you shit in my worfless dead mouff, m’am.’

Elsewhere in the ‘newspaper’ there was an attack on Devi Sridhar, Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, misrepresenting an interview she gave to the New York Times about the differences between how the Scottish and UK governments have handled the coronavirus outbreak, which they topped off with the disingenuous and inaccurate headline: SNP AIDE BLAMES ENGLISH FOR RISE IN CASES’.

Never one to miss a chance to stick it to Labour, there was a piece on Jack Straw’s son blacking up. And another one with a headline straight out of The Daily Mash: DID CORBYN’S MARXIST HENCHMAN GIVE BORIS AND CUMMINGS VIRUS? Good question. Once you’ve answered that, let’s find out if Jeremy Corbyn intercepted the Roswell aliens, stole the recipe for AIDS from them, and then used it to sink the Titanic.

I knew this next headline would be divisive, given that my mother and I have polar opposite positions on both the SNP and Independence: ‘£30M BILL FOR SWINNEY’S U-TURN ON EXAMS FIASCO’. I could almost hear my mother’s face tightening into a scowl as I read it aloud.

This was the story of the Scottish Government apologising for allowing geography and socio-economics to have a more impactful influence on post-COVID student grades than the measured predictions of their teachers. Not ideal, though can you imagine The Mail’s headlines in some alternate universe where the Scottish government hadn’t at least made a token effort to compensate for the teaching profession’s very human impulse to be nice to their kids during these troubling times: ‘EVERYONE’S A WINNER in SNP SCOTLAND: CLASS OF 2020 CERTIFICATES NOT WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE WRITTEN ON.’

However, in the face of evidence and dissent the government was big enough to concede that its methods, reasonings and results had been flawed. They then issued a full and frank apology, and then promised to make the appeal process quick and pain-free. And literally free. Which they did.

I guess if you were being uncharitable you could characterise that as a U-Turn, but genuine political U-Turns usually come with less apologies (usually nearer zero) and a million per cent more obfuscation. So, again: disingenuous framing.

Mum, however, wouldn’t accept any defence of John Swinney or the SNP . ‘I’ve always hated Alex Salmond,’ she said. I just shook my head and kept flicking the pages.

The most unforgivable piece in that day’s hell-rag was probably the one carrying this head-line: ‘SO WHY IS BBC HANDING YOUR LICENCE FEE TO THIS SLEAZY PEDDLER OF PORNOGRAPHY?’

BBC The Social commissions online videos from contributors on a wide range of themes and topics, ranging from humour and health, to inspirational stories and educational vignettes. The fee for having a video accepted and featured isn’t huge.

One of these occasional contributors, Mandy Rose Jones, whose content is predominantly focused on mental health and body image, also sells pictures and videos of herself through an adult on-line portal called AdmireMe.

Both this site and the lady herself are unaffiliated with the BBC. Nevertheless, the poor girl was horse-whipped across two pages, as The Mail held her up as some sort of pervasive sexual deviant out to warp the nation’s kids. The article was nothing less than ritual humiliation, the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake. A spurious, offensive diatribe. What this woman chooses to do online – as long as it’s legal – has no bearing whatsoever on the videos she produces for BBC The Social. And for all that it matters, which it doesn’t at all, no-one would’ve known about Mandy’s presence on AdmireMe had the Mail not chosen to turn her into collateral damage in their ongoing ideological war against the BBC.

The Mail is a hateful, gossip-filled tabloid that lends the illusion of a broadsheet. To make stupid people feel clever; and important. If this newspaper were a person it would be a dead donkey with the face of Katie Hopkins. It’s disingenuous, dirty, despicable, deceitful and disgusting. And I wish my parents wouldn’t buy it.

‘Come on, son,’ my mum said to me, with a proud and wounded look on her face. ‘What am I supposed to do? Buy The Daily Record?’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just closed the newspaper and walked away.

COMPETITION: Pandemic-themed Limericks

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During lockdown I wrote Paper Mountain: a dystopian novella inspired by the coronavirus. I want you to write something inspired by the coronavirus, too. A limerick: as funny, foul, searing or serious as you like. Send them to me by the end of August, I’ll read them, judge them – boy will I judge them – and the best three will win a prize, and be published on this blog to be read by less than 25 people and a handful of automated Russian and Chinese sexbots. You lucky lot.

 

Prize pool is as follows:

 

  • An empty packet of Frazzles once enjoyed by Ant (ate 60 per cent) & Dec (ate 40 per cent)
  • A full set of ITV News at Ten action figures, including the rare ‘Helicopter-Attack Trevor MacDonald’
  • The complete box-set of ‘The Only Way Is Essex’ melted down and fashioned into the shape of a dog poo
  • A dog poo
  • A luxury VIP weekend at Butlins’ Skegness where you’ll share a chalet with Nigel Farage, the cast of Eldorado and a spaniel named Gary
  • A selection of Dot Cotton’s fag ends
  • A crown made entirely from McDonalds’ plastic cutlery, speckled with Jesus’ blood
  • A tiny top hat and tails suitable for a wasp
  • A scarecrow with the face of Katy Hopkins that’s been banned in 147 countries
  • Brian Blessed’s bruised and battered bicep
  • Brian Blessed’s bat and ball for the baseball building he built  
  • The book: “How to Use Alliteration Effectively,” by Brian Blessed
  • A signed photo of Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses (it’s been signed by Mr T)
  • A statue commemorating the moment a brave turkey ended the life of the cruel tyrant Bernard Matthews, which is due to be torn down next week because the turkey once said something problematic on Twitter
  • A haunted Emu puppet that comes to life at night to vanquish the last of Rod Hull’s mortal enemies  
  • Two squirrels that have been surgically altered to resemble Morecambe and Wise
  • A dead octopus that’s wearing a chef’s apron
  • A sample of my DNA
  • Half of one of the Krankies (your choice)
  • A signed photo of my local butcher
  • A signed copy of my novella plus a guaranteed free copy of my upcoming paperback compendium Dad or Alive: The Hell and Happiness of Parenting
  • A signed copy of my novella (signed under a false name)
  • Fuck all

Unfortunately for you, only the final three items in this list are the actual prizes. Entry details below.

 

Send your limericks to theotherjamie@hotmail.co.uk by the 31st of August, and let fate do the rest. 

Please share this far and wide, and do try your hand at a wee limerick or two.

If you don’t want to enter the competition and just want to check it out in paperback, or free with Kindle Unlimited, click the link here 

Happy rhyming, douchebags.

Jamie on the Box: Muppets Now

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Disney’s first stab at the muppets post-Henson, the 2011 feature film The Muppets, was almost immaculate. The character of Walter was a master-stroke, both an entry-level proxy for the new generation of kids encountering Jim Henson’s phantasmagoric creatures for the first time, and a reminder to old fogeys like me of how much the muppets meant to them and how excited we were to see them again.

The muppets themselves weren’t quite as anarchic or unpredictable as they’d been in their 70s/80s heyday – alluded to in the movie itself through Animal being constrained from indulging his destructive impulses by way of self-help therapy – but what the movie lacked in chaos it made up for in reverence, well-earned sweetness, a plethora of genuinely catchy musical numbers and laugh-out loud moments. Disney had captured lightning in a bottle, but didn’t appear to know what to do with it once they had it, as evidenced by 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted, a sequel that was watchable, though lacklustre and lacking in heart.

ABC’s The Muppets – the 2015 behind-the-scenes mockumentary that was cancelled after one season – showed staggered promise, but, again, the showrunners fatally misunderstood the property. The result was an ill-judged, frequently insipid, tonal mish-mash that alienated long-time admirers like me, and failed to ignite adoration in those coming to the muppets cold. Instead they were left cold. What I want to know is, who looked at the muppets and thought, ‘I know what’ll reinvigorate this franchise: multiple references to Kermit the Frog’s sex life.’ In the end, The Muppets new TV series wasn’t bold or edgy enough to work as an all-out, adults-only entry in the canon, but it was too adult to appeal to children. So who the hell was it for?

And now we have Disney’s Muppets Now, a show perhaps cynically designed to capitalise on the Zoom-era zeitgeist at a time when most TV shows have been crippled, cancelled or postponed by the creep of the coronavirus.

The show follows Scooter’s attempts to cobble together an online extravaganza from the filmed segments sent across to him by his co-stars, uploaded before our very eyes as we watch the episode, while Kermit frets and frowns.

The first of these segments is Life Sty, wherein Miss Piggy explores beauty, style and showbiz pizzazz, featuring guest appearances by actor/singer Taye Diggs and actress Linda Cardellini. Next comes little Walter’s showcase of his fellow muppet’s lesser-known talents, this week turning the spotlight on Kermit’s almost supernatural talent for photo-bombing. The Swedish chef is next, hurdy-gurdying through a cook-off with celebrity chef Carlina Will, before Kermit tops it off with a one-on-one (well, several-on-one) interview with Ru Paul.

And it was, you know… Okay. A bit flat. I watched it with my two young kids, 5 and 3, and they were bored for most of it. Things weren’t much better over on my side of the age divide; I sat stony-faced for the most part. I enjoyed bits of it, but again I was left wondering, ‘Who is this for? What is this for?’

The Piggy segment was one-note and predictable. The cooking segment – by far the worst – felt like exactly that: a cooking segment; an insipid piece of fluffery you might find on a magazine show like The One Show or Saturday Morning Kitchen, but without even those show’s intermittently successful attempts at good-natured humour. The Swedish chef seemed incidental to his own showcase. He was no longer the agent of chaos I’d enjoyed watching as a child (and an adult, I hasten to add). He Just seemed disgruntled and mean-spirited.  More inexcusably still, he just wasn’t funny. My kids agreed.

And what the hell has become of Kermit? I’m a Henson purist, but even still I came to appreciate and enjoy Steve Whitmire’s take on the world’s most famous amphibian. Matt Vogel is the latest actor to puppet and voice Kermit following Whitmire’s acrimonious departure from the franchise in 2017, and he’s just not Kermity enough. Vogel’s evocation/impression – whatever you want to call it – is poor to the point where I think I would be better at it, and his attempt to capture the character leaves Kermit’s green feeling distinctly grey.

Did Kermit turn to valium after his last show was cancelled? Is that the in-show explanation?

It’s telling that the strongest segment is the photo-bomb one; a segment containing two muppets and precisely zero humans. It’s very funny, and uses its characters well. Likewise, the interplay between Uncle Deadly and Miss Piggy is a genuine joy to behold. Again, it’s an interaction that doesn’t need a celebrity guest to make it work. It’s already there in the script.

Disney seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that it is the muppets’ celebrity guests that have always made the brand work; made people watch. Sure, the original Muppet Show had a different celebrity cameo every week – everyone from Elton John to Steve Martin to the cast of Star Wars – but the appearances never felt like celebrity-for-celebrity’s sake. While the show’s guest stars added a direction, a feel and a flavour to their particular episode, people would watch it whether they were there or not: there was never any doubt that the muppets had top billing. There’s something depressing and par-for-the-course about the modern iterations of the muppets trying to shoehorn in as many celebrity appearances as possible. Even when the original series featured a star that few people had heard of, the magic was still there. Not so now.

While I agree that change and re-contextualisation often can re-invigorate a long-running property, not every revived show needs I-Phones, shaky-cams, Zoom calls or numerous nods to contemporaneous social mores. Call me a cranky cultural conservative if you like. I suppose I am when it comes to the muppets, the first show I remember watching as a very small child.

I hope the next five episodes of Muppets Now contain something to make this old man and his own little muppets chuckle, or even smile. But if that turns out not to be the case, then let’s hope that someone at Disney works out that the best way to capture the energy and essence of these furry, fuzzy, fun-lovin’ little critters is to let them come home. Put them back in their theatre, re-cast a credible Kermit, and then, frankly, leave them the fuck alone to do their thing.

Kids: A Walk in the Park

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It was a nice day on Sunday so I walked the boys to the park. My eldest cycled, the youngest walked, and I use ‘walk’ in its loosest possible sense. The scenic route that winds from our house to the park would take an average adult, walking at a brisk pace, about twenty minutes. It takes my children about as long as it took the three little girls in Rabbit Proof Fence to walk from the top of Australia to the bottom. My kids – even on bikes – dawdle like tourists. They sniff and search like dogs. Not a blade of grass or a fallen crisp packet is left un-investigated. Not a single opportunity to bicker or fight is squandered.

My eldest, Jack, 6 (almost), kept cycling off round corners as I hollered after him like a damsel in a horror film, as my youngest pestered me every few minutes to be lifted onto my back or shoulders, on the grounds that his legs were about to fall off. In the end he was more backpack than boy; a land-mine-lacerated soldier in NAM being rushed to the EVAC point. When we eventually made it to the park, we had just over an hour left to enjoy its delights before we would have to gather up the sherpas for the long hike back home, and to dinner –  you know, that meal where it’s a fifty/fifty shot whether the kids will eat anything, or just drop it on the ground and lobby for cake.

Time (and the coronavirus) has both brought the boys much closer together, and made them fight more viciously and frequently than ever before, but for all their shared ground and similarities each new day seems to bring a fresh divergence between their respective wants and needs.

Jack wanted to cycle round the bike circuit at the park – paved and lined to look like a town in microcosm, with park benches and bored parents standing in as buildings. Christopher wanted to run riot in the play-park itself. Naturally, I had to accompany Chris, on the grounds that he’s three, and more likely to attempt a daring escape. Luckily – for both my legs and my aversion to child social services – the two areas are only separated from each other by a hip-high metal fence.

I positioned myself inside the play-park so I was loosely equidistant from the two boys, with a clear line of sight to both. Whenever I put my focus on one of them I had to quickly crane my neck and spin around like a giant, agitated meerkat, only allowing myself to relax once I’d locked on to their manic movements. I had to remember to occasionally wave or smile recognition at my kids once I spotted them, so the people in the park didn’t think I was a particularly brazen paedophile.

Jack quickly struck up a friendship with a slightly older kid who was in the bike-park on a skateboard. At first I had to scrutinise their body language from afar to make sure Jack wasn’t being bullied by a human Bart Simpson. But, no. They were thick as thieves, in that enviable, you-had-me-at-hello way in which kids bond with their peers. I could see that Jack had assumed a leadership role, and was taking charge of their play, in that enthusiastically demanding but wild-eyed and creative way of his. Minutes later, Jack ran up to the hip-high fence, and I walked backwards to meet him, keeping my eyes trained on Chris as he flew down the chute for the fifty-billionth time (with just as much glee as he had the first time).

‘What is it, buddy?’ I asked Jack.

‘Daddy, will you come and play with us? I need some ideas for games.’

I was touched by the request, which probably spoke to the size of my inner child, but I told him I could neither abandon his little brother to fate nor drag him out of his perma-plastic wonderland against his will. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘You’ve got tonnes of great ideas. I’m sure you’ll think of plenty of things to do.’

Just as Jack ran back to his new best friend, Christopher called me over to the chute, next to which was a little ground-bolted circular table complete with circular-table-bolted stools. He invited me to sit down, then scooped up some bark from the ground. He dropped two equal-sized piles of it on the table, one for me, one for him. ‘Your dinner, daddy,’ he said.

I pretended to eat some.

‘You want some chips?’ he asked. I nodded. Another pile of bark.

‘Tomato ketchup?’ he asked. I nodded, but I was a bit worried about that one. Thankfully he just mimed it.

As we were ‘eating’, a wee girl of similar age to Christopher arrived at my side, watching the proceedings with an expectant look. I offered her my seat. ‘Go on, sweetheart, you two can have dinner together.’

I moved back towards the hip-high fence and watched them with a smile as they played out their teeny-tiny, obliviously-cute approximation of a first date (excuse my heteronormativeness and projections of sexual power structures there). Once they were finished with their ‘meal’, they went off into the park together; spontaneously, wordlessly, operating by a mixture of instinct and telepathy, one following the other, then the other following the one, doing a fleet-footed, whistle-stop tour of the play-park, ninety-nine per cent glee, one per cent attention span. I, of course, had to follow them at a distance; a grumbling chaperone.

Neither of my kids needed me. Sure, they needed me to be physically present, to protect them from the formless dangers that lurked on the periphery of their seemingly safe spaces; to get them home again. But for the first time they didn’t need me to prop up their play, go on the roundabout with them, or join them as they threw sand in the air like confetti. I was pleased for them, but I was also, you know, kind of devastated. I knew this was just a blip. It’s not as though they were about to go off on a gap year or start working at IBM or something. But still. Being a parent is absorbing loss by degree, each new chunk of knowledge they acquire or glimmer of independence they gain taking them further away from you. This felt like one of those moments, and standing inside of it I imagined I could see all the way through to that final moment, when the house is empty of children.

Jack came running towards me, shaking me from my angst. ‘Daaaddddeeeeee!’ he shouted. ‘I need a peeeeeeeeee!’

I helped vault him over two hip-high fences, and stood guard at the side of a tree while he peed, breaking off half-way through to dash back to the park, because Christopher had been abandoned by his new friend (after he’d just cooked her his signature bark dish, too) and was running free and wild down the length of the play-park. Walking back to Jack with Chris in my arms, I thought to myself: ‘Maybe today isn’t one of these moments.’ My kids need me.

And I need them

The celebrities of the cigarette warning world

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A moment of stress-clouded weakness earlier in the year led me to take up smoking again after a three-year break. I think God must have learned there was a 39-year-old Scotsman out there who’d marginally increased his life expectancy, and He wasn’t having any of it.

I always find the best time to start smoking again is just before a global pandemic that attacks the human respiratory system.

A lot’s changed since I’ve been away from the heady world of smoking, but unfortunately not the bit about cigarettes killing you. Apparently that’s still a thing. But the packaging has changed. The ante has been well and truly upped. The uncle, too. Hell, the whole fucking family. Lung surgery. Dead guys. Babies having a fly fag. I wouldn’t be surprised to pick up a packet of baccy one day to see it emblazoned with the elevator of blood from The Shining, along with the caption, ‘All smoke and no vape makes Jack a dead boy.’

My favourite warning picture is the one where a woman is sporting a mighty cough face while holding out a blood-spattered hanky. It made me laugh. Not because I find the thought of mouth and lung cancer hilarious – although if we’re all being honest with ourselves it’s probably still slightly funnier than Mrs Browns’ Boys – but because it got me to thinking about the woman in the photograph.

Some of the people featured on fag and baccy packets are real, especially the ones with sunken faces and tubes coming out of them. Sometimes these images have been used without permission. But cough lady is almost certainly an actress/model. How do I know this?

Let me set the scene.

RING RING, RING RING

“Hello?”

“Hi, I’m a photographer. I heard smoking gave you cancer. Mind if I come round and snap a picture of you having a bit of a big cough?”

“Sure. Come over. My baby smokes too if you want to get a few snaps of him at the same time?”

The photographer has been in the woman’s house for thirty minutes…

“Sure you don’t feel a wee cough coming on, ma’am?”

“Nope. Not at the moment.”

“…Want me to get you a packet of Salt and Vinegar Squares from the car; they’re pretty sharp, might help gee it along?”

“No thanks.”

(looks at watch) “It’s just I’ve got a bum cancer shoot in about forty minutes… maybe if you smoked a cigarette?”

“How dare you come in here an…CRU CRU HU HUUU HUU OHH HO HO HUH!”

(grabs camera) “Oh, brilliant, love, that’s it. Spew that lung for daddy! FANTASTIC, is that blood? Just hold it up there, yep, oh, that’s it, red like a rose. Red like Santa’s toilet paper after a bumpy sleigh ride. Just tilt it to me, love – maybe look a bit more horrified? PERFECT! The camera loves you, baby!”

That’s a photo shoot I couldn’t see even the world’s most ethically compromised photographer taking part in, much less the ‘model’. So the woman must have been hired from an agency. Specialising in what, exactly?

“Darling, I’m waiting on my agent calling, don’t use the phone!”

“It’s 2020, though, everyone’s got mobiles?”

“I know, darling, but the guy writing this blog used RING RING a few paragraphs back, he’s clearly something of a throwback, can we please just go with this?”

RING RING, RING RING

“Hello? (lowers receiver, covers mouthpiece) DARLING, IT’S MY AGENT! DON’T GO ON THE INTERNET, EITHER, I NEED THIS PHONE LINE TO STAY FREE. YOU CAN GO ON FRIENDS REUNITED LATER!”

“….”

“Sorry, hi. Thanks for phoning. You got me an audition? Oh I knew this moment would come! My big moment. My parents will finally be proud of me. What have you got for me? Cinema ad? Shakespeare play? Small part in a movie? Recurring role in Eastenders?

(silence)

You want me to pretend to have cancer in a photo?”

(husband sneaks up the hall with a bunch of flowers)

(she waves him away, shakes her head solemnly, lowers receiver again)

“Darling, you’d better cancel that Mini-Disc player we ordered through Littlewoods.”

Some strange things go through my head, they really do. Then I got to thinking, is there an awards’ night for people in this niche of the industry?

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the sixth annual awards gala for ‘People Whose Images Are Used in Terrifying and Embarrassing Ways’. And the nominations are… Barbara Findlayson, for ‘Woman pulling her mouth into an ‘O’ shape due to severe vaginal itching’. (polite applause) Jacob Graham for ‘Old man pishes himself at the bowling’. (polite applause)  Gloria Fonko, for ‘Woman screams because a spider bit her on the tit’. (polite applause) And Karen Globenstein, for ‘Woman who coughs blood and little bits of Salt & Vinegar Squares crisps into her favourite hanky because she’s got the cancer’. (whoops and cheers) Karen, get on up here, you son of a bitch!”

(Karen jumps to her feet and starts screaming with excitement) “TOMMY, CALL ARGOS AND GET THAT MINI-DISC PLAYER BACK ON THE GO. THROW IN A LASERDISC! FUCK IT, GET A FURBY AND A STEP-MASTER, TOO!”

Good on you, Karen.

Who says smoking is bad for you?