Tag Archives: health

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?

Back (Pain) to the Future

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Being a tall man certainly has its advantages: you can see over high fences; you can reach things in shops that would be out-of-reach to most mortals of average height (like jars of olives and dirty magazines); and you’ve got a ready-made moral right to claim aisle-seats in planes and cinemas.

But there’s a flip-side:

1) short people will ask you what the weather’s like up there almost every single day, and expect a big laugh each and every time (what they won’t expect is for you to smash them into the ground like tiny tent pegs, so do that);

2) in shops you’ll become a slave to little old ladies who can’t even reach the Bisto shelf unaided, much less the porn and olives;

3) thanks to your height people will automatically assume you’re a gifted basketball player, and then laugh when you leap in the direction of the hoop like a highly-effeminate trampolining Nazi;

4) and, finally, and perhaps most crucially, you’ll suffer such exquisite back-pain that even glamour models with big cannon-ball boobs that have been cosmetically-enhanced into the high alphabet will express deep and earnest sympathy for your plight.

What I think I look like with a sore back.

I’m a tall man who sits behind a desk for a living and gets little opportunity for exercise. I’m also the son of a tall man who spent most of his adult life cursed with a bad back; plus I’m getting older, weaker, and generally creakier. I’m a chiropractor’s wet dream.

That being said, I’ve been pretty lucky only to have experienced intermittent pain and discomfort. Genetics and heredity being what they are, I could well have spent most of my life hunched over like a bell-ringer with a chronic self-abuse problem.

I may not experience back pain often, but when it comes – much like the bell-ringer – it comes hard. A few weeks ago I was showering before work when I felt a sharp, sudden, jolting pain in my back, like someone had thrown a harpoon down my spine. The pain moved up and down, and kept returning, so there were hints of boomerang in there, too. Let’s just split the difference and call it a ‘harpoonerang of agony’.

What I actually look like.

Because there’s no such thing as a moment to yourself in a house shared with children, my eldest son, Jack,happened to be on the pan poo-poo-ing at the same time as I was showering. This gave him literally the best seat in the house from which to view my torment. When I cried out in pain, he expressed sympathy in the only way he knows how: by laughing hysterically and cruelly mimicking my oyahs and back spasms. I usually play the clown at home, so in one respect I was being hoisted by my own petard (Tommy Cooper must have felt similarly miffed as he keeled over dead to a chorus of hoots and cheers), but, in another respect, my son’s clearly an irredeemable savage, and I’ll make sure he pays for this day’s sacrilege for the rest of his miserable fucking life.

As the pain intensified, my youngest son, Christopher – doubtless attracted by the siren call of his big brother’s cackles – waddled into the bathroom. He stood at the side of the bath with a big grin on his face and also began impersonating me, making ‘ooooo’ sounds in the manner of a mildly-amused monkey. I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, which sent a few more pellets of pain ricocheting up my spine.

And this, too.

I made it to the bedroom, walking like a lock-legged zombie, each pull of the towel across my wet skin more like a knifing than a drying. The pain became too much, and I lowered myself onto the bed, where I lay flop-backed like a capsized tortoise. Jack decided that the best way to alleviate my suffering would be to bounce up and down on the bed beside me and then jump down onto my stomach. All that was missing was a referee slapping the bed for the three-count. Christopher decided to sink his teeth into my nipple and clamp on with all his dental might, like an angry parrot. At least their mum didn’t make it the hat-trick by taking a 2X4 to my bollocks.

“What about your work?” my partner, Chelsea, asked, as I lay prone.

“Work? WORK? What about my ‘walk’? I can’t even stand, for Christ’s sake.”

She tried everything to get me back on my feet: berating me, telling me how pathetic I looked, making repeated references to how old I was. Nothing worked! Actually, flippancy aside, I know for a fact she used every tool at her disposal to help me up: I know because she put my socks on my feet.

Now, she hates feet in general, but she hates my feet more than a whole wheelbarrowful of disembodied leper feet. My feet repulse her. Even if they’re clean. Even if they’re freshly showered. Even if they’ve just been decontaminated with super-strong chemicals in a government laboratory, and then scrubbed and filed down to the bone, and then doused in turps and rubbing alcohol. Even then she’d rather die than massage them. She doesn’t even like looking at them.

What she did was love. Or pity. It’s one of them, certainly, and who cares which? It’s a win for me, and that’s the important thing. It gets better, though. Not only did she put my socks on my feet, but she gave me a back massage, too. The only thing missing was the offer of a bowl of hot Bisto, a tub of olives and half hour alone with my laptop, and it would’ve been my perfect day.

After close to forty minutes spent writhing on the bed, I managed to wriggle and struggle and roll and heave myself to my feet. I had to push my neck up and out, like a giraffe spoiling for a fight. I started to move in slow-motion, desperately avoiding any stretches or twinges that would send me back to the surface of the bed a half-crippled beetle of a man. I was feeling a little self-conscious, wondering if I looked a little bit silly, a fear quickly confirmed when Chelsea burst out laughing.

“I’m glad my incapacity amuses you so much,” I huffed.

“I’m sorry, it’s just… you look like you’re doing a moon-walk.”

She then imitated me, which made Jack laugh again, which made me laugh, and which, predictably, sent me back to the surface of the bed a half-crippled beetle of a man. Getting up the second time was easier, but no less painful. “I’m really not sure I should be going to work,” I said. “Look how long it’s taken me to stand up and put socks on. And I never even put the socks on myself.”

I peered down at my son, Jack, who was no longer mocking or laughing, but looking up at me with a heavy, mournful face, his eyes wet with the first faint shimmer of tears. That beautiful little soul. I’d thought him callous and unkind, a psychopath in training. And yet there he was, moved to tears by my predicament. My blessed boy. My little miracle. Suddenly, none of the pain mattered. My boy was unspeakably kind and compassionate, and if the agony of my mattress-based crucifixion had been necessary to coax that out of him, then so be it. It was a price worth paying.

Except that’s not why he was on the brink of tears.

He thought that if I stayed off work with my half-crippled back then he wouldn’t be able to go to the zoo with his grandpa.

I smiled and laughed, and then thought to myself…

‘I hope he inherits my big, long back…’

After the Ban: What Happened to Tony the Tiger and Friends?

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It’s exactly one year since the government banned all brand mascots from appearing on the packaging of sugary breakfast cereals marketed at children. The ban also covered advertising, ensuring that iconic characters like Tony the Tiger and the Honey-Monster – beloved of the breakfast table for decades – would never be seen by children again, except maybe in old photographs or on-line shrines.

While it could be – and frequently is – argued that the ban was good for the hearts and waistlines of our nation’s children, it had an undeniably devastating economic and psycho-social impact on the brand mascot community, many of whom have struggled to pick up the pieces of their lives and careers.

Cecil in happier times.

Tony the Tiger – real name Cecil T. Entwistle – is perhaps the most vocal member of the ‘Breakfast Club’. I met him at a Soho bar at 11 o’clock in the morning to discuss how he’d coped since the ban. He was already drunk. Truth be told, he’s drunk a lot these days – just pick up any copy of The Sun or Heat magazine to see the proof of that – but this time he had perhaps some small justification for his behaviour: he’d just settled his fifth divorce.

“Do you want to know what’s Frostie?” he asked with a caustic grin. “That bitch’s mother. Good fucking riddance to both of them.” He downed a gin & tonic. “I hear she’s fucking the Coco Pops’ monkey now…” This seemed to amuse him greatly, and he started singing his old rival’s TV ad jingle: “I guess she’d rather have a blow of Coco’s cock.”

He gave a sad little laugh, picked up another G&T, swirled it around, and then downed it, too. “You can BET that little fucker turns the milk chocolatey.”

He downed another. Then another. Then another, before spinning down memory lane like a tornado.

Coco the Monkey: shagger

“See, I had it all, man. Money, power, pussy on tap – I’m talking primo, free-range jungle pussy: lions, tigers, bears, Dorothy, the little dog… you name it. I had a platinum litter box, Versace tail-caps, balls of wool as big as buses, open-top fish tanks with genetically-modified basking sharks in them – man, they were fucking delicious. I could scratch where I liked, piss where I liked, lick my own balls whenever I liked – and, boy, do I like doing that. Man, it was grrrrrrrr…”

With a sudden and terrifying ferocity he threw a glass across the room, shattering it against a wall. “I can’t even say my own CATCHPHRASE any more, can you believe this shit? Covert advertising!! Covert advertising my hairy orange arse!”

Tony brought a clenched paw down hard on the table. “They take my face off the fucking boxes, and GUESS WHAT? The kids are STILL fat cunts!”

Tony Tiger was probably the worst hit financially and professionally by the ban. A matter of hours after the ‘Tigers and Monkeys on Boxes and That’ 2018 Act came into force, Tony gave a heated interview to the BBC, at the climax of which he asked: “What am I going to do now? Work in a fucking bank?”

He now works in a bank.

Or rather he did. Later on the day of our interview I learned that he’d been fired from his position as clerk for stealing stationery, and eating his line manager. He’s now waiting to hear if he’s been accepted for the next series of Big Brother.

By mid-afternoon on the day of our interview Tony was alternating between sobbing into his hands, and ranting that Jamie Oliver was a Jewish conspiracy. As I walked through the door of the pub into the daylight beyond I left him with a karaoke mic gripped in his paw, shouting ‘GGGGGGGRRRRRREEEEEEEAAAAAAAAATTTTTTT!’ into it over and over again as the words to ‘Sweet Caroline’ flashed up on a giant screen behind him.

I pity him. But his lot is a pleasant one compared to those of some of his contemporaries.

Of all the ‘Breakfast Club’ mascots, Honey Monster was the one who seemed to accept the end of his career with the most grace and the least rancour. He had options. For a time afterwards he worked as Boris Johnson’s body-double, but was fired for being too competent and handsome. He also enjoyed critical and commercial success with his autobiography, ‘Would Still Taste as Sweet’, becoming a darling of the talk-show circuit. He dated both the Nesquik Bunny and Count Chocula, releasing hit singles with both of them. No matter what he turned his hand to, his intelligence, wit and playfulness shone through. Perhaps as a consequence, no-one realised just how lost and shattered the Honey Monster was at his core, and by the time they did it was too late: not just for Honey Monster, but for his victims, too.

In January last year he suffered a psychotic break while at a reunion party. During a ten minute rampage he snapped the necks of Snap and Pop, eviscerated the Lucky Charms’ leprechaun, and battered the Milky Bar Kid to death. When police arrived at the scene they found Honey Monster sitting calmly in an armchair drenched in blood. When asked to explain what had happened, he just shrugged and said: “The Milky Bar Kid is on me.”

Professor Weeto as he looks today.

When detectives investigated Honey Monster’s house they found over 20,000 pictures and photographs of Jamie Oliver, all with the eyes cut out. Well-known celebrity psychiatrist Professor Weeto appeared as a defence witness at the trial. He said that in his professional opinion, each of Honey’s victims had been a proxy for Jamie Oliver – the moon-faced chef who’d been instrumental in bringing the era of the brand mascots to an ignominious end. Weeto then appealed to the jury to acquit the Honey Monster on the grounds that Jamie Oliver ‘was a total fucking arse-piece.’

They didn’t listen. Weeto later said: “It’s hard to convince people a defendant isn’t a monster when his name literally has ‘Monster’ in it.”

Could Hioney Monster be described as a ‘cereal killer’? I asked him.

“Fuck off,” he replied.

Honey Monster was sentenced to life imprisonment in HMP Glen Michael, where he now spends his days in an underground isolation cell behind an impenetrable Plexiglas wall, reading, thinking and shitting in a bucket. When I met him he was in a characteristically loquacious mood.

“Sugar has become emblematic of the struggle against freedom,” he began. “That sweet, refined nectar is nothing less than a stand-in for our souls. If we lose our right to imbibe sweetness and to impart it to others, then we lose ourselves. We lose control. We, the cereal mascots, were painted as harbingers of corruption, enemies of youth, monsters, and we were summarily executed for our crimes by that taste-bud tyrant who sits upon his throne in the hypocritical heaven of his rich man’s paradise. I used to be so angry about what he did, but thankfully I’m at peace with it now.”

The person you described there, I asked. Do you mean Jamie Oliver?

The Honey Monster reached inside his pants, shat violently on his hands and clapped twelve times, sending foul fireworks of faeces shooting into the air, into his mouth and everything. He rubbed some of the slimy brown mixture into his eyes, before nodding calmly.

“That’s the fella, yeah.”

Oliver’s luxury Ivory Tower

I wanted to ask Jamie Oliver if he felt responsible for what had happened to the mascots. We met on the top floor of his ivory tower, in a room shaped like a giant quinoa and spinach patty. Dark storm clouds pushed against the curvature of the window. Now and then a flickering tongue of lightning would pierce the gloom, lighting up the clouds like electrocuted jellyfish.

Oliver stood with his arms folded against his chest, a cloak of organically-sourced hemp billowing around his body thanks to the air blasting up through powerful jets he’d had installed around the room for that express purpose. No small wonder that Jamie Oliver has won the prestigious ‘Most Pretentious Cunt in the World’ award six-years-running.

“Do I feel… responsible?” he asked himself, re-positioning himself as the interviewer. “DOES A BOOT FEEL RESPONSIBLE FOR SQUISHING AN ANT?”

Tragic

I repeated the question. He walked up to the window, and gazed out over the clouds. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.”

I pointed out that I hadn’t actually said anybody’s name. He turned to face me with hatred in his eyes.

“There will be NO food in the future. Only air that’s been filtered through a free-range hen’s lungs, and scented with jasmine. I HAVE SPOKEN.”

I made my excuses to terminate the interview and started walking towards the lift. Oliver rushed over and grabbed me by the arm.

“Mate, you don’t have any Mars Bars or Turkey Twizzlers on you, do you? I’m fucking starving.”

I was glad to be leaving this spaghetti junction of human and cartoon misery behind me. When I was perhaps half a mile distant from Jamie Oliver’s tower, I turned around and looked at it. I couldn’t help but reflect that the moral high ground is an incredibly lonely place. Few have escaped the brutal domino effect of the mascot ban, even its own architect, who has been left in a fugue of madness and low blood-sugar.

All stories, however tragic, usually have at least one happy ending, and this one is no exception. Crackle – lucky to have left his encounter with the Honey Monster with his life – has risen Phoenix-like from the flames of death and loss to embrace something of a career renaissance. He’s going to be presenting Britain’s Got Talent alongside Declan Donnelly.

“Crackle and Dec,” he smiled, “Who would have thought it?”

Dec shoved him. “Dec and Crackle, you little cunt.”

Movie Reboots – ALLAN VS PREDATOR

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'Please demonstrate how you would lift this human safely, taking care not to hurt your back.'

It’s fair to say that the two AVP films didn’t exactly get the pulses of fans or critics racing. In fact they were shite.

But this time, the Predators face their greatest nemesis of all: Allan.

Allan is an officer with the Health and Safety Executive who objects very strongly to the flagrant disregard the Predators show towards meeting safety standards in the workplace. Although filming is still underway, we managed to obtain a few excerpts of dialogue from a scene in which Allan has a white-knuckle showdown with the head Predator.

'That's it, Tentacle Face. I'm shutting this mother-fucker down.'

ALLAN: Do you think it’s safe to have your staff piloting a large spacecraft through a potentially very busy region of space where there may be elderly space users, when clearly their vision is limited to detecting thermal signatures from warm-blooded creatures? Can I see a copy of your risk assessment forms, please?

HEAD PREDATOR: Graaahhraaahhragraaahhh.

ALLAN: And has the thermo nuclear device attached to your arm been PAT tested yet?

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter-Field. It’s kind of like Cloverfield, but you won’t be able to tell the difference. See also: Alien vs Creditor. Phillip the creditor doesn’t care how many mouths they’ve got to feed. He’s still repossessing their eggs.