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The Jobs of the Future, Today

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The jobs people have and the work they do can tell us a lot about what it was like to live during different times in human history. The technologies and philosophies. The hopes and dreams. The haves and have-nots. But what about the UK now, today, in our machine-led age of brands, connectivity, the internet, and social media? What kind of work is out there, and what does it tell us about the experience of living and working in 2019?

Roving reporter Jamie Andrew waded into the workforce to find out.

Davey Johnson, 46, Salt-of-the-Earth Compliance Officer, Alloa, Scotland

I’m a no-nonsense, tells-it-like-it-is, salt-of-the-earth type, and my job is to make sure that the rest of the world knows it. I carry out most of my work on the threads underneath articles shared on social media by local news organisations.

It’s exhausting work. I’m there, first thing in the morning, desperately trying to find ways to put a right-wing spin on the more gentle and whimsical articles with which these outlets tend to start the day. It can be tough. You know, I might have to find something militant to say about, say, a wee boy winning a prize for drawing a nice picture of a rabbit at his school. I’ll do it in baby steps, start off with a, ‘Wisnae like that in my day’, maybe follow it up with a, ‘These snowflakes and their pictures – I was shooting rabbits at his age’, and before I know it, I’ve slam-dunked it with a ‘Wonder if they’ll still let us draw rabbits come the Muslim caliphate, eh?’

By lunch-time it’s easy. Me, I’m feeling like Neo fae the Matrix: whoosh, bam, kaplow! Everything’s just happening, like magic. I’m skimming the headlines or the wee prompts by the page admin, and the replies are just boomin’ out of me…

‘Should kids start school at 10am instead of 8am?’ BOOM! Should they FUCK! ‘What do you think about smacking children?’ BLAM! Dae it as hard as possible. Never did me ony harm! ‘Breast-feeding in public?’ SLAP! Tits oot for the lads, absolutely NOT tits oot at my dinner table, ya manky bastards. ‘What do you think about the government’s initiative to lower the murder rate in our cities? ‘BASH! Bloody pansies! My grandfather murdered me when I was 12. And it never did me ony harm!’

The trick is to sound a bit like you’re in that Monty Python’s Yorkshireman sketch, but eighty per cent more racist.

I’m bloody good at my job. Science, solidarity and compassion are no match for the angry, knee-jerk opinions of working-class, salt-of-the-earth types like me.

Randall McCallum, 31 Dinner Photographer, Bangor, NI

Not everyone can afford a new car or a dream home to rub in their followers faces on Facebook or Twitter. You don’t need that. These days, the battle to win over hearts and minds – well, the battle to make hearts and minds seethe with rage and envy – is being fought at the dinner table. That’s where I come in.

Forget fortune. You don’t need a new car to make Elspeth who used to be in your class at school jealous as fuck. The new signifier of social sophistication is food. Or, as I like to say, Duck L’Orange is the new hatchback.

All you need is a really snobby meal slapped on a dinner plate and snapped artistically, perhaps with some augmentation filter added in so the food looks like it’s glowing or glistening – just as long as you don’t use the wrong filter and end up accidentally attaching donkey ears to your Colombian goat-loin curry.

I’m so good at what I do I can make waffles look like a meal Gordon Ramsay might one day demand to impregnate. I drape parsley over them, sexily – so bloody sexy that it seems like Leo Di Caprio might paint it – then I tag it with something like #FreshPotatoGriddles, maybe even translate it to French first, because French makes everything shit sound really good, you know, with the possible exception of Citreon and Renault.

Before I got in to dinner-plate photography, I was in the wine business. I used to snap pictures of women’s hands clutching wine glasses, and then I’d add captions in post-production like, ‘WINE O’CLOCK’, ‘BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS ALL DAY’, and ‘OBLIGATORY AIRPORT PHOTO’, you know. The work dried up, though, mainly because my clients didn’t. They all died of cirrhosis.

For the future, I’m thinking about going into business with my cousin, Tristan, the world-famous ‘Dick-Pic Stylist’. Super talented guy, he used to have Wayne Rooney and Leslie Grantham on retainer.

Jeremy Phillipston, 23 Professional Netflix Content Absorber, Cardiff, Wales

The best part about my job is when I’m talking to someone, and they’re telling me that they’ve heard about this great new series that’s just arrived on Netflix, and I get to cut them off with, ‘Yeah, I finished it last night, it’s great, you should watch it.’ I love that.I love watching their little smiles become hyphens.

The Haunting of Hill House, the Ted Bundy Tapes, the new season of Daredevil, sixteen new films that were only dropped on Netflix last night – before you’ve even had a chance to hear about them, I’ve fucking seen them. All of them.

Not everyone appreciates what I do. Parents with young children, people who work, people who don’t sit in their pyjamas for entire days at a time eating nothing but crisps – they all resent me. It’s not my fault they’re lazy, though. They should get their priorities straight. Problem they have is, they’re spending too much time playing with their children. Too much time talking to their partners. In short, too much chilling, not enough Netflix. If I can make people feel inadequate and excluded enough that they feel driven to binge-watch television to the exclusion of all else in their lives, then job done.You’re welcome, society.

This job was recommended to me because of my interest in my grandfather’s career. He was a Full-time Plot Spoiler, and he was bloody good at it. He’d walk out of elevators with a big mobile phone clamped to his ear shouting things like, ‘YEAH, YEAH, BRUCE WILLIS WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME, I KNOW, I KNOW, WHAT A FUCKING TWIST.’ He once took out a full-page ad in The Times that said, YOU KNOW THAT MOVIE ‘SAW’? WELL, THE DEAD GUY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM IS THE BADDIE. PS: STONE ME, DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER.

They’re making the story of his life into a 12-part series on Netflix next year, which I’ve already seen last week.You should watch it.

Sharon Grantham, 35 Worker in a GIF factory, Huddersfield, England

Me mam worked in a factory supplying funny pictures of cats and husbands to Bella and That’s Life magazines from 1969 to 1998, so I guess this sort of thing’s in me blood – along with the diabetes.

I started off in the Meme Warehouse, but most of me friends ,last few years, said the money was in GIFs – well, they pay more, in them GIF factories, ’cause it’s more dangerous an’ that. Some of them GIFs – they don’t look big on the screen, or, like, when you use them on your phone, do they? – but some of them are, like, the size of cardboard boxes, you know, them great big ones. The big boxes you’d use if you were movin’ house and that. And heavy. I knew a lass who got crushed to death by a GIF of a dancing beaver, just splatted her face off, it did. Bits of her brains all over me shoe. Worse, though, them that ordered the GIF deleted it almost as soon as they put it on Facebook, cause what they wanted was actually a GIF of a dancing Diva, but the predictive thingy put the wrong word, so me friend died for fook all, which is a shame. Still, the boss donated a nice GIF for her funeral, it was a flower all growing fast in fast motion, like it were speeded up, so the flower started off hanging down then jumped up and out, you know. I thought it were nice, but Jimmy who works the line with me was like, Christ, Sharon, that’s the GIF me and me mates use if we wanna say a woman’s given us a stiffy, and I said oh my God, and he’s like, well, I guess she is a stiffy now, so maybe it’s alright?

It’s dead hard in the GIF factory. We can be on the production line, and the big horn’ll go off, and the boss will say over the loudspeaker, he’ll shout something like: ”ERE, YOU, YOU LAZY BITCHES, THERE A WOMAN ON A GROUP IN FACEBOOK WHO’S NOT ‘APPY ABOUT SOMETHING, SO SHE NEEDS A GIF OF A BIG BLACK LADY WAGGLIN’ ‘ER FINGER. NOT TOO SASSY IN THE FACE CAUSE SHE’S ANGRY, BUT SHE’S NOT ‘ANGRY’ ANGRY, IF YOU KNOW WHAT AH MEAN. ALSO, ‘OW WE GETTIN’ ON WITH THE BATCH OF GIFS OF ALL DIFFERENT PEOPLE BEING SICK? NEED IT FAST, PIERS MORGAN’S ABOUT TO GO ON AIR.”

I’m proud of it, cause the boss says most folk just talk in GIFs now anyway, like, cause it’s easier and more fun, and you can say lots more than you can with words, and there won’t be any words left by this time next year cause of Brexit, cause once we run out of words we won’t be able to get any more sent in from Sweden or wherever they come from. Where is it we get words from again?

READ MORE OF JAMIE’S ROVING REPORTS BELOW

After the ban: What happened to Tony Tiger and friends?

Is the billionaire superhero ‘fake news’?

 

Is the Billionaire Superhero Fake News?

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Sometimes all you can do is wait, and hope that a billionaire will save you.

It was a cold, dark night in Gotham City. Wisps of black and violet smudged across the sky like old paint. The moon struggled to illuminate the gloom below its ephemeral bulk; the night – getting darker and heavier with each passing minute – threatened to swallow not just the faint glimmers of light, but the moon itself.

Bernie Roberts stood inside his underpass. If he wasn’t exactly comfortable, then at the very least he was sheltered from the elements: it could be worse. He warmed his hands in his pockets, trying to flex the feeling back into his fingers.

Here he was, spending another night of countless nights beneath the neon stars of his hollowed-out home, empty tonight of the howling wind that sometimes threatened to evict him. He was 48. This was his first and last step on the property ladder. He didn’t feel sad about that. He didn’t feel much of anything. There was no time for pity in a city that alternated between cold indifference to your very existence one moment and then actively trying to snuff it out the next. Gotham had all the love and wisdom of an Iron Age God.

There was death on every street. Down every alleyway. Round every corner. That was just a fact.

Bernie watched as a crowd of men in bowler hats and balaclavas sped towards him from the darkness outside, their heavy wads of stock portfolios held aloft like clubs. He didn’t even try to run; there was nowhere to hide, and, besides, his limp was too stiff to take him anywhere fast. They swarmed him; beat him long and hard; beat him until so much blood fell from his face that he looked like he was fighting not men, but Ebola.

Bernie had lived inside that underpass since he was a teenager, and now he had to face the prospect that he was going to die there.

No, he said to himself, in a voice he’d long considered dead.

I will not die here.

Not here. Not tonight.

I want a home of my own. A family. To get a job in a hotel and raise chickens in the backyard. It’s not too late… I won’t let them kill me…

Adrenalin returned sharpness to his senses. His arms turned to steel, propelling the boulders his fists had become into the faces of his shocked attackers. He clung on to the miserable shadows of his life with a violence and vigour that hadn’t raced through his sunken veins in decades. His fire and fury caused the bankers to redouble their efforts to destroy him. Or at least try to. They were reeling. Hurting.

They were losing.

And their breed wasn’t used to losing.

Their blood splashed the walls of the underpass like paint flicked from a laden brush, as those grimy, bony fists of Bernie’s continued to punch and pound at the bankers’ Bryl-creamed skulls.

From the darkness beyond the underpass came a sound like a kite unfurling in the wind. Something swooped from the murk and dropped down firmly at the tunnel’s dark jaw. The men’s shaking fists all fell silent as they turned to look. They froze: meat-puppets in a life-sized diorama. The eerie, artificial lights of the underpass made it difficult to make out the dark figure who was now watching them from the night beyond. But the dark figure could see them.

And he was angry.

“It’s… it’s the Batman!” cried one of the bankers, as the caped crusader emerged from the darkness.

Batman hated these kinds of scenes; they made him sick to his stomach. That’s why he’d made the mask. That’s why he paced and prowled through the city of Gotham at night. Waiting. Watching. Ready to put things back the way they should be.

Ready to make things great again.

Batman swished through the underpass, and positioned himself right in the middle of the huddle of men.

“Now you’re going to pay for what you’ve done,” he growled.

And, with that, he grabbed Bernie by the scruff of the neck and started kicking the ever-loving shit out of him.

BIFF! (Tannen)

“You’re a bad dude!”

KA-POW!

“You’re deep state!”

SMACK!

“You’re fake news!”

CHA-CHING!

The bankers huzzahed and hoorahed!

“Thanks for saving us, Batman!” they shouted excitedly.

Batman dropped the tramp’s corpse to the ground, reached into his utility belt and pulled out his bat-penis, before showering the dead man’s chest with a tremendous amount of bat-piss.

“I’m Batman,” he said. “The greatest Batman. Believe me. Nobody Batmans better than me.”

The bankers danced in a circle around Batman shouting ‘MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN! MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN!’ as Batman found a hidden reservoir of piss in that little winkie of his, spun round and around in a circle, pissing all over them, too, as they grinned and clapped with glee.

I watched – astonished – not quite sure what to make of it all, and feeling slightly guilty that I’d just stood there scribbling down notes as a middle-aged man had been beaten to death by a fat old maniac.

Batman’s identity is no secret, of course. No sooner had billionaire property magnate Bruce Trump yanked on his suffocatingly-tight bat-themed corset for the first time than he’d taken out a full-page ad in the New Gotham Times that revealed his ‘secret’ persona to the world. Naturally, this was next to a full-page ad, also taken out by Bruce Trump, in which he vehemently denied that he was Batman, and threatened to sue anyone who repeated the claim. Which of course he’d already done himself in the adjoining advert. Bruce Trump is now the only man on earth ever to have successfully sued himself. Under the terms of the law-suit, Trump now has to pay himself damages of £500m.

Which of course he’s refused to do.

Trump always releases details of his vigilantism schedule well in advance to ensure full-spectrum press coverage. That’s how I managed to be present at the bloody demise of Bernie Roberts. I conducted a short interview with Trump as we stood next to the piss-covered dead guy.

I first asked his opinion on other superheroes in the public eye.

“Superman?”

“Weak.” He nodded, before adding: “Retard.”

“Captain America?”

“Unpatriotic.”

“The X-Men?”

“Shouldn’t be serving in the military.”

“Wonder Woman?”

“You know my policy on fucking all things Amazonian.”

“Doctor Victor von Doom?”

“Great guy. Strong. His people love him.”

I pointed out that Dr Doom rules the Kingdom of Latveria as a brutal dictator; not to mention that he harbours super-criminals and ploughs billions into developing different ways in which to destroy the earth.

“Strong,” he repeated, nodding. “Good chest.”

I asked him what had motivated him – a man of such disgusting wealth – to take a more direct hand in society through his role as Batman – besides, of course, being able to bill the city for his services, and forcing the mayor to give him a massive tax break to boot.

“Well, I’m finally able to take on the greatest scourge that modern America has yet faced.”

“Income disparity? Inequality?” I asked.

[“You?” I thought to myself]

“The poor,” he said.

“The poor?”

“And Mexicans.”

“Are there any Mexicans in Gotham City?”

“Not now,” he said, pouting.

“OK. But let’s talk about tonight: what’s the tangible benefit to society of kicking an ostensibly innocent homeless man to death?”

“And poor Mexicans, they suck the worst,” he continued.

“We’re done with Mexicans now.”

“You’re damn right we are. Bad hombres.”

“Let’s get back to the matter at hand. You kicked a homeless man to death.”

“Did I? Or did Trump just free up hospital staff and help to lower house prices?”

He tapped the side of his skull.

I stared down at my notepad. I didn’t know what to say.

“How much do you spend on R&D at Trump Enterprises?”

“If they want to dance, that’s their business, but I’m not paying for it.”

I stared at my notepad again. “It means Research & Development…”

He continued. “I didn’t do it anyway.”

“You didn’t do what?”

“The homeless dude. It wasn’t me.”

“You didn’t beat him to death?”

“It was the Black Panther.”

“Obama?” I asked incredulously.

He nodded.

“But I watched you do it.”

“’Trump has more class than to do what Obama just did, which is to beat a homeless gut to death.’ Use that quote in the write-up, OK?”

“But…” I said again, “I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Your eyes are fake news,” he said, “You see, Jamie, the problem with Trump City is that the…”

“Gotham City,” I corrected him.

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “There are bad hombres here.”

“And you’re getting rid of them?”

“I’m draining the swamp.”

“I thought that drain the swamp thing was a reference to corruption. Aren’t you supposed to be fighting corruption? How does attacking the poor and making life easier for the rich fight corruption?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut in before he could say it: “Fake news?” I suggested.

He slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re getting it.”

I later discovered that prior to losing everything and ending up cold and alone in a Gotham City underpass, Bernie had run his own construction company. He and his crew had worked the contract for the ‘Trump Enterprises’ building back in the 90s, but the business was wiped out when Trump failed to pay Bernie for any of the work he’d carried out or compensate him for any of the cash outlaid for materials. All of which makes Bernie Roberts’ last words all the harder to process:

“Thank you… Batman.”

Bruce Trump would like to think he’s a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, when in reality he’s a contradiction wrapped inside an improbability. Without his inherited wealth and narcissism a man with a face such as his would’ve struggled to seduce Mrs Miggins the school dinner-lady – a lady with significantly more chin-warts than hygiene certificates – and probably would’ve found himself fired from a succession of fast-food restaurants for continually sexually harassing customers and pilfering from the till, before eventually finding himself – quite appositely – sleeping in an underpass before being beaten to death by a crazed billionaire.

I wondered if there really was such a thing as a benevolent billionaire, or if the billionaire alter-egos of ostensibly ordinary superheroes in comic books are only written rich to explain how they’re able to finance an expensive life as a vigilante without having to work.

Was Tony Musk – aka Iron Man – a good guy?

Tony Musk looks like the by-product of a DNA-gangbang between John Barrowman, Ally McCoist, and some description of hideous merman. Musk is his name, his brand, and he very much looks like he has a musk; a heavy one, probably redolent of seaweed, skunk and self-satisfaction.

I interviewed him in his lab in Musk Tower as he pored over plans for the new crowd-control robots he planned to market to the middle-east.

“You know, it might shock you,” he said, his eyes darting around crazily, “but I’ve got some great ideas for the poor. First of all, to put them in rockets and shoot them into space.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “So they can learn satellite repair, and maybe help to explore and seed other planets?”

He stared at me blankly for a moment. “Yup. Yup, let’s go with that.”

As we were talking, a woman fell past the window, as she hurtled towards the city streets below. We both ran to the window. War Machine whooshed down from the roof, scooped the woman in his arms and carried her ground-wards to safety. The crowd cheered.

Musk shook his head.

“Paedophile.”

Read Jamie’s other celebrated special reports:

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

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.”