being typecast as a jolly TV vicar, and jacks it in to go serious. Nobody ever wants to hire him again, he’s not very good at it, and he ends his career playing Death in a room above a pub in Worthing (see also ACTORS).
2. AUTHORS. After their early hits with books like The Reverend Bumblebee in Love and Bumblebee’s Dilemma, which sold by the crate-load and have found happy homes on shelves in bathrooms the world over, authors tend to get a bit gloomy around the onset of middle age (see CHARLES DICKENS). They lose the urge to tell stupid stories, and suddenly seek meaning. They get a bit too much into Martin Amis. And they write a five-million-word novel called Over, or The Now Black. Which does really badly but someone buys the film rights, changes it completely and calls it More Bloody Cartoon Penguins, and everyone’s happy.
3. ROCK STARS. Every rock star ever has started out singing songs called ‘Oo Yeah Woo Yeah’ or ‘Hey Mister Gnome I’m Over Here’, songs that make up for in childishness what they lack in originality. And ten years later, where is your rock star? Off his noggin on wobble juice, standing on a stage dressed as Gardener’s Question Time and singing something deep and meaningful about his life that’s almost as long as his life.
4. COMEDIANS. Again, massive popularity due to one skill – making people laugh – puts them in a position to go off and do what they really want to do, namely play a tramp in a play. Or a ‘Fool’. Or, oddly, a butler. Which is the sort of fact that would worry a butler.
5. TV PRESENTERS. The worst-case scenario of all. Because when you become a TV presenter, you are saying to the world, ‘I know that I am a knobstone, but hey! I am smiley and will not do anything to annoy you.’ But some of them break that contract with the audience, and go and do something really silly like play a serial killer in a TV drama, or marry Bono.
MOBILE PHONE USERS
You can always tell if someone is a complete worthless arse by the way they use their mobile phones. If, for example, they talk without apparent interruption, it’s not because they’re having a chat with someone who’s a good listener, it’s because THEY DON’T KNOW WHEN TO SHUT UP. The reason it sounds as though there’s nobody on the other end is not because they’re so lonely that they have to pretend they’re talking to someone (although that might easily be the case), it’s because they are so sub-crustaceanly rude that not only do they not know the difference between a conversation and a monologue, they don’t care.
This also explains why these worthless nobulons only seem to know one pronoun: ‘I’. ‘I did this’ and ‘I said that’ for hours and hours. In a sane, polite society, surely we could invent a phone that delivers a small electric shock (or even a big, brain-melting one, it’s all the same thing) to anybody who uses the word ‘I’ more than a thousand times in one minute? It doesn’t seem unreasonable (see PEOPLE WITH HUGE EGOS).
PEOPLE WITH HUGE EGOS
Surely there was a time when having an ego was a bad thing? By ‘ego’, this book doesn’t mean ‘a sense of self-awareness’, that’s quite a useful thing, especially if you haven’t got any trousers on and you’re making your maiden speech to the House of Lords. No, the word ‘ego’ here ‘means massive and utterly unfounded belief that everything you say or do is incredibly interesting just because you are the person saying or doing it’.
You can’t open a newspaper these days without (see YOU CAN’T OPEN A NEWSPAPER THESE DAYS WITHOUT …) seeing some piece of print onanism where somebody whose views change with the temperature of their earwax is going on about something that a) they know nothing about, b) they care nothing about, and c) they probably wrote a column about last month which stated a completely opposite point of view. This wouldn’t be so bad, but they always have to drag everything back to themselves. ‘This new law will cause hardship for millions. I know, because I saw a tramp once.’ GO TO HELL!
And that’s before we get into the world of the fawning interview and its cousin, the celebrity autobiography. There is something about the sight – or maybe it’s the smell, a faint odour of musk and diamonds – of celebrities that makes intelligent people and journalists go all wobbly at the brain. Yes, they are prettier than us, and richer, and have our entire lifetime sex ration in one evening, but the only thing they have in common with everyone else is that when they open their mouths they’re no more or less interesting than the rest of us. And as they spend all their waking hours on telly, talking about themselves, chances are high that they ran out of interesting stuff to say a long, long, long time ago.
PEOPLE WHO USED TO BE FAMOUS
Yes, we know. People come up to you all the time and say, ‘Didn’t you used to be X?’ Well, serves you right for being famous then. And for telling everybody when you were famous that, oh, you’d give anything to not be famous again.
PEOPLE WHO WERE NEARLY FAMOUS
Sometimes you feel sorry for them – that one wrong decision which crossed the thin line between eternal fame and working in a chip shop – then you look at their faces. Their strange, not-rich, not-poor faces, which can’t make up their minds if they’re the faces of people who were nearly famous and long to be sitting on the lap of fame, or people who don’t care about being famous and are just Normal. Although not with that fake tan, gold chain and ‘hairstyle’ you’re not.
PEOPLE WHO WENT TO SCHOOL WITH SOMEONE FAMOUS
Don’t go to their gigs when they come to your town. Don’t show the reporter from your local paper all your school photos. Don’t go on This Is Your Life and weakly shake their hand as they try to remember who you are. Buy a high-powered rifle and shoot them. They’re famous and you’re not! What’s wrong with you! (NB: If you do shoot anyone famous, don’t say you got the idea from this book. That would just make YOU look silly. Probably best to not shoot anyone at all.)
TV PRESENTERS
They don’t seem to know anything. Time was when a TV presenter was at worst a jobbing actor with a nice voice (see ACTORS) and at best a polymathic journalist and historian who’d sailed the Amazon in a kayak to interview Fidel Castro. But these days … It looks like the TV companies just send a van round the hair salons of the land with the words FREE CONDITIONER INSIDE THIS VAN! GET IN THE VAN! IT’S PERFECTLY SAFE!
You can understand it with the kids’ TV presenters. There’s not much need for intellectual rigour or a deep-veined knowledge of the Middle East when all you have to do is talk to a toy animal and introduce some other toy animals. It’s not even completely mind-offending with the teen and youthy presenters. Never mind the fact that they’ve only learned to read autocues and keep staring at books, wondering when the page is going to move down; never mind the fact that they can only communicate by waving their arms and shuffling about on their backsides, like a man who’s been glued to a toilet trying to get help. All they have to do is interview soap stars and pop stars, who are equally ill-prepared for taking GCSEs, buying things with coins or any other rigorous tests of the mind.
All that’s fine. What is a little bit vexing is the fact that newsreaders and current-affairs presenters seem to be going the same way. No wonder the world is in a terrible state. Thirty years ago, a good TV interviewer could reduce a president or a prime minister to tears just by ripping apart their domestic transport policy. Now an incisive interview with a politician doesn’t go much further than a pretty lady disguised as a real news reporter saying to a major political figure, ‘I like your shoes. Where did you get them?’
