PRESENTERS 2
And what happened to talking proper? All right, so a full-on return to the bollock-throttling vocal styles of the 1950s isn’t necessarily a good thing. But it would be nice to have presenters who had some vague grasp of normal patterns of speech. It’s not as if they all come from tiny villages deep in the heart of the Auvergne. Most of them are putting on a completely made-up glottal Estuary media Cockernortherny accent anyway.
It’s all good for sales of the Radio Times anyway, since if you can’t understand what the stone-chewing inarticulatists are saying, you can just go and look it up in a listing mag, and pray it doesn’t say, ‘7.30 – Cawnashem Speet’.
SCIENTISTS
Science used to be our friend. It eradicated disease! It made labour-saving devices! It shortened distances and aided communication! It was like Superman, only instead of one man in a dim costume, it was loads of men and women in white coats, all working round the clock to try and make things less crap.
And it worked for ages. Things did become a lot less crap. Despite the claims of several religious groups, life is a lot better now that a) we don’t have to pretend that we’re all going to one of two made-up places, b) we can have it off with any grown-ups we feel like, and c) everyone knows that any bloke in a robe who claims to represent the creator is at best misguided and at worst a kiddy fiddler. So hurray for science and reason.
But now it seems to have got a bit odd. Those lovely scientists are cloning each other and growing giant cabbages and generally doing the big science equivalent of taking the back off the watch and pulling all the bits out without really knowing how to get them all back in again. They tell us they are doing so in the pursuit of knowledge. A special knowledge that comes on rectangular pieces of paper with numbers and pictures of presidents and queens on it (no, not stamps).
PEOPLE WHO YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF WRITING THEIR MEMOIRS
Who are you? Why have you written a book? Is the title of your book your catchphrase? Why are you smiling on the cover? Are you a pop singer? A page-three model? A former leader of the Conservative Party? What’s going on?
PEOPLE WHO ARE FAMOUS FOR ONE THING AND THEN GO AND DO ANOTHER THING
You know. Like gardening experts who write novels. Or actresses who ‘invent’ perfumes. Or rock stars who exhibit their horrible paintings. People like that. There should be a special Celebrity Law which covers the activities and maintenance of famous people, and one of the first stipulations of this excellent new Celebrity Law should be that EVERYONE WHO IS FAMOUS CAN BE FAMOUS FOR ONE THING AND ONE THING ONLY. Otherwise it’s just annoying.
PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY, REALLY, REALLY FAT
Once – as we are always being told in the sort of columns that tell you things you could have worked out for yourself if you weren’t so busy reading columns – it was a sign of wealth and importance to be fat. (Even though most paintings and statues and so on of interesting historical figures – Jesus, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Napoleon, Florence Nightingale – show them to be of slender to average build. And also even though most of history’s gits – George III, Mussolini, Nero, Michael Moore – have clearly dined often and on lard.) Whatever the truth of that theory, these days it is clear that rich people are thin and poor people are fat. The difference is so marked that banks no longer ask your income when you apply for an account, they just weigh you.
It’s completely wrong. Setting aside the horrible irony that the very poor of the world are starving while the moderately poor could live off their own body fat for years at a time, it suggests that not only do the superwealthy have all the dosh, they also have all the healthy food. While the lowerly waged spend their lives sticking ‘pizzas’ (i.e. flat loaves of bread covered in dinner snot) and burgers (claws and beaks and fins) and fizzy drinks (carbon dioxide in a diluted sugar sauce) into their surely weeping digestive systems, rich people are living on nice green food and fresh fruit.
The life of a peasant was famously, again in one of those columns, said to be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. These days, the life of a poor person in the West is what? Boring, brutish and obese? Ears and eyes filled with bad telly and guts filled with bad food?
Perhaps it’s deliberate. By adding mass to the masses, they can’t rise up and overthrow the ruling classes because they can’t get off the sofa. Feed people enough chemicals and E numbers and they’ll settle into a state of such comatose apathy that only the sight of a Big Brother contestant actually exploding on television will wake them up (see REALITY TELEVISION). Or maybe the aliens who really rule the world are just fattening us up.
EUROVISION
Oh God oh God oh God oh God.
BBC VERSUS ITV
They were so different once. One was austere and grey and talked nicely and wanted us to better ourselves, but not too much in case we liked it and took over. The other was funny and vulgar and liked America and made a lot of noise and wanted us to win money and prizes and go mental. It was rather nice, like having two different aunts, one of whom always gave you a really dull book for Christmas but always looked after you, while the other gave you £20 and a PlayStation but was too pissed to make Christmas dinner. Between the two of them, they pretty much had things sorted out.
But now the differences between them seem to have blurred. The BBC has decided to become zippy and modern and have bad soaps (see AFTERNOON SOAPS and, worse, reality shows (see REALITY TELEVISION), and generally try to look like an ageing librarian out on the town with his nephews. Meanwhile, ITV have started making crappy crime dramas and Jane Austen adaptations (see JANE AUSTEN). These days the only way to tell them apart is that ITV game shows use a lot of blue lighting and BBC ones favour liberal use of red. Bit like party conferences, really.
EUROVISION 2
The thing is with the Eurovision contest … it’s where do we begin to tell the story of how crap a thing can be? For a start, what is ‘Eurovision’? Has anybody ever seen one? Is it a company? A technique? A pseudonym for one of the Transformers? Nobody seems to know, but it’s been around since the 1950s, so it’s probably a war crime. Only joking.
Secondly, whose idea was the Song Contest? Because if there’s one thing we can be absolutely sure about regarding the countries of Europe, it’s that you don’t want to be stirring up national rivalries with that lot. These are countries who’ve gone to war over the most trivial matters – the shooting of an Archduke; the question of who’s got the real Pope – so having a contest based on something really important like music is bordering on madness.
In fact, the main criterion for joining would appear to be that your nation has recently been involved in a bloody conflict. So when the Contest started, it was all the people who’d been in the last big war. Then in the 1960s and 70s new sites of violence like Israel and Cyprus got involved. And after that? Serbia, Bosnia, places like that. One can only surmise that Estonia got in by lying to the selection panel and claiming to have had a war that nobody saw happen.
EUROVISION 3
And
