I passed a pair of teddy boys last week. Not aul fellars, yer usual ted vets or the revivalist rockabilly mob from the early 80s. These were young lads, decked out in cartoon ted outfits, drapes, brothel creepers, big DA Swedes; the works. At first I felt a guffaw raising in my throat but then I kind of felt a glow of warmth towards them. At least they were trying, at least they were DIFFERENT. Walk down around any city centre and everyone looks the same. Apart from Manchester and Liverpool’s ninja scal community, each city and town has its own standard variation on the scally and then there is the ever increasing tribe of Goths/emos/alternatives who are of course every bit as conventional and identical as the ’chavs’ they ridicule for all looking the same.
Then there’s the Topshop mob; that inbetween middle ground of gel headed whoppers in Chinese dragon stitched kecks and the equally preposterous mob of neo-student bohemians in comedy charity shop outfits. Magazines devoted to ’street style’ often feature photoshoots in cities across the world and with the exception of Tokyo, all the people featured dress similarly, atleast the ones who the photographers select. There’s a uniformity of fashion that is truly global, an accepted aesthetic of ’cool,’ a homogenous uniform that reduces all notions of style to an easily marketed range of seasonal ’looks’ which don’t really change for years, decades even.
In Liverpool, idiosyncratic styles still occur now and then, particularly with the girls. That big hair with big flower look of the summer was peculiar to junior scallettes and as far as I know didn’t happen anywhere else in Britain, Likewise the big fuck off rollers and jim jams tucked into Uggs of the daytime Blag Wag brigade seems to be a scouse phenomenon. These things may seem ludicrous but still prove that Liverpool’s youth is self-confident enough to go their own way, do their own thing no matter what the self-elected ’style gurus’ dictate is ’hip.’ Just as in the 80s, when the style press ignored ‘casual’ for years until it reached Oxford Street, so these parochial fashion phases are either ignored altogether or ridiculed by pompous fashionistas who won’t or can’t accept that organic trends can happen without either their input or approval.
So, even though I don’t like that Showaddywaddy ted style but loved the original neo-Edwardian look of the 50s, I still smiled also at seeing those teds as I did spotting a young skinhead outside the local cinema. In amongst the usual gangs of ninjas, emos and skaters, he stuck out like a sore thumb in his green MA1, braces, half mast Levis and oxblood DMs. Maybe ’This Is England’ has brought back that Oi Skin look of the late 70s, itself a mutated, uglier version of the original skin/suede head look, to a new generation. In a nondescript world where everything is up for sale, every style and culture chopped up and shipped out for mass consumption, let’s hear it for the dolly birds with the beehives and the pyjamas eh?
Tuesday 3 November 2009
1, 2, 3 fuck the BBC...
BBC Footy Presenters – look it was bad enough when that cunt Lineker replaced Lynam but atleast the obesity encouraging twat had played the fuckin’ game. Now we’ve got fucking kids tv presenters, radio one cast offs and fuckin weathergirls on the screen. Fuckin’ Chappers! He makes a few cracks about being a ‘Man U’ fan (no self-respecting Man United fan EVER calls em Man You you fuckin phoney cunt) on that cunt Moyles’s radio show and next minute he’s doing a fucking Jeff Stelling. They’ll have that plazzy fuckin Liverpool supporting whopper, Spoony presenting MOTD 2 next or Colin fuckin Murray anchoring Five’s fuckin entire output. Maybe they think they’re reaching a whole new audience here, the kind of cunt who thinks lager adverts are funny, the kind of cunt who watches Sky games in the alehouse wearing an old skool replica kit and screams ‘get in my son’ when his pet team scores. And maybe they’re right!
BBC footy pundits – either they’re ex-Liverpool or Arsenal defenders all arse licking each other with their chummy old pals act or they’re eager young pups looking to replace the chummy vets brigade. Either way, they’re all a bunch of say nothing fence sitting boring cunts who look as if they’ve all been asked to dig into the BBC Footy Clobber Box and pull out a shite shirt and kecks combo in no particular order; grey, white, beige, black, just no big colours OK, nothing denoting individualism or personality, just stick to safe neutrals, don’t want to frighten the viewers, the Points Of View crew, just stick on one of those shirts, remember your poppy, don’t want the fucking Daily Mail brigade on our backs do we and please, please please don’t ever try to say anything controversial eh?
BBC6 continuity announcers – it’s either the same fuckin’ bird who does the voice-over for fuckin’ Masterfuckinchef and used to do those fuckin annoying Woolies adverts before they laid off that stupid fuckin sheep or else they’ve genetically engineered an entire generation of continuity announcers to all sound the fucking same with that fucking appalling last syllable dipping down at the end of each and every fucking word……you know her:
‘At breakfast it’s (drops an octave) Moyles at supper it’s Mao Tse (drops an octave) Tung’
‘At three it’s the Freak (drops an octave) Zone with Stuart Mac(drops an octave) onie, at five it’s Fish (drops an octave) fucking with Fearne (drops an octave) Cotton’
She’s on CityTalk too, she’s on every shite radio programme across the land, she’s talking on the tv, on the radio, she’s reading the autocues, the security announcements at railway stations, the telephone numbers on 118, she’s everywhere, the girl who talks like (drops an octave) that even when she comes…’you’re the best (drops an octave) ever!’ radiating insincerity and smug middle English contentment. Continuity Announcing Has Never Been (drop an octave) Shitter!
BBC Industrial Dispute Reporters. OK, for all their hysterical talk of the BBC being a hotbed of lefty liberal values, the Tories really know that they can rely on the BBC to uphold the establishment when it comes to the crunch. Especially when it comes to strikes. All this bullshit about the BBC being ‘unbiased’ ‘balanced’ and ‘fair to both sides’ flies out of the window when there’s a strike. It always comes out against striking workers whether they’re miners, dockers or posties, allowing reporters to voice their own opinions instead of simply reporting facts (hence the word ‘reporter’ not ‘commentator’), interviewing several people with the same opinion usually government ministers, bosses, outraged members of the Great British Public (posh people!) then giving union bosses a hard time whilst allowing bosses an easy ride. That half-arsed Alcibiades, Peter Mandelson has set a trap for posties, an obvious trap but one he’ll no doubt reap the rewards off once the mail is totally privatised and he ends up with some fancy consultancy or directorship with TNT following the Thatcher model of privatise then profiteer. Ofcourse the ‘balanced’ BBC will help him do his bidding because they can’t afford to rock the boat, they’re tied into the system, they ARE the system. Cunts!
BBC iplayer. It’s fucking boss! I love the BBC me, imagine a world without it, adverts all the fucking time, lowest common denominator, Celebrity Whelk Stall programmes for grinning halfwits and senile racists. iPlayer makes the unmissable unwatchable, atleast it does on my fucking iphone! 70 trillion quid’s worth of tax payers dough and what do we get Jonathan Ross arse licking Roland Rivron on Jools Holland and Strictly Come Dancing with Dale fucking Winton. That’s what we pay our licence fee for, top quality family entertainment with no homos, wogs or poor people to spoil our viewing pleasure. Cunts!
BBC footy pundits – either they’re ex-Liverpool or Arsenal defenders all arse licking each other with their chummy old pals act or they’re eager young pups looking to replace the chummy vets brigade. Either way, they’re all a bunch of say nothing fence sitting boring cunts who look as if they’ve all been asked to dig into the BBC Footy Clobber Box and pull out a shite shirt and kecks combo in no particular order; grey, white, beige, black, just no big colours OK, nothing denoting individualism or personality, just stick to safe neutrals, don’t want to frighten the viewers, the Points Of View crew, just stick on one of those shirts, remember your poppy, don’t want the fucking Daily Mail brigade on our backs do we and please, please please don’t ever try to say anything controversial eh?
BBC6 continuity announcers – it’s either the same fuckin’ bird who does the voice-over for fuckin’ Masterfuckinchef and used to do those fuckin annoying Woolies adverts before they laid off that stupid fuckin sheep or else they’ve genetically engineered an entire generation of continuity announcers to all sound the fucking same with that fucking appalling last syllable dipping down at the end of each and every fucking word……you know her:
‘At breakfast it’s (drops an octave) Moyles at supper it’s Mao Tse (drops an octave) Tung’
‘At three it’s the Freak (drops an octave) Zone with Stuart Mac(drops an octave) onie, at five it’s Fish (drops an octave) fucking with Fearne (drops an octave) Cotton’
She’s on CityTalk too, she’s on every shite radio programme across the land, she’s talking on the tv, on the radio, she’s reading the autocues, the security announcements at railway stations, the telephone numbers on 118, she’s everywhere, the girl who talks like (drops an octave) that even when she comes…’you’re the best (drops an octave) ever!’ radiating insincerity and smug middle English contentment. Continuity Announcing Has Never Been (drop an octave) Shitter!
BBC Industrial Dispute Reporters. OK, for all their hysterical talk of the BBC being a hotbed of lefty liberal values, the Tories really know that they can rely on the BBC to uphold the establishment when it comes to the crunch. Especially when it comes to strikes. All this bullshit about the BBC being ‘unbiased’ ‘balanced’ and ‘fair to both sides’ flies out of the window when there’s a strike. It always comes out against striking workers whether they’re miners, dockers or posties, allowing reporters to voice their own opinions instead of simply reporting facts (hence the word ‘reporter’ not ‘commentator’), interviewing several people with the same opinion usually government ministers, bosses, outraged members of the Great British Public (posh people!) then giving union bosses a hard time whilst allowing bosses an easy ride. That half-arsed Alcibiades, Peter Mandelson has set a trap for posties, an obvious trap but one he’ll no doubt reap the rewards off once the mail is totally privatised and he ends up with some fancy consultancy or directorship with TNT following the Thatcher model of privatise then profiteer. Ofcourse the ‘balanced’ BBC will help him do his bidding because they can’t afford to rock the boat, they’re tied into the system, they ARE the system. Cunts!
BBC iplayer. It’s fucking boss! I love the BBC me, imagine a world without it, adverts all the fucking time, lowest common denominator, Celebrity Whelk Stall programmes for grinning halfwits and senile racists. iPlayer makes the unmissable unwatchable, atleast it does on my fucking iphone! 70 trillion quid’s worth of tax payers dough and what do we get Jonathan Ross arse licking Roland Rivron on Jools Holland and Strictly Come Dancing with Dale fucking Winton. That’s what we pay our licence fee for, top quality family entertainment with no homos, wogs or poor people to spoil our viewing pleasure. Cunts!
Thursday 15 October 2009
Wednesday 14 October 2009
"Get ye coat you've pulled"...
When I was about 17 I ended up with this calamity in the Rubber Duck by the docks. She looked like Dawn French.
"I'm going to lose weight, I promise" she kept saying.
I kissed her and it felt like I was doing duck-apple in a bowl of custard. Horrendous stuff.
So I bummed her in the field by Seaforth station.
Then I went home to do some serious soul searching.
More Hideous truths...
This really did not happen to me, but to a close friend of mine.
He pulled some meffy looking sort about fifteen years his junior (always been a bit of a lothario my mate) and did the business in the back of his car on the way home.
Two weeks later there is a picture of the same bird on the front page of the Runcorn World underneath the headline "Girl Sues Nightclub After Toilet Horror".
Turns out the following week she'd sat on a bog in a popular Runcorn nightspot and her weight had been sufficient to crack the bowl in two, causing her to fall into it and sustain a 10 inch gash in one of her arse cheeks......there was even a picture of her baring the injured arse-cheek to show the stitches to the reader.
"I'm going to lose weight, I promise" she kept saying.
I kissed her and it felt like I was doing duck-apple in a bowl of custard. Horrendous stuff.
So I bummed her in the field by Seaforth station.
Then I went home to do some serious soul searching.
More Hideous truths...
This really did not happen to me, but to a close friend of mine.
He pulled some meffy looking sort about fifteen years his junior (always been a bit of a lothario my mate) and did the business in the back of his car on the way home.
Two weeks later there is a picture of the same bird on the front page of the Runcorn World underneath the headline "Girl Sues Nightclub After Toilet Horror".
Turns out the following week she'd sat on a bog in a popular Runcorn nightspot and her weight had been sufficient to crack the bowl in two, causing her to fall into it and sustain a 10 inch gash in one of her arse cheeks......there was even a picture of her baring the injured arse-cheek to show the stitches to the reader.
Tuesday 13 October 2009
Carry on casual...
Carry on Casual: Anachronisms in the UK
I have to be honest. I’ve enjoyed some of Nick Love’s previous films. Maybe that’s akin to admitting to a bad Greggs chicken pasty addiction or tells you I’m a clueless pleb with no taste but both The Football Factory and The Business, while hardly being Ken Loach or Pedro Almodovar get-your-thinking-head on efforts, gave me the odd grin. And his vastly-underrated debut effort Goodbye Charlie Bright is worth ninety minutes of anyone’s time in my opinion. But the release of Love’s big screen re-make of eighties football hooligan drama The Firm does beg one question of a director who claims to be fastidious in his attention to detail. Namely – how the fuck did they manage to get so much wrong?
I had more than a sneaking suspicion where this all might be heading the day the film was released. Love was interviewed on a Guardian blog and the accompanying picture showed him wearing what looked to these eyes like one bad striped linen blazer that might well have had Anna Wintour going weak at the knees if Roger Federer was accepting the Wimbledon mens singles trophy in it. Love (or more likely some twat of a stylist) had bastardised the jacket with a Fila BJ badge on the left tit, thus making the wearer look like a right tit. You couldn’t make it up …..
Perhaps I’m not really qualified enough to comment on this. After all, I’m not a Cockney and, unlike Love, I’m not on drinking pal terms with pricks like Guy Ritchie. But I did own at least three of the tracksuits and a version of one of the coats ported by members of the cast back in the day, whichever day it’s supposed to be. Which is the crux of the problem with The Firm. The chronology is all over the shop. Love seems to have been so determined to show the “casual” era in all its technicoloured Fila and Tacchini glory, that he’s forgotten one of the most important parts of the supposed casual ethos – getting it right. It reminds me of a great scene in an episode of Cheers where Norm Peterson and Cliff the postman have just sat through an all-day screening of sword-and-sandal epics, holding a loser-buys-the beers competition to see who could spot the most anachronisms. Norm claims victory but Cliff is not happy and, after buying the drinks, ponders out loud at the bar to no-one in particular about the crucial winner “… six? You spotted six? I’m not having that. No way was Caesar Augustus wearing a pair of Reebok …”
And neither would Caesar Augustus, Gus Caesar or any character in The Firm have been wearing blue adidas Munchen at £38 a pair, not unless he was, I believe the phrase is, Nicholas old chap, a “fackin’ toby”. Even this northern monkey, between a bout of bubonic plague and grooming the family whippet in the winter of 1989, managed to buy a pair of Munchen for what was an extortionate £25. By January, pissed off with the thick soles in comparison to the design perfection that were royal blue Gazelles (£14:99), they’d been relegated to the cubyhole. My beloved Gazelles were re-stored to playing out prominence alongside a pair of Diadora Borg Elite purchased the previous summer for £35 (over half a week’s wages at the time, or so my arl man used to say) and a year-old pair of adidas Korsika
The original television version of The Firm was set in the 1987-88 season, in the lead up to the 1988 European Championships in West Germany. The weakest part of a piss-weak plot being Gary Oldman’s character Bexy looking to lead a “national firm” that appeared to comprise of Eastenders, Only Fools and Horses and Grange Hill free transfers against the might of Hamburg and Feyenoord’s naughtiest that summer. An easy solution for Love and his writing loveys would have been to simply remove any reference to this, thus helping transport the film back to the 1982-1984 period the wardrobe is clearly meant to encapsulate. Except that the soundtrack would have then plotted up and conspired to commit more disorder. We get lead character Dominic and his mate buzzing about Yarbrough and Peoples Don’t Stop the Music, in the manner that you did when you first heard a song that really made your spine tingle, and then they are shown getting down to the same “just-breaking” classic in some East End barn of a club. No argument on that one. It’s one top tune. That had charted over here in December 1980. I’ll hazard a guess as to why it has been included. Footage available on You Tube shows Cavin Yarbrough performing the same tune stood at his keyboard while wearing a navy/cream Fila BJ Settanta tracksuit top (with a pair of impossibly tight white kecks).Which raises the possibility that Dallas Cowboys had a well-dressed mob before Chelsea (… why do I feel a dozen-page thread on this very topic on some “casuals” forum naturally beckoning …). Just to totally confuse the issue, the soundtrack then also throws up the 1977 Giorgio Moroder disco opulence of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and – god knows why – Soft Cell’s Tainted Love in the opening and closing titles. Given that the soundtrack album contains the near-forgotten 1985 gem that is Rene and Angela’s I’ll Be Good, the latter’s prominence in the film in preference to it is nothing short of criminal to this pair of ears. But I listen to stuff like the Bunnymen, Jeff Mills and David Bowie so what do I know?
If you loved this mode of dress as much as most of those involved did, then it could be argued for the defence that The Firm might be viewed as the 1980s casual generation’s Quadrophenia. Except the seaside fight scene here is on the front at Southsea rather than Brighton and involves the Pompey 6:57 v ICF. And Lesley Ash doesn’t get nailed up a back passage. Or run past a cinema advertising a film not made for another fifteen years (Heaven Can Wait). At least that’s one thing the two films have in common. Shite chronology. The one thing though, with the exception of the tracksuit overkill and Pompey not sitting down to the a la carte menu with Bexy afterwards, that Love has got more or less spot on is the fracas at Southsea. Two large mobs squaring up, loads of posturing and gesturing, things getting thrown and broken and when it does finally go off, the actual boxing being reduced to six-a-side at the front. Sorry, did I say 6:57 v ICF? That would mean Portsmouth v West Ham and we’re back to 1987-88 again. Why? Because the period 1980-1987 saw Pompey literally fighting their way up through the bottom three tiers of English professional football, while West Ham were in the First Division and the two clubs consequently never played each other until that season. And contrary to what those clowns at Boys Own seemed to think, a 1987 tear-up involving the 6:57 and any other well-dressed mob would have seen a sea of Italian denim, leather, knitwear, sweatshirts and running shoes rather than tennis wear. Tennis wear which would not have been bought or stolen from a branch of JD Sports in London as shown in the film. Because JD didn’t open a branch in London until 1989. And if they had have done so seven years earlier, it’s highly unlikely that they would have permitted young oiks to shoplift their best stock in Head bags as easily as portrayed in the film. Because if it was anything like MC Sports or Hurleys, it would have all been hung up about fifteen feet above you next to the roof. And despite the obvious help of adidas marketing, who must have wet themselves when asked to get involved in this project after Awaydays, West Ham’s top lad would not have been wearing 1999 version reissue Forest Hills. And unless it was a London thing I somehow missed in my drunken, matchday stupour, I somehow don’t think you would have seen as many full tracksuits being worn as Love would like to have everyone believe. Unless Boro were involved of course. As in “Boro have just got off the ordinary lads – load in full turkeys” (trans: young men from town in north-eastern England not normally associated with cutting edge fashion have arrived on the train, many wearing full Sergio Tacchini tracksuits). Another tracksuit big issue is the preponderance of emerald green/cream Fila BJ Settantas on show in the film. These were like the holy grail and I only saw a grand total of two in the flesh during this period. One on an Everton lad who I only knew by sight at that time but got on first-name terms with a few years after and the other on possibly a DLF head standing on the platform at Derby. The only other sighting that I can dredge up from the back of a mind full of nonsense is on the last Match of the Day of the 1987/88 season and Birmingham City winning at Southampton to stay up. Loads of young Zulus piled on the pitch from the home seats under the cameras to celebrate and one lad in the iconic green ran over to shake hands with Mick Harford
No doubt The Firm will put unslashed arses on unslashed cinema seats. Football hooliganism/football casual culture is big bucks these days. Across from the cinema I watched it in, Borders were holding a hooligan book signing, with a journalist signing copies of a book co-written with lads with an eye for a quid. And aimed at a market demograph fast becoming more familiar with the nuances of cs gas than CS Lewis’s Ordinary to Narnia. There are people who will watch The Firm, enjoy it and believe it is a true reflection of what watching football in the nasty 1980s was all about. Bluffers like a work colleague who spent that whole era playing local league football on Saturdays, discovered labels and England away games five years ago and now tells anyone who will listen what it was like being a hooligan. They will definitely see Love’s version of events as the real deal. Whether those that really were there also do so is another story. One probably already signed up by Warner Brothers and to be directed by Nick Love for release in 2012, telling how Gary Bushell and the Cockney Rejects brought acid house to East London in 1980 after witnessing Clyde Best and Mike Marsh in dayglo Fila BJ Terrindas playing six-hour Balearic sets at a Canvey Island soul weekender.
I have to be honest. I’ve enjoyed some of Nick Love’s previous films. Maybe that’s akin to admitting to a bad Greggs chicken pasty addiction or tells you I’m a clueless pleb with no taste but both The Football Factory and The Business, while hardly being Ken Loach or Pedro Almodovar get-your-thinking-head on efforts, gave me the odd grin. And his vastly-underrated debut effort Goodbye Charlie Bright is worth ninety minutes of anyone’s time in my opinion. But the release of Love’s big screen re-make of eighties football hooligan drama The Firm does beg one question of a director who claims to be fastidious in his attention to detail. Namely – how the fuck did they manage to get so much wrong?
I had more than a sneaking suspicion where this all might be heading the day the film was released. Love was interviewed on a Guardian blog and the accompanying picture showed him wearing what looked to these eyes like one bad striped linen blazer that might well have had Anna Wintour going weak at the knees if Roger Federer was accepting the Wimbledon mens singles trophy in it. Love (or more likely some twat of a stylist) had bastardised the jacket with a Fila BJ badge on the left tit, thus making the wearer look like a right tit. You couldn’t make it up …..
Perhaps I’m not really qualified enough to comment on this. After all, I’m not a Cockney and, unlike Love, I’m not on drinking pal terms with pricks like Guy Ritchie. But I did own at least three of the tracksuits and a version of one of the coats ported by members of the cast back in the day, whichever day it’s supposed to be. Which is the crux of the problem with The Firm. The chronology is all over the shop. Love seems to have been so determined to show the “casual” era in all its technicoloured Fila and Tacchini glory, that he’s forgotten one of the most important parts of the supposed casual ethos – getting it right. It reminds me of a great scene in an episode of Cheers where Norm Peterson and Cliff the postman have just sat through an all-day screening of sword-and-sandal epics, holding a loser-buys-the beers competition to see who could spot the most anachronisms. Norm claims victory but Cliff is not happy and, after buying the drinks, ponders out loud at the bar to no-one in particular about the crucial winner “… six? You spotted six? I’m not having that. No way was Caesar Augustus wearing a pair of Reebok …”
And neither would Caesar Augustus, Gus Caesar or any character in The Firm have been wearing blue adidas Munchen at £38 a pair, not unless he was, I believe the phrase is, Nicholas old chap, a “fackin’ toby”. Even this northern monkey, between a bout of bubonic plague and grooming the family whippet in the winter of 1989, managed to buy a pair of Munchen for what was an extortionate £25. By January, pissed off with the thick soles in comparison to the design perfection that were royal blue Gazelles (£14:99), they’d been relegated to the cubyhole. My beloved Gazelles were re-stored to playing out prominence alongside a pair of Diadora Borg Elite purchased the previous summer for £35 (over half a week’s wages at the time, or so my arl man used to say) and a year-old pair of adidas Korsika
The original television version of The Firm was set in the 1987-88 season, in the lead up to the 1988 European Championships in West Germany. The weakest part of a piss-weak plot being Gary Oldman’s character Bexy looking to lead a “national firm” that appeared to comprise of Eastenders, Only Fools and Horses and Grange Hill free transfers against the might of Hamburg and Feyenoord’s naughtiest that summer. An easy solution for Love and his writing loveys would have been to simply remove any reference to this, thus helping transport the film back to the 1982-1984 period the wardrobe is clearly meant to encapsulate. Except that the soundtrack would have then plotted up and conspired to commit more disorder. We get lead character Dominic and his mate buzzing about Yarbrough and Peoples Don’t Stop the Music, in the manner that you did when you first heard a song that really made your spine tingle, and then they are shown getting down to the same “just-breaking” classic in some East End barn of a club. No argument on that one. It’s one top tune. That had charted over here in December 1980. I’ll hazard a guess as to why it has been included. Footage available on You Tube shows Cavin Yarbrough performing the same tune stood at his keyboard while wearing a navy/cream Fila BJ Settanta tracksuit top (with a pair of impossibly tight white kecks).Which raises the possibility that Dallas Cowboys had a well-dressed mob before Chelsea (… why do I feel a dozen-page thread on this very topic on some “casuals” forum naturally beckoning …). Just to totally confuse the issue, the soundtrack then also throws up the 1977 Giorgio Moroder disco opulence of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and – god knows why – Soft Cell’s Tainted Love in the opening and closing titles. Given that the soundtrack album contains the near-forgotten 1985 gem that is Rene and Angela’s I’ll Be Good, the latter’s prominence in the film in preference to it is nothing short of criminal to this pair of ears. But I listen to stuff like the Bunnymen, Jeff Mills and David Bowie so what do I know?
If you loved this mode of dress as much as most of those involved did, then it could be argued for the defence that The Firm might be viewed as the 1980s casual generation’s Quadrophenia. Except the seaside fight scene here is on the front at Southsea rather than Brighton and involves the Pompey 6:57 v ICF. And Lesley Ash doesn’t get nailed up a back passage. Or run past a cinema advertising a film not made for another fifteen years (Heaven Can Wait). At least that’s one thing the two films have in common. Shite chronology. The one thing though, with the exception of the tracksuit overkill and Pompey not sitting down to the a la carte menu with Bexy afterwards, that Love has got more or less spot on is the fracas at Southsea. Two large mobs squaring up, loads of posturing and gesturing, things getting thrown and broken and when it does finally go off, the actual boxing being reduced to six-a-side at the front. Sorry, did I say 6:57 v ICF? That would mean Portsmouth v West Ham and we’re back to 1987-88 again. Why? Because the period 1980-1987 saw Pompey literally fighting their way up through the bottom three tiers of English professional football, while West Ham were in the First Division and the two clubs consequently never played each other until that season. And contrary to what those clowns at Boys Own seemed to think, a 1987 tear-up involving the 6:57 and any other well-dressed mob would have seen a sea of Italian denim, leather, knitwear, sweatshirts and running shoes rather than tennis wear. Tennis wear which would not have been bought or stolen from a branch of JD Sports in London as shown in the film. Because JD didn’t open a branch in London until 1989. And if they had have done so seven years earlier, it’s highly unlikely that they would have permitted young oiks to shoplift their best stock in Head bags as easily as portrayed in the film. Because if it was anything like MC Sports or Hurleys, it would have all been hung up about fifteen feet above you next to the roof. And despite the obvious help of adidas marketing, who must have wet themselves when asked to get involved in this project after Awaydays, West Ham’s top lad would not have been wearing 1999 version reissue Forest Hills. And unless it was a London thing I somehow missed in my drunken, matchday stupour, I somehow don’t think you would have seen as many full tracksuits being worn as Love would like to have everyone believe. Unless Boro were involved of course. As in “Boro have just got off the ordinary lads – load in full turkeys” (trans: young men from town in north-eastern England not normally associated with cutting edge fashion have arrived on the train, many wearing full Sergio Tacchini tracksuits). Another tracksuit big issue is the preponderance of emerald green/cream Fila BJ Settantas on show in the film. These were like the holy grail and I only saw a grand total of two in the flesh during this period. One on an Everton lad who I only knew by sight at that time but got on first-name terms with a few years after and the other on possibly a DLF head standing on the platform at Derby. The only other sighting that I can dredge up from the back of a mind full of nonsense is on the last Match of the Day of the 1987/88 season and Birmingham City winning at Southampton to stay up. Loads of young Zulus piled on the pitch from the home seats under the cameras to celebrate and one lad in the iconic green ran over to shake hands with Mick Harford
No doubt The Firm will put unslashed arses on unslashed cinema seats. Football hooliganism/football casual culture is big bucks these days. Across from the cinema I watched it in, Borders were holding a hooligan book signing, with a journalist signing copies of a book co-written with lads with an eye for a quid. And aimed at a market demograph fast becoming more familiar with the nuances of cs gas than CS Lewis’s Ordinary to Narnia. There are people who will watch The Firm, enjoy it and believe it is a true reflection of what watching football in the nasty 1980s was all about. Bluffers like a work colleague who spent that whole era playing local league football on Saturdays, discovered labels and England away games five years ago and now tells anyone who will listen what it was like being a hooligan. They will definitely see Love’s version of events as the real deal. Whether those that really were there also do so is another story. One probably already signed up by Warner Brothers and to be directed by Nick Love for release in 2012, telling how Gary Bushell and the Cockney Rejects brought acid house to East London in 1980 after witnessing Clyde Best and Mike Marsh in dayglo Fila BJ Terrindas playing six-hour Balearic sets at a Canvey Island soul weekender.
Friday 9 October 2009
A Big Nothing..
There's a little-known and decidedly average George Romero movie called Bruiser which, despite turning rubbish and hysterical at the end, has a creepy and intriguing premise. In it, Jason Flemyng plays a successful young marketing exec who wakes up one day to discover his face has inexplicably transformed into a smooth, white, featureless mask. He stands horrified in front of the mirror, trying to remove it but failing because it's fused to his head. He has literally become a blank.
That's the best bit of the film. After that it all goes a bit daft, as Flemyng's newfound anonymity sends him doolally and he runs around Los Angeles killing people left right and centre (mainly centre) until you just don't care any more. I'd have preferred him to stand weeping in front of the mirror for the remaining 90 minutes because I found that bit exceptionally creepy. And you know why? Because I can relate to it, that's why. Thanks for asking.
I could relate to it not because I've got a smooth, featureless face - sadly, it's more like a lumpy relief map charting myriad disappointments - but because in the past few months I've grown increasingly concerned that deep inside, underneath, in my heart, at my core, in my bones, within the very centre of my soul, lurks a terrifying, all-consuming, awful, echoing blankness.
Just to be clear, this is not the same thing as depression, which would manifest itself as an actively negative mindset. Rather it's an absence of any definable mood whatsoever. It's not like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-empty; more like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-full, but shrugging indifferently and staring at the wall instead of running around giggling and setting off party poppers. And to be fair, vacant indifference is the only sane reaction to a mere glass of water in the first place. It's hard to muster much enthusiasm or despair either way. Which leaping great cretin at the Department of Psychological Metaphor decided your opinion vis-a-vis a glass of water should be the barometer of character anyhow? If you want to find out who's a pessimist and who's an optimist, don't faff around filling tumblers - water's a precious resource, for Christ's sake. Just ask them. Or issue them a form with OPTIMIST and PESSIMIST printed on it, and see which box they tick. It's not rocket science.
Anyway, back to my thudding personal blankness. It's probably a bonus. On the one hand, I take absolutely no pride whatsoever in whatever meagre professional achievements I can muster, take little interest in anything outside work and am essentially just a blinking, shuffling mannequin watching events in his life merely drift past like underwhelming prizes on the Generation Game conveyor belt. And on the other, I just don't give a shit. It's a win-win situation. Or it would be, if I had any concept of "winning" in the first place.
Apparently this condition is known as "anhedonia" - the inability to derive any pleasure from things that would normally be considered pleasurable. Hand someone truly anhedonic a slice of chocolate cake, and at best they'll think, "Hmm, my tastebuds indicate this cake is delicious," rather than simply enjoying it. They subject it to Spock-like analysis, swallow it, shrug, and then crap it out a few hours later, wearing a neutral, unchanging expression throughout. Well, that's me, that is.
And it's hard to see what the cure might be. If you've fallen out of love with life - not to the point of actually disliking it, you understand, but to such a degree that you merely tolerate rather than welcome each passing day - it's surely impossible to get the spark back. Any suggestions? Religious epiphanies and extreme sports are out. I'd immerse myself in a hobby but they all look so pointless. You might as well sit alone in a shed counting numbers. I've tried cultivating a passion for the arts but that didn't work either. I mean, I quite like plays, live music, exhibitions, museums but not enough to spend more than 25 minutes journeying to see them. (*EXCEPTIONS Goodison & The Hare & Hounds). Reading's all right, but be honest - turning the pages isn't ultimately worth the effort. Perhaps serial killing would help. Yeah. That'd give everything a welcome bit of edge. Although I'm prepared to believe even that gets boring surprisingly quickly: within two weeks I'd be yawning my way through yet another humdrum strangling.
Still, it could be worse. Having listlessly Googled anhedonia, I see it's related to a hilarious spin-off condition called "ejaculatory anhedonia". Apparently it mainly affects men, and as the name suggests, the unfortunate few who suffer from it are incapable of deriving any pleasure whatsoever from orgasms. They make a bit of mess while staring impassively into the middle distance, and that's it. Like the human equivalent of a pushdown soap-dispenser. Now that would be depressing. Ah, well.
That's the best bit of the film. After that it all goes a bit daft, as Flemyng's newfound anonymity sends him doolally and he runs around Los Angeles killing people left right and centre (mainly centre) until you just don't care any more. I'd have preferred him to stand weeping in front of the mirror for the remaining 90 minutes because I found that bit exceptionally creepy. And you know why? Because I can relate to it, that's why. Thanks for asking.
I could relate to it not because I've got a smooth, featureless face - sadly, it's more like a lumpy relief map charting myriad disappointments - but because in the past few months I've grown increasingly concerned that deep inside, underneath, in my heart, at my core, in my bones, within the very centre of my soul, lurks a terrifying, all-consuming, awful, echoing blankness.
Just to be clear, this is not the same thing as depression, which would manifest itself as an actively negative mindset. Rather it's an absence of any definable mood whatsoever. It's not like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-empty; more like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-full, but shrugging indifferently and staring at the wall instead of running around giggling and setting off party poppers. And to be fair, vacant indifference is the only sane reaction to a mere glass of water in the first place. It's hard to muster much enthusiasm or despair either way. Which leaping great cretin at the Department of Psychological Metaphor decided your opinion vis-a-vis a glass of water should be the barometer of character anyhow? If you want to find out who's a pessimist and who's an optimist, don't faff around filling tumblers - water's a precious resource, for Christ's sake. Just ask them. Or issue them a form with OPTIMIST and PESSIMIST printed on it, and see which box they tick. It's not rocket science.
Anyway, back to my thudding personal blankness. It's probably a bonus. On the one hand, I take absolutely no pride whatsoever in whatever meagre professional achievements I can muster, take little interest in anything outside work and am essentially just a blinking, shuffling mannequin watching events in his life merely drift past like underwhelming prizes on the Generation Game conveyor belt. And on the other, I just don't give a shit. It's a win-win situation. Or it would be, if I had any concept of "winning" in the first place.
Apparently this condition is known as "anhedonia" - the inability to derive any pleasure from things that would normally be considered pleasurable. Hand someone truly anhedonic a slice of chocolate cake, and at best they'll think, "Hmm, my tastebuds indicate this cake is delicious," rather than simply enjoying it. They subject it to Spock-like analysis, swallow it, shrug, and then crap it out a few hours later, wearing a neutral, unchanging expression throughout. Well, that's me, that is.
And it's hard to see what the cure might be. If you've fallen out of love with life - not to the point of actually disliking it, you understand, but to such a degree that you merely tolerate rather than welcome each passing day - it's surely impossible to get the spark back. Any suggestions? Religious epiphanies and extreme sports are out. I'd immerse myself in a hobby but they all look so pointless. You might as well sit alone in a shed counting numbers. I've tried cultivating a passion for the arts but that didn't work either. I mean, I quite like plays, live music, exhibitions, museums but not enough to spend more than 25 minutes journeying to see them. (*EXCEPTIONS Goodison & The Hare & Hounds). Reading's all right, but be honest - turning the pages isn't ultimately worth the effort. Perhaps serial killing would help. Yeah. That'd give everything a welcome bit of edge. Although I'm prepared to believe even that gets boring surprisingly quickly: within two weeks I'd be yawning my way through yet another humdrum strangling.
Still, it could be worse. Having listlessly Googled anhedonia, I see it's related to a hilarious spin-off condition called "ejaculatory anhedonia". Apparently it mainly affects men, and as the name suggests, the unfortunate few who suffer from it are incapable of deriving any pleasure whatsoever from orgasms. They make a bit of mess while staring impassively into the middle distance, and that's it. Like the human equivalent of a pushdown soap-dispenser. Now that would be depressing. Ah, well.
Grounds for complaint...
Almost half of the teams currently playing in the Premiership have grounds that were built in the past 20 years. A handful of others are in old grounds, but which have been changed beyond all recognition from 30 years ago. A few more are desperate to move to new stadiums, with some plans already in place and others floundering on the wave of a recession. We, the fans, are never consulted on these things. Much in the way that everybody knows what the result of a referendum to bring back hanging would be, everybody knows what answers fans would give to moving grounds. Unless, of course, you are a Liverpool fan, who seem willing to move into a caravan whilst the new one is being haggled over.
History, it seems, has no place and no value.
But what is this obsession with "improving" stadiums (I'd say "stadia" but that the word just sounds a bit Deloitte and Touche)? You never hear a good word about a new ground from anybody who attended an old one, and the issue of terracing has never gone away, much to the annoyance of both clubs and the FA. After all, if we had terraces how would the greedy, corporate-driven clubs be able to justify charging up to 50 quid to watch just an hour and a half of football which isn't even guaranteed to be of average quality, never mind good?
Sadly, this isn't just an English phenomenon. I watched my first baseball game in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1996 and my last in Boston in 2007.
At the Royals Stadium in KC, I was mightily impressed with the stadium in many ways. It was new and very, very big. What it lacked, as so many do, was any sense of attachment. I felt like a customer who was being catered to, rather than a fan who was there to watch simply because I wanted to. The stadium has now been renamed the Kauffman Stadium, after the long time Royals owner (sound familiar?) and has been extended and modernised, despite only being 30 odd years old.
The New York Yankees have rebuilt Yankee Stadium, a place where more sporting history has been created than almost anywhere else on earth. It's true that they built the new one to exactly the same dimensions as the old, but it's still a new stadium. The House that Ruth Built is now the House that Steinbrenner Demolished.
In contrast, a trip to Fenway Park, Boston is a trip back to a time when the working man could still afford watching his favourite sport and the 'baccy juice was flying left right and centre. I don't remember what we paid for tickets that night but, even now, the cheapest ticket at Fenway is still only $12, or about £7. That's right, 7 quid for a ticket to a game which will last about 2 1/2 hours. Granted, the cheap tickets are quite a distance from home plate, but even those in much better stands are only $30, or about £18. Oh, and there's terracing, too. Other objections to the new Yankee Stadium aside, they haven't tried to make the fans pay for the move. The cheapest bleacher seats are just $5, about the price of a pie at Goodison. Compare this to the Emirates Stadium, which has tickets that are, on average, twice as dear as at Highbury.
Fenway - along with Wrigley Field in Chicago - is, quite rightly, seen as a national treasure, and the notion of the Red Sox ever moving out is unthinkable. There are pillars everywhere, supporting the upper tiers, and the stadium is surrounded by buildings, in the same way many English football grounds used to be, before the obsession with retail parks and hotels started. This restricts crowd numbers, but none of that matters. This is Fenway, and it will take an earthquake to bring it down.
It's sad that football clubs can't think the same way. Of course, the spiralling debts created by chairmen chasing an impossible dream means that many grounds just aren't/weren't big enough. I mean, how do you finance half a billion pounds worth of debt, if you've only got 40,000 people turning up for 19 games a season? Well, you start by charging exorbitant ticket prices knowing that, when your own fans stop turning up, there'll be a stream of Japanese and Scandinavians queuing up to take their places.
Football, as we knew it, is all but dead in this country. The stadiums are soulless, bland, flatpack affairs with barely even a nod to history. When it comes crashing down, and it will, who do you think the clubs will turn to?
History, it seems, has no place and no value.
But what is this obsession with "improving" stadiums (I'd say "stadia" but that the word just sounds a bit Deloitte and Touche)? You never hear a good word about a new ground from anybody who attended an old one, and the issue of terracing has never gone away, much to the annoyance of both clubs and the FA. After all, if we had terraces how would the greedy, corporate-driven clubs be able to justify charging up to 50 quid to watch just an hour and a half of football which isn't even guaranteed to be of average quality, never mind good?
Sadly, this isn't just an English phenomenon. I watched my first baseball game in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1996 and my last in Boston in 2007.
At the Royals Stadium in KC, I was mightily impressed with the stadium in many ways. It was new and very, very big. What it lacked, as so many do, was any sense of attachment. I felt like a customer who was being catered to, rather than a fan who was there to watch simply because I wanted to. The stadium has now been renamed the Kauffman Stadium, after the long time Royals owner (sound familiar?) and has been extended and modernised, despite only being 30 odd years old.
The New York Yankees have rebuilt Yankee Stadium, a place where more sporting history has been created than almost anywhere else on earth. It's true that they built the new one to exactly the same dimensions as the old, but it's still a new stadium. The House that Ruth Built is now the House that Steinbrenner Demolished.
In contrast, a trip to Fenway Park, Boston is a trip back to a time when the working man could still afford watching his favourite sport and the 'baccy juice was flying left right and centre. I don't remember what we paid for tickets that night but, even now, the cheapest ticket at Fenway is still only $12, or about £7. That's right, 7 quid for a ticket to a game which will last about 2 1/2 hours. Granted, the cheap tickets are quite a distance from home plate, but even those in much better stands are only $30, or about £18. Oh, and there's terracing, too. Other objections to the new Yankee Stadium aside, they haven't tried to make the fans pay for the move. The cheapest bleacher seats are just $5, about the price of a pie at Goodison. Compare this to the Emirates Stadium, which has tickets that are, on average, twice as dear as at Highbury.
Fenway - along with Wrigley Field in Chicago - is, quite rightly, seen as a national treasure, and the notion of the Red Sox ever moving out is unthinkable. There are pillars everywhere, supporting the upper tiers, and the stadium is surrounded by buildings, in the same way many English football grounds used to be, before the obsession with retail parks and hotels started. This restricts crowd numbers, but none of that matters. This is Fenway, and it will take an earthquake to bring it down.
It's sad that football clubs can't think the same way. Of course, the spiralling debts created by chairmen chasing an impossible dream means that many grounds just aren't/weren't big enough. I mean, how do you finance half a billion pounds worth of debt, if you've only got 40,000 people turning up for 19 games a season? Well, you start by charging exorbitant ticket prices knowing that, when your own fans stop turning up, there'll be a stream of Japanese and Scandinavians queuing up to take their places.
Football, as we knew it, is all but dead in this country. The stadiums are soulless, bland, flatpack affairs with barely even a nod to history. When it comes crashing down, and it will, who do you think the clubs will turn to?
Tuesday 6 October 2009
presenter biffs & student bulbs..
You’d have thought that after Alan Partridge satirised the medium so brilliantly, chat show producers would’ve learned a lesson or two in the past decade. After watching Jonathan Ross interview Graham Norton about which guests Norton would be interviewing on his own chat show, they obviously haven’t and the whole incestuous cycle now seems complete. Ross is on the way down, not because of ‘ManuelGate’ or because of his obscene wages but because his shtick has become predictable, boring, lazy and smug. Ofcourse Ross has always been these things, but resurrected himself by being incredibly rude to certain guests (easy targets usually, never the real A Listers who he sucked up to.) Likewise another great BBC talent, Norton has also found himself being paid to tone down the kind of saucy camp flim flam that made his name over on Channel 4. Together they managed to provide a telling example of how the being chained to a financially lucrative yet creatively stifling golden handcuffs deal has frittered away whatever talent they once possessed.
In the chatosphere, Ross became famous by attempting a kind of third rate version of Letterman back in the 80s. Whereas the standard British model of chat was largely centred around relatively probing and in-depth interviews by the likes of Parkinson and to a lesser degree, Russell Harty, the American versions were far zappier, more comedic, looser affairs all round. Ross was the first British chat show to attempt an admittedly third rate copy of the Letterman/Leno formula with The Last Resort. What else was there; Wogan? Norton followed the likes of Julian Clarey and Paul O’Grady with a mix of feeble smut and innuendo stretched out with tedious, suckholing interviews with so-called ‘gay icons’ and third rate cabaret.
Commissioners think that anyone can present a chat show – even the likes of Davina McCall and Charlotte Church. In the US the likes of Gary Shandling mocked the Lettermans and over here Mrs Merton and Partridge parodied UK programmes so effectively that no-one should ever attempt a chat show before watching one or both series to avoid the usual pitfalls; bad research, poor questioning, crap guests with nothing to say (but a book/film/product to plug), gormless hosts who can’t adlib but stick rigidly to pre-prepared questions, chummy backslapping sessions with showbiz chums, inane ego massaging for Hollywood stars, shite house bands, dim straight-man foils etc etc. A return to 70s style in-depth interviewing would be nice and whilst the likes of Mark Lawson can do this, he’s usually shoved away at obscure times on obscure digital formats. The mass audience, so the thinking goes, cannot stomach the kind of interview Parky used to do in his prime but now prefer fluffy exercises in product placement and cosy mutual masturbation. Ross interviewing Norton on his chat show about which guests Norton would be interviewing on his chat show is perhaps about as absurd as it gets.
Students
Well we had a couple of months where we could get served at Dorys or McCanns (it’s still McCanns OK? Tom Thumb can fuck off lid!) without being stuck behind a – what’s the collective noun for students? - an ‘irritation’ of students talking in that generic accentless, plazzy posh, middle English student voice, wearing their stupid fucking ‘Grimshaw’ outfits (50s asylum haircuts, tatty too tight cardys, ball breaking shit toppers and comedy slip ons…and that’s just the girls!) thinking saying ‘I’m gonna do Dizzee Rarscal; the Musical’ is funny and marvelling at all the pathetic, desperate ‘Freshers Week’ club posters (Trainspotting poster skits in 2009? Radical!!) and all the usual shite will be trotted out; that students provide a valuable source of income to the night-time economy and maybe that’s true; students spend money on themselves, then fuck off back to whichever nondescript Daily Mail shithole they came from after completing their studies. Students exist in their own privileged bubble and the only economy yhry contribute to are those of nobhead club promoters and er, how shall we put it ‘property developers.’ Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of a universal education system that rewards talent and hard work but today’s student masses are a very different breed to those who used to pollute ‘alternative’ discos in the 80s. At least they pretended to be political for the few years inbetween leaving public school and a job with daddy’s firm. Today’s lot with their smurf hats, berets, wacky barnets, 50s slap and La Roux haircuts think swearing in Subway is an act of defiance. Let’s hope the recession culls thousands of these clowns. See how they’re all jumping up n down now the recession is affecting THEM instead of those useless ‘chavs!’ It’s sooooo unfair! This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. All those A levels and diplomas and degrees and they can’t even get a job at Burger King. At this rate, they’ll not be able to go out on the piss six nights a week at Indiecation and help the night-time economy recover from decades of underinvestment. What will happen to us all?
In the chatosphere, Ross became famous by attempting a kind of third rate version of Letterman back in the 80s. Whereas the standard British model of chat was largely centred around relatively probing and in-depth interviews by the likes of Parkinson and to a lesser degree, Russell Harty, the American versions were far zappier, more comedic, looser affairs all round. Ross was the first British chat show to attempt an admittedly third rate copy of the Letterman/Leno formula with The Last Resort. What else was there; Wogan? Norton followed the likes of Julian Clarey and Paul O’Grady with a mix of feeble smut and innuendo stretched out with tedious, suckholing interviews with so-called ‘gay icons’ and third rate cabaret.
Commissioners think that anyone can present a chat show – even the likes of Davina McCall and Charlotte Church. In the US the likes of Gary Shandling mocked the Lettermans and over here Mrs Merton and Partridge parodied UK programmes so effectively that no-one should ever attempt a chat show before watching one or both series to avoid the usual pitfalls; bad research, poor questioning, crap guests with nothing to say (but a book/film/product to plug), gormless hosts who can’t adlib but stick rigidly to pre-prepared questions, chummy backslapping sessions with showbiz chums, inane ego massaging for Hollywood stars, shite house bands, dim straight-man foils etc etc. A return to 70s style in-depth interviewing would be nice and whilst the likes of Mark Lawson can do this, he’s usually shoved away at obscure times on obscure digital formats. The mass audience, so the thinking goes, cannot stomach the kind of interview Parky used to do in his prime but now prefer fluffy exercises in product placement and cosy mutual masturbation. Ross interviewing Norton on his chat show about which guests Norton would be interviewing on his chat show is perhaps about as absurd as it gets.
Students
Well we had a couple of months where we could get served at Dorys or McCanns (it’s still McCanns OK? Tom Thumb can fuck off lid!) without being stuck behind a – what’s the collective noun for students? - an ‘irritation’ of students talking in that generic accentless, plazzy posh, middle English student voice, wearing their stupid fucking ‘Grimshaw’ outfits (50s asylum haircuts, tatty too tight cardys, ball breaking shit toppers and comedy slip ons…and that’s just the girls!) thinking saying ‘I’m gonna do Dizzee Rarscal; the Musical’ is funny and marvelling at all the pathetic, desperate ‘Freshers Week’ club posters (Trainspotting poster skits in 2009? Radical!!) and all the usual shite will be trotted out; that students provide a valuable source of income to the night-time economy and maybe that’s true; students spend money on themselves, then fuck off back to whichever nondescript Daily Mail shithole they came from after completing their studies. Students exist in their own privileged bubble and the only economy yhry contribute to are those of nobhead club promoters and er, how shall we put it ‘property developers.’ Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of a universal education system that rewards talent and hard work but today’s student masses are a very different breed to those who used to pollute ‘alternative’ discos in the 80s. At least they pretended to be political for the few years inbetween leaving public school and a job with daddy’s firm. Today’s lot with their smurf hats, berets, wacky barnets, 50s slap and La Roux haircuts think swearing in Subway is an act of defiance. Let’s hope the recession culls thousands of these clowns. See how they’re all jumping up n down now the recession is affecting THEM instead of those useless ‘chavs!’ It’s sooooo unfair! This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. All those A levels and diplomas and degrees and they can’t even get a job at Burger King. At this rate, they’ll not be able to go out on the piss six nights a week at Indiecation and help the night-time economy recover from decades of underinvestment. What will happen to us all?
Sunday 6 September 2009
Fashion...Talk to Frank..
Dear Frank,
I’ve always worn trainers but this summer have been tempted to buy a pair of those flimsy plimsoles everyone seems to be wearing these days. Can rocking a pair of plimsoles ever be justified in this day and age?
Ged, Tuebrook
Frank replies :
Ged, plimsoles are for schoolies and grannies and even schoolies and grannies stopped wearing them in the 70s so the simple answer is ‘no!’ Plimmy’s are an abomination, a disgrace to footwear fetishists the world over. You might as well buy a pair of slippers lad.
Dear Frank
I hear slippers are gonna be massive this autumn. Can you recommend any hip n’ happenin’ styles?
Mike, Leigh
Dear Mike,
Slippers are indeed tipped to be the latest craze to hit the Park End in mid-September, matched with baggy boxies, grey knee length hiking socks pulled right down to the ankle and an aul Ocean Pacific t-shirt with rocky burns all down the front for that authentic 1984 doley look that’s all the rage in Netherley these days.
Dear Frank
My wife says I always look a state and should dress my age like Gary Lineker or Alan Shearer but I reckon Big Ears and Baldie dress like pure beauts. Who’s right?
Tommy, Skem
Dear Tommy,
Your missus has been too busy watching Gok Wan and 10 Years Younger. Tell her to mind her own fucking business and stop buying shite from Cricket just so she can look like an even fatter version of Stevie G’s bird. If we wanted to dress like off duty bizzies, we’d go and get a store card for Flannels.
Dear Frank,
How come you lot reckon you’re so up on the fashion scene when every time I see you, you’ve got a pair of reissued Trimm Trabs in disgusting colours and a Lyle & Scott t-shirt on?
Joe, Stoke
Dear Joe,
That wasn’t Frank you saw, it was Franks’s twin brother! We dress like members of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy circa 1856 and subscribe to The Chap so fuck right off!
I’ve always worn trainers but this summer have been tempted to buy a pair of those flimsy plimsoles everyone seems to be wearing these days. Can rocking a pair of plimsoles ever be justified in this day and age?
Ged, Tuebrook
Frank replies :
Ged, plimsoles are for schoolies and grannies and even schoolies and grannies stopped wearing them in the 70s so the simple answer is ‘no!’ Plimmy’s are an abomination, a disgrace to footwear fetishists the world over. You might as well buy a pair of slippers lad.
Dear Frank
I hear slippers are gonna be massive this autumn. Can you recommend any hip n’ happenin’ styles?
Mike, Leigh
Dear Mike,
Slippers are indeed tipped to be the latest craze to hit the Park End in mid-September, matched with baggy boxies, grey knee length hiking socks pulled right down to the ankle and an aul Ocean Pacific t-shirt with rocky burns all down the front for that authentic 1984 doley look that’s all the rage in Netherley these days.
Dear Frank
My wife says I always look a state and should dress my age like Gary Lineker or Alan Shearer but I reckon Big Ears and Baldie dress like pure beauts. Who’s right?
Tommy, Skem
Dear Tommy,
Your missus has been too busy watching Gok Wan and 10 Years Younger. Tell her to mind her own fucking business and stop buying shite from Cricket just so she can look like an even fatter version of Stevie G’s bird. If we wanted to dress like off duty bizzies, we’d go and get a store card for Flannels.
Dear Frank,
How come you lot reckon you’re so up on the fashion scene when every time I see you, you’ve got a pair of reissued Trimm Trabs in disgusting colours and a Lyle & Scott t-shirt on?
Joe, Stoke
Dear Joe,
That wasn’t Frank you saw, it was Franks’s twin brother! We dress like members of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy circa 1856 and subscribe to The Chap so fuck right off!
Tuesday 1 September 2009
Benefit Busters..
There’s this family I know who’ve never done a tap in their entire lives, the whole bunch of them; mum, dad, kids, grandkids, aunties, uncles, nephews, nieces have sponged off the state all their lives and have the barefaced cheek to demand more money from the tax payer every year; they get their homes paid for, they manage to run a fleet of cars and go on foreign holidays all the time all at our expense. This family’s name is the Windsors.
You see there are benefits scroungers at all levels of society it’s just that, for some reason, it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who come in for the biggest amount of flack from the government, the middle classes and their moralistic one-eyed media. Take the recent benefit Fraud adverts with their Finchy from The Office voice over; ‘Benefit Fraudsters; We’re Closing In! Ralph Ineson threatens as targeted scroungers get fingered by the dole’s Gestapo. Funny how they seem to turn a blind eye to, or cut deals with rich bastard tax exiles and corporate tax evaders who take billions from the exchequer every year, yet seem desperate to claw back that 30 quid a week on the side that Billy or Tracy earn on top of their JSA. Where are the costly prime time adverts with ‘Tax Exiles/Tax Dodgers; we’re closing in’ eh? No, can’t afford to upset the big boys, after all the likes of Blair and Brown and Cameron will be seeking employment from these fellars soon enough.
This hypocritical and one-sided attitude towards ‘drains on the economy’ applies equally to TV; only on British television could a programme such as ‘The Duchess On The Estate’ get commissioned. The premise for this seems to be that the ‘underclass’ require a lesson in good old fashioned self-reliance, hard work and community spirit from…..er, Sarah fucking Ferguson of all people!! Yes, the so-called ‘Duchess of York’ (didn’t she lose that title when she jibbed her moron of a husband?) is on a mission to ‘Get Britain Back On Track!’ by passing through North Moor in Wythenshawe lecturing scallys and forelock tugging whoppers on the benefits of community values.
What qualifications this civil list sponging parasite has for ‘Getting Britain Back On Track’ is never made clear but she IS ‘committed’ in an aristocratic ‘something must be done’ kinda way, that commitment seeming to start and end with a ten day fly-by visit to hand picked ‘deserving poor’ types and local dignitaries who can’t resist the regal clout her plans to renovate a local building into a community centre provide. It’s breath-taking that these inbred aristos never for once question their own reliance on the state to maintain their extravagant up-keep whilst dishing out platitudes on the work ethic to the lower orders.
In keeping with the trend for similar ‘philanthropy begins at home’ type programmes such as ‘The Secret Millionaire’ and ‘How The Other Half Live’ ‘The Duchess On The Estate’ never question the social and economic reasons why millions of people, through accidents of birth remain rooted in poverty whilst others, whether through their own talent, skill or luck or, more likely through exploitation, ruthlessness and good old fashioned inheritance, manage to lord it over the common folk, dishing out alms and advice to those deemed worthy or desperate enough of their benevolence.
Allied to the tut-tutting of old money, people like Hayley Taylor, the ‘star’ of Channel 4’s ‘Benefit Busters’ series sees her role to get single mothers back into the workplace as an act of charity. As she dishes out the kind of vacuous job-seeking ‘dos and don’ts’ that makes Pauline from The League Of Gentlemen sound like Plato, (don’t chew gum during an interview!! etc) Hayley personifies the desperate condition of internecine class hatred in modern Britain.
Make no bones about it, Hayley despises her ‘customers’ far more than Sarah Ferguson despises the populace of North Moor. Camouflaged behind the preposterous 80s fashions of a woman who has spent far too much time reading quack motivational manuals, her hideous hatred seeps out. When one single mum claims/confesses that ‘she’s paid too much to do nothing instead of working’ Hayley almost explodes with suppressed glee that one of her charges has articulated what millions of fellow Daily Mail readers believe; the system’s all wrong they say.
And they’re right, it is all wrong but not because benefits are too high as Hayley and her confused pal soon discover, but because New Labour’s ‘flexible’ workforce is paid at such an appallingly low rate that there’s no financial incentive to escape the benefit ‘trap.’ In short the existing benefit system is bankrolling a slew of exploitative employers who offer little more than short term, lowly paid, zero job satisfaction opportunities for an almost 19th century semi-educated workforce. Hail the Anglo-Saxon model of modern workforce flexibility in all its phoney joy Santa Claus hatted glory!
From her humble semi-detached parlour, Hayley irons another hideous outfit for a seemingly opportune ‘tea and chat’ meeting with the ‘social welfare’ company head honcho who lives in the kind of extravagant country pile that Sarah Ferguson’s kids would sneer at for being ‘soooo nouv.’ It’s the highlight of her entire miserable life, it’s her garden party with the queen moment, the culmination of a life spent adulating some and despising others.
After insulting, brow-beating and humiliating her ‘babies’ into accepting two weeks unpaid trials for minimum wage shelf stacking jobs at Poundland, Doncaster’s Doley Diva congratulates herself and her company for helping these pitiable women back into the ‘job market’ because ‘who else would do it?’ Well, the old jobcentres used to do it actually until bits of it were privatised in the 80s and 90s, paying for country mansions for self-satisfied ‘social welfare’ gurus with messiah complexes and wages for self-deluded ‘Getting Britain Back On Track’ harridans like Hayley fucking Taylor.
Sarah Ferguson seems a simple enough soul; in her own primitive mind she probably thinks she’s ‘doing her bit’ much as Prince Charles is no doubt utterly sincere in his views regarding modern architecture, climate change, the fate of the bumble bee and the role of mistresses in a 21st century marriage. But, y’know so fucking what? Charles is an incestuous aberration as were his parents, his grandparents and his imbecilic offspring. If his princes and Sarah’s princesses are so fucking intelligent and talented let them make their own way in the world instead of providing state sponsored occupations and hobbies for them. Then they’d maybe earn the right to pontificate.
Funny how the architects of ‘meritocracy’ the self-made men and women of Daily Mail land continue to worship the idle rich whilst still pouring boiling oil on the ‘benefit scroungers’ of so-called ‘sink estates.’ Hayley Taylor and her ilk are perhaps more objectionable than the Charlies and Sarahs of this world because they DO know better, they probably do understand that success and failure has little to do with talent but everything to do with opportunity. Maybe Finchy could ponder that the next time a voice over wedge is waved in front of his ugly Yorkshire fucking face.
You see there are benefits scroungers at all levels of society it’s just that, for some reason, it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who come in for the biggest amount of flack from the government, the middle classes and their moralistic one-eyed media. Take the recent benefit Fraud adverts with their Finchy from The Office voice over; ‘Benefit Fraudsters; We’re Closing In! Ralph Ineson threatens as targeted scroungers get fingered by the dole’s Gestapo. Funny how they seem to turn a blind eye to, or cut deals with rich bastard tax exiles and corporate tax evaders who take billions from the exchequer every year, yet seem desperate to claw back that 30 quid a week on the side that Billy or Tracy earn on top of their JSA. Where are the costly prime time adverts with ‘Tax Exiles/Tax Dodgers; we’re closing in’ eh? No, can’t afford to upset the big boys, after all the likes of Blair and Brown and Cameron will be seeking employment from these fellars soon enough.
This hypocritical and one-sided attitude towards ‘drains on the economy’ applies equally to TV; only on British television could a programme such as ‘The Duchess On The Estate’ get commissioned. The premise for this seems to be that the ‘underclass’ require a lesson in good old fashioned self-reliance, hard work and community spirit from…..er, Sarah fucking Ferguson of all people!! Yes, the so-called ‘Duchess of York’ (didn’t she lose that title when she jibbed her moron of a husband?) is on a mission to ‘Get Britain Back On Track!’ by passing through North Moor in Wythenshawe lecturing scallys and forelock tugging whoppers on the benefits of community values.
What qualifications this civil list sponging parasite has for ‘Getting Britain Back On Track’ is never made clear but she IS ‘committed’ in an aristocratic ‘something must be done’ kinda way, that commitment seeming to start and end with a ten day fly-by visit to hand picked ‘deserving poor’ types and local dignitaries who can’t resist the regal clout her plans to renovate a local building into a community centre provide. It’s breath-taking that these inbred aristos never for once question their own reliance on the state to maintain their extravagant up-keep whilst dishing out platitudes on the work ethic to the lower orders.
In keeping with the trend for similar ‘philanthropy begins at home’ type programmes such as ‘The Secret Millionaire’ and ‘How The Other Half Live’ ‘The Duchess On The Estate’ never question the social and economic reasons why millions of people, through accidents of birth remain rooted in poverty whilst others, whether through their own talent, skill or luck or, more likely through exploitation, ruthlessness and good old fashioned inheritance, manage to lord it over the common folk, dishing out alms and advice to those deemed worthy or desperate enough of their benevolence.
Allied to the tut-tutting of old money, people like Hayley Taylor, the ‘star’ of Channel 4’s ‘Benefit Busters’ series sees her role to get single mothers back into the workplace as an act of charity. As she dishes out the kind of vacuous job-seeking ‘dos and don’ts’ that makes Pauline from The League Of Gentlemen sound like Plato, (don’t chew gum during an interview!! etc) Hayley personifies the desperate condition of internecine class hatred in modern Britain.
Make no bones about it, Hayley despises her ‘customers’ far more than Sarah Ferguson despises the populace of North Moor. Camouflaged behind the preposterous 80s fashions of a woman who has spent far too much time reading quack motivational manuals, her hideous hatred seeps out. When one single mum claims/confesses that ‘she’s paid too much to do nothing instead of working’ Hayley almost explodes with suppressed glee that one of her charges has articulated what millions of fellow Daily Mail readers believe; the system’s all wrong they say.
And they’re right, it is all wrong but not because benefits are too high as Hayley and her confused pal soon discover, but because New Labour’s ‘flexible’ workforce is paid at such an appallingly low rate that there’s no financial incentive to escape the benefit ‘trap.’ In short the existing benefit system is bankrolling a slew of exploitative employers who offer little more than short term, lowly paid, zero job satisfaction opportunities for an almost 19th century semi-educated workforce. Hail the Anglo-Saxon model of modern workforce flexibility in all its phoney joy Santa Claus hatted glory!
From her humble semi-detached parlour, Hayley irons another hideous outfit for a seemingly opportune ‘tea and chat’ meeting with the ‘social welfare’ company head honcho who lives in the kind of extravagant country pile that Sarah Ferguson’s kids would sneer at for being ‘soooo nouv.’ It’s the highlight of her entire miserable life, it’s her garden party with the queen moment, the culmination of a life spent adulating some and despising others.
After insulting, brow-beating and humiliating her ‘babies’ into accepting two weeks unpaid trials for minimum wage shelf stacking jobs at Poundland, Doncaster’s Doley Diva congratulates herself and her company for helping these pitiable women back into the ‘job market’ because ‘who else would do it?’ Well, the old jobcentres used to do it actually until bits of it were privatised in the 80s and 90s, paying for country mansions for self-satisfied ‘social welfare’ gurus with messiah complexes and wages for self-deluded ‘Getting Britain Back On Track’ harridans like Hayley fucking Taylor.
Sarah Ferguson seems a simple enough soul; in her own primitive mind she probably thinks she’s ‘doing her bit’ much as Prince Charles is no doubt utterly sincere in his views regarding modern architecture, climate change, the fate of the bumble bee and the role of mistresses in a 21st century marriage. But, y’know so fucking what? Charles is an incestuous aberration as were his parents, his grandparents and his imbecilic offspring. If his princes and Sarah’s princesses are so fucking intelligent and talented let them make their own way in the world instead of providing state sponsored occupations and hobbies for them. Then they’d maybe earn the right to pontificate.
Funny how the architects of ‘meritocracy’ the self-made men and women of Daily Mail land continue to worship the idle rich whilst still pouring boiling oil on the ‘benefit scroungers’ of so-called ‘sink estates.’ Hayley Taylor and her ilk are perhaps more objectionable than the Charlies and Sarahs of this world because they DO know better, they probably do understand that success and failure has little to do with talent but everything to do with opportunity. Maybe Finchy could ponder that the next time a voice over wedge is waved in front of his ugly Yorkshire fucking face.
Thursday 16 July 2009
Breakfast?? Wake up and smell the coffee..
Is there any sight more nauseating than the BBC's Breakfast team of presenters as they chew the fat with some invited talking head from sloppy research central on hot topics such as militant Islamic youth? Look at em, this cancerous array of bland Middle English accents, faces and attitudes; the Daily Heil hate sheet made human flesh and served up every morning to poke the eunuchs of Middle Earth into fits of prejudicial apoplexy. What do YOU think about striking catering workers bringing misery to thousands of innocent holidaymakers? Text in YOUR message or simply press the red button and register YOUR impotent rage. This cosy sofa Nuremburg whips up the massed ranks of white collar weasels to almost head exploding levels of anger. Like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, these people seem to be living on the very edge of gun- totin-good- people-pushed-too-far-homicidal rage. Just one more little push from the tabloids or Breakfast telly and they might just y'know...vote BNP!
Like most of the people who bother to write in to Points Of View (have you heard their voices?), these people live in a cultural void; the vapid, featureless, identity free sprawl of Nowheresville UK. They therefore cling desperately to anything that gives their mundane lives some sense of meaning. For many this manifests itself in an exaggerated, malignant patriotism and a romantic (and ultimately fictitious) notion of 'Britishness' and its supposed virtues - y'know the usual bullshit: tolerance, fair-play, a sense of humour and decency. That these people are almost always the least tolerant, fair-minded, humorous or decent people on God's green earth never seems to diminish their sense of self-delusion.
BBC Breakfast people infact. GMTV with its crass mix of dumb celebrity lead features and Chat magazine freak tales, gets a different audience altogether. These people don't vote, they don't spend, they are essentially non-people. The Breakfast brigade, however, these people MATTER. They are the so-called 'silent majority' who never fucking shut up. They are not the ageing array of blue-rinsed bigots that now form the rump of what's left of old school Conservatism, no these are 'consumers,' they are 'tax payers' and 'licence fee payers' and dammit, they've been taken for granted for far too long! They have rights and they have power. They're fed up of their tiny share of GDP being constantly under threat from the massed ranks of evil scroungers and miscreants intent on destroying the very fabric of their non-descript B&Q and Blockbuster lives. Gypsies and junkies, migrants and militants, single mothers and suicide bombers; they want what's mine, what's ours by birth, as Englishmen, as wealth creators, as voters in a 'liberal democracy (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean). Their tolerance is defined as the ability to withstand the occupancy of this island with people of colour without resorting to burning them in their sleep or trucking them off to be gassed, as less civilised and fair-minded folk would do.
They are Bill Turnbull's maggot offspring still gorging on the rancid corpse of Empire, feeding their polluted guts on Churchill and Wellington and Nelson and Drake and Beckham and Branson and Blair and Bono and Johnny and Tim and plucky little Paula and (sssh black lesbian) Kelly. They sit in the M&S café and swap house prices, they listen to Coldplay CDs on the car stereo, they go to watch Robbie as a couple and dress at Gap and H&M. They are England Fans with England shirts and England flags and they whoop and shout "Coooooome on England!" because to be a patriot in one's own country is the easiest thing in the world. They believe in nothing because they have experienced nothing and so they can't understand anyone who possesses what used to be called 'idealism'.
Theirs is an abstract and sanitised patriotism and it's one that has been largely fostered by the BBC , who's propagandist function has always been (whatever the right wing press say) to uphold the interests of the establishment, because they are part of the system, funded by the system, controlled by and populated by the system. In BBCLand we're all just one big happy Tru-Brit family; Last Night Of The Proms, Trooping The Colour, The Boat Race, The Grand National, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon, the test match (highlights on the news or listen to 5Live)., the FA Cup final, Only Fools & Horses, Dad's Army, the Two Ronnies, Lenny Henry, Have I Got News For You, They Think It's All Over, Question Time, Dimbleby's Portrait Of Britain, Coast, Simon Schama, Jools Holland, Blue Peter, Horse Of The Year Show, Edinburgh Tattoo, State Opening Of Parliament, VE/VJ Day, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 anniversaries, the Queen's Jubilee, the Queen's birthday, the Queen's minor illnesses, royal birthdays, royal funerals, royal marriages, royal funding (only 61 per day folks - cheaper than a loaf of bread!!).
It's enough to turn anyone into a suicide bomber. Get this suckers, England doesn't exist. It's a made up place, same as every other country. There is no English race just as there is no white race, or black race or any other race. Trace your ancestry back far enough and we're all just a monkey fuck in the jungle. Invent your own rituals if you like and your own religions and customs and laws and flags and live somewhere beyond the hills, over the plain, across the sea. Call it England or Israel or America or Japan or China or India or Iran. John Donne was wrong; every man is an island. Me, I know I probably share this crackpot view of the world with 0.1% of humanity but that suits me fine. You want to get wrapped up in phoney notions of culture and ethnicity? Go visit Auschwitz and see where that gets you.
The young suicide bombers who attacked London believed in another system, another way of life, another state-less state of being altogether. A hundred years a go they would have been called anarchists or communists. You might not agree with their aims or their methods, but you can't deny them their ideology. If the BBC reporters who covered the bombings couldn't grasp or even seek to understand this, then perhaps the problem is with them, more than anyone else. Just as the BBC apologised after 911 when 'uppity Asian/Arab' members of the audience on Question Time tried to put into context the reasons that may have lead the plane hijackers to perform their murderous deeds. It's Israel stooped! No, the state only wants debate on its own terms otherwise it's 'my country right or wrong' and 'treason trial' time.
60 years ago when idealistic young men from across the globe went off to Spain to fight fascist Franco in the International Brigades, they did so because they felt united by a common brotherhood, a shared political cause. They joined up to fight the oppressor, a cabal of tyrants intent of imposing their twisted idea of culture upon others. Young men always want causes to believe in and fight for, which is why suicide bombers, who should be over-60 years of age to qualify, are almost always below the age of 25. They see their martyrdom and the death of 'infidels' as a noble and honourable path to paradise. Whether or not they acted out of a twisted interpretation of the Koran or more non-spiritual political beliefs, they wanted to do their bit for the cause. Like it or not, no-one wakes up one morning and decides, 'think I'll go and blow myself up on the tube for a laugh.'
The likes of Bobby Sands and IRA hunger strikers of the 70s were also prepared to die for their beliefs and were also ridiculed and demonised at the time. Silly boys having their minds twisted by evil men who never risk their own lives for the cause. That was how it was seen and perhaps there's even an element of truth in it. Our school was one long Bobby Sands joke but, when alls said and done, this young man starved himself to death for a free Ireland. The ultimate irony is of course that martyrs never see their dreams realised and Bobby and co would no doubt be appalled to see their sacrifices wasted on some inter-government carve up between Dublin and London. As de Beauvoir put it; 'If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat'. All causes end in either compromise or capitulation. Old men know this, which is why they don't sign up for Paradise backpacks. Idealism's a young man's game but what we need to recognise is the reasons why people think the way they do and how both government and the media must accept responsibility for shaping the dominant cultural forces that enable society to become polarised, divided and antagonistic.
I'm proud of being a northerner with all the abstract geographical, cultural and political baggage that word entails. It's not a conscious thing really, just a feeling of difference, of otherness to 'southerners.' Humans are tribal animals and if differences between us didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. You follow the reds, I'll follow the blues, you like that music, I'll like this music, you wear those clothes, I'll wear these clothes. Each to their own. Englishness and Britishness isn't something you sign up to. I wouldn't sign up to one of New Labour's preposterous 'Loyalty' oaths so why should anyone else?
My notion of who I am and where I fit into the world around me may be not be shared by anyone at the BBC but then the BBC is a self-perpetuating, closed shop of Oxbridge mediocrity, that engenders a distorted vision of Britain based upon its own bourgeois prejudices. Take their current 'the accent is on Voices' campaign for example. Even when the BBC tries to be inclusive and recognise that there are many and various aspects of Britishness, it still manages to fuck it up by getting getting a bunch of nobs from marketing to put on ridiculous 'regional' accents. It's almost as funny as those Fast Show 'We're Cockneys/Geordies/Yardies' sketches. The same patronising, paternalist attitude that condescendingly states 'and now the news and weather where YOU live.'
Greg Dyke said that the BBC was hideously white but he missed the whole point. It doesn't matter if the BBC becomes less white if its intake still comes from the same social and economic backgrounds. Just because Blue Peter has an Asian and a Geordie presenter doesn't make it any less hideously middle class. Were the BBC responsible for turning five young black and Asian young 'Brits' into suicide bombers? Of course not but lets not pretend that by swallowing the us and them line that all governments follow when they try to squirm out of problems of their own making, makes it any safer for the rest of us. You want context, you want analysis, you want intelligent debate, you want understanding, you want answers? Don't tune in to BBC Breakfast for fuck's sake.
Like most of the people who bother to write in to Points Of View (have you heard their voices?), these people live in a cultural void; the vapid, featureless, identity free sprawl of Nowheresville UK. They therefore cling desperately to anything that gives their mundane lives some sense of meaning. For many this manifests itself in an exaggerated, malignant patriotism and a romantic (and ultimately fictitious) notion of 'Britishness' and its supposed virtues - y'know the usual bullshit: tolerance, fair-play, a sense of humour and decency. That these people are almost always the least tolerant, fair-minded, humorous or decent people on God's green earth never seems to diminish their sense of self-delusion.
BBC Breakfast people infact. GMTV with its crass mix of dumb celebrity lead features and Chat magazine freak tales, gets a different audience altogether. These people don't vote, they don't spend, they are essentially non-people. The Breakfast brigade, however, these people MATTER. They are the so-called 'silent majority' who never fucking shut up. They are not the ageing array of blue-rinsed bigots that now form the rump of what's left of old school Conservatism, no these are 'consumers,' they are 'tax payers' and 'licence fee payers' and dammit, they've been taken for granted for far too long! They have rights and they have power. They're fed up of their tiny share of GDP being constantly under threat from the massed ranks of evil scroungers and miscreants intent on destroying the very fabric of their non-descript B&Q and Blockbuster lives. Gypsies and junkies, migrants and militants, single mothers and suicide bombers; they want what's mine, what's ours by birth, as Englishmen, as wealth creators, as voters in a 'liberal democracy (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean). Their tolerance is defined as the ability to withstand the occupancy of this island with people of colour without resorting to burning them in their sleep or trucking them off to be gassed, as less civilised and fair-minded folk would do.
They are Bill Turnbull's maggot offspring still gorging on the rancid corpse of Empire, feeding their polluted guts on Churchill and Wellington and Nelson and Drake and Beckham and Branson and Blair and Bono and Johnny and Tim and plucky little Paula and (sssh black lesbian) Kelly. They sit in the M&S café and swap house prices, they listen to Coldplay CDs on the car stereo, they go to watch Robbie as a couple and dress at Gap and H&M. They are England Fans with England shirts and England flags and they whoop and shout "Coooooome on England!" because to be a patriot in one's own country is the easiest thing in the world. They believe in nothing because they have experienced nothing and so they can't understand anyone who possesses what used to be called 'idealism'.
Theirs is an abstract and sanitised patriotism and it's one that has been largely fostered by the BBC , who's propagandist function has always been (whatever the right wing press say) to uphold the interests of the establishment, because they are part of the system, funded by the system, controlled by and populated by the system. In BBCLand we're all just one big happy Tru-Brit family; Last Night Of The Proms, Trooping The Colour, The Boat Race, The Grand National, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon, the test match (highlights on the news or listen to 5Live)., the FA Cup final, Only Fools & Horses, Dad's Army, the Two Ronnies, Lenny Henry, Have I Got News For You, They Think It's All Over, Question Time, Dimbleby's Portrait Of Britain, Coast, Simon Schama, Jools Holland, Blue Peter, Horse Of The Year Show, Edinburgh Tattoo, State Opening Of Parliament, VE/VJ Day, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 anniversaries, the Queen's Jubilee, the Queen's birthday, the Queen's minor illnesses, royal birthdays, royal funerals, royal marriages, royal funding (only 61 per day folks - cheaper than a loaf of bread!!).
It's enough to turn anyone into a suicide bomber. Get this suckers, England doesn't exist. It's a made up place, same as every other country. There is no English race just as there is no white race, or black race or any other race. Trace your ancestry back far enough and we're all just a monkey fuck in the jungle. Invent your own rituals if you like and your own religions and customs and laws and flags and live somewhere beyond the hills, over the plain, across the sea. Call it England or Israel or America or Japan or China or India or Iran. John Donne was wrong; every man is an island. Me, I know I probably share this crackpot view of the world with 0.1% of humanity but that suits me fine. You want to get wrapped up in phoney notions of culture and ethnicity? Go visit Auschwitz and see where that gets you.
The young suicide bombers who attacked London believed in another system, another way of life, another state-less state of being altogether. A hundred years a go they would have been called anarchists or communists. You might not agree with their aims or their methods, but you can't deny them their ideology. If the BBC reporters who covered the bombings couldn't grasp or even seek to understand this, then perhaps the problem is with them, more than anyone else. Just as the BBC apologised after 911 when 'uppity Asian/Arab' members of the audience on Question Time tried to put into context the reasons that may have lead the plane hijackers to perform their murderous deeds. It's Israel stooped! No, the state only wants debate on its own terms otherwise it's 'my country right or wrong' and 'treason trial' time.
60 years ago when idealistic young men from across the globe went off to Spain to fight fascist Franco in the International Brigades, they did so because they felt united by a common brotherhood, a shared political cause. They joined up to fight the oppressor, a cabal of tyrants intent of imposing their twisted idea of culture upon others. Young men always want causes to believe in and fight for, which is why suicide bombers, who should be over-60 years of age to qualify, are almost always below the age of 25. They see their martyrdom and the death of 'infidels' as a noble and honourable path to paradise. Whether or not they acted out of a twisted interpretation of the Koran or more non-spiritual political beliefs, they wanted to do their bit for the cause. Like it or not, no-one wakes up one morning and decides, 'think I'll go and blow myself up on the tube for a laugh.'
The likes of Bobby Sands and IRA hunger strikers of the 70s were also prepared to die for their beliefs and were also ridiculed and demonised at the time. Silly boys having their minds twisted by evil men who never risk their own lives for the cause. That was how it was seen and perhaps there's even an element of truth in it. Our school was one long Bobby Sands joke but, when alls said and done, this young man starved himself to death for a free Ireland. The ultimate irony is of course that martyrs never see their dreams realised and Bobby and co would no doubt be appalled to see their sacrifices wasted on some inter-government carve up between Dublin and London. As de Beauvoir put it; 'If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat'. All causes end in either compromise or capitulation. Old men know this, which is why they don't sign up for Paradise backpacks. Idealism's a young man's game but what we need to recognise is the reasons why people think the way they do and how both government and the media must accept responsibility for shaping the dominant cultural forces that enable society to become polarised, divided and antagonistic.
I'm proud of being a northerner with all the abstract geographical, cultural and political baggage that word entails. It's not a conscious thing really, just a feeling of difference, of otherness to 'southerners.' Humans are tribal animals and if differences between us didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. You follow the reds, I'll follow the blues, you like that music, I'll like this music, you wear those clothes, I'll wear these clothes. Each to their own. Englishness and Britishness isn't something you sign up to. I wouldn't sign up to one of New Labour's preposterous 'Loyalty' oaths so why should anyone else?
My notion of who I am and where I fit into the world around me may be not be shared by anyone at the BBC but then the BBC is a self-perpetuating, closed shop of Oxbridge mediocrity, that engenders a distorted vision of Britain based upon its own bourgeois prejudices. Take their current 'the accent is on Voices' campaign for example. Even when the BBC tries to be inclusive and recognise that there are many and various aspects of Britishness, it still manages to fuck it up by getting getting a bunch of nobs from marketing to put on ridiculous 'regional' accents. It's almost as funny as those Fast Show 'We're Cockneys/Geordies/Yardies' sketches. The same patronising, paternalist attitude that condescendingly states 'and now the news and weather where YOU live.'
Greg Dyke said that the BBC was hideously white but he missed the whole point. It doesn't matter if the BBC becomes less white if its intake still comes from the same social and economic backgrounds. Just because Blue Peter has an Asian and a Geordie presenter doesn't make it any less hideously middle class. Were the BBC responsible for turning five young black and Asian young 'Brits' into suicide bombers? Of course not but lets not pretend that by swallowing the us and them line that all governments follow when they try to squirm out of problems of their own making, makes it any safer for the rest of us. You want context, you want analysis, you want intelligent debate, you want understanding, you want answers? Don't tune in to BBC Breakfast for fuck's sake.
Tuesday 14 July 2009
In the Noughties....
“In the city theres a thousand faces all shining bright, And each one of those faces is under 25! “
Or so Paul Weller said before he became some beaut running around the New forest in a loin cloth for a Style Council sleeve. But it did get me thinking about my own age. Now going on into my late twenties and I’ve got to look at the facts that im not exactly a youth anymore. Which kind of saddens me. Not because I’m terrified of the inevitable approach of the big 3-Oh as some whoppers are probably going to keep on telling me for the next few months but because I missed out on having my own youth culture of my own. Whilst some had mods, rockers, skinheads, punk, northern soul, warehouse parties etc etc What did I have? Coldplay and the fucking Kooks? Wise up.
But then looking back, I always did feel a bit out of sync with everyone else in my demographic. The noughties, the decade of believing anything FHM told you. Shocking state of affairs really. Even the name seems like some sort of focus group, committee decided marketing name. “Welcome to The Noughties. Its young, fresh, modern, urban, cool and best of all, sounds a bit like Naughty.” Sadly many took the bait. I seemed to be surrounding by clueless types who thought Robbie Williams was cool And I know other decades were full of whoppers as well but at least there seemed to be an alternative, an underground to seek refuge in. Yet I live in the age where Girls Aloud sang “Sound of the Underground” without a hint of Irony. They’re about as underground as your average 747.
However it did get me thinking about the things I never did and hopefully I didn’t make too much of a tit out myself. Then again there is still just under half a year left to make amends.
But, hey, I shouldn’t dwell on it too much. So I didn’t go fighting rockers along beach fronts on bank holidays, spend all night gurning at Shoom or become king of the terraces in my Hi-Tech Silver Shadows, at least I never had a spice boy haircut.
Things I've never done during the Noughties
Had a Toni & Guys special.
I must have missed a meeting but somehow becoming a hairdresser, not a barber but a hairdresser mind, has become a manly occupation. And having a haircut named after part of London is apparently the “In” thing to do. The Hoxton Finn, The Barnet barnet, The Camden Twat. Now I’m not trying to say that silly haircuts were the preserve of the Noughties, but there is a difference between gelling your hair into a slick back or a home bleaching and spending 50 quid to have a consulatation with Anton who suggested you should get a Shoreditch Mong which will cost you another 60 quid but don’t worry you’ll get a free head massage from the 17 year old trainee, you sexual deviant.
Voted on Big Brother
Or any other reality TV show for that matter, because frankly in the great scheme of things IT DOESN’T MATTER!!! The only time I would ever text in or press the red button is if it would lead to the release of a pack of rabid hounds, who had been starved half mad, into the house. If they survived that then they deserve their 70 grand cheque.
Bought into the whole Metrosexuality con
Ohh Fat Frankie Lampard waxes his armpits. Oooh men wearing eyeliner.
Ooooh men straightening their hair. Oooooooh, could you all go away and die please and we’ll use the money you vain tarts use to preen yourself on something more useful instead.
Been to a Starbucks.
Once had a conversation with one of those boring people who insist on telling you how sodding Green they are and how they are “sooooo against globalisation and have watched Supersize me like 30 times,” all the while he was drinking a Starbucks coffee. Its like the posh kid from Eton who got nicked at the May Day riots in London a few years back for smashin up a MacDonalds. Or the fact Banksy is a public schoolboy. What also bugs me is how they don’t stick to their own little Wi-Fied up caffeine speakeasies, tip tapping away on their laptops in an attempt to seem important. We now have to put up with coffee bores who insist on making queues at Greggs longer than necessary by ordering a double mocca, chocca, frig-a-chino with soya milk and hazlenuts at ten to eight in the morning. Behave yourself, I’m trying to buy a steak slice before I go to work.
Joined Bebo
Or as it should really be known, Bebophile. Social networking for sexual predators.
End of story.
Wore a trackie top with the name of a fictitious US Mid-West Univeristy on it
We’ve all seen them. People walking around with a zip up trackie top with some crap like Michigan State Cougars ’79 or Boston French Ticklers ‘77 blazoned across the chest. What the hell does that mean?? I know that it means. What it means is that you’re bird chooses you’re clothes for you, you GAP clad automaton. Here’s an idea, get your girlfriends handbag, have a rummaged around inside until you find your testicles and go and buy something a bit smarter, you’re almost 30 you scruff.
Enjoyed the music of Robbie Williams
The mere sight of this object gets me into a ranting rage. If I was to ever meet him I would set his face on fire and then put it out with a golf shoe, and then repeat the process ad nauseam. He’s not the entertainer, he’s a prick. Look at when Take That made a come back with their Morrisons-hawking anthem Shine and were getting the dubious honour of Brit awards etc. This no mark is so desperate for attention that he would elicit pity from people by booking himself into rehab for… Caffeine addiction. Oooh, I drink too much red bull and espressos, give me some sympathy please.
Robbie here is some advice for you. Dry your eyes, get your glad rags on, get yourself down the docks and get yourself a big strapping stoker from the coast of Kuala Lumpar and you’ll feel a whole lot better.
Worn a scarf indoors
My mate is in a couple of bands which means over the years I have been in and around the local music venues to lend my support. And I have seen what has to be one of the most arsey fashion styles in a while, wearing a scarf indoors. I’ve seen them with their Shoreditch mong haircuts, t-shirts that are a little too tight and bootcut jeans. And to top it all off they are wearing aviator shades and a scarf. If its cold enough to be wearing a scarf then may I suggest putting on a jumper, or possibly a jacket. The secret of staying warm is layers.
Sat and watched an episode of Sex and The City in order to get my Nat King Cole
Boyfriends, husband, lovers, backdoor men, and “friends” who live in the hope that one day the object of their affections will get drunk enough and/ or feel sorry enough for them to sleep with them. If any of you have thought that sitting through this will help you’re chances, you should hang your head in shame. This show has to be the zenith of “aspirational” programming which has clogged our airwaves in the noughties. Whilst crap like Footballers wives is easy to dismiss due to it being, well, crap, this comes with an amount of credence which is dangerous. But I’ll ask you this. Why would I want the women in my life to aspire to be anything like those Harpies on that show. Vapid, self obsessed, vain etc etc need I go on?
“But Paul, it completely revolutionised how many women are portrayed on TV. Women who were usually cast as sex object are now the ones talking about the sex, bladebladeblah…”
No it didn’t. All this nonsense was created by a rather skilled marketing executive who had the difficult brief of selling the exploits of over privileged, over sexed Manhattan socialites to the world. Let’s look at the facts. All the women in that show are obsessed with shoes and clothes and all the women in that show constantly talk about men. Oh yeah, I see how they’ve revolutionised TV by changing absolutely nothing. So now they put some low level soft porn smut in and I’m meant to be shocked. Come to some of the boozers round my gaff. The barmaids say things that would make Caligula blush never mind that bird out of Mannequin.
Read Harry Potter
Lets get this straight. That is a children’s book you are reading. And buying the adults copy without the cartoon pictures on the cover doesn’t make it any better. The thing that bugs me is that its just people buying what their told to buy. “Oh yes, I heard it on GMTV and This Morning that many grown ups read this gash so its perfectly okay”. And I particularly hate people who advertise the fact they read Harry Potter by reading it on the bus to work. I have not worked out how I am going to combat this yet but have thought of two plans. Plan A, the next time somebody pulls out a couple of Harry Potter and the Homoerotic subtext (think about it. He hits puberty, discovers he’s “different” from everyone else and doesn’t have to live in the “closet” under the stairs anymore) I will sit right next to them and pull out a copy of Spot the Dog. Or Plan B, I will pull out a couple of Razzle and calmly explain that since there are reading a children’s book, my reading material has to be of a highly adult nature to level things out.
Or so Paul Weller said before he became some beaut running around the New forest in a loin cloth for a Style Council sleeve. But it did get me thinking about my own age. Now going on into my late twenties and I’ve got to look at the facts that im not exactly a youth anymore. Which kind of saddens me. Not because I’m terrified of the inevitable approach of the big 3-Oh as some whoppers are probably going to keep on telling me for the next few months but because I missed out on having my own youth culture of my own. Whilst some had mods, rockers, skinheads, punk, northern soul, warehouse parties etc etc What did I have? Coldplay and the fucking Kooks? Wise up.
But then looking back, I always did feel a bit out of sync with everyone else in my demographic. The noughties, the decade of believing anything FHM told you. Shocking state of affairs really. Even the name seems like some sort of focus group, committee decided marketing name. “Welcome to The Noughties. Its young, fresh, modern, urban, cool and best of all, sounds a bit like Naughty.” Sadly many took the bait. I seemed to be surrounding by clueless types who thought Robbie Williams was cool And I know other decades were full of whoppers as well but at least there seemed to be an alternative, an underground to seek refuge in. Yet I live in the age where Girls Aloud sang “Sound of the Underground” without a hint of Irony. They’re about as underground as your average 747.
However it did get me thinking about the things I never did and hopefully I didn’t make too much of a tit out myself. Then again there is still just under half a year left to make amends.
But, hey, I shouldn’t dwell on it too much. So I didn’t go fighting rockers along beach fronts on bank holidays, spend all night gurning at Shoom or become king of the terraces in my Hi-Tech Silver Shadows, at least I never had a spice boy haircut.
Things I've never done during the Noughties
Had a Toni & Guys special.
I must have missed a meeting but somehow becoming a hairdresser, not a barber but a hairdresser mind, has become a manly occupation. And having a haircut named after part of London is apparently the “In” thing to do. The Hoxton Finn, The Barnet barnet, The Camden Twat. Now I’m not trying to say that silly haircuts were the preserve of the Noughties, but there is a difference between gelling your hair into a slick back or a home bleaching and spending 50 quid to have a consulatation with Anton who suggested you should get a Shoreditch Mong which will cost you another 60 quid but don’t worry you’ll get a free head massage from the 17 year old trainee, you sexual deviant.
Voted on Big Brother
Or any other reality TV show for that matter, because frankly in the great scheme of things IT DOESN’T MATTER!!! The only time I would ever text in or press the red button is if it would lead to the release of a pack of rabid hounds, who had been starved half mad, into the house. If they survived that then they deserve their 70 grand cheque.
Bought into the whole Metrosexuality con
Ohh Fat Frankie Lampard waxes his armpits. Oooh men wearing eyeliner.
Ooooh men straightening their hair. Oooooooh, could you all go away and die please and we’ll use the money you vain tarts use to preen yourself on something more useful instead.
Been to a Starbucks.
Once had a conversation with one of those boring people who insist on telling you how sodding Green they are and how they are “sooooo against globalisation and have watched Supersize me like 30 times,” all the while he was drinking a Starbucks coffee. Its like the posh kid from Eton who got nicked at the May Day riots in London a few years back for smashin up a MacDonalds. Or the fact Banksy is a public schoolboy. What also bugs me is how they don’t stick to their own little Wi-Fied up caffeine speakeasies, tip tapping away on their laptops in an attempt to seem important. We now have to put up with coffee bores who insist on making queues at Greggs longer than necessary by ordering a double mocca, chocca, frig-a-chino with soya milk and hazlenuts at ten to eight in the morning. Behave yourself, I’m trying to buy a steak slice before I go to work.
Joined Bebo
Or as it should really be known, Bebophile. Social networking for sexual predators.
End of story.
Wore a trackie top with the name of a fictitious US Mid-West Univeristy on it
We’ve all seen them. People walking around with a zip up trackie top with some crap like Michigan State Cougars ’79 or Boston French Ticklers ‘77 blazoned across the chest. What the hell does that mean?? I know that it means. What it means is that you’re bird chooses you’re clothes for you, you GAP clad automaton. Here’s an idea, get your girlfriends handbag, have a rummaged around inside until you find your testicles and go and buy something a bit smarter, you’re almost 30 you scruff.
Enjoyed the music of Robbie Williams
The mere sight of this object gets me into a ranting rage. If I was to ever meet him I would set his face on fire and then put it out with a golf shoe, and then repeat the process ad nauseam. He’s not the entertainer, he’s a prick. Look at when Take That made a come back with their Morrisons-hawking anthem Shine and were getting the dubious honour of Brit awards etc. This no mark is so desperate for attention that he would elicit pity from people by booking himself into rehab for… Caffeine addiction. Oooh, I drink too much red bull and espressos, give me some sympathy please.
Robbie here is some advice for you. Dry your eyes, get your glad rags on, get yourself down the docks and get yourself a big strapping stoker from the coast of Kuala Lumpar and you’ll feel a whole lot better.
Worn a scarf indoors
My mate is in a couple of bands which means over the years I have been in and around the local music venues to lend my support. And I have seen what has to be one of the most arsey fashion styles in a while, wearing a scarf indoors. I’ve seen them with their Shoreditch mong haircuts, t-shirts that are a little too tight and bootcut jeans. And to top it all off they are wearing aviator shades and a scarf. If its cold enough to be wearing a scarf then may I suggest putting on a jumper, or possibly a jacket. The secret of staying warm is layers.
Sat and watched an episode of Sex and The City in order to get my Nat King Cole
Boyfriends, husband, lovers, backdoor men, and “friends” who live in the hope that one day the object of their affections will get drunk enough and/ or feel sorry enough for them to sleep with them. If any of you have thought that sitting through this will help you’re chances, you should hang your head in shame. This show has to be the zenith of “aspirational” programming which has clogged our airwaves in the noughties. Whilst crap like Footballers wives is easy to dismiss due to it being, well, crap, this comes with an amount of credence which is dangerous. But I’ll ask you this. Why would I want the women in my life to aspire to be anything like those Harpies on that show. Vapid, self obsessed, vain etc etc need I go on?
“But Paul, it completely revolutionised how many women are portrayed on TV. Women who were usually cast as sex object are now the ones talking about the sex, bladebladeblah…”
No it didn’t. All this nonsense was created by a rather skilled marketing executive who had the difficult brief of selling the exploits of over privileged, over sexed Manhattan socialites to the world. Let’s look at the facts. All the women in that show are obsessed with shoes and clothes and all the women in that show constantly talk about men. Oh yeah, I see how they’ve revolutionised TV by changing absolutely nothing. So now they put some low level soft porn smut in and I’m meant to be shocked. Come to some of the boozers round my gaff. The barmaids say things that would make Caligula blush never mind that bird out of Mannequin.
Read Harry Potter
Lets get this straight. That is a children’s book you are reading. And buying the adults copy without the cartoon pictures on the cover doesn’t make it any better. The thing that bugs me is that its just people buying what their told to buy. “Oh yes, I heard it on GMTV and This Morning that many grown ups read this gash so its perfectly okay”. And I particularly hate people who advertise the fact they read Harry Potter by reading it on the bus to work. I have not worked out how I am going to combat this yet but have thought of two plans. Plan A, the next time somebody pulls out a couple of Harry Potter and the Homoerotic subtext (think about it. He hits puberty, discovers he’s “different” from everyone else and doesn’t have to live in the “closet” under the stairs anymore) I will sit right next to them and pull out a copy of Spot the Dog. Or Plan B, I will pull out a couple of Razzle and calmly explain that since there are reading a children’s book, my reading material has to be of a highly adult nature to level things out.
Ant & Dec or out on the lash..
I have a theory that binge drinking in this country is not the result of an unhealthy attitude towards alcohol and intoxication which is exacerbated with draconian and patronising licensing laws, and amplified by the greed of developers and local authorities that have turned almost every city centre and market town into carbon copy plastic toy towns full of modern day gin palaces and tots in pink polo tops. No, its because Saturday night telly is rubbish. They talk about TV dumbing down but its been braindead on a Saturday for years. Talk about insulting your intelligence though, this continual stream of dross gives your intelligence a good kicking, nicks its wallet and throws its keys down a drain.
Hole in the wall? We actually think this is entertainment now, watching ex soap stars and z listers being pushed into water by a foam wall?? Run an electrical current throw the water and then it’d be entertaining, then I’d watch. Then you have the National lottery Quiz show, as if anyone tuning into the National lottery wants to see some nerk from Northampton win 50grand. In fact the last time I saw this program a woman answered this question “What B is the capital of Argentina?” She said “Brazil” I threw my trainer at the telly. And its not much better on the other side with family fortunes. But now its All Star family fortunes and its presented by professional northerner Vernon Kaye who takes his Brucey impersonation too far, but its okay because he knows he is and its all post modern, so don’t worry about it.
However its not all bad though. You do get the comic genius of Harry Hills TV Burp. Yes, I know its not Curb your enthusiasm but it makes me laugh, a lot. And then you have the One Shows Christine Bleakley in a revealing samba outfit on Strictly come dancing ( I would do shameful and terrible deeds for that woman).
It just mystifies me how cavalier the attitude of TV producers must be towards their audience to put this much brain rotting, soul destroying crap over the airwaves. Why they think people want to watch “stars” such as Gemma Atkinsons sister in law win a luxury spa day is beyond me, but then again people must be watching it and that’s why they are TV producers and I’m not. They must be sat down in their glass fronted office towers laughing at how the proles will watch anything they splash out at them. But the very worst one has to be the X-Factor, a show so ludicrous and tacky that the attempted piss take by Peter Kaye recently fell flat on its comedic harris because the fact of the matter is, you would have gotten more (albeit unintentional) laughs watching an episode of the X Factor.
Simon Cowell. He sits and listens, pulls a face, abruptly stops someone who is in obvious need of professional psychological assistance, gives them his pre written piercing jibe and another little bit of both him dies on the inside. The only reason I can see why he goes through his pantomime villain act every week is because he enjoys it, which speaks volumes about the man. But it’s the whole sham of it which offends me, and yes I do feel offended by their lies. He’s a salesmen who knows what he can sell, how he can sell it and who he can sell it to. Yet, he sits and judges them upon their singing ability. This coming from the man who gave us the musical detritus that is Boyzone. This coming from the man who gave us the musical equivalent of cod liver oil, Westlife. This coming from the man who gave us the WWF Superstars!!
Louis Walsh. Spends far too much time around publicity hungry teenage boys with silly haircuts for my liking. God knows what laws he’s broken in the confines of his record company office. And I don’t mean the criminal laws of the land, but the very laws of nature them self. He manages Westlife apparently and no group of people can be so squeaky clean without having some really dark secrets to hide. Now I want to make it clear I’m only speculating but I wouldn’t be shocked if there was ash trays made from human hands, a makeshift opium den and an altar for a black mass on the Westlife tour bus. I reckon Louis has been through that scene near the start of Godfather 2 more times than his immortal soul would bear to remember. Just take a moment and hear his soft Irish lilt saying the words “Its okay, this girl had no family, we’ll take of it, no one will even notice she’s gone missing…” Doesn’t seem so far fetched does it??
Dan… Danni… Danni Mino… Nope, just can’t say her name with a straight face. Just sit for a minute and ask yourself “What is Dannii Minogues most famous song?” I just did, writing this, and I’ve got to admit I don’t have a Scooby doo either. Primarily famous for being outshone by her sister for almost the last 20 years and she has the gall to sit in front of people and tell them they’re not good enough. Freud would have a field day with that one. She didn’t even have the bottle to chin Sharon Osbourne, Cheryl on the other hand would have knocked her spark out. The only thing she has done of any note in recent years is getting a lap dance, which leaves me with all I can say about her “Dip me in honey throw me to the Lesbians.”
Cheryl Cole. What a horrible, vacuous, incubus of a human being she is. I wish she would just disappear back from whatever BMWs back seat she rolled off of in the first place. From Pop Wannabe to WAG in five easy steps via some toilet based assault , but now her high heels are Jimmy Choos and they’re hanging out of a Lexus’ window instead of a 5th hand beamer. Her only plus point is she got rid of Sharon Osbounre, who somehow made a career out of being half pissed and patronising people, but thats her only plus point. She sits and performs every cliché she can think of from sassy attitude to crying at every sob story in a desperate attempt to win the hearts of the public. I don’t know why these celebrities always want to win the publics hearts, I’ve met the public and they’re pricks for the most part ( Sorry that’s a lie. I know why they want to win our hearts by ballroom dancing in the jungle, its so they can get that lucrative Iceland advertising contract, hawking frozen fish and chicken dippers and maybe a recurring spot on Loose Women) And if that’s not bad enough, its on twice on the same bloody night and repeated the next sodding day!! That’s its, I’m away out to get pissed.
Hole in the wall? We actually think this is entertainment now, watching ex soap stars and z listers being pushed into water by a foam wall?? Run an electrical current throw the water and then it’d be entertaining, then I’d watch. Then you have the National lottery Quiz show, as if anyone tuning into the National lottery wants to see some nerk from Northampton win 50grand. In fact the last time I saw this program a woman answered this question “What B is the capital of Argentina?” She said “Brazil” I threw my trainer at the telly. And its not much better on the other side with family fortunes. But now its All Star family fortunes and its presented by professional northerner Vernon Kaye who takes his Brucey impersonation too far, but its okay because he knows he is and its all post modern, so don’t worry about it.
However its not all bad though. You do get the comic genius of Harry Hills TV Burp. Yes, I know its not Curb your enthusiasm but it makes me laugh, a lot. And then you have the One Shows Christine Bleakley in a revealing samba outfit on Strictly come dancing ( I would do shameful and terrible deeds for that woman).
It just mystifies me how cavalier the attitude of TV producers must be towards their audience to put this much brain rotting, soul destroying crap over the airwaves. Why they think people want to watch “stars” such as Gemma Atkinsons sister in law win a luxury spa day is beyond me, but then again people must be watching it and that’s why they are TV producers and I’m not. They must be sat down in their glass fronted office towers laughing at how the proles will watch anything they splash out at them. But the very worst one has to be the X-Factor, a show so ludicrous and tacky that the attempted piss take by Peter Kaye recently fell flat on its comedic harris because the fact of the matter is, you would have gotten more (albeit unintentional) laughs watching an episode of the X Factor.
Simon Cowell. He sits and listens, pulls a face, abruptly stops someone who is in obvious need of professional psychological assistance, gives them his pre written piercing jibe and another little bit of both him dies on the inside. The only reason I can see why he goes through his pantomime villain act every week is because he enjoys it, which speaks volumes about the man. But it’s the whole sham of it which offends me, and yes I do feel offended by their lies. He’s a salesmen who knows what he can sell, how he can sell it and who he can sell it to. Yet, he sits and judges them upon their singing ability. This coming from the man who gave us the musical detritus that is Boyzone. This coming from the man who gave us the musical equivalent of cod liver oil, Westlife. This coming from the man who gave us the WWF Superstars!!
Louis Walsh. Spends far too much time around publicity hungry teenage boys with silly haircuts for my liking. God knows what laws he’s broken in the confines of his record company office. And I don’t mean the criminal laws of the land, but the very laws of nature them self. He manages Westlife apparently and no group of people can be so squeaky clean without having some really dark secrets to hide. Now I want to make it clear I’m only speculating but I wouldn’t be shocked if there was ash trays made from human hands, a makeshift opium den and an altar for a black mass on the Westlife tour bus. I reckon Louis has been through that scene near the start of Godfather 2 more times than his immortal soul would bear to remember. Just take a moment and hear his soft Irish lilt saying the words “Its okay, this girl had no family, we’ll take of it, no one will even notice she’s gone missing…” Doesn’t seem so far fetched does it??
Dan… Danni… Danni Mino… Nope, just can’t say her name with a straight face. Just sit for a minute and ask yourself “What is Dannii Minogues most famous song?” I just did, writing this, and I’ve got to admit I don’t have a Scooby doo either. Primarily famous for being outshone by her sister for almost the last 20 years and she has the gall to sit in front of people and tell them they’re not good enough. Freud would have a field day with that one. She didn’t even have the bottle to chin Sharon Osbourne, Cheryl on the other hand would have knocked her spark out. The only thing she has done of any note in recent years is getting a lap dance, which leaves me with all I can say about her “Dip me in honey throw me to the Lesbians.”
Cheryl Cole. What a horrible, vacuous, incubus of a human being she is. I wish she would just disappear back from whatever BMWs back seat she rolled off of in the first place. From Pop Wannabe to WAG in five easy steps via some toilet based assault , but now her high heels are Jimmy Choos and they’re hanging out of a Lexus’ window instead of a 5th hand beamer. Her only plus point is she got rid of Sharon Osbounre, who somehow made a career out of being half pissed and patronising people, but thats her only plus point. She sits and performs every cliché she can think of from sassy attitude to crying at every sob story in a desperate attempt to win the hearts of the public. I don’t know why these celebrities always want to win the publics hearts, I’ve met the public and they’re pricks for the most part ( Sorry that’s a lie. I know why they want to win our hearts by ballroom dancing in the jungle, its so they can get that lucrative Iceland advertising contract, hawking frozen fish and chicken dippers and maybe a recurring spot on Loose Women) And if that’s not bad enough, its on twice on the same bloody night and repeated the next sodding day!! That’s its, I’m away out to get pissed.
Through The Wire..
The end of the football season is always a time of ambivalence. On the one hand, it’s a relief to be off the treadmill for a while - a break from organising our lives around the match and draining our finances accordingly. On the other, you soon long for the routine of the match and the publication of the fixture list is greeted with the same level of gratitude a junkie has for their fix. But when The Sopranos finished on E4, there were no such mixed emotions and wailing and gnashing of teeth was heard from Bootle to Kirkby. As the best television series in history is no more, many Shitbookers will be wondering what can fill the space in their lives left by the departure of T and the boys. Let’s face it, nothing out there even comes close to replacing the tales of New Jersey’s finest. Apart from one programme - The Wire on BBC 2. The Wire is ostensibly about ‘the game’ - drug dealing and hustling in Baltimore - and explores all the different groups that affect and are affected by it - police, drug dealers, trade unions, school kids and law-abiding citizens. But, as with all great television, it deals with far more complex and wide-reaching issues. Made by HBO, the cable network behind The Sopranos, The Wire is just as brutally realistic and multi-layered with some columnists believing it to be an even better programme. They argue The Sopranos experienced some dips in quality (especially in the Kevin Finerty episodes) whereas The Wire has maintained an almost impossibly high standard over four seasons. Much like in The Sopranos, no character in The Wire is straightforwardly good or bad. The police can be despicable both in their motives and actions and even the cold-blooded, predatory Omar occasionally reveals a softer side. Or as soft a side as somebody who robs drug dealers with a sawn-off shotgun for a living can have. Each collective is flawed, all of them embody the expression ‘money flows uphill, shit flows down.’ The police get fucked over by their superiors and justice falls by the wayside in the quest for better statistics to appease the Mayor; for the drug dealers, the runners and look-outs are expendable commodities and loyalty is conditional - conditional upon it not costing them money; and the trade unions lose sight of what’s important and become little more than glorified gangsters. Expediency and buck-passing are characteristics uniting all these groups but they somehow manage to stick together even when falling apart. The Wire and its cast have a list of collective and individual awards to rival United and Ferguson's. Time magazine, the American Film Institute and the New York Post have all honoured the programme and English broadsheets, particularly The Guardian, have been unremittingly effusive in their praise. Although it may seem unbelievable, the programme has come close to being cancelled. Like Arrested Development, disgracefully cancelled after three seasons, The Wire may be too complex and the seasons too long to keep the attention of the fair-weather viewers who want nothing more from television than a chance to switch their brains off for an hour or so. If that’s what they are looking for, they are definitely watching the wrong show. The Wire knows exactly where it is going and takes its time getting there. This allows the characters to develop fully, meaning you actually care about what happens to them. Chief writer David Simon often refers to it as a visual novel and its ability to genuinely engage and provoke visceral reactions at the plot’s twists and turns is more synonymous with literature than television. Much of this is down to the fact the characters are not cliches or stereotypes. Stringer Bell, for example, is definitely not a typical gangster. Eschewing the posturing and mindless violence of his contemporaries, Bell is a successful business student who reads Adam Smith, talks of market saturation and applies the same detached criteria to the drugs trade as he does to his college assignments. Bell’s nemesis Omar Little is the only homosexual character in The Wire but is far too terrifying for any of his enemies to perceive this is a weakness. He is scared of nobody, does not respect reputations and everything - murder, theft - is “all in the game.” His signature look is a trench-coat and a sawn off. Lead character Jimmy McNulty is part of the police force charged with bringing down Bell and his crew. American-Irish (“Can I have a Jameson’s please?” “We’ve only got Bushmills” “Isn’t that Protestant whisky?”), he regularly practices what George Best referred to as “the three Irish F’s - fucking, fighting and fucking drinking.” He is egotistical, selfish, incapable of monogamy, narcissistic and self-destructive. But never unlovable and certainly never less than compelling. In The Wire, The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO possess the Best, Law and Charlton of US TV, with the sublime Entourage taking the Paddy Crerand role of cult hero. Readers of Swine, take my advice. Get down to HMV and invest in the box sets immediately. You have nothing to lose but your social life.
FIVE ACE SCENES - McNulty and Bunk’s unique two-minute assessment of a crime scene - the dialogue? Purely the word ‘Fuck’ - used 35 times - Omar goes a huntin’ after Weebay - “Ayo, lesson here, Bay. You come at the King, you best not miss” - Landsman’s assessment of Bunk & Lester’s fashion sense - “pinstriped lawyerly affectations and brash tweedy impertinence” - Bubbs’ trip to Hamsterdam - so squalid you’ll want to take a shower immediately afterwards - The wake of a murder detective at a local bar with The Pogues’ The Body of an American playing in the background.
FIVE ACE SCENES - McNulty and Bunk’s unique two-minute assessment of a crime scene - the dialogue? Purely the word ‘Fuck’ - used 35 times - Omar goes a huntin’ after Weebay - “Ayo, lesson here, Bay. You come at the King, you best not miss” - Landsman’s assessment of Bunk & Lester’s fashion sense - “pinstriped lawyerly affectations and brash tweedy impertinence” - Bubbs’ trip to Hamsterdam - so squalid you’ll want to take a shower immediately afterwards - The wake of a murder detective at a local bar with The Pogues’ The Body of an American playing in the background.
These are the times...
What’s Eating Pew Pew Barney McGrew Cuthbert Dibble & Grub?
By Paul Sharkey
Pew
The BNP’s success in the north west and Yorkshire got a lot of press with both the right wing press and the so-called ‘liberal’ media elite (the Guardian/Radio 4 etc) blaming this squarely on the shoulders of the ‘poor white underclass’ who’s silly little heads have been turned by vile fascists reaping the rewards of MPs expenses anger and ‘mass immigration.’ And whilst there’s obviously an element of truth in this, what really allowed the BNP in is New Labour’s entire strategy since coming to power in 97. Put simply New Labour needed to win over the mass of upwardly mobile floating voters who in the past have voted Tory out of self-interest and natural bigotry. The traditional old Labour vote in the industrialized heartland were, as usual treated with a mixture of contempt and outright hostility during the early years of the Blairite regime. These people, these voters were expendable in the brave new world of ‘third way’ politics. It wasn’t about ‘left’ and ‘right’ anymore it was ‘occupying the centre ground. Even the Tories knew that their old rump of party activists were expendable as they too shifted towards the centre with family friendly policies rather than xenophobic bile. New Labour under Blair and Brown were desperate to seem business friendly and desperate to keep in with the press barons who could make life difficult for them. They therefore cut their political cloth according to the pattern of maggots like Murdoch and the Mail’s Paul Dacre.
Into this idealistic void, the BNP exploited sometimes legitimate but more often than not distorted and exaggerated complaints about the treatment of poor ‘whites’ compared to immigrants and ethnic minorities. The usual stuff’ ‘they’ get priority treatment for housing, ‘they’re taking all the jobs, ‘they’ got free mobile phones. When you’re bottom of the pile there’s a natural desire to blame others for your predicament but its never the right people who are targeted; never the industrialists, city boys and the political parasites who feed of them. The cunts who impoverish whole communities whole countries, whole continents at the flick of a switch, the push of a button, the stroke of a pen.
Ofcourse it’s in the ‘establishments’ interests to shift the blame away from themselves by such diversion tactics which is why the right wing press stoke up all these immigrant scare stories, feeding resentment and hatred. Rather than tackling the big issues of a globalised economy, Labour simply plays to Dacre’s tune, pacifying the Daily Mail set and abandoning their core support to the ravages of this gloriously flexible ‘free’ market they’re so fucking proud of.
Signing ‘Not In My Name’ petitions and lashing eggs at Nick Griffin may well register a token protest but it’s all too easy for the middle class media to make sweeping generalizations about the BNP’s support or the apathy of Labour’s once solid support with glib clichés and misrepresentations. Most people aren’t arsed about politics in the first place and voting for Labour or Tory is now almost the same thing, infact when the LibDems become the left wing choice, you know the system is now arse about face.
New Labour have pissed 13 years of power up the wall. Even when the financial crisis hit and they could’ve got away with a truly socialist programme, they bottled it and handed over trillions to bail out the city. Let then never again say ‘the country can’t afford decent pensions, health care, housing, transport’ and if we get a Tory government for another generation, never let them lay the blame at their traditional supporters who were once again shat on by the very people supposedly looking after their interests.
Pew
Hastily re-shot anti-bacterial spray adverts that now mention Swine Flu. Kills all known germs (Geordie accent) ‘INCLUDING SWINE FLU’ – dead!! First it was HIV/Aids (it’s never just aids now is it?), mad cow disease and bird flu that was going to kill everyone, now swine flu is the latest plague penciled in the wipe us all out. Makes you almost nostalgic for the the good old nuclear holocaust days.
Barney Mcgrew
Speaking of which…..North Korea! Kim Il Mad has taken over from Robert Mugabe as my favourite pint sized tyrant. He’s boss and atleast unlike those half arsed Iranians he’s actually got the capability to wipe out half the planet, which is why the Yanks play it all cagey and don’t dare invade as they did in Iraq, Afghanistan and those other two camels and a pea shooter countries. In the cold war days it was easy, ‘you nuke us, we nuke you’ but when the technology is in the hands of I dunno, crazy Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Stalinist nut jobs then hmmmm….maybe it’s time every fucker came to their senses. Non-proliferation treaties can’t and won’t alter the fact that human greed and idealism will use technology for evil purposes.
Cuthbert
Is shaving his hair and bleeching his teeth.
Dibble
Flip Flops eh? Soon as it goes over 60 degrees out they come, the meathead in flippies massive. Bald heads, ale guts, csrgo shorts, AX tee-shirts and designer flip flops sweatily sticking to their fat fucking kebs as they waddle down Bold St, mobile to ear loudly planning some bogus meet or transaction with some nugget sat somewhere in Concert Square with his top off and a pair of jarg Gucci shades glued to the top of his swede.
Grub
Spare us from aristocrats with a sense of social purpose. Prince Charles’s interventionist genes have been handed down to his alleged offspring with both Harry and Wills appearing in some ill conceived environmental charity advert dreamt up by their idle dumb daddy. ‘Saving the rainforest….for everyone!’ yah! Then Harry is whisked off to America to visit the site of 911 and is described on news bulletins as ‘a war veteran’ Ho Ho!! Next its Wills and Harry together posing in their pilots uniforms saying they want to fight on the frontline in time! IN TIME yah? Yah! In time for when the fucking war’s well and truly over. What an insult to those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan to describe Harry as a war veteran, what an insult to our intelligence to pretend they’g go anywhere near a real battle zone, what a disgrace that the BBC continue to plug these two vile morons and their idiotic aul fellar as upstanding champions of charity.
By Paul Sharkey
Pew
The BNP’s success in the north west and Yorkshire got a lot of press with both the right wing press and the so-called ‘liberal’ media elite (the Guardian/Radio 4 etc) blaming this squarely on the shoulders of the ‘poor white underclass’ who’s silly little heads have been turned by vile fascists reaping the rewards of MPs expenses anger and ‘mass immigration.’ And whilst there’s obviously an element of truth in this, what really allowed the BNP in is New Labour’s entire strategy since coming to power in 97. Put simply New Labour needed to win over the mass of upwardly mobile floating voters who in the past have voted Tory out of self-interest and natural bigotry. The traditional old Labour vote in the industrialized heartland were, as usual treated with a mixture of contempt and outright hostility during the early years of the Blairite regime. These people, these voters were expendable in the brave new world of ‘third way’ politics. It wasn’t about ‘left’ and ‘right’ anymore it was ‘occupying the centre ground. Even the Tories knew that their old rump of party activists were expendable as they too shifted towards the centre with family friendly policies rather than xenophobic bile. New Labour under Blair and Brown were desperate to seem business friendly and desperate to keep in with the press barons who could make life difficult for them. They therefore cut their political cloth according to the pattern of maggots like Murdoch and the Mail’s Paul Dacre.
Into this idealistic void, the BNP exploited sometimes legitimate but more often than not distorted and exaggerated complaints about the treatment of poor ‘whites’ compared to immigrants and ethnic minorities. The usual stuff’ ‘they’ get priority treatment for housing, ‘they’re taking all the jobs, ‘they’ got free mobile phones. When you’re bottom of the pile there’s a natural desire to blame others for your predicament but its never the right people who are targeted; never the industrialists, city boys and the political parasites who feed of them. The cunts who impoverish whole communities whole countries, whole continents at the flick of a switch, the push of a button, the stroke of a pen.
Ofcourse it’s in the ‘establishments’ interests to shift the blame away from themselves by such diversion tactics which is why the right wing press stoke up all these immigrant scare stories, feeding resentment and hatred. Rather than tackling the big issues of a globalised economy, Labour simply plays to Dacre’s tune, pacifying the Daily Mail set and abandoning their core support to the ravages of this gloriously flexible ‘free’ market they’re so fucking proud of.
Signing ‘Not In My Name’ petitions and lashing eggs at Nick Griffin may well register a token protest but it’s all too easy for the middle class media to make sweeping generalizations about the BNP’s support or the apathy of Labour’s once solid support with glib clichés and misrepresentations. Most people aren’t arsed about politics in the first place and voting for Labour or Tory is now almost the same thing, infact when the LibDems become the left wing choice, you know the system is now arse about face.
New Labour have pissed 13 years of power up the wall. Even when the financial crisis hit and they could’ve got away with a truly socialist programme, they bottled it and handed over trillions to bail out the city. Let then never again say ‘the country can’t afford decent pensions, health care, housing, transport’ and if we get a Tory government for another generation, never let them lay the blame at their traditional supporters who were once again shat on by the very people supposedly looking after their interests.
Pew
Hastily re-shot anti-bacterial spray adverts that now mention Swine Flu. Kills all known germs (Geordie accent) ‘INCLUDING SWINE FLU’ – dead!! First it was HIV/Aids (it’s never just aids now is it?), mad cow disease and bird flu that was going to kill everyone, now swine flu is the latest plague penciled in the wipe us all out. Makes you almost nostalgic for the the good old nuclear holocaust days.
Barney Mcgrew
Speaking of which…..North Korea! Kim Il Mad has taken over from Robert Mugabe as my favourite pint sized tyrant. He’s boss and atleast unlike those half arsed Iranians he’s actually got the capability to wipe out half the planet, which is why the Yanks play it all cagey and don’t dare invade as they did in Iraq, Afghanistan and those other two camels and a pea shooter countries. In the cold war days it was easy, ‘you nuke us, we nuke you’ but when the technology is in the hands of I dunno, crazy Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Stalinist nut jobs then hmmmm….maybe it’s time every fucker came to their senses. Non-proliferation treaties can’t and won’t alter the fact that human greed and idealism will use technology for evil purposes.
Cuthbert
Is shaving his hair and bleeching his teeth.
Dibble
Flip Flops eh? Soon as it goes over 60 degrees out they come, the meathead in flippies massive. Bald heads, ale guts, csrgo shorts, AX tee-shirts and designer flip flops sweatily sticking to their fat fucking kebs as they waddle down Bold St, mobile to ear loudly planning some bogus meet or transaction with some nugget sat somewhere in Concert Square with his top off and a pair of jarg Gucci shades glued to the top of his swede.
Grub
Spare us from aristocrats with a sense of social purpose. Prince Charles’s interventionist genes have been handed down to his alleged offspring with both Harry and Wills appearing in some ill conceived environmental charity advert dreamt up by their idle dumb daddy. ‘Saving the rainforest….for everyone!’ yah! Then Harry is whisked off to America to visit the site of 911 and is described on news bulletins as ‘a war veteran’ Ho Ho!! Next its Wills and Harry together posing in their pilots uniforms saying they want to fight on the frontline in time! IN TIME yah? Yah! In time for when the fucking war’s well and truly over. What an insult to those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan to describe Harry as a war veteran, what an insult to our intelligence to pretend they’g go anywhere near a real battle zone, what a disgrace that the BBC continue to plug these two vile morons and their idiotic aul fellar as upstanding champions of charity.
Thursday 9 July 2009
A list of things that make me smile...
My little princess Olivia x
Adidas Stockholm
The Wire
Gomorrah
Pink Floyd
Porridge with Ronny Barker
Lacoste Polo t shirts
The Sopranos
Kendall Ball & Harvey
Diadora Borg trabs
A Bacon barm with red sauce
CP Compnay Ice jackets
The Pink Panther
Miami Beach
The Park End
Bob Latchford
All dayer's on the ail & marching powder with your mates
Mikel Arteta
Larry David
Richard Prior
Sharp's goal at Anfield 84'
Adidas Mamba, Samba & Bamba
New York City
Sports Night
The Jam
The Golden Vision
Joy Division
The Grey Everton away top from the 83/84 season
Rigsby
Getting bladdered and re living tales of going to Town when you were 16.
Adidas Stockholm
The Wire
Gomorrah
Pink Floyd
Porridge with Ronny Barker
Lacoste Polo t shirts
The Sopranos
Kendall Ball & Harvey
Diadora Borg trabs
A Bacon barm with red sauce
CP Compnay Ice jackets
The Pink Panther
Miami Beach
The Park End
Bob Latchford
All dayer's on the ail & marching powder with your mates
Mikel Arteta
Larry David
Richard Prior
Sharp's goal at Anfield 84'
Adidas Mamba, Samba & Bamba
New York City
Sports Night
The Jam
The Golden Vision
Joy Division
The Grey Everton away top from the 83/84 season
Rigsby
Getting bladdered and re living tales of going to Town when you were 16.
This is a Modern World...
Walking down West Derby Road, I noticed a large unkempt scruffy woman walking towards me holding a a carrier bag from the local shithole fastfood eatery. As she got closer, it dawned on me that she was wearing an "Istanbul 2005 Champions League Final" t shirt. Now, being an avid Evertonian any cunt wearing one of those nasty cheap garments is enough to make me want to hurl, but this Grade A scruff was wearing it nearly 4 years after they lifted the fucking thing. As she walked past I didn't even make eye contact, she repulsed me that much. From the corner of my eye I noticed her hair looked like it hadn't been washed for days, and the pair of tracky bottoms she was sporting were those cheap nasty efforts, probably "Donnay" or some other shitty label they sell in those god awful sport shops. Once I was past the fucking heffa I thought to myself "Why can't I just be like her and not give a fuck". It would be a lot easier and far less stressful. I have pride and self worth, something this human being clearly never had. Just by looking at the pig you could tell she'd never held a job down in her whole life. The road before I got to my house some skinny scrawny middle-aged fella dressed in a black tracky was walking his Staffordshire bull terrier, whilst smoking a roly with his head down. He didn't even look up at me as I walked past. Another smackhead, crackhead or alky. What the fuck has this place turned into? It used to be such a nice area years ago. Am I different? Am I the strange one?
It was a warm summer evening, I was wearing my Lacoste polo top and combat shorts with my Timberland boat shoes. Not that these 2 fucking scruffs would even know or appreciate what I was wearing. I've always been into the clobber from a young age, as were all the kids that used to live round here. To see these scruffs bouncing round here these days makes me so angry. The people imitate the area - dirty, rundown and in the gutter. I feel like I don't belong in this modern world.
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