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!

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.