Читать книгу Scotland’s Jesus and My Shit Life So Far 2-in-1 Collection - Frankie Boyle - Страница 14

The best TV show ever would be a programme where really fat people were made to live in a house with a really thin door, and the winner would be whoever got thin enough to get out first. And all the furniture was made of cake. But we can’t even have that because it wouldn’t be quite deadening enough.

I find it incredibly odd that TV, a terrible succession of images of ever-increasing meanness and bankruptcy, holds such a fascinating appeal for people. Even those like me, who believe they reject it, watch and tweet about it. Maybe we kid ourselves that we’re talking about the death of culture or something. Really, we’re just sprinkling the salt that helps people shovel this shit into themselves. Sometimes, when I found myself on TV crucifying some celeb or game show, I wondered if I wasn’t just filling the role of the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in 1984.

I actually think that being viewed ironically is the only way much of our culture can survive. How could Louis Walsh be viewed with sincere feeling? If we view Louis Walsh as a text, there’s no reading of him that suggests he is supposed to be interpreted as anything other than the very arseflute we feel so superior about viewing him as.

Indeed, it’s possible that sincerity would destroy capitalism, as none of its products are really supposed to inspire sincere feeling. There’s a singer called Daniel Johnston, who was a big influence on Nirvana, and a great documentary was made about his mental illness called The Devil and Daniel Johnston. At one point he’s in an asylum, really struggling, and he asks his manager to try to get him a job writing jingles for Mountain Dew, the fizzy drink. He’s an amazing artist who’s just obsessed with writing this jingle, for some reason. They play the song he wrote over a shot of the Mountain Dew vending machine in the asylum. It’s just this heartbreakingly beautiful thing crafted from love and disappointment and regret and it’s all about Mountain Dew. And, of course, it’s hard not to sit there and think what a stupid fucking thing Mountain Dew is to sing that about. In the face of his sincerity, the triviality and crassness of cans of sugary water seems obvious. So instead, Mountain Dew get (previously) credible rappers to do ironic promos and there’s a general air of ‘Hey, we all know what this is, right? This is the bit where I’ve got to sell you the drink’, and it sure sells a lot of fizzy pop.

As a comedian, I find it odd that people imagine a comedian is better because they’ve seen them on TV. When I see a comic on TV it’s . . . well . . . it’s kind of like when I see a doctor on TV. Someone good at presenting themselves without necessarily being technically competent. A haircut. A cunt. It’s almost fun that something as banal as telly has this hold over people. Like everybody sat down of an evening and stared at a ball of coloured wool. A nurse actually stabbed her boyfriend to death because he didn’t want to watch Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Well, there was only one way to decide . . . FIGHT!

Being a comedian gives you an interesting view of how the media works. Most people whom I’ve read writing media columns for papers seem barely above the level of punters. I wonder if maybe this is because there’s a lot of money in TV, and if you had any understanding of how programmes worked you’d go and make some yourself.

One thing you notice is the increasing depoliticisation of TV shows. Obviously, there’s still a huge political agenda at work, but much less overt politics. The main satire show in Britain, Have I Got News for You, begins with picture jokes so forced and dispiriting they act as a kind of ideological security scan. If you can smile and nod your way through that shit then they know you won’t flip out during the shrieking cognitive dissonance of playing guessing games against a backdrop of worldwide war and financial meltdown.

I was on there once when they showed a picture of a girl being captured by police as she tried to steal a leg of frozen lamb. She was pictured attempting to climb a fence as several police officers dragged her down from below. Everyone made jokes like, you know, maybe she should have stolen three more legs and ridden off on them. I dimly knew I was supposed to join in with a ‘I suppose if you saw enough lamb thieves jumping over a fence you’d fall asleep!’ or whatever, but all I could think was how hungry do you have to be to steal a leg of frozen lamb. I can’t imagine what any decent human being could possibly have interjected. ‘She looks frightened’, perhaps.

There’s always a terror on these shows that someone will say something offensive, but there’s a bigger fear of someone saying something relevant. In a world where we fly remote-control bombs into civilians and rip out our planet’s lungs to fund our appetite for shiny gee-gaws, I find the idea of being offended at a joke vaguely decadent. I don’t wish any harm on such people, except perhaps that they suddenly develop a sense of irony as they tweet their moral outrage on a phone made by a suicidal slave.

I think if someone announced that the whole of the last couple of decades of telly had actually been a huge overarching art project about banality and worthlessness, a deliberately clumsy shadow play of exhausted memes, I would stand up and applaud. Perhaps you can just view it that way, anyway. I mean, the only interpretation that really matters for you is your own. I always enjoy The Matrix a lot more by pretending that Morpheus is the spiritually enlightened version of Laurence Fishburne’s character in King of New York.*

Perhaps our media output is an enormous subconscious defence mechanism. You know how radio waves and TV signals travel off through space? Perhaps we know that we’re not ready for first contact and fear the malevolence of a race advanced enough to travel easily among the stars. So that’s what our culture is for. No technocratic alien race will willingly visit the world that produces Take Me Out.

Look at the sheer creative morbidity of our top-rating shows. Strictly gets 11.5 million viewers – I never even realised there were so many people in the country going through the menopause. The show lost viewers with Bruce’s return – which shocked me. I thought the only point in watching was the grim anticipation of seeing him collapse, develop a cocoon, then fly off like a giant moth.

Alan Sugar says that The Apprentice has not been sexed-up for ratings. It must be for more sinister reasons, then. It was the sexiest series so far, yet still presented by a man who looks like he’s been cleaned out of someone’s belly button.

I have to accept some responsibility for The X Factor’s reappearance this year. The sloppy calibration of my flux capacitor meant I failed to go back to 1924 as planned, and beat John Logie Baird to death with a replica TV Quick Best Entertainment Show Award. I overshot by a full decade, the one consolation being that, thanks to my efforts, we’ve at least been spared the empty hypnotic indulgence of Professor Hugo Moffat’s clockwork mesmetron.

I confess I lost a big X Factor bet at the bookies this time round. I’d got 4 to 1 on me taking my own life before the end of the series. Every week we’ve heard who was the bookies’ favourite. Is that much of a guide? Can the best judge of the nation’s mainstream musical tastes really be someone whose perfect sound is a chorus of divorced men coughing and sobbing as they try to light tear-stained roll-ups?

In 2012 The X Factor lost two million viewers. Perhaps it’s simply becoming harder to operate a remote control when you’ve got cloven hooves and a twitch. I think ‘viewers’ is the wrong word. It’s too active. Still, I suppose there’s just not the space to write ‘This Saturday two million fewer people had the deluded shuffling of sterile karaoke puppets reflected in the glaze that coats their lifeless eyes.’ I’ve started to wonder whether ratings are down because people have absorbed all the crap they can take. Maybe it’s literally brimming up to their eyeballs and when they next chop an onion their face will shit itself. Are there too many ad breaks on it now? I’m glad of them. At least it’s a relative break from the relentless commercialism.

But these declining viewing figures are a concern. Experts estimate if they don’t stop falling, by 2032 the show will be forced to travel door-to-door, contestants trying to win viewers over by singing through their letterboxes. It will constitute a sorry procession, forced to trundle its way from town to town in cages set upon little wooden carts, Simon’s brain atop in a nutrient-filled jar, the whole affair pulled along by a team of blinded stray dogs, relentlessly driven forward by a cackling hooded driver dangling an Asda Smart Price sausage from a fishing rod.

I’m enjoying the X Factor iPhone app where you can hit a button to clap or boo the acts. To get a rat in a lab to do that they’d have to give it some kind of reward – perhaps by making the singing stop. A lot of the show seems to involve cutting back to the judges’ faces as they run through the three or four emotions available to them. Except Louis, who always has the startled look of a sleeping pensioner who’s just heard a noise downstairs.

Louis always says ‘You deserve to be on that stage’ to everyone he sees, when realistically that would only be true if he were standing in front of a gallows. Simon needs to find a way of getting better judges on the show – perhaps with some sort of televised judging contest. Gary Barlow’s performance is utterly compelling. His voice has a faraway, hollow quality, as if during a séance his body’s been seized by some blasphemous entity. I keep expecting him to interrupt someone covering ‘Valerie’ with a haunting monologue about the indignities his soul is suffering in hell. Perhaps his ghost can only rest if he uses boot camp to get the bands to solve his own murder. When the triumphant spirit explodes as incandescent light from a screaming Gary’s nose, mouth and eyes, we can all tap the clap button.

I’m surprised Britney Spears managed to get a job on the US X Factor. The last time she went near a judging panel they took her kids away. Britney is pumping weights, and doing yoga and kick-boxing. She will soon hold the title of fittest woman alive that no one wants to fuck. Her fans vented their anger about her lacklustre UK shows. I saw a bit of Britney’s dance routines on the news – in fairness, I thought I was watching Libyan rebels dispose of Gaddafi’s corpse. It’s hardly surprised that Britney doesn’t look totally focused – in fairness, she’s probably trying to work out where she is, who she is and why a voice is telling her to kill. I wonder why famous people even get mental disorders. What tips them over the edge from their usual happy setting of just wanting the whole world to worship them?

Nicole Scherzinger says she’s been feeling lonely since her split from Lewis Hamilton. She confessed that she has no friends in London and has been reduced to dining out with her own staff – as if they were real human beings! Nicole had to fork out thousands for a flight upgrade after X Factor bosses booked her into economy. Luckily, she could put it on her card. If she’d had to busk for it in departures she’d still be there when plate tectonics had solved the problem. Of course, these days former X Factor winner Steve Brookstein travels for free. Simon’s had his skin made into a natty set of matching luggage. To this day he swears that when he opens the shoulder bag he sometimes hears a plaintive ‘We’ll make another album soon, won’t we Si?’ drifting up from features a casual glance might assume were just blemishes in the leather.

You remember Steve Brookstein? ‘What’s the time?’ ‘Steve Brookstein time.’ That one.

I had my fingers crossed that James Arthur would win The X Factor, so that we’d never hear of him again. Do be careful, James. It appears that Simon’s tucked a clause in your contract that should your album flop he can hang your ornately inked pelt from the wall of his walk-in humidor. Fans queued overnight to meet James. I’d queue up overnight to see him, the same way I would have done if I’d been alive in Victorian times and had the chance to see Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. James can now enjoy what being an X Factor winner means. Constant Twitter abuse, one failed album and a brief part in a shit West End musical. James said, ‘I’m probably going to get my teeth fixed. It’s not a vanity thing.’ Well, it is, and it will be like putting twenty-six-inch rims on a wheelie bin.

Fellow X Factor champions Little Mix say they’re bidding to crack America. Shouldn’t they start by trying to crack Britain first? Little Mix show just how little you can achieve without any talent or hard work. Little Mix. Less a band name, more a description of the group’s gene pool. They look so young I just don’t feel comfortable playing the usual girl-band ‘In which order would you?’ game. OK, if you insist. I suppose I’d behead the blonde one first, then beat the other three to death with her corpse. The girls are proud to say they’re teetotal and never touch drugs. They get high on life! And suffer from a desperate addiction to the approval of total strangers. They want to inspire their fans. Good! About time little girls had some proper role models. I can’t be the only parent getting fed up of all that ‘I want to be a vet, I want to be a nurse’ bullshit.

Presumably the first inspirational message of empowerment for their legion of young fans will be, ‘Yes, you too can endorse goods or products as directed by your management.’ Simon wants them to focus on the music. Apparently, in their contract he’s even decreed their vaginas be covered in hot wax before receiving the seal of his holy ring.

Clean-living Little Mix have adopted ‘We won’t steal your boyfriend’ as their motto. It’s a self-help mantra that’s been used unsuccessfully by the members of Westlife, Boyzone and in the adapted form, ‘I won’t steal your boy’, by none other than Michael Jackson. They’ve been described as so likeable they could sell coals to Newcastle. That expression should be updated – how about, ‘They could sell a Federico Fellini boxed set in Newcastle’?

The girls were slammed for using an autocue. An autocue machine, yes, like they have down those autocue bars where hen nights sing ‘I Will Survive’. I hear that they were told not to learn the lyrics to their songs as Simon considers it essential to dull the winners’ powers of recall, so family and past friends don’t hinder reprogramming.

Sharon Osbourne returned to the UK to be an X Factor judge, confirmation apparently coming when a deserted ship, the long-dead skipper lashed to the wheel and the hold containing just a single chest freezer, bumped eerily into a jetty at Southampton. Her return means that Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne are living apart. They’ve stayed together through thick and thin – or Jack and Kelly, as they’re otherwise known.

They wanted to inject something new into the show so they’ve brought back Sharon – who, of course, has had so many new things injected into her you could bounce a coin off her face. Sharon’s set to do X Factor mentoring by Skype. Is Skyping right for an X Factor judge? Maybe I’m tiring of the show but the way I’d most like to see them giving advice is via an Ouija board. Contestants mustn’t worry, as they can ask Simon’s advice at any point, just by writing their question in urine dribbled from an upturned crucifix, then throwing it into the fire. The great thing about Sharon is that she speaks her mind – it’s just a pity that her mind appears to be haunted by the soul of an angry dockworker. Personally, I’ve missed Sharon’s little words of wisdom – to make up for it I’ve had to spike my nan’s tea with meths. I was sad that Tulisa’s been given the heave-ho. I liked Tulisa on there – with her boobs and hairy Greek arms you could squint and imagine Simon was still there.

Simon says he’s a workaholic; judging by his face, so’s his plastic surgeon. Simon looks like he’s had the Botox applied by someone whose only qualification is a three-week upholstery course they took in prison. On the plus side for Simon, at least his hair’s no longer the weirdest looking thing on his head.

What about that Simon Cowell biography by Tom Bower? It described the life of a tortured genius. Perhaps a slight overstatement, though I’d do anything to make that phrase just half true. He’s had so many affairs! Simon managed to keep them secret by only ever having sex with all these women in the privacy of his publicist’s imagination. The author had access to Simon’s entire inner circle – mainly soft toys who’ve attained a level of higher trust by having their button eyes removed. The book costs £18.99. Though if you sent me £9.99 I’ll gladly send you my summary in an old Pringles tube.

Simon wasn’t available for further comment. He’s believed to be in an aircraft hanger full of tenners somewhere, a leaf blower in each hand, gleefully shrieking beyond the audible human spectrum. And in a desperate search for scandal, hidden cameras have been installed in all the X Factor backstage rooms. This shit running for eight years isn’t considered scandal enough.

It seems that Simon was ‘feeling very low’ over the rev-elations about his private life, according to a press release to promote the revelations about his private life. A lot of girls Simon has slept with are coming out of the woodwork. Well, from the look of them they’re coming out of the waxworks. I don’t believe it he did it eleven times in one night – glamour model Alicia Douvall just doesn’t look like that sort of woman, the type that can count. I’ll bet Simon can, if the guy is hot enough. I’m joking – I really mean, if the guys are hot enough. I’m joking – I really mean, if they guys are paid enough. I’m joking – I really mean, if the guys are finished in the recording studio. Only kidding. Simon’s said he doesn’t care if people think he’s gay as it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Not true, Simon. If it turned out you were gay the homo-sexual community would be extremely ashamed.

Yes, in Bower’s book the cat is out of the bag. Simon’s a tiger in the sack. He’s ruined more springs than a Scottish weatherman. The book says he tried to shag Cheryl, but she told him she didn’t want to spoil the happiness she’d found. She was dying of malaria at the time. These endless stories about Simon being unlucky in love are his best chance of looking human since he stopped living with a professional make-up artist. You can’t make Simon seem human! I’ve got more chance of sympathising with a dry-stone wall that falls on a toddler.

Simon’s been likened to a Roman emperor – how times have changed. While Nero had the power to end a gladiator’s life, Simon orders the mentally challenged to sing ‘Mama Do the Hump’ while their leggings sag around their arse. Dannii Minogue had an affair with Simon. Now we know why she spells her first name that way; she wants to distance herself as much as possible from the reality of who she is. He said, ‘It was her sexy clothes and tits – it was genuine love.’ Remind me, in which of Shakespeare’s love sonnets does he compliment a lady’s clothes and tits again?

No wonder Dannii went from Simon to a rugby player. Once she’d bought the strap-on, she may as well use up its warranty. Dannii went to Twitter to ask for privacy, displaying the same logic as when she turned to Simon for love. Resorting to Twitter to ask for privacy is a bit like asking a zombie horde for a vegetarian gravy recipe. It’s said Simon liked to treat the female judges like ‘toys’ – presumably, then, Dannii was a doll who’s face has been repaired and Sharon was one that was used too much by rough kids then left in a carrier bag out the front of Oxfam.

Simon’s got a woman – Lauren Silverman – pregnant. It seems the conception was touch and go, Lauren almost regaining consciousness halfway through as she’d only eaten half the chocolate mousse. Simon claims he never wanted children. Which, to be honest, is probably the best thing to say when you’re in the music industry and Operation Yewtree are buzzing about. It’s the age-old story – millionaire flat-topped androgyne impregnates property mogul’s wife on ocean-going yacht. The woman’s husband must be gutted – after all, he only invited Simon on holiday so he could use his man-tits as a travel pillow. It’s Sinitta who I feel sorry for – if she doesn’t play nice with the new baby she’ll be put in a cattery.

I think he’ll be a good dad – surely there’s no way he’s able to sleep at night anyway. He likes the idea of being a dad. Of course he does. Who doesn’t like the idea of being a dad? Even women like the idea of being a dad. Never having to do the night feeds. Taking a week off work and then never really having to spend any time with the kid until it’s seven. Being a dad is great.

Except, of course, when it isn’t. When all you want is to be as far away from your offspring as possible. That’s why they’re called ‘offspring’, because most of the time you’d like to go off without your children and come back sometime around spring.

Then again, Simon has the money to make it work. As dads, which one of us hasn’t at some point wanted to turn our backs on the kid and climb into a helicopter, and, as it hovers above our home with a bearing set for the south of France, shower the nannies with £20 notes while shouting over the noise of the rotors, ‘Good luck, Consuela; the little fucker’s your problem – see you next spring’?

Simon hasn’t the patience to sit through fifteen seconds of a ventriloquist’s act. How’s he ever going to deal with a toddler saying ‘toast’ repeatedly for four hours? People in Simon’s circle said the pregnancy seemed very out of character. Which is an understated way of saying, ‘HOLY SHITBALLS! THIS AIN’T RIGHT! THE GUY’S MORE BENT THAN THE ZIMBABWEAN ELECTIONS!!’

• • •

I always wonder why, on Britain’s Got Talent, they cut back to Amanda Holden for reactions? Her face doesn’t fucking move! They might as well cut to V for Vendetta, or that crystal skull Arthur C. Clarke was always banging on about. I honestly don’t know if there’s more poison in Simon’s heart or Holden’s forehead. The reason Amanda Holden gets so many Botox jabs into her forehead is to prevent all the worry lines that would result from trying to work out how shagging Les Dennis fifteen years ago qualifies her to judge a talent contest. If Holden cries any more then I’m worried the salt water will warp whatever it is her face is made out of. Mind you, Simon’s face now looks puffier than the Puffa jacket that Puff Daddy would wear on a puffin-watching trip.

Half a million pounds for the winner – Britain’s Got Talent is the only place left in the country where the mentally disabled actually get some money. This year they opened the series in the contestants’ houses to explain why they’re auditioning. How are they going to top that next year? Go back one step further and explain it by showing the contestants’ mothers downing vodka in pregnancy? It must be a weird job for David Walliams, slowly realising that every character he’s created has been surprisingly sane and realistic.

After a fourteen-year-old boy with cerebral palsy did a stand-up routine, Alesha Dixon said, ‘You were great. You made me laugh before the act even started.’ Good one, Alesha – and people said you were just a face on a stick.

Saudi Arabia’s version of the show, Buraydah’s Got Talent, isn’t going to allow singing, dancing or women. It sounds restrictive, but technically Subo could still have won it. I can’t wait for the Saudi Simon Cowell – a controlling, power-hungry man with a dislike of women.

Thailand’s Got Talent went the other way and shocked viewers with a contestant who paints using her breasts, something I’ve tried with my partner to spice things up in the bedroom. Way more trouble than it was worth, so we switched to rollers for the lounge. It’s double standards. This woman paints with her tits and gets worldwide recognition, yet when Susan Boyle does it she gets tasered outside her local chip shop and charged with graffiti.

I was sad that ITV and the BBC decided to schedule The Voice and Britain’s Got Talent against each other, because I was worried that I might finally run out of hate. I suppose it’s not a big deal because we’ve all got hard-disc recorders now. If they’re both on at the same time you can just watch something good you taped earlier that week.

If it weren’t for The Voice then judges like Danny Wotsit would be nobodies today. It’s the show where the judges turn their backs on the contestants. A bit like The X Factor a week or two after the final. If they want music-industry realism surely they should have it so contestants perform with the judges only being able to see the top of their heads.

Not being able to see contestants is an interesting format tweak. If they can just eliminate the other four senses, too, they’ll have really nailed it. Not looking directly at contestants is hardly original. Even now when Simon has a meeting with Susan Boyle I hear he reverses up to her using the reflection in the back of his highly polished shield.

People get snobby about watching The Voice and say, ‘Oh, I want to see REAL singers.’ Go out, then! Go out! You’re watching a reality show where the judges have been picked purely on their ability to grunt in slightly different ways. Danny O’Donoghue said he needed coaching to stop himself swearing on the show. I just have one thing to say about that. Who the fuck’s Danny O’Donoghue? Whoever he is, he has a brutal 80s flat-top. Like Skynet built a special Terminator to infiltrate Cork’s gay community. I think there should be another celebrity on the back of the chair and the chair should keep spinning really fast, so they kind of strobe into a single entity. What a thrill for contestants to have their career ended by a hybrid of Christina Aguilera and Mr. T, who has never even seen their face.

Jessie J looks like someone has pitched the elixir of youth on Dragons’ Den and didn’t mention it had side effects. Bless Jessie for getting her head shaved for charity; but she’s afflicted with a bit of a man-face – she now looks like Action Man has moulted. I believe her when she says it’s ‘not about the money’, so she must be a judge on The Voice because she genuinely hates music. But it does need that Susan Boyle moment, doesn’t it? Someone hitting a note so high that the rest of will.i.am’s hair pops out of his head.

Viewing figures for The Voice started high and then dwindled after they stopped the spinning chairs. To combat this, next series they’re going to keep Jessie J in a centrifuge machine like an inarticulate tranny kaleidoscope. Of course, being on The Voice did wonders for the career of its first winner, Leanne Mitchell – mainly because she now works in MFI as a revolving-chair saleswoman.

I don’t need to watch people recruiting young women on to a ‘team’ without having seen their real faces – that’s just an evening on Twitter for me. Viewers liked it when the judges couldn’t see the acts, so they’re going to speed through the singing and finish the series with a close-up of Tom’s cataracts slowly taking hold. Tom rarely gets all of his favourite singers on his team, as he kept accidentally pressing the large red button on his emergency necklace.

The ‘battle’ round is always very exciting. Last year I watched a fat bloke in a Hawaiian shirt scream ‘Sign, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours’ into a middle-aged dinner-lady’s face and I’ve never felt more alive.

• • •

The BBC had high hopes that The Voice would put it back on the map in the face of ITV’s dominance of the reality TV space. But for the BBC to flourish it needs its biggest supporters to get behind it. Maybe it’s time to accept we’ll just have to sell it to a group of wealthy paedophiles. Yes, it’s radical, but they’d only have to paint over the bottom bit of that first ‘B’. Toilet signs were among hundreds of items pilfered by souvenir hunters after BBC TV Centre’s final broadcast, as people filled their houses with objects covered in paedo DNA.

Vernon Kaye was escorted out of the BBC when security caught him trying to steal a dressing-room sign. At least, that’s the reason they gave him. You didn’t need that sign, Vernon, you’ve been stealing from the BBC your whole career. I took a lifesize model of George Alagiah, which I keep in my wardrobe. But it’s started to make knocking and sobbing noises so I might have to chuck it out.

George Entwistle resigned as director general. He’d only been in the job for fifty-four days. To be fair, I’ve been in jobs longer than that and still not known where the toilets are. It must have been an awkward leaving do to arrange. I don’t think they do cakes in Patisserie Valerie that say, ‘Sorry, you got the paedophile wrong.’ Trust has been lost in the BBC now. To be honest, I thought that it was lost after the first series of The One Show.

The BBC’s sloppiness reflects badly on all journalists. Not least tabloid ones, as when trawling the internet for stories they often end up copying and pasting from bbc.co.uk.

Tell you who you don’t hear much from lately – that woman who insisted she was the illegitimate child of Jimmy Savile. It seems that almost every day for a couple of years a new, well-known face is unveiled in the relentless Advent calendar of sexual abuse. I, for one, look forward to the mass trial of Britain’s celebrities at some paedophile Nuremberg. Honestly, the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard that Dave Benson Phillips used to wank into the gunge tank. I was never into the celebrity paedo parties. I’d stand in the corner and simulate the experience by having Jeremy Beadle give me a handjob. Once, Mike Reid gave me a Reacharound.

When I heard Rolf Harris had been arrested I thought it was for his performance at the Royal Jubilee. If Rolf goes on trial then at least the courtroom artist won’t feel under any pressure to do a good job. They’ll probably find it hard to resist drawing him with the body of a kangaroo.

The owner of the first time-machine will have a moral dilemma about whether to kill Hitler or bomb the 1988 Royal Variety Performance. It seems when it comes to TV, the author L. P. Hartley was right: the past is a foreign country. Paedoslovakia. Ironically, the only non-paedophile on telly in the 80s was Ian Krankie. Perhaps evidence will emerge that Britain itself is a paedophilic landmass and when we’re all drunk at Christmas, it rams Anglesey up Ireland’s arse.

Footage emerged of Savile defending Gary Glitter. So, he might have been a predatory paedophile but at least he wasn’t a hypocrite. The pair actually invented the platform shoe together, purely as a way of seeing children who were slightly further away.

For those conspiracy theorists who say these scandals will one day be shown to involve our politicians, well, who knows? They kill kids, so there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t be fucking them. There are quite feasibly politicians alive today who took to fucking kids just to try to give themselves the stomach required for the real business of government.

The Sun’s front page reported ‘Gary Glitter’s 10 hour sex quiz’. Finally, a show you could imagine Justin Lee Collins hosting. I have to say, Glitter didn’t do himself any favours when questioned over child sex offences by trying to bribe police with Top Trumps cards and a Kinder Egg. Officers aren’t expected to question him again for a while. As it’ll take them months to chip open his laptop with a toffee hammer. Savile’s cottage in the Highlands was vandalised. It appears that they’ve scraped off so many of the hundreds and thousands you can now see the gingerbread walls beneath. Jim Davidson said, ‘The Jimmy Savile witch hunt is going a bit silly.’ It’s not a witch hunt, Jim. Remember, witches never existed.

Jim Davidson was cleared of historic allegations that he sexually molested two women. He says he’s ‘a gentleman’ who once gave up his bed for a drunk dancer. ‘I never laid a finger on her, even though she was completely comatose and wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on.’ I always thought a gentleman ‘never tells’ but it appears that a gentleman is someone who could have raped someone but didn’t.

Davidson says he’s not a Jimmy Savile figure. True. People used to like Jimmy Savile.

Davidson was once voted Britain’s funniest man. I can understand this, as when I first heard the news of his arrest I couldn’t stop laughing. He’s previously had brushes with the law after he was banned from driving following a speeding offence. If I were the judge I’d let him keep driving. But ban him from using his seatbelt or his brakes. When he was caught by police and asked if he was the driver he said, ‘Can I nominate someone I don’t like?’ Good luck pinning three points on the entire Pakistani population of the UK. Jim, if the system really allowed us to nominate someone we didn’t like you’d currently have two and a half million points on your licence.

I must say Stuart Hall does look very sad. Either he feels guilty or he used up all his laughter in the 70s. Stuart began his career on Look North. Unfortunately, while you were looking north he’d be going south. Stuart Hall had a room set aside at the BBC where he could entertain ‘lady friends’. No wonder he always appeared animated and excited on screen. He knew he was only seconds away from heading back to his whore-filled room.

Hall got fifteen months. The judge couldn’t have given him fifteen years because there was a worry he’d ejaculate on hearing his sentence. He said there was a vendetta against famous people. Hey, if you don’t want a vendetta against you, maybe don’t abuse so many people they can form a mob. As he was sentenced his victims cried, but he showed no emotion; arousal doesn’t reach an eighty-three-year-old’s face for a good ten minutes. The sentence was lenient because he had to be tried under the 1956 Act. Shame he didn’t have consensual sex with a man. We could have thrown the book at him.

When I think about 70s television one of my major memories is that test-card girl who used to sit really still for hours on end playing noughts and crosses with the clown puppet. Looking back, I think she sat there all night on her own because she was too scared to return to the BBC dressing rooms. You begin to look back at these shows in a different way, now. Was Mr Benn constantly changing outfits just to evade capture from the police? One minute dressed as a Native American, the next as an astronaut, simply to make it harder for his victims to pick him out of a line-up?

Making nostalgia programmes is going to be tricky now. I Remember the 70s will just be full of people crying, with a helpline number at the end. People of my age can’t look back on the 70s with any enjoyment. At least teenagers nowadays can look back at an innocent world of kids’ presenters going on coke binges and hanging themselves. A lot of the guys from the 70s are saying, ‘We didn’t ask the girls’ ages.’ To be fair, the fact she’s telling you about her pets and her favourite princess means you don’t really have to.

With all the scandals, everyone involved in Children in Need must be walking on eggshells. Or sitting in a bath of beans. Whichever raises the most money, I guess. They’re not even allowed to hold any big cheques anymore in case behind one someone is being sucked off by a teenager. Jimmy Savile was banned from Children in Need. Which is lucky, as no one would want to see Pudsey using himself to show the cops where Jimmy touched him.

I must say, I prefer the old Blue Peter appeals. There was one for stamps when I was a little boy. There’d been a famine in Ethiopia, and the great thing was, once the target had been reached they kept the viewers involved by sending the presenters out to show the work of the appeal. I remember they took a jumbo from London to Addis Ababa, then a little propeller plane that landed on an airstrip where the forest had been cleared. Then into a Jeep for a day and a half, with the last twenty miles on foot. I can still recall them now, arriving in this simple of village of mud huts and being met by the grateful chief, who took them into his own hut, which was a little larger, the doorway topped with the feathers from colourful birds. You know something? I think he had the biggest stamp collection I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing like a hobby to take your mind off your appetite.

• • •

Ricky Gervais was cleared of breaking Ofcom rules for calling Susan Boyle a ‘fucking mong’. Quite right, too. Sometimes a joke has such skill in its construction, such heights of imagination and poetry, that it transcends our petty linguistic taboos. I read a columnist describe him as a moron for saying it and adding that she didn’t need to explain why she could use the word ‘moron’ and he couldn’t use ‘mong’. Because that’s where our culture is at in terms of debate – a kind of secondary-school level.

You’d imagine why someone could use one word rather than another would be the starting point of an undergrad-uate seminar. Perhaps we would even ask whether meaning is constructed in the listener (phenomenology), or whether the newspapers that publicised Gervais’s foolishness were authors by relocation. You know, the idea that if I project a porno on to the front of a local nursery school they arrest me rather than Ron Jeremy. Perhaps most of all we would wonder why modern liberals have a set of words they feel must not be used regardless of context. Something you’d normally associate with fundamentalist religion. Instead, we’ve an increasingly infantilising cultural climate of because that’s just why.

It seems strange that nobody ever mentions that the ideas of I want to see interesting, free comedy that pushes boundaries and I never want hear a joke I disagree with are mutually exclusive. Here’s an amusing email my agent got recently:

Hi Hannah

I write a column for the **** ******.

I was concerned to read in the Sun what Frankie Boyle had written about the death of Brian Cobby, best known as the voice of the speaking clock, saying how he had died ‘after his third stroke’.

My understanding is that Mr Cobby did indeed die of a stroke but this seems to me distasteful in any case. I would like a comment from Boyle justifying what he has said and possibly an apology to Mr Cobby’s family.

Thanks, *****

• • •

People who say you don’t see white dog shit anymore haven’t been watching Jeremy Kyle. Jeremy says he has nothing to lose by doing a quiz show because he’s already the most hated man in Britain. That’s a level of self-awareness people will never have thought he had and he’ll have gone up in their estimation. Although he’s still the most hated man in Britain. Kyle’s studios have been fitted with walk-through metal detectors. I hope that sends out a clear message to anyone going – ‘Remember, you can still punch him.’

Somewhere Angelina Jolie’s pre-cancerous boobs are fighting Jeremy’s cancer-ridden testicle in the ultimate battle of good vs evil. I was saddened by the news of Jeremy’s illness, as I was so close to fully disposing of any residual belief from my Catholic upbringing of an interventionist God. Jeremy wanted the results given to him straight. A shame – really, doctors should have made him wait for three minutes while a bingo-fixated cartoon fox tried to trick him into borrow-ing money at 1,000 per cent APR. But all respect to Jeremy. It takes some skill to turn abusing street drinkers into a winning format.

Cancer doesn’t discriminate, which actually makes it morally superior to Jeremy Kyle. Must’ve been quite humbling for cancer to enter Jeremy’s body and find it’s the least toxic substance in there. Like Ian Huntley turning up at a party only to find its Josef Mengele’s house. Jeremy won’t let cancer beat him! He’s never been stopped by lack of talent or conscience, so why stop now? His fans have sent cards. Must be touching to receive a ‘Get Well Soon!’ card from people who’d spit at a fat person. Having just one testicle shouldn’t affect sperm production. A relief for Jeremy, as his pre-show dressing-room ritual consists of ejaculating onto a sculpture of his own face carved from the frozen tears of former guests.

Really, the majority of our TV output is just a kind of sewer of the collective unconscious. On the day of Amanda Knox’s trial Matthew Wright’s show on Channel 5, The Wright Stuff, held a phone-in titled ‘Foxy Knoxy: Would Ya?’ It couldn’t really have been in any worse taste if they’d have gone for ‘Fred and Rosemary West: I Don’t Fancy Yours Much’. Channel 5 insists the discussion was handled sensitively, and how couldn’t it have been when the panel included Christopher Biggins? It reminded me of the time when Matthew Wright discussed the problem of female circumcision with Lion-O from ThunderCats. Matthew knows a sexy murder when he sees one! He realises it would be almost impossible for his viewers to knock one out to the story of a burglar being strangled in Aldershot. And the ‘almost’ in that sentence must really depress him.

*Also, my reading is that Peter Pan and the Lost Boys are the souls of abortions. It would certainly explain Captain Hook.