An old friend who I should really make a bit more of an effort to get in touch with once remarked that, if I were to appear on BBC2’s Room 101, the show would never end. There are literally millions of things that irritate me (including the use of the word ‘literally’) and so, as an exercise in pointlessness, I thought I’d share some of them with you. And after you’ve finished this diatribe of random ranting, you might want to add another of life’s irritations – stuck up, moaning gasbags who waste their’s and everyone else’s time moaning about everything, standing on the outside of the tent of life pissing in, instead of doing something useful such as saving the rain-forests or indulging in really fantastic sex.
The Cult Of Banality
I absolutely cannot understand why a seemingly rational human being would go out and work at a job they dislike, to earn money that isn’t enough, wasting many precious hours of a life they have but one fleeting shot at, and then go and waste some of that money on Heat magazine. Where the hell has this worshipping of mediocrity, fecklessness, banality, inanity and worthlessness sprung from? At what point did our nation, a country that for centuries turned out extraordinary figures of the calibre of William Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill and John Lennon with almost superhuman ease, start farting out contemptible rats of the likes of Jade Goody, Abi Titmuss, Gordon Ramsey, Alan ‘Fucking’ Sugar, Lilly Allen and Guy Richie? And at what point did the British, who in generations past had the good sense to revel in the fact that they had the singular fortune to inhabit the same islands as these great figures of history, start worshipping self-absorbed morons and elevate them to the position of the most celebrated figures of the age? Did I pop out for a fag and miss that bit of the meeting?
I’m almost speechless in my mystification over this cult of banality. I grew up to understand that one achieved the epithet ‘celebrity’ because you were ‘celebrated’ for something you’d achieved. Winston Churchill, for instance, is celebrated as the man who stuck to his guns in the face of the greatest threat to Western civilisation since the sacking of Constantinople, and therefore saved his nation and the world from the moral bankruptcy and unspeakable sadism of the Nazi hoards. Abi Titmuss, on the other hand, appears to be celebrated primarily for the availability of a grainy video of herself naked whilst sucking the penis of a man who used to present Wheel Of Fortune. Am I, perhaps, to be forgiven for wondering how these two parallel universes collided? At how you used to have to have done something pretty damned impressive to earn the celebration and admiration of one’s peers, but now have to do absolutely nothing noteworthy at all to receive exactly the same cloying affection?
This is a ridiculous state of affairs. People who buy Heat and Hello, and Nuts, and OK! and what-have-you are fucking idiots aren’t they? Don’t you have to suffer from some sort of mental instability if you find nothing at all wrong in buying magazines full of photographs of people you don’t know sitting on beaches or going shopping? I’ve got plenty of photos of me doing random, everyday stuff like pointing at walls and sticking my thumbs up at various national monuments … do you want those? And more’s to the point, can I have some of the money you seem so blissfully happy to throw away?
I’m sorry if this upsets any of you … actually, no I’m not. If you waste money that could be better spent paying for the inoculation of children in Third World countries because you’re bonkers and want to stare at a photo of Victoria Beckham having her hair done, then can you just bugger off and get your rationality bone polished? You’ve elevated idiocy to a status it doesn’t deserve and as a consequence made rich rubbish that should, by a process of natural selection, be starving in the gutter. Please can you sort yourselves out before we all suffocate under the weight of a gigantic, stinking, Jade Goody-shaped flabby arse?
The Acceptability Of Pornography
I’m tired of hearing women and hep-cats pretend they like pornography. In fact, I’m tired of hearing anyone say they like pornography. Pornography is, was, and always will be a filthy, inhuman trade inhabited by monsters and drug-addicts wherein lies the path of damnation. Pornography is not cool. Pornography is not ironic. Pornography is not ‘post modern’. Ponography is the graphic representation of the sex act turned on its head in the most brutal of manners for the delectation of men who need stimuli above their own imagination in order to aid the process of having a fucking wank. And that’s all it is. I don’t watch porn because it’s ‘now’ or ‘cool’ or acceptable to do so amongst the most enlightened of our times - I watch it on my own because I’m masturbating. That’s what most men do. We like keeping our dirty little habits to ourselves, thanks very much – we don’t need ‘em dragged out into the open by women and fashionistas trying to ‘reclaim’ them.
Plasma Screen TVs
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against enormous, vulgar, room-swallowing, entertainment hubs per se- it’s what they represent that unnerves me. Plasma screen TVs are the current Holy Grail that lies at the heart of every greedy consumerist’s quest to own above all else. Not content any more to hunger for important things such as universal well-being, a cure for cancer, an end to poverty, or just a general mucking-in to make the world a better place, today’s generation of greedy bastards want instead unimportant shiny rubbish made from wires and plastic that is sold at a price that beggars belief. They also want this crap regardless of whether they actually need it or, indeed, whether it will actually fit inside their house. A personal favourite of mine as an example of this pointless avarice is the thirsty new clamour for lap-top computers. Once charged at a price that only businessmen could afford, lap-tops are now being churned out at £500 a pop. They come with eye-watering amounts of RAM, breathtaking amounts of hard-drive capacity, processors that handle information at the speed of light … and are then bought in droves by people who use them solely for doing online shopping. This random, fatuous, pointless, money-wasting exercise in unadulterated greed is the equivalent to going out and buying a monstrously expensive tool-belt of the sort a professional tradesman would need, and then only ever using the screwdriver to change plugs.
But shit it looks good alongside your MP3 player and your credit-card thin DVD player and your 42-inch plasma screen TV and all that other shit you own to fill that gaping fucking hole where your life’s meant to be. And doesn’t it just give you a wonderful, glowing feeling inside knowing that all this brand-new, state-of-the-art plastic shit you remortgaged your house to afford in your never-ending game of electrical one-upmanship with your friends replaces the older, millimetres thicker, slightly smaller, less powerful plastic shit you had to ring a loan company in order to finance just a few scant months before? And weren’t you proud of your achievements in spending so much money you didn’t have on stuff you’re amazed to discover cost you £1000 back in December and now costs me £300 to buy off you? You must be pleased as Punch to find out there are still shmoes out there willing to part with a fraction of the money you did to purchase your shitty, but still perfectly serviceable, unfashionable cast-offs.
I sincerely hope at least one of these people wakes screaming on their death beds and realises they’ve wasted their entire adult lives persuing dross that they have had to replace on an almost daily basis with slightly flashier dross. They probably won’t though … they’ll be too busy worrying if they’ve got the most up-to-date death bed.
The Rape Of The English Language
I was on the bus the other day when I heard a university student say this:
“Did you, like, know, like, that the carrot was like, genetically-engineered to be, like, orange, yeah? Basically, yeah, the carrot was, like, white, right, until they, like, genetically modified it or some shit to, like, make it, like, orange, like.”
A vocal dexterity worthy of Oscar Wilde, I’m sure you’ll agree. This, let me remind you, was coming from the mouth of a man in the process of receiving the tertiary phase of his education. This wasn’t a monkey. Or a village idiot. Or a child. This was an educated man unable to vocalise above the level of a doofus. Let me put that sentence to you again, with a bit of fiddling around with the grammar to fit how I, a speaker of the English language, understood it:
“Did you, similar to, know, similar to, that the carrot was similar to, genetically-engineered to be, similar to, orange, yes? In its essence, yes, the carrot was, similar to, white, right, until they, similar to, genetically modified it or some shit to, similar to, make it, similar to, orange, similar to.”
Is Voltaire on the bus? Was that David Lloyd George I just heard enunciating? Are there oratory awards one can receive for such outstanding feats of diction? How the hell did this creature get into a higher seat of learning without being able to speak properly? Does one go for one’s interview and simply keep schtum nowadays? Because if you open your mouth, unintelligible drivel pours out like a river of vocal sewage? My generation doesn’t babble like this. My parent’s generation didn’t either, and neither did their parents. Where on earth did they learn it from if nobody on the blessed island talks like this? It’s as bewildering a conundrum to me as if I bred a child that inexplicably grew up to speak French.
Another example is the word ‘awesome’. I am not thunderstruck with awe when mine eyes behold the spectacle that is Spider-Man III. I do not sink to my knees in humble admiration for the awe-inspiring wonder of a text message of somebody’s tits writ-large in all their digital majesty. I have found precisely two things ‘awesome’ in my life thus far: Winston Churchill’s A History Of The English-Speaking People and Sir John Vanburgh’s Blenheim Palace – a structure of such grace, elegance and beauty I was struck dumb in its presence.
The Taj Mahal is awesome. The Great Wall of China is awesome. The Great Pyramid at Gizeh is awesome. The American Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Sistine Chapel and the Parthenon are awesome. I’m sure the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria were awesome in their day.
A free-kick that produces a goal from the feet of David Beckham isn’t.
Self-Indulgent Protests
In 2003 I cadged a lift on a bus full of anti-war protesters because tickets to get down to London were going at £10 a shot – yes, I’m that cynical. I was therefore on hand to witness the anti-war shenanigans that brought the capital to a halt, and was appalled. What was this raggedy-ass collection of dread-locked dregs with their pseudo-ethnic bongos, whistles, tambourines and bells? Was this a dignified protest about the forthcoming hostilities, or some sort of marijuana-fuelled street jamboree where mongrels of the sorriest kind, give-it-a-fucking-rest 60s burn-out beatsters, students with nothing better to do, and furious, I’m offended by everything, religious nutcases danced their way to Hyde Park and all had a jolly good time? “What the fuck are we celebrating?” I thought, as I ducked into an underground station so I could visit the Natural History Museum.
I loathe self-indulgent protests. A friend of mine argued that the great anti-war protest of early 2003 hammered the point home that the majority of people in this country didn’t want to start a fight with Iraq. No it didn’t. One million people dancing through the streets of a major world city causing traffic chaos does not represent the majority of the population or its views. In an island of 70 million people is it not too outrageous to say that it was the anti-war movement that was in the minority that day? And what, exactly, did their ’spontaneous’ outpouring of protest achieve? Was Baghdad spared the bomb? No it wasn’t. Is Saddam still there? No he isn’t. What did the anti-war protest achieve? Why, nothing of course. Absolutely fuck-all.
I suppose you could argue it gave a bunch of already self-satisfied morons a sense that they’d given the powers that be a black eye. Sadly this wasn’t the case, because the powers that be are happy to let you have your voice as long as you’re finished by eight and all go off home without smashing up too many McDonald’s restaurants along the way. They’re not actually concerned that you don’t want a war because they know you’re too bland, too ordinary, and too damned pacifist and lovey-dovey to do anything other than wave plaques and blow whistles for peace. They also know that you, unlike Nelson Mandela, Ghandi, Emmeline Pankhurst and the Chartists, are unprepared to go to prison for your beliefs – because you rather like being free and don’t actually believe so rabidly in your cause as you suppose.
Protests need teeth or else they need to be so overwhelming that they actually bring the economy of the country in question to its knees. This happened with Ghandi in India. Everyone started making their own stuff instead of buying it and the British saw the Jewel in the Crown turn to shit. And in Britain in the early 80s black people, sick to the back teeth of being treated like third-class dogs suspected of every crime under the sun, took up their Molotov cocktails and invaded the streets to riot and cause havoc and generally wake the government up to the fact that we couldn’t carry on living in a country where Mind Your Language was made by a major broadcasting company and where pubs displayed signs saying ‘No Irish, No Dogs, No Blacks’.
But did the middle-class hoards who descended on London to hoot and jeer learn from history and do anything other than wander about making a racket? No. If they’d had any backbone they’d have stormed the gates of Downing Street, dragged the Prime Minister from his office and hanged the grinning, self-righteous little bastard from the nearest lamp-post. Because the government knew there wasn’t the faintest possibility of this occurring, they let the kids have their fun, dutifully cordoned off the capital, made statements that they vaguely ’sympathised’ with the protesters, and then unleashed hell on Iraq anyway.
Fuck your pansy-assed protests that achieve precisely nothing at all. Get your bloody hands dirty and then come back and say you’ve delivered a bloody nose to the establishment. Don’t like the way those poor dolphins keep getting fucked-over by trawling nets? Then firebomb the Japanese embassy. Sickened by the fur-trade? Beat the shit out of stupid rich people. Grow some fucking claws if you don’t like what’s being done in your name – don’t bother with banners, try arson.
The Rise of The Bully
I’m not wrong in my belief that bullies are to be derided and ostracised in civilised society am I? Apparently so, if shitbags such as Gordon Ramsey, Alan ‘Fucking’ Sugar and that pack of critical arseholes that form the Dragon’s Den cabal are any judge. When did being a boorish, stupid, unpleasant, megalomaniacal, vile, pompous bully become the qualifications required for getting your own TV show? When did we allow the kids who stole your pocket-money to become the multi-millionaire glitterati? Why are we encouraging behaviour we patiently attempt to discourage in our children? What’s going on?
Look at Gordon Ramsey. I’m afraid I don’t buy into the myth that a cook is a terribly important member of the human race, regardless of how good he is at his job. Someone who cooks food and arranges it around a plate in an attempt to disguise how little’s actually there doesn’t fill me with admiration. Someone who then charges me £100 for a small plate of food and a glass of old wine doesn’t enamour me towards them either, it outrages me. But what certainly doesn’t light my fire is a cook who does all of the above whilst being a bellicose, frightening, loud-mouthed shit at the same time.
Liam Tucker, in a recent article about Ramsey’s The F Word pointed out how this dreadful little man operates when he speaks to people. He bellows an offensive statement at his victim, then roars ”YES?” at the end of each statement, regardless of whether it’s a question he’s asking or not. The effect is to make it seem that everything Gordon’s said has already been tacitly agreed upon by the other party. So a typical Gordon Ramsey exchange goes something like this:
“You’re a fucking cunt, YES?”
“Er … yes?”
“And you can’t fucking cook for shit, YES?”
“Er … yes … no … erm … can I have another go?”
And that deserves its own television show does it? The last person I remember behaving like this was my old sports teacher, and he was a frog-eyed, contemptible little fuck who should have been flayed alive. How does a bullying windbag whose only ‘talent’ in life is the ability to not fuck up fish dishes end up as an almost messianic figure of reverence for the Channel 4 set? He’s a cunt isn’t he? That’s certainly what I’ve derived from watching his shows. Why is a cunt allowed to be on television? He’s a cunt, YES?
The Importance Of Everyone
Because the Western world had to undergo the flim-flammery and general smile-on-me-brother-try-to-love-one-another blather of the Baby Boomers’ exercise in 60s self-indulgence, we have suffered under the dreadful, dangerous and downright wrong philosophy that everyone, regardless of blatant evidence to the contrary, is important. We have a culture where winning, heroics, being a champion, being the best etc etc. are not as important as treating everyone equal and everyone’s opinions, jobs, lifestyles and what-have-you as being just as valid and important as everyone else’s. This is clearly claptrap. There are plenty of people out there of such monumental unimportance it beggars belief that they can take themselves seriously at all. Here’s a handy set of questions for you to figure out if you’re important or not:
- Do you put out fires for a living?
- Do you keep the streets safe from vagabonds and cut-purses?
- Do you heal the sick?
- Do you mend stuff that’s broken or install stuff to make life easier for others?
- Do you administer justice?
- Do you run the country, the financial institutions, the retail institutions or the manufacturing institutions?
- Do you make sure our streets and homes are free from rubbish and the vermin that rubbish encourages?
- Are you so fabulously talented in your chosen profession that even a person of your character and exemplary modesty is prepared to admit you’re a little bit special?
- Does doing your job mean the rest of us don’t drown in fountains of human shit spewing up from our drains?
If the answer to all of the above is ‘no’ then congratulations, you’re not terribly important. Let me explain. If all the advertising executives, television producers, copywriters, animators, film directors, ‘barristas’, hair-dressers, beauticians, consultants who aren’t medically trained, actors, buskers, Andrew Lloyd Webbers, Stings and Bonos died right now would the world come to a grinding standstill? No, it would just become a bit boring but we’d survive. Now let’s consider what would happen if all the plumbers, doctors, sewage workers, fire-fighters, policemen, paramedics, builders, carpenters, binmen, politicians, judges, scientists, road-sweepers, motorway maintenance men, train-drivers and toilet cleaners suddenly shuffled off this mortal coil. Civilisation would be on its knees in about ten minutes. People would die. Effluence, garbage, the dead, the dying, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all would pile high in the streets. Nothing would work. Nothing would be made better. Shit would be burned to the ground. Criminals would run free in the streets. Anarchy would reign. Life, as most of us know it in all its cosiness would cease to be sweet and instead become dreadful. It certainly wouldn’t be boring – it would be like living in Mad Max III.
Stop harbouring under the notion that your IT job, or your TV job, your ‘Meejia’ job, or for that matter your Illustration job puts you on a higher level than the man who empties your bins. Just because you spent three years getting into debt to qualify you for a career sitting in an office eating weeds stuffed in a panini in London doesn’t make you one-tenth as important as the woman who wipes your backside when you’re old. By thinking you’re an important man when you aint, you keep missing the point of really important people like Stephen Hawkings when they alight into your world and make it a better place for you.
All professions, even ones as vacuous as advertising, have their genuinely important people. In my profession, which I reluctantly admit is ‘art’ (and by that I mean art art, not ‘the arts’ which is an umbrella term for anything vaguely creative from basket-weaving to African drumming, God forbid), there are some pretty heavyweight characters. From Michelangelo to Monet, Gauguin to Van Gogh there’s some big, motherfucking, downright important sons o’ bitches in there. A third-rate scribbler of cartoons who is gravitationally dragged into the same firmament as these titans by the simple association of also applying paint to paper for a living (well … sort of) knows his place. Sadly, most of my contemporaries do not. A know a guy who has had one – one – illustration published in a national magazine and now behaves like he’s the second-coming of Pablo Picasso. I know Graphic Designers who genuinely believe that the ability to arrange big letters and pictures into a coherent whole that’s pleasing on the eye puts them in the same category as Rembrandt. I would argue that being the head designer on Grand Theft Auto IV doesn’t make you Tintoretto, it just makes you good at making violent driving games … so why the enormous sense of self-importance?
I honestly think the world’s supposedly important people would find their empty lives a damn-sight easier to deal with if they understood that they’re actually of very little importance in the scheme of things. I’m well-adjusted to the fact that my contribution to art will be mostly forgotten after my death, if not in my own lifetime. It doesn’t bother me that I’m not very significant – I wish other people could get on the self-derision bus because believe me, you come across as a hell of a lot less pompous and people who do actual, proper jobs might stop hating your guts for being a self-indulgent ass with too much fucking money.
The Ironic Celebration Of Tawdry Shit
Just because you’re smirking and nodding your head in a just-so, aint I too cool for school, satirical way when you lie and say you like ABBA ironically doesn’t make your choice of shit any less shit. There is nothing ironic about liking crap, and there is nothing wrong with just liking it for being crap. I like loads of crap stuff – I just don’t feel the need to pretend I like it in some vague, post-modern, self-congratulatory way. It’s shit, yes, but I like it.
The Bee Gees, ABBA, disco music, flared trousers, lava-lamps, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Earth, Wind and Fire, Tubular Bells, Wings, the career of Roger Moore, caftans, afghan coats, The Carpenters, Cher, having hair like Art Garfunkel’s, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Boy George, kung-fu movies, Les Miserables, Genesis, Asia, The Two Ronnies, fondue sets, The Good Life and Chuck Norris movies were all shit when they first lapped at the shores like acid and burned a hole into the coastline of culture - and they’re still shit now. The passage of time and the thin veneer of irony doesn’t make Hall and Oates Ironic 2007 Version any less risible than Hall and Oates Original 1987 Just Plain Shit Version. History doesn’t turn Stalin into a nice old man who was kind to children, and neither does it wipe away the crimes against humanity that were every single record ever released by Leo Sayer. There’s not a time-limit where Sting suddenly stops being shit.
And there’s no need for it. So what if you like Rolf Harris, own everything The Wombles ever recorded and wear your Bay City Rollers flares with pride? Stop making excuses for your dreadful tastes. Stop pretending you like idiotic bullshit in a cool way. You just like idiotic bullshit. So does everyone else and it’s the reason why Barbara Streisand hasn’t starved to death.
I could go on, but looking at this I’m in danger of writing a book. There are millions upon millions of things that get up my nose. These are the ones that are currently at the forefront of my mind. If I wrote this tomorrow it would probably be wasps, or Paul McCartney taking a piss on his own musical achievements, or wind farms, or council tax, or the soulless, faceless, steaming pile of shit that is the Wetherspoons corporation, or happy-slapping, or how I’ve got so old and stupid I now believe the youth of today could do with a stint in the Army, or olive bread, or London, or IT ‘professionals’, or that bald clown Donald Trump and his ludicrous comb-over that no-one’s got the guts to challenge him about, or how the hell Alan ‘Fucking’ Sugar gained the same honour from the Queen as did Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Winston Churchill and, damn it, even Sir Francis Chichester, or weird, hybrid bread, or children, or the cult of the mother, or that unpleasant old bag Madonna, or … oh, I think you get the point.
