Dawn of the Dumb (23 page)

Thanks Labour. Thanks for cocking things up and handing the Eternal Enemy a second chance. We’re doomed—doomed, I tells ya.

It’s going to be like the 19805 all over again. What better time then, for
The Line of Beauty
(BBC2), a coming-of-age drama set in gaudy, salmon-pink Thatcherite Britain. It’s been adapted from the Booker-prize winning Alan Hollinghurst novel by Andrew Davies, the one-man screenplay sweatshop whose annual workload would put a Cyberman to shame.

More on those later. Anyway,
The Line of Beauty
tracks the fortunes of Nick Guest, a naive young gay guy lodging with the Fed-dens, a blisteringly posh, offensively loaded family living in a Notting Hill house the size of a flagship branch of PC World. Daddy Fedden is an aspiring MP, a personal friend of Mrs Thatcher and, most importantly, a thumping great git. The rest of the Feddens are more sympathetic, particularly their daughter Cat—a textbook beautiful mess.

Nick is soon drawn into a world of glamorous parties populated exclusively by chortling dinner-jacketed bluebloods with names like Toby and Jerome and Sebastian and Saffron and Camilla and Glyndebourne and Squiffy. Incredibly, rather than instinctively vomiting into his hands and smearing it round their tittering, privileged faces, he finds himself rather seduced by it all, and sets about becoming a professional hanger-on.

In the meantime, he’s also exploring his sexuality with the demented zeal of an automated buggering machine. Early on, we’re smacked in the face by a helping of enthusiastic al fresco sodomy which promises to send the BBC’s homophobe hotiine into meltdown, largely because it looks like jolly good fun. And that’s by no means the end of it. Nick will have sex at the drop of a hat. Especially if someone bends down to pick it up.

Chuck in a blizzard of cocaine and the ever-lengthening shadow of Aids and…well, you can see the icebergs looming.

Appropriately for something called
The Line of Beauty
, the cast is preposterously beautiful. Nick, played by newcomer Dan Stevens, is a bit like a Muppet Baby incarnation of Hugh Grant, all limpid eyes and bewildered, stuttering smiles; while Hayley Atwell, playing Cat, starts out pretty and gets better-looking by the second. By the end of the first episode, she’s so stupendously gorgeous, she’s almost physically painful to look at. I had to rub an ice cube directly onto my heart just to sit through her scenes. That woman takes the piss.

Mind you, Mrs Thatcher turns up in episode two, and in this world even
she’s
bloody beautiful. Honest. I damn near abased myself. To the Iron Lady. It’d take years of psychotherapy to undo that.

It’s all sturdy, classy stuff, albeit slightly hamstrung by the passive presence lurking at its core—Nick’s such an eager-to-please social chameleon he feels like more of an interested bystander than a lead character, and the Hugh Grant act starts to grate pretty quickly. A good watch nevertheless, even if it never really quite takes off the way you hope it will.

The Tories aren’t the only heartless, blank-eyed, nightmarish, marching, mankind-crushing army of despicable automatons making a televisual comeback this week: the Cybermen return in tonight’s
Doctor Who
(BBC1). Like the Tories, they last posed a serious threat back in the Eighties. Unlike the Tories, they can traditionally be killed by rubbing a lump of gold into their chestplates. If only real life was as simple as the world of populist fantasy.

This series is turning out to have some impressively hardcore sci-fi ‘chops’, and
The Rise of the Cybermen
is a prime case in point, with more ideas packed into its 45 minutes than most shows—and all Tories—manage in a lifetime.

A banana skin and an open manhole

[20 May 2006]

M
y theory that 98 per cent of everything is absolutely rubbish doesn’t quite hold water when it comes to the world of cinema. There it’s more like 99.3 per cent.

I recently had one of those evenings where you sit indoors alone, so bored and lonely you teeter on the verge of gouging one of your own eyes out just so you’ll have something to tell the grandchildren. In desperation, I flipped through Sky Movies, desperate to find something interesting to look at. In the event, I might as well have stared up a cat’s bum instead.

Modern cinema is downright embarrassing. It’s all Adam Sandier this and Will Smith that. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson smugging their shortarsed, bent-nosed heads off.
Ocean’s Twelve. I, Robot. Garfield. Miss Congeniality 2. The Chronicles of Riddick. The Chronicles of Riddick. The Chronicles of Riddick. The Chronicles of Riddick
.

And what about
Crash?
Triple Oscar-winning
Crash
. Jesus. Have you
seen
it? It’s the single most patronising film ever made: the characters might as well be walking around wearing sandwich boards with ‘RACE IS A COMPLEX ISSUE’ printed on them in massive, flashing letters. I half-expected ‘Ebony and Ivory’ to start playing over the end credits—but no: that might’ve been funny, thereby rendering the film 1 per cent less awful, and that would never do. Not when there’s berks to feed.

Of course, mankind’s been churning out terrible movies ever since the first motion cameras were invented; over time, our culture simply forgets the really bad ones, like a repressed abuse memory. Curiously though, while the rare gems of brilliance get praised to the hilt, we rarely get a chance to actually see them.

Case in point: Buster Keaton. Since year dot I can remember being told that Buster Keaton was a comic genius; that he virtually invented ‘deadpan’ comedy; that he made audiences laugh so hard they’d cough blood all over the seat in front, which is why cinema seats are traditionally coloured red. I’d seen the famous clip from
Steamboat Bill, Jr
. in which Buster survives being crushed by a collapsing housefront by standing in the tiny gap where the window should be, and was suitably impressed, but the rest of his work blurred into a mass of speeded-up film and tinkling pianos in my head, none of which seemed the slightest bit amusing.

As a result, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the first edition
of Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns
(BBC4), which examines Keaton’s work in some detail. By the end of the show I was blown away, partly because Merton’s unabashed love for his subject is infectious (and a delight to see), but mainly because the clips themselves are genuinely bloody funny.

I used to think people only
pretended
to like silent comedies in order to impress girls in glasses, but on this evidence I was wrong. And when you’re not laughing, you’re gasping. We’re always told that the appeal of slapstick lies in its sense of
Schadenfreude:
the sickening delight of watching misfortune befall another, generally in the form of a banana skin and an open manhole—but on this evidence, you’re more likely to experience the chair-clenching terror of watching a man genuinely dicing with death before your very eyes. Perhaps I’m stupid, but I’d forgotten just how perilous early slapstick could be. After witnessing clip upon clip of Keaton literally risking his life on camera, even the most demented excesses
of Jackass
or
Dirty Sanchez
look hopelessly tame.

But the best thing about the show is that it isn’t just a load of clips. The first 35 minutes consist of a potted history and mini-lecture from Merton—and then just at the point where you start thinking ‘this is all very well, but now my appetite’s been whetted I wish they’d show us a whole Keaton film’, they bloody well do: for the final 25 minutes we’re treated to a 1921 short called
The Goat
, in its entirety. And suddenly an eighty-five-year-old silent film becomes the freshest piece of comedy you’ve seen in years. Tinkling pianos and all.

CHAPTER SIX

In which Sandi Thorn is unmasked, romance is denounced, and Justin Timberlake is told to go and fuck himself

Time to get tough on flags

[26 May 2006]

R
ejoice! Thanks to the national obsession with football, the cross of St George has finally been reclaimed from the racists. Nowadays, when you see an England flag on a car, sprawled across a T-shirt or flapping from a novelty hat, you no longer assume the owner is a dot-brained xenophobe. Instead you assume he’s just an idiot. And you’re right. He is.

It’s a great piece of visual shorthand. Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation’s dimbos to wear dunce’s caps in public. No one would stand for it. There’d be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and Co. to the Nazis. We’d see rioting in the streets—badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.

Instead, every numbskull in the land is queuing up to voluntarily brand themselves. They even pay for the privilege! As brilliant ruses go, it’s the most brilliant, rusiest ruse you could wish for. I can’t wait for stage two, when they’re persuaded to neuter themselves with safety scissors.

The only problem I have with this berk-demarcation scheme is the design of the flag itself. Personally, I’d jettison the big red cross/white background malarky in favour of a black rectangle with the word CRETIN printed in the centre in stark bold text.

Traditional flags are hopeless. A few weeks ago, I took part in a pub quiz. In round three you had to match countries to their national flags. It was impossible. With a few notable exceptions, most flags are more or less identical. A different colour here, a thicker line there, but on the whole they all just look like…well, like flags.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I always thought that the whole point of flags is to make it easy to tell which country you’re dealing with. Instead, thanks to a rash of uninspired design choices, they do the precise opposite. Flags have become a tedious puzzle, a tosser’s clue. What next? Replace the names of countries themselves with anagrams? What is this,
The Da Vinci Code?
The system’s in chaos.

Who decides what can and can’t go on a flag anyway? Is there a worldwide flag council overseeing this stuff? Presumably drawings are permitted—the Welsh flag’s got the right idea with that lovely dragon—but what about photographs? If, say, the Dutch decided to replace their boring tricolour with some hardcore pornography, would they still be allowed to hang it outside the UN?

Or what about sarcastic flags? If I was prime minister of Iraq—which I’m not—I’d commission a parody of the Stars and Stripes and insist on using that. Replace the stripes with missile trails and the stars with skulls. And a little cartoon of George Bush pooing into a bucket or something. It wouldn’t cost much and it would make literally everyone in the world laugh out loud. And perhaps all that laughter would bring us all together as one, and we’d spend the rest of the century hugging each other and tumbling around in a great big bed. Or perhaps not.

Anyway, in summary: those protesters who burn flags outside embassies have got the right idea—but they shouldn’t be burning them because they disagree with something the country in question has done. They should be burning flags just because they’re flags. And flags are rubbish.

The great online dick fight

[2 June 2006]

L
ast week I wrote a load of nonsense about flags and idiocy; as well as appearing in print, it also turned up on the
Guardian’s
‘Comment is Free’ blog-o-site, where passers-by are encouraged to scrawl their own responses beneath the original article.

Some people disagreed with the piece, some agreed; some found it funny, some didn’t. For half a nanosecond I was tempted to join in the discussion. And then I remembered that all internet debates, without exception, are entirely futile. So I didn’t.

There’s no point debating anything online. You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky. The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional ‘live audience’ quickly conspire to create a ‘perfect storm’ of perpetual bickering.

Stumble in, take umbrage with someone, trade a few blows, and within about two or three exchanges the subject itself goes out the window. Suddenly you’re simply arguing about arguing. Eventually one side gets bored, comes to its senses, or dies, and the row fizzles out: just another needless belch in the swirling online guffstorm.

But not for long, because online quarrelling is also addictive, in precisely the same way Tetris is addictive. It appeals to the ‘lab rat’ part of your brain; the annoying, irrepressible part that adores repetitive pointlessness and would gleefully make you pop bub-blewrap till Doomsday if it ever got its way. An unfortunate few, hooked on the futile thrill of online debate, devote their lives to its cause. They roam the internet, actively seeking out viewpoints they disagree with, or squat on message boards, whining, needling, sneering, over-analysing each new proclamation—joylessly fiddling, like unhappy gorillas doomed to pick lice from one another’s fur for all eternity.

Still, it’s not all moan moan moan in NetLand. There’s also the occasional puerile splutter to liven things up. In the debate sparked by my gibberish outpouring, it wasn’t long before rival posters began speculating about the size of their opponent’s dicks. It led me to wonder—has the world of science ever investigated a causal link between penis size and male political leaning?

I’d theorise that, on the whole, right-wing penises are short and stubby, hence their owners’ constant fury. Lefties, on the other hand, are spoiled for length, yet boast no girth whatsoever—which explains their pained confusion. I flit from one camp to the other, of course, which is why mine’s so massive it’s got a full-size human knee in the middle. And a back. A big man’s back.