Dawn of the Dumb (27 page)

Beside the fact that it’d be bloody weird if what went into crisps didn’t go into me, but somehow leaped inside the nearest bystander, what’s really annoying about the advert (paid for by the British Heart Foundation) is that it’s a hysterical exaggeration, the equivalent of a shrieking idiot telling you you’ll have someone’s eye out in a minute if you don’t put the cap back on that pen.

What their stupid poster is trying to say is this: if you eat a large bag of crisps every day for a year, you’re effectively ‘drinking’ almost five litres of cooking oil. But so what? Drinking five litres of cooking oil would indeed be awful, but only if you necked it in one go. Sip it in tiny quantities over a full year and it might be quite pleasant. Or you could drizzle it over some crisps. That’d be even nicer.

You could create an equally sickening campaign attacking organic brown rice. Run a cinema ad showing a year’s worth of excrement emerging from someone’s backside in one endless, unbroken go, accompanied by a voice-over saying look, if you eat organic brown rice every day for a year, here’s how much waste you’ll jettison. And then to underline the point you’d show someone vomiting over it. You know: just to argue your case subtly, like the British Heart Foundation does.

It’s not just them. Wizened, infuriating, oatmeal-and-bracken guru Gillian McKeith creates unappetising food mountains in the kitchens of blobsome paupers in an effort to fuel their self-disgust. Look, you hopeless waddling gluttons: look how revolting it is when we take all the cream cakes and sausages you ate in a week and stack them on top of each other! Watch how the tomato sauce from Thursday’s spaghetti hoops congeals with Monday’s chocolate milkshake. Weep! Weep, you fat fools!

St Jamie Oliver pulled the same stunt on his recent
Return to School Dinners
, mixing chips and cakes and fat into an almighty steaming lump in front of horrified onlookers. As a spectacle, it’s stomach-churning; as dietary advice, it’s meaningless. Churn a ton of pesto, scallops, muesli and yoghurt together and it’ll look just as grim, especially if the camera intermittently pans up to take in St Jamie’s increasingly well-fed face gurning over the top of it.

Still, who cares if the shock tactics make sense—this is about saving lives, right? Well, yeah, maybe—that and snobbery. But where does this demonisation end?

Tip junk food into a trough and you’re effectively saying the people who eat it are pigs: greedy ignorant livestock, who perhaps deserve pity, or perhaps scorn, but clearly don’t deserve freedom of choice. Because left to their own devices, look what they’ll do: they’ll happily drink a five-litre bottle of cooking oil, like the woeful, indolent scum we think they are.

The decoy doomsday

[13 October 2006]

I
always wondered what the end of the world would look like. Now I know. Let’s face it—we’re doomed. Each time I pick up a paper or catch a bulletin, the news is 15 per cent worse than before. Seriously, if I switched on the TV and they were showing live footage of an army of fire-breathing pterodactyls machine-gunning people to death on the streets of London right outside my door, I’d be horrified, but not entirely surprised, nor any more scared than I already am. I’d probably just shrug and wait for them to smash the door down.

We’re so screwed, I don’t even know what to worry about first. Terrorist extremists? Yeah, they’re frightening—but what about those North Korean nukes? Or global warming, come to think of it? I need a personal bloody organiser to sort it out—a gizmo that’ll set me a ‘timetable of concern’ just so I can break down my overall sense of creeping dread into manageable, bite-sized flurries of panic. Otherwise, I’m in danger of forgetting to worry about some things—like bird flu, for instance. I haven’t seriously crapped myself about that since, ooh, February? Whenever it was, a top-up’s long overdue.

I’m not the only one. I was reading a George Monbiot piece about climate change on the
Guardian
website the other day, and it painted such a bleak vision of our potential future, I swear I physically felt my will to live draining through the soles of my feet, as though it were being flushed out of me and replaced with a sort of heavy, porridge-like despair.

Below the article, in the comments section, a passer-by remarked, ‘I have two pieces of advice for anyone reading this: (1) Keep an overdose-sized supply of sleeping pills stashed away that is sufficient for yourself, your family and anyone else you care about. (2) When things start getting bad, use them.’ And this was one of the cheerier entries.

Still, the news isn’t always violently upsetting. No. Sometimes the bad headlines turn out to be a false alarm—like the other day, when early reports of a second
⁹
/
₁₁
happening
right now
turned out to be a comparatively minor accident involving a light aircraft. Can’t be much fun being one of the victims, of course—for one thing, you’ve just been killed, and for another, your death was announced by an anchorman mopping his brow, and drowned out by a worldwide sigh of relief- but for the rest of us, it was the closest we’ve come to hearing good news in ages.

With this in mind, perhaps news journalists everywhere would like to make our lives a little more bearable by running several deliberately petrifying and utterly fabricated stories a week, just so the genuine terrifying stuff feels a bit less terrifying by comparison. And at the end of the week, simply reveal which stories were true, and which were fake. That way, we’ll spend our last few years on Earth feeling like we’ve lived through a string of lucky escapes, rather than a protracted, dispiriting meltdown.

Start with the pterodactyl example. A week later, invent a health scare—some new hyper-contagious disease that makes your eyes boil and burst and run down your cheeks. The gorier the better. Then invent some bogus knuckle-whitening bullshit about a maniac on the Korean peninsula who’s got hold of a nuclear bomb and…Oh. Oh bugger.

One night in paradise

[20 October 2006]

Y
ou’re whisked to a top London restaurant for an expensive bloody meal. Before eating, you slurp drinks at the bar: a three-dimensional diagram populated by the cast of
Star Trek
. The ceiling is high, the lighting is low, and everything looks supernaturally rich, as though a high-definition ‘cinematic’ visual effect is being applied in post-production. All the laughter and hubbub sounds posh or strangely accented. Surely you’re in a commercial.

One of your party orders a vodka and cranberry. ‘That’s a Belvedere,’ says die barman with a smile. So from now on, a Belvedere it is. Shortly afterwards, a woman from the future arrives to tell you your table is ready. She practically curtsies as she does so. The Belvedere is gently taken from you, placed on a silver platter and spirited away to your table, to greet you on arrival, thus sparing you the bicep-snapping ordeal of lugging it all the way there yourself.

Orders are taken and a meal is served; each dish is whispered into position under your nose and unveiled like a precious gem being offered to a sultan. At the table beside you sits a preposterous man sporting a cravat and moustache, each straining to out-ridiculous the other. He’s of indeterminate age—anywhere between twenty-five and forty-five—yet no matter how old he is, his companion is clearly twenty years younger.

In between silky mouthfuls, you scan the room, playing the ‘escort/daughter’ guessing game as you alight on various couples. A bullish man with a fat thigh for a neck is dining with an underfed beauty in a backless spun-gold drape. She’s a supermodel; he’s a burly Greek fisherman crossed with Tony Soprano.

The bill arrives; it’s large but it’s worth it. Your laid-on taxi is late. As you stand outside, a bodyguard built like a gigantic iron bell ushers a group of Russian businessmen into a people carrier. Then Tony the Fisherman and his superwaif date emerge and clamber into a tarmac-hugging supercar, so shiny on the eyes it’s like being stabbed in the iris with a pin. The seats are low; as she dips to get in, her entire compact bum pops out the back of her backless drape. Tony roars away with a hand up her skirt.

Eventually your car arrives. The driver apologises with so much forelock-tugging deference, he might as well invite you to beat him. ‘Would you like some music?’ he asks as you pull away. You say that’d be nice, and suddenly the air’s filled with some bullshit bounce-wid-me R&B, all glossy beats and, genuinely, a lyric about ‘feelin’ ready to squirt’. The car is the size and shape of a riverside apartment. You could comfortably stage a threesome in here without awkwardly banging your elbows.

Outside on the street, pavement scum queue for night buses. Suddenly, part of you feels like winding down the window and giving them the finger. Because compared to you, they’re just clueless, staggering crudsacks. You’ve spent the night in an expensive Bond movie, pampered at every step, ferried home like a prince. Those laughable bozos wind up howling incoherently like cows in the rain.

Eventually you’re dropped home. This special cab cost three times the usual. You’ve spent a fortune. You get what you pay for. You pay to feel superior. It works. The rich do this nightly. They must be insane.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In which millions come to bury Sezer, Billie Piper is praised to the skies, and Gillian McKeith attempts to murder music.

Berks the size of hills

[27 May 2006]

C
hrist almighty. Hellzapoppin’. Where on God’s Earth do you start?
Big Brother
(64) has shovelled some berks our way in the past, but this time—for round seven—they’re using nuclear-powered shovels and berks the size of hills. It shouldn’t be possible, but clearly it somehow is.

By now, everyone in Europe will be aware that one housemate has stood out for all the wrong reasons: I speak, obviously, of Shah-baz. Shahbaz—a children’s party entertainer created in a madman’s laboratory, set loose on the world minus an ‘off’ switch. Shahbaz—an episode of
Cmckerjack
with an erection down its shorts, running, sobbing and shrieking, right in your direction. Shahbaz the All-frighty. Fear him. Pity him. Just for God’s sake don’t encourage him.

Shahbaz spent his first few days in the hellhouse bouncing round the linoleum shrieking, blubbing, squealing and bear-hugging anyone within grasping distance. That was disturbing enough. But when, for some mad reason, this failed to win anyone over, he really went into meltdown—deliberately provoking arguments then playing the victim: behaviour that’s not so much attention-seeking as attention-kidnapping. By the time you read this he’ll be conducting a dirty protest in tears—and all because he just wants to be loved. Unsettling in a none-too-entertaining way, he should’ve been pulled out days ago, and unless he’s an actor, I fear for his stability following the inevitable eviction. Here’s hoping for a soft landing and a happier tomorrow.

Of course, there’s one bit of knowledge Shahbaz can comfort himself with: whatever his faults, at least he isn’t Sezer. Sezer: yuk. Just what we need on our screens: a pint-sized, pixel-eyed, monotone, priapic, hair-gelled rodent, so in love with himself he probably masturbates to videos of himself masturbating. And it’s misplaced adoration, because sculpted torso aside, he’s got precisely nothing going for him. He’ll never say anything you haven’t heard expressed by someone less objectionable before. There are a million identical dullards in the capital alone—hurl a bag of shit into any bar in central London and the chances are it’ll burst over four or five of them. (Footnote: infuriatingly, at the time of writing, Tuesday morning, Sezer has behaved entirely reasonably for a full 24 hours. If he doesn’t start pissing me off again, I’ll have to revise my kneejerk opinion of him. And that would never do.)

Most of the remainder are relatively dull. There’s Mikey (sexist Vernon Kay/Owen Wilson cross-splice whose punchably dumb face probably adorns the banknotes in Thickland); George (near-silent posho with the head of an Easter Island statue and a severe case of Portillo lips); Nikki (spoiled chimpette who throws tantrums like Geoff Capes throws fence-posts) and Grace (skinny dance instructor apparently played by Peaches Geldof).

Who else? Think hard now. You can do it. Ah yes: Lea (planet-boobed sometime pornstar who’s surgically enhanced her way out of the human race altogether—she now resembles Samantha Janus as described by a lunatic); Dawn (an ‘exercise scientist’ who believes in chakras—so not a scientist at all then); Imogen (cute but flavourless; a passable human vacuum in a thong); and Richard (catty Right Said Fred diplomat clearly doomed to spend the rest of his natural life lifting heavy objects on daytime DIY makeover shows). Apparently, there are two others, called Bonnie and Glyn. But I don’t think they’ve been on camera yet. Still it’s not all bad news. Lisa (Lucy Liu channelling the spirit of Bez), for instance, is vaguely tolerable.

But the clear victor, by ten country miles, is Pete—the Tourette’s sufferer whose frequent uncontrollable spasms turn him into a cross between Rik from the Young Ones, Keyop from
Battle of the Planets
, a Tex Avery cartoon wolf, and Klunk, the chirruping inventor from
Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines
. Funny, charming, intelligent, talented, modest and utterly even-handed, he’s by far the most likeable contestant in the programme’s lengthening history. And if he doesn’t win, I’ll eat Shahbaz.

The twat amplifier

[3 June 2006]

I
used to quite like my ears. Not visually, I mean, but notionally. I admired the way they were content to hang around on the side of my head ferrying noises into my brain. Selfless. Reliable. Steadfast.

This week, however, our relationship changed forever. They turned on me. They forced me to listen to
X Factor: Battle of the Stars
(ITV); specifically, they forced me to listen to Gillian McKeith singing.