Dawn of the Dumb (32 page)

I’ve never fully understood the public’s docile acceptance of psychics, or why, when it comes to their supposed abilities, the burden of proof is assumed to lie with the sceptic, as opposed to the sort of shrieking idiot who claims to be able to contact the spirit world (or in Derek Ogilvie’s case, communicate telepathically with kids too young to talk).

I’m quite hardcore on this. I think every psychic and medium in this country belongs in prison. Even the ones demented enough to believe in what they’re doing. In fact, especially them. Give them windowless cells and make them crap in buckets. They can spend the rest of their days sewing mailbags in the dark.

The audiences that psychics prey on are equally infuriating, albeit less deserving of contempt. They’re just disappointing, like a friend who’s let you down. Often, they’re simply grieving and desperate.

I mean, if you want to believe in psychics, fine. You’re a dangerous idiot and I wouldn’t trust you to operate a spoon without putting an eye out…but fine. Your choice. Delude yourself silly. Your world is probably more fun than the real one. There’s no death, just an afterlife filled with magic spirits who like to communicate with eerie, ugly, otherwise-unemployable bottom-of-the-barrel ‘showmen’ back on Earth.

But don’t accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a ‘closed mind’ or being ‘blind to possibilities’. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.

(If you want to feel your eyes pop rudely open, swot up on the ‘cold reading’ techniques fake psychics use—a combination of guesswork and sly conversational tics which give the impression that the ‘psychic’ is magically receiving accurate information from the ether. A fantastic (albeit pricey) step-by-step guide is available from ianrowland.com.

Anyway, back to my psychic prison fantasies. The problem with trying to jail all the mediums in Britain is they’d see it coming and (a) escape overseas to somewhere even more gullible, like Narnia, before you’d passed the legislation, or (b) call on their ghostly friends in the spirit world to whisk them from harm’s reach.

Except they couldn’t because ghosts—unlike scumbags and conmen—don’t exist. Pity. But that’s the real world for you. Often disappointing. But real. At least it’s always real.

Faces not words

[8 January 2007]

I
read a magazine yesterday and suddenly truly understood in my bones that human civilisation will die screaming in our lifetime.

It happened on the toilet. I was reading a copy of the free magazine Sky send to all their subscribers. Visually inhaling crap at one end, rectally exhaling it at the other; my corporeal self a mere conduit for the elemental crapforce that binds the universe together. I have all the spirituality of a doorframe. This is as close as I get to a religious experience.

Anyway. The Sky magazine is one of those /fear-a-like graphical holocausts where every millimetre of the page is plastered with rowdy colours and exclamation marks that crane their necks to squeal at you. I say I was ‘reading’ it, but in reality you don’t ‘read’ magazines like that. There is too much visual noise, so instead you simply ‘look at’ them, having first disengaged your temporal lobe so you don’t feel like you are being stabbed in the mind by an over-zealous Christmas lighting display. Even though that is precisely what is happening.

And I was dumbly gazing at the bit that tells you which films are coming up on the movie channels, when I noticed that at the bottom of each synopsis sat a group of tiny faces. Celebrity faces. Nestling at the end of the paragraph, like part of the typography, as though the editors had done some research and discovered their readers had devolved to the point where their brains can no longer parse text unless it is broken up with miniature photos of their famous imaginary friends grinning back at them. I slapped myself awake and tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

Slowly it dawned on me: this was a rating system. I flipped back a few pages, and sure enough, there was the key: a brightly-coloured box full of little celebrity faces, accompanied by a brief description of what they stood for. ‘It’s fast, easy, and practical,’ lied the subhead. This is what each face meant:

• Brad Pitt—‘Eye Candy’
  
• Peter Kay—‘Laugh Out Loud’
  
• Michael Jackson—‘Thriller’
  
• Sarah Jessica Parker—‘Get the Girls Round’
  
• Christopher Lee—‘Scary’
  
• Victoria Beckham—‘Star Spotting’
  
• Chico—‘Guilty Pleasure’
  
• Ant and Dec—‘Family Fun’
  
• Vicky Pollard—‘Real-Life Shocker’
  

Sure, it would insult the intelligence of a cod. Under this system,
Schindler’s List
= Vicky Pollard.

But I knew it was worse than that. I just didn’t know why, not yet. So I looked at it again. Somewhere in my head, a camel’s back splintered beneath a straw. And I understood: this is madness. Genuinely: this is madness. Concepts replaced by faces. Grinning faces. It is not evidence of’dumbing down’. It is the disjointed thought process of madness. That this is even vaguely acceptable is the most dizzying madness of all.

I wanted to run into the street, without even pausing to wipe, and hurl myself, boggle-eyed, at passers-by, flapping the magazine around, screaming: ‘HELP! WE’VE LOST OUR MINDS! I HAVE PROOF! I HAVE PROOF.’

But I didn’t. I stayed put; pooing and afraid.

And I thought: Our leaders lie, and we know they have lied, and there is war in our name, and the world kicks and boils itself to death and we do nothing but stare into the tiny grinning faces of people we don’t even know; faces that are, apparently, more ‘fast, easy and practical’ than language itself. I give us six years, tops.

On recognition

[15 January 2007]

T
here are four problems with having a byline photograph hovering over the top of a column, like the one you can see up there on the right (unless you’re reading this online or between the covers of a book, in which case you’re spared the misery).

Problem one: the average writer has a face like a bloodhound’s funeral. Problem two: in most byline shots, the writer is making eye contact with you, which automatically makes the column itself faindy unnerving to read, because you’re dimly aware someone’s staring at you—someone who wrote it, and is probably scanning your face for clues as to what you make of it, even though logically you know that can’t be true, because all they are is a photo and…Hang on—what was it they were writing about again? Oh, forget it.

Problem three is that, as a writer, you’re stuck with whatever expression your face happened to be pulling when the photo was taken. That’s the face you’re making as you say all this stuff, no matter what ‘all this stuff’ happens to be. If you smile, you smile for ever. From now on, every word you write will be interpreted in the context of you enjoying a great big smile, so if you write about the twentieth anniversary of die
Zeebrugge
ferry disaster in which 187 people died, it’ll look as though you’re pretty chuffed about the whole thing and don’t care who knows it.

Problem four is that you’re no longer anonymous, so if you call Geoff Capes an idiot and Geoff Capes reads it, and then two days later you bump into Geoff Capes in the street, there’s a good chance Geoff Capes will hit you, especially if, thanks to the byline photo, he thinks you were smiling while you slagged him off. Since Geoff Capes has fists the size of microwave ovens, this is bad news (or it would be, if he
was
an idiot, which I’m certain he isn’t—although I hear Richard Litdejohn believes otherwise).

For years I was without a byline photo, and had no desire to get one, because I knew they were intrinsically wrong. But I never fully appreciated the luxury of anonymity until it was taken away from me. Thanks to a combination of the byline photo and a low-budget BBC4 show during which my face repeatedly pops up onscreen, I now get recognised about once a week. In terms of celebrity, that puts me 40,000 rungs below the bloke in the elephant.co.uk commercial, but nevertheless it’s weird.

I’m still geared toward assuming that anyone who unexpectedly introduces themself to me in a pub or nods at me in the street is either someone I’ve met before but failed to recognise, or a kindly stranger who’s about to warn me I’ve left my flies undone. Instead, now, they’re occasionally people who know who I am but first have to ask me to confirm that I am who I am, before going on to explain that they thought I was who I am, but they weren’t sure. By which point, neither am I.

It’s not always pleasant attention, either. One man stomped over in a newsagent’s to call me a ‘telly cunt’, which struck me as hilarious two days later when I finally stopped shaking.

Still, it could be worse. While I was going out with my ex-girlfriend, she landed a part in ITV1’s erstwhile women-in-prison schlockfest
Bad Girls
, playing a lesbian murderer—which meant van drivers wound down their windows to shout ‘lesbian!’ or ‘murderer!’ at her when we walked down the street. Generally, this was done with affection, but that’s hard to explain to passers-by who by now are regarding the two of you with open suspicion.

Burqas for all. Only way forward.

CHAPTER NINE

In which the MacDonald Brothers provoke war an Anglo-Scottish war, Jeffrey Archer hurls pennies at beggars, and Shilpa Shetty meets some new friends

Up the Eton Road

[21 October 2006]

I
f you’re looking for proof that there’s a large number of knee-jerk racists lurking among the Great British Public, surely the outcome of last week’s
X Factor
(ITV) vote is it.

Maybe you didn’t see it because, like many a caring, sharing
Guardian
reader, you prefer the unbearably cruel early audition shows in which one no-hoper after another gets a big bum wiped all over their dreams. The tacky live studio finals, which are essentially more about celebration than denigration, leave you cold. And who can blame you? Most of the acts are mediocre at best, and some of them are downright rubbish.

Louis Walsh’s selection is especially poor. He’s already lost The Unconventionals, a sort of doo-wop amateur dramatic society known round these parts as A Cappella Irritant Squad, who last week delivered a performance of’Dancing in the Street’ which sounded like six clumsy cover versions playing at once. The audience couldn’t wait to ignore them.

And they were his most likeable act. The rest are saddled with absolutely unforgivable band names; names so shitbone awful, you hate them before they’ve even opened their mouths. There’s a flavourless quartet called 4Sure (4FuckSake would be more appropriate), and an ethereally skinny boy band called Eton Road (which sounds like a euphemism for an illegal underage sex act to me—as in ‘the police arrived just as he was taking one of the prefects up the Eton Road’). But worst of all, there’s the MacDonald Brothers.

And this brings me to my point. The MacDonald Brothers are a pair of characterless twins whose startlingly dreadful performance somehow managed to veer from cheesy to flat to eerie to nauseating and all the way back to cheesy again before finally settling on outright rubbish. There’s something indefinably creepy about them—they’re the kind of act a child killer might listen to in his car. And yet somehow, they were spared elimination by the viewers at home.

Meanwhile, a twenty-six-year-old called Dionne, whose voice is so good it could advertise heaven, was left at the bottom of the pile alongside The Unconventionals. Why? Well, it can’t be her singing. Perhaps it’s the gap between her front teeth, but I doubt it. That’s sort of endearing.

No, the only reason I can think of is that she’s black, and there’s still a sizeable section of the audience that’s either threatened or dissuaded by that. There’s no way a rational person could choose the MacDonald Brothers over her. It’s like choosing a kick in the balls instead of a cuddle. The programme’s not at fault here. The viewers are.

Anyway, what I’m getting round to is this: if you watch
The X-Factor
, it’s time to stop doing so in a detached, ironic, I’m-above-this-shit kind of way. It’s time to muck in and get voting. Yes it is. Stop arguing. So what if it’s a rip-off? You want the MacDonald Brothers to win? You sicken me. Vote Dionne.

Anyway.
The X-Factor
isn’t the only live, over-long reality spectacular. Last week, Sky unveiled
Cirque de Celebris
(Sky One), which…well, you can guess what it is from the tide. Yes, in an apparent bid to strip the word ‘celebrity’ of its last remaining atoms of glamour, the famous are now desperately performing circus tricks for your amusement, like starving dogs at a medieval banquet.

Sadly, it’s not as much fun as you think. Yes, you get to see Syed from
The Apprentice
dangling from a trapeze, and Zammo dancing on a large, brightly-coloured ball, like a bear in a bad cartoon, but the show lasts 90 minutes—approximately 60 minutes longer than its novelty value. Still, at least it’s given Grace from
Big Brother
a chance to rehabilitate herself (she came first last week). More importandy, if the look of concentrated terror on Syed’s face is anything to go by, it’s only a matter of time before he shits himself live on air—and in those tight spandex tights, that’s going to look absolutely hilarious. It’s surely worth recording just for that.

TOUCH WOOD

[28 October 2006]

L
ots of things designed to be used by children end up appealing to adults too. Harry Potter. Jelly babies. Kids’ bums. The list is endless.

TV’s
Doctor Who
is a good example. Originally conceived as an educational drama for ig6os kiddywinks, it attracted a devoted adult audience from the very beginning. They knew they were watching something that wasn’t, strictly speaking, ‘for them’ but they loved it anyway.