Dawn of the Dumb (45 page)

You’ve never had so much choice. It’s part of your destiny. Because you’re worth it. Everything in those movies happens for a reason. And it happens in front of your eyes because you’re special. Keep repeating: You are special.

Now, if you’d just like to pop that special fingertip of yours on this scanning device for a moment…that’s the way…and just keep your special eyelids open while the iris recognition software does its thing…that’s lovely…now, you might get a bit bored during this next bit—we’re going to analyse your prior credit transactions and generate a purchasing destiny chart—so while we’re doing that, slip some headphones into your special little ears (white headphones, pink headphones, red, blue, olive—pick a colour that you feel expresses your personality best) and listen to your very own choice of music while our computer chugs away in the background. Are you comfortable? Would you like to lie down? We’ve got 1,000 pillows for you to choose from. Pick the one you feel expresses your personality best. Plump it up (or don’t! You decide!). Lie back. Close your eyes (quickly or slowly! You decide!).

Tell you what. We can pump some dreams into your brain if you like. Want dreams? More than 2,000 Adam Sandier dreams at the touch of a button. Have it your way. And we’ll do what we like while you enjoy your little snooze. That’s right. That’s good. That’s special. You’re special. Keep repeating: You are special.

Dicks, lies and measuring tape

[4 June 2007]

I
t’s what you do with it that counts. And, according to the
Sun
newspaper, what almost half of men ‘do’ is fret about it. ‘MEN FEAR TOO SMALL PENIS SIZE’ bleats the headline, which, like all
Sun
headlines, sounds a bit like ‘red injun’ dialogue from an old cowboy film (quite a racy one, in this case). Apparently, Dr Kevan Wylie of the Royal Hallamshire hospital has recently overseen the completion of a sixty-year study into penis size, during which 12,000 penises were ‘analysed’—an average of 200 penises a year. Assuming they took weekends off, that’s 0.76 penises a day. At some point you’d drift off and start doodling on them.

The survey ultimately concluded that ‘the average erect penis was 5.5 ins to 6.2 ins long and 4.7 ins to 5.1 ins in girth’. And looked hilarious resting on a Petri dish.

If we generously take the average to be six inches, and multiply that by the total number of appendages, it means they examined a total of 72,000 inches of penis, which sounds impressive until you input that figure into a conversion calculator and realise it’s a mere 1.136 miles. A frail old lady could cycle that distance in less than five minutes, assuming she could keep her eyes on the road.

Anyway, it wasn’t all warm hands and tape measures. The researchers also asked the owners of the penises some probing questions—presumably in a misguided attempt to break the ice, or make the whole scenario feel faintly less awkward. They found that ‘those with a ‘normal-sized’ penis often mistakenly thought theirs was too small’. Perhaps the researcher had huge hands.

No. It seems pornography is to blame, as ‘almost 40 per cent blamed their insecurity on watching porn as teens’. Presumably they also felt insecure that they weren’t a smooth-chested, oily West German pulling a face like a man undergoing an ingrown toe-nail operation under insufficient local anaesthetic. On the plus side, they’ll have learned to pronounce the phrase ‘Ich komme’, witnessed countless body-fluid tributes to Jackson Pollock, and perfected the art of slamming a laptop shut at the sound of approaching footsteps.

The tragedy here is that most of them are anxious for no reason. The
Sun
reports that ‘there is no need to worry as 85 per cent of women ARE satisfied with their partner’s penis proportions. The study found GIRTH matters more than length to 90 per cent of women.’ That’s how they printed it—GIRTH, in bold capital letters, no messing about. It’s a raunchy paper, the
Sun
.

(Speaking of suns, or rather sons, if I ever have one—a son—I’ve just decided that I’m going to call him Girth, to give him a subliminal advantage with any would-be suitors. Girth Hammer Lointhump Brooker. He’ll thank me for it one day, if only because having a unique Googlewhack-of-a-name is a real boon in our thrilling online age. Finding him on Facebook will be easy, and who wouldn’t want someone like that listed among their ‘friends’?)

To assist worried readers, the
Sun
thoughtfully accompanied the article with a ‘Pecker Checker’—a graphic of an actual-size ruler with the ‘average zone’ clearly labelled. In doing so, it is actively encouraging male readers to press their erect penises against the page, which is a cheery way to pass a few minutes on a quiet afternoon—or it would be, if the article weren’t surrounded by adverts for MFI kitchens and BT broadband hubs, a column called ‘The Whip’ topped by an illustration of a gloved hand wielding a lash, a photograph of silver-haired sixty-year-old aristocrat Benjamin Slade and, most alarmingly of all, a headshot of Mr Bean hovering perilously close to the ruler’s tip, gazing directly into your eyes. Anyone who can maintain even a below-average erection under those circumstances is precisely the kind of psychopath who shouldn’t be allowed to own a penis in the first place.

So, then. Penises. Men fret about them too much. The answer, perhaps, is to remain erect at all times, as the moment a penis starts engorging, it drains blood from the brain, leaving the owner incapable of worrying about anything more complex than where he wants to put it. Long or short, fat or thin—they’re good for depleting common sense, soiling sheets, terrifying bystanders, creating selfish offspring and precious little else. Plus they look ridiculous. If you’ve got one, or access to one, take a good look at it this evening and ask yourself: how can this possibly be the work of a sane God?

Washing machines live longer with Calgon

[11 June 2007]

M
y favourite advert at the moment is for Calgon. A kindly looking handyman is sitting behind a washing machine and a box of Calgon, addressing me directly. ‘You’ve heard about Calgon, but why should you use it?’ he asks. It’s true. I have indeed heard of Calgon, but don’t know why I should use it. It is as if he has looked into my soul. This guy understands me better than many of my closest friends, and I’ve only known him four seconds.

Better still, he follows his ice-breaking question with a straightforward answer. Apparently Calgon stops your washing machine turning into a crumbling chalk sculpture. ‘Calgon protection,’ he says, patting the box. The advert ends with a good old-fashioned jingle—a small choir singing: ‘Washing machines live longer with Calgon!’ It couldn’t be simpler.

Now obviously, I’m never going to buy Calgon; popping a Calgon tablet ‘in every wash’ might make the washer ‘live’ longer, but (a) it sounds like too much trouble to go to on behalf of a machine and (b) I could probably spend the money I’d saved on not buying Calgon on getting a new machine when the old one finally dies of limescale cancer—and I bet new washing machines are thrillingly advanced these days, with wi-fi iPod connections and sat nav and everything. But I appreciate the ad’s straight-talking nature. It’s refreshingly unsophisticated, and unlike almost every other advert on television, not glaringly over-pleased with itself.

Right now, there’s a rash of commercials which combine ‘twee’ with ‘patronising’—‘tweetronising’ if you like, although that’s quite tweetronising in itself. You can spot a tweetronising commercial a mile off- it’ll have a modern folk music backing track, a cast of non-threatening urban hippy replicants, and a drowsy hello-birds-hello-sky overall attitude that makes you want to chase it down an alleyway and kick it until the police arrive.

Furthermore, tweetronising takes infantilism to a new level. They’re like children’s programmes in miniature—not so much talking down to the viewer as placing the viewer in a cot and tickling his chin. George Orwell once described advertising as ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’. These days it’s more like the rattling of a rattle.

Take the current Orange ad in which a woman stands in a forest unfolding a range of ain’t-it-cute props while a self-consciously lo-fi recording of a female voice recites the following:

I like conversations that last for hours and hours

Full of jokes about singing bees and talking flowers

I like it when they take up whole mornings

And fill up whole nights

When they mention books and cocktails

And trumpets and kites

I like them when they talk about parties and talk about dreams

And talk about cakes covered in cream

And all that they need is me and a friend

And the talking to go on and never to end.

Never to end? I’m all for a bit of pointless digression, but this bitch wants to witter about ‘singing bees’ and ‘trumpets and kites’ for
eternityffiiis
is a description of hell. Orange does not think insipid babble is the sole preserve of womankind, incidentally-there is a companion ad backed with a man moronically singing about how he likes to talk about dinosaurs, cars and ‘anything that pops in my brain/ and then falls out my mouth/ kind of like the rain’. He is either naturally stupid or recovering from a head injury. Or maybe years of intensive mobile phone use have caused a brain tumour so huge it’s crushed his IQ to the back of his skull, leaving him with the conversational skills of a six-year-old.

The rule of thumb seems to be that the more grimly impersonal the product, the more ingratiatingly syrupy the ad. Cars, for example, were until recently portrayed as cold mechanical sharks; selfish metal cocoons that transported men in sunglasses across isolated desert roads at fearsome velocity. Now, apparently, they are cuddly scamps with an impish sense of humour. Or toys. Or skateboards.

But they’re not. Cars are bastards. You know that advert where the smashed-up little girl whines about being run over at 40 miles an hour? A car did that. And the car was such a bastard, it probably thought it was all her own fault. (And to be fair, it’s got a point: if she’s OK with being hit at 30 mph, why didn’t she start running away at 10 mph the moment she saw it heading toward her at 40?

No, she’d rather laze about on her back at the side of the road, moaning about it. I’ve got no sympathy. She’s an idiot.)

In summary: phones are little plastic boxes, cars are large metal boxes, and no amount of goo-goo gurgling will change that. Please, advertisers: enough with the sugar and folk music. It’s time to get puritan. Washing machines live longer with Calgon. Ronseal does what it says on the tin. That’s all we need to know.

On Glastonbury

[27 June 2007]

H
ere’s an entirely random list of things I hate. Mud. Rain. Inconvenience. Any form of discomfort whatsoever. Loud noises. People. People’s friends. People standing next to other people, with yet more people in between. Drunks bumping into you and being sick down your leg. Poorly maintained public toilets. Camping.

You’ll find all these things and more at the Glastonbury festival, which is why it has always struck me as heck on earth. A long weekend in a wet field surrounded by students on cider, thirtysomething Faithless fans, and everyone I avoided at school. That’s not a holiday. That’s a penance.

On top of that, I’d heard my share of off-putting Glastonbury myths. Tents bobbing in a mud-slide. Widespread trench foot. A man on ketamine eating his own hand. One of my friends swore blind she knew a man who’d been sitting in a Portaloo when some passing japester decided to tip it over, door side down, leaving him trapped inside a coffin full of foaming crap for fifteen horrifying minutes; it went in his eyes and mouth. He got dysentery.

In summary: pretty far removed from my idea of fun. Consequently, I’ve never been. Until now. I got talked into it by the
Guardian
. From the start, I was adamant about one thing.

‘I’m not camping,’ I said. ‘I hate camping more than I hate the Nazis. Plus I can’t use sleeping bags because I get restrictive claustrophobia.’

‘What’s that?’ they asked.

‘It means I panic in any situation where I can’t fan my arms and legs out to their fullest extent.’

‘Are you making this up?’

‘Almost, but no. Anyway, I’m not camping.’

‘But we want you to experience it properly,’ they said.

‘Sod ‘properly’. I don’t want to experience it at all. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.’

Many complain that Glastonbury has become too corporate and sanitised. These days you’re more likely to see Alan Yentob slipping in a puddle than a naked hippy up a tree; celebrities outnumber acid casualties. There are phone-charging tents and cashpoints. It’s a theme-park ride. All of which should make it ideal for cosseted, mid-thirties media cry-babies like me. Instead, here I was falling at the first hurdle. To a wuss like me, a mere tent represented intolerable squalor.

In the end, we struck a deal: the paper would supply me with a magic pop-up tent, so simple a cat could assemble it. All I had to do was promise to camp for one night, and I could spend the rest of the festival sleeping off-site in a winsome, rustic cottage full of potpourri. During the day, if I got scared of the crowds, the press pass meant I could hide out in a backstage compound, gawping at Pete Doherty. The toilets were the clincher: apparently the ones backstage flush properly.

And so I agreed. But even the prospect of one night of camping terrified me. A seasoned outdoorsman I ain’t. Within an hour of the phone conversation, I was standing in a branch of’outdoor experts’ Black’s—true alien territory—panic-buying like a man who had foreseen Hurricane Katrina. Cagoules, wellies, rucksacks, pocket torches, a rain hat—even waterproof socks. Anything capable of repelling the elements. All that was missing was a sword and a shield.