My Shit Life So Far (24 page)

‘Enough, Fred Savage! I hold your heart within a Perspex cube!’

As I remember, it was delivered as a booming psychic voiceover. Clearly the world needs more of that kind of thing. I’m also writing my new touring show, which is called ‘I Would Happily Punch Every One of You in the Face’. Writing it involves a lot of going to comedy clubs and finding out that a lot of things I thought were funny are actually not funny and don’t even make any sense. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to the end of this brutal ‘pre-season’ bit. It will be a relief to get down to talking some serious rubbish on a nightly basis while energy drinks destroy my health and sanity. Oh no, wait a minute, it’ll be worse. Still, the good news is I can’t live for ever.

At least it’s now a really good time to be a topical comedian with a dystopian worldview. Never has everything seemed to be going to fuck with quite such alacrity. The Bank of England has started printing £75 billion of new money to pump into Britain’s economy. Soon the banks will start lending again and people will have more cash in their pockets—it’s just unfortunate that a Mars bar will cost over £1 million. I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about though. Printing money may not have worked in Zimbabwe or Nazi Germany, but third time lucky eh? The one bright spot in the financial crisis was when the Chancellor announced in his budget that ‘I’m taking the necessary measures
for Britain’s recovery’. Unfortunately the gun jammed when he tried to shoot himself in the head.

With everyone watching what they spend, Lidl is becoming the most successful supermarket in the UK. The Germans have finally won. They swore in 1940 they would have us all eating bratwurst and finally they’ve managed it. It’s all the strange German food that amuses me. Lidl is full of the kind of people who go on holiday but eat chips because they are scared of foreign food…and there they are, being forced by their poverty to buy herring in some freaky, day-glo yellow sauce, and sausages that look so like your childhood imaginings of an alien’s cock.

Not that you catch a politician in Lidl, of course. It was the
Daily Telegraph
that printed MPs’ expense claims and its readers were furious. They have to pay for their own chandeliers, tennis courts and moat cleaning. What I’d like to know is if MPs can claim for all those things, then what aren’t they allowed to claim for? Chocolate fountains? Cream horns? Golden baths? Or are all these sexual practices allowed too? Douglas Hogg claimed to have his moat cleaned and Michael Spicer claimed to trim the hedge around his helipad. They couldn’t have made the Conservative Party look any more like aristocratic idiots if they’d claimed cash for ‘a termination for the scullery-maid and a third-class ticket for her crossing to New Amsterdam’.

Trying to defuse the crisis, Gordon Brown appeared on YouTube—and that’s what everyone said when they saw it. Apparently Gordon Brown wore make-up to cover up his blemishes
and wrinkles. Christ, what does he look like without make-up on? ET with skin cancer? If an alien skinned a fat man to wear his flesh as a suit would it really look any different from Brown? He’s now so wrinkled he looks like Sid James’s nutsack. Brown looked like a man getting a prostrate exam from Freddy Krueger. The last time I saw someone looking that fake and uncomfortable on YouTube they were telling us that they were being treated well by their captors. I mean, someone really should tell Brown to stop smiling—it just looks like he’s trying to shit a sea urchin. Where did Brown learn to smile? Watching
The Shining
? John Prescott said Brown had ‘the worst smile in the world’. Obviously there weren’t any mirrors about when he was shagging that secretary.

In preparation for the tour I’ve been trying to get fit as my body had begun to resemble a sort of fleshy landslide. In a moment of madness, I booked some colonic hydrotherapy. I have to start off by saying that it did make me feel better, but I honestly don’t know that it was worth the several circles of hell it took me through. For a start, you have to wear paper pants. Never good and in this case ladies’ pink paper pants, due to supply-line difficulties. I had naÏvely imagined that I would be left to do the actual, well, insertion, myself. No, it’s rammed up there by a stranger. As she did it she blurted, ‘I’m sorry about this Frankie!’ So was I. Essentially, a colonic is a bum abortion and it’s very difficult to keep the conversation going with the practitioner. We chatted idly about our hopes for the future, but the fact that she was manoeuvring a hose around in my arse just killed any real chance of rapport.

After the next tour, that’s very probably it for me. Getting out of live work and getting out of show business are my priorities. Hopefully when I retire I can find some hobbies that interest me, like prescription med addiction, dread and loneliness. I’d like to be able to write something really good, a film or a novel, but secretly know this would just see me meeting the same cunts on a slightly different basis. You meet some decent-enough people in comedy or telly, but you must never imagine that they are your friends. One must strive for a mindfulness that they could watch you die, right in front of them and feel only a numbed indifference. Or, at best, mildly horny.

When you meet people you admired on TV ten years ago they always seem slightly lobotomised, as if the quality of cocaine they briefly achieved melted their synapses. I think people get addicted to the money, and to having things done for them. As a result, they agree to more and more shit. Can you honestly watch the telly on a Saturday night and say that mankind deserves to survive as a species?

Of course, I am as big a Cunt as anybody. Probably bigger. Well, listen to me show business, and listen good. I may be a Cunt, but this is one Cunt that you’re not going to fuck!