Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (2 page)

Orwell imagined a coercive totalitarian state but Aldous Huxley probably made a better prediction of our current reality. In
Brave New World
people are complicit in their own enslavement; they’re into it. I think we can go further. It’s not just that people are controlled by propaganda, or even that they enjoy being controlled. I think that people are now propaganda. People are no longer the things being controlled, they are the method of control, both of themselves and others. Of course, I’ve written this little serious passage here to advance my own status
.

I’ve tried to structure this book as simply as possible since it’s supposed to have the energy and flow of a good stand-up show. Hopefully, everything is done here as I’d do it on stage – a dip for you to regroup in the middle, a closing peroration, and even this little bit where I just kind of tail off mid-sentence as I realise that I already have your money . . .

One of the great tricks the British royals have managed to pull off is to have convinced everybody of their own irrelevance. They behave much like any big company, downplaying their influence, externalising their expenses, meeting with dictators, watching themselves sexually savaging hypnotised victims in the mirrored Aviators of their bodyguards, reporting back to superiors in other dimensions who appear to them suddenly in famous paintings, bad news causing their enraged overlord’s face to seethe like a nest of startled snakes.

What’s called pageantry and tradition – public events that only serve to highlight the relative charm of North Korea and the buying up of any golden sheds/tennis rackets that got missed by Michael Jackson – is just misdirection. It’s the simple misdirection employed by a category of human being pitied by even the most denigrated monster of showbusiness, the stage magician. And that’s all the royal family are. Entertainers who’ve enjoyed the ultimate success by the most tried-and-tested route: aiming low.

Kate’s pregnancy really brought the nation together. It was no longer just me thinking about her vagina 24/7. And call me old fashioned, but I thought it was nice to see a pregnancy announced – for most women in this country you only know they’re with child because they’ve switched to menthol fags. Still, a lot of pressure for William. I suppose he’s just hoping that he can be as good a father as his nanny was.

The birth was announced by putting a notice on headed notepaper on a wooden easel at the gates of Buckingham Palace – it’s the royal equivalent of sticking a congratulations bed sheet on a roundabout. The law was changed because it was ‘a historical anomaly that prevents the eldest child of the monarch from becoming the head of state simply because of their gender’. Unlike the historical anomaly that makes someone the head of state simply because they are born into a particular family.

Kate was a patient at the exclusive King Edward VII’s Hospital. Aren’t the royals wonderful? Even at their roughest they refuse to be a burden on the NHS. Kate had to endure eleven hours of labour. Which is more than the combined total the rest of the family has managed in the last twenty years. Being named George, her son will join six out of the past ten kings, exhibiting the imagination you’d expect from a family who have to be trained how to wave. Why think of a name at all? You won’t get anything funkier than Prince.

Fifty armed police officers are to guard the new prince. Wow, in
The Omen
he only had that weird nanny with the Rottweiler. There were few volunteers. Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to employ decoys? He’s a baby – that’s pretty much the only time any lookalike has ever actually looked alike. The police will have to hand back their firearms once the baby boy becomes fully sentient, just in case a perceived slight leads him to lock their eyes with a haunting gaze, before causing them to vacantly push the barrel into their mouths and squeeze the trigger.

A Swedish magazine published eleven topless shots of the Duchess of Cambridge. It was the least erotic thing to have ever happened in Sweden. Why can’t she just sunbathe topless on the balcony of Lord Linley’s £15 million château in Provence like normal people? The British press will never publish pictures of Kate’s tits. Due to the lack of space left after printing ones of her sister’s arse.

The royal couple made a criminal complaint when the topless photos were published in a French magazine, and a French court prevented their further publication. The ban was soon extended to Italy and the rest of Europe, meaning the pictures were then only available to be seen on something called the internet. I sympathise with Kate feeling under constant surveillance. Thanks to my Catholic education I often can’t shake off the idea my dead relatives are watching me. To be honest, I only ever feel comfortable masturbating while wearing a sombrero.

Maybe we should be glad that other countries take such an interest in our royal family – even if it’s in this weirdly specialist porn way. Apparently, the Palace is so worried about Kate being papped that for the next few years she’s to be permanently blurred during daylight hours by being shaken at high frequency by ladies-in-waiting.

The Palace was furious at the paparazzi hounding her like Diana, as royal protocol dictates that they wait till Prince Philip gives the nod. Surely the quickest way to stop the demand for these pictures is for the royals to finally go nude. I know what you’re thinking. How about the etiquette of them breaking wind in public? Easy. Those dishwasher liquitabs with the dissolvable coating and detergent inside? Use them as suppositories and if it does happen it’ll just come out as bubbles. At the moment protocol forces Her Majesty to hold farts in for years, only letting them out when the RAF do a fly-past over the Palace.

The supply of bland, feigned outrage about things like this seems endless. Eamonn Holmes on
This Morning
accidentally broadcast a photograph of Kate in a bikini. The programme had to apologise, as obviously the image should have been obscured by a list of suspected paedophiles. In fact,
This Morning
should really have had to apologise for showing an unblurred image of Eamonn Holmes. Eamonn’s terrified the incident could prove yet another blow to his chance of a knighthood, a dream first dented in 2006 when the Queen accidentally pricked his casing with her sword and he whizzed about the room screeching like a punctured lilo.

In 2012 we had the disgraceful spectacle of the Diamond Jubilee. I’ve got to admit I was out on the streets cheering her on, although I’m not sure she fully appreciated my chant: ‘Sixty years since your dad died, do dah, do dah!’

Michael Gove suggested celebrating the Jubilee by building a royal yacht. To be honest, I was just going to get her bath bombs or a book token but it was typical of Gove to try to show me up. I hate him, the unctuous, wet-lipped, Dickensian freak. If you asked a football stadium full of people if they’d like to see him kicked to death by a minotaur wearing plimsoles – so it would last longer – you wouldn’t find a single person who wouldn’t masturbate while it was happening.

I suppose a boat would be immune from a below-the-waterline al-Qaeda attack, as it’s nearly impossible to get a watertight seal on your mask with a big, bushy beard. That’s why the kids in Atlantis never get Christmas presents . . . but they don’t cry about it. It’s under the sea, so crying would be pointless.

A barge is totally in keeping with the royal tradition as typified by Liz and Phil. Engineering and shipping – you can’t get much more German and Greek than those. And nothing says recession solidarity more than waving from a throne atop a golden barge. It looked like something Liberace would have rented if he’d taken a break on the Norfolk Broads. The whole thing was car-crash television, which made it strangely apt for a royal occasion.

Actually, I didn’t go to see the flotilla as I failed to find a pair of clear-plastic water-skis to add a ghostly ‘walk-on-water’ quality to my Princess Diana outfit. Still, congratulations, Ma’am, on sixty years of feigning interest in an assortment of bland hats while a sycophantic media faithfully recount your occasional nondescript remarks as witticisms. Hers is an inspirational story. The meteoric rise of a girl born simply the daughter of a humble king. And let’s not forget her role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a position that I’ve always thought must piss God off quite a bit. A little boy gave her some Werther’s Originals to pass on to Philip. I understand that he prefers to receive jelly babies, as when the bag’s destroyed by Special Branch in a controlled explosion there’s less chance of the corgis getting shrapnel wounds.

All the royals were there – Princess Anne, the Duke of York, the Duke of Hazzard, Prince Harry, the artist formerly known as Prince, Lord and Lady Gaga, the Duchess of Cambridge, Duchy Originals Sausages, Viscount Biscuit and Sir, would you please put your trousers back on, the other diners are getting upset? We had a street party with jelly and ice cream and games for all the local children. It wasn’t to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee – we were trying to flush out a paedophile.

Unemployed jobseekers were forced to sleep under London Bridge and work unpaid on the Jubilee river pageant. It wasn’t all bad as they did get to watch the world’s richest family sail by them in a golden barge. Sleeping under a bridge? That’s Victorian, medieval even . . . what place could it possibly have at a royal event?

In honour of the Jubilee, Madame Tussauds unveiled their new waxwork of Her Majesty. Apparently, to re-create the effects of aging they just moved the old one next to the radiator for a couple of hours. I’m definitely going to take a look. Especially after the success of my trip to see the Prince Philip last Christmas, when I managed to land a couple of darts right in his chest. The Queen’s waxwork has had its own special alarm ever since 2004, when the head was stolen and used to forge loads of big stamps.

God, the Queen must’ve been in a lot of photos – all the official ones, obviously, and she also loves to jump in the back of tourists’ pictures for a laugh. We’ve all got our favourite memories of the Queen – mine was when she played Superintendent Jane Tennison in
Prime Suspect
. But she’s great for tourism. Mainly because the sort of people dumb enough to want to see her are also the ones dumb enough to pay £5 for a warm Tango and a mechanically recovered meat hotdog, and £45 to watch roller-skating cats banging out the hits of Bucks Fizz.

By way of a gift for her Jubilee, the Queen was given 169,000 square miles of Antarctica, which she accepted with her trademark gracious scowl. Barack Obama said that while many presidents and prime ministers had come and gone, the Queen had endured. Barack, that’s because you can vote for them, you prick.

Much is made of the Queen ‘not being able to answer back’. As if a multi-millionaire with access to harems of devoted apemen and to drugs that let her taste chamber music really aches to be involved in a Twitter spat. The royals actually wield a lot of power. The Queen demanded to know why hate cleric Abu Hamza couldn’t be deported. The police had been trying to arrest Abu Hamza for years but for some reason he just kept slipping out of the handcuffs.

I think it’s great that the Queen’s showing an interest in the sort of evil people who shouldn’t be in this country instead of having them over for lunch, like she did with Robert Mugabe, Mswati III, Idi Amin, Hamad Al-Khalifa and President Assad. The journo who revealed the Queen’s annoyance apologised for his breach of royal protocol, adding, ‘From now on any pillow talk stays in the bedroom . . . Oh, no, you’re not going to print that, are you?’

The royals have been unwell recently. The Duke of Kent had a mild stroke. He said he wanted to be back at work as soon as possible. It must have been more serious than we first thought, otherwise he would have remembered that he’s never worked a day in his fucking life.

Meanwhile, Prince Philip was told he can no longer hunt as it may dislodge his heart, presumably knocking it into a place where it can receive its long-dead messages of love. There’s a small metal tube that is holding his heart together. That would be a spectacular death, though, as he rips his own heart out to desperately load it into his shotgun.

I wonder if he got the NHS treatment we all get? I can’t help thinking there’s a twenty-year-old rugby player coming to in a field somewhere, his chest stitched like a 1950s football, barely able to get to his knees with his new nonagenarian heart.

I’m being unfair – the royals do pretend to do their bit for the community. Prince Andrew abseiled down the Shard for charity. He didn’t raise as much money as everyone had hoped, as he made it down alive. He had to quit as Trade Envoy due to his links with a convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. A member of the royal family shouldn’t be making us look stupid overseas. That’s clearly the job of the SAS, the MOD and Jordan. The
Sun
referred to Epstein as the ‘Paedophile Billionaire’, which reminds me of the old children’s rhyme: ‘The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand friends. Not one of them what you might consider babysitting material.’ Perhaps all paedophiles should be forced to have celebrity friends. It’d be an end to them being able to loiter anonymously around school gates. ‘Get in the car, kids, quick! I don’t like the look of that man playing conkers with Bono!’

Fergie took £15,000 pounds from Epstein. How many people would turn down fifteen grand, no strings attached, because it came from a child abuser? I mean, many people give more than that every year to clothing companies who tie six-year-olds to sewing machines. Fergie said, ‘I would throw myself under a bus for Andrew.’ He’d be very touched, if he knew what a bus was.

• • •

Prince Harry fought in Afghanistan. They kept that pretty quiet, didn’t they? It’s good that he went. If you want a flag waver for democracy it makes sense to send a prince. I say hats off to him. It’s about time we had a few more positive role models for downtrodden ginger people. It might finally inspire them to turn their back on witchcraft.

Harry admitted that he’s killed people, which should put an end to the question of whether he’s really a member of the royal family. Saying that he’s killed members of the Taliban hasn’t made him a target; it’s made all the gingers in the army who aren’t surrounded by personal bodyguards twenty-four hours a day targets. It shows how sensible he’s been, though. Nobody can get near you with a bomb belt if they have to be naked to get into your hotel room.