The Hell of It All (36 page)

Adding to the confusion, I’m tired. Strike that – exhausted. Working on a TV show might look like a parade of easy-going giggles from the outside, but on the inside it’s an endless treadmill that eats time like a sperm whale eats plankton: in immense, cavernous gulps. Yesterday I rose at 9 a.m. after three hours’ sleep, then stayed in the edit until 6 a.m. this morning. At 7 a.m. I arrived home and tried to sleep, in the knowledge that I was supposed to be up in about two hours’ time. Knowing the builders next door would start clanging scaffolding poles around like an open-air tribute to the musical
Stomp
at about 8 a.m., I found some wax earplugs and wedged one in each lughole. But there was another problem. Light was streaming through the windows. I searched for an eye mask and failed. But while scavenging through the bottom of an old drawer, I found a pair of black knickers belonging to an ex-girlfriend. That would have to do. I pulled them over my head like a Mexican wrestler until they covered my eyes, and lay down. I probably looked quite dashing.

I tried to sleep. But exhaustion is a funny thing. It sends the brain haywire. Deaf and blind, I lay there with the old Birds Eye Steakhouse Grill song looping endlessly in my head. Hope it’s chips, it’s chips. We hope it’s chips, it’s chips.

In between verses I worried that my boiler might malfunction and kill me with carbon monoxide fumes if I fell asleep. I’m not one for keeping up appearances, but even I blanched at the thought of my neighbours seeing my blue, icy cadaver being hauled out on a stretcher with a pair of knickers on its head. That’s what they’d remember me for. The fear of this kept me awake until some time around 8.30 a.m., when my bladder complained that it needed to go to the toilet. I got up, but in my confusion – hope it’s chips, it’s chips – I attempted to make my way downstairs to the loo without taking the pants off my head. I walked into a door. Now I was performing slapstick for the benefit of no one.

I pulled them up just above my eyes, headed downstairs and drained myself. On the way out of the bathroom I caught sight of myself in the mirror, wearing the knickers like a skullcap. The other thing about exhaustion is that it encourages hysteria. I laughed, then saw myself laughing, and laughed some more. I returned to bed, still giggling, and lay there in the dark with the singing Birds Eye workmen driving their van around in my mind. Hope it’s chips, it’s chips. We hope it’s chips, it’s chips. I think I even said that aloud at one point. For a moment, I was genuinely insane. At some point I lost consciousness.

I overslept of course, and awoke at 1.30 p.m. in a state of some confusion, stumbled downstairs and opened the fridge door so I could see the kettle – unnecessary, what with the daylight and all. I drank a coffee, phoned the
Guardian
, and said I was going to start writing. Then I typed the first sentence of this column. Then I wrote the rest. And then you read it. This proves I can, at least, maintain a veneer of efficiency amid the self-inflicted mundane chaos of my life, even if in doing so I end up slightly wasting your time. Other columnists write of glamorous parties and faraway lands, of politics, or romance, despair and elation and the unending mysteries of the human condition. On this page you find nothing but the fevered hope that it’s chips, it’s chips, and for that I apologise.

It’s not so great being a shambles. But it’s the only life I know.

Petty criminals of Britain! Stop breaking into that shop for a moment and bloody well pay attention. As of today, those of you doing community service are required to wear a new uniform. It’s a high-visibility orange bib with the words COMMUNITY PAYBACK printed across the back in bold black type. How’d you like them apples? Not so carefree now, are we? Consider yourselves well and truly shamed.

That’s right. Community Payback bibs. It might sound stupid, but this is Jack Straw’s idea and he wants it taken very seriously indeed, which is why he’s been pictured in the
Daily Mirror
holding one of the new bibs aloft while maintaining a preposterously solemn expression on his fizzog, staring straight through the lens like either (a) a sinister stage magician trying to stop the cameraman’s heart or (b) Droopy preparing to knock on the door of a close friend and inform them of the death of a beloved relative. Pick your favourite of those two similes and apply it to his face. That’s what he’s done. He’s thought, ‘Jesus, this is ludicrous; better look like I mean business and see if I can front it out,’ and as usual he’s pulled it off with quite brilliant aplomb. No one does a face-of-death quite like Straw. Despite possessing an inherently comic, kindly and rubbery face, which in any sane world would make him a shoo-in for the role of a goonish neighbourhood postman doing pratfalls in a broad sitcom, he’s learned to overcome this affliction and can now resemble utterly authentic doom incarnate whenever the situation demands it. Look at this latest snap and the temperature drops in the room. You’d think he’d been born without laugh muscles and raised in a civilisation that never invented the smile. Bravo.

Pity about the bib, though. For one thing, even though it’s clearly designed to demean the rapscallion wearing it, the government’s ‘respect tsar’, whose real name is Louise Casey, says it isn’t. ‘The point of the orange jackets is not to humiliate people but to make the punishment visible,’ she claims.

You’ve got to respect her opinion, mainly because she’s the
respect tsar so she’ll definitely notice if you don’t – but really, that line of argument isn’t fooling anyone. It’s a bib, for Christ’s sake. And besides, if ‘visibility’ is key, she’s missed a few tricks. In fact the whole project is far too timid. Just be honest, announce you’re going all-out to humiliate, demean and belittle, and we, the nation, will embrace it. Ignore the carpers. They’ll never like it anyway. So don’t wuss out. Go for broke.

Start by changing the wording. ‘Community payback’ is rubbish. ‘Community’ is pure British wonk-speak – the simpering language of milquetoasts – while the embarrassing yee-haw showboating of ‘payback’ must have been included in a half-arsed attempt to impress the tabloids. Put the two words together to make ‘community payback’ and the result just sounds lame, like the mistranslated overseas title of a below-par Schwarzenegger action movie in which he launches an all-out assault on a hardened gang of litter louts holed up in Chertsey.

And how are we, the snickering public, supposed to refer to these recidivist saps when we spot them emptying the poop bins anyway? Do we call them ‘paybackers’ or ‘CPs’, or what? If you’re going to label them, at least come up with something populist. Something we can use. How about ‘SCUM SLAVE’? Or ‘CHAIN GANG BETTY’? That last one would definitely catch on. I might start shouting it at them in the street tomorrow. So put that on the back of the jacket. And, bearing your stated aim of ‘visibility’ in mind, don’t just stop at bold capital letters: the typeface should physically light up, like a Vegas casino hoarding. Actually, the whole jacket should light up. And it shouldn’t be a jacket. It should a fluorescent green leotard with a transparent panel located over the testicles, so you can see them squashed up against the window like depressed balding commuters and, above it, a small flashing sign with the words ‘HA HA LOOK AT MY HILARIOUS BALLS’ accompanied by an arrow pointing at them, picked out in multicoloured LEDs visible from half a mile away. Blind pedestrians who wouldn’t otherwise get to enjoy the spectacle should be catered for too, thanks to a looped iPod soundtrack consisting of assorted celebrities describing precisely how ridiculous the miscreant’s balls look,
backed with comedy tuba music blasting from a heavy iron tannoy mounted on the offender’s head.

That’s a more effective deterrent than a little orange bib. And perhaps Jack Straw could model one at the press launch, doing one of his trademark sober expressions. He could probably even pull a serious face with his balls, so they looked suitably noble and statesmanlike even while flattened against the transparent pane, thereby underlining the scheme’s commitment to visibility and aversion to humiliation. If anyone can do it, he can.

‘Santa’s gone home. Santa’s fucking dead.’

As theme park slogans go, it’s a winner. Sadly, it wasn’t the official tagline for Lapland New Forest, the temporary Christmas attraction that was forced to close last week after furious visitors demanded their money back. Instead, the ‘Santa’ line was shouted at a
Sun
reporter and a ‘handful of queuing families’ by a member of staff disconsolately closing the gates for the last time.

Lapland New Forest sounds like a barrel of laughs. The publicity material promised a glorious winter wonderland replete with animal attractions, an ice rink, log cabins, a nativity scene, a snowy ‘tunnel of light’, and, of course, Santa’s grotto. But according to incensed visitors, it turned out to be ‘little more than a mud-covered car park’. They complained that the generator for the ice rink had malfunctioned, turning it into a pool of water, the ‘tunnel of light’ was actually a few fairy lights dangling from trees covered in artificial snow, the nativity was an amateurish billboard, the log cabins were green sheds, and the animal attraction was a handful of reindeer and several ‘thin-looking huskies chained up in a pen’. To keep the kids happy, there was apparently a four-hour queue for Santa’s grotto, at the end of which families were charged £10 for a photo with the man himself. Oh, and refreshments weren’t cheap either. Five drinks and a baguette would set you back £17.

Many visitors, who’d paid around £25 per ticket, weren’t especially impressed, and the mood quickly turned ugly. One of the
security guards told the BBC he’d quit, partly because he was ‘really, really ashamed’ to work there, and also because of the level of violence he and the rest of the staff had been subjected to by irate customers. ‘Santa got attacked,’ he explained. ‘One of the elves got smacked in the face and pushed in a pram.’

So now it’s closed, which is a shame, because it sounds great to me. I love underwhelming theme parks. Slick, showy ones with hitech rollercoasters may be entertaining on the day, but really they’re all the same. I’ve been to Euro Disney, Alton Towers and several others in that snazzy corporate vein, but they all blend into one in my memory. Mostly, I remember the queues. Give me a ramshackle DIY attraction any day. Those are the ones that stay with you.

I’ll never forget the Concrete Menagerie, for example. Picture Madame Tussauds, but with the celebrity waxworks made out of concrete. And instead of stunning likenesses of the rich and famous, imagine a group of misshapen figurines that were scarcely recognisable as human beings, painted by an especially hamfisted group of GCSE art students in a hurry. That was the Concrete Menagerie. It was housed in the back garden of a house in Northumberland. A full-scale model of Jaws (the shark, not the Bond villain) which resembled a giant grey phlegm glob with eyes was one highlight. Another was a figurine of Lawrence of Arabia sitting astride a camel. Lawrence had a set of real false teeth stuck in his mouth, leaving him with an unsettling rictus grin.

Recently, a friend excitedly recounted a family trip to Collector’s World, ‘a highly popular tourist attraction in Norfolk’, according to its website. He, his wife and their offspring got lost on a driving trip and found themselves drawn mysteriously towards it. It consisted of room upon room of bizarre, apparently unrelated artefacts. There was a ‘Pink Room’ dedicated to Barbara Cartland, a telephone museum, a collection of antique cars, some sort of hideous-sounding ‘gynaecological chair’, and best of all, a hall filled solely with memorabilia relating to the actor Liza Goddard, which apparently included pullovers and a mug she’d once drunk out of. Exhilarating and frightening in equal measure, I’d imagine, especially if you’re Liza Goddard yourself.

So popular are skew-whiff theme parks, in fact, that there are two whole books devoted to collecting the best of them:
Bollocks
to Alton Towers
and
Far From the Sodding Crowd
, which contain opening times and travel information for a veritable goldmine of enchanting and/or eccentric attractions, including the British Lawnmower Museum, Gnome Magic, the Margate Shell Grotto, and Cuckooland (a collection of 550 vintage cuckoo clocks). That Lapland New Forest has closed its gates before the team had a chance to include it in a third volume is almost – almost – a national tragedy.

Besides, if they’d somehow managed to keep it going, the weight of publicity its sheer thudding, sprawling crapness has generated over the past week could surely have turned things around, at least in terms of ticket sales. Thousands of people would doubtless have made the ironic pilgrimage, and the worse they’d found it, the better. A disappointing trudge through a car park to be ripped off by a man in an ill-fitting Santa costume.

It’s hard to think of a more appropriate Yuletide experience.

Only one thing’s going to get us through 2009, and that’s romance. And possibly cannibalism. But mainly romance.

In case you missed the bulletin in your post-festive daze, let me bring you up to speed. According to the latest predictions, here’s what we’re in for this year: MISERY. Yes, not just misery, but MISERY. In capitals. Just like that.

Dim your lights. Here’s the highlights reel. The worst recession in 60 years. Broken windows and artless graffiti. Howling winds blowing empty cans past boarded-up shopfronts. Feral children eating sloppy handfuls of decomposed-pigeon-and-baked-bean mulch scraped from the bottom of dustbins in a desperate bid to survive. The pound worth less than the acorn. The City worth less than the pound. Your house worth so little it’ll collapse out of shame, crushing you in your bed. Not that you’ll die peacefully in your sleep – no, you’ll be wide awake with fear, worrying about the situation in
the Middle East at the precise moment a chunk of ceiling plaster the size of a flagstone tumbles from on high to flatten your skull like a biscuit under a shoe, sending your brain twizzling out of your earholes like pink-grey toothpaste squeezed from a tube. All those language skills and precious memories splattered over your pillows. It’ll ruin the bedclothes. And instead of buying expensive new ones, your grieving, impoverished relatives will have to handwash those bedclothes in cold water for six hours to shift the most upsetting stains before passing them down to your orphaned offspring, who are fated to sleep on them in a disused underground station for the rest of their lives, shivering in the dark as they hear bombs dipped in bird flu dropping on the shattered remains of the desiccated city above.