Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Staying Alive

Ever get the sort of day where you just feel totally wonderful about being alive? No? Well I’d recommend them if you don’t.

Mine occurred on Friday. I’d had an easy day at work followed by a superb martial arts class and a quick walk through town in the blazing sun. I returned home to my ever-loving (and ever-sarcastic) wife and stepson and even two rejection letters (count them: not one but two!) from the BBC couldn’t dent my bullet-proof joie de vivre. Not even the start of Big Brother could dampen my ardour for life. It was that good. Bliss…

But then I saw The Contender on ITV 1 and my misanthropy returned with a vengeance. The dark curtains of despair were drawn right over the window of my happiness, a window that was then booted in by Chav yobs and bricked up by half-witted builders before being covered with a huge sign reading ‘No entry – ever!’

The Contender is dreadful. It’s so bad that even ITV executives, the people who brought viewers the woefully dreadful Celebrity Love Island (whoever comes first wins!), should be ashamed of screening it.

The premise is that a group of amateur boxers, muscled dullards to a man, join a faux boxing academy with the eventual winner getting a shot at a title of some description. Celebrity boxing faces Sylvester Stallone, he of Rocky fame, and Sugar Ray Leonard, he of cheating Marvin Hagler out of the world title fame, help the contenders along and are on hand to provide ‘salient’ commentary.

But asking these two inarticulate buffoons for incisive insight is a bit like asking Ray Charles to describe scenery on a train journey. They simply don’t have the capacity (the vocabulary, the means of expression, any basic command of diction, etc) whereas at least Ray could make up a song about it.

One memorable exchange on Friday went something like this:
Contender: Ithhsgreathtobehere.
Stallone: Mumblemumblemumblemumble.
Leonard: Whisperwhisperwhisper.

By far the worst trick that the show pulls, though, besides the dull contestants, the idiot experts and the hackneyed Big-Brother-with-fisticuffs format is the introduction of the contestants’ families.

Each episode ends with a fight between two of the contenders with the loser eliminated from the show and the producers ensure the kids of each contender feature prominently in the build-up to this fight. Then during the rounds the cameras linger on the previously introduced kids to gauge their emotions, which go from ecstacy if their fathers triumph to utter gut-wrenching tears and despair if they lose. And the latter is awful to watch.

It’s emotional pornography of the worst kind. People with nothing are offered the chance to get something then when it’s brutally snatched away the cameras are on hand to catch the reactions of adults – and of young children. Cross the You’ve Been Framed! format with footage from Belsen and you couldn’t get a much more exploitative or sickening viewing experience.

Oh, hang on. ITV are already there with that idea and they’ve claimed the copyright…

Friday, May 27, 2005

Work Envy...

Generally I am quite content working as a word hack in a London-based magazine factory. The pay is OK, the job not very demanding and some of the people pleasant to work with. But sometimes I get grief and have sudden urges to borrow the nearest Uzi and liberally spray several people with hot lead love.

A friend of mine, however, does have the best job in the world working as an advisor at a theatre company and, masochist that I am, I’ll sometimes ask her what she’s doing. I bumped into her this morning and made this mistake and she told me wondrous tales of travelling to far-away circus festivals to check out stiltwalkers. Previous queries have also resulted in stories about firing guns at work, messing around with swords and ensuring thespian dogs are kept in the lap of luxury.

I put apostrophes the right place and ensure Ross Kemp is spelt correctly (‘talentless personality-vacuum apple-up-his-arse twat’ for those who interested in matters of spelling).

Today I did chance on a job that sounds even better than my friend’s job, though, and that is Garment Tester. Or more specifically Knitwear Garment Technologist. This carries a salary of £38K and as a far as I could tell it involves trying on knitwear and assessing whether it looks OK and how long it will last before wearing out. There was also some total bunkum about analysing market trends but I ignored this as anything that vaguely sounds like market or marketing should always be translated as ‘Can talk utter shite until the recipient of said diatribe seeps blood from his ears and stabs himself in the eyes with the nearest pieces of cutlery in a sad ATTEMPT TO MAKE IT ALL STOP!’

And that’s also the way I feel about Big Brother which begins tonight.

I despise Big Brother because (a) it’s spawned a spate of reality TV shows even more appalling than it is, (b) it’s spawned a generation of Z list celebrities who seem to think that showing their arse, tits or pecs on TV is reason enough for a life of pampered celebrity, and (c) it always draws me in to watch it when I’ve tried to avoid it like the plague.

But, in my defence, there’s no wonder really. C4 gives the bloody thing wall-to-wall coverage, the tabloids give it more page space than the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, and people who you once thought sane suddenly become babbling idiots who care about someone who previously they’d have spat on then shat on if they saw in the street – and that’s before they had a reason to hate them!

Anyway, my money is on the Tory-voting Irish bisexual woman named Geraldine with the shaved head, facial piercings, tattoos and penchant for auto-asphyxiation. Go Ger!

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Goodbye Mr Chips

The boy sneered and threw chips at me last night during tea. My crime? I merely asked whether 50 Cents, a popular American singer among young folk who like rap music, was really going to the candy shop in his latest song and, if so, why didn’t he order some sweets we’d heard of in the country to help his CD’s UK sales.

For example:
‘I’m going to the candy shop.
Uh-uh. I’m gonna get me some midget gems.
Uh-uh. And some Maltesers too.
Uh-uh. And strawberry bon-bons’d be nice.
Uh-uh. Because I want bright pink pooh.’

After removing the vinegar-covered missiles from my person and being told I was an idiot, I retired upstairs to do some work on my latest stage play and listen to the footy.

The stage play is called Trust and it tells the story of a councillor in a small northern town whose life-long dream is to stand as the local MP. But this dream is threatened when a new candidate is parachuted in by the Party – and when a scandal surrounding a crooked business deal and a recently deceased councillor threatens to become public knowledge.

It’s about real politics versus realpolitik, about the difference between the old school politician of conviction and principle (Benn, Kinnock, Heseltine, Tebbit, Thatcher) and the new breed of career politician (take your pick from all the faceless wonders representing seats they have no connection to) who want power without necessarily having politician convictions or the local power base to get it.

Writing this is proving to be slow work as I’ve yet to get a real handle on it even though it’s plotted out and I quite like the characters.

I did have another top idea for Chunky Shaft, though. In one episode he’s going to run a talent contest a bit like Fame Academy for would-be porn stars. His new show will be entitled Bone Idols.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

It’s a rum do, Ron, Ron, Ron...

I watched a documentary on porn star Ron Jeremy last night (purely in the interests of research for my Chunky Shaft TV project, of course) and I think he’s quite a dude. He may look like he used to be an 8ft-tall man whose body and features have been squished to half their normal size, but he’s self-effacing, funny and is under no illusions about the business he is in. He’s also had sex with a jaw-dropping 4000-plus women – and if a little chubster like him can do it then there’s obviously hope for anyone out there.

(That is unless you happen to be any TV or theatre producer who rejects my scripts, of course. Not only does a curse of no-between-the-sheets-action-ever await you but you will also be forced to an eternity of watching far uglier and less interesting people than yourselves go at it like rabbits to really rub salt into the enforced celibacy wound. Don’t say you weren’t warned... )

What made my TV viewing such a bizarre experience last night, though, was watching The Farm which was on before on five (or Channel Five before it was rebranded with fewer words and capital letters – there must be a shortage around the Long Acre area of London where the company is based) then watching the Ron Jeremy documentary.

The Farm is about the lowest of the low when it comes to reality TV and my only previous sighting of this show was last week when Keith Harris was on his way to a family funeral and was carrying on a conversation with his famous glove puppet Orville as he prepared to inter a relative. Unsettling was not a strong enough word...

But it was bizarre watching The Farm and then watching Ron Jeremy in action among various thighs because of the other people involved in both shows.

Both featured vacuous bimbos who seemed convinced that appearing in their respective vehicles would further their careers and both shows also featured utter dunces trying desperately to justify their appearances in front of the cameras using all manner of spurious bullshit. Not one ever simply admitted ‘I know I’m getting f***ed and this role will tarnish my reputation and career for ever but I’m actually just doing it for the money.’

Well, nobody apart from Ron who went further up in my estimation by admitting this on both shows...

The Farm only has another few days to run and I am currently praying that some of the animals involved develop a mean streak and start lashing out at (a) the idiotic blonde girls, (b) that utter personality vacuum whose used to be with Jessie Wallace and (c) the young bloke with the tattoos.

Ron and Keith can stay and split the prize money. God knows they deserve it for putting up with that lot!

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Monkey magic?

It’s an old hypothesis but if an infinite amount of monkeys had an infinite amount of time and they were put in a room with an infinite amount of typewriters then somewhere along the line The Complete Works Of Shakespeare would be produced. A huge amount of monkey shit would also be produced but even that would be far preferable to the current bilge that the BBC pumps out four times a week (five including the omnibus for the really masochistic and double that number for viewers with BBC 3 who can’t get enough wrist-slitting cockney japery and want the repeats) in EastEnders.

Last night’s episode focused on relative Albert Square newcomers the Miller clan who comprise of dad Keith, Toby-jug-faced mum Rosie, cheeky wideboy son Mickey, daughter Demi, son Darren, granddaughter Aleesha and family pet Ghengis the dog. The fact that the latter two usually take the acting honours tells you everything you need to know about the Millers but it’s not entirely their fault. Especially as it seems that the EastEnders scriptwriters have taken every social problem, council estate and chav-tastic stereotype they can think of, stuck them all in a bag, given it a good shake then produced scripts for the Millers with whatever falls out first.

So far the Millers have had a teen pregnancy, a problem child at school, an illiterate dole cheat father and a binge-drinking teenage son. Expect a crack-addled illegal immigrant cousin who can’t get enough of a new casino that’s opened up in the Evans old car lot arriving very soon.

I used to love EastEnders and it’s now patently rubbish. It’s most exciting plotline at the moment concerns Dot learning to drive with that bloke from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

If I was in charge I’d give the monkeys a chance. God help us...

Monday, May 23, 2005

Football Crazy

The wife returned from her business trip to Italy with tales of nights out with a stunningly attractive millionaire, breath-taking scenery and wonderful food. Her adventures certainly made my nights in eating Cheesy Wotsits and watching Bid-up TV seem far less interesting, but with the boy also back from his school trip it was reassuringly pleasant to have the house again filled with the familiar directed-at-me cries of ‘Don’t be so stupid!’ and ‘You’re an idiot!’

On the opposite end of the familiarity scale, however, I was introduced to an entirely new sensation this weekend – and that was wanting Manchester United to win a football match.

In terms of football loyalties I support Leeds United, the boy supports West Ham and the missus comes from a long line of Chelsea fans. So when it comes to watching a match between the Mancs and the Arse you’d probably have to search high and low and then search plenty more to find a less interested household. In fact ‘less interested’ is quite polite as the energy produced solely by my loathing of these two teams could probably power the grid of a small country.

So my only interest in the FA Cup Final this year was the hope that both teams would display their usual ill grace and penchant for violence and leave a Goya-esque scene of severed limbs and stud-imprinted cadavers littering the Millennium Stadium, with uber-thug Roy Keane perched on a crossbar chewing the severed head of Patrick Viera and Arsene Wenger and Alex Ferguson trying to hammer spikes into each other’s heads with croquet mallets.

Sadly this didn’t materialise and the match was 120 minutes of Manchester United trying to score and Arsenal trying to stop them. And the worrying bit was that I wanted the Mancs to score and I even felt a little sorry for them when Arsenal went on to win on penalties.

But then I realised I was feeling sorry for a bunch of over-hyped and over-paid footballers, who in the grand scheme of things are really only a little further up the evolutionary scale than baboons who throw shit at each other.

So I had a good laugh at the gutted and wished injury on the victors and watched several episodes of The Sopranos instead...

Friday, May 20, 2005

Sleeping With The NME

Today I woke up at 10.45am. I lounged around in bed for 15 minutes then realised it wasn’t a Saturday as I’d dreamt and remembered I was due to be in the office at 10am. I dived out of bed, scared the cat who was napping alongside me, slipped on the music mag I fell asleep reading the previous night and nearly broke my back. Ouch!

Such tardiness used to be something of a weekly occurrence in the old days of my regular boozing so it came as quite a shock to discover the new me had overslept. It’s true that the missus and the boy are away so I did have a few beers the night before. It wasn’t the earliest of nights either but I have now developed a cut-off point where I head home before things get messy and I awake the next morning feeling like a rat has been gnawing on my cerebral cortex.

I was going to invent some ludicrous excuse for arriving nearly two hours late but then I realised it was pointless so I made my apologies and admitted I simply overslept. It is also pointless making excuses as one of my work colleagues, who is a serial offender on the tardiness front, has cornered this particular market.

I actually admire the chutzpah of this colleague so much that I have kept a list of his best excuses and, should anyone need a good one, please feel free to borrow from any of the following:

1 Someone spiked my drink last night and I was hallucinating all day and thought I was at work
2 I’ve been invaded by ants
3 My toilet exploded
4 My mate locked me in the house and I had to wait for him to come back and let me out
5 I didn’t realise it would take me so long to get ready this morning
6 I had a dodgy prawn sandwich for breakfast and had my stomach pumped
7 I was at the dentist with my wisdom teeth and the dentist collapsed
8 I was in the bank and the security system was triggered and we all got locked in
9 A woman fainted in M&S and I had to resuscitate her
10 I had a violent nightmare and ended up punching myself unconscious in a dream

The man is a genius and should he ever apply this type of imagination in a literary or dramatic field the rest of us wannabe scribes can pack up and go home.

PS. We lost the pool match last night as well. Bugger...

Thursday, May 19, 2005

On The Pool

One of the few consistent interests in my life since the age of about 12 (insert rude joke here) is eightball pool and I remarkably remain a half-decent player at this baize-based pseudo-sport despite the demands of work and my ambitions in other areas.

It’s such an important part of my life that my good lady wife even sacrificed our huge bedroom and decamped us into the guest room so I could have a table at home. It’s gestures like that (and her letting me watch Comics Hour on QVC without running out the house screaming ‘I’ve married a geek!’) that make me realise she’s rather fabulous.

Tonight my team in a London pool league plays a cup final against a team of women. This match has been rearranged three times now and it’s rapidly turning into a pressure game because (a) it’s a cup final, (b) it’s an all-female team and losing could dent my male pride and (c) several of my martial arts chums are coming along to have a few games so I want to play well to impress them.

Normally playing and potentially losing to any female wouldn’t be a major worry in terms of embarrassment as quite a lot of my female chums are also pool players and quite capable of giving any player a serious booting. But it still provides food for thought and adds that little bit of extra spice so maybe I’m not the reconstituted non-sexist guy I actually think I am.

Maybe in fact I am the type of new man Steve Coogan creation Paul Calf mentions: ‘I’m a new man me. You’ve got to be if you want to get your leg over with a bird these days...’

So if I refer to any of the opposition as ‘Treacle’ or ‘Darling’ later this evening I’ll let you know.

And I'll obviously keep it very quiet if we lose...

War Is Hell!

The TV show I am currently trying to sell is a sitcom about a postman-turned-porn-star called Chunky Shaft. It’s set in a small northern town and the basic premise is that Chunky (Colin is his real name) is an unlikely sex star who’s not really all that clued up on anything outside the business and his part in it. He sees sex as purely a job, is quite disillusioned with romance and can’t understand why everyone else makes such a big fuss over pornography.

The first episode for this is written and the other five episodes are planned out but I keep coming up with jokes that I want to add in. I’d like to pretend that this is because I am a serious writer who’s creating all the time but it’s really because I enjoy making puerile gags about sex.

The other great joy of this project, of course, is that I can buy as many porn films as I want and claim them against tax as research (Note to my wife and the Inland Revenue: This is a joke. I’m not actually doing this).

Anyway, my latest idea sees Chunky making a World War One porn film called Somme Like It Hot where British soldiers and German nurses get jiggy in the bomb and mine-infested No Man’s Land. Chunky plays a brave Tommy and when the final orgy scene takes place he arrives to see cavorting bodies and pumping arses going at it in No Man’s Land.

He then says: ‘It’s a f***ing minefield!’

Oh well. I thought it was funny...

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

The Godfather

One of my best friends became a father for the second time today after his wife gave birth to a baby girl in the early hours of the morning. I’m godfather to their first child, also a girl, and I’ve been asked to be godfather to their second child too.

This is obviously very touching as it means the parents have some affection for the big-nosed idiot who occasionally drops round their house but it also means I have some responsibility to be a positive role model and help educate the child in the ways of the world. Which brings me onto Harry Potter...

My first godchild celebrated her birthday at the start of the year and, halfwit that I am, I have only just got round to buying her a present. When I asked her what she wanted she said the second and third Harry Potter films but when I got to the video shop this morning I pondered the wisdom of this purchase for a good 10 minutes.

For those who’ve managed to avoid or studiously ignore the Potter phenomenon, I worship at your feet. But the rest of us have had to put up with the bespectacled trainee wizard git for some time now and I wasn’t sure whether I was happy perpetuating this horrible phenomena any further when it came to my goddaughter. And there are good reasons for this...

The main reason, of course, is because I am a horrible bigot who even now, after several years drinking lattes and eating sushi, still likes to occasionally wear his working-class credentials on his sleeve and remains deeply suspicious of anything so patently middle-class as Quidditch, girls called Hermione and the rest of the Harry Potter jolly broomsticks nonsense.

It’s also a dangerous thing to encourage children to attend a boarding school of any description thinking that it will be a land of comedy wizards and magic-based japery. Such establishments are places of fear and unhappiness and produce members of the Tory Party and are to be avoided at all costs!

Sadly, I eventually succumbed to my goddaughter’s wishes and bought her the Harry Potter films. But I will be scouring the video shop again later this week to find her some more positive role models via the medium of film.

Early ideas to educate her about independence and style and not following the crowd include The Wild One with Marlon Brando, Rebel Without A Cause with James Dean, Enter The Dragon with Bruce Lee and Violent Cop with Beat Takeshi. I was going to also buy her Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 subtitled classic The Seven Samurai to teach her about morality and obligation but that may be too much for a four-year-old...

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Free At Last?

I am now sans wife, who’s off to do important work-related things in a far-off land, and sans stepson, who’s away for the week on a school trip.

Bizarrely I was looking forward to this time on my own as it meant I could indulge all my worst habits such as eating with my mouth open, biting my nails and dressing the cats up as PoWs and chasing them around the house while dressed in a Nazi uniform shouting ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ (I made that last one up). Then my family would return and I would revert to someone with basic social graces.

But now I realise I will get home and the house will be empty, the bed will be too big and I won’t have a sarcastic teenager telling me I’m an idiot when I ask questions such as ‘Is Dirty Ol Bastard that rapper’s real name then?’ when I try to touch base with young folk.

Faced with this situation of relationship freedom several years ago (before settling down to life of domestic bliss) a little neon sign would have gone on in my head that read ‘Party time!’ and my brain would already be bopping to the beat of whatever folk singer or goth band I was listening to. It would have been an orgy of excess the likes of which would have made Charles Bukowski look like a monk and would have put Oliver Reed (RIP) and Alex Higgins to shame. But these days, of course, it’s an entirely different matter...

So rather than party like it’s 1999 as Mr Prince or Mr Symbol or Mr Whatever-his-bloody-name-is-these-days would say I am contemplating the following: (a) attending an extra martial arts class, (b) doing some gardening during the evening and (c) spending an evening writing bits of a new stage stage play.

And the worst thing about this is that I’m actually LOOKING FORWARD TO DOING THESE THINGS rather than heading on out and letting rip.

I will confess to one indulgence during this time, though, and that will be watching the excellent House Of Tiny Terrors on BBC 3. This programme follows a child behaviour expert who shows troubled parents the errors of their ways when it comes to raising toddlers. It’s real-life TV without the schlock that treats its participants and its viewers as though they have some intelligence and don’t need to watch fights, nudity or celebs every five minutes. Its presenter Dr Tanya Bryer is a real star in the making and resembles Kat Moon from EastEnders but without the pillow face, the orange skin and the wardrobe of a prostitute. Tanya is great and so is the show. Enjoy...

Trainer Tamer!

Buying casual sports footwear is a veritable minefield and I freely admit that I actually get scared when it comes to buying trainers. In fact it would perhaps be less painful if my feet were cut off in some freak gardening digging accident to prevent me from ever having to face another trainer shopping trip ever again.

Of course, it used to be so much easier...

As a small child growing up in Yorkshire there were three choices when it came to buying trainers: white Green Flash, black Adidas with leather uppers and the ubiquitous black pumps used by schoolchildren for games (or PE as it was later rebranded to make games teaching a slightly less laughable profession).

And for many including myself this was still a trainer choice too many but at least it was manageable. Now however...

I have to enter a huge chain store pumping out looped Missy Elliott tracks with walls covered in different makes, colours and styles of trainer. There are trainers for football, skateboarding, tennis, running, basketball, climbing, kicking... The list is endless and to the uninitiated like myself it’s frightening and intimidating – and that’s before I have to attract the attention of some surly youth who’s less interested in being there than I am to actually try to buy a pair.

I thought I had this cracked yesterday as I’d decided on a new trainer policy which was to buy the simplest-looking, logo-less black trainers in the store. Sadly the only one answering this description was also the pair purchased by my teenage stepson several weeks before and I couldn’t possibly inflict on him the indignity of a hugely unfashionable 36-year-old man wearing the same footwear as him (especially after the jockstrap incident).

But I’m planning on doing some gardening when I get home so if the spade’s sharp enough my dilemma may soon be at an end...

Monday, May 16, 2005

The Write Stuff!

I’m currently having a moral dilemma. Channel 4 are running a competition for unproduced playwrights with the winner getting the chance to have a play staged in the West End. This is a good thing and as an aspiring playwright it’s something I should be entering as I’m back writing after a lengthy lay-off and am steadily amassing a pile of rejections from the some of the finest theatres in the land.

Unfortunately there’s a catch...

This competition is actually part of some sort of TV reality show where the wannabe scribes are whittled down to ten then filmed as the selection process whittles them down to a winner who gets the prize of a West End production. It’s a sort of high-brow Big Brother.

Now in our household reality TV sits somewhere between Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein when it comes to naming the evils of the world. Just look at The Farm, a reality show on Channel 5 at the moment where celebrities have to run a small holding and embark on all manner of bizarre tasks. Shoddy nasty rubbish! One of the entrants on this is porn star Ron Jeremy, a man who often makes his living by having anal sex in front of the camera – and I thought even he would have had more dignity than to appear in this degrading nonsense.

So what to do? Not enter and potentially miss out but maintain the moral high ground – or potentially subject myself and, god forbid, my wife and stepson to the sort of insightful rubbish and half-arsed interviews that such shows usually produce?

I reckon the world already has enough nano-celebrities so it’s back to the rejection letters...

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Shop Soiled

I've been learning martial arts for the past two years and a common problem is how certain anatomical features ‘hang’ when I’m doing this in the loose trousers provided as part of the uniform. I sought advice on this from several colleagues and a jockstrap seemed to be the most popular answer to my ‘personal arrangement’ problems so I finally bought one on Saturday as I had a martial arts grading on Sunday and didn't want anything flapping around.

Now before my shopping trip I was a jockstrap virgin and had no idea what to expect. So here’s a quick lesson for those not familiar with jockstraps and how they function...

The jockstrap is essentially three bits of elastic with a triangle of material thrown in. One bit of elastic goes around the hips and the other bits of elastic go around each leg below the buttocks. At the crotch is a material cradle which pulls everything together and keeps it compact. It’s a bit like a pair of Y-fronts with all the material cut out except for the front bit so it leaves everything uncovered except for the genitals themselves.

Now the jockstrap does it’s job but attractive and aesthetically pleasing it is not. So my only advice to any fellow jockstrap virgins who (a) buy one of these things and (b) want to check out that it’s actually on correctly is not to model it in front of your wife without first checking that your teenage stepson is not in the vicinity...

My wife thought my latest purchase hilarious but the boy gagged then threatened to dig his eyes out with a spoon so he’d never have to see such a horrible sight again.

I am a bad step-parent. Social Services have arrested people for less...