Irony-free outbursts from Russell Howard fans

As I've not been anywhere near here for a while, I found a couple of comments awaiting moderation that have been sat there doing nothing. I thought I'd share them with you. These are aimed at myself and anyone else who commented on previous posts about Russell Howard (Lucky 13 and Aaargh! It's the Dystopian Advent Calendar 2010), who inspires a baffling degree of violent hero-worship in some of his fans.

Firstly, we have Matthew Burn, who tried posting the same comment twice from behind the safety of his computer screen/keyboard before realising that they have to be moderated first, the silly billy.

"Jealous scum... The lot of you... Would publish something more creative and witty but I really couldn't be fucked with the likes of you... Enjoy the safety of being behind a computer screen/keyboard pussies..."

Thanks, Matthew! Finally for now, we have someone who wished to remain Anonymous, which is a shame; being behind the safety of his computer screen/keyboard, he or she needn't be so shy amongst friends.

"You're all sad pathetic cunts. You need to get a life instead of coming on the internet to insult him. Go fuck yourselves"

Ho, ho! Wise words indeed, Anonymous! And thanks for coming on the internet to add your thoughts.

Hopefully, I'll have more to share with you in the future. These are fun people.

ITV in 'praise' shock

It's been a while. Hello.

So, what's new? Well, I'm still getting abuse from Russell Howard fans, who have an insane level of hero-worship for him, so nothing new there. Other than that, business as usual.

Apart from one thing. A few weeks ago, I praised ITV.

I know, I couldn't believe it either.

To celebrate 30 years of Children's ITV, the CITV channel ran an Old Skool Weekend, and as you can imagine, I was a bit bloody happy about it. For all of its many, many, many faults, ITV was responsible for some of the best children's television during the 80s and 90s, eclipsing Auntie Beeb almost entirely. It was generally more anarchic, less staid, and tapped into the psyche of kids in a way that Peter Simon's Double Dare could only dream of.

"Where am I?"
"You're in a room."

A few things became obvious during these two days of brilliance. Firstly, child actors used to be less drama schooly, to coin a phrase; they were believably normal kids, bereft of the plague of jazz-hands camera-mugging that infects the airwaves nowadays, such as Dani Harmer with her unfeasibly large, orange face. We were treated to two episodes each of Woof!, from opposite ends of the show's run,  Children's Ward from around 2006 (by which time the general quality of CITV had diminished somewhat), Knightmare (from the last series where they started pissing around with the formula, brought in fledgling CGI and tried to make it look like an Amiga role playing game), and the wonderful Press Gang, Steven Moffat's first television work. How jarring to hear mild swearing and to see a dead drug user in a children's programme. The late, lamented Cosgrave-Hall's Dangermouse and Count Duckula, the 90s remake of The Tomorrow People, and the very bleak Dramarama, a children's Twilight Zone made on a children's department budget, the episode 'Back to Front' being a highlight of the whole weekend, with a very dark, downbeat ending. Largely superb stuff overall.

I have no idea who two of these people are.

However, how do you choose from three decades of programming to cram into a microscopic schedule? There were some notable omissions, like Your Mother Wouldn't Like It and its spin-off, Palace Hill. Round the Bend was absent, as were Bad Influence and Telebugs, and seeing as it was on a weekend, an episode of Number 73, Get Fresh, Ghost Train or Motormouth wouldn't have gone amiss. A couple of episodes of Fraggle Rock ended up as filler material, and it was the US version that was never shown over here, being as the localised UK version starring Fulton Mackay and John Gordon-Sinclair has been wiped from the master tapes, just like the Beeb used to do with Doctor Who. Seems like a literal waste of time to me.

The choices did seem a little odd at times. As I mentioned, Knightmare was represented by a couple of latter-day episodes rather than the early stuff when it was at its height of popularity and quality, and Press Gang was bookended by its first ever and last ever episodes. For nostalgia-seekers like me who found themselves getting drawn into the episodes, it's a tad cruel to deny us everything that happened in between.

And there's the problem. Facebook was awash with people of a certain age clamouring for more, talking over the whole weekend about their memories of these gems of broadcasting, but it ended as quickly as it started. That's it, no more. The following day's schedule on CITV just highlighted how utterly shit their modern day programming is, and how overlooked the entire era is. Nostalgia channels will show 'grown-up' shows from decades past, but there is a huge gap in the schedules for nostalgic children's channels.

When TV was good.

Still, kudos overall to ITV for daring to make this weekend possible, with entire episodes of both forgotten and fondly-remembered classics dominating the arse end of the channels list for a couple of days. If the BBC attempted anything like this, it would take the form of a 1-hour listings show on BBC Three narrated by Robert Webb, a countdown of brief clips interspersed by talking heads segments with Fearne Cotton, Jack Whitehall and Barney Harwood taking the piss out of, rather than celebrating, the shows. Credit where credit's due, for one brief weekend, innocence without irony won the day. More please.

Stu Hall's Letters From Canada #4

I have been living in this country for four years now, and there has been a perpetual bogeyman hiding in the shadows. I’ve never seen him. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced anyone has seen him, but he must exist because people whisper about him all the time. Who is this bogeyman? No, it’s not Prime Minister Harper. I’m talking about a bizarre meteorological event that Wikipedia describes as, “raindrops [that] become supercooled while passing through a sub-freezing layer of air … [that] freeze upon impact with any object they encounter”. It has a METAR code. I don’t know what a METAR code is, but it has one. I am talking about “freezing rain”. No, no. Not hail. It’s different to that (and hail has it’s own METAR code). No, no. It’s not sleet. No, not black ice, either. It’s “freezing rain”.

Let’s back up a bit. British people are well known for talking about the weather, but Canadian people are little obsessed about it too. As the dominant European settlers, it is our gift to Canucks. The tools to discuss weather, and a penchant for tea. While British people are specifically obsessed with their one day of snow, or their one week of summer, Canadians are obsessed by freezing rain and spread warnings about it all the time. Because worrying about snow in Canada is for tossers. The problem with this chatting is that it spreads to the 24-hour news networks. Just like everywhere, these feral bullshit gatherers work so hard to whip up the drama of a story, to create an exciting narrative for the purpose of selling advertising, that they end up creating the story itself. There’s going to be freezing rain. Stay indoors, unlike us, filming from our satellite van parked on the hard-shoulder, otherwise you will die. The news networks’ warnings make freezing rain sound like a dastardly, yet mostly ineffective, form of moisture based terrorism.

The fact that I have never witnessed this mysterious form of precipitation and the fact that people are terrorised off the streets by its mere mention means that I am now calling for a ban on H20 in any circumstance where its gas, solid or liquid chemical state is in a position to be confused.

NO MORE TEA FOR YOU, CANADA.

@stuhall occasionally parps out something of vague interest on his blog

Stu Hall's Letters From Canada #3

Unless you’ve road-tripped across some large territories, I’m going to assume that you can’t really visualise the size of the world’s 2nd biggest country. Well, fear not. I am here to help elucidate and confuse you in roughly equal measure. The first time I came to Canada, I thought it might be interesting to drive a hire car around Lake Ontario. It is one of the Great Lakes and Toronto lies on its shore. I didn’t know this at the time, but other sizable towns on the shore of Lake Ontario include Kingston, Burlington, Oakville, Hamilton, St. Cathe`rines, Niagara and Mississauga, which is pronounced roughly as “missy-saga”, making it sound a bit like a prostitution service at an over 50’s resort. It turns out that the time it takes to drive around Lake Ontario is measured in days. It’s big. Immense. Massive. Larger, but significantly more natural than, all 6 of the Kardashian’s tits combined. Let’s look at some of the measures that people use to conceptualise the size of things, shall we? Quite often people will say that something is the size of a certain number of football pitches. So how many football pitches could you fit in Canada? NEARLY TEN MILLION. Ok, that doesn’t help. We need to something larger. How many times would London fit into Canada? About 6,500 times. Oh! British people love to say how many times larger than Wales a thing is. Wales fits into Canada around 480 times. That’s a bit easier to imagine. And what’s more, both countries have people angrily speaking secondary languages!

@StuHall sometimes updates his blog, stuhallwrites.com

The New Elizabethans

Hello. Please welcome Jim Lawrence to the Dystopian Fuchsia 'team' with his first article...


The New Elizabethans – An Alternative List

You are almost certainly aware – it’s been shoved down our throats since last year, after all – that our glorious unelected head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, will be enjoying (yes, she does occasionally crack a smile) her sixtieth year on the throne in 2012. To commemorate this exciting fact Radio 4 will be selecting a panel next month whose task it will be to compile a list of the sixty living Britons who have most influenced our national life. Just as the first Queen Elizabeth ruled over a Golden Age that ushered in the Early Modern Period, an era of cultural and political ferment not seen in Europe for generations, so it is said that our Elizabeth has overseen a time of greatness, of innovation in the arts and sciences, of profound changes in mores and social habits, a symbolic Mother of the Nation at whose ever-flowing teat we grateful subjects imbibe comfort and unity.

Well, I think the picture is not so clear. I tend to the Rotten theory of post-war British society – that it’s the fascist regime that made you a moron. (Not you of course, gentle reader.) And so, in that spirit of splenetic, contrarian, dangerously close to misanthropic disgust with this low dishonest decade or six, I offer you my own list of sixty luminaries who, in my view, have done their best to make Britain what it is today. And never before in the field of human TV watching, sport obsessing, flag waving, bovine conformity has so much contempt been owed to so few by so many.

1. Katie Price
2. Everyone who has ever been in Hollyoaks
3. The Saatchi brothers
4. The Beckhams
5. Ann Atkins
6. Peter Bazalgette
7. Lord Tebbit of Chingford
8. Wayne Rooney
9. Peaches Geldof
10. The inventor of Thought for the Day
11. Joe Pasquale
12. Neil & Christine Hamilton
13. Abi Titmus
14. Simon Cowell
15. The Chuckle Brothers
16. Garry Bushell
17. Chris Moyles
18. Cheryl Cole
 19. Danny Dyer
20. Fred Goodwin
21. Kelvin Mackenzie
22. Louise Mensch
23. Boris Johnson
24. Ant & Dec
25. Adam Boulting
26. Pete Waterman
27. Peter Hitchens
28. Russell Brand
29. Phil & Kirsty
30. Peter Andre
31. Everybody who works for Talk Sport
32. Sir Digby Jones
33. Lord Sugar
34. Jimmy Carr
35. Rebekah Brooks
36. Richard Littlejohn
37. Melanie Phillips
38. Kay Burley
39. Andrew Neil
40. Commissioners of BBC1 sitcoms
41. Trevor Kavanagh
42. Janet Street-Porter
43. Michael Portillo
44. Clarkson, May & Hammond
45. Vernon Kay & Tess Daly
46. Lord Prescott
47. Keith Lemon
48. Nick Clegg
49. All royal correspondents and entertainment ‘journalists’
50. The National Lottery Commission
51. Lord Mandelson
52. Sir Phillip Green
53. Andy Coulson
54. Lord Rothermere
55. Migration Watch
56. The Confederation of British Industries
57. The Adam Smith Institute
58. Everyone involved with Loose Women
59. Quentin Letts
60. And finally the two towering figures who most neatly epitomise and did so much to create the spirit of this vicious and shallow age: Baroness Thatcher of Kestevan and Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

Text by Jim Lawrence, image by Ian Hewett

Stu Hall's Letters From Canada #2

Boris Johnson on Crack

In May 2008, Londoners voted for Boris Johnson to become their mayor and in December 2010, the people of Toronto voted for Rob Ford to become their mayor. It seems that on both sides of the Atlantic, on the other side of a couple of fences, there was a hell of a lot of green grass.

There are similarities between the two mayors. They were both voted in because people were apathetic to their predecessors, but the main similarity is that they are both buffoons. In appearance, Toronto mayor Rob Ford shares a striking resemblance to both the arch nemesis of Danger Mouse, Baron Von Greenback, and to the James Bond Villian, Goldfinger.

Both mayors can be infantile, although in the childishness stakes, Rob Ford comes out on top. His brother, Doug Ford, also works in government and is not afraid of wading in with his massive mouth like he is auditioning for some angsty playground confrontation scene from Waterloo Road.

Everyone in Toronto would like subways. But, if they had the option, everyone in Toronto would also like to skip through Homer Simpson’s Chocolate Fantasy Land in place of their daily commute. Ever since someone lost all the money in the world, most people accept that both options are equally irresponsible. Except Rob Ford (and Doug). He wants subways, and he resists answering questions from the media. He literally stands at conferences and repeats “Tax-payers want subways, it’s what tax-payers want, it’s all about subways”. Jeremy Paxman would wring his fucking neck.

As a compromise, most TAX-PAYERS and the city council want a light railway like the London Docklands. But... Rob Ford repeats his mantra, “TAX-PAYERS WANT SUBWAYS, nah-nah-nah, I can’t hear you!”

Rob Ford has been arrested for possession of marijuana

Accused of fighting a student American Football player

Accused twice of driving whilst using a mobile phone

Called three councillors “two steps left of Joe Stalin”

Called an opponent a “gino” (an ethnic slur against Italian-Canadians)

Said “I don’t understand a transgender, I don’t understand, is it a guy dressed up like a girl or a girl dressed up like a guy? And we’re funding this for, I don’t know, what does it say here? We’re giving them $3,210?”

Avoided attending Gay Pride

Was ejected from an Ice Hockey arena by security after swearing at a couple

Suggested that women get AIDS by having sex with bi-sexual men

When a TV presenter from a satirical news show tried to interview him in his drive, he called Police 3 times and swore at the operator when police were not forthcoming

Said that “Those Orientals work like dogs” (“orientals” is politically incorrect in North America and so is calling people dogs).

Said "my heart bleeds for them [cyclists] when one of them gets killed... but... it's their own fault"

Boris Johnson looks like a tit on his Have I Got News For You appearances, gets locked out of his home by his angry wife right in-front of the media as he returns home from a jog, misses several times when he shoots at a basketball hoop (again, before the press) and talks nonsense about bendy-busses. Basically, he is cuddly and cute even when he is patronising the people of Papua New Guinea for living lives of "bourgeois domesticity". Can we have him please?

Stu Hall's Letters From Canada #1

Hello sir! Your regular host, Ian, has invited me to guest post on his blog. It didn’t take me long to accept his offer and begin writing about Canada, where I have been living since 2007. You see, before I moved here, I knew bugger all about Canada. The only Canadians I knew were Terrance and Phillip from South Park. I was genuinely surprised to learn that, when Canadians speak, the top halves of their heads don’t really flap around. While you might not be as ignorant as I was, I’m just going to go ahead and assume you are. British people seem to believe a number of stereotypes about Canada, but let me set them straight. It doesn’t snow all the time, just enough to raise the all-important suicide rate. Not all Canadians are nice people. For example, most Torontonians would kill you if it meant getting your seat on the bus. Canadians don’t go around saying “Eh?” as they emerge bleary-eyed from their igloos. No, they say it as they emerge bleary-eyed from the bar. Or the local coffee shop, for that matter.


 Coffee brings me on to things that are actually true about Canadians. They love coffee. Instead of a newsagent on every corner, Canadians have a coffee shop on every corner. Ok, that's kinda true of Britain, too. But in Britain, they are Italian-style places that require a credit check just to make a purchase. Canadian coffee shops require a few quarters and a liberal sprinkling of pocket lint. If you want to catch a Canadian, you could do far worse than by setting up a trap using coffee as bait, or better yet, microwavable macaroni and cheese (“Kraft Dinner”). They’re obsessed with that shit, and I’m yet to work out why. I suppose it’s the Pot Noodle equivalent: “It’s dirty, and you want it”. All Canadians apologise for Bryan Adams and Alanis Morissette. 


I hope you enjoyed dipping your toe into Canada, or at least my warped impression of it. It’s ironic that I have written about stereotypes, because if you choose to continue reading my posts, what will become apparent is that Canada is not that easy to pin down. The only constants about Canada are that it is a massive, massive place and Canadians.... really love coffee. I don’t want you to think I’m winging this, especially with Ian paying me so much to write here. It’s not like I don’t have any ideas (I have at least two more ideas for columns about Canada that came to me during a feverish dream), but if there’s a Canadiana based topic you would like to hear about, leave a comment and let me know. 


 @stuhall writes sporadically at http://www.stuhallwrites.com