PorkBalls, Blairpologists and Monkey Poo

It's been a while, etc. But enough of that. Welcome to hell. Hello!

As the UK teeters on the edge of financial ruin, and the populace seems to now be leaning so far to the right that the country might actually crash into the fucking Netherlands, we can at least console ourselves with the fact that Gammonface is on his last day, and we will no longer have to put up with a regressive, right wing, elitist and dangerous Prime Minister. Instead, we're going to get a regressive, right wing, dangerous and elitist Prime Minister. And he's left the country in a divided and bitter mess, the scamp.

Gammonface, or PorkBalls, finally got that Broken Britain that he so craved when he was first elected. Or something like that. He kept on about it, anyway. I wasn't really listening.

Yep, the UK's falling to bits. All of the Brexit leaders (Pob, BoJo the Narcissistic Clown, multi-millionaire common man Nigel something) have scarpered, whilst their lies still stick to the walls like monkey poo. So much monkey poo. No matter how hard you scrub, no matter how many of us try to jetwash the simian lie-nuggets, full of nuts, mashed banana and thinly-veiled racism, people are reluctant to see the truthy walls underneath, thinking that a faecal Farage masterpiece is easier on the eye. Soon, we won't even be able to afford Brillo pads, as our currency is about level with Post-It notes at the moment. But at least the EU can't fund projects in some of our most deprived areas now, eh? The fuckers. How dare they?!



Just as we're all fatigued from the devastation of Brexit, we get the bittersweet joy of Cameron deciding to not be bothered to deal with the chaos he's inflicted on the country. This triggered the Tory leadership battle, with the party tearing itself apart. An ideal time for the Opposition to destroy them. But, the PLP being the PLP, they thought they'd give the Tories an even playing field, which was very generous and sporting of them.

Anyway, back to the Tories. BoJo was favourite (a phrase that looks bizarre and doesn't quite work), but the twin events of being stabbed in the back by Pob, and realising that his I'm-going-to-be-PM positioning in supporting Brexit whilst publicly not really a few months ago had blown up in his clown face, he decided he couldn't be bothered to sort out his fucking mess either, and was last seen in a really shit reboot of Happy Days.



Everyone was leaving everything, even if they weren't in it. Fleeing responsibility is the new black amongst the out-of-touch political elite.



But Pob sprang back, lacking the upper body strength to get his knife back out from between BoJo's bumbling shoulder blades but chipper, lovable and charismatic as ever. Also, a ritual was performed involving a salt pentagram and mongoose blood, and Liam Fox rematerialised in our plain of reality. Realising that not enough of the animal kingdom was represented in this Contest of Champions, Stephen Crabb also threw his hat into the ring, and his car keys into a bowl, looking like a character from a Kenneth Grahame cheese nightmare.



And then, someone else. Andrea something. It turned out that her credentials were a bit suspect, but since nobody really knew who she was, it probably wouldn't have been spotted anyway.




And this one was there too. 



While all this rubbish brewed in the background, and the country waited with baited breath for an even more right-wing government, the Chilcot Inquiry finally showed up, and was completed before George R.R. Martin could release The Winds of Winter. Season 7 of Game of Thrones will be following the latter few volumes of Chilcot instead, so we may finally get to the scene where we find out what secret notes Cersei Lannister was passing to George W. Bush, and where Blair sits on the Iron Throne, but gets a really big sword up his arsehole.


This led to lots of parliamentary Blairpologists trying to downplay their culpability, whilst Blair appeared on TV, his rictus grin spitting out no apology. It was everyone else's fault, you see. Everyone but Our Tony. Jeremy Corbyn apologised on behalf of the Labour Party, which Chief BBC Propagandist Laura Kuenssberg probably twisted into an admittance of guilt.

Back to our favourite right-wing zealots. The first round of voting saw Liam Fox lose out. If Fox and Hunt had campaigned together, they would have been leapt upon by the Tories. Crabb dropped out, after being caught finding that sexting is really moreish, and then Pob spat on his final TV screen.






Andrea Leadsom valiantly destroyed her career by saying something crass about having kids and yah-boo-Theracist-May-doesn't, and within a day or two, she was gone, and we were stuck with another PM without a mandate of their own, but with a really impressive record of human rights abuse, and with an extremely popular policy ready to launch where you'd better delete your fucking browsing history sharpish. The Tories were still intact, and this was largely due to the Parliamentary Labour Party being opportunistic shits.

Whilst the Tories pulled together like wasps around a cadaver, over in the Labour Party, Hilary Benn called Jeremy Corbyn a twat or summat to his face, and his leader had no choice to sack him on the grounds of being a disgrace compared to his father. This led to clearly spontaneous, on-the-hour resignations from the Shadow Cabinet, coincidentally keeping them in the news, all on the basis that Corbyn had failed to win the Remain argument, which he didn't. But still, the spontaneous, unplanned and unchoreographed resignations happened hourly, just as they'd been planning and choreographing for months. One thing led to nothing, so did another, and finally, a candidate was chosen to sacrifice her political career to clear the way for others to contend. Step forward 4th-place runner-up of last year's Labour Deputy Leader contest.

Although I don't think she's quite got the hang of it yet. Anyway, she's awful. So awful, that you can only laugh at the sheer mess she's made of her presentation so far, ably mimicking the Blairite soundbites that have been scripted for her by... someone. I can only guess who, but I'm pretty sure their name's an anagram of Mean Old Serpent. Her awfulness isn't exclusive to her ham-fisted leadership campaign. She has an appalling voting record, voting for the Iraq war, voting against an inquiry into it, abstaining against the welfare bill... she's a disgrace.

So, here we are. We're having a leadership contest in the Labour Party, and we've got a vile new Prime Minister. She's chosen her cabinet already, and has filled it with like-minded people.



The thing is, the Tories are no different to the rebelling PLP members. Both howl and bang tables at meetings (the Tories with May, the PLP with Kinnock, both in the same week), and both are in it to win it, no matter the cost. They're a bit like football teams; no real difference in what they do, they're ultimately aiming to win by playing the same game as each other. We really do need an alternative to this shower of shit.

Bah.

Anyway, back tomorrow with some Fun May Facts. Ta ta!

Class Wars: Askew Hope

Last week, the BBC released a revised class structure. They didn't feel that the current three-tier one defined people well enough, so their patronising 7-tier structure, based on things ranging from who you're friends with, what your hobbies are and how many people called 'Colin' you know was designed to neatly categorise the British Public like cattle.

The Tories aren't happy with this, and want it resimplified, so have devised their own multiple choice test to seperate the posh from the plebs. See how you do! Post in the comments your outcome.

https://testmoz.com/140607

And, taken from the pages of Young Tory Fun, here's something to start 'em young:

Speaking of bloated Tories, here's something I noticed recently about two of them...

And finally...

Take care, one and all. Don't let them beat us.

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