set aside at the BBC where he could entertain ‘lady friends’. No wonder he always appeared animated and excited on screen. He knew he was only seconds away from heading back to his whore-filled room.
Hall got fifteen months. The judge couldn’t have given him fifteen years because there was a worry he’d ejaculate on hearing his sentence. He said there was a vendetta against famous people. Hey, if you don’t want a vendetta against you, maybe don’t abuse so many people they can form a mob. As he was sentenced his victims cried, but he showed no emotion; arousal doesn’t reach an eighty-three-year-old’s face for a good ten minutes. The sentence was lenient because he had to be tried under the 1956 Act. Shame he didn’t have consensual sex with a man. We could have thrown the book at him.
When I think about 70s television one of my major memories is that test-card girl who used to sit really still for hours on end playing noughts and crosses with the clown puppet. Looking back, I think she sat there all night on her own because she was too scared to return to the BBC dressing rooms. You begin to look back at these shows in a different way, now. Was Mr Benn constantly changing outfits just to evade capture from the police? One minute dressed as a Native American, the next as an astronaut, simply to make it harder for his victims to pick him out of a line-up?
Making nostalgia programmes is going to be tricky now. I Remember the 70s will just be full of people crying, with a helpline number at the end. People of my age can’t look back on the 70s with any enjoyment. At least teenagers nowadays can look back at an innocent world of kids’ presenters going on coke binges and hanging themselves. A lot of the guys from the 70s are saying, ‘We didn’t ask the girls’ ages.’ To be fair, the fact she’s telling you about her pets and her favourite princess means you don’t really have to.
With all the scandals, everyone involved in Children in Need must be walking on eggshells. Or sitting in a bath of beans. Whichever raises the most money, I guess. They’re not even allowed to hold any big cheques anymore in case behind one someone is being sucked off by a teenager. Jimmy Savile was banned from Children in Need. Which is lucky, as no one would want to see Pudsey using himself to show the cops where Jimmy touched him.
I must say, I prefer the old Blue Peter appeals. There was one for stamps when I was a little boy. There’d been a famine in Ethiopia, and the great thing was, once the target had been reached they kept the viewers involved by sending the presenters out to show the work of the appeal. I remember they took a jumbo from London to Addis Ababa, then a little propeller plane that landed on an airstrip where the forest had been cleared. Then into a Jeep for a day and a half, with the last twenty miles on foot. I can still recall them now, arriving in this simple of village of mud huts and being met by the grateful chief, who took them into his own hut, which was a little larger, the doorway topped with the feathers from colourful birds. You know something? I think he had the biggest stamp collection I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing like a hobby to take your mind off your appetite.
• • •
Ricky Gervais was cleared of breaking Ofcom rules for calling Susan Boyle a ‘fucking mong’. Quite right, too. Sometimes a joke has such skill in its construction, such heights of imagination and poetry, that it transcends our petty linguistic taboos. I read a columnist describe him as a moron for saying it and adding that she didn’t need to explain why she could use the word ‘moron’ and he couldn’t use ‘mong’. Because that’s where our culture is at in terms of debate – a kind of secondary-school level.
You’d imagine why someone could use one word rather than another would be the starting point of an undergrad-uate seminar. Perhaps we would even ask whether meaning is constructed in the listener (phenomenology), or whether the newspapers that publicised Gervais’s foolishness were authors by relocation. You know, the idea that if I project a porno on to the front of a local nursery school they arrest me rather than Ron Jeremy. Perhaps most of all we would wonder why modern liberals have a set of words they feel must not be used regardless of context. Something you’d normally associate with fundamentalist religion. Instead, we’ve an increasingly infantilising cultural climate of because that’s just why.
It seems strange that nobody ever mentions that the ideas of I want to see interesting, free comedy that pushes boundaries and I never want hear a joke I disagree with are mutually exclusive. Here’s an amusing email my agent got recently:
Hi Hannah
I write a column for the **** ******.
I was concerned to read in the Sun what Frankie Boyle had written about the death of Brian Cobby, best known as the voice of the speaking clock, saying how he had died ‘after his third stroke’.
My understanding is that Mr Cobby did indeed die of a stroke but this seems to me distasteful in any case. I would like a comment from Boyle justifying what he has said and possibly an apology to Mr Cobby’s family.
Thanks, *****
• • •
People who say you don’t see white dog shit anymore haven’t been watching Jeremy Kyle. Jeremy says he has nothing to lose by doing a quiz show because he’s already the most hated man in Britain. That’s a level of self-awareness people will never have thought he had and he’ll have gone up in their estimation. Although he’s still the most hated man in Britain. Kyle’s studios have been fitted with walk-through metal detectors. I hope that sends out a clear message to anyone going – ‘Remember, you can still punch him.’
Somewhere Angelina Jolie’s pre-cancerous boobs are fighting Jeremy’s cancer-ridden testicle in the ultimate battle of good vs evil. I was saddened by the news of Jeremy’s illness, as I was so close to fully disposing of any residual belief from my Catholic upbringing of an interventionist God. Jeremy wanted the results given to him straight. A shame – really, doctors should have made him wait for three minutes while a bingo-fixated cartoon fox tried to trick him into borrow-ing money at 1,000 per cent APR. But all respect to Jeremy. It takes some skill to turn abusing street drinkers into a winning format.
Cancer doesn’t discriminate, which actually makes it morally superior to Jeremy Kyle. Must’ve been quite humbling for cancer to enter Jeremy’s body and find it’s the least toxic substance in there. Like Ian Huntley turning up at a party only to find its Josef Mengele’s house. Jeremy won’t let cancer beat him! He’s never been stopped by lack of talent or conscience, so why stop now? His fans have sent cards. Must be touching to receive a ‘Get Well Soon!’ card from people who’d spit at a fat person. Having just one testicle shouldn’t affect sperm production. A relief for Jeremy, as his pre-show dressing-room ritual consists of ejaculating onto a sculpture of his own face carved from the frozen tears of former guests.
Really, the majority of our TV output is just a kind of sewer of the collective unconscious. On the day of Amanda Knox’s trial Matthew Wright’s show on Channel 5, The Wright Stuff, held a phone-in titled ‘Foxy Knoxy: Would Ya?’ It couldn’t really have been in any worse taste if they’d have gone for ‘Fred and Rosemary West: I Don’t Fancy Yours Much’. Channel 5 insists the discussion was handled sensitively, and how couldn’t it have been when the panel included Christopher Biggins? It reminded me of the time when Matthew Wright discussed the problem of female circumcision with Lion-O from ThunderCats. Matthew knows a sexy murder when he sees one! He realises it would be almost impossible for his viewers to knock one out to the story of a burglar being strangled in Aldershot. And the ‘almost’ in that sentence must really depress him.
*Also, my reading is that Peter Pan and the Lost Boys are the souls of abortions. It would certainly explain Captain Hook.
I love the idea of animals being just like, or even superior to, humans but when you really look at it they just