The Hell of it All Read online

  Here’s how it works. Let’s say a 16-year-old called Ryan has stolen a shopping trolley and spun it round and round in the town centre while screaming abuse at horrified passers-by. He’s arrested and charged and hauled into court. The judge sentences Ryan to five hours’ community service on Channel Loser.

  As part of his punishment, Ryan has to hand over his mobile phone, so the police can search through his address book and text all his friends, telling them what time to tune in. Let’s say it’s 4 p.m. As the clock strikes four, Ryan’s friends flop down on the sofa, switch on the box, and this is what they see.

  Ryan is wearing nothing but a pair of bikini bottoms. ‘Hello,’ he says, reading slowly from the autocue. ‘My name’s Ryan Daniels and I stole a trolley.’ Then the Thomas the Tank Engine theme music starts playing and Ryan has to dance to it. When the tune comes to an end, it instantly skips back to the beginning and Ryan has to start again. This sequence is repeated until he bursts into tears.

  Then Ryan’s mum walks in, spits on a bit of tissue, and wipes his face with it. Then she produces a bag of his laundry and goes through every item in it one by one, complaining bitterly about the state of his underpants and so on.

  Once she’s gone, Ryan climbs into a paddling pool filled with ice-cold water and sits down until his genitals have shrivelled to squinting point. Then he has to stand up and pull down his bikini bottoms, at which point a girl from Hollyoaks walks in, points and laughs in his face for 10 minutes.

  Then Ryan has to push his face into a cow’s backside. The sole concession to his personal dignity is a bucket on the floor to be sick in. Finally, there’s a three-hour interactive section where the audience at home texts in phrases that Ryan has to read aloud. This, the simplest section, is also the most entertaining. Picture it.

  Come the end of his punishment, Ryan will never re-offend and probably won’t even go outside again. Problem solved. What’s more, we’ve all been entertained. Everybody wins. Cameron, if you’re reading – you can have this idea for free.

  Next week: solving climate change with kites.

  Planet of the spiders [3 September 2007]

  Forget rainy April or snowblown February – early September is the very worst time of year, for one simple reason: it’s spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever’s nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind. To a committed arachnophobe like me, spider season is like a live-action version of the videogame Doom. My flat is briefly transformed into a sort of white-knuckle ghost house in which dropping your guard, even for a moment, can have terrible consequences. The other night, for instance, I awoke at 4 a.m. for a dozy late-night trip to the lavatory. As I sat there, blearily performing the necessaries, a spider the size of a small dog unexpectedly crawled out from behind the toilet and scampered across my bare right foot. I reacted like I’d been blasted in the coccyx with a taser gun. Blind panic took control of my body before the need to stop ‘going’ had registered in my brain. You can imagine the aftermath. It’s like a dirty protest in there. I may need to move house.

  What’s the point of spiders anyway? They’re just mobile nightmare units put on the Earth to eat flies and frighten people by scuttling out from under the TV stand and lolloping crazily toward you. Non-arachnophobes just don’t get it. Fear of spiders isn’t a choice, but a residual evolutionary trait that some people have and some don’t, just as some people can fold their tongues and others can’t. When I see a spider, I’m across the room before I know what’s happened, like an animal running from an explosion. It’s not learned behaviour, you patronising idiots. It’s automatic code, hardwired into the brain. Some brains. My brain.

  Once, when I was a student, I was preparing a meal in a hall of residence kitchen when some japester ran in carrying a huge spider he’d found outside. Having made a couple of girls scream, he decided to lunge in my direction. Without even thinking, I swiped at his belly with a kitchen knife in a desperate bid to stave him off. The blade narrowly missed him, which was a shame, because it meant I had to spend the next half-hour listening to him self-righteously bleating about how I must be crazy and he was only having a laugh. I just shrugged. Don’t startle someone with a knife in their hand unless you’re prepared to face the consequences, moron. Next time I’ll go for the eyes.

  But like I say, non-arachnophobes don’t understand. Too lacking in imagination and/or basic human empathy to comprehend the instinctive primal reaction spiders provoke in genuine sufferers, they blather idiotic platitudes like ‘It’s more scared of you than you are of it’, which is absurd since (a) spiders aren’t gripped with hypnotic dread at the sight of people, and (b) the spider’s primitive brain doesn’t have any concept of fear, in much the same way it doesn’t have any concept of what the Police Academy movies are.

  Spiders are so resolutely horrible, they don’t even have to exist to be scary. A few weeks into a bumper spider season, I find I’m often as frightened of spiders that aren’t there as ones that are: terrified to pick up a shoe in case there’s a spider in it, for example.

  This is because spiders have precisely the same modus operandi as terrorists: they target innocent civilians at random, strike unexpectedly, and cause widespread disproportionate fear. Oh, and they often die as a result of their actions, or at least they do if I’ve got a rolled-up newspaper to hand. Spiders don’t videotape their own suicide notes before embarking on their death campaigns, but that’s only because they’re too thick to operate the controls.

  All of which prompts the question of why the military doesn’t get involved. Think about it: if the army fought the War on Spiders instead of the War on Terror, it would be (a) winnable, (b) cheaper, (c) popular, and (d) justifiable in the eyes of God. I’d certainly slumber more soundly in my bed if I knew Our Lads were available on 24-hour call-out; a dedicated anti-arachnid task force that would turn up at your home in the dead of night and splatter that absolute whopper that ran under the cupboard an hour ago and has left you unable to sleep ever since. Oh, and please note I’m suggesting the use of lethal force as a default. None of this fannying around with pint glasses and sheets of paper and ‘putting him outside’. He’ll just crawl in again, stupid. If a murderer climbed through your window you wouldn’t just ‘put him in the garden’. You wouldn’t rest until you saw his brains sloshed up the wall. It’s the same with spiders. If it’s not been reduced to a gritty, twitching smear, it’s not been dealt with at all.

  Actually, since this is a liberal paper, I suppose arrest and detention might be acceptable. The army could take care of that: scoop the bastards up and whisk them away to spider prison. The cells would need impossibly tiny bars, mind. Anyway, that’s what this country needs: an armed response to the arachnid menace. That this hasn’t happened is the greatest tragedy of our age.

  – The above column on spiders was written at the last minute as a replacement to the following article, which was spiked prior to publication on for being slightly too bleak for Monday morning Guardian readers to countenance …

  Pointlessness abounds [intended for 3 September 2007]

  Here’s a sentence rarely used to open newspaper columns: why don’t the vast majority of people just blow their own heads off? You, with the coffee cup. You, with the shoes. Why are you bothering? What’s the point? Is there a point? And has anyone written it down in an easily-digestible form? With pictures? Like a Mr Men book? If you think that sounds a touch depressing, you’re wrong. Pointlessness is liberating. But we’ll get onto that in a minute. First, let’s consider life: the case against.

  OK. I live in London, a city where it’s hard not to look around and think, ‘Christ, so it’s come to this?’ on a daily basis. Cities are one of human civilisation’s most significant creations, and London is supposed to be one of the finest cities in the world. But it’s horrible. It’s cold, cramped, and ringing with sirens. Visually, it’s an unending collage
of immense grey boxes squatting beneath immense grey clouds, surrounded by thick grey-tasting air. Your best chance of seeing a splash of colour in London is to stare at a billboard or spew on the pavement. Coincidentally, those two activities also represent the finest entertainment the city has to offer.

  But it’s not just London that’s awful. You are too. And by ‘you’, I mean ‘us’. Humankind. After all, we clearly peaked about 40 years ago, and it’s been downhill ever since. For all this talk of the dazzling modern age, the two biggest advances of the past decade are Wi-Fi and Nando’s. That’s the best we can do. Meanwhile the environment’s crashing, fundamentalists and morons are at each other’s throats, God’s so disappointed he’s wished himself out of existence, and the rest of us are merely pottering around, distracting ourselves by fiddling with our iPod settings.

  Ooh look I’ve changed the menu screen wallpaper. Ooh look I’ve changed it back. Ooh look I’ve – oh. A mushroom cloud. That’s annoying. How am I going to power my iPod now? The charger’s just melted. As have my hands. And I’m thinking these thoughts with a boiling molten brain bubbling through a fissure in my freshly carbonised skull. Oh well. Night night.

  And even assuming the world doesn’t come to an end while you’re standing in it, the sheer scale of creation renders most existences futile. The universe is so timelessly immense, absolutely anything you say or do is meaningless by comparison. In the grand scheme of things, even mankind’s brightest stars – yer Beethovens and Shakespeares and Einsteins – are fleeting pixels, gone in the blink of a mosquito’s eye. And most of us don’t achieve anything like as much as them. In fact most of us achieve less than, say, Daniel Bedingfield.

  So, to return to my opening question, why don’t the vast majority of people just blow their own heads off? The answer, presumably, is that life’s inherent meaninglessness is precisely the thing that gives it meaning in the first place. If Jesus Christ turned up tomorrow on CNN to officially announce what the point of existence was, it would ruin everything. What if it turned out to be ‘collecting teacups’? By that reckoning, most of us are failures. As it stands, none of us are. In the absence of any formal rules, the only thing required of us is basic human survival. And we might as well be upbeat about it.

  Daniel Bedingfield, incidentally, worked this out some time ago and wrote a catchy, cathartic song about it – ‘Gotta Get Thru This’ – which went to number one. If he’d called it ‘Might As Well Blow My Own Head Off’ it wouldn’t have had half as much airplay. We can all learn from that. We can all learn from Daniel Bedingfield. Now there’s a sentence rarely used to close newspaper columns.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In which lies are told by everyone except Simon Cowell, Jamie Oliver cooks tomatoes, and the 24-hour news networks look for Madeleine McCann

  Like, totally psychotic [14 July 2007]

  You know what I miss? Fray Bentos steak and ale pies. I haven’t had one in years. But as a student, I ate them constantly. I thought they represented grown-up cooking. After all, this wasn’t your average takeaway slop. No. A Fray Bentos supper required preparation and patience. You had to shear the lid off with a tin opener, and chuck the pie in the oven for half an hour. The end result was sublime. Except it wasn’t. Having wolfed down better, fresher meals since then, I now realise that what I was eating tasted like dog food boiled in a stomach lining by comparison. At the time I just didn’t know any better. Now I couldn’t face one. I’ve been spoiled. You can’t go home again.

  I’m starting to wonder if obsessively watching The Wire has similarly spoiled me in terms of TV drama. By now, the sound of yet another person blasting on about how good The Wire is probably makes you want to yawn your soul apart, but really: it’s so absorbing, so labyrinthine and bloody-minded, it makes almost everything else seem a bit … well, a bit Fray Bentos.

  Take Dexter. I’d heard a lot of positive things about it. Beyond positive, in fact: people queued up to give it a blowjob. And tickle its balls. And look it in the eye while they did so. These were people I trusted. And then I sit down to actually watch it and discover my head’s been so warped by Wirey goodness, Dexter simply gets on my wick.

  The premise is as dumb as a dodgem full of monkeys. Anti-hero Dexter is a blood-spatter expert working for the Miami police department. He’s also a serial killer. But that’s okay, because he’s managed to channel and control his murderous tendencies by indulging in vaguely justifiable slayings – i.e. he only kills other serial killers.

  Preposterous, yes, but there’s nothing wrong with a preposterous set-up per se. Unfortunately the show ping-pongs between quirky, tasteless comedy and what it seems to earnestly believe is a compelling study of the psychopathic mindset. It’s a bit like watching an episode of Scooby-Doo in which the lighthouse keeper who’s disguised himself as a sea monster in order to scare people away from his gold spends half his screen time mulling over the philosophical meaning of masks. And then stabs Shaggy in the eye with a toasting fork.

  What’s more, the show depends on the viewer finding Dexter himself curiously charming despite the fact that he enjoys strapping his victims to a gurney and torturing them with a drill. The easiest way to achieve this is to make said victims ‘worse’ than he is. Implausibly worse. This week, for instance, Dexter’s stalking a hit-and-run drunk driver – which means he can’t be just any old drunk driver, but a serial offender who’s apparently ploughed through an orphan in every state, repeatedly beaten the rap, and then shrugged it off as no big deal.

  They might as well cut to a shot of him dancing on a grave with a bottle of champagne in his hand. Enter Dexter stage left with his power drill. Cue cheering. Cut to ad break. Phew, this show is, like, intense, man. It totally toys with your sense of moral justice and shit. Awesome!

  Add to that a bunch of mono-dimensional cops working alongside Dexter (including his sister, whose sole character trait is a potty mouth), an irritating voiceover that’s about one-tenth as wry as it thinks it is, and a smattering of unbelievably bad yet apparently earnest flashback sequences in which young Dexter is schooled in the art of anger management by his FBI-profiler dad, and you’re left with a weird, offensively simplified mulch which only an idiot could truly refer to as ‘dark’.

  Which isn’t to say it’s utterly terrible; I’m curious enough to try the next episode. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s any more sophisticated than The A-Team. It’s gorier, that’s all.

  Death to the liars [21 July 2007]

  Shriek! Panic! Kick the neighbours awake and tell them the truth! Your TV is deceiving you! The Queen didn’t storm out! Gordon Ramsay didn’t catch that fish! And that animated 3D map the weatherman stands in front of ISN’T REALLY THERE! It’s all a lie! A disgusting, despicable lie! HANG THEM! HANG THE LIARS! On live, un-manipulated television – pure and truthful, the way it used to be.

  Yes, for months now the papers have been behaving like hairless pod people who’ve just pulled the tube pumping hallucinatory Matrix code into their brains and stood up, truly awake for the first time in their lives, squinting and blinking at the world as it is, rather than the cartoon fib they’ve been fed. And now they’re bravely running round town knocking on doors, alerting the dreaming populace to the cold hard truth, goddammit.

  Revelations about premium-rate phone-in lines and misleading news reports are one thing, but come on – Gordon Ramsay didn’t catch a fish? Frankly, I’d be surprised if he was on the boat in the first place. Most of it’s blue-screen trickery anyway. When you see him chopping onions, those aren’t actually his hands – they’re CGI simulations. He’s not even a real man. He’s a bear in a rubber mask. And a violent, angry bear at that. They just edit out the bits where he attacks people and steals picnic baskets, dub someone saying ‘fuck’ over the top, and hide subliminal messages in the accompanying musical bed, commanding you not to question the verisimilitude of what you’re seeing.

  Yes, television routinely tells fibs, and should always be approached with
a healthy degree of scepticism, and any big lies it tells deserve to be exposed – but to hear the tabloids bang on about it, you’d have thought they were fearless campaigners for truth who’d never, say, take 25 photos of a celebrity emerging from a nightclub, select one in which their eyes are in mid-blink and their gob’s half-open (probably because they’re telling the photographer to piss off), then run it to illustrate a story about how drunk they are, because look, look, you can see it – those drooping eyelids, that dangling jaw.

  ‘We’re all worried sick about him – he’s on the fast track to an early grave,’ said a source close to the star (who can’t be named for reality-based reasons). Massaged reality is all around us. Although of course, since I work in both newspapers and television, you shouldn’t believe anything I say anyway. These aren’t even real words. I filmed the individual letters two years ago, then edited them out of sequence to give the impression of an article.

  Right now, for example, I’m pretending to write about Heroes, which starts this week on vanilla terrestrial television following a wildly successful run on the Sci Fi channel earlier this year, and which I’d somehow managed to miss until now. In fact I know so many people who’ve already seen it – downloading it here, burning it onto a DVD there – I’ve sometimes felt like a Victorian gentleman who’s somehow beamed himself into the future and discovered himself to be a walking anachronism.

  And now, finally, I understand what the fuss was all about. Heroes is great: a sassy modern take on comic-book superheroes, clearly influenced by Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Nonsense, maybe, but hugely entertaining nonsense. Surprisingly grisly too.

  If you’re one of the three people who hasn’t already watched the entire first season on an iPhone or something, I won’t spoil any of it for you. But for pity’s sake do tune in, because it’s a beautifully assembled piece of popcorn fun – even though none of the actors have real superpowers, and apparently the words they’re saying are all scripted in advance, and they just turn up on set (yes ‘on set’ – those aren’t their real homes) and read the scripts out and pull faces that make it look like they’re experiencing real emotions and then it all gets edited together into a ‘story’, which the public buy hook, line and sinker. Man, it’s a devious world.