As someone who works in the almost unthinkably glamorous world of television – in which everyone earns, like, seventy-six billion pounds a day and is completely creatively fulfilled in every single way – I’m fascinated by the history of the medium. Or, to be more accurate: by the abortive elements of that history.
Bad TV Shows, in other words. They intrigue me.
Not just yer run-of-the-mill bad TV, you understand … that stuff is ten-a-penny. I mean the ultra bad stuff – the claw-out-your-own-eyes, end-of-the-universe, shit-out-your-lungs-into-a-flannel bad stuff. I’m a connoisseur, you might say.
Still: nothing has ever amazed me as much as‘Cop Rock’. A short-lived US television series that aired on ABC in 1990, the show was a police drama presented as a musical. It was created by ‘NYPD Blue’ mastermind Steven Bochco. It is also unimaginably awful.
Want to take a look at some of the greatest Cop Rock moments? Just hit up that ‘read more’ link and we’ll do just that.
Interesting question over at The Guardian: what do you consider to be the worst book of the decade?
Some of the comments are really quite enlightening. There’s a whole lotta McEwan-hate out there, as well as the more obvious end of the critical spectrum: tearing the ‘Da Vinci Code‘ a new one (which is sort of like picking apart ‘The Birdie Song’ for lack of harmonic complexity, to be honest. Easy target, anyone?)
Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers both get a kicking, as does post-millennium Martin Amis (a tad unfairly, I reckon: ‘Yellow Dog’ is woeful, sure, but ‘The Second Plane’ and ‘House Of Meetings’ are both fantastic. Not ‘London Fields’, but then what is?)
My vote for full-on stinker of the noughties, however, goes to Gregory David Roberts’ ‘Shantaram’. You’d think a semi-autobiographical tale of an Australian convict making a new life in India would be at least partially interesting, wouldn’t you? At least in a guilty-pleasure, read-it-on-a-longhaul-flight kinda way? Nope. Sorry.
Infact, it’s the only book I’ve ‘reviewed’ thus far on literary-social-networking commune GoodReads:
I managed 200 pages of this utter drivel before giving up completely. Poorly-written nonsense which is gathering critical acclaim from people who probably read one book a year.
At one point – during a scene when the narrator is looking at a river – he ACTUALLY writes: ‘I was thinking of another river. A river that runs through all of us. The river of the heart.’
I do not have time in my life for this sub-Danielle Steel horseshit.
The book also contains the line “my body was her chariot and she rode me into the sun”. Like, seriously.
If you’d like to raise the comment number on this site from ‘atrocious’ to ‘merely abysmal’, by the way … please feel free to share with me your most dreaded literary no-nos below.
I’ve been cobbling together a load of Funny Or Die ideas with my co-writer of late – it gives you a little more freedom to be wildly offensive than TV work does - but sometimes something just raises the bar so much that you have to throw your hands up in the air and start all over again.
None of our ideas so far have been as good as this … something which fills me with writerly rage. It would be even more annoying if the sketch wasn’t so balls-to-the-wall fantastic.
See, the irony is that I like posting on this site. I like sharing my rambling thoughts with an infinitesimally small corner of the internet. I just don’t do it a lot. Well – hardly ever. Actually – on a pathetically irregular basis, truth be told.
So: here’s a pledge (made to myself and anyone else who cares). I’m going to add a post at least once a day for the rest of December. This will a) serve as a vague online reminder that I am infact still alive, and b) keep me off the streets. Maybe.
Now that the Tories essentially have the next UK election sewn up, I find myself struck by an odd feeling: that I have more contempt for the Conservatives who label themselves as ‘compassionate’ and ‘progressive’ than I do for the old-school Friedmanite Thatcher-worshippers.
Hey, at least the latter camp are open and honest about their politics of privilege and their naked contempt for the poor. Remember, kids: Cameron may spend his time yakking about wind turbines … but he’s still a champagne-guzzling, dead-eyed public schoolboy with a £30 million private fortune who would lay off your entire family in a heartbeat if it would up his shareholder points.
Ahem. Aaaanyway.
The reason I mention this is because I’ve just heard about Constantine Xinos – an American chap who, were he located in Britain, would fit into that second category nicely. The President of the Home-Owners’ Association in a gated community in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, Xinos hates the lesser-fortunate so much (“I don’t want to live next to poor people, I don’t want poor people in my town”) that he’s lobbying to have his local library closed. Why? Because, like, poor people go there! Y’know, those insufferable scumbags who – get this – can’t even afford books so they have to borrow them!
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but this really is an astonishing case. Interviews with Xinos read like the dialogue of the bad guy in Erin Brockovich. Some choice snippets? Okay, then:
“Those of you with tears in their eyes talking about the library, put your money where your mouth is. I don’t care that you guys miss the librarian, and she was nice, and she helped you find books.”
“This is the real world and the lesson, you folks who brought your kids here [to the library], is if you want something, pay for it.”
And my favourite: “I understand that my philosophy is conservative.” Gee. You reckon?
Read more about this jaw-dropping madness at the Daily Herald.
If you’re a fan of spoof documentaries and genuinely terrifying prosthetics, then – boy oh boy – are you in for a treat. ‘John’s Operation’ is a short film co-written by myself and one Mr Tom Barbor-Might (who also took on producing and directing duties). Killer performances from the cast all-round. Take a look:
Fundamentalist Environmentalists, then. And, no, I’m not referring to people who advocate recycling or clean energy technology or curbing unnecessary pollution – y’know, rational stuff – but more to lunatics like George Monbiot, who regularly dispatches his over-the-top invective via The Guardian.
(Incidentally, I still can’t decide on my favourite Georgie-boy moment. It’s either his carbon-footprint warning that “flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable as child abuse” or that one feature in which he claims that the UK population can “save the planet” by climbing into canoes and fishing for our own food. Seriously. All sixty fucking million of us.)
The thing is: there’s something about these hyperbolic nutters that really annoys me. Not just their sneering anti-human contempt. Nor their hatred of the working classes and lower orders (gosh, how dare those oiks demand widespread mass transport and cheap flights). Nor their disgusting rank hypocrisy (I’m guessing, for example, that Monbiot doesn’t row himself across the ocean whenever he’s off on a promotional book jaunt).
No: the major bugbear I have is with their oddly-held belief in a Mother Gaia figure. You know what I mean – the notion of ‘nature’ being some sort of innate consciousness, a peculiar God-like entity which both weeps with horror and wags its fingers whenever us dirty, dirty humans are up to our usual dirty, dirty tricks.
Why do I find this notion so silly? Click on ‘Read More‘ to find out …
Anyone out there of the XY Chromosome persuasion may want to brace themselves. Why? Because some devastating scientific news is heading your way, straight from the pages of the Daily Mail: “Are We On The Brink Of A Society Without Any Need For Men?”
Yep – not content with their usual verbal carpet-bombing of blacks and gypsies, the Mail has now turned its critical eye to an entire gender. They’re not alone, however: The Mirror is wondering if we’re facing the “End Of Men”, while the New Zealand Herald is ushering in “A World Without Need For Men”.
So: what are they all babbling about? Apparently there’s been a new advance in medical technology which means it is possible to create human sperm in the lab. The scientists behind this have taken great pains to explain, however, that the process is simply a fertility aid and will not be used to directly create babies. Ergo: no ‘end of men’. Sorry, girls (or should that be: sorry, bitter spiteful fat girls with deep-seated daddy issues who, like, totally relate to the ginger one from Sex And The City).
I shouldn’t be surprised at the reaction. A story like this – generic ‘men are obsolete’ bilge – tends to turn up every few months. What fascinates and infuriates me in almost equal measure (I’m usually always more infuriated than fascinated) is the underlying philosophy behind it.
It’s one that runs something like this: men are no longer needed in order for women to reproduce. Therefore men are unneccessary. Boil that down and what have you got? This: the notion that having children is the most important thing that any human being can do. A notion which is, quite frankly, a crock of undiluted shit.
Want to find out why? Course you do. Just hit up that ‘read more’ button.
Remember when the internet first started in about 1846 and people were enthralled by the fact you could ‘chat to strangers’ online? Remember how everyone soon came to realise that ‘chatting to strangers online’ was frankly a bit tedious, so started using the web to do productive and interesting stuff instead?
Here, then, is something that might make you feel old. Leif K-Brooksprobably won’t remember the early days of the internet. Why? Because he’s only 18 years old. And – like a teenager pretending that vinyl is edgy and cool while their parents look on, shake their heads and go back to using Spotify – he has also just launchedOmegle, a strange new site which takes an old-school net notion and adds … well, nothing much really.
Here’s the site blurb:
“Omegle is a brand-new service for meeting new friends. When you use Omegle, we pick another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each other. Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like.”
As baffling as this may seem at first – you could literally get the same effect from dialling a random telephone number, surely? – I have to say that I can honestly see this catching on, or at least becoming a successful fad.
The reason? Simply because the internet is now old enough to foster ironic nostalgia. Thousands of twenty-to-thirty-somethings are going to stumble across this and smirk at how revolutionary chatrooms used to seem (despite the fact that most of the discussion always revolved around the fact that you almost saw Scully’s cleavage in The X-Files, although that creepy dude who could stretch his limbs got in the way). Mark my words – it isn’t going to be too long before hipster revivalists bring back the Hamsterdance or Mr T Ate My Balls. God, it is rumoured, may well weep.
You should have a go on Omegle, though, if just for the sake of curiosity. Who knows? You might end up having a conversation as scintillating as the following:
Connecting to server…
You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger:hey
You: hi
Stranger:asl?
You:26, m, london
Your conversational partner has disconnected.
“Imagine all the people, sharing all the wooo-hooorllddd …”
And so to ‘Skeletons’ from ‘It’s Blitz!’, which I found myself buying more out of bored curiosity than anything else – ‘Fever To Tell’ and ‘Show Your Bones’ were okay, fun, poppy albums with a couple of standout numbers, so I was kind of expecting more of the same. (Excuses for not buying it three weeks ago covered, then. Ahem.)
Imagine my surprise when I found myself listening to ten tracks of Dave-Sitek-produced, Bunnymen-meets-Pogues-meets-Tori-Amos-meets-Kate-Bush wonderfulness, then.
Seriously, though … when did these guys suddenly get so good?
As someone who works in the almost unthinkably glamorous world of television – in which everyone earns, like, seventy-six billion pounds a day and is completely creatively fulfilled in every single way – I’m fascinated by the history of the medium. Or, to be more accurate: by the abortive elements of that history.
Now that the Tories essentially have the next UK election sewn up, I find myself struck by an odd feeling: that I have more contempt for the Conservatives who label themselves as ‘compassionate’ and ‘progressive’ than I do for the old-school Friedmanite Thatcher-worshippers.
Fundamentalist Environmentalists, then. And, no, I’m not referring to people who advocate recycling or clean energy technology or curbing unnecessary pollution – y’know, rational stuff – but more to lunatics like George Monbiot, who regularly dispatches his over-the-top invective via 
Anyone out there of the XY Chromosome persuasion may want to brace themselves. Why? Because some devastating scientific news is heading your way, straight from the pages of the Daily Mail:
Remember when the internet first started in about 1846 and people were enthralled by the fact you could ‘chat to strangers’ online? Remember how everyone soon came to realise that ‘chatting to strangers online’ was frankly a bit tedious, so started using the web to do productive and interesting stuff instead?
And so to ‘Skeletons’ from ‘It’s Blitz!’, which I found myself buying more out of bored curiosity than anything else – ‘Fever To Tell’ and ‘Show Your Bones’ were okay, fun, poppy albums with a couple of standout numbers, so I was kind of expecting more of the same. (Excuses for not buying it three weeks ago covered, then. Ahem.)