Blither & Blather

Sporodic ramblings of a mad fella.

[blitherandblather]

This Is The News

 As gun crime continues to increase in the city, the mother of 24-year Dennis Farley, who was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting, today told reporters “I have lost a son, but heaven has gained a real asshole today. A real tedious, exhausting, dipshit of a man.”

 Bently Farley, 57, recalled her ‘exhausting’ son at a press conference held earlier this morning, stating “He always use to say ‘pacifically’. You know? Like specifically, but wrong? That really used to rub me up the wrong way. And He used “apropos of nothing” way too often. How often does the average person need to use the phrase “apropos of nothing”? Maybe once, twice in their entire life. Dennis used it all the time. For no god damned reason, either. If there was a show on telly that he wanted to watch, he couldn’t just say “There’s a show on that I want to watch,” he’d have to say “apropos of nothing, such and such is on TV tonight.” It was excruciating. I don’t even think he knew what it meant; it was just something he picked up and thought made him sound clever. Which, by the way, he was not. Well, he’ll be misusing phrases and pronouncing words wrong with Saint Peter from now on.”

 Dennis, circled above at some event or other, left school at the age of 18 to become a lathe operator’s assistant, had aspirations of becoming a big name in the music industry. His mother told reporters how he often talked about being the next Eminem, and how he was “just waiting for his big break”. 

 “Listen to this, though,” said Bently, openly sharing her deceased son’s notebooks to a room packed with complete strangers. “These are some of his ‘raps’. Sittin’ on this bus, all covered in dust, and rust and pus, here we is, just the three of us. I don’t claim to be the biggest rap fan in the world, but this is bollocks, right? I mean, who’s covered in dust, rust and pus? Him or the bus? And who are the three of us? As far as I’m aware, he only had one friend, and even he was an online friend, I don’t think they’d ever met in person. Dust and pus is such a lazy rhyme. Still, I’m sure f4rtlvr322322 misses my Dennis dearly. He’s with the angels now, rapping away about nothing in particular.”

 Dennis’s father, who attended the meeting via Facetime, added “Did Daniel mention anything about my wrench? He borrowed my wrench to fix a wheel on his skateboard and I never saw it again,” before the wifi cut out and the screen went blank.

 “That bloody skateboard,” Mrs. Farley added, ignoring the fact her husband had gotten their late son’s name wrong. “Mummy, he used to say. Twenty-four years old and he still called me Mummy. Mummy, I’m gonna be the next Tony Hawks. I think he meant Tony Hawk, the skater and not the leader of Morris Minor and the Majors, but you never knew with him. He had a new obsession every week. Maybe he did want to be a middle-of-the-road comedian. I dunno, I barely listened to him by the end. He could turn his hand to anything and be equally shit at whatever he attempted. He used to carry around his skateboard and acoustic guitar at the same time, but I’d never seen him actually use either. Still, he’ll be constantly reinventing himself with one boring, trite and unoriginal trope after the next in heaven now.”

 When asked if she was going to miss Dennis, Mrs. Farley replied simply, “Who?”

[blitherandblather]

Review of a Movie I’m Never Going to Watch: Yesterday

I don’t hate The Beatles, but I’m don’t consider myself a fan of them either. Truth be told, I would be completely indifferent to them if it weren’t for the fact I keep being told they’re the greatest band in the world, which they’re fucking not. Loads of bands are better than The Beatles. Right off the top of my head, The Pixies are a better band than The Beatles.

I hate when people tell me The Beatles are the greatest band in the world, because that’s the opinion of someone who has absolutely no interest in music, and every interest in being part of a majority. These people say The Beatles are the greatest band in the world, even though their knowledge of music extends as far as whatever plays on the radio while they’re at work. These are people who have been conned in to thinking Robbie Williams is an entertainer. The Monkees; they were a better band than The Beatles.

The kind of person who says The Beatles are the greatest band in the world are the same people who refer to Shakespeare as ‘The Bard’, despite never having read anything he’s ever written apart from what they were forced to read at school. They’re the same people who claim Shakespeare is the greatest English writer in all of history (he’s not, Bernard Cornwall is). They say this, not because they’ve studied the various works of various authors throughout the ages, but because they’ve been told Shakespeare is the most bestest and wordiness.

The Kinks; they were better than The Beatles, too.

The kind of person who says The Beatles are the greatest band in the world are the same people who say Robert deNiro is the greatest living actor in the world (he’s not, Robert Duvall is). They say this because they’ve heard it, not because they’ve formed an opinion on the subject. They’ve seen maybe Goodfellas and Meet the Parents (“He can do serious and comedy!” they’ll point out, completely missing the fact that being able to play two different parts is the absolute minimum requirement you need to be an actor). They’ll reference Taxi Driver, despite never having watched it all the way through, and they’ll reference Raging Bull, despite never having seen any of it. They’ll suspiciously avoid referencing Rocky and Bullwinkle, Grudge Match, Showtime, Stardust and Little Fockers, because they’ve never heard of any of them because they’re not interested in movies, or acting. They’re only interesting in joining in on a popular, established opinion.

The Jackson Five were better than The Beatles.

The kind of person who says The Beatles are the greatest band in the world are the same people who say Del Boy falling through the hatch of the bar after telling Trig to ‘stay cool’ is the funniest thing that’s ever happened on British TV (it’s not; comedy is subjective so I’m not going to say what I think is the funniest thing that’s ever happened on British TV, but David Jason carefully falling on to a mattress is not it. It’s just fucking not) despite the fact they are they same kind of people who also watch Mrs. Brown’s Boys and anything with Ant or Dec in it.

Queen were a much better band than The Beatles.

If your favourite band is The Beatles, then never, ever talk to me about music. If your favourite band in the whole history of music in the entire world is The Beatles, then you have no opinion on music and I don’t want to talk to you about it. In fact, don’t talk me at all. Go suck a lemon. Go listen to Revolution 9 and tell me The Beatles are the greatest band in the world. Go listen to “Piggies” and tell me The Beatles are the greatest band in the world. Try and stay awake through “Flying” and tell me The fucking Beatles are the fucking greatest fucking band in the fucking world, you cunt.

Anyhoo, my blah towards The Beatles and my hatred of anyone at all who says The Beatles are the greatest band in world has nothing to do with why I’m never, ever going to watch Yesterday.

In case you haven’t heard of it, and there’s no reason you should other than the fact it’s got Beatles songs in it, Yesterday is a fillim about a…

Before I go on, I should point out that I don’t really know what happens in this movie. I saw it advertised on the side of a bus and thought to myself, “That looks really shit. That looks really shit, really stupid and really offensive. There’s no way anybody would make a movie that shit, stupid and offensive and try to get a pass just because they’ve got Beatles songs in it, is there?” and then I went home and looked it up on IMDb, read the blurb and, yeah. Someone really did make a movie that shit, stupid and offensive.

So, here’s what I think the movies about; a busker wants to be a professional musician, but he’s not good enough so he doesn’t get anywhere. Then something happens and he wakes up in an alternate universe where The Beatles never existed, but he can remember all their songs, so he plays them while he’s busking and everyone that hears him play is so amazed he becomes a superstar and gets on Top of the Pops and everything.

Why It’s Shit

That’s a fucking terrible premise for a movie. Who gives a fuck about buskers? Not even buskers give a fuck about buskers. There is one good movie about buskers and it’s called Once and it’s not about buskers. And Ed Sheeran isn’t in it. Oh yeah, Ed Sheeran is in Yesterday as Ed Sheeran. That alone sums up why it’s shit, but I’ve got more.

The protagonist in this movie is a plagiarist. This is the guy we’re supposed to be rooting for. He’s a fucking thief. He has no musical talent, so he steals other people’s work and passes it off as his own. And it fucking works. He becomes a superstar and gets to meet Terry Wogan and that. Why are we supposed to be on this guy’s side? And why The Beatles? Why not a good band?

See, Wall Street is about a bastard and American Psycho is about a psycho (can’t remember where he’s from) and The Shining is about a bastard psychopath and Leon is about an actual murderer who murders people for money and then teaches a twelve-year old girl how to also be a murderer but the point of those movies is that we know we’re rooting for the bad guys; it’s a bit of fun seeing the bad guys win in movies. They’re utter shits but they get away with it even though they know they’re utter shits. Yesterday is advertised as the ‘feel good hit of the summer’. Why? Why are we supposed to feel good about a plagiarist being rewarded for stealing someone else’s intellectual property?

In movies where the protagonist is an anti-hero, we’re titillated and thrilled to be on the bad guy’s side because we’re never on the bad guy’s side in real life, even when we are. We always believe we’re on the side of good because we’d all commit suicide if we were honest with ourselves for even a split second, so it’s fun to be on the bad guy’s team. Fun, not feel good. We don’t feel better about ourselves when we cheer at Jack Nicholson-Torrence threatening to bash his wife’s fucking head in because she had the audacity to exist. We don’t feel better about the world when Patrick Batman slaughters so many people he loses track of who he’s killed and who he hasn’t. Why should we feel better about life because some talentless little shit is being rewarded for copyright infringement?

Fuck, this movies sounds shit.

Why It’s Stupid

I write science fiction, too. You may think a daft feel good romp about The Beatles doesn’t fall under the sci-fi category. You may not. I don’t know, I’m not a fucking mindreader. Regardless of what you think, though, the main character wakes up in an alternate universe. That is squarely the realm of science fiction. This is a sci-fi movie and sci-fi movies have been trying for years to be taken seriously, and not dismissed as some stupid kid’s shit.

Here’s a few sci-fi movies you might have heard of:

Blade Runner (1982)

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The Conversation (1974)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Gattaca (1997)

Moon (2009)

What each of these movies has in common, apart from being science fiction, is that they all take themselves seriously and the writers did a tonne of research to make sure the worlds they created were as realistic as possible. Did the writers of Yesterday do that? Did they fuck.

This is a movie set in an alternative universe where everything is exactly the same except The Beatles never existed. First of all, what does that mean, The Beatles never existed? Does that mean George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney were never born? Or that they never met? Or they never learned to play music, like Ringo? However this movie plays it, I’m willing to bet that what they meant to say was the music of The Beatles never existed.

For example, between them, the members of The Beatles fathered ten children. Where are they in this alternate universe? Did they never exist? Do they exist but have absolutely no idea where they came from? This is a feel good movie in which, right as soon as the actual plot starts, ten people either die or become fatherless. Paul McCartney adopted his first wife’s daughter. That didn’t happen in the alternate universe Yesterday is set in. This is not a feel good movie if you are, or are friends with, Heather McCartney.

In this alternate universe, was Life of Brian never made? That’s bad news if you’re a boring arsehole who can’t think of anything funny to say and have to resort to quoting Monty Python movies in the Teeside University Student’s Union Bar that one time. Or did the movie get funded without George Harrison, but Terry Jones can’t remember who by?

In this alternate universe, what happens when you put on Thomas the Tank Engine? Is it just the sound of steam engines chuffing away, with no narration explaining what the communist bastards are up to? Muse; they’re a better band The Beatles.

What about Noel and Liam Gallagher? In this alternate universe, does Oasis not exist? That’s the first feel good thing I can think of to say about Yesterday. Is Noel sitting around, desperately strumming the same three chords over and over again, woefully unable to work out how to turn them in to a song that wankers will sing the chorus to whenever Wetherspoons closes, while Liam sits around bizarrely exaggerating how many people it takes to make a cup of tea? In this universe, does everyone still hate Heather Mills, but are unsure as to the reason?

Come to think of it, while not, not, absolutely not being the greatest band in the world (The Rolling Stones were better), The Beatles were such a huge phenomenon, they kind of legitimised pop music. They didn’t do it alone, that’s for sure, but they certainly helped by making it hugely profitable; enough so that investors started taking pop music seriously. In a world without The Beatles, The X-Factor wouldn’t exist. Another feel good moment. Simon Cowell wouldn’t be a mogul. Stock, Aiken and Waterman wouldn’t have become billionaires off the backs of naive young starlets. Radio would be completely different. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal was formed partially as a backlash against the teen-centric pop scene. In this universe, who the fuck won the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest (which reminds me, Megadeth are a better band than The Beatles)?

Are vegetarians in this brave new world sitting around wondering who Linda McCartney is, and why her, admittedly very nice sausages are so expensive? In this universe, does nobody have to pretend to understand what transcendental meditation is?

There are so, so many questions I have. A world in which The Beatles never existed would be completely alien to ours. It’s not just a case of their music going missing; The Beatles shifted entire cultures. There’s no way our protagonist could just wake up and integrate himself in this universe. Post-1960’s, he would have no cultural reference points at all. He wouldn’t know who or what the fuck anything was. He’d be like Captain America, waking up after being frozen in ice for decades, only instead of being a super soldier with an indomitable sense of right and wrong, he’d be a schmuck with a handful of bad covers of songs by not the greatest band in the world (Bananarama were better).

Maybe some of these questions are answered in the movie. I doubt it, but I’ll never know unless somebody whose seen the movie tells me. I don’t care, by the way, so don’t feel like you have to let me know. I’m never going to see it and I don’t really care about anything that happens it, because it’s a fucking offensive movie.

Why It’s Offensive

I bet some of you reading immediately jumped to offensive being some sort of confused comment on the protagonist being of Indian descent. I understand. The world is horrible and the racists are winning, so when you hear the term ‘offensive’, you immediately look at the race of the actor in this (probably) awful movie. He’s English, by the way.

But, no. No, I wasn’t referring to race when I said offensive. I wasn’t talking about race or gender or political leaning or anything that would get me labelled as a SJW or a snowflake or a cuck or a human being. When I said ‘offensive’, I meant it’s offensive towards anyone with any artistic or creative talent whatsoever.

To reiterate: this movie is about a busker who wakes up in an alternative universe in which nobody has ever heard of The Beatles. He’s from our universe, where The Beatles did exist, so he can remember all of their songs. He then plays these songs while busking, and because the songs are so good (they’re not, Muse are a better band), he becomes famous.

This movie is offensive to me on so many levels. The cream does not rise to the top. It fucking doesn’t. To make it – and I mean really make it – in any creative industry takes talent, yes. But it also takes a fucktonne of hard work, a shittonne of luck and a thirdthingtonne of resilience. In most creative industries, it also helps if you’re not averse to fucking over your peers in order to give yourself more leg room.

Yesterday seems to be saying that all you need to do to become famous is to be good at the thing you do. You want to be a famous novelist? All you have to do is write a really good book. Wanna be a painter? Paint a really good painting. Be a really good actor. Be a really funny comedian. Design a really good dress. Design a really interesting building. Sculpt a really good vase. Do a really interpretive dance. Stress a really obvious point.

The flip side of this, of course, is the movie saying if you’ve tried your hand at anything creative and you’re not famous world-wide, it’s because you’re not good enough. Fuck you, movie. You’re about a world in which a busker wakes up in a world without The Beatles. Who are you to judge my artistic talents? At least I don’t have Ed Sheeran in me, anymore.

I know a thing or two about being creative and having absolutely nothing come of it. All three artistic avenues this movie drunkly stumbles down, I’ve also done. And I’ve done it better. And I’ve done it drunker.

Firstly, music. I wrote a song when I was about five years old that’s better than anything The Beatles have ever written (Bungle and The Lads, my fictitious band, were a better band than The Beatles). It was a moving, thought-provoking piece about the plight of the angels who were cast out of heaven, particularly those who opposed Lucifer. These poor bastards thought they were protecting paradise by quelling the rebellion of those angels who were pissed off at God’s stepchildren being written in to the will (if you think about it). The music was… well, non-existent. I could kinda play the Eastenders theme tune on the keyboard when I was five, but I’d yet to master the vuvuzela, my eventual instrument of choice. But the lyrics alone… man, I can’t even describe how moving they are. Let me just give you sample. I won’t do the whole thing because you’ll literally die from emotional overload, but just read these two lines and, if you need a lie-down before moving on, I totally understand.

“They are them devils, and they’re on fire.

They are on fire, and they are devils.”

Five. Years. Old. I know, right? My music has only gotten better since then. Secondly, movies. Yesterday is a movie and I can movie better than it. I’m not just talking about the home movies I made with my family; Time Crimes, Indiana Jones and the Battery That Ran Out and Knight Chess (I think) and Some Shit We Made Up As We Went Along. I’ve also been in a few semi-professional movies, playing “Dart Player in Background” and “Man With Beard” because I have friends who want to make movies and an awful lot of free time. But, I’ve also been in totally professional movies that have been in the cinema, too. Movies you’ve even heard of. I was “blurry guy” in Trainspotting, but I didn’t get credited for it because I accidentally walked in to the shot ‘cause I didn’t know they filming and, now I think of it, that take mightn’t have been the one they used in the movie but they gave my fifty quid just on the off-chance, so that makes it a bona fide movie appearance, and I was also in Judge Dredd (the Stallone One, not the good one) as “extra” during one of the Block Riot scenes, for which I got fifteen pound and a free meal. I’ve been in a bunch of movies and not once have I shared screentime with Ed Sheeran. So, yeah. I’m better at movie than Yesterday.

But, seriously though, I am a writer. I’m writing right now. I know because I can hear the keys on my laptop clacking away. I’m a writer and I’m a pretty good writer. That’s a lie because I’m a really good writer and I was just being modest a sentence ago. Not that quantity matters, but I’ve written eleven books and over a hundred short stories. My early stuff was shit, but I learnt from it and got better and now I’m really good. I know for a fact I got some guy (who I’ve never met, but who decided to email me about his life) to reconcile with his mother who he’d not spoken to in three years because he read one of my books and was so moved, emotionally, that he began to see his own life in a new light. I’m a sarcastic son of a bitch, but that’s a true story and I’m fucking proud of it. Unless his mother is a cunt and he was right not to speak to her for three years… never thought about that before. I don’t know if this is true, but one of my readers once told me my book made her orgasm. I dunno if she was, like, playing with herself at the time or what, but I’m genuinely more proud of that than I am of reconciling an estranged mother and son, if it’s true. Meh, I don’t care. I orgasmed a woman without even being in the same room as her. If it’s true. Why would anyone lie about something like that?

Anyway, the point is, I’m a good writer, but according to Yesterday, I’m not, because I’d be famous if I was, because all you need to do to make it in a particular field is be good at the thing you’re doing.

Once again, the protagonist is a busker. That’s only one or two (invisible) rungs up from being a fucking mime. When was the last time you ever listened to a busker who wasn’t playing a song you already knew? You barely listen to buskers when they’re playing songs you do know. There’s no way in fuck you’re going to stop and listen to one who’s playing a song you’ve never heard of. You’re not going to assume they wrote it themselves either. You’re not even going to notice if the song is any good one way or the other because every single busker in the world sounds like a busker. It’s a good way to earn money doing something you love and I’ve got nothing against buskers, but as a way to break in to music industry, it’s a dead end.

THIS IS THE BIT WHERE YOU TELL ME SOME CUNT WAS BUSKING AND A RECORD PRODUCER WAS WALKING BY AND THEY MADE A RECORD AND WHO GIVES A FUCK, I’VE NEVER HEARD OF THE PERSON YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT AND CATATONIA DON’T COUNT.

Catatonia, they were about on the same level as The Beatles.

This movie is offensive towards The Beatles. This movie is implying that The Beatles would have become famous based solely on their music. In a universe where The Beatles never existed, a busker is able to become famous just by playing their music, so it stands to reason that The Beatles would have become famous if they’d just practised in their garage long enough for a record producer to walk by. It ignores the fact they gigged every night at every venue they could; it ignores their residency in fucking Hamburg, it ignores Brian Epstein and all the marketing and strategy and planning and hard work that went in to creating The Beatles. According to this movie, the thing that made The Beatles was their music, and fuck all else. It skips over their hard work, it skips over their intelligence, it skips over their basic fucking charisma. Not everyone can be a rock star. It doesn’t matter how fucking talented you are, some people just aren’t interesting enough to hold your attention.

So, fuck this movie for pretending making a living out of being creative is easy, so long as you’re good enough. Fuck this movie for assuming fame is the end goal of creativity. Fuck this movie for skipping over the ‘work’ part of all creative work.

But most of all, fuck this movie for trying to hoodwink its way in to the cinema by using a The Beatles soundtrack. You insidious little cunts, you knew exactly what you were doing. You knew this movie was an insult to every creatively-minded person in the world and the only people who would ever feel good about watching it are people who claim The Beatles are the greatest band in the world, because those people have never had a creative fucking thought in their lives.

Addendum

I got really angry writing this. I genuinely got angry writing a review for a movie I haven’t even seen, have no intention of seeing, and which doesn’t even exist in the universe I woke up into this morning. I believe I justified myself in the above rant, but just in case I didn’t, I’m going to take one last stab at proving what an utterly clueless wank you are.

If, and it’s a big if, The Beatles are you favourite band, without Googling or checking through your (not yours, your flatmate’s) CDs or anything, name a The Beatles song that isn’t in the list below, or mentioned in the article above.

Hey Jude

Let It Be

Here Comes the Sun

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Come Together

Penny Lane

Yesterday

Elanor Rigby

Yellow Submarine

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (actually, you didn’t even know this one, did you?)

All You Need Is Love

Strawberry Fields Forever

Twist and Shout

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

I Am the Walrus

I Saw Her Standing There

She Loves You

With a Little Help from My Friends

I Feel Fine

Norwegian Wood (for all you Murakami fans out there)

Back in the U.S.S.R.

A Hard Day’s Night

Money (That’s What I Want)

Love Me Do

Get Back

Help!

Ticket to Ride

Helter Skelter

[blitherandblather]

How To Write A Book: Part One: How To Write A Book

That's a shit title, isn't it? What a stupid thing to write an article about; how to write a book. You already know how to write a book. It's like writing anything, only longer. You get some ideas and you write them down. Start with chapter one, write down all your ideas and when you run out of ideas, write “The End” and that's your book. That's all there is to it. There you go; that's the whole article. How to write a book: Step One, write a book. What a waste of everybody's time that was.

Obviously, I'm joking. This isn't how to write a book. You already know how to do that. You've read books before, right? If you haven't, stop reading this and go read a book. Read lots of books. You'll figure out how to write a book by reading them. They're all the same. A front cover, a load of chapters with words in them, then a back cover. That's all there is to it.

No, I'm not going to teach you how to write a book. I'm going to teach you two other things that are far more important. Firstly, I'm going to teach you how to write a good book. That's the tricky part, especially considering that what a good book is, is up for debate. There are people out there – nobody I know, but people just the same – there are people out there who think Dan Brown is a good writer who writes interesting books. Dan Brown once wrote the sentence “The famous man looked at the blue cup” so I disagree, but that's just, like, my opinion. There are no set rules as to what makes a good book. If you write something and somebody enjoys it, even if that somebody is you, then you've written a good book for that person.

What qualifies me to teach how to write a good book? Simple; I've done it. I've written nine books so far, and seven of them have been good. One of them is great. Of course, I'm judging that by what I think a makes for a good book, but that's what I was talking about in the previous paragraph. There is at least one person out there who thinks seven of my books are good. In truth, there are lots of people who think my books are good. In fact, over a million people read my book Sand, and the vast majority of them thought it was good. They told me so. Mostly, they were strangers, too, so it's not like they said it to make me feel better or anything. If there's one thing the Internet is good for, it's making strangers feel like shit, so if someone goes out of their way to tell you they enjoy your book, you should listen to them.

Secondly, I'm going to teach you how to write a successful book. This is less open to debate. A successful book is one which makes you money. If you're a successful writer, and you write successful books, then you can do it full time. That's kind of the end-goal for most writers; to be so good at writing people pay you to do it, and pay you so much you don't have to work a shitty day job to make ends meet. I've met writers who have been published and critically well received, but who work in niche markets that don't make any money. This is called literature. Your great-great-grandkids will benefit from you writing literature, but you, personally, will live in squalor for your whole life, you'll die alone and you'll be buried in a pauper's grave. If you want to write literature, then go ahead. Good literature can improve the world in distinct and unimaginable ways. You'll make the world a better place by writing good literature, but you are going to die of scurvy.

What qualified me to teach how to write a successful book? Absolutely fuck all. I've never done it. I've only ever had one book published, and it was one of the not-good ones. It was a book about vampires and some people liked it. I am not one of those people. It was a noisy, messy book. The pacing was all over the place, the characters were unlikeable and unrealistic and the ending was rushed and a complete cop-out. Why this was the only book I've ever attempted to make money from is beyond me. I'm guessing it's because it's my least-favourite thing I've ever written. It love it, because it's one of my babies, but I don't like it. I don't really care about it, despite the fact I love it. So, that was the one I chose to send out in to the world to fend for itself. I self-published it, which is a tricky thing to do. It's possible to self-publish a successful book, but I never managed it. I think I made something like £28 in total with that book. It took me six months to write. If we're going to be completely mercenary about it, I earned about 15p a day writing that book. There are children in sweatshops that make more than that.

See, I read a lot of How To Write articles. I always feel like there's a magical ingredient I'm missing. I read articles from other writers about how they achieved success and it always feels like there's a paragraph or a chapter than just isn't there. They always read something like this:

“I was working as a waiter in a restaurant when writing my first book. I would get up at six in the morning and write for three hours, then go wait tables for nine hours. When I got home, I'd spend an hour editing what I'd written that morning, then repeat the process the next day. I did this every day for two years. My agent sent the manuscript out to over a hundred publishing houses and they all rejected my book as books about Trolls falling in love wasn't 'in' right then. However, the head of Flibbertigibbet Inc. just happened to come across my book and he understood what we could do with it. After meeting with him, he signed me on to a three-book contract and that's when Fox Entertainment became interested in turning my little book in to a movie!”

Which, I mean, hey, great for you. But there's a few holes in the tale. And they're all like this. Every single success story I've read goes along these lines. First of all, how did you manage to get up at six every morning? How did you manage to find a job where they didn't care that you were half-asleep for your whole shift? Most importantly, where the fuck did you get an agent from!? How did you meet the head of a publishing house? How did Fox hear about your book!? WHAT AM I MISSING?

There's a whole bunch of other stuff I don't know. Some of it, I've learned “on the job” as it were. For example, when I first started writing, I had no idea you were supposed to edit your own book. I thought editors did that. But, no, you have to edit a thousand times before your book gets anywhere near an “editor”. What do you put in a synopsis? How do you figure out what agents you're supposed to approach, and how do you approach them? Where do you draw the line between buttering them up and completely whoring yourself out? What's the difference between an agent and a manager? Once again, how do you find the time to write while also working and having a life? What is the secret? How the fuck do you even get started?

That's what this is for. See, I haven't written a successful book. I haven't even gotten close. I've never had an agent or a manager or the head of a movie company ringing me up asking how many sequels I've got planned. I'm a complete novice. Nine books under my belt and I still haven't got a clue what I'm doing. But I'm learning, and I'm going to share what I've learned in this little articles. All the little bits that are a mystery to me right now, I'm going to figure out.

I'm going to share everything I do, the successful bits and the (I'm guessing far more numerous) failures. I wish somebody had already done this, so I don't have to. But, if there is a magic formula to writing a successful book, I'm going to find it and I'm going to share it with you cunts.

In between, I'm going to be teaching you about the first bit; making your book as good as it can be. It's going to be quite an adventure, probably. Or, I'm going to get frustrated and give up in a month. Either way, it should be fun. Join me, why not?

[blitherandblather]

Hire Me, Before I Kill Again

My dad was a hard working man. Probably why we didn't get on. He tried very hard to instil a work ethic in to me, but never really succeeded because I have been fired from pretty much every single job I've ever had, and I've had a lot of jobs. I've had every kind of job there is, apart from those requiring any kind of training or knowledge. Entry level, minimum wage jobs; they're my forte. I've been a labourer, an office clerk, a receptionist, a porter, a cleaner, a warehouse monkey, a mascot-guide, a PA, a bank robber (kinda), a fry cook, a filer, a security guard, a doorman, a barman, a roofer, a bricklayer, a roadie and I've worked for the Royal Mail both as a postman and a do-fuck-aller.

I have a wide experience of every low-profile job there is and I've been shit canned from every single one of them. Is this because there awaits for me a higher destiny? Am I wasting my time at these little nothing jobs, when I should be concentrating on becoming the leader of the universe? No, not really. The reason I keep getting fired is that I don't care. I have never cared about a single job I've ever had. I don't care about the product, I don't care about the customers and I don't care about my co-workers.

I stupidly, but genuinely, get offended when companies expect me to work for my pay. In the back of my head, I honestly believe that once a company hires me, they should be so grateful to have me on their books, they should pay me regardless of my doing any work or even turning up. The work I  do do is so amazing, in my head, that it makes up for everything else. It makes up for the shitty attitude, the long lunches, the unexplained absences and the periods where I just space out, doing absolutely nothing of value to anyone while the company falls apart around me.

I'm one of those people who turns up to a job and, within five minutes, starts giving suggestions on how they could improve the operation and save a tonne of money. Nobody ever listens to my ideas, and everyone I've ever worked for has gone bankrupt because of this, except for the ones who haven't. The ones who were doing just fine before I turned up are, on the whole, doing just fine now they've gotten rid of me. But I genuinely don't give a shit either way. I told them how to run their company better, the company they've been running successfully for the past forty or fifty years, and that's me done. Fuck off if you think you're getting any more work out of me. I don't care that you hired me to move boxes, I've improved your entire operation in five minutes. If you chose to ignore my expertise in a business I have no experience in whatsoever, then that's on you. I'm not going to give the secrets to success and move boxes, and I'm also not coming in tomorrow 'cause of a thing.

You should hire me, whoever you are. I'm great at job. I've had dozens upon dozens of them and I've been great at all of them. Here's a list of things I'm great at, the things I hate about working, and the thing you should be taking away from each example. This will help you figure out what to do with me when you inevitably decide to hire me and instantly give me a pay rise.

I Hate My Co-Workers

This is true, despite the fact that I'm between jobs right now. It doesn't matter. Stick me in any job and I'll hate my co-workers. I hate them all. They're like customers in a Wetherspoons; it doesn't matter which one you go in to, they're all the same. I hate the low quality comedy you get from co-workers. I hate explaining to every single person I meet why I don't like football, or why I don't eat meat or any of the other things that are nobody's fucking business but my own. I hate listening to them chew their food during our lunchbreaks. I hate hearing about their boring lives. I hate hearing stories that revolve around work and how amazing they are. Nobody ever tells a story of how average they are at a job; everybody's the same as me, deluding themselves that a company will go bust if we ever leave them. I hate how petty they make me; how I get annoyed at how shit they are at their jobs. Fuck that noise, it’s none of my business. Fuck all my co-workers, past, present and future. Even the ones I liked.

What You Should Learn From This:I work best when I'm alone. Leave me alone; all the way alone. Let me work from home and never ask what it is I'm working on. Just send me my wages at the end of the week and take comfort that I'm working for you, as opposed to against you.

I'm Very Lazy

This is a good thing, because it means I use my brain. I figure out the easiest way of doing anything, which is normally not doing it. I hate working for a living so I figure out a way to not do any work. I used to work on a building site and my job was; I had to shift eight boilers a day, and then I could go home. The boilers weren't especially heavy, but they were bulky and awkwardly shaped and there were no elevators anywhere and it was a bastard of a job and it took me forever to do it. Anyway, I invented and built a yoke for moving boilers and, once it was built, it took me about ten minutes to get the boilers from A to B and I never worked past lunchtime on that site again. It was one of the few jobs that just ran out, as opposed to me being fired. When I was a postman, I realised I could shave hours off my route by throwing everyone's mail in to a canal rather than going to each individual house. I've been told to point out that that's a joke. Fuck me, I hate the Internet sometimes. The point is, there's a better way of doing the thing that you're doing and if you hire me, I'll figure out what it is. But that's all I'm going to do.

What You Should Learn From This: I'm smarter than you are, and I'll help your business. But I'm so smart, a lot of the time, it's going to look like I'm just sitting there staring off in to space, but really I'm concentrating on a way to make your life even easier and more successful, so just leave me alone to get on with it.

I Don't Like Being Told What To Do

I once butted my head straight through an office wall because I'd heard the phrase “If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean” one time too many. I hate this, and many other pithy office phrases with a fucking passion. You'll only ever hear them from middle-management cunts who seem to think that if you're not working 100% percent of the time, you're stealing money directly from their pockets. These are the pricks who think, if it takes ten minutes to perform a task, then you should be able to do it six times an hour, and forty-eight times in a shift, as though fatigue isn't a thing, nor are hiccups, boredom or mistakes. I know what I'm supposed to be doing, and cleaning isn't it. For one thing, I'm shit at cleaning. I'm shit at cleaning for the same reason I'm shit at working; I don't care. Unless the untidiness of a place is hindering me from doing my job, or a serious fire risk or something, I don't give a shit. Come look at my house, you'll see how little I give a shit about tidiness. Only joking, don't come to my house. It's not just cleaning though, it's anything. Don't tell me what to do. Let me figure out what to do. You should be there in case I have any questions, otherwise leave me alone. Even if you've hired me for a specific reason, I'll find something more interesting to do if you just leave me alone.

What You Should Learn From This: I work better if it's on a project I'm interested in. More to the point, I only work if it's on a project I'm interested in. I work very well on projects I'm interested in, though. I'll go for hours, sometimes days, without a break. No food, sleep or human interaction is going to get in the way of me solving a problem once I've encountered it. Just... just make sure you're not the problem, okay? I can't guarantee your safety.

My Timekeeping and Attendance is Atrocious

Yeah, about that. If you want a guy who's going to be on time every time, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, then I'm not your guy. I have no tail of any description. I don't care about the job, and I care even less about it when I'm wrapped up in bed dreaming about Milla Jovovich. You've got to give me a reason come to work. I'm not just going to turn up because you're paying me to do so, you should be doing that anyway. I'm a miracle. I'm one-of-a-kind. I'm not the kind of person whose value can be determined by whether or not I turn up at the office. I'm an alcoholic, so there's no point in me turning up on time, I'm not going to be able to do any work for the first four or five hours anyway. When I do get to work though, holy shit, stand out of the way. You're going to see some shit. Shitting shit, the shit I'm going to shit out will make you shit blood. Oh, I've also been diagnosed with depression (had it a long longer, but only been diagnosed for about a year). That means, you lucky so and so, that there will be days where not only do I not turn up, but I'm not even going to call you to let you know I'm not turning up. There's a good 20% chance you won't see me on any given day, and a 5% chance you'll never see me again. The best part of the depression is that I don't have manic depression, just depression, so I don't even get the ultra-productive bit of it. Fun! The point is, it doesn't matter if I'm there or not. I'm only ever going to work when I feel like it anyway, so you might as well let me turn up whenever the fuck I feel like it, and be grateful that I'm still working for you at all. The work you'll get from me, if you just leave me to my own devices, is far superior to the shit you're getting from all the other pricks who have such little creativity in them, they're more than happy to let fucking clockwork determine their fates.

What You Should Learn From This, You Cunt: I work to my own schedule. I work though, that's the point. You're not going to get a guy who turns up on time every day but does nothing other than wear out the arse on his trousers. You're going to see the reshaping of entire worlds, but on my time, not yours. Who the fuck do you think you are?

In Summary...

Let's look at everything I've taught you today. What job suits me? Where should I bring my unique skills and who is going to benefit from hiring me? More importantly, whose life is going to be made inexorably more difficult by not hiring me? I am best suited to a job where I have no co-workers. I'm a lone wolf, walking a lonely road by my lonesome. Leave me by myself, and let me use my brain. That's what I do best; think about stuff. It looks, to the layman or the simpleton, that I'm doing nothing, but I'm actually splitting the atom in my brain. You can't put a price on that. Well, you can. It's slightly above minimum wage. That's really all I'm asking for. Also, leave me alone to decide what I'll be thinking about. Don't tell me what problem you need solving, let me figure that out for myself. I want to be left alone, focusing only on that which interests me. And, just let me do it. Don't decide that as well as rebuilding the world from scratch, that I could also do a bit of sweeping up, or help unload the stationery order when it comes in. And don't worry about when I'm doing it. If it's 3am or 6pm, it doesn't matter. It's getting done. Give me a deadline and I'll meet it. Give me six months, or a year, or however long I tell you it's going to take, and then leave me alone. When we reach the deadline, you'll discover that I haven't paid any attention to your problem whatsoever. I have, instead, solved a far bigger problem you weren't even aware of. There are three possible positions I can think of that would fit these, admittedly specific criteria and here they are:

WRITER

This would be the occupation of choice for me. Sitting alone by myself, writing away on my laptop. The first draft has to be in by March the 1st? Done. There's your first draft, and here's a little murder mystery I knocked up on the side while I was at it, just to flex the ol' grey matter. Come on, publishing houses and literary agents, sign me up! I've already written nine fucking novels. Nine! I've written nine novels, and every single one of them is a work of art apart from the three shit ones. Publish my sci-fi epic; that'll keep us all in work for at least the next nine years, it will redefine science fiction and probably be turned in to the most successful movie franchise in cinematic history, making us all billionaires a billion times over. We'll have more money than Google. But, you got to work at my pace. And pay me.

SERIAL KILLER

My dedication to detail, my reluctance to leave shit alone and stop picking at scabs makes me the perfect candidate for a serial killer. I already don't like people and being a serial killer would mean there are less people around, so it's something I would enjoy. I'd be meticulous, and I'd work whatever hours were required. I'd kill indiscriminately as well, with no pattern. That way, I'd never get caught. I'd kill everyone in a completely different way, using different tools, different methods and different levels of violence. Sometimes, it would be injecting an air bubble in to the bloodstream, other times it would be a chainsaw from scrote to skullcap. Sometimes I'll kill under the cloak of the shadows, other times I'll hack away in a shopping mall during black Friday. I'll have no god damned consistency whatsoever, and if anyone even gets close to figuring out who I am, I'll burn their families to death just to distract them. I'll go fucking mental. I'm serious; you have no idea how fucking sick I'll go. I'll go after people based on their religion, their skin colour, their politics or their choice of potato chip dip. I'll skin prostitutes while they're still awake. I stab politicians through the eye with corkscrews. I crack open the skulls of regular Joes and eat their brains and send cryptic messages to the tabloids, daring them to work out my motive, let alone my identity. Unless, of course, I sell a book before this becomes necessary. It's up to you, in the book world, which path I walk. My books are very good and I've gone crazy with the world building, so there's more than enough of a foundation to build on. You're not taking a huge risk here, just let the world know these books exist and they'll sell themselves. Otherwise, all the blood I spill is on your hands.

POSTMAN

Admittedly, this goes against the entirety of the article, but I quite enjoyed being a postman. The only trouble was, my route was three hours away from where I lived and I got sick of getting up at 3am every day. So yeah, either a writer, a serial killer or get me a post route somewhere close to home. I probably won't kill anyone.

[blitherandblather]

YouTube Rewind 2018

Hey! It's Will Smith from the Internet! You know Will Smith from the Internet, right? No? No, me neither. Like everybody else on the entire planet, I know Will Smith from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and a metric shit-tonne of mediocre movies. I've got nothing personal against the guy, I just don't know where a man of such middling talent gets such confidence. Holy fuck, does Will Smith ever love Will Smith. He has an entire YouTube channel filled with videos of Will Smith talking about Will Smith and pointing out how great Will Smith is. He has four and half million people watching those videos too, so, in a way, I guess it makes sense they got him to kick off YouTube Rewind 2018, but in another way, one of the last things I think when I hear the name “Will Smith” is the Internet. In case you don't know, because I didn't until a few days ago, YouTube Rewind is an annual video that showcases the most annoying wastes of time that filled up the eternal cesspit that is YouTube over the past twelve months. I should point out that the video probably isn't aimed at me. I mean, I use YouTube, but the last “things” I remember breaking the Internet was that guy talking to his dog about sandwiches and that girl getting hit on the head with a shovel. Nevertheless, I'm doing the novelization of the entire fucking video, all eight minutes and fourteen seconds of it. If you haven't seen it yet, I want to conduct an experiment. Read this article first. It's not going to make any sense, but see if you can get through it, then watch the video. Then re-read this, and see if it makes any more sense the second time around, because I'm guessing the answer is no.

Righty-ho, here we go. The video starts with Will Smith, standing on a platform, staring at some mountains and looking incredibly smug for a man who starred in Wild Wild West. His phone buzzes to let him know the video's started and he wonders what he would include in the video he's in, if he was in the video he's in. He comes up with Fortnite and Marques Brownlee. I haven't the faintest fucking idea who Marques Brownlee is, but I do know that Fortnite is one of the shittest computer games ever inflicted upon the world, so I'm already in disagreement with 50% of Will “The Legend of Bagger Vance” Smith's choices. We're off to a bad start.

We cut to the interior of a school bus filled with people, any one of whom could be Marques Brownlee. Each of them looks like somebody I would hate if I met them in real life, and each of them has an affectation to set them apart from the rest of the crowd, which makes no sense since all of them are doing the same thing. They're all setting themselves apart from the rest of the crowd, so they have essentially become a crowd. A crowd of absolute cunts.

Some music starts. I don't know what it is, and everybody jumps out of a moving bus. Unfortunately, this is done in front of a bad green screen and everyone involved is quite safe. This is the point in the video (not yet a full minute in) when we discover the bus is actually flying through the sky, which is a reference to Fortnite, which is why I had to pause to ten minutes so I could puke up the shame of getting said reference. Anyway, they all jump of the bus and fall to their deaths.

The end.

Wait, hold up! I don't mean that. You don't have to wait or hold up; certainly not just because I said so. That's just something Youtubers say a lot. Wait. Hold on. Back up. Hold it. Wait. They're always telling us to fucking wait and hold up. You're on YouTube, we can just pause you. You don't have to ask us to wait. I dunno if the people that jumped out the bus really died, but there's another bunch of unpalatable arseholes waiting for them on the ground. Or, maybe they're the same bunch of arseholes wearing different coats. I don't know. I don't know who any of these people are, only that an awful lot of them have bright blue hair cut in to a wanky style.

Some woman who looks like an ex of mine reiterates what Will “I, Robot” Smith said at the start. This is YouTube rewind and they have to put some content in to it. We're now over an eighth of the way through. Cue some bad acting while whoever the fuck these people are pretend to consider what content to put in the video before three people shout out “K-Pop!” at the same time.

What I assume is K-Pop kicks in and a bunch of people I wouldn't let near my kids dance badly in front of another green screen. Cut to more people looking really fucking pleased with themselves. I just realised they're all YouTubers. In some universe other than my own, these people are superstars. For now. Ask me again in a years' time.

Next, we move on to a wedding. Some smiling woman has just married a cartoon of a cat playing bongos. I think he's called bongo cat, but the woman has the exact same expression Melania Trump permanently sports. She's clearly uncomfortable, this clearly wasn't her idea and she's clearly only doing it because she's addicted to attention. Even the other YouTubers look bewildered.

There's a pot full of melted lipstick in the next shot. This is the science portion of the video. Like most shots in the video and, indeed, all YouTube videos, it lasts for less than a second; image after image after image is fired at you in ceaseless, brutal succession to distract you from the fact you're not actually watching anything. Nothing's going on and there's no substance to any of it, just fast editing and attractive young people, who are now in Korea! Mukbanging! This reference was so far removed from anything I understand about anything that I had no choice but to Google what it meant. It means eating a lot of food whilst standing in front of a video camera. Nothing's worth doing if it's not done in front of a camera. This video is starting to make me feel unpleasant. Still, we're well over a quarter of the way through.

The food section lasts for quite a while; a least four seconds, the last two of which concentrate on a dog not eating food. I don't think I've ever seen a dog not eat food before. I don't mean the dog's doing something that isn't eating food, I mean he's sat in front of a table full of food, being encouraged to eat, and he's not eating. This video is beneath him. He's the only YouTuber I've like so far, and the only one with any dignity.

More fast paced edits in which far too many people are shown, each of them given a fraction of a fraction of a second of screentime. They still try to make the video their own, though, over-acting and generally making tits of themselves. I almost feel sorry for them, believing that they're actual celebrities; that anyone outside of a YouTube audience knows or cares who they are. I'm not a football fan, but I know who David Beckham is. I know nothing about fashion, but I know the name Kate Moss. I do watch videos on the Internet, and on YouTube itself, and I still have no fucking clue who any of these people are, what their gimmick is or why they're all so fucking excited all the time. Non-stop giddiness from every single one of them; there is no difference, personality wise, from one to the next, just slightly different hairstyles. Then I remember they're all millionaires who live in vast mansions on private islands and my pity turns back to hatred.

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write: a yodelling, ice-skating, seven-year old cowboy salutes us from under a giant marshmallow. I don't believe that would make sense even if I understood the context. More young people dancing and smiling. More music that's not for ears as old as mine. More dancing. Back to the Mukbangers. Back to the cat wedding. Back to the dog? Back to the ice-skating cowboy? What the fuck is going on? We're only three minutes in! Why are we having repeats already? Surely enough happened over the course of the entire fucking year that they can fill up three minutes of airtime without resorting to repeats, no matter how fast the editing is?

Oh, thank fuck. Someone I recognise. Sure, it's a cartoon character but it's one I know. It's a guy who calls himself The Odd1sOut. He used to do comics that were pretty funny, but now he's a YouTuber because there's money in that. He's a funny guy and a natural story-teller. They give him one line of dialogue and it's not funny. It's a link to a music change. They bundle all the animated YouTube channels together before cutting to Trevor Fucking Noah? Seriously? The political comedian is in this piece of shit? My respect for Trevor Noah takes a beating by his appearance in this pointless fucking tripe, but the fact that he's flossing really takes this piss. Not only is flossing shit, even by YouTube standards, it started in 2017. Come to think of it, so did Fortnite. Huh, not even the premise of this utter garbage stands up to scrutiny. Still though, Trevor Noah...

Oh, and John Oliver, doing a different Fortnite dance. I don't know what that one's called, but he looks overly happy to be doing it. I have the same reaction seeing John Oliver in this video as I did when Ben Elton hosted the Royal Variety Performance. I already didn't like you based entirely on your face, but now I have a valid reason.

We're told to wait, wait, wait, hold on again.

Then there is a bizarre shift in tone in the video. It gets all serious for a bit. The music, while still shit, becomes a little bit more meaningful. We're told, without any details, about people who have made a difference to the world through YouTube and how bloody brave they all are. Somebody mentions, briefly, mental health. Somebody else talks about Asian representation in mainstream entertainment. Somebody else talks about drag queens. But, you can tell they mean it because they're kind of squinting a little bit when they're talking about it and nodding really earnestly like, it, y'know, totes brave. So, totes emosh. They go on to talk about women's empowerment, single mums (or moms, I guess), people working to improve educational standards in impoverished countries and how ruddy, bloody brave everyone is, without once mentioning what the fuck any of this has got to do with YouTube or explain how YouTube helped any of these people do any of these things in any way whatsoever. Still though, so bloody brave. It would be a lot more poignant if I didn't want to punch every single one of them in the face.

There's a brief moment of awkward silence to announce the serious bit is over. It's hilarious because the one thing YouTubers can not do is remain silent. My son watches more YouTube “shows” than I do, but I'm often in the same room as him while he does so and I just don't understand how anything sinks in; video after video is just a wall of noise with these fucking children babbling as fast as they can, yacking on and on relentlessly and a hundred miles an hour despite the fact they've got absolutely nothing to say. Absolutely nothing. The awkward silence is cut short by one of the funniest segways I have ever seen in my entire life.

One moment, we're listening to people talk about the most serious and earnest subjects they can think of, and one YouTuber even mentions that she got really sick earlier in the year. She didn't say exactly what the sickness was, or why her sickness is, apparently, a highlight of the YouTube year, but it's the heaviest moment in the video and it's followed immediately by somebody saying “Wait, hold on, maybe we should read the comments.”

I love the comments on YouTube; on the Internet in general, but YouTube is great for comments. It's that little space of the Web reserved for the truly unhinged; the utterly and irretrievably insane. I'll quite often skip the video entirely and just go straight for the comments. My favourite times are when an argument breaks out between two opposing opinions. Person A thinks the Masterchef Winner was well-deserved this year, Person B thinks another contestant was robbed and within four or five paragraphs, the show has been forgotten entirely while the two commenters spiral down a well-worn path of insults, racism accusations, Hitler comparisons and death threats before a third, unknowing innocent, steps in to the middle of the battle because they're curious where they can buy that wok the winner used halfway through episode four. It's the best, worst and, certainly, the maddest humanity has to offer in a tiny little bubble. Sadly, the comments chosen for this video are just suggestions of what to put in the video. We're over five minutes in to an eight minute long video and they're still trying to work out what the fuck they're supposed to be doing, which represents most YouTubers' videos perfectly, IMHO.

Then, I don't know what happens. They focus on the comments and the video loses what little cohesion it had altogether. Football, a car in space, people wearing clothes that wouldn't look out of place on Roblox (as your grand-kids, grandpa), a big silver ball in the woods, more flossing, more arseholes trying to grab the spotlight in a billionth of a second and then Baby Shark, a shitty kids song that got inexplicably popular for no god damned reason whatsoever. And a montage of everything we'd just seen in the previous seven minutes.

Fuck me, still a full minute to go. Oh, wait. Hold up. Back up. Wait, wait, wait. There's not a minute to go, because here's Will “After Earth” Smith again, smiling away and adding absolutely nothing of value to the video. He looks through a pair of binoculars that are there, I guess, and then fucks off clutching two massive bags full of cash.

The last minute of the video is taken up entirely by links to the channels of those people in the video, including Will “Shark Tale” Smith, which would have been more helpful at the start of the video, or at least during. Either way, it's a moot point because I'm never going to click on any of the links because I'm absolutely horrified that this is what passes for entertainment. Do absolutely nothing, but do it fast and you'll be gone before anybody even notices.

But, it makes sense to end the Rewind with a bunch of ads, because this is a highlight show. YouTube is showing us the highlights of the year and it turns out there weren't any, but there's a full minute of ads. The ads are the only thing the video actually focuses on and, to me, that's fitting. Because, if I had to look back over the past year of irritating YouTube bullshit and pick one thing that summed up the experience, it would be the fucking ads. Every three minutes, another fucking ad. They put ads in trailer videos. They put ads in ads. It won't be long before YouTube is just another shopping channel; in the same way MTV no longer plays music, YouTube will no longer have any content, just ads, and the rewind will be all the best ads of that year, broken up by brand new ads. It's a scary thought, but no more scary than Suicide Squad.

By the way, YouTube does this annually, but I'm not going to. Up until a week ago, I'd never even heard of the Rewind. I was just curious to see what, really, nobody was talking about and now I'm sorry I did and I'm sorry I wrote this article about it and I'm sorry you're reading it.

It's over now, though.

[blitherandblather]

Mission Failed

This one time, I punched a priest right in the mouth. It wasn't an accident, either. It wasn't like I was horsing around and the priest got in the way. It wasn't like I meant to push him away and got a bit over-enthused. No, this was a full-on haymaker; a perfect line-'em-up, pull back, measuring-tape from knuckle to jaw wallop right square in the kisser. He was really old, too, so he went down like an absolute sack of shit. It was one of those almighty smacks that made everyone within a half-mile wince and seize up, as though riding the shockwave of the punch. It was absolutely perfect. It is one of my favourite memories and I masturbate thinking about it at least three times a week.

Now, you might be asking “What are you playing at, hitting a poor old priest like that?” in to the open air. I mean, you might not. I don't know, do I? I'm not fucking psychic. Even if I could read your mind, I've already finished writing this. By the time you read this, I've moved on to something else. I'm not able to answer any questions you have. Just read on and see if the answer's already in here somewhere. If not, well, tough shit.

Anyway, before you start feeling sorry for this priest, I should point out that he was a Catholic priest and, therefore, a paedophile. Doesn't sound so bad now, does it? This one time, I punched a paedophile right in the mouth. You don't have a problem with that, do you, you fickle bastards. All Catholic priests are paedophiles, every single one of them. By proxy, if nothing else. I hate Catholic  priests. I had the Catholic god; he's the biggest bully in the universe. What kind of god refers to himself as “God”? What kind of god makes calling him “God” the first commandment? A bully, that's what kind of god. The Catholic god is a bully and priests are those sycophantic little shits who hang around bullies. They like having the power that comes with being a bully, but they don't want the risk that comes with being a bully when everything goes to shit.

Because of this, my first reaction when hearing about John Allen Chau, the missionary killed by Sentinelese arrows was, obviously, “What? Missionaries? Are there still missionaries? And tribes cut off from the rest of the world, who hunt but bow and arrow? What century are we living in?” But then, I realised I was fine with all that and my second reaction was “ha ha”.

What the fuck was this guy thinking? The sheer arrogance of the man. These people have being doing just fine all by themselves for who knows how long. The age of Crusades is over; it's no longer okay to just barge your way in to another culture and force everybody to follow your god on pain of death and destruction. Who the hell did he think he was, trying to get these people to subscribe to his beliefs while he, in turn, completely dismissed theirs? For fuck's sake, the Sentinelese live without fire. They haven't got to the Greek gods yet, and you want to jump right in with Jesus and the Holy Trinity? Not only is that like starting a show with “Tony Soprano sits alone in a diner; cut to black,” but its comparable to teaching them how to use Snapchat. The Christian faith is unbelievably complicated; scholars spend their entire lives working trying to figure out the Bible before realising it's a load of bullshit that doesn't mean anything. The Sentinelese, even if they were interesting in learning about other cultures, which they demonstrably are not, wouldn't stand a chance of getting their heads around the King James remix. The only real documentation on the people of the tribe comes from Maurice Portman, who described them as “peculiarly idiotic”, which, ordinarily, would make them perfect candidates for Christianity. There is also the additional problem that nobody else in the entire world understands their language, not even the rudiments, and on top of that, THEY KILL ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE WHO COMES ON THEIR ISLAND.

Sorry about that caps there, but it had to be stressed. Every ship that grounded there by accident, every interfering sod who tried making contact in the past and every down-on-their-luck merchant who tried trading with them, everyone who has had the slightest contact with the tribe and lived to tell the tale has said the exact same thing. The Sentinelese are an incredibly aggressive people who will attack anyone who encroaches on their territory. It's not like they're a well-known tribe, either. John Allen Chau didn't come across them by accident; he went there specifically to convert them to Christianity. He knew how they were going to react. He knew what they were going to do. He went to the island several times before they finally got sick of his god-bothering ways and finally made sure he couldn't bother them anymore. Plenty of people have said it's a shame that he died, by I disagree. The man was a fool who had been warned repeatedly to leave these people alone, warned by the Sentinelese themselves, no less. I'm not the kind of person who gets upset when people I don't know, like celebrities or whatever, die, and I'm certainly not going to lose any sleep over a moron who stuck his head in a lion's mouth then shot the lion's ballsack with a taser. People die all the time. Sometimes it's sad, sometimes it's hilarious. With Chau, it was just pointless. A stupid death for a stupid cause. The only plus side is they killed him before his dirty, stinking body, filled with its western diseases the Sentinelese have no immunity against, wiped the whole lot of them off the face of the earth.

But that was a gut-reaction, my in-built, anti-religious nature that bubbles to the surface anytime I hear a story about some sanctimonious snake-oil salesman getting their comeuppance. Then I actually read an article or two about it and the thing that jumped out was his age. Chau was twenty-six when he was turned in to a colander. He was a kid. Of course he was stupid, all kids are stupid. I know I was. I paid money that I'd worked for to see Sophie Ellis Bextor when I was a kid.

I mean, I'm not saying Chau was blameless. I'm saying he was stupid. He was running on that special kind of stupid that only those not beaten by the relentless indifference of life can. But stupid can only get you so far. I was stupid for a long time and I barely got across the Irish Channel. My stupid didn't get me anywhere near an isolated, uncontacted people nine thousand miles away.

Where were this guy's parents? Chau enrolled with the Covenant Journey; a kind of shitty Christian version of the Jewish Birthright programme. They knew what he was up to; they knew exactly what he was up to. He wrote them letters nearly every day telling them what he was doing. His parents must have been aware of this, too. I found out about Covenant Journey the same way Chau probably did; via the Internet. That means he has the Internet. That means his parents have the Internet. That means they have Google and they could have, at any time, checked out what he was doing. Chau wasn't secretive about his plans. He told the whole world, via his IG account, where he was going and what he was going to do when he got there.

His parents have said they forgive the Sentinelese for killing their son, and to that I say fuck you and your forgiveness. They aren't the ones at fault here; never were. Your son shouldn't have been there and you shouldn't have let him go. You might as well “forgive” a tornado for ripping a trailer-park in half. The tornado is just doing what tornadoes do and doesn't give a shit if it has your forgiveness or not. Do five minutes research on the tribe and you'll see the nicest thing anybody has to say about them is they haven't killed anyone for twelve years. Coincidentally, the last time anyone intruded on their land was... well, you can figure that bit out.

At the time of writing, the local authorities have abandoned any plans to retrieve the body of Chau. The Sentinelese have buried it on the beach, because it's fucking rife with diseases that will kill them. The locals in the area are, rightfully, appalled that Chau went there in the first place. The fishermen who helped him get to the island have all been arrested, which will probably amount to nothing but is a good start at least. 'Cause it's not just an ethical thing, leaving them alone. It's legal as well. It's against the law to go anywhere the Sentinelese or their island. Chau knew it and so did the fuckers who brought him there. He was a dumb kid, but they knew exactly what was going to happen when he got there. They effectively led him to his death, in exchange for payment. Even the tribesmen themselves recognised Chau as a dumbass kid, chasing him off rather than killing him first time round. It was only when he kept coming back that they lost their temper.

But, yeah. Leave his body buried in the sand. Probably the waves will get to it sooner or later and wash him away to sea. There's nothing good that's come out of this story. There's nothing funny about it. A people who want to be left alone bring hounded by an arrogant and bullying religion. A handful of poor fishermen valuing money over the life of a fellow human being. A dumb kid following the advice of his imaginary best friend getting killed in an admittedly pretty bad-ass hail of arrows. The parents who let him do it, the cult who helped him do it and now an asshole like me throwing my two cents in to the ring, like there aren't enough unqualified dickheads blabbing on about the rights and wrongs of the whole shebang.

One thing's for certain, though; I'm happier than ever at punching that priest.

[blitherandblather]

My Boss is Twenty-Nine

Man, life is good. I was hoping it would turn out like this. I always dreamed that, at my age, I'd be working a temp job for minimum wage in a factory with no windows. I'm so happy reality matched expectation that I wrote a poem about it. And here it is, you lucky bastards:

I work on this production line,

To get these orders out in time,

But the one thing here that really grinds?

My boss is only twenty-nine.

The boredom atrophies my mind,

When will the end-of-shift bell chime?

This job is torture, but the real crime?

My fucking boss is twenty-nine.

My arthritic bones, all day, they whine,

While he bounds round just like a child.

It drives me absolutely wild,

My boss is fucking twenty-nine.

But, while I fucking lose it ment'ly,

I ask you ladies, and the gentry,

Could it be worse? Oh yes, and plenty,

'Cause his boss? She's only twenty.

It could be worse, I say again,

Since her boss recently turned ten,

And if that shit's not enough for you,

His boss is in the terrible twos.

So, I guess I shouldn't get so shirty,

That my boss has not yet quite turned thirty,

'Cause the thing, in the end, that will beat us,

The CEO's a fucking foetus.

[blitherandblather]

Get Out There and Don’t Vote

Democracy... what a load of shit.

I hate democracy and the whole democratic process. Democracy is built on the presupposition that we're all born equal and, maybe we are. We're sure as fuck not equal by the time we're old enough to vote, though. I'm not equal to, say, Tim Peake. That fucker's been to outer space. He's literally left the planet. He's seen the Earth in its entirety, with no imaginary borders or divisions between religions or beliefs. My vote isn't worth as much as his. Neither is yours. If I get to vote purely on the basis that I'm alive, then he should get five votes, because he knows more than I do. And he's been to space and he's a nice guy who genuinely seems to want to make the world a better place. I'm also not equal to Christopher Langan. Never heard of him, huh? He's the smartest man in the world. Let that sink in. He's the smartest man in the world. We're not equals. This guy taught himself how to read when he was four years old. Do you understand that? Not only was he reading at four, he taught himself how to do it. When I was four years old, I discovered that I would collapse on the floor if I spent ten minutes spinning around in circles. The only thing I've got in common with the Christopher Langan is my first name. And, yet, we both get one vote apiece.

It goes the other way, too. There exists in there world people who have deliberately never read a book. Ever. Not even at school, where you have to read books or they don't let you leave. There are people who are in their eighties and still have to go to school every day because they refuse to read a single book. They're going to die in detention. How stubborn do you have to be to never read a book? It doesn't even have to be a good book. Just read something, anything. You can't form opinions on anything if you don't read; the only thing you can do is appropriate other people's opinions and pass them off as your own, with nothing to back them up with should you be questioned on them. Don't be proud that you've never read a book, it's not an achievement, it's a fucking embarrassment. If you've never read a book, you don't get to vote, okay? You don't understand anything. You can't understand anything and you refuse to learn how anything works, so you don't get to vote on how anything works. Thankfully, this isn't a rule that has to be enforced; it's surprisingly self-policing, that one.

Also, you one get one vote, and that's it. So, if you vote on I'm A Celebrity..., that's it. You've used your vote for the year. If you took the time to call in to a TV show and let them know you'd prefer it if (Interns: Check which D-Lister couldn't get a pantomime gig this year) got voted out of the jungle instead of (Interns: Check which 80's supermodel has an autobiography coming out this Christmas), then you're done voting for the year. You don't get to decide who runs the country.

Another rule in my version of utopia, the voting age should be lowered to six. Six-year-olds are the most open minded and caring people in the world. They can tell just by looking at a person if they're good or bad. They also care. They're bothered what happens to the world because they're going to be stuck there for a long time. The want people to be happy and, as long as they themselves are fed and have a bed and a few toys and a family unit that cares for them, they don't really want much else. They want everyone to have that. Happiness, to a child, is a universal human right. The voting age then cuts off again at sixteen, when kids turn in to assholes, angry at the world and selfish. They have sponge-minds that suck up any information presented to them as though it's the absolute truth and the only truth that exists. Tell them something else two hours later and their entire philosophy changes. You can't trust teenagers. They're too malleable. Their minds are like plasticine. One day, homosexuality is faggy and the next they discover they quite enjoy a finger in the ass during foreplay. Their brains are bombarded by new ideas and philosophies, which is great, but their brains are also working at full capacity, capable of seeing all points of view simultaneously. There's no consistency in a youngster's mind. If they could, they'd tick every box on a ballot sheet, then set fire to it, because of the inherent corruption that comes with any form of government. You can vote again between the ages of thirty and sixty, when you actually know a thing or two about a thing or two, but you're still young enough for it to matter. If you're ninety years old, voting doesn't apply to you because you don't do anything all day and you're going to die tomorrow, anyway.

Either way, it's all fucking pointless. Who gives a shit who's in charge? What difference does it make? Here in the UK, we have two political parties and a bunch of time-wasters. Can't vote for the Tories, because they put money ahead of humanitarianism. Can't vote for Labour, because they're too soft on the hard issues. We tried voting for the Lib Dems once, but they panicked we'd called their bluff and realised they were in way over their heads, forming a coalition, in which fuck all got done for four years. It was terrible, in as much as nobody noticed anyway.

What, exactly, does the government do? There's an old, unfunny adage that proclaims “If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal” and it's true, to a point. It doesn't matter who's in charge because nobody is. Any time there's an actual decision to make, a decision that is genuinely going to affect the people of a country – and I should point out here, I mean the people of this country – they throw the decision right back to us, the dumb shits who voted them in to power in the first place. The EU referendum was decided by ordinary schmucks like you and I, many of whom had no idea we were in the EU in the first place. Why the fuck are we paying these people to govern the country if they're just going to make us do their job for them?

In 1948, Britain entered Malaya to battle the Chinese Communist Party. This conflict when on to 1960. Between 1950 and 1953, Britain was involved in the Korean War. 1951, the Canal Zone Emergency in Egypt saw us involved in guerilla warfare. 1952-1960, Kenya. 1955-1959, Cyprus. 1956, the Suez Canal. 1962-1975, Oman and Dhofar. '62-'66, Borneo. '63-'67, Yemen. '69-the end of time, our good friends in Northern Ireland; the “troubles”. 1982, the Falklands. 1990-91, Gulf War One. '92-2001, Balkans. 2000, happy millennium, Sierra Leone! 2001-2014, for fuck's sake, Afghanistan. 2003, Gulf War II: The Gulfening. And so on. Since WW2 which, admittedly, wasn't our fault, there has been one day where a British Serviceman hasn't been killed in action. That's what the government does. It sticks a pin in a map to decide who we're going to fight with today.

There are one hundred and twenty four thousand members of the Tory party and five hundred and fifty two thousand in the Labour party. That's a total of seventy billion politicians in the country. That's fifty politicians for every civilian. Do we really need that many people to pick a fight? Could we not just have one guy clicking “random article” on Wikipedia until a country comes up on his screen and, so long as they're not as well armed as us, we go to war with them? That would leave us with the question of what to do with all those suddenly out-of-work politicians, but I'm sure we could figure something out. Using them as fuel or hardcore or something. They're fuck all use for anything else.

Because they react, and that's it. They're supposed to be the leaders of our country, but they don't actually lead us anywhere, do they, the cunts? They see what the rest of us are doing and the react to it, retroactively pretending it was their idea all along. And we, for our part, ignore everything they say (apart from who we're currently at war with) and just plod on with our meaningless lives, moaning that the price of fags has gone up 15p but beer's gone down six, so that's all right, isn't it? If the whole lot of them just fucked off on holiday, would any of us even notice? Would our lives be any different if every single politician in the world boarded a spaceship and flew off in to the sun? Depends on the propellant, I suppose, but that's more a chemical consideration rather than a political one.

Point is, I vote in every election that comes along. I vote in the big one every four years and I vote for the little local ones whenever the slip comes through my door. In between elections, I tend to ignore everything that goes on in Parliament. I'm like one of those arseholes – exactly like them, in fact – who becomes an expert in the louge every four years during the Winter Olympics, but forgets even the existence of the word “louge” in-between. The only thing I really understand about politics is that it's always wrong. The politicians in power are never the ones I voted for, even when they are. When someone I vote for gets in to power, they instantly pull of the masks are reveal themselves to be Mr. Wickles the caretaker. Ha ha, you fools! It was me, all along!

So, what's the point of voting? We never win. Doesn't matter who you vote for, the government gets in either way. They carry on doing whatever the fuck it is they do, and we carry on trudging through our daily lives, pretending that we had a say in things. It's huge lie we've all agreed to play along with and it's miserable and depressing and pointless and endless.

Except that, they play along too. They play along knowing that we're playing along. They do whatever it is politicians do because they know, every four years, that we won't let them play anymore if they don't follow the rules. We don't know what the rules are, but we know what they aren't, and we can tell when they're not playing fair. We don't kick them out of the game; we just put them on the naughty step for four years, after which they can try again. We all do this, and we all have to do this because, Jesus Christ, imagine what they'd do if they thought we weren't paying any attention at all.

[blitherandblather]

CAoS Theory

If I were a religious man, I'm pretty sure I'd have given Satanism a shot. I'm not the kind of person who commits to anything for very long, so it wouldn't be that big a deal. I switch pinball-fashion from one dead-end, minimum wage job to the next on a bi-weekly basis. I just don't have the attention span to make a career of anything. I've already forgotten what I was talking about at the start of this paragraph and now I'm going to have to go all the way back to beginning to find out. It has pros and cons,  short attention span.

Satan, that's it. Or, at least, the Church of Satan. It's hip, it's new and it's utter bullshit. I find most religions to be utter bullshit, but at least this one has a few ideals I can get on board with. For one thing, Stupidity in a cardinal sin in Satanism. In fact, it's sin number one; it's the worst thing you do in the Church, be stupid. I can agree with that, it's my least favourite characteristic in a person too. There's a suspiciously prominent “don't fuck children” rule thrown in there too, as if in direct response to some other religion. Almost as if they were worried priests getting kicked out of other churches might end up theirs, so they just wanted to get the message out there. Come if you want, but, let's just be clear here, absolutely no fucking children. In fact, no children at all. Seriously, we're not letting anyone under the age of 18 through the door. Understand? Good, welcome to the CoS; here's your birthday cake.

Satanists are also atheists, so there's no real worry about being judged in the afterlife, because there isn't one. They also don't really care if you're a Satanist or not. They don't have masses or go knocking door-to-door. There's very little you actually have to do to be a Satanist. Most of it is about self-reflection and embracing nihilism. Oh, and their High Priest has released a bunch of albums you could use as mood setters while playing Dungeons and Dragons. Above all, though, Satanism is a philosophy and a way of thinking as opposed to an actual religion, and, if I were to join any organisation, I think they'd be the ones for me.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with the Netflix show Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a new imagining of the Archie Horror comic book of the same name. It's a far darker and grittier look at the character than that taken by Melissa Joan Hart. Like most of Netflix's own shows, this 10-parter has an ongoing arc, split by story-of-the-week episodes. Sabrina is a half-witch, which means youngsters can relate to her, but also that her life is going to be more interesting than yours.

The Dark Lord, the devil, wants Sabrina to join his legion of followers, like her father promised she would before mysteriously dying in a plot point. But Sabrina is half-human, too, and she has a boyfriend and it's all, like, so unfair and stuff. So, a deal is struck between the innocent teenager and the manifestation of all evil, ruler of hell and destroyer of souls. She's allowed to go to her regular, human school, as long as she also attends The Academy of Unseen Arts, which I was positive was where Rincewind got kicked out of. As if this wasn't complicated enough, there is a witch-killer on the loose picking off Satan's followers. Also, there's like, these really mean girls? And, like, this boy? Like, a wizard boy? And he, like, likes Sabrina? But Sabrina's already with this human guy? It's totes drama, you guys.

There are a lot of positives with the show. Kiernan Shipka, playing Sabrina, is very likeable and exudes a confidence which makes us feel like she's been playing the role for years. The certifiably insane Michelle Gomez, perfectly cast as the possessed corpse of Sabrina's (human) High School teacher/(spoilers) Madame Satan herself, has great fun lurking around mischievously in the background of shots, plotting devious deeds and threatening pretty much everyone she happens to bang in to. Richard Coyle, playing the High Priest, hams it up unapologetically as the puritanical and ever-so-slightly-corrupt Father Blackwood. The show rarely panders to the viewer, assuming we already have at least a passing knowledge of the occult, mentioning Morgan le Fay, Lilith of Aradia, the Witch of Endor, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie Laveau, Tituba, Nehman, Badb, Macha, the Virgin of Juno, and the Kindly Ones (not looking forward to spellchecking that sentence). All of that is in one monologue, by the way, powerful stuff although, admittedly, utter gibberish if you don't know your witches. The plot also leans heavily on the Devil and Mr. Webster, with many feel-good moments where the clever half-human beats the devil himself in a game of wits.

There is plenty to moan about too, however. The storyline is plodding and, for most of the season, utterly directionless. Minor plot points are brought up to give the show a feel of gravitas it doesn't actually possess; an underdeveloped young girl is bullied by transphobic jocks, her father refers to his gay brother as “an abomination” and Sabrina's ward, Aunt Zelda (she's got a harsh exterior but, shock and horror, there's a heart of gold under there!) has an affair with Father Blackwood, whose wife is too pregnant to satisfy him sexually. To atone for this affair, both participants flagellate themselves, which also brings BDSM in to the mix, completely out of place and tone with the rest of the show.

Lucy Davis, Sabrina's other ward, Aunt Hilda (she's got a soft and squishy exterior but, shock and horror, there's a bellyful of fire under there!) mumbles distractedly in the background, utterly unsure how to play the character and becomes more of a distraction from, as opposed to a part of the story. The love triangle between Sabrina, dishy human Harvey Kinkle (who is given precisely fuck all to do except be dishy) and the dishy warlock Nicholas Scratch (maybe a spoiler alert, this was the devil's name in The Devil and Mr. Webster) feels tacked on and pointless. All YA fiction requires a love triangle, because how else can a young woman figure out who she truly is unless she can figure out which, of two, boys she wants to fuck the most?

Characters motives change on a whim, ranging from mildly irritating – Aunt Hilda warning Sabrina not to cast a particular spell, while simultaneously telling her exactly how to do so – to the fucking baffling – Madame Satan helping Sabrina exorcise a demon out of a human body, then coming back later on to murder the human for no fucking reason.

A plot point is brought up early in which a young, and possibly unaware, warlock is brought in to the morgue. He has definitely been murdered, and the Spellmans worry a Witch Hunter has come to town. They are so sure of it, they bring the news to the attention of Father Blackwood, who tells them to “keep an eye on it”. And it's never mentioned again.

Father Blackwood's position is similarly vague and malleable. In the first episode, the Spellman sisters are so terrified of the man, they're reluctant to even speak to him. In a later episode, when they've got shit going on, they pretty much to tell him to fuck off and let them get on with it. And he agrees. Sabrina constantly interrupts his sermons, pointing out that their religion is a crock of shit and that he, himself, is making up shit as he goes along. She's correct, of course, but he's the head of his particular coven and yet does nothing about her impertinence. On the other hand, when a full witch makes a minor mistake, he threatens to kill her and her two sisters if they ever screw up again. There's absolutely no consistency with his standing in the community, nor what his reaction will be to any given situation. Particularly irritating are the scenes with Blackwood and Madame Satan, during which it's never explained who is whose boss. They bark orders at each other one minute, then cow down the next. It feels like parts of the show are still in their first draft, whereas others have had copious amounts of rewrites, but both have been filmed and edited in to the final product.

Episode five – of ten – is a dream episode! The ultimate failure in any show (Star Trek disguised their dream episodes using a Holodeck instead, but the result was exactly the same), dream episodes are ones in which nothing fucking matters, because it's all a dream. It doesn't matter what happens in the episode, it's wiped out by the end credits. To stick a dream episode halfway through your first season stinks of an underdeveloped script. If there isn't enough plot to fill up ten episodes (and, believe me, there isn't), then don't film ten episodes. Condense it in to nine, or eight. Hell, be British about it and just have two six-part seasons and then never return to the premise ever again. You'll be beloved forever.

Therein lies the major problem with CAOS. There just isn't enough of it, and there's too much of it. The characters are, on the whole, dull, unimaginative and one-dimensional. The plots to each episode are dribbled across an hour plus of screen time, with barely half an hour's worth of material and the overall arc of season one focusses far too much on setting things up for season two, without giving us a reason to want to come back. By the end of episode ten, I was bored more than anything. I cared nothing for any of the characters and any good will I had felt towards the show at the beginning had been long-since spent. To the devil with them all.

[blitherandblather]

Sandy Foreigners

When I first came to Britain in the mid-80's, everybody was racist and foreigners were hilarious. There were sitcoms whose entire premise was an Englishman forced to have a conversation with a foreigner. We all hated the French, the Germans, the Welsh, the Indians, the Africans, the Jamaicans, the Russians, the Americans and the Chinese, but that was it because we didn't know the names of any other countries. Then the 90's came barging in with its Internet and all of a sudden, the whole world was our neighbour and racism went the way of the Microwave; everyone was crazy about it at first, then kinda meh, and finally just embarrassed to talk about it.

But, hey! Here comes Brexit; we're finishing what Hadrian started and it's high time we reverted back to our old ways. Let's polish off our shit Pakistani impressions. Let's refer to any non-Caucasian as “them”. Let's give Jim Davidson another shot. Unless, of course, racism comes back and we're at the wrong end of the spectrum this time around. If that's the case, then I'm dead against it, but so long as white folk are the sole beneficiaries of racism, I say let it fly.

And I'm not alone in thinking like this, am I? Statistically speaking, half of you agree with me. Or, I should point out infuriatingly, just over half of you. Why else would you vote to take the UK out of an organisation designed specifically to ensure we never see a third World War? Racism has to be the only answer. For too long, you haven't been able to tell jokes about foreigners eating dog food or fucking camels or whatever other unlikely, yet bizarrely universal, stereotypes you had floating around your head. You haven't been able to establish your dominance based solely on the accidental geography of your birth. You've had to treat other human beings like human beings and it's time to fight back! David Cameron offered you this chance to be openly, anonymously racist and you jumped on it whole-heartedly. Bravo!

I'm joking, of course. Nobody voted to leave the EU because they're closet racists. That would be insane. Nobody would fuck up a international peace treaty over something so petty. You'd have to be a complete fucking maniac to do something like that. You'd have to be the stupidest, tiny-brained, most childish, ridiculous, fuck-brained, moronic asshole to break away from a guaranteed no-war pact just because Sambo got that promotion you didn't deserve anyway, right?

No, surely the reason you voted leave was because of the £13bn the UK paid in to the EU budget. I mean, sure, we got £4.5bn back, but that's still a deficit of £8.5bn, right? Imagine what we could do if we weren't pissing away that money every year. We'd have the country fixed in no time with that money. More cops on the street, more money in to NHS, more funding for education. We'll be a country of super-healthy geniuses living in a crime-free utopia in no time! Or, we'll buy and crash another submarine. Either way. What we do with that money is entirely up to us, the people. Well, the government, at the very least. And we trust them, right? They're not going to piss the money away on, say, import and export tariffs with other countries, just because we're not in the single market anymore, are they? Who knows? The important thing is, you considered all of this before voting Brexit. You didn't just vote to leave the EU because of Johnny Foreigner over there. The EU budget was weighing heavily on your mind, and you weighed up the pros and cons.

Or, maybe it was the trade deals in particular you had a problem with? If, like a xenophobic David Pumpkins, the UK becomes its own thang, then we can establish whatever crazy trade agreements we want, with whoever we want! We can demand anything, let's go crazy. Anyone wanting to trade with the UK has to do so while wearing a John Bull waistcoat, singing Football's Coming 'Ome whilst sat inside a giant teacup. Of course, other countries might not want to trade with us if we make those demands, but the main take from this is that we finally have a say in the rules. I mean, we have a say in how the rules are drawn up now, it's just that so does everyone else. It's all a compromise with everyone getting some, but not all, of what they want. It might sound childish to some to break up the EU because we don't like sharing, but we used to own the entire fucking planet and they didn't, so who are they to tell us how to do anything? The Empire wasn't built on compromise, it was built on bull-headed, immature bullying. It's what makes Britain great, and I'm glad you put so much consideration in to the matter before voting to leave. I know the trade agreements never sat quite right with you, and I'm glad you finally got the chance to set it right, rather than voting leave just because you can't understand a bloody thing Gunga Din is saying.

Maybe you were just being patriotic, though. After all, the UK used to be a sovereignty, right? This country was built on the ideals of libertarianism, by people who didn't know what that word meant. The UK should be able to dictate what the UK does. We should be able to establish our own laws, our own customs and our own ways of thinking. We should also be allowed to kick the shit out of anyone who doesn't abide by those standards. We're bloody lucky 1984 didn't happen already, right? Didn't bloody need to, did it? Not with the bloody EU taking away the sovereignty of the nation. Bloody EU with their bendy bloody bananas and their bloody light bulbs. Finally, for Queen and Country, our children will once again be allowed to blow up their own balloons. It doesn't matter that all of these directives turned out to be utter bullshit that never happened, the implication was there. They could have made all these crazy laws if they had wanted to, and that simply isn't cricket. England, and, by extension, Scotland, Wales and a bit of Ireland, should be ruled by the Crown. And the elected government, too, but mostly the Crown. Those whackos in Brussels, making up these crazy rules, maybe, they're not even elected! I mean, neither are the Royals, but then God did that, probably or something. Who's even in charge of the EU? Who do you complain to? Who decides what's law and what isn't? It's not like the rules are printed under the lid to the box anymore, thank you very much Geneva Convention, I think. Best off out of it. Let's make up our own stupid rules. We don't need the EU's help on that. I mean, sure, we've been doing exactly that without interference since the formation of the EU, but the thing is, you put all this down on a piece of paper before you voted leave. You argued with your peers, you went back and forth, you picked away at it until you were finally and one hundred percent positive that leaving the EU was the only option. Your wife running off with Pierre had no bearing on your decision whatsoever.

Or, was it immigration that was bothering you? That's a hot-button topic, isn't it? It's not quite the same as racism, because you can back this one up with figures and facts, so it's okay. It doesn't matter than the facts and figures actually go against your argument, they're facts and figures just the same, and you can't argue with them. Thanks to the EU, any fucker from anywhere in Europe can just waltz in to the UK, set up shop, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. They can even claim benefits! The £8.5bn we're giving Europe every week isn't enough? They have to come over here and scrounge £140 a fortnight to feed their bloody foreign kids too? In a twenty-fucking-bedroom house overlooking Hyde Park? Makes you sick just trying to picture it in your head, doesn't it? Especially since that's all you can do, because it never happened. But look at the facts and figures! Nine hundred and forty thousand eastern Europeans! Seven hundred and ninety thousand western Europeans! We have to shut our borders down, and fast! As long as we're in the EU, they're free to come and go as they please! And so are we, but that's not the point. And, also there were three million immigrants from outside the EU, so closing that particular stable door would be as helpful as broken-glass toilet paper, but you thought about this before voting leave, and that's what we should be focussing on. It wasn't a knee-jerk reaction. You didn't just see an opportunity to let the “others” know they're not welcome, in your head, and run with it. You put real thought in to what closing the borders to European immigrants would mean for the UK, even if the answer was fuck all, and you made your decision.

Building on that open borders idea, maybe it was the security of the UK that was bothering you. Maybe you were up all night fretting about the safety of your fellow countrymen. If anybody can just stroll in to the country, then anybody can just stroll in to the country with a bomb. Ian Duncan Smith himself said we were “leaving the door open” to terrorist attacks, and he was the former work and pensions secretary, so he should know. Ignore all those boffins over at the army who might have mentioned he was talking out of his arse. The world is a scary place these days and the sandy foreigners, in particular, are playing dirty. They're bringing bombs in to the country! And, sometimes aeroplanes, but mostly bombs! Or, they're building them here, with every day items that anyone could buy at any time and regularly do, but, by God, it's scary out there, isn't it? It's like a war. A war with terrorists, rather than just on terrorists, like we used to have. And of course, everybody knows what you want during a war is less allies. Any one of them could be double-agents. Can't trust them, you know. Foreign-types. But, as scary as all of that is, I can still feel safe in the knowledge that you thought about this in great detail before voting to leave. You piled up two stacks in front of you; one stack of towel-headed Mola Rams carrying bindles filled with sarin and TNT in to the country, and another stack of international co-operation between intelligence agencies and you put a pin in the scariest one. Democracy in action.

Was it jobs? Did you line up guaranteed jobs for British-born citizens against a labour shortage before you voted to leave? Was it dominance; the UK re-establishing itself as a independent nation against the loss of any influence in Europe? Did you decide pea-cocking was more important, before you ticked the leave box? Whatever it was that finally tipped the scales for you, after hours, days, maybe even weeks of agonising which direction the country should take, I will be forever grateful that you put the time and effort in, that you played out the hypothetical what-ifs, and that you fully considered the consequences of your actions before you decided to send 'em all back, you fucking Nazi.

[blitherandblather]

The Eternally Hungry Monster

Once upon a time, I had aspirations of being a rock star. I had a band, I could play a few instruments and I had a modicum of talent when it came to stringing one chord after another. I was a teenager, full of teenage angst, so no shortage of material to work with when it came to subject matter either, dad. Nothing ever came of it because of course it didn't, but I had fun while it lasted.

A big part of that fun was the struggling. Getting a gig, which is what musical types call a job, is a tough ask. Especially a first gig, when the only people who have ever heard your band play are the members of the band itself, and whose opinions are therefore biased, although I did once hear our bass guitarist tell a publican we were “okay; nothing to write home about”. You essentially walk in and tell the owner you're great, and they either take your word for it or they don't. Hi, we've never played live before, but we want to play here. On your busiest night. And we want you to pay us to do so. No, we don't have a demo tape, the nineties are dead.

You get used to rejection fast, or you don't and you never get that first gig. Six months down the line, if you're lucky, the tides turn and venues call you, asking if you're available to play that weekend. It's an amazing feeling building your army of fans, living off the thing you enjoy doing most and doing the thing you enjoy second-to-most with certain members of your army of fans. Some of my happiest memories revolve around acting like a dickhead on stage in some dive bar, the air thick with hope, dreams and Lynx deodorant. Then drugs entered the equation and there were fights, traumas, Jimmy quit, Jody got married and I died of an overdose on the toilet. Great days.

That part of the journey fuses a band together, even when you inevitably split up and never speak to each other for the rest of your lives. It's important and integral to your growth as a performer. And it's not just bands; stand-up comedians have to slog their way through hours upon hours of open mic nights, honing their craft to a perfect five-minute routine before getting a sniff of a paying gig. Magicians will give away a million free demonstrations of their skill before earning a buck and those folk who do dance routines with their dogs are a waste of everybody's fucking time, so who cares how they get where their going?

Or... you could just turn up an audition on TV and get famous instantly. What do shows like The X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent and The Voice all have in common? The answer, of course, is that I can't tell which one is which. These vacuous, pseudo-talent shows that cost nothing to make and rake in billions in revenue are the fast track to stardom for many up-and-coming acts, and they all get to prove Andy Warhol right, the bastard, and grab their five minutes of fame. I mean, the really good ones and the really bad ones. There's a surprising lack of just average performances, when you think about it. It's either pure shit, or it looks like it's going to be pure shit but then turns out to be quite good. Not amazing, because if it was amazing they wouldn't touch these rehashed Gong Show atrocities with a bargepole, even if that was their act, but quite good. Good enough to get the braying masses in the audience on to their feet, anyway. The audience always seems so shocked at the revelation of someone turning up to a talent show with a modicum of talent. The constantly shocked by it. Four of five times an episode, in fact.

If you get three votes, or a golden button or a full sheet of stickers or Yahtzee or whatever it is that lets you know you've done well and that you can now tell everyone your tragic backstory, you go on to round two, which is exactly the same as the first round, except the shit has been filtered out so the viewers at home who only watch perversely aren't watching anymore. Oh, and you have to come up with something new to impress the judges.

That's the thing, though, isn't it? Eh? Isn't it? Simon Cowell and his peers aren't try to kickstart anyone's career, no matter what they claim. They're there to sustain careers; theirs. The acts on Britain's Got Talent aren't moving on to better things after the season ends, they're the content for the season. They're allowed to perform on stage because the show needs performers. Once the season is over, nobody gives a flying fuck what happens to any of the acts. They've served their purpose and kept the ratings high enough to justify salaries all round and another season next year. The acts live in this bubble of fame for a confined amount of time, from their first “audition” to the closer. Sure, they might get some “As Seen On Pop Idol” work in WMCs across the land, and maybe even make a living for a few years following their brief moment in the sun, but we're not going to discover the next Rolling Stones queuing up for an open audition at the Birmingham NEC. We'll be lucky to find the next Leon Jackson, whoever the fuck he is.

These shows are junkies hiding behind the mask of promotion. The acts are sacrifices on the altar of novelty; give us more, give us new, give us more newer. A traditional comedian can keep going for months with one routine; a music act can live off a single set list for years, if they're lazy enough. Which we were. But these poor bastards, dragged out in front of the spotlights and the judgemental eyes of an impatient nation have to come up with a new routine every week. Your act has to be new and unique and better while, at the same time, being recognisable to the thing we're pretty sure you did last week. It's hard to say, we've seen a billion other acts since then. Which one are you again?

Like talent vampires, our judges sit in front of these poor hopeless hopefuls, grinning inanely, offering sound-bite snap-judgements and contributing nothing to the show itself. Replace Cowell, Louis Walsh and the other one with dog in front of two sausages; if he goes for the keilbasa, you're through to next week's show. If the dog prefers the bratwurst, that's your too bad. Better luck next time. The eventual outcome of the show will be exactly the same – nobody wins – and the dog gets to eat sausages. That's a win-win for everyone except the acts, and, honestly, they've kind of brought this all themselves, right?

Fame Academy started in 2002. Winning that show was so pointless, not only has nobody heard of any of the acts since the show ended, but you yourself had forgotten there even was a show called Fame Academy until just now. Who is going on these shows in the sincere belief they'll be at Wembley next year in any other capacity than the audience? The desperate, the deluded and, above all, the sustenance for the eternally hungry monster that is reality TV.