The rich and insane
There’s always been a place for the village idiot. These days, that place would appear to be a seat in Government rather than seated in the stocks, but there are other options – screaming abuse at strangers outside railway stations for instance, or being on television.
The fortunes of the genuinely deranged have fluctuated over the years and depending on which culture you were born into. In the past, being a gibbering loon may have seen you burned as a menace (Europe) or all-but-worshipped as somebody obviously touched by the Gods (anywhere which today counts olive oil, tourism and sexually transmitted diseases as their major industries). In more civilized times, we locked the loonies up and gentry went to go and see them on Sundays, like Disneyland with nutters.
For a while, nutters were on telly – usually on reality tee vee shows pretending to be ‘real’ people. The reason that nobody realised they were screaming nutters rather than ‘characters’ (‘characters’ are to be tolerated, just ask anyone in a local boozah about the bloke in the corner with his trousers tied with hairy string and a brace of live ferrets performing inside the top hat he’s wearing and it will be explained he’s a ‘character’. In my experience character = slight smell of wee-usually the ferrets’) was that the antics of a dyed-in-the-wool nutter are practically identical to those of a game show presenter.
Now, nutters have moved to the courts.
Whatever you thought of Heather Mills, whatever position you took or did not take and even if you cared nary a toss, her performance outside the divorce court the other day was like watching a slow motion train wreck. A train carrying a load of monkeys all flinging excrement at each other. If Heather were a nuclear power station, this is the point where the big red ‘meltdown’ light would be flashing.
I guess the issue was: how could ANYONE complain about ANYTHING after being given twenty three million quid of somebody else’s money! There were many low points but my favourite (watching the scene from between the cracks in my fingers while hidden behind the sofa) was the fabulous point where she pointed out that Macca is obviously content to see his daughter travel B class while he travels A class. How I yearned for Macca to lean into camera and smugly explain ‘actually, I hire a private jet…just to go to the shops’.
If Heather ever wonders just when the British public decided she actually was a complete deranged chav bitch after all, it was that moment – when a lot of parents sat at home knowing that their kids would be travelling Z class, if at all, lost sympathy.
The other madman performing for the gentry this week was MoHarrods Al Fahyd. Mo is insisting that the royal family give evidence at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana, he’s convinced that they plotted her death. Now, I think we can cut the guy a certain amount of slack – he’s foreign – but there comes a point where one stops making sympathetic noises and starts muttering ‘nutter’. That point is when he accuses the Duke of Edinburgh of masterminding assassination plots.
The fortunes of the genuinely deranged have fluctuated over the years and depending on which culture you were born into. In the past, being a gibbering loon may have seen you burned as a menace (Europe) or all-but-worshipped as somebody obviously touched by the Gods (anywhere which today counts olive oil, tourism and sexually transmitted diseases as their major industries). In more civilized times, we locked the loonies up and gentry went to go and see them on Sundays, like Disneyland with nutters.
For a while, nutters were on telly – usually on reality tee vee shows pretending to be ‘real’ people. The reason that nobody realised they were screaming nutters rather than ‘characters’ (‘characters’ are to be tolerated, just ask anyone in a local boozah about the bloke in the corner with his trousers tied with hairy string and a brace of live ferrets performing inside the top hat he’s wearing and it will be explained he’s a ‘character’. In my experience character = slight smell of wee-usually the ferrets’) was that the antics of a dyed-in-the-wool nutter are practically identical to those of a game show presenter.
Now, nutters have moved to the courts.
Whatever you thought of Heather Mills, whatever position you took or did not take and even if you cared nary a toss, her performance outside the divorce court the other day was like watching a slow motion train wreck. A train carrying a load of monkeys all flinging excrement at each other. If Heather were a nuclear power station, this is the point where the big red ‘meltdown’ light would be flashing.
I guess the issue was: how could ANYONE complain about ANYTHING after being given twenty three million quid of somebody else’s money! There were many low points but my favourite (watching the scene from between the cracks in my fingers while hidden behind the sofa) was the fabulous point where she pointed out that Macca is obviously content to see his daughter travel B class while he travels A class. How I yearned for Macca to lean into camera and smugly explain ‘actually, I hire a private jet…just to go to the shops’.
If Heather ever wonders just when the British public decided she actually was a complete deranged chav bitch after all, it was that moment – when a lot of parents sat at home knowing that their kids would be travelling Z class, if at all, lost sympathy.
The other madman performing for the gentry this week was MoHarrods Al Fahyd. Mo is insisting that the royal family give evidence at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana, he’s convinced that they plotted her death. Now, I think we can cut the guy a certain amount of slack – he’s foreign – but there comes a point where one stops making sympathetic noises and starts muttering ‘nutter’. That point is when he accuses the Duke of Edinburgh of masterminding assassination plots.
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