http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/23/television-nudity-recession-credit-crunch

When things are tough, the proles need distracting. Sorry, entertaining. Originally, this took the form of bread and circuses, an idea that was updated to glitzy cinema in the Great Depression and titillating telly now, because in a modern context there is nothing entertaining about watching a poppy seed topped artisan baked granary bloomer being fought over by a couple of clowns. Although if the recession keeps up and ticket sales continue to fall at Boppo’s Circus, we may well end up being confronted with this spectacle, after they’ve eaten all the circus animals, and the weaker of the acrobats.

Entertainment keeps the proles in their seats cheering (or out of their seats cheering if they are watching ‘Clown Fight’, a new show I have just invented) when they might usefully be doing something else, like turning into an angry, jeering mob and marching on some seat of power. Removing your undies might be empowering, but I bet it’s not a patch on lynching a Fat Cat.

Television is certainly doing a very good job of tacking the various issues that cause, and stem from, a global economic downturn with programmes that are about as substantial as the froth from a fwapachino sold by a coffee chain who’s business model is predicated on people not wanting change from a fiver for a paper cup full of warm milk. This includes the news, where efforts to kick-start the economy have been made by the graphics department submitting their overtime forms. No item about the current economic conditions is complete without a graphic featuring more arrows than were seen at Little Big Horn.

And just what is the correct term for the slowdown that turned into a downturn that turned into a credit crunch that turned into a recession that is turning into a depression that will eventually end up as…what? We need a new term, a term for the catastrophic financial situation we find ourselves in. It has to be a new term you see because, like everything else that has happened before but is happening again now, it’s more important this time round because it’s happening to us!

That’s where television is failing us. On the news, the current economic climate could be better summed up by a correspondent crying and screaming while he soils himself and then sets himself on fire than a computer generated arrow. As for entertainment, surely what we need now is one of those shows that used to be so popular in the seventies, where society has collapsed and people live a grim existence in an isolated farmhouse fending off feral neighbours an worrying about the reappearance of the Plague. I remember this sort of thing fondly because it used to be on on a Sunday tea-time because it was considered appropriate kiddies’ programming. This was because it raised themes of subverting authority which caused kids to consider how they might fare in a world that was 99% depopulated but also because it was incredibly cheap to make, because by way of props all you needed was a land rover and a shotgun. Well, it certainly prepared me for the dystopian present, I know that all you need to survive when civilization implodes is access to a farm house, flares (trousers, not distress) and an ill tempered old fellow who, nevertheless, is the only bloke left who knows how to make petrol from stoats.

This is probably the format of the next Big Brother.

We don’t need nudity. We need a programme called ‘who’s to blame’ where every week an angry mob of clowns try, convict and lynch somebody who may have had something to do with the recession (‘Clown Court’?) because, let’s stop being distracted by the pink wrinkly bits on show after the watershed, somebody out there is responsible for making the high street resemble a post apocalyptic scene where a finance smart bomb has destroyed all the shops with a poor business model. Mind you, I see that a bag of pick ‘n’ mix went for twelve grand at action last week; maybe if Woolies had managed to sustain that sort of business, they’d still be trading.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/16/walkers-crisps-new-flavours-brooker

‘In these health-conscious times, potato crisps have a bad reputation. Gone are the days when you could walk down the street cheerfully snuffling through a pack of Smokey Bacon.’

Ah yes, I recall that Posy Simmons cartoon about a couple of ‘foodyobs’ shopping at a lone olde fashioned shoppe and topping up on proper crispy type crisps, then breathing them all over the macrobiotic organic hand-knitted foodinistas on the pavement outside. But that was the 80’s…

…now, thanks to the eradication of manners and standards by the sort of people who eat with their fingers, think a knife is for stabbing other hoodies and think a fork is something that you do to your biatch, it’s perfectly acceptable to consume the convenience food of your choice while meandering along, dropping onion slices to the left, fries to the right and curses and ringtones fore and aft. Crisps? Crisps? Eating a bag of crisps is the equivalent of fine dining.

More than that, it’s fun to have the full crisp experience near burger-schlorping trolls. You open your bag and then rustle it, simulating the sound of autumnal leaves and confusing the troll into thinking that winter is approaching (watch them eat faster in an attempt to put on weight for their winter hibernation). Then carefully extract one crisp after another and consume delicately, showing the troll how snacks should be snacked, masticating carefully and avoiding the scattergun approach the troll employs that so often results in the partial consumption of the carton. Finally, blow up the bag, stand behind the troll and bring your hands together in a mighty clap that simultaneously bursts the bag and the bowels of the troll as he thinks it’s all kicking off. It’s a well known fact that a bag of crisps burst in a bus shelter sounds exactly like a converted .33 starting pistol, making the troll think he is the victim of an assassination attempt by the bloke that used to start the egg-and-spoon race at his primary school.

There have always been experiments with crisps; anyone who remembers ‘bones’ or ‘fangs’ or even ‘space invaders’ will know that when it comes to being inventive, the manufacturers of artificially flavored puffed corn snacks have a taste for novelty exceeding the sort of person who spend their spare time nailing owls to clocks.

There are certain base states of crisp that will always be with us. Salt and vinegar is salt and vinegar even when it’s called maldon sea scab and sarson dripping. Indeed half the fun of buying artisan crisps is trying to decode the flavours; is ‘congealed lactate and flatlander root’ cheese and onion or cause to take yourself off to the doctors?

Then there are the classics. Cheese puff corn snack. These always taste better abroad because the EU banned the stuff that makes them really orange and really cheesy and now you can only get the good stuff in countries that border on rogue food states that take a relaxed attitude to using the same colouring that goes into flourescent jackets and traffic cones in a snack.

The Walkers exercise is, while fun, somewhat redundant. The acme of food science and snack has already been reached. Pickled Onion flavoured Monster Munch. As a child, I recall that these, and some orange squash, put me in a state of excitement that it would now be hard to reproduce even using a combination of class A narcotics, horse liniment and skydiving. Any snack that actually makes your eyeballs itch and your mouth taste like the sort of site Greenpeace protest at the establishment of is not just good, it’s great.

But voting? What a waste of time. Voting gives us mediocrity. What you need is a food dictatorship, that’s why chefs come off as tinpot Nazis, because too many cooks really do spoil the lark tongue and stoat ear soufflé and in a kitchen you need a free range git calling the shots. What you need for crisp flavours is a group of food scientists with no morals, stained orange lab coats and a permanent tangy fur on their tongue, and it’s that tangy fur that’s the next great flavour.