Terrorists could never make 'Bake off' - their video's are shit!

Back when the world was black and white, people knew how to behave in front of the camera.  They stared into the lens as if hypnotised and spoke either in a sort of strangulated RP, or with a regional accent, usually northern.  Headscarves featured.

The popularisation of the family cine camera did little to lessen the public’s respect for film, which was finite and had to be processed by the chemist.  The early days of video cameras started to erode the mystique of moving images, when anyone could appear on their own telly and mistakes could be taped over, or sent to television shows so that you could appear on other peoples’ tellies with your skirt ticked into your knickers or something equally hilarious.

It took Yoohootube to make us realise that the democratisation of broadcasting proved that talent is not democratic, but the lack of it certainly is.

‘The Great British Bake Off’ is beyond Event Television, it is Phenomenon Television that has made stars of its presenters (a bloke apparently made of mahogany and a woman who is a cross between an Aunt Sally and Zelda from ‘Terrahawks’) and of the contestants.  How?  Two words: Peril!

Women directors like Jerry Bruckheimer strive to introduce peril into their movies, and usually do so by Blowing Shit Up while all the time threatening something that will make those explosions look like atom farts.  This can be a meteor, or a bomb, or a bomb strapped to a meteor.

But fuck that.  You want to know what peril is?  Peril is having your bake judged.  Anyone who has every put a plate of home baked biscuits down in front of a bunch of unsuspecting friends knows the moment of peril just after one of them takes the first bite.  The next thing out of their mouth had better be ‘that’s delicious’ and not ‘as I was saying…’ or ‘fuck, that’s atrocious’, because you can go from friend to cunt in one chew if you don’t praise the bake.  That’s what it means to bakers.  They all know this.  Anyone who has ever had their cooking criticised will know that there is only one reaction, a cocktail of shame and psychosis.

That’s why the audience are on the edge of their seats.

That, and the British fucking LOVE cake.  National game is cricket, yea?  Right, name me one other game, IN THE WORLD, that stops for lunch, and then for afternoon tea.  Test matches last for five days.  That’s ten opportunities to get some cake down you.  Think I’m kidding?  Google images of Mike Gatting and tell me that there’s a man who refuses carbs.

People look forward to Bake Off before it starts, enjoy it when it’s one and talk about it when it’s finished.  Know why?  Because it’s lovely.  This is a reality show where the only villain is time and whatever idiot confesses to bringing along any sort of store bought gadget or device.  Knocked up that cookie cutter in your shed?  Great!  Bought it?  You fucking disgust me!

Bake Off is British through and through.  The clue is in the title.  It’s great television and it demonstrates beyond a doubt that you need talent to appear on telly, either to make, present or just fucking cook scones badly on, you need talent.

A sword just don’t cut it.  Terrorists have taken to sharing their holiday videos with the world and the news media.  For what reason, Christ alone knows because if they think it’s somehow going to frighten, scare, intimidate or impress people, they really, really need to fire their audience research people.  The same audience that are nearly in tears when the old chap gets a hug from the Sex Pest on bake off and hang around to watch the news are then shouting ‘arsehole!’ at the bloke with his mum’s headscarf, a balaclava and a glaring deficiency in the girlfriend department.  Whatever terrorist videos are (and the only thing I can possibly think they are in internet terms is ‘troll bait’), they certainly aren’t good.

Think you’re tough?  Try baking two dozen identical flapjacks with the nation waiting to Tweet things about you?  No?  Thought not.

Haunted household objects

Unless you’re a collector, an enthusiast or a nutter, it’s more than likely that the things that fill your home are a mixture of the essential, the useful and the occasional luxury. If you have extra soft quilted loo paper then you’re covering all three categories there.

If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie dolls still in their boxes then you are collector. If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie doll heads that have been wrenched off their bodies, then you are nutter.

For most folk though ordinary, everyday households are, by and large, filled with ordinary, everyday objects that are, on the whole, fairly innocuous. Occasionally something has the capacity to be odd, creepy or sinister, if you have something that’s antique, or stuffed, or both, then this can often be the case. Folk had a different aesthetic and the Victorians in particular thought that no home was complete without a stuffed raven or a hunting scene diorama. Such items look a little incongruous today when placed on Ikea furniture.

Then there are things that are just too jolly to ever be creepy, like clockwork chickens! What’s not to love?


Paintings though, can be odd, in any number of ways. There’s the portrait where there’s something just not quite right; on the plus side, it may hold the key to a puzzle that will point the way to lost treasure (if you’re lucky it’s a figure pointing to the base of a familiar tree while holding a spade, if you’re unlucky it’s a figure sitting at a chess table which has been set up with a problem, in an unfamiliar landscape, with notes in mirror writing in a foreign language and you just have to hope beyond hope that the painter wasn’t a practical joker). Occasionally of course paintings provide useful places with assassins – with exactly the same eyes as the person in the painting – to lurk behind, peeping and awaiting their pouncing opportunity.

Or the painting of somewhere that turns out to have something of a gruesome history, which you only find out about after you’ve bought it. Or, always my favourite, the painting that actually changes appearance when you’re not looking.






M.R. James combined these to great effect in his short story ‘The mezziotint’. If you thought the scariest thing about buying art was the price tag, think again.

Art, of course, is all about provenance. That creepy washed out sketch on the wall, the one that’s signed ‘Vincent’, that’s worth something. But giving an object an interesting back story can also boost value, and nobody wants any romantic crap – it’s got to be action, adventure or, best of all, horror.

Clocks are another good example of an ordinary object that can, with the twist of a pen, become far more interesting as you note that it has, on more than one occasion, struck thirteen. Grease in the mechanism or something more sinister?

The oddest object I know of? A mass produced camera from the 1930s.


Why? Well, it’s all because of a comic. ‘The Collector’ was a British horror anthology comic that ran for precisely one issue in 1977. The story goes that it was beset with misfortune from the outset. Competing with an already crowded comics scene, not only did a distribution cock up mean that only a few copies made it into the shops (the remainder somehow being delivered to a chicken rendering plant where they were put to a use that is as baffling as it is unappetising), but it was released in the summer of Star Wars, and if your comic didn’t have wookies, robots, glowing swords and space ships, you were toast.

Frankly, an old fart who owned a junk shop making Hitchcock-like appearances in comic strips about haunted, cursed or otherwise macabre objects wasn’t cutting it, and The Collector sank after just one issue.

But not without a trace. The comic came with a free gift – allegedly the very same cursed poker chip that featured in the lead story.

Not long after, gruesome tales started circulating the playgrounds that kids who had been lucky, or unlucky, to get hold of the issue had come to bad ends, just like the owners of the chip in the story. The only thing that kids like doing more than teasing other kids is delivering tales of misfortune about their peers with more relish than you’d find in McTavishe’s House of Condiments.

Not many people remember ‘The Collector’ these days, (it’s unlikely you’ll even find a reference to it on the web) and the only time you’re likely to see an issue is bagged at some comics fair. The copies with the free gift still attached don’t sell well.

As for why this makes the camera creepy? One of the other stories was about an investigator of the paranormal brought in to investigate a mysterious death at a church, where the warden has apparently been scared to death. The investigator, armed with a camera to collect evidence, spends a night in the crypt and is found, the next morning, stone dead, a look of terror on his face. The camera has taken one shot; could it be that a photograph exists of something with the power to kill men with sheer terror. Is there a photograph of the devil himself? The collector isn’t saying.

Spooky enough? Well, the thing is, the story itself is based on a local myth from the area where I grew up. Okay, so I’m sure that just about every postcode with an old building of some sort has a story like that issued by the Department of Tourism. Heritage ghost stories are probably handed out to churches just like anyone with an interest in promoting tourism near a body of water bigger than a puddle can whip up a story about the creature in the lake. If you have a hotel on a moor or heath, it’s a difficult balancing act between making sure there are regular blurred photographs of ‘The Beast’ to intrigue visitors and hoping that nobody recognises that for the last one, you forgot to take Mr Tibbles’s collar off.

Thing is, and a friend of mine picked up a camera, just like the one in the story, at a church fete many years ago.

He’s never opened it but apparently it’s taken one exposure.

So the question I like to tease him with is this: did he buy a camera or did he buy the camera?

Does he have a camera, sitting on a shelf in his shed, that has a photograph of whatever was in that crypt?

He’s fairly pragmatic about it. Apparently he was expecting to pick up an antique, collectable, camera at the fete and flog it on Ebay, netting a tidy profit. Unfortunately the cameras were mass produced, are incredibly hard wearing and, as a result, they go for peanuts on auction sites. What he needs, he assures me, is a rumour that it’s not just a camera, it’s a camera with a story, a camera with a secret.

I asked him: do you really think I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than make up some tosh about a haunted camera and post it on my blog?

Tut.

Proper jobs

Trades come and go. During the industrial revolution one of the best trades to be in was being a child. A qualified child could pretty much turn their hand to anything, from working long hours in brutal conditions in a mill, to working long hours in brutal conditions down a mine, right up to understudy for Santa. These days, traditional work for children in England is pretty much restricted to thieving and being injured for the amusement of others on ‘you’ve been maimed’, although it would appear that exciting new prospects are opening up in the fields of lurking, being sullen in public and moaning. Traditional employment for children in textiles, mining and so on are still available in the developing world apparently but, frankly, that’s a hell of a commute.

Have I got a proper job? You’d have to ask somebody else.

But I do occasionally wonder if I might be better off doing something proper. Not important, Christ, I hope I’m self aware enough to realise that I can’t be trusted with the responsibility of anything that actually matters. Not even glamorous, I look terrible in sequins.

But I do think I’d make quite a good explorer.

All of the signs are there but principally my love of maps coupled with my inability to ask for directions and the absolute conviction that if you just keep going long enough you are bound to arrive at your destination or more probably something even more interesting. This, as far as I can understand it, is how most of the great discoveries of foreign parts were made, either sailors were looking for a quick route from A to B or merchants were trying to deliver silks and spices without so much wear and tear on the camels.

Most compelling of all though is my utter inability to travel light. Something tells me that a train of bearers would finally see an end to my ‘oh did I remember to pack?’ episodes part way through a journey. Yes, yes you did remember to pack it, because all that is left at home is a vague outline of a house in your garden. In fact your patio and shed are being erected for the night over there.

I’ve got a swiss army knife and a compass. Quite a good start I think. My long term aim is, of course, to have a country named after me but I have a sneaking suspicion that they have all been discovered. So either I have to be the first on the spot when the ice cap melts and there’s some rock, some dinosaurs and so on underneath, or I’ll just have to settle for a plateau.

While what I do might not be exciting, might in fact lead me to fantasise about being an explorer (always polar, never jungle), at least it’s better than being a clown. This, I’m pretty sure, has to be the lowest form of employment, because people who do it are generally doing it because they find it gratifying and, and this is the scary bit, they think others will too.

I mean, even a crack addict whore listlessly gobbling the cock of an overweight businessman in a car park is probably not thinking ‘this is a great performance’. I’d imagine he’s thinking ‘I hope this guy doesn’t realise I’m a man’ and possibly ‘Wow, I’d really like some crack’. Plenty has been written about clowns being more sinister than funny. I’d go further than that, I’d say they are so tragically unfunny that they kill any emotion in anyone watching, even fear. My proof? Why are there no clowns on youtube? If clowns were so frickin’ hilarious then why is the number one youtube video, week after week after week, not clown related? Having said that, clown in an industrial accident, fuck yea, five stars. But a clown doing his act on youtube, Jesus, how creepy would that be? Booked a clown for your kid’s party? No? then just watch this clip, with luck, it’s the one where the clown falls into a threshing machine. That’s why Mr Giggles can’t be here today kids.

That, and he’s a peado.

A sprinkling of stardust

There’s more excitement in the village than there’s been since the last informal running of the bulls. Discreet yellow signs point the way for ‘cars’ to go to ‘base’ and, intriguingly, ‘set’. It would appear that that crazy old business we call show has come to the village and judging by the plethora of vans, lights, gaffers, best boys and cables, we’re not just being sprinkled with stardust, we’re having it crapped all over us.

There appears to be a film unit at the Vicarage. The Vicarage is no longer the abode of the vicar, it was sold off years ago by the local church to raise money for either charity or to finance the vicar’s somewhat expensive tastes in fine vestments and booze, depending on who you believe.

Actually, I rather liked the old Vicar, he was an ex-RN type who could have come straight out of central casting, looking as he did like an aged version of the jolly mariner depicted on the front of a packet of Player’s Navy Cut. Word had it that the church thought so highly of his work in our delightful corner of a leafy shire that they packed him off to some inner-city parish. Apparently his beard covered most of the expression of shock he wore in his last months, but by no means all.

Whoever occupies the Vicarage, the finest house in the village, has obviously decided to supplement their income by hiring it out as a filming venue. The film unit have been there for a few days now and so I am assuming they are not taping a porno, although the way that films are made these days, maybe they are filming the original ‘Dirty Doinking’ and the sequels ‘Dirtier Doinking’ and ‘Filthy Doinking’ back to back. If they are filming back to back, it’ll be a pretty dull porno.

In fact, the presence of blokes in puffa jackets grunting into walkie talkies, that staple of the film industry, indicates the sort of production likely to end up actually on the box rather than on youhootube. It has gathered remarkably little attention. When I were a lad it would have been the subject of considerable interest, now everyone has a video camera and puts their own film together to broadcast to their mates, even if this is just happy slapping a rotweiller until it comically savages them (I’d give that three stars, four if the dog eats the camera after eating the tormenter).

Or maybe it’s just the wrong type of entertainment. With interior filming in an old house, this is likely to be something that means tight breeches on the men and plunging necklines on the women, Jane Dickens or similar. Of more interest no doubt would be a talent show. Indeed, I’ve worked out the perfect talent show formula – acts are not even allowed to perform, they simply turn up in a room and have abuse hurled at them and their dreams shattered for the entertainment of a baying mob who can, by pressing the red button, activate a hose that shoots liquid shit at the hapless soul at 800psi until they stop screaming. Surely that is kinder than the seconds of suspense that come between the host saying ‘the result of the vote is that you are…’ and the word ‘fucked!’ or ‘Coming back next week’.
For my generation at least, seeing local views on telly is still a bit special. For many, the glamour fades when the view is partially obscured by a BBC reporter in a flak jacket, or a line of riot police, but there’s something about seeing something familiar treated in an unfamiliar way that fascinates, like when they put straw down in front of an old building and, hey presto, it’s the Victorian age, marred only slightly by the double glazing and the satellite dish.

Of course those desperate to break into the business could just hang around the set hoping that the leading man meets with an accident like ‘being bludgeoned by an ambitious local’, or try to get a part by giving the director a blow job. If it’s a porno, that’s the audition.

The sweet smell of success

In a masterwork of procrastination, I spent the morning watching the video blog ‘RocketBoom’. This 3 minute daily short video discusses techhie issues with a wry, dry and oh-so-amusing spin. The presenter is super-hot, which doesn’t hurt.

Several of the pre-Christmas postings were about ‘memes’ – postings of images or, more recently, short videos - that have attracted gazillions of views and then gigazillions of parodies on video hosting sites – think some freak blubbing over Britney and you’re there.

That so many people could watch the image of somebody blubbing is the last word in the democratisation of celebrity in the internet age. Forget fame, you can now be infamous and you don’t even have to kill anyone to do it.

If you have a video camera and a PC you can have your own television show. If nobody watches it you can just pretend that it’s worthy like they do with ‘real’ telly. If everyone hates it you can feel misunderstood and plaster on the black mascara. So everyone can be sorta, kinda, famous, even if it means that the world doesn’t know your name, but rather calls you ‘blubbing guy’.

This diluting of being in, on or around the media seems to have a pretty profound effect on ‘grown-ups’, so I wonder what it’s like for adolescents? I wonder if the most popular girl in school has her own page or blog or youtube channel that acknowledges she is the most popular girl in school – or is that shot to buggery because ordinary girl has more pokes on facebook because she knows a hell of a lot about Star Trek.

Ordinary people are acting like celebrities by recording their own teevee programmes. Celebrities are acting like ordinary people by getting out of cars without any pants on – this means that here is only one real test of whether or not you are a real live celebrity – do you have your own fragrance?

Because it’s easy to lip-synch to ‘nothing compares to you’ while shaving your own head and so be that day’s hit on youtube, but it’s less easy to market the smell of you.

Which is why the most popular girl in school will always be the most popular girl in school – because if the most popular girl at my school when I was a teen had turned up and started flogging bottles of her own scent, there would be a queue of sweaty adolescents round the block ready to pay good money for a sniff of Jane.

My kind of marathon

Thanks to the magic of youhootube or whatever it’s called, I’ve spent about nine solid hours this weekend slumped on a sofa binging on ‘Black Books’. Marathon sessions of any programme are when you find out if they are really good; does the programme have the ability to silence that part of your brain that is telling you that you are Wasting Your Weekend, that you should Be Doing Something, even if it’s just opening the curtains, showering or getting out of your dressing gown.

Luckily, the part of my brain – the ‘perky section’ – that tells the rest of me that it should go for a walk and enjoy the majesty of the turning leaves and the brisk Autumn air has a hard enough time fighting my internal sloth without having to put up with external influences.

So sofa it was. I have to admit that things got a little tricky about a third of the way in, when my hangover abated long enough for me to realise I was hungry, but by putting together a running buffet on a plate, I was able to bring by starch, salt and fat levels up to optimum. I was then able to spend the next two hours fighting nausea but at least fighting nausea on a full stomach.

So it’s dark now and too late to Do Anything. Well, not quite dark, fireworks light the night all colours and bangs and pops make the place sound like downtown Bagdad on any night of the week. The air is no longer fresh but has the fresh tang of borderline legal Chinese gunpowder. Opening the curtains does reveal rockets and other skybourne fireworks, but also makes you wonder what you’re missing as you watch back gardens light up with what you hope is an impressive firework rather than, you know, somebody getting pissed and throwing paint thinner on the barbeque.

Tomorrow night is bonfire night, best enjoyed with a mug of soup stirred by a sausage – with a sparkler stuck in it. It’s also the first year when I think I shall try launching my rockets Pakistani style – in a BBC report recently celebrating Parkistani men (it’s always bloody men isn’t it) were seen gripping the stalks of rockets and then lighting them. Jesus, what savagery…can these third world idiots not afford a decent pair of gardening gloves – I bet not one of them even owns a decent set of pruning shears.

Who's who?

There’s currently speculation in the media, and nowhere else, that the announcement about Doctor Who being ‘rested’ for 2008 means David Tennant will hand over to a new Doctor in 2009. Complete tosh to fill up column inches, but it at least prompted the following thoughts:

In the short time between the revival of Doctor Who and the announcement of its hiatus, there have been a couple of changes to British cultural life that will make the casting of the next Doctor entertaining; these are the growth of Yooohoootube type internet sites and the ascendance of the televised ‘talent’ show as a) a way to find a leading man, b) a way to raise revenue for charity causes/evil masterminds depending on your channel of choice and c) a method of reducing the sum level of human decency on the planet by crushing the dreams of some Enya wannabe who is so untalented it boarders on being a learning disability and who’s expression on being told that they can’t sing is not unlike that of a bride being unexpectedly pelted with baboon excrement.

The BBC could make a fortune by having the role of the new Doctor as an open call. And of course at the end they could just fix the result. More than that, they could make a small fotune by having a ‘phone vote on the name of the show - ‘Is there a Doctor in the house?’, ‘Paging Doctor Who?’, ‘Who you?’, ‘Are you Who?’ are just four shit examples of how titling shows is best left to creative people rather than, say, me. Hell, I couldn’t even come up with a decent working title for the show, traditionally an anagram of the final show, although calling it ‘ghzxcvzrebshkjsiuhgs’ would mean it scored really high at scrabble and would automatically sell to Polish TV.

Want to be the next Doctor? Then get your audition reel on YouTube now! All across the nation Dads are depriving their toddlers of safety scissors and glue in a frenzy of set construction. Home-made daleks are coming to life in garages and sheds and Christmas lights are being turned into ‘special effects’ through the simple expedient of nailing them to whatever silver foil is left over from the manufacture of the cyber-man for showreel two!

Youtube is full of people who can’t act and who think they can. But that’s okay, because so is Eastenders. It’s the perfect place to house all of the ‘cast me as Doctor who’ videos. You would even be able to categorise them: ‘just a bit of fun’, ‘ironic’, ‘funny but hopeful’, ‘earnest’ and ‘terrifying’ and, knowing just how intense some fans can get about Doctor Who (they make the deranged fan in Enimenenenens ‘Stan’ look positively ambivalent), this is likely to be the most populous and popular category.

As for the identity of the 11th Doctor…please God let it be me! I know I can’t act and I’m not handsome or charismatic but I do have my own sonic screwdriver. Which you’ll see, sharpened to a point and held against the chubby throat of Russel T Davis in a youtube video I like to call ‘cast me you bastard or I’ll open you up like a gay welsh courgette!’

(Not really, I don’t condone violence, homophobia or the use of vegetables)

Cultural Guides

I suppose that travel is what you make it. The problem is that so many people conspire to make it as unpleasant as possible, from Ringtone Joe on the train through Fastlane Fuckwit on the roads to, possibly more seriously, terrorists in the air (or malicious baggage handlers, they’re about on a par).

I was on the motorway this weekend, travelling to see my family and as usual my wife saw the opportunity of our being trapped together in a speeding metal box for two hours as an excellent opportunity to discuss our relationship in circumstances that make my trying to step out the door deeply inadvisable.

So that was time well used, but it’s not always the case. A lot of the time travel is limbo, you’re in hiatus as you travel from point to point. A good example were the airport cabs I saw, travelling from Gatwick to Heathrow, ferrying folk from one airport to another, presumably to make a connecting flight. The journey is about an hour, which is a short time in terms of air travel, but a long time to waste. Which got me thinking.

More and more cars these days have these in-car DVD players, to make sure that the kids get in-car DVT rather than getting exercise and entertainment through the traditional routes of squabbling, fighting and violent bouts of travel-sickness. Most travellers are curious about the country they are visiting or about to visit - so why not have a ‘cultural guide’ DVD in the car. No segment longer than two minutes, talking about all the things you really need to know about in a country; tipping, how to avoid being roped into folk-dancing, how to greet the chap standing at the urinal next to you, that sort of thing. You can use the DVD menu to navigate the various categories and geographical areas and, of course, you can listen to it in the language of your choice (note to manufacturer, always get the translation checked, you don’t want what you think is an Armenian translation of your piece about the canals of Birmingham to actually being a bloke saying: ‘visiting Birmingham? Then make sure to visit Jeff’s knocking shop, only two minutes from the station’).

Of course the real place for this sort of programme is on YouTube as a cultural guide channel. Every programme is a maximum of two minutes, talking about one feature of your town and the thing is, you can make stuff up! I’d love to see some proud local strolling through the pretty but unremarkable graveyard of his village church pointing out the burial places of Shakespeare, Dickens, JFK, Elvis and Frodo Baggins.

Everybody must have one feature of their home town they are proud of. I’d like to see somebody standing in front of a kebab van extolling the virtues of chilli sauce with the sort of brio you normally associate with a travel journalist doing a spot in front of the Taj Mahal. Or got an area where you want to advise visitors to avoid? How about a dispatch from Dog Shit Alley wearing a BBC approved flak-vest.

On the plus side, a balanced an honest view of the off-beat delights of an area may be refreshing, the only drawback is that after seeing a few cultural guides, the tourist may well ask to tell the cabbie to turn the car round and head for home.