I hate almost everything about A Question of Sport. Particularly presenter Sue Barker, an orange leather sofa cushion in human form. But most of all, I hate the way the panellists are always getting up out of their seats.
They're always doing something. Always jumping up and down, or standing up and rotating their heads from side to side, or waving their arms around. I mean, what is this? A chimps' tea party?
Just sit down, sit still and answer the fucking questions. Idiots.
I tell you what gets me about Nelson Mandela: he's a selfish bastard.
I was 11 years old when he finally checked out of his cell on Robben Island. And what day does he choose to come out? The day I've set the video timer to record the wrestling. So the next morning, as I replayed the tape, all I had was two hours of news footage of Mandela making his long (and, might I say, boring) walk to freedom.
He'd been in there 27 years. Another night wouldn't have killed him.
I never did find out if the Ultimate Warrior beat Rick Rude in that steel cage match.
Here's my experience of the House Party:
You arrive far, far too early. It becomes apparent that you're horribly overdressed. You attempt to introduce yourself to some new people. They mishear your name. You don't correct them. Your misheard name spreads around the party like wildfire. You pass the point of no return. You spend the entire evening responding to the name "Don."
An argument that threatens to get nasty. It doesn't.
Someone juggles. Everyone goes on about it.
You make a really good joke. No one hears it. You wonder whether it's OK to make it again. You do make it again. Everyone does hear it. No one laughs.
You tell your host you're leaving. He tells you his DJ mate hasn't even arrived yet. You pretend you've got another party to go to "before sun-up." You wonder whether "sun-up" made you sound a bit Crocodile Dundee. It did.
You go home. You drink a glass of milk. You put your jim-jams on. You realise that while internet-based social networking sites will doubtless bring about the end of modern civilisation, at least you'll no longer have to physically spend time with people.
First it was kids TV. Then it was boybands. Now it’s violent crime.
I was watching Richard and Judy the other day (or at least my girlfriend was. Richard and Judy are her fantasy parents. Although Richard's just a step-dad. She's very specific about that) and they were hosting a phone-in on mugging. At one point Richard said - and I'm quoting here: "In my day, nobody carried knives. They just roughed you up a bit and took your wallet."
Incredible. There was, apparently, a golden age of mugging. A gentler, less complicated age, when mindless thugs would only beat the living shit out of you before they stole everything you owned.
Bring back flogging, I say. Oh, and 5ive. I quite liked them.
The most miserable weekend of my entire life was spent at the Glastonbury festival. My abiding memory is of moping around at six in the morning in soggy trousers, eating vegetable tempura and drinking cheap whiskey. It was like being locked inside a Scotland simulator for three days. Needless to say, I never went back.
So you can imagine my delight when I checked the Glastonbury weather forecast today and saw this:
Three solid days of biblical downpour!
You know that day that Travis Bickle was on about, the one when the real rain was gonna come to wash the scum off the streets? Well guess what folks - it's TODAY! And since "Glasto" (spit) is now exclusively attended by rich old hippies, coked-up millionare clotheshorses and clean-cut, mummy-loving JK & Joel-types, Glastonbury '07 is officially the tsunami it's OK enjoy.
So happy trenchfoot, shitbirds.
It's the arms that get me. Those toned, muscled, boyband arms. There's something incredibly creepy about a cutesy, smiling, friendly cartoon dog with a physique like a twenty-something gym instructor.
The head says: "Hiya! I just wanna be your friend!" The body says: "And then I want to carry you into that bedroom, lay you down and make love to you."
Romantic sex with a cartoon St. Bernard: not something that makes me want to buy travel insurance. For future reference.
I mean Jesus pal, I know we're all struggling to find good jeans at the moment - what with the whole skinny-fit thing - but are they really the best you could do?
These jeans encapsulate all that's bad - and all that can be bad - about trousers. Stonewashed, covered in pockets, slightly tapered, these are jeans so monumentally horrid they provide the clearest evidence yet of the godless, infinitely cruel nature of the universe.
Stonewashed combat trousers: they're not OK. Unless you want to look like the head of a Belgian paedophile ring.
What do you buy the man who has everything? An FM shower radio. Obviously. But what do you buy the man who has everything and an FM shower radio? Well that's easy. A 10-inch plastic pool table.
The executive mini-sport is literally the least useful thing money can buy. A note to mums: the next time you're shopping for birthday presents and you catch yourself thinking, "I could just give him the money, but I know he'd only spend it on a miniature ping-pong set," put the credit card away and return home.
As for me, I've got the mini ping-pong, the mini table football, the mini ten-pin bowling and the mini mini-golf. You should see my loft. It looks like a gang of really sporty midgets has broken in and set up a youth club.
I'm uniquely appalling at Taxi Driver Smalltalk. I want to say: "There's an extra two quid in it for you if we can just sit here in silence." But I don’t. Instead, just to avoid the awkward silence, I unleash my one and only piece of taxi-based chit-chat:
"So, what time are you on until?"
I barely even understand the significance of this question, I just heard my dad ask it once. And despite the fact that I've asked it literally hundreds of times, I can't remember what a single one of them has said. Which means I have no frame of reference. What is a respectable time to be on until? 3am? 4am? 5am? I don't know. So when they reply, I just have to wing it.
"Oh, that's not too bad," I say, like I'm some kind of expert in the field of taxi driver working hours.
Then I make a big play of getting my mobile out, and I do some pretend-texting for a bit.
I try to be a good human. I strive to always see the best in people, to never indulge in blind hatred against my fellow man, to never wish ill or accident or tragedy on others. But holy shit, Justin Lee Collins can really test a man's patience.
To be honest I was already struggling with the hair, the beard and the West Country accent. Then he goes and adds the red highlights. It's like he's determined to turn his head into the most detestable five-kilogram mass of solid matter in the cosmos.
Not that I hate him, you understand. I'm pretty much OK with everything from the neck down.
Some people just have too many gimmicks. I met this bloke the other day and he was an actor (ding!), a former lottery winner (ding ding!) and he lived on a houseboat (ding ding ding!). Each one of these in isolation could spawn a litany of nicknames. (Three off the top of my head: Sir Act-a-lot, Lottery Face, Houseboat.) And while he's sitting there on his gimmick mountain, some poor bastards have barely got a foible to their name.
Obviously pirates were the original Gimmick Hogs. They've always got something. An eye-patch, a peg leg, a metal hook, a giant hoop earring, a tattoo, a bandana… You never see a pirate and think, "Well he certainly could do with an accessory."
I propose a strict 'one gimmick per-person' policy from now on. As for how we go about enforcing it, I'll leave that for the bigwigs at Whitehall to sort out.
The standard deal is, I believe, 72 virgins. If it was me, I'd need a quick word with Allah about all this:
1) For starters I wouldn't want virgins, I'd want slags. Virgins are no good to me. I might have time to tutor one or two virgins in the dark art of "getting freaky", but 72? Plus, think of all the cuddling afterwards. Also, slags are more of a laugh.2) I really don't want 72 of them. What if I find one slag that I get on really well with? How I am supposed to keep the other 71 entertained? Say it's raining outside, they've already done the Sudoku. Then I'm just going to end up feeling guilty. I'll settle for two. Maybe three. But they must be slags. I really can't specify that enough.
Not that I'd carry out a suicide bombing in the first place. 72 virgins? Knowing my luck I'd end up with the Blazin' Squad.
I'm at a party. Someone asks me what I do for a living. I tell them. "Oh," they say. Then their little face lights up and they hit me with it:
"You should write a sitcom about this!"
Whatever situation we're in at that time, no matter how dull or unfunny it is, they implore me to turn it into six 30 minute episodes of narrative comedy. One person I met - and this is no word of a lie - suggested I write a sitcom about… (wait for it) … a man who sweats exclusively through his head. I mean, wow. Where do you go with that? (Answer: "To ITV2." They weren't interested.)
If I meet double-glazing salesmen at parties, I don't say, "You should build a conservatory here! And you could have, like, a small step down to the garden, and-and-and really big south-facing windows!"
So thanks for the input, but please, give it a rest. To be honest, I have enough crappy sitcom ideas of my own without you chipping in.
I'm not talking about the obscene ones. I enjoy those. My current favourite is entitled "Hymen Penetrator." (Unless I'm very much mistaken, isn't that one of the lesser Geldofs?)
The ones that really get me are the more personally insulting spam emails. Like the message I received the other day simply entitled, "You Fanny."
Now I don't know exactly what the sender of this message was trying to sell me, but his sales technique certainly was unorthodox.
"YOU FANNY! Would you like to buy some Viagra?"So if you're reading this Mr Horseshoe E. Thimbleful (although I'm starting to wonder whether that is your real name), cheers, but I think I'll leave it.
Don't get me wrong. I hate the official London Olympic logo too. (Although respect to the accompanying video for giving people epileptic seizures. If nothing else, this proves that epileptics AREN'T COMPATIBLE with the future. And surely it's better that we know that ahead of time.)
But the more national newspapers attempt to prove that a child with a pencil crayon could do better, the more I come to appreciate the highly-expensive efforts of the Wolf Ollins advertising agency.
Exhibit A: the effort above. I mean, HOLY SHIT. The London Eye, a Double-decker bus and Big Ben all in the same logo! And as if that wasn't quite British enough, they've topped it off with the classic 'café menu' font.
Frankly, if my child drew that I'd take him to see a specialist.
For some people, it's the plastic wrapper on their sofas. For others, it's the scratch-proof sheet on the screen of their mobile phone.
For my dad, it was the protective film on the miniature plastic piano from the 1990s boardgame Noteability.
Now I understand why you might want to keep your actual piano scratch-free. It's a highly valuable instrument, probably a much-loved family heirloom. But the Noteability piano? The battery-powered, two-inch high, horribly whiny Noteability piano? The one manufactured in a Taiwanese sweatshop?
And yet nothing and no one could get him to remove that scratch-guard. Lord knows why. Maybe he had visions of me playing a recital on it at his funeral. A really tinny rendition of Amazing Grace, perhaps.
And so for years my dad's much-loved Noteability piano remained in pristine condition. Until last month, when he tossed it into a skip.
Officially it's the Soul Patch. You might know it better as the TwatLip. I refer, of course, to that noxious little cloud of hair that lingers - like a pervert by the school gates - just below the bottom lip.
This is a beard for clean-cut jock-types who don't have the balls for the full-on Brian Blessed. People who don't deserve a beard. It's for wealthy white folk with nothing better to do than sit around, noodling with their facial hair.
The Soul Patch: truly the fretless bass of beards.
It might seem harmless enough, but that's what they said about the Toothbrush Moustache. And the Toothbrush Moustache? Try the Hitler Moustache.
A genocidal world leader with a Soul Patch by 2050. Bet on it.
You're stuck at the traffic lights, sweating bullets in the heavy overcoat you knew you shouldn't have worn, when the stupidest idea you'll ever have dances through your brain like an epileptic on roller-skates: "Maybe I could take my coat off! Here! In the car! In this tiny, enclosed space! Even though I've only got, say, 10 seconds until the lights change!"
So you go for it. You've got one eye on the lights, the other on the zip. You're undoing the seatbelt with the left hand, frantically tugging at your sleeve with the right. Arms flail. You're knocking the windscreen wipers on, resetting the radio presents, altering the angle of the interior mirror.
And then - somehow, someway - you wriggle your way free. The truth is, no one's actually sure what happens if you don't remove your coat before the lights change.
All I know is, I don't want to be the one who finds out.
'This Rubbish Smiley Face With Its One Big Stupid Ear' is part of a newspaper advert for a mortgage company. "Phone us now," says the advert. To hammer the point home, it illustrates the concept of telephone communication via what can only be described as a cross between a 1950s emoticon and that laboratory mouse with the human ear growing on its back.
"Call now to talk to a sympathetic ear who will try to help," says the advert underneath.
Wait. "A sympathetic ear who will try to help"? You mean, if I call that number I'm literally talking to the big stupid ear? Not a qualified mortgage advisor. Not even the rubbish smiley face. Just the big stupid ear.
Mortgage advice. From a big stupid ear. I really don't think so.
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