The David Cameron Nightmare Seed.

Hello, people.  How are you today?  Good?  Filled with nonsense and joie de vivre?  Want to have that stripped away from you in the most brutal way possible?  Of course you do.

Look at this face:

Really look at it, ignoring its graininess^*.  Many of you know this smug, horrible avatar of greedy privilege.  Some call him reptilian, but I think that gives reptiles grounds to sue.  See those shark-like dot eyes, black with caustic ideology.  I bet you can hear his voice, spouting shit so corrosive it's easy to believe his heart doesn't pump blood, but pure bile^**.

Now imagine that face, hovering over you, flushed red^† with sweat.  Perspiration forming rivulets and running down his nose to drip into your eye.  Hair plastered to his head.  His arms shake with the effort of keeping him above you.  He grins at you in post-coital goofiness and withdraws his rapidly diminishing erection, wiping it on your thighs as he does.

He flops down onto his side with a long, drawn-out sigh.  He reaches across to his discarded trousers, fishes in the pockets, pulls out his wallet and peels off few notes.  These notes he carefully shoves into your mouth until you gag, his post-coital smile still in place, never.  As you are about to vomit he lets go and punches you in the face.

Not pretty.

Now, if you're Scottish, think about that.  Think about any future Prime Minister of any party, sitting in Westminster, erection and fists at the ready.  I could say so much more, but I'll leave that there for you to think about.

^* Maybe I should have black-and-whited it.

^** Or you're a Tory and think he's a capitalist hero, in which case I am sorry for your illness.

^† Redder, if you want to be entirely accurate.  I'm always going for accuracy.  Except for when I can't be arsed.


Will

Riffling some brain folds.

On the off chance it's escaped your attention, I like films.  I like all kinds of films. Horror, action, comedy, fantasy, thrillers, dramas and on rare instances even a western. I have a curious relationship with the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Yes, that's a brave statement to make, I know, I'm a hero.  You can sit down from your ovation now and let me speak so that you, too, may understand.

I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here.  In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it.  If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.

When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day.  The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying.  When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer^* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax.  I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.

Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years.  There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question.  Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering.  I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.

Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed!  The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog.  Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way.  The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him.  Hacking the school's computer.  He commits several kinds of fraud^** including impersonating a police officer.  Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories.  And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this.  Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron^†.

My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film!  How can this be?  My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it.  He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world.  I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters.  You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.

As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend.  It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma.  For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.

In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding.  I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel.  I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science^‡.  I've even gone in a similar direction.

For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later.  He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane.  He's got a good life.

One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat.  Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life.  Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor.  Tom says she reminded him of his mother.

Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs.  Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future.  Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.

There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character.  I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?

^* Bonus!  Played by Charlie Sheen!

^** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.

^† I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.

^‡ This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.


Will

Oh, I can't be bothered changing the channel...

“On the first day of Christmas TV gave to me,
Hours of depressing soap operas!”

It’s the season to be merry, have fun, relax (kind of…well not really, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?), overeat, over drink and sit down to watch some bad television. Y’know, the stuff that the channels have been hooting and hollering about since the end of October.

Every year, for those of us who watch any television, we switch on the goggle box whenever we manage to roll out of bed and after we’ve unwrapped our presents and we hope beyond reasonable hope that this year it will be different. This year our expectations will be, if not met, at least given something to chew on.

We will look out on the Arctic nightmare the outside world has become, this year we’re looking at heavy snowfalls and sub zero temperatures, and feel cosy as we curl up in front of the television.

(The bookies must be shitting themselves this year. Hoping that we’ve had all the snow we’re going to get in 2009. Y’see, snow lying on the ground doesn’t make it an official White Christmas, snow falling does.)

We want to be enthralled, entertained, made happy that its Christmas and that we don’t need to interact with our relatives, alternatively grinning at us like they want eat some vital part of our anatomy or scowling at us like they want to eat some vital part of our anatomy. Yes, you’ve given us some lovely gifts and I’m most grateful, honestly, but right now could you stop staring at me like you’re one of the cast from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and let me inure myself to the season with something mindlessly amusing flickered into my brainstem.

Yes, we get the odd gem of good telly. Things like ‘Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death’ and a good film from four years ago will be highlights, but they tend to be few and far between, stuck amongst things like the Queen’s Christmas Speech and any number of rank smelling dramas and television shows that wouldn’t be allowed on air at any other time.

I mean Noel Edmonds is a master of bringing us foetid television, the worst being (and I’m not the only person to note this and I may even have been pointed in the direction by Charlie Brooker, so what? This is the internet, I don’t no stinking original ideas!) ‘Noel’s HQ’ and ‘Noel’s Christmas Presents’. Horrific examples of celebrity guilt schmaltz that would make Frank Capra break out into hives.

Then you have the catering to the soap opera junkies. These poor, zombified souls have been steadily hooked more and more by these insidious dramas, going from being shown two or three nights a week to encroaching on every night. Now the vicarious living that’s offered by these programmes is ingrained in quite a portion of the UK population.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the portrayals of life in these fictional places was, y’know something akin to real life with ups and downs, but the wisdom of dramatic imperative for programmes like ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Emerdale’, ‘River City’ (which is only in Scotland, the rest of the UK can heave a sigh of relief about that) and the grand master of them all ‘Eastenders’ is that life for working class people is a never-ending slog from one kind of deep misery to another. The characters listlessly go through their joyless existences until they are swept off the mortal coil in some way so tragic that it stops you from wanting to get up in the morning. Unless a character comes into the show when they are older, they are unlikely to reach anything approaching old age – most of them are lucky if they make it out of their teens. And don’t even get me started on the miraculous metamorphoses that take place.

The grand high wizard of this crushing misery is ‘Eastenders’, a programme so morose that you’d be lucky to see an actor smile in a month, let alone an episode. These people live such uncertain, tragic and short lives that you wonder why anyone would want to live in Albert Square. Murder, rape, insanity, disease and disaster are staples of soap opera life, but only ‘Eastenders’ is innovative enough to pile it all onto the one character. Yes. Yes! They are visionaries in their desperation to keep the viewers coming to the show.

And the Christmas episodes are the jewel in the miserable crown of the ‘Eastenders’ year. A day when they have to double the depression. We are treated to an hour long episode filled with less Christmas cheer than in the city centre of Tehran.

Which brings the thought of what the writers would do if they could get away with it. I mean, they seem to be so keen to portray life with such grey joylessness, and bleak desolation, why not step it up, take it to the next level? I’ve been thinking about this and it wouldn’t be that hard. It would actually be cheaper than their normal offerings, whether they used special effects…or not.

It start like this: you open with the ‘Eastenders’ theme tune as normal, then you would have the characters all sitting in the Queen Vic. All of the tables and chairs have been removed so that everyone has to sit down. As you have come to expect, no one is smiling, but this time there is quite a concrete reason for this – they are all holding shotguns in their mouths.

Slowly the camera pans across their faces, the deadness created by their grinding lives shining there, perhaps a hint of pleading in the younger characters’ eyes. No one says a word, they just stare long and deep into the camera.

Then the person at the end of the line fires. And so it goes, they blow their brains, making a tune: ‘Jingle Bells’ in 12-gauge minor.

Once this spectacle ends the camera drifts across the bleeding, twitching corpses, showing us the growing pools and rivers of blood as they form on the wooden floor. In the background a baby cries and over the sound track plays Adagio for Strings. This continues for the rest of the hour-long running time, going into silence once the music stops, the only sound now the crying baby.

And now ‘My Family’.

Now, I know that this is what people want, but sometimes perhaps the channels might want to consider thinking a bit differently and have something fun, even funny for us to watch after gorging on our Christmas meal.

A nice dream.

And on that note I say Merry Christmas and, if I don’t feel another rant coming on beforehand, a very happy New Year!


Will

The Delia Dream.

I have a dream. Not a recurrent dream just a…persistent one. It involves Delia Smith, the doyen of British cookery and woman with some complicated ideas about cooking Christmas dinner. I imagine if she’d gone down the Keith Floyd route of mixing booze with his presenting.

This is informed by something that happened a few years ago. In which the erstwhile television cook stormed the pitch in the middle of a Norwich City game and proceeded to inform the fans, in a coherent and sober way, what her thoughts were.

Now imagine the scene, our host is standing at her traditional homely kitchen counter, in her traditional homely kitchen (in her very own home we are shown through loving exterior wide shots) the ingredients for the upcoming recipe arrayed all nice and tidy around her with the appropriate utensils. And a glass of wine, with bottle nice and handy.

That last detail is important – watch it carefully.

She launches into her opening salvo; a lovely little starter that involves pancetta and cheese. She stutters and stammers a bit, but let’s be honest, that’s just her style. Saint Delia can be forgiven any kind of inarticulate garbling because she has our best interests at heart, she wants us to learn to cook and enjoy it. Bless her heart.

Try not to be distracted by her earrings, as mesmeric these adornments are – looking like those head phones that people really serious about music wear – you do not want to miss any of this wonderful, tasty recipe. The food is the important thing, not the preposterous jewellery.

Seriously.

During this segment she sips daintily at this wine. Stuff that is probably quite expensive, but that she has a cellar the size of your entire house full of. After all Delia’s a very wealthy woman and rightfully so. She’s worked hard over the decades to bring good cooking and awareness of fresh ingredients.

Y’know until this controversial tome came along, but we won’t worry about that either. Oh no.

At the end of her guide to creating this culinary treasure she looks pretty relaxed and the wine bottle is looking a little over half empty.

It’s all good for Delia.

She now guides us over to another worktop. Homely as the first, forgetting the fact that you’re now being guided through a kitchen that a family of three could live in with room to spare for garage. It doesn’t matter, it’s the illusion that she’s just like you and I, and she happens to know all these wonderful things about cooking.

Our loosened hostess carries the glass and bottle of wine with her to this second counter. There’s already two bottles of wine waiting there, open, for her, but this is neither here nor there.

Her next dish is a, let’s say, stew, full of fresh vegetables, spices, herbs and whatever meat might be in your brain at the moment. A game stew. How’s that? A mix of venison and partridge perhaps. Yum.

The wine takes something of a bashing in this section, as this dish requires a lot of cooking so poor Delia is becoming rather thirsty. And giggly. Really it’s infectious, how much fun she’s having chopping and browning meat and cooking vegetables. She even makes some potatoes to accompany the dish, as well as a nice red currant jelly.

It’s all a lot of work and she babbles with increasing ebullience. Sometimes meandering away from the task at hand, pointing at the camera man and laughing at that oh-so funny birthmark that looks like an ejaculating penis on his face or becoming quiet and contemplative as she ruminates about how much she loves her husband, he’s a pain in the arse, but that doesn’t matter, because we’ve been through so much…

Now watch as an empty wine bottle is discreetly taken from the counter. Delia isn’t even aware as she sloshes some more wine into her glass, gets confused, asks if that was supposed to go into the stew and is told that’s the bottle of red on her right.

She quaffs her drinking wine, while pouring her cooking wine into the pot. A few finishing touches and a few more slugs of wine and we can leave the pot to simmer while Delia brings us to dessert.

“Don’t you take that camera off me, ya basserds!” she shouts when the poor, penis-faced camera man moves a little too fast as she moves back to the original counter.

This counter, by the magic of television and a put-upon and unsung home economist, has been cleaned and the ingredients for the meal’s finale are placed out.

A tiramisu. Oh dear.

She goes through creaming the mascarpone and cream together, swaying and making obscene suggestions to the camera man, “Is that to scale?” she asks the poor man, pointing the mark that he’s becoming ever more conscious of. She manages this, just.

Soaking of the sponges proves too much and things take a turn for the disturbing. The coffee liqueur bottle is to her lips in a flash and its contents are guzzled with disconcerting speed. It’s quite amazing that she doesn’t spill any as she’s swaying like a sapling in a hurricane.

“Thissis boring! Less fuckin’ party!” she cries and clambers up onto the counter and starts to dance, gripping the coffee liqueur bottle, with wild abandon.

The crew look on, being showered by Tia Maria, unsure of what they should do. With grim professionalism, and perhaps a little bit of vengeful glee, the cameraman keeps his lens firmly on the action.

Delia’s warmed to this party idea and is now calling for some “fuckin’ music”. Her blouse has fallen off one shoulder, revealing densely freckled skin, much to the horror of every member of the crew. Except maybe that producer who’s had a thing for her since the early days.

“C’mon! Get yer fuckin’ clothes off! Don’t be such a buncha prudes!” she slurs, undoing more buttons on her blouse. “Get em off!”

Some production assistant has scurried out of the room to retrieve Delia’s husband, who has that ‘oh, fuck, not again’ look about him and grabs her off the counter.

Our last view of Delia as the credits roll is her being dragged out of the kitchen, stripped to her bra and screaming, “Yer alla buncha fuggin’ borin’ cunts! Aaaargh!”

Join us next week when she makes coq au vin.

That is a dream. Isn’t it beautiful?


Will

And 'Crown Wearer' ends...

And so the year-long experiment ends. Read the final parts at Crown Wearer and then tell me what you think.

To everyone who read the whole thing and supported me, you have my many thanks.


Will

Crown Wearer Archive time!

Since I've reached the five hundred update mark (which, incidentally is also almost the half-way mark) on 'Crown Wearer', I thought that it would be appropriate to bundle together some of the earlier posts to make it easier to catch up so go here: Crown Wearer blog


Will