Dawn of the Dumb (31 page)

Tonight’s episode just seems to end at a weird, arbitrary junction, as though a final scene was cut at the last minute.

And Robin’s archery skills are so superhuman, there’s no sense of peril; when he gets into a tight spot, you know he’ll simply do something impossible with his arrows, then smugly waggle his eyebrows around like Robbie Williams. And he’s too young. The repeated references to him spending ‘five years away’ fighting in the Holy Land are supposed to imbue him with gravitas, but instead make you think he must’ve still been a foetus when he set out.

The remaining cast largely consists of people who look distract-ingly like other people: Marian looks like Rachel Weisz, Much resembles a cross between Paul Giamatti and Leigh Francis, and Alan-a-Dale could easily play Alun Armstrong’s son (largely because he is).

Despite the avalanche of flaws, I can’t bring myself to entirely hate Hood ‘06: Grand Theft Sherwood because (a) I suspect it’ll improve, and (b) it does have intermittent flashes of thumping good Saturday-night fun about it, even if they are few and far between.

Robin should be able to properly kill people though. I know it’s pre-watershed, but the bloodless A-Team panto-fighting is ridiculous. This is Ye Olden Days! Life was brutal! And if we don’t see an arrow puncturing an eyeball before the end of the series, I’ll be furious.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In which words are replaced by faces, psychics are thrown in jail, and Barclays Bank wants to be your friend

The best a man can get

[30 October 2006]

D
amn the news, damn it to hell and back. It used to be so exciting: sieges and streakers and balaclavas and Fred West and all that. There were good guys and bad guys. It was cute. And quite funny. Not any more. Now no one’s in the right and we’re all going to die. It’s so depressing, the only sane course is to ignore it completely until it goes away.

That’s why we’re so hooked on distraction, which is available in more forms than you can shake a stick at (stick-shaking being just one example). TV provides distraction, as do sport, fashion and coloured lists of Chantelle’s top ten favourite cuddles.

The internet is an incredible distraction: the equivalent of one of those Pavlovian training machines that dispenses pine nuts to lab rats when they nudge the correct lever—except instead of nuts, the internet dispenses porn, chit-chat,
⁹
/
₁₁
conspiracy theories and YouTube footage of kittens falling over.

The greatest form of distraction, however, has to be the pursuit of swanky material goods. Nothing staves off that gnawing sense of dread quite like a spending spree. Maybe I won’t get my legs blown off by terrorists if I buy enough aspirational bullshit? That’s the spirit.

This being space year 2006, you no longer need to visit Harrods to experience the kind of opulent extravagance usually associated with billionaires and sultan’s daughters. A trip to Asda will suffice. Almost every product you can think of is available in a toffee-nosed aristocratic version, all the better to mesmerise yourself with.

Fancy some crisps? Don’t scoff bog-standard Walkers; indulge in some hand-cooked balsamic and sea salt Kettle Chips instead. You’ll still end up fat as a whale, but at least you’ll have taken the posh route.

Clothes a bit mucky? Forget ordinary washing powder. Use new ‘Crushed Silk and Jasmine’ Bold 2-in-i. That’s right: crushed silk and jasmine. Make sure your butler programmes the spin cycle correctly when he’s using it.

Need a shave? Toss out your Bics and grab the Gillette Fusion, which single-handedly represents Consumer Product Event Horizon by combining ‘the comfort of five blades’ (on the front) with ‘the precision of one’ (on the back). The main cutting surface is about the size of a sheet of M; so large you can’t get it under your nose without shearing off your top lip, which is why you need the blade on the back—it’s the only bit you can enjoy a reasonable shave with.

There’s also a battery-operated ‘Power Handle’ option that makes the whole thing buzz like a wasp in an envelope—not to help you shave, but to offer yet more fleeting distraction from the
unremitting misery of life
.

The Fusion Mk2, out next year, features 190 blades, a aoGB hard drive, a pine nut dispenser and a synthesised voice telling you everything’s OK, even though the mere existence of such a razor proves otherwise. I’ve pre-ordered mine already.

The bank that likes to say any old shit

[6 November 2006]

S
o the other day I’m using an ATM, and while I’m tapping in my PIN number, trying to perform an obfuscating contemporary dance with my fingers so it looks like I’m typing different numbers to the ones I’m actually using, my eyes momentarily alight on the top of the cashpoint and I notice it isn’t a cashpoint at all. Not officially, anyway.

It’s been renamed The Hole in the Wall. Right there on the machine itself. Barclays has taken the unofficial, slang name for the ATM and legitimised it. It is co-opting the language of the people. It is trying to pretend it is ‘one of us’. It can piss off.

It gets worse. Next to the door, there’s a sign reading ‘Through these doors walk the nicest people in the world’—which strikes you as monumentally nauseating, until you realise it’s a little gag: beneath, in smaller lettering, it says something along the lines of ‘…as voted by their mums’. Tee hee, Barclays! Tee hee!

When I get home, I do a bit of Googling and discover this japery has been going on for a while; I just hadn’t noticed until now. Apparently, it’s all part of a rebranding exercise.

Barclays felt it was perceived as being too stuffy, too formal, so it decided to replace traditional banking jargon with chummy, colloquial language. The ATM became The Hole in the Wall, the customer-service desk has a sign saying Can I Help? over it, and the Bureau de Change has been rechristened Travel Money.

Why leave it at that? If you’re hell-bent on making your bank look and sound like a simpleton, a desk labelled Travel Money is still a bit too formal. Why not call it Oooh! Look at the Funny Foreign Banknotes! instead? And accompany it with a doodle of a French onion-seller riding a bike, with a little black beret on his head and a baguette up his arse and a speech bubble saying, ‘Zut Alors! Here is where you gettez les Francs!’

Actually, why still call yourself a bank at all? ‘Bank’ sounds boring. Call yourself ‘Barclays Money Circus’ instead.

Don’t know about you, but I feel like vomiting myself inside out whenever big businesses try to cute themselves up this way—all lower-case brand names and twee little jokes and overuse of the words ‘you’ and ‘my’ and ‘we’ and ‘us’ as though we’re a bunch of cuddly-wuddly pals and hey, we’re all in this crazy world together, so let’s have some fun with it, right guys?

It’s the modern equivalent of someone who uses multiple exclamation marks to denote how ZANY!!!!! they are. It’s desperate. Anyway, one solution is to come up with new colloquial terminology they can’t co-opt. Sod The Hole in the Wall. They’ve absorbed that one. Let’s start calling ATMs Coinshitters instead. See how long it takes Barclays to start using that. My guess is quite a while.

World War II: the domestic version

[20 November 2006]

V
ideo games are great. Vibrant, addictive and continually evolving, they beat TV hands-down on almost every count. Video games don’t pause for an ad break every 15 minutes. There has never been a video game hosted by Justin Lee Collins. You can’t press a button to make Phil Mitchell jump over a turtle and land on a cloud (unless you’ve recently ingested a load of military-grade hallucinogens, in which case you can also make him climb inside his own face and start whistling colours).

Yes, games are great. Trouble is, they’ve become so sophisticated, some are no longer content to provide simple fun, and instead aim to immerse you in a world of their own devising—and not always in a good way.

Earlier this year I played a game called Condemned, in which you had to trudge around a dingy underworld desperately fighting off psychotic tramps using virtually anything that came to hand: planks, crowbars, shovels, you name it. Between scuffles, you had to collect dead birds and bits of old tin. I soon gave up, not because the game was rubbish, but because I was too depressed to continue.

And now there’s Call of Duty 3, a first-person shooter which takes the mournful contemplation and harrowing violence
of Saving Private Ryan
and applies it to a video game. ‘Brings you closer than ever to the fury of combat,’ screams the back cover, and it isn’t bloody kidding. Previously, the closest I’ve ever been to the fury of combat is wrestling with a tough-to-open ketchup sachet in a motorway service station. Now I’ve got the Second World War in my living room.

Press ‘Start’ and you’re plunged headlong into a bedlam of gunfire and screaming, replicated in HD visuals and 5.1 surround-sound. You’re firing wildly in the vague direction of Nazis, out of your mind with terror, while battle explodes all around you. It’s enough to make Donald Rumsfeld as stiff as a flagpole.

For extra immersion, the game simulates blurred vision and tinnitus whenever a blast goes off at close range. When you’re injured, the controller vibrates in your hand, imitating a faltering heartbeat. And when you inevitably drop dead, the screen pretentiously displays a sombre quote about war, such as ‘All wars are fought for money—Socrates’, presumably because a simple ‘Game Over’ might appear somehow disrespectful, what with the Second World War being a real event that killed millions and all that.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it should be banned or put on a high shelf where humankind can’t reach it. I’m saying it’s a good thing. Because eventually I realised the experience of playing it was so relentlessly horrible, I’d rather go and do the washing up, just for some harmless escapism.

That proved so relaxing, I wiped the oven clean too. Later I might do some paperwork I’ve been putting off. The war was too real for my liking. I’m a deserter now, and real life is paradise. Hooray for pixels.

If I didn’t do it

[27 November 2006]

T
his week, I was originally going to write about If I Did It, OJ Simp-son’s notorious hypothetical ‘confession’ to the hideous murders he definitely didn’t commit with a knife that wasn’t his in a jealous rage he never experienced. Then my editor pointed out that since the OJ story had already been covered in exhaustive detail elsewhere in the paper, for days, the publication of yet another article on the matter might just smack of overkill—fitting, perhaps, given the subject at hand, but tiresome for anyone who had already had their fill of the story.

So I reluctantly agreed not to write about it. And I haven’t.

But if I had (which I haven’t), I’d have started by asking whether OJ (who is innocent) was the best choice of narrator in the first place. After all, once you remove the murders from his CV (murders which shouldn’t be on there in the first place, since he had nothing to do with them), he’s kind of boring.

If you must get a famous person to explain how they’d have carried out a murder they didn’t commit, cast someone more surprising, someone less likely. I’d prefer to hear, say, Norman Wisdom speculating about how he’d have done it. Chances are he’d have made a hilarious bungling mess of things—accidentally ripping his trousers as he struggled to pull on that undersized glove, tumbling over a hedge on his way to the getaway car. It’d be a scream.

Come to think of it, this could form the basis of a great Christmas novelty book—a soo-page compilation in which celebrities describe precisely how they’d have committed various appalling crimes throughout history, in blistering first-person detail.

Shriek! as Tim Henman explains how he would have stalked London’s East End in the late nineteenth century, killing prostitutes. ‘I reckon I acted alone,’ he writes. ‘I’d possibly had some kind of surgical training and perhaps heard voices in my head urging me to kill.’

Gasp! as Lorraine Kelly recalls the chilling moment she stood in the Texas School Book Depository watching John F. Kennedy through her rifle sights. ‘As my finger tightened on the trigger,’ she explains, ‘I’d definitely have wished I was back on the sofa at GMTV introducing an item on rollerblading, or sandwiches, or shuttlecocks…anything really, instead of standing there, preparing to assassinate the world’s most powerful man.’

Get confused! as Kelly Osbourne imagines how Tony Blair might have single-handedly carried out the Sharpeville massacre—in a series of crayon illustrations by Pete Doherty.

If any celebrities are reading this now, email me your confessions and we’ll have it in the shops by Christmas. All proceeds go to charity. Or rather they would, if you’d read this request and I’d written it—which you haven’t and I didn’t.

When it comes to psychics, my stance is hardcore: they must die alone in windowless cells

[4 December 2006]

I
f I walked into a single mother’s house and said I could read her baby’s mind, then started shouting four-letter words, claiming I was simply voicing her offspring’s thoughts, I would expect to be arrested the moment I stepped outside.

And if, during my ‘psychic reading’, I also speculated about the mother’s sex life, and a potentially abusive relationship with a former boyfriend, claiming her toddler was concerned about ‘men who want to touch Mum’s privates’, and I went on and on in this vein until the mother burst into tears, there in the living room, in front of her child, I’d expect to be arrested, sectioned, and beaten in the back of the van.

And if I allowed a TV crew to broadcast what I was doing, I’d expect to be attacked by a mob, who’d pull me apart and kick my remains around the street, pausing only to spit on any bits of my face that got stuck to their shoes.

But no. In fact the outcry would be muted at best and Ofcom would turn a blind eye—as it did last week, while clearing Channel s’s unbelievably disgusting Baby Mind Reader of any wrongdoing.