The Hell of It All (35 page)

Consider
Ludicrous Diversion
, an Edge Media documentary which implies the 7/7 bombers weren’t really bombers at all, but patsies framed by ‘the system’. Rather than offering any hard evidence for this startling claim, it highlights minor anomalies in the official version of events, the police’s reluctance to release CCTV footage, and references to past miscarriages of justice such as the Guildford Four, then expects the viewer to add two and two to make 25. It’s like a lazy and badly made
Power of Nightmares
, convincing only to the eagerly paranoid.

In between the programmes, there are adverts for Cillit Bang (whose exact role in the New World Order has yet to be established) and a seven-hour – yes, SEVEN-HOUR – ‘DVD presentation’ from David Icke, in which he tells the viewer how the world really works. And presumably apologises for not employing an editor. In summary: it’s bunkum. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’m a mainstream media shill. They’ve got to me already. And now they’re coming for YOU.

The landmark sitcom
Seinfeld
was famously described by its own makers as ‘a show about nothing’. But it wasn’t really. It was a show about minutiae and neurosis and social transgression. And jokes. In fact it was a show about everything, brilliantly disguised as a show about nothing with a breezy, relaxed, sardonic style. That’s why it’s still such a great show, once you adjust your filter to disregard the infuriating slapped bass peppering each episode like a squelching fart cannon.

Seinfeld
appeared in 1989, which means we’ve been waiting 20 years for an authentic ‘show about nothing’. Now we’ve got one. And in a neat reversal, it’s a show about nothing disguised as a show about something. On the surface,
The Celebrity Agency
is a modern docusoap. But that surface is tissue-thin. Beneath it: nothing.

Once you strip away the adverts and titles, the premiere episode is a mere 20 minutes long – edging on nothing, although it feels longer because there’s so much nothing crammed into it. It details the day-today workings of Jonathan Lipman Ltd, a talent agency without the talent. It’s a company which ‘represents celebrities’: arranging PAs with WAGs, photoshoots with
Big Brother
contestants, and promotional events in which Kenzie from
Blazin’ Squad
eats a Pot Noodle on an open-top bus … that kind of thing. Incredibly, they manage to facilitate this without ever once staring into the middle distance while hacking at their wrists with a penknife in a desperate bid to leave this meaningless universe behind. Instead they seem to enjoy it.

The first episode features two photoshoots. One involves Bianca Gascoigne looking sultry at a Manchester carwash for a lads’ mag. The other is an
OK Magazine
‘look at my lovely home’ puff-piece starring Imogen from
Big Brother
in a house that isn’t even hers. Absolutely nothing occurs at either location, but even these nilch-vacuums are overshadowed by a staggering detonation of nothing taking place in London.

The agency’s biggest signing, Paris Hilton, is in town for a personal appearance at the Mahiki nightclub. And here’s what happens: Paris Hilton has a spray tan (off-screen); Paris Hilton receives suitcases full of promotional freebies (on-screen); Paris Hilton eats a meal (off-screen); Paris Hilton stands in a nightclub for about an hour (on-screen); Paris Hilton gets paid an estimated 30,000 for her trouble (off-screen).

As you may have noticed, half of what Paris Hilton does takes place off-screen, which means – yes! – LESS THAN NOTHING is happening. It’s the first successful transmission of televisual antimatter. That’s because the show isn’t actually about her, but the staff of the agency, starting with Jonathan Lipman himself, who seems to be the kind of super-self-confident cock-of-the-walk that makes you actively pray for Armageddon the nanosecond he swaggers into view. He sports one of those half-spiky, half-swipey haircuts that only exist courtesy of about 28 pots of a futuristic micro-fibre styling clay with a name like ‘Punk Mud’ or something.
He is, to put it mildly, an aching great dick of the highest order.

Which isn’t to say he spends his time beating his chest and loudly proclaiming his own brilliance. Far from it. He’s actually rather low-key and casual and is probably quite a nice guy. Somehow, that only makes it worse. He’s cheerfully promoting the adulation and elevation of nothing, like a man selling vague sections of air for a living, and he hasn’t even got the decency to seem bitter and frightened about it. Instead he stands at the very centre of this whirling vortex of shitstink with his hands in his pockets, tapping his toe to ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna, waiting for the paparazzi to arrive. And photograph nothing.

You’ll choke on it but only momentarily. The nightmare tide of nothing quickly overwhelms you. It kills all thought and meaning and replaces them with nothing. Submit, human. Submit. There’s nothing you can do to stop the nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

President Barack Obama. President Barack Obama. Nope, still can’t get used to it. It’s literally too good to be true. I must’ve died in my sleep and am now having an insane fantasy pumped into my head by the Matrix. Any minute now Salma Hayek is going to float through the door with a tray of biscuits and I’ll know the game’s up. Or perhaps I’ve just come round from a coma. The election took place 10 years ago, and what I’ve just sat through was actually a Hollywood movie loosely based on real events. And in a bid to appeal to the multiplex crowd, they decided to jettison all semblance of subtlety.

On the one hand, you had Obama (Will Smith in admittedly impressive makeup, although the ears never really convinced). He was practically walking on water. No one’s that nice. And pitched against him, the Republican campaign, which was so nakedly horrible it could only have been orchestrated by Skeletor. Nudge-wink comments about ‘the real America’, underhand attempts to link Obama with terrorism, automated robo-calls whispering desperate fibs into the ears of voters … if Obama’s grandmother had died while he was at her bedside in Hawaii, they’d have erected billboards claiming he couldn’t be trusted around white women. Jesus, guys, why not just change your name to the Bastard Party and march around in long black capes? Vote for us, we’re openly despicable.

The scriptwriters clearly decided to balance the nastiness by introducing some satirical comic relief in the form of Sarah Palin, but she was scarcely plausible either. And they never really nailed her story arc, instead being content to have her wandering through every scene she was in, screeching inept banalities like a rightwing version of Phoebe from
Friends
. And what was with the whole Joe the Plumber sub-plot? I mean, c’mon, they invited him on tour and everything. As if. In the real world, no one would’ve bought that for a second. That’s precisely the sort of thing that breaks the all-important suspension of disbelief. It didn’t help that the guy they cast to play him, Michael Chiklis, is instantly recognisable from his
leading role as the corrupt, brutal cop Vic Mackey in the hit TV series
The Shield
.

And the ending was far too saccharine. Dancing in the streets? Tears of joy around the globe? Oh please. I give it four out of 10. A rental at best.

One drawback – or possibly advantage – of being known as an easily riled automated curmudgeon is that people tend to hurl recommendations my way. ‘Here, look at this,’ they chortle, holding something irritating under my nose. ‘You’ll hate it.’

Usually the item in question is merely a bit disappointing. But the other day someone urged me to buy the latest copy of
Tatler
and read the Little Black Book section. ‘It’s absolutely unbelievable,’ they said. I was intrigued enough to pop to the newsagents and cough up my £3.80. Even though I don’t think I’ve ever read an edition of
Tatler
in my life, I had a general sense that being seen with it in public was a bad idea, so I turned the magazine around, hiding the cover against my chest as I left so no one could see what I was carrying. Better to let the passersby assume I’m carrying a porn mag, I figured – although the whopping great advert for Cartier diamond jewellery on the back probably gave the game away. I don’t think they advertise in
Barely Legal
.

Once I was safely out of sight, I gingerly opened the magazine and started reading. Three seconds later, I was furious. Before getting to the Little Black Book section, I’d alighted on an article about a ‘sexy Holland Park billionairess and her fabulous life’. She was called Goga Ashkenazi, and she was pictured swathed in fur, diamonds dripping pendulously from her ears like shimmering globules of semen in a bukkake movie. She was clutching a miniature dog that looked like it’d been peeled; one of those scrawny upholstered canine skeleton-creatures with the facial tics of a tiny frightened bird. Given the alarming way these microdogs pant 5,000 times a second, I always think they’re about to die, that their pea-sized heart might suddenly burst like a popcorn
kernel inside that rodenty little ribcage. That worries me.

But Goga wasn’t worried. She was smiling. As well she might. If she wanted, she could buy a million dogs and spend a month hurling them into a threshing machine for chuckles. According to the article, she’s so rich she ‘summons private jets like most people hail cabs’, and once lost a ‘£500,000 piece of wrist candy’, shrugged, and simply put on another one. It describes her as ‘a sort of 21stcentury Holly Golightly’, which seems a bit harsh. Holly Golightly was a call girl. Ashkenazi is an oligarch with her own goldmine. And maybe she’s lovely, but the article was so fawningly, nauseatingly dazzled by how much money she’s got, it’d be impossible for any sane human being reading it not to thoroughly despise her by the end.

Shaken, I turned to the Little Black Book section, which turned out to be an authoritative A–Z of overprivileged arseholes (most of them still in their early 20s), plus the occasional celeb, rated and compiled by the single biggest group of wankers in the universe.

You’re supposed to want to sleep with these people, and the text attempts to explain why. It’s the ultimate in self-celebratory nothingness, 2,000 times worse than the worst ever article in
Heat
magazine. It includes five lords, six ladies, four princes, five princesses, two viscounts, three earls, a marquess, and 16 tittering poshos whose names are prefixed with the phrase ‘The Hon’ (which, I’ve just discovered, means they’re the son or daughter of a viscount or baron). Names like Cressida, Archie, Guy, Blaise and Freddie feature heavily. How annoying is it? Put it this way: James Blunt is also on the list, and he’s the least objectionable person there.

Each entry takes the form of a chortling mini-biog guaranteed to make you want to punch the person it describes flat in the face. Thus, we learn that ‘Jakie Warren’ is ‘the heart-throb who lives in the coolest house in Edinburgh and has the initials of all his best friends tattooed on his thigh. You can touch them but he’ll make you buy shares in the racing syndicate he co-owns with Ed Sackville … Good in bed, we hear.’

Or consider ‘The Hon Wenty Beaumont’: ‘The growl, the growl – girls go weak for the growl … Utterly divine Christie’s kid who
enjoys nothing more than playing Pass the Pig during weekends at the family estate in Northumberland or in Saint-Tropez.’

In other words, the only thing these waddling skinbags have going for them is unrestricted access to a vast and unwarranted fortune. Ignore the bank balances and it reads like a list of the most boring, horrible cunts in Britain.

As an additional poke in the ribs, each entry is accompanied by a tiny photograph, so you can squint into the eyes of the cosseted stranger you’ve suddenly decided to hate. The girls are technically pretty in a uniform, Sloaney kind of way, while the men are more varied, falling into three main categories: dull preening James Blunt types, dull preening indie types, and simpering ruddy-cheeked oafs who look like they’re about to pull a pair of underpants over their head and run around snorting like a hog in a bid to impress a drunk debutante.

In summary, it’s an entire alternate dimension of shit, a galaxy of eye-stinging fart gas, compressed into a few glossy pages. It will have you alternating between rage, jealousy, bewilderment and distress, before dumping you in a bottomless slough of despond. Buy a copy. No, don’t. Stand in a shop flipping through the pages, deliberately fraying each corner as you go. Drink it in. Feel your impotent anger levels peaking. The headrush is good for you. Try it. You’ll hate it. Thanks for the recommendation. I’m off for a cry.

It’s great being a shambles. Just peachy. Rather than gliding through a staid, predictable life full of contentment and friendship, you lurch from one crisis point to the next, constantly challenged by your own ineptitude. One day I’m going to write a 24-style thriller in which the main character is under constant threat, not from terrorism, but himself. A typical episode would open with him being woken from oversleeping by having his house repossessed because he’s forgotten to fill out some forms. It might sound dull at the moment but trust me – once we’ve layered a pulsing soundtrack over the top you’ll need to sprout fingernails at an
unnatural rate to keep up with the amount you’re chewing off.

I practise incompetence at an Olympian level. It recently took me 21 days to get round to replacing the lightbulbs in my kitchen, which for several weeks had been blowing one-by-one until finally the room was plunged into darkness. For 21 days I had to feel my way into the room like a blind man, then prop open the fridge door in order to have enough light to be able to see. Your eyes get used to it after a while. So does your brain. It became a routine. Soon opening the fridge felt as natural as flipping the light switch. Standing there, chopping onions in the artificial gloaming, all felt well with the world. It took an incident with a broken glass on the floor and a shoeless foot to nudge me in the direction of the nearest lightbulb stockist, and even then I instinctively used the fridge as an impromptu lamp for another two days before re-acclimatising myself to the concept of ceiling-based light sources.