Thought for the Day

You know those World's Best Dad mugs? Patently bollocks, aren't they? There's only one world's best dad, whoever he may be.

And so many dads have got them, you've got to wonder how many of them are less World's Best Dad than World's Biggest Cunt.

There have got to be dads out there who, when they're not being great dads, are absolute cunts. And it goes without saying that a lot of these dads are closer to being the world's biggest cunt than being the world's best dad.

So next time you see some big cunt slurping his tea out of his World's Best Dad mug, remember he's unlikely to be the world's best dad. He's just a cunt with a mug.

My Blog's New Manifesto

Would your blog be more or less entertaining if you just wrote an online diary of your working life?

Mine would be a must-read. But I'm not going to do it, of course. I'm not that stupid.

So what you get is a mixture of tv reviews, news commentary and the strange things I'm told or overhear or see. Not really about the stuff that affects me directly.

Why not continue as before?

Because I'm finding it an increasingly arduous task to do the things this blog was set up for. I'm getting bored of waffling on about stuff off the telly. I can comment more succinctly on Twitter. I can get things off my chest there without having to construct something deep and meaningful, making my brain ache.

So from now on, expect ill-thought-out opinion and observation, not long-winded review. There are too many words in the world as it is.

Strike!

Last night we watched a talking heads programme in which ex-strikers told us their memories.

There were some surprises.

As a rookie reporter, the odious shit Kelvin MacKenzie had once been on strike. But he spoke with relish about how when it was his turn to be on the management's side in the Wapping dispute he would goad the print workers by sticking two fingers up at them as he drove past the picket lines. People were losing their jobs and he was laughing at them.

As an angry young pilot, Norman Tebbit had withdrawn his labour. But of course the boot was on the other foot when he became Secretary of State for Employment and he presided over the destruction of the working class. He said he was perfect for the job as he had inside information on how unions work, having once been an active union member himself.

Then there was Eddie Shah, once a less than enthusiastic striker, then the enemy of the print workers union as he started the shite Today newspaper using new technology. Shah hates union leaders with a passion and told a story of how five coffins were once sent to his home, one for each member of his family. Whether this was an action perpetrated by union officials, Shah didn't say. But he hates them anyway.

There were women, too. The women of the Dagenham Ford plant, fighting for equal pay with the men. And Anne Scargill, fighting to keep coalminers and their families alive and well during the 84-85 miners' strike.

Back to the men's world, there was the gravedigger who described probably the most animosity aimed at strikers by the general public. But what else can you do, working in appalling conditions with bosses who don't give a shit about your health or welfare?

(This got me thinking, wouldn't it have been funny if, as well as rubbish piling up on the streets, bodies were too? Imagine those documentaries. "The 1970s. 3 Day Week. Petrol shortages. Energy crisis. Rubbish and bodies piling up on the streets. We were ready for a change. A revolution. Four skinny white boys who were hanging around a clothing store called Sex...etc, etc").

And finally there was the miner who appeared on The Tube with The Redskins. He stepped up to the microphone, ready to cut through all that 80s new pop shit with his words of working class solidarity, backed by a soulful socialist worker skinhead combo. And what happened?

The microphone didn't work.

We Have The Actors, Why Not The Writers?

Twitter seems to have thinned things out. I continue to flit between twittering and blogging. But there's less of me here and more of me over there. And my attention span is getting even shorter. I can't read too much, I can't write too much. So why don't I shut up and get on with it?

I've written enough about the first Red Riding on here. The second and third episodes were probably even less entertaining and the various strands didn't really come together satisfactorily. It was a mess which left me not caring what the fuck it was all about. Let's just forget about it and watch something decent.

Like Mad Men. The second series is as good as the first. I can watch this beautifully written character-driven stuff 'til the cows come home. What's particularly galling is that we can't seem to do this stuff in the UK. The Americans hit us with superbly crafted stuff like The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men. What do we have? Piss poor adaptations of sensationalist novels.

A Dose Of Reality

Jade Goody's funeral, on April 4th, will be a "Jade Goody production", according to her publicist, Max Clifford.

Large television screens are to be installed outside her local church for the thousands of members of the public likely to turn up.

The funeral will not, however, be broadcast live on Channel 4. Davina McCall will not whip up the crowd into a frenzy of tears. Attendees will not hold up signs saying "Hello Mum" or "Living The Dream".

It will be a dignified affair. Big Brother obsessives have grown up a lot over the last few months. They now know it's no good living the dream if the dream ends up as a nightmare. Look at Chantelle, falling in love with gorgeous posh Preston, ending up with that little London runt Jermaine.

Life is shit for almost everybody and fame doesn't change that. Reality has kicked in for the reality massive. They will never again be able to watch a young woman on Big Brother without thinking of the future consequences. They will never want to get too attached to strangers ever again. If you hurt when a stranger hurts just how much are you going to hurt when someone close to you hurts?

Britain has grown up.

No Pets, Please

As I was stroking my sister's dog I was told I look so natural with a dog by my side. My family have given up hoping that I might produce offspring and now are trying to urge me to get a pet. They think, to make my life complete, I need to look after another living being.

Fortunately, when it comes to children and animals me and Betty have pretty similar outlooks. We don't get on with children. We never have, not even when we were children ourselves. OK, I suppose I don't mind children if they're quiet, if they keep themselves to themselves, if they're seen but not heard. But you don't get that a lot nowadays, more's the pity.

We don't get on with cats. Cats give me the creeps. Their suspicious feline movements, their smarmy furry sidling up to your leg, their viciously digging claws, their disgustingly rough tongues, the revolting way they lick their privates, their innate need to kill. If cats were human they'd all be locked up and in straitjackets.

Dogs are a different kettle of fish. We love the sight of a good dog, though not a rubbish little yappy one like a Yorkshire or Cairn Terrier. And dogs seem to like me.

I think dogs know I'd let them get away with things. I'd let them run wherever they'd want, shitting and pissing, sniffing and tasting wherever they'd choose. With our 1980s dog, Cindy, I'd let her shit anywhere in the park, though thoughtfully she never defecated on the football or cricket pitches. I wasn't going to pick it up, it would have made me retch. Of course she'd shit in our garden, too. I'd spend hours going round with a spade, scooping it all up, plopping it in a bucket and tipping it into the sewerage system.

Dogs' waste, vets' bills and the inevitable illnesses and death are what stop me from getting one of these beautiful creatures. And the responsibility, of course. Responsibility for the two of us is all I can muster.

So, no, no children, no animals for the rest of our lives. Nothing to make our lives complete.

The Damned United

"But, Geoff. You like football. You like films. Why not go and see The Damned United?"

Because I am loyal to the families of my heroes. If the Clough family say the book is a load of old shit and as we all know films of books are very rarely as good as the books, just what is the point?

I will go further and say if any currently or previously working class person does go and see this film they will be betraying their forefathers and mothers. Let's have some solidarity with the Clough family, people.

Besides, the actor playing Billy Bremner looks like Bob Mortimer in a joke wig.

D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

I'd already spoken to my mum earlier in the day. But she phoned back early yesterday evening to tell me my cousin's husband had left her. He'd been having a secret affair for a year and straight out of the blue he left, leaving his middle aged wife and their child. My mum said she was shocked. Of all the marriages in the family this was the one she thought would last. I don't know if all those marriages included mine. I never know with her.

How was I supposed to feel? I'll tell you how I feel. Quite good about it, really. Good to hear about a marital break up in another part of our extended family. First it was my parents, then my sister. But those splits were subject to my dad's influence, weren't they? Everybody knew he was the lowest of the low, going off with a woman twenty-odd years his junior. And it was his blood that made my sister leave her husband.

Well, it's time for my extended family to join the modern world. Divorce happens. Yes, it's painful for the people concerned but we're talking about human beings here, not devils and saints. The question is, will my cousin's husband join my dad in the devil corner? Probably. One tends to see things in black and white from the moral high ground.

Paul O'Grady/Old Lady

My stepdad got tickets off the internet for Paul O'Grady's television chat show. The retireds like Paul O'Grady now he doesn't dress up as a woman.

So off they went to that London, using their free transport passes and joined the queue to get in. But why were there two queues?

The woman in front of my mum said the other queue was the "Priority Queue".

After a while they found out what that meant.

The people in the Priority Queue went in first. Then a few people from my mum's queue were let in. Leaving lots of disappointed pensioners with promises that they shouldn't worry, next time they would be in the priority queue.

So a wasted journey for many, including the old woman who'd got three buses with her son as she was too infirm for the rigours of train and tube travel.

On the back of my mum's tickets, in small letters, it does explain that entry to the show is not guaranteed. Talking to a work colleague I have since found out that this is exactly what they do for Loose Women shows, too. It virtually guarantees a full house.

I am so angry at this I could spit. How Paul O'Grady can treat people who have fought in two World Wars in this way is absolutely disgraceful. O'Grady, if you're reading this, let me tell you now, I will never watch your show. Even if you're still on the telly when I'm retired, I'd sooner watch some cooking bollocks presented by someone with no personality than a so-called man of the people who has absolutely no scruples about wasting the time of hard-working ordinary people.

Mr Bean Goes To Hell

My memory of 1974 is pretty poor. But I'm sure that year wasn't as boringly brown as in this first part of Red Riding. And I'm sure a lot of the police were bastards. But were they really as violent and diabolic as in this fiction?

And as Betty said, the main character was wearing "one of those jackets the young men always wear when they make dramas about the 70s these days." Not a leather bomber in sight.

As with Life On Mars I came away thinking, like the journalist who had a go at the scientologist, YOU WERE NOT THERE!

The story was particularly unbelievable. Sean Bean was not only a nasty successful working class property developer who terrorised his way to wealth, he was a child rapist and murderer, too.

I think.

I wasn't sure by the end.

The police, who knew all about Sean's evil ways, beat up the investigative journalist and gave him a gun to kill Bean. They couldn't do it themselves, you see. They were in too deep.

And for a man who was Yorkshire's answer to Al Capone, it was bloody easy for the wimpy, badly injured young journalist to breach Bean's security and shoot dead his two bodyguards then Bean himself.

This week's Yorkshire Ripper case should be interesting. Sutcliffe will seem like a pussycat in comparison to Mr Bean.

Once Upon A Time In The West

My stats tell me I had 174 unique visitors yesterday, a massive increase on my usual small readership. Which only goes to prove THE POWER OF TWITTER and the insignificance of day to day blogging.

Still, let's get back to normal.

We're not having a holiday this year, this year being 2009 Worry About The Future Year, so we have to take vicarious pleasures. The 2-part series Touring Britain with David Heathcote (repeated at 11.30 on BBC4 tomorrow night) was a pleasure. In the first part he used an 1887 Baedeker Guide to tour the north west of England and in the second he used a couple of 1930s Shell Guides to tour Dorset and Cornwall.

What about that erection, eh?




I was already enjoying David's company but when he got to Padstow I began to like him even more. It took him an age to find somewhere to park and walking round Padstow's crowded streets he could take it no longer.

"Padstow: it's rammed with people of the most obnoxious kind. And it sucks."

The guide David was using was written by John Betjeman.

"The thing about the Betjeman entries, it's all about the buildings, it's not about the people at all. Sometimes it's the people that are the problem. I feel like the worst kind of inverted snob, but right now, I couldn't give a stuff about Padstow."

The guide Betjeman wrote in the 30s described the "unspoilt Cornish experience". A time when a village like Polperro was actually lived in all year round by real families. A time before landowners sold people's homes to the new landlords of holiday homes and the rich second homers. A time before the village died.

Titter Ye...Oh, Please Yerselves

Inspired by Shaggy Blog Stories, TwitterTitters is a book of comic writing, all the proceeds of which (less the production and postage costs) goes directly to Comic Relief.

You can read about it here and buy it here.

I won't be buying a copy as I bought two copies of Shaggy Blog Stories (embarrassed by the unfunniness of my own story and slightly amused a couple of times at others), I thought Phoenix Nights was bollocks and Chelsey: OMG! looks like a load of old shite. Maybe some of you lesser known *writers* are in it and can persuade me to fork out the nine quid.

But if it takes your fancy, go ahead and buy it. Christ knows Twitter's got to be good for something other than mentioning how you didn't get to sleep last night and that you're having a nice cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch.

Soap On A Rope

Talking about Coronation Street today, I was told it was "downmarket". In comparison to University Challenge and QI.

Well, I suppose it is. You don't need to be brainy to watch it. But you can be.

Craig Charles, hyper-intelligent renaissance man, poet, author, comedian, DJ, actor, cokehead, has been having the piss taken out of him by supposed "Corrie fans" at the football.

"I’ve never had any problems like that with Red Dwarf fans, they’re generally intelligent people," he said to The News Of The World so it must be true. "Maybe not so much with Corrie, it’s kind of lowest common denominator stuff!"

No, Craig. Corrie's humour is subtle, requiring a more mature intelligence than a comedy made for teenage boys whose balls haven't yet dropped. Stick to your turgid Funk & Soul Show and your audience of three ageing talc-addled Northern Soul bores.

Are You An Underachiever?

I have to battle against thinking I am. Thinking that would be boasting that I'm capable of actually achieving something of artistic merit and it was just down to my lazy attitude that I've never made something of my life.

I could have been a musician, a film director, a screenwriter, a novelist. All these things I could have been but I've just been too lazy to find other people with the enthusiasm to help me.

See? It's a good case for the prosecution.

Rather than make my own art I take great pleasure in criticising other people's. Is this healthy?

Well, look at all the tortured artists. There's no way in the world I'd want to be one of those. Satisfaction in your own art can't last forever. Unless you're completely up your own arse. And who wants to be Bono?

So give me the lazy life with full reign to think and observe without the drive to be someone. The drive that screws people up.

The Life Of Riley

Watching Ian Broudie on Sky's Songbook series I started thinking about what could have been, if only...

I wanted to learn the guitar in my middle teens. I got a cheap second hand semi-acoustic and my dad's mate from work (not the one who taught me to play tennis) out of the kindness of his heart gave me some lessons. He was a lovely bloke, small, slight of frame, with long red hair. He was into melodic rock and singer songwriters and played in a band which did covers of the hits of the day

I was at that age when I was very open to suggestion when it came to music. Yes were what my friends at school liked so I did, too. But there was no way I could play like Steve Howe, not in a million years.

So my guitar teacher showed me a few chords, basic strumming. And within a few weeks he got me a big notebook in which he wrote down the lyrics to some songs with the chord changes in the appropriate places. I could pretend I was Bob Dylan or James Taylor or Neil Young. We even did a duet doing Bad Company's Feel Like Making Love which was a bit strange as I wasn't ready for any of those shenanigans.

I enjoyed being taught but it wasn't much of a revelation to me. All I could do was strum and sing which got a bit boring after a while. I started writing my own songs which were rubbish. I knew they were but it was something to do to take my mind off the horrors of study.

Now, watching Ian Broudie and reading Rip It Up And Start Again I realise what could have been. If only I'd had an older brother or sister into cool music. If only I'd had some arty mates who wanted to make future music. If only I'd been brought up in Manchester or Liverpool or Sheffield or gone to art school in bloody Watford! I was in the wrong place at the right time.

Not that Ian Broudie ever wrote good songs. He just strums and writes rubbish, just like I did.



For Ian's tips on how to become a musician (including how to be in the right place at the right time, go here).

The Full Circle

Yes, more digs, I'm afraid.

In this week's Socialist Worker there's an in-depth article on online social networking, saying how it is the antithesis of socialism and how the lack of actual real social interaction in today's society is part of a capitalist conspiracy designed to alienate the middle classes from the working classes, keeping them in their own cliques, making them less likely to fight the Nazis and the capitalists on the streets, less likely to hold Socialist Worker placards at protest marches, less likely to fight for the right to work of the common man or woman, placated by videos of cats being abused by their cruel owners and lost in a world of masturbatory self-centred blog posts about their sad unpolitical lives.

For some time I have been sick and tired of the reactionary and wooly liberal broadsheets taking a pop at my friends and our hobbies but now the Left's blustering bullies have their foot in the door I am beginning to find the whole thing a farce of Brian Rix proportions.

A Question Of Etiquette

When talking to friends and family about another man, I use the term "bloke". As in "There's a bloke on the train who gets right on my tits." Or "He's a nice bloke." Or "The bloke's a wanker."

But things are different in a work situation. I can't say "The bloke from the bank rang back about direct debits."

I can't say "guy" because I'm 47 and English.

I can't say "man" because I'd sound like a child.

So I end up saying "chap". I sound like a Royal.

I don't like it and I'd never say "He's a jolly nice chap," but what else do I call these people?

The Bloke In MVC: An Apology

He's probably forgotten about it but the memory of it is haunting me.

A couple of years ago, CD and DVD shop MVC was closing down. All stock was for sale at knockdown prices. Of course, I filled my boots. You don't look a gift horse in the mouth (yes, I did buy some Joni Mitchell).

I was umming and aahing over the Jah Wobble anthology. I wasn't overly keen on him though I did enjoy a 12" he did with Holger Czukay and of course the Public Image stuff is fantastic.

So I thought "sod it" and took it to the counter.

The assistant looked at me with horror. "Good choice," he said, but didn't leave it at that.

"I honestly didn't think anybody was going to buy it," he said. "I'd made sure it wasn't easy to find. And I would never have believed in a million years that somebody in Bexleyheath would want to buy a Jah Wobble album."

He wanted it for himself. The shop was closing down, he was losing his job and I was taking his only compensation.

I felt awful. But I didn't stop him scanning the barcode, didn't stop him taking my card. My signature was unwavering and confident.

I played the CD when I got home. Apart from the Public Image stuff and the one track with Holger Czukay, it was shit.

I played it again last week. It was still shit. And I felt the guilt rise up in me. And it won't go away.

A BRIT of Alright

The winners of the BRIT Award For Outstanding Contribution To Road Safety, The Pet Shop Boys, were running through a medley of their songs, old and new.

"They're alright," I said to Betty. "But I prefer Suicide."

OK, I know it's not like comparing the Beatles and the Stones or the Pistols and The Clash, but I knew what I was getting at.

So glad to see Iron Maiden win Best British Live Band, not because I think they're any good or because they were the one band shortlisted I have seen live, but because the serious, heartfelt acts like The Verve, Coldplay and Elbow were beaten by votes from a devoted fanbase who follow their heroes purely to be entertained, not to feel at one with the singer onstage, having an intimate, sincere moment with Ashcroft or Martin or Garvey. Iron Maiden may be shit rock 'n' roll but at least they do rock.

Trouser Trouble

Middle aged spread creeps up on you. I thought I was fine wearing my 34 inch trousers. Then it was time to buy a new pair and I realised the old ones had stretched quite a bit.

Wrapping the tape measure round my waist is dispiriting. It's one of those metal measures you use for measuring your living room or your dick. "12 inches but I don't use it as a rule!"

38 inches, though! I don't look it. To look at me you might say 34 or 35. But 38?

So I shop for some 38" trousers. Short leg. Fucking hell, I'm like Danny DeVito!

But 38's too loose. I try on a pair of 36s. I have to breath in and they're too tight around my bulging, muscular thighs and my perfectly proportioned arse. So I buy the 38s with a belt.

Trouble is, the holes in the belt are in the wrong places. Either too tight or too loose. So I make a hole with a screwdriver and a pair of scissors.

Not bad. But with my light blue shirts, if I walk any distance my trousers start to fall down. It's fucking embarrassing to keep pulling them up when I'm walking. You see, the light blue shirts are made of thinner material than the others. There's not enough bulk around my middle. Either I need to feed myself more or I need to get some braces. I can't wear braces! This is not fucking Gordon Gecko or Mork and Mindy, this is 21st century business!