Makes you proud to be British.....

Today I literally had a "WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" moment whilst watching the news on ITV1. As is to be expected, the majority of the news centered around small villages in rural Cumbria, the area where, for the benefit of those who dwell under large rocks, a previously-nondescript middle aged man went apeshit and drove around shooting strangers and ex-colleagues in the face with a hunting rifle. All seemed normal thus far, the presenters rambling on in a soft, hushed monotone as they do when a tragic event has taken place. There was the usual roving reporters stood in the village square or in front of a police cordon telling of a community still in shock over what has happened. There was someone from the local community such as the vicar or a victim's cousin's friend's pet hamster being asked to describe the mood of the local community. This is all par for the course and is to be expected in such an event. What i didn't expect, or think was in any way a good idea, was to have a nine year old boy who had the misfortune to witness one of the victims get shot in the head go in front of ITV's cameras and be asked to recall his memories of the incident. Am I the only person who thinks it is blatantly exploitative to ask a small child to relive such an event for the sake of entertainment? And you've got this soulless heathen of a reporter goading this child into revealing more gory details to the point where you half expect him to ask how many pieces the victim's skull fragmented into upon impact. But this is the way the news is nowadays. The news isn't the news anymore. Like with any movie, any CD, any book, any TV drama series, any soap, we select whether we watch BBC News, ITV News, Sky News or CNN based on which station offers the most interesting narrative or the most outlandish statements. For example, if BBC News are saying things like "Derrick Bird was a quiet but friendly chap with no history of mental illness" and Sky News are saying "DERRICK BIRD TRIED TO CHECK INTO MENTAL HOSPITAL NIGHT BEFORE KILLINGS!" naturally you are going to gravitate towards Sky News' coverage because it is more interesting, more exciting, more entertaining. And that what TV news is these days. Entertainment. Look at all the fancy title sequences, look at how any two-bob celebrity is shoehorned into a news report to give their view on a subject they know fuck all about. It's all about who can say the same thing in the most entertaining way. And the eyewitness report of a nine year old boy is more entertaining than the thoughts of a fuddy-duddy old priest.

It also made me smile in a depressed, resigned kind of a way that, after the reports on this shooting had ended the next item on the agenda was the bombshell that England captain Rio Ferdinand had twonked his knee and was out of the World Cup, the news of which was delivered in the exact hushed monotone I mentioned earlier, the kind of patronising softly-softly voice which usually accompanies stories such as the one above. It says so much about the society we in Britain exist that the news of an athlete on wages of over £100,000 per week has picked up a recoverable knee injury is delivered in the same anguished way as the news that twelve innocent people have been murdered for no good reason.

YOU'RE HAVIN' A LARF, AIN'CHAAAAAA?

The appeal of EastEnders is difficult to explain. A downright bizarre parallell universe whose grip on reality can be placed somewhere between Narnia and a bad acid trip, this is a corner of East London in which exists the world's busiest launderette since no-one seemingly owns a washing machine, ditto a fridge which would explain why there is always at least 80% of the population of Walford in the local cafe at any given time of day. A place where the mantra is less Love Thy Neighbour, more Fuck Thy Neighbour. A place where no one can keep a secret for more than about 14 seconds, which is troublesome in a place where everyone who has the misfortune to pass through it is in some way or another a lying cheating devious bastard with all sorts of unsavoury secrets to hide. A place where the standard form of communication is blind rage and incoherent yelling at one another. A place which seems to be more difficult to escape than the island in Lost. Seriously, there will be maybe 3 or 4 occasions anually when someone will stroll into the market with 392 glossy shopping bags having apparently been down Oxford Street, not to mention the fact that everyone in Walford works within 6 yards of their front door.

Although all these points seem like criticisms, they aren't intended to be. Things have to be this way because EastEnders is a piece of entertainment. Soaps cannot be 'realistic' because lets be honest, real life is fucking boring. What would you rather see, Who Killed Archie or Who Called Archie A Bloody Rotten Bugger And Gave Him The Finger? In reality, most people settle arguments by shouting and swearing. In Walford, disputes are solved by a great big statue to the temple.

My favourite things about EastEnders recently are as follows:

• The Masood Family

The temptation with any soap is to adhere to lazy ethnic stereotypes. For a long time I saw this family as a waste of time, nothing more than the token stereotypical Asians with their own takeaway food business, an attempt to reflect the diverse ethnicity of East London. But the producers threw an unexpectedly fantastic curveball at the Masooods by having their eldest son Syed embark on a passionate affair with local raving homosexual Christian. The shit hit the fan over New Year with Syed's mother Zainab finding out about the affair, in typical soap fashion, on the day of her son's wedding. After a fucking eternity in soap terms, the whole sordid business came out [so to speak] which has sent Zainab batshit insane, disowning her sinful son and wrecking her marriage in the process. It's been a joy to watch Zainab morph from a typically uptight muslim wife and mother to a deranged she-nutter utterly unable to seperate her love for her son from the humiliation he has bought on her family. Recenty she has fritted between reluctantly allowing Syed into the family home, changing her mind and burning all his shit and cooking meals which no one eats, all with the facial expression of a woman who just got slapped in the face with a decomposing seagull carcass. Husband Masood [I've only just realised they refer to him by the family name... So what, is he Masood Masood?....] spends most of the time trying to convince his wife to see reason, doing so with the air of a man who just enjoyed a massive spliff. As for Christian, he has recieved a couple of beatings for his troubles, and seems to spend his days prancing around in a tracksuit which he is far too old to pull off, casting longing glances at Syed whenever their eyes meet across the market.

• Phil and Shirley [and Ben Mitchell]
  

Despite the fact that all they seem to do is argue about how best to deal with Phil's son, dance-crazed poofta Ben and neck bottles of vodka, Phil and Shirley are a wonderful pairing, despite the utter bleakness of their lives. But this is the appeal of them, two people whose lives resemble a train wreck, it's only in the world of soaps that these two middle-aged reprobates could be allowed custody of two young children. Shirley, a lady with a face which could curdle solid brick, and Phil, still pink and rotund as ever, are dealing with psychopath-in-training Ben, who has taken to torturing his younger sister inbetween dressing as Lady Gaga and crying EVERY FIVE FUCKING SECONDS. I really hope the producers stick with Ben Mitchell until he is an adult [Or get rid when he gets to 15 and have him return 3 years later played by someone else] so we can witness first hand his inevitable development into a full-on serial killing nutcase lunatic. And Phillip himself is always worth watching just on the off chance he has a drink and stomps around Albert Square telling peopel it is "time to die!" or accusing characters from the board game Cluedo of murder.

• Danny Mitchell....

.... is leaving! I'm sick and tired of looking at this gormless twat gurn his way through every scene he is in, showing about as much charisma as a kitchen worktop. And, have you seen the face on those lips? What a complete jizz tissue. FUCK OFF NOW. And take Roxy with you. All that bitch seems to do these days is shout at people stood 2 inches in front of her.

• Jack Branning's Miraculous Recovery

It is amazing how a few weeks ago when he took a bullet in the brain, doctors said he would be paralyzed down one side of his face, which led to some unintentionally hilarious scenes when he woke up from his coma and looked like a really shit ventriloquist whenever he tried to talk. BUT LO AND BEHOLD 3 weeks on, his lop-sided face has been cured and he is free to use both sides of his face to try and act with.

• Darren Miller

It was amazing a few weeks ago when Jack got shot and Darren was asked to look for wheelchair-bound tosser Adam but returned with an empty chair and said he"found part of him." One can only assume Adam, in the panic following a gunshot, was crawling down the street outside like some kind of beached eel trying to find the sea.

• Kat Slater is returning

Although the producers saw fit to have Shane Ritchie tag along, the news of which ranks alongside being told you have won the lottery, but Shane Ritchie has to tag along.

• Fatboy

Should be the most irritating little cunt in the existence of intelligent life, but I somehow aspire to be him. BUFF TING.

Lost? Yep, me too.

A few months ago, I decided I would track down and watch all of the episodes of Lost I had missed. Considering I hadn't watched it for about 3 years, this was a lot of missed episodes. I got hold of seasons 2, 3, 4 and 5 [season 6 was yet to start] and caught myself up in a matter of weeks. My understanding of the Lost saga is as follows:



. Oceanic 815 crashes onto a remote tropical island. As well as following the group's lives on the island, we see their lives before the crash in a series of flashbacks.

. Survivors of said crash run into a group of people already living on the island, who become known as 'The Others.'

. Some people manage to leave the island, but feel like they need to go back, which they do. By now, the flashbacks have become flashforwards, showing us the fate of the group which escaped and why they feel the need to retun.

. A big wheel deep underground is turned, sending the island travelling through time, visiting several periods of history until resting itself in the 70s.

. Some of the group manage to make a life for themselves as part of the Dharma Initiative, a group of scientists located on the island to study the island's unique electromagnetic powers.

. The group that escaped the island return and all hell breaks loose, culminating in the detonation of a hydrogen bomb which, in theory, will reset their timeline and plonk them back to the time before they boarded the plane which crashed on the island in the first place.

. The island seems to be unaffected by the bomb blast. However, we are now being shown not flashbacks or flashforwards, but what seem to be completely different timelines, each character living an entirely different life to the ones we had seen in the flashbacks/flashforwards.



And this is all without even mentioning the polar bears, a man who can manifest himself into a plume of black smoke, the characters seeing into the future, the characters able to move between two different periods of time, the characters that can see/talk to dead people. Basically, Lost makes no fucking sense. Even with 4 episodes left until it is all over, I still find myself utterly unable to make any real guess as to what is going to go down. The last episode hinted at the island being some sort of purgatory, with a supposedly dead character saying that he is one of the ones stuck on the island and cannot move on, or something to that effect.

I've always been optimistic that, in the end, everything will make sense. Well, maybe make sense is the wrong phrase. Maybe its better to say I hope everything is explained. I've always kept faith that all these bizarre goings-on were going somewhere, and even with little over 4 hours of Lost left to go, I remain cautiously optimistic that my faith will be rewarded.

Is a school massacre storyline out of the question?...

Why is everyone so utterly in love with Glee? MAN, IT IS SO ANNOYING. Everything about it is just so over the top, so camp, so irritating and grating and unfunny. I hate how every week a gaggle of easily-persuaded morons lap this shit up in CD/MP3 form and give this shit the publicity and credibility it scarcely even deserves. I reckon the makers of this garbage are laughing their balls off at how easy they have it. What do they have to do? Most of the show is already written for them, what with every episode just being a load of ugly outcasts butchering every semi-popular song of the past 30 years.

Actually, you know what is worse than Glee?

NOTHING.

Not a thing on earth is as face-achingy bad as this shit.



I want to beat every single one of these people to death with the severed head of the person next to them. Especially that wretched little homo at the bottom in the middle. Closely followed by that cretin with the glasses and the face of a brain-damaged camel.