Originally published in www.swinemagazine.co.uk Nov 08
If you’re reading this you’re probably huddled around a clockwork Mac in a school gymnasium, having bartered the sleeves from your Lyle and Scott pullover for ten minutes online time. The Kredit Krunch has been hard on us all, but Swine is here to assist you with the simple process of living now that the economy is in ruins and marshall law is just around the corner.
Tip 1 – Foraging
It’s been a couple of weeks so your body has run out of fat reserves and is now burning off muscle and sinew. Shortly your limbs and extremities will contract from tissue wastage, leaving your gnarled hands looking like grasping Madonna-claws. Now is the time to forage for seasonal bounty. Roundabouts are a good source of defunct daffodil bulbs, they’re near to the surface so you shouldn’t expend much energy digging them out with your ragged, bloody fingertips. Another good bet is conkers – they’re not as poisonous as they look and you can chew on one for hours if you put your mind to it.
Tip 2 – Shelter
If you’re one of the 5 million people whose house is now owned by the Pathfinder scheme, then you’ll be living under a tarpaulin while an upwardly mobile first-time buyer snaps up your property as buy-to-let for the cut price of £1.5 million for a one bedroom flat. Tarpaulins are a luxury you can’t really afford – but you can get a cheap water butt or compost bin from the council under the European Social Fund Too Little Too Late Environmental plan, and two people can live in there quite comfortably. To deter squatters, spray paint ‘electric off’ or ‘rats in house’ onto the front like they’ve done on Edge Lane.
Tip 3 – Entertainment
During the war (the Iraq war) people got by one 40 inch plasma per family, but these are dark times and you’ll have to be more creative. If you have children, consider letting them join a ‘crew’ or a gang run by a friendly old Jewish gentleman who will teach them to do street theatre in the East End of London. The re-introduction of the death penalty under the tyrannical reign of High Commander Ian Blair is a blessing in disguise. Public executions are a cheap day out for all the family, and as they’re now being held in stadiums you can once again take to the terraces and yell abuse at paedos, rapists and robbers without having to pay £30 for the privilege.
Tip 4 – Sex
The government’s new policy of ‘one child per home’ contains many loopholes. (You may only have one child, but you can still have two ‘dogs’). However, the high price of contraception rules out vaginal intercourse, unless you’re a lezzer. Back door action is where it’s at, but remember it is still illegal, so if you’re caught it may mean castration or eviction from your compost bin. A safer option is just to read each other erotic fan fiction which you can find on any Liverpool FC discussion forum. Just search “Torres, Stevie, hard tackle ” and there’s a wealth of filthy imaginings to make those mandatory 19 hour nights just fly by. Going gay is another option.
Tip 5 – Alcohol
Alcohol is the only thing that makes life worth living, but high prices and increased demand has prices the average citizen out of the pub. You might try leaving fruit to go off and ferment. I heard that works. Virtually anything that can alter your mind in any way is now too expensive, but a good head injury works every time. You’ll feel lightheaded and woozy, slur your speech and pass out, all without spending a penny. Maybe you and a friend could take it turns to smack each other in the head with stones, or run tandem into a wall at full pelt – whichever way you try to do it, those ‘hangovers’ the next day will make you feel like you’ve had a great night in Spooners.
So there you have it – the Kredit Krunch doesn’t have to be all misery and death – make a bit off effort and it’ll be just like the war, which your dad always says was so fucking fantastic. Have fun Swiners!
Friday 20 November 2009
Sunday 21 June 2009
The Top 5 Most Offensive Children's Films*
*as defined by the Christian Childcare Action Project
Originally from Swine Magazine May 09
The Christian Childcare Action Project (or CAPP) spend most of their time viewing filth, in order to warn other parents about the perils of letting your child watch kissing or arguing on the big screen. They rate films out of a hundred, the lower the score, the more evil the film, with a score of 100 being the goal for which all entertainment should strive. Now if you’re sitting reading this and thinking “I don’t need a bunch of God-botherers to tell me which films aren’t suitable for Cruz and Rihanna”, you’d be so very, very wrong. As you can see, sometimes the most debauched children’s films can slip through the net…
5. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
If you’re looking at the title and thinking, “Hey, isn’t that the cartoon about a family of ecologists with mum and dad and three cute kids?” You’d be right. And either a parent or a little too interested in children’s films. Get out. Just get out right now.
One of the talking animals is called Darwin, which doesn’t go down well. CAP goes on for a whole paragraph about how apes don’t have souls, but the real issue it has with the film is that of youthful impudence and death threats. Eliza, the Dr Doolittle-esque heroine runs afoul of poachers who threaten to kill her. Fair enough, you might think, it’s wrong to threaten the life of a child, but it’s not quite as bad as goading a parent into trying to kill a child. You know, like GOD DID!
God instructed Abraham to take his boy Isaac up onto a mountain top and offer him up a sacrifice. Not only did Abraham bound up the mountain like a billy goat, anxious to please the Big Man, he made Isaac carry up the wood for his own funeral pyre. Nice guy.
The Wild Thornberrys Movie scores 33% evil for talking to animals, children disobeying parents and death threats on children.
God scores 49% evil for death threat on child and prolonged mental and physical torture.
Funniest contraventions of Biblical law : flatulence, “crude monkey display.”
4. Scooby Doo
The live-action Scooby Doo movie was offensive to public decency in many ways; the fact that it even exists sometimes makes me want to punch the wall until my knuckles bleed. The CAP reviewer is particularly incensed by the amount of cleavage on display from Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and one scene in which Fred and Daphne swap bodies and comment on the possibilities which could arise.
Cleavage is indeed a problem. In the Bible for example, the Song of Solomon has this to say; “Thy stature is like a palm tree, and thy breasts are clusters of grapes. I will go up the palm tree and clutch the boughs.” Nudge nudge, wink wink. If that’s too vague a suggestion for you, check out Genesis 19, where Lot gets drunk and screws both his daughters. Yes, you read that right.
There’s one area on which CAP and the rest of the world agrees. “ Scrappy is not at all likable. Indeed, Scrappy is demonic and bitter with a hugely misshapen grotesque head of monstrous proportions and features and an attitude to match.”
Scooby Doo – 40% evil for cleavage and an annoying dog.
God – 90% evil for prolonged incest and poems which belong on a toilet wall.
Funniest contravention of Biblical law : “Daphne’s head under Scooby’s tail”.
3. Eragon
A fantasy story about a kid who realises he can ride dragons and has some kind of mystical quest to complete. Something to do with destiny or having great hair.
There seems to be genuine disappointment at the lack of cursing but CAP gets its knickers in a twist about Eragon’s ‘refusal to leave a residence’. They are also dismayed by the amount of ungodly creatures, and then by the fact that Eragon kills them. “Unholy beasts and creatures throughout” states the review, and it could almost be talking about the Old Testament, which is chock full of cool beasts. The cherubim sound cute but they had four faces; of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. They also had wings and carried flaming swords, whereas all Eragon has is some crappy dragons. That’s not to mention the actual Beast of the Bible, which is so fearsome it needs a capital letter, and has seven heads and ten horns.
Eragon – 41% evil for mystical dragons and almost-cock
God – 62% evil for flaming swords and things with a numerically interesting head and horn combo.
Funniest contraventions of Biblical law : “below navel skin threatening exposure of that which follows.”
2. Shrek
One of the most baffling entries because of the judgements made upon what is or isn’t ‘damaging’ to children. In this film Shrek inherits the crown of Far, Far Away from the King. Mistake number one, as ‘death of old age’ apparently comes under the bracket of violence and crime. If he died of old age then surely the criminal here is God?
The reviewer is disgusted that there is a scene which depicts a baby accidentally seeing his father’s genitals, and also that a donkey is present at the time. Now anyone brave enough to whip it out in front of a donkey when there’s a third party there to make comparisons gets a slap on the back from me. And when did it become sinful for a donkey to see your bits? Unless you’re covering them in apple sauce and swinging them coquettishly (thankyou Youtube) I can’t see where this would be a problem.
Check out Ezekiel 23, where our old friend the Song of Solomon has a word to say about donkeys; “She lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys’ and whose emission was like that of horses.” I swear to God I am not making this up – and He knows, His guys wrote the damn thing.
The review ends with this comment about the trailers for the film; “By the way, in the trailers selected for the showing I attended, Bart Simpson is seen frontally nude with a French fry hiding the most intimate features of his gender-specific parts, about the same amount of Austin Powers' flesh hidden by the baby's head. Come quickly, Jesus! We are morally attacking our children!”
I would like to think that the reviewer has a room full of dusty case files which contain comparative images of cocks and what they are obscured by in the movies.
Shrek the Third – 45% evil for fighting and showing a donkey your cock.
God – 80% evil for donkey-cock loving whores.
Funniest contravention of Bible law : “character in underwear, repeatedly”.
1. Kangaroo Jack
This PG romp about a kangaroo who accidentally steals mob money receives a rating of 29/100, which in CAP terms makes it less suitable for children’s viewing than Kill Bill Volume 2 which gets a respectable 33.
Amongst the films misdemeanours are “lies”, “reckless driving” and what the reviewer refers to as “grossly exaggerated flatulence”. We are not told what constitutes a ‘gross exaggeration’, there are no charts to aid our decision making.
The violence in the film seems to be of particular concern, not only “fighting” but “beating”, “strike in the face” and “assault”. I commend the reviewer’s vigilance at spotting the differences between beating and striking in the face, and between these two and assault. And between those three and fighting.
If violence is an issue for our reviewer he may want to set to his Bible with a big black marker to protect the youth. God is the shizzle at imaginative violence, for example, did you know that the dowry paid by King David for his wife was 100 foreskins? And not only did David go and get them without hesitation, he got twice as many, just to show the future father-in-law he was serious.
Kangaroo Jack – 71% evil for violence requiring four synonyms.
God - 98% evil for crimes against the foreskin.
Funniest contravention of Bible law : “attention to crotch”
Dishonourable Mentions
Very few films achieve that golden 100 rating which means there is absolutely nothing Biblically wrong with the film. The ratings system is so robust that not even actual Bible stories can escape the beady eye of the CAP reviewers.
Baby Miracles is a series of Bible stories made for children, and although they got a 100 rating for their re-telling of the story of creation, they weren’t so lucky with Noah’s Ark and Jonah and the Whale. CAP knocks two points off the Noah story because of the ‘violence’ included when people are drowned for disobeying God. Jonah and the Whale is docked three points for violence, namely, yes, you guessed it “man being swallowed by whale”.
Similarly, The Joseph Story, a cartoon by Bugtime Adventures, is reprimanded for showing Joseph being sold into slavery. The Jesus Video has scenes of ‘side-on male nudity’ and, shock, horror “death by crucifixion”, which makes it less suitable for children than The Jungle Book 2.
May God have mercy on our souls – though He probably wouldn’t, looking at the evidence.
Tuesday 21 April 2009
The Secret Life of Beers
Originally published in Swine Magazine - April 09
If like me you find the conversation can dry up after 12 solid drinking hours, read on and furnish your pickled brain with some proper knowledge on our malty best friends.
Hoegaarden
This trendy witbieren was on its arse back in 1955. The Belgian Hoegaarden brewery (named after the town) closed its doors and it was left to a milkman called Pierre Celis to brew some up in hay loft ten years later. Demand was still high and times were good, until a massive fire claimed the new brewery in 1985 and Celis had to take the InBev dollar to rebuild it. He complained that InBev wanted to change the traditional recipe to make the beer more mass marketable, and took his ball home, starting the new Celis Brewery in Texas. InBev tried to close the Hoegaarden brewery and move it but local protests stopped them in their tracks and the beer continues to be brewed there.
The traditional many sided Hoegaarden glass comes in 12 sizes, from a tiny shot glass used for product launches to a 12 pint version which InBev claim is for 'display purposes only'.
Tetley's Bitter
Henry Boddington, John Smith and Joshua Tetley – or the Holy Trinity as I call them – are the fathers of modern British Bitter. Joshua bought the Leeds brewery in 1822 and in 1839 made his son a partner in the new Joshua Tetley and Son Brewery. By the sixties the company was expanding and merged with the Warrington Walkers (of which I am not one – my family were the other Warrington Walkers, much to my shame), the start of many name changes and buyouts until the word Tetley was dropped from the brand all together and Carlsberg UK became the brewer.
In 1911 Tetley's challenged Harry Houdini to escape from a cask of their ale. He didn't manage it, and indeed who would want to?
Guinness
Synonymous with Ireland but based on a porter, which originated in London. So concerned were the brewery with quality they hired a statistician called William Sealy Gosset to work out which were the best yielding varieties of barley. To prevent Guinness secrets being revealed he was never allowed to publish academic papers under his own name, and his greatest work, Student's t-distribution, was published under this pseudonym. I haven't the foggiest what this t-distribution means but basically whenever you use Microsoft Excel you're using it.
Tuesday 20 January 2009
Burn The Arenas : The MEN vs the Hollywood Bowl
I find it hard to express in words how much I detest the Manchester Evening News Arena. Usually I settle for a primal scream which is a cross between a slaughtered goat and the first spasmodic mewlings of a Boyzone reunion tour audience. Sometimes I dress a dummy in a big yellow jacket and burn it, simultaneously hitting it with sticks and crying.
The MEN is like a punishment for wanting to be entertained. I suspect it was designed by a member of Opus Dei who is sickened by the decadence of performance that he wants us all to be metaphorically birched by high ticket prices, ridiculously overpriced food and a Gestapo like staff who would sooner leave your children orphaned than allow you to use flash photography.
I haven't been to the MEN for a while, in fact I have avoided it like the plague. Actually, if someone said to me "Kirsty, there's a village over there with the plague, or there's the MEN arena", I would hitch hike to the plague ridden village singing Hallelujah. Unfortunately, any performer slightly more popular than The Wurzels seemed destined to end up there and so I ventured to see Steve Coogan wishing I could just be blinkered and sedated like a travelling racehorse until I reached my seat.
First off, you don't park in the MEN if you want to get home before dawn. The arena car park is so congested that you all sit beeping and shouting at each other, edging forward inch by inch until someone just speeds over the edge of level four and everyone is rescued by helicopter. The alternative is to give £6 to Dazza who will ensure your car isn't broken into by waving a baseball bat with nails sticking out of it.
Once inside, that's it – you can't exit unless you're going home. This is because all of the tickets are checked by barcode, so once you get scanned, you're a prisoner of the venue. This is where the real fun begins. Fancy a drink? Well you've been frisked for bottles on the way in so you'll have to pay £3 for a warm mini-bottle of Becks that looks like something you'd give to a child so he could play at being a landlord. Either that or a pint in a plastic cup for £4.
Food is relegated to the starchy and inedible. They have a team of Chinese kids selling ice cream and candy floss, or a strange chicken wrappy thing, also £4. The hotdogs look like they've been made from previous employees and the pies were last seen on I Wouldn't Eat That, the hilarious consumer programme hosted by Nicky Campbell's devolved sense of self-importance.
Whilst sitting in this consumerist nightmare I recalled this summer when I went to Los Angeles and saw the new musical by Eric Idle at the Hollywood Bowl. The Bowl is one of the best and most famous performance venues in the world, but rather than beat you over the head with this fact they actively encourage people to come for the music and not the opportunity to spend. You can bring in your own food and drink (yes, even alcohol) and although they do provide food themselves it's reasonably priced. They rent you cushions to sit on for $2 and the only programme is a $3 magazine listing all of the season's performances and interviewing the people involved. Once inside the venue you can wander round as you please, the staff are actually there to help you rather than make you feel like you're in jail, and you can take flash photography all you want – it's an outdoor venue so it will look shit anyway. Oh, and by the way – the seats were even cheap. £10 to see the show from the cheap seats, with a view ten times better than the top tier of the MEN.
If the Bowl was transplanted to Manchester they'd ban all outside food and drink, force you to buy their rancid fast food and ensure that all staff members were on strict instructions not to allow anything which might pass for enjoyment or freedom. Ticket prices would skyrocket and they'd draft in Tweenies On Ice for a few months to make sure that a whole new generation of gig goers believed that this was the pinnacle of entertainment.
The Echo Arena is exactly the same, as is the NEC in Birmingham and the SECC in Glasgow. All nasty soulless places which have little to do with music, or with fun. Luckily it seems that all but the leviathans of music have deserted the Arena circuit, preferring to play twice as many shows in small venues and not have to spend millions on lighting design just to make sure the stage doesn't look too shit in the aircraft hanger they've been booked into.
Carling venues aren't up to much either but at least they don't try and masquerade as some kind of 'experience'. I'd rather 'experience' a rectal examination than the plastic scalping that goes on at arenas. I suggest an organised rebellion whereby 20,000 people all buy tickets to an event and walk in there wearing nacho hats filled with hot cheese. If I win the lottery this weekend I will make it happen. And so perish all tyrants!
The MEN is like a punishment for wanting to be entertained. I suspect it was designed by a member of Opus Dei who is sickened by the decadence of performance that he wants us all to be metaphorically birched by high ticket prices, ridiculously overpriced food and a Gestapo like staff who would sooner leave your children orphaned than allow you to use flash photography.
I haven't been to the MEN for a while, in fact I have avoided it like the plague. Actually, if someone said to me "Kirsty, there's a village over there with the plague, or there's the MEN arena", I would hitch hike to the plague ridden village singing Hallelujah. Unfortunately, any performer slightly more popular than The Wurzels seemed destined to end up there and so I ventured to see Steve Coogan wishing I could just be blinkered and sedated like a travelling racehorse until I reached my seat.
First off, you don't park in the MEN if you want to get home before dawn. The arena car park is so congested that you all sit beeping and shouting at each other, edging forward inch by inch until someone just speeds over the edge of level four and everyone is rescued by helicopter. The alternative is to give £6 to Dazza who will ensure your car isn't broken into by waving a baseball bat with nails sticking out of it.
Once inside, that's it – you can't exit unless you're going home. This is because all of the tickets are checked by barcode, so once you get scanned, you're a prisoner of the venue. This is where the real fun begins. Fancy a drink? Well you've been frisked for bottles on the way in so you'll have to pay £3 for a warm mini-bottle of Becks that looks like something you'd give to a child so he could play at being a landlord. Either that or a pint in a plastic cup for £4.
Food is relegated to the starchy and inedible. They have a team of Chinese kids selling ice cream and candy floss, or a strange chicken wrappy thing, also £4. The hotdogs look like they've been made from previous employees and the pies were last seen on I Wouldn't Eat That, the hilarious consumer programme hosted by Nicky Campbell's devolved sense of self-importance.
Whilst sitting in this consumerist nightmare I recalled this summer when I went to Los Angeles and saw the new musical by Eric Idle at the Hollywood Bowl. The Bowl is one of the best and most famous performance venues in the world, but rather than beat you over the head with this fact they actively encourage people to come for the music and not the opportunity to spend. You can bring in your own food and drink (yes, even alcohol) and although they do provide food themselves it's reasonably priced. They rent you cushions to sit on for $2 and the only programme is a $3 magazine listing all of the season's performances and interviewing the people involved. Once inside the venue you can wander round as you please, the staff are actually there to help you rather than make you feel like you're in jail, and you can take flash photography all you want – it's an outdoor venue so it will look shit anyway. Oh, and by the way – the seats were even cheap. £10 to see the show from the cheap seats, with a view ten times better than the top tier of the MEN.
If the Bowl was transplanted to Manchester they'd ban all outside food and drink, force you to buy their rancid fast food and ensure that all staff members were on strict instructions not to allow anything which might pass for enjoyment or freedom. Ticket prices would skyrocket and they'd draft in Tweenies On Ice for a few months to make sure that a whole new generation of gig goers believed that this was the pinnacle of entertainment.
The Echo Arena is exactly the same, as is the NEC in Birmingham and the SECC in Glasgow. All nasty soulless places which have little to do with music, or with fun. Luckily it seems that all but the leviathans of music have deserted the Arena circuit, preferring to play twice as many shows in small venues and not have to spend millions on lighting design just to make sure the stage doesn't look too shit in the aircraft hanger they've been booked into.
Carling venues aren't up to much either but at least they don't try and masquerade as some kind of 'experience'. I'd rather 'experience' a rectal examination than the plastic scalping that goes on at arenas. I suggest an organised rebellion whereby 20,000 people all buy tickets to an event and walk in there wearing nacho hats filled with hot cheese. If I win the lottery this weekend I will make it happen. And so perish all tyrants!
Saturday 20 December 2008
Walker's Best Of 2008 - a lazy opinion piece for Swine Magazine
Originally published in http://www.swinemagazine.co.uk/ Dec 08
Best LP Jonathan Coulton - JoCo Looks Back
Some would say your life isn't complete until you've heard an arresting love song which was written from the point of view of a giant squid. I would be one of those people.
Runners Up : Flight Of The Conchords – Flight Of The Conchords, Laura Marling -Alas, I Cannot Swim
Best Live Act Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm – Manchester Uni – 29.10.08
All seated, full of people who laugh at references to the computer game Fable, songs about fractals and fighting nuns. Sounds like the world's worst gig but was actually the world's greatest.
Also featured a cameo from Neil Gaiman, reading lyrics about a creepy doll.
Runners Up : Edwyn Collins, Serj Tankian
Top 5 Singles
5. Lightspeed Champion – Galaxy of The Lost
4. Black Kids – I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You
3. Laura Marling – Ghosts
2. Estelle - American Boy
1. Vampire Weekend – Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
Best Club Strangeways @ The Library, Leeds
No point in explaining because I bet no-one's ever been there but this IS the best club night of 2008.
Runners up : Jamm, Brixton ; The Cabin Club,Liverpool and its foetal DJs
Best Film The Dark Knight
Almighty hype + Recently dead young actor usually = overrated but TDK was bombastic, brooding and surprising.
Runners up : The X Files : I Want To Believe (Yes, honestly)
Best TV Heroes (BBC 2)
To all the naysayers who have been complaining about a drop in quality, Sylar is the best character on television, and Sylar is in Heroes, therefore, Heroes is the best thing on television. www.endofshow.com/thelist is my Heroes podcast BTW.
Runners Up : Dead Set (Channel 4), The IT Crowd (Channel 4)
Best Radio Russell Brand
Well I think the loss of the show is a loss to BBC 2, and seeing as I can't vote for myself…
Runner Up : Me on End Of Show (HCR 92.3) (Balls to humility)
Best Book Stephen King – Duma Key
Chilling return to horror from the spookiest looking author of all time. Seriously, he looks like one of his own monsters.
Runner up : Stephen Fry In America
Best Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo Who am I to argue with everyone else in the world?
Best Event San Diego Comic-Con 2008
Attendees may be pegged as huge geeks but Comic-Con is the breeding ground of everything you will see on a screen for the next year. The media kingmakers' convention.
Best Weather Girl/Boy
Dianne Oxberry, watch the featured locations on the map, she spells out swear words with them – seriously, one week it was Chester, Urmston, Northwich, Trafford.
Tomasz Schafernaker – eye candy, the only thing worth watching on BBC News 24. Gives me a warm front every time.
Best LP Jonathan Coulton - JoCo Looks Back
Some would say your life isn't complete until you've heard an arresting love song which was written from the point of view of a giant squid. I would be one of those people.
Runners Up : Flight Of The Conchords – Flight Of The Conchords, Laura Marling -Alas, I Cannot Swim
Best Live Act Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm – Manchester Uni – 29.10.08
All seated, full of people who laugh at references to the computer game Fable, songs about fractals and fighting nuns. Sounds like the world's worst gig but was actually the world's greatest.
Also featured a cameo from Neil Gaiman, reading lyrics about a creepy doll.
Runners Up : Edwyn Collins, Serj Tankian
Top 5 Singles
5. Lightspeed Champion – Galaxy of The Lost
4. Black Kids – I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You
3. Laura Marling – Ghosts
2. Estelle - American Boy
1. Vampire Weekend – Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
Best Club Strangeways @ The Library, Leeds
No point in explaining because I bet no-one's ever been there but this IS the best club night of 2008.
Runners up : Jamm, Brixton ; The Cabin Club,Liverpool and its foetal DJs
Best Film The Dark Knight
Almighty hype + Recently dead young actor usually = overrated but TDK was bombastic, brooding and surprising.
Runners up : The X Files : I Want To Believe (Yes, honestly)
Best TV Heroes (BBC 2)
To all the naysayers who have been complaining about a drop in quality, Sylar is the best character on television, and Sylar is in Heroes, therefore, Heroes is the best thing on television. www.endofshow.com/thelist is my Heroes podcast BTW.
Runners Up : Dead Set (Channel 4), The IT Crowd (Channel 4)
Best Radio Russell Brand
Well I think the loss of the show is a loss to BBC 2, and seeing as I can't vote for myself…
Runner Up : Me on End Of Show (HCR 92.3) (Balls to humility)
Best Book Stephen King – Duma Key
Chilling return to horror from the spookiest looking author of all time. Seriously, he looks like one of his own monsters.
Runner up : Stephen Fry In America
Best Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo Who am I to argue with everyone else in the world?
Best Event San Diego Comic-Con 2008
Attendees may be pegged as huge geeks but Comic-Con is the breeding ground of everything you will see on a screen for the next year. The media kingmakers' convention.
Best Weather Girl/Boy
Dianne Oxberry, watch the featured locations on the map, she spells out swear words with them – seriously, one week it was Chester, Urmston, Northwich, Trafford.
Tomasz Schafernaker – eye candy, the only thing worth watching on BBC News 24. Gives me a warm front every time.
Saturday 20 September 2008
What I Did In My Holidays
Originally published in www.swinemagazine.co.uk Sep 08
One of my finest school moments came in the first week of 2nd year juniors when we were asked to do a project entitled ‘My Summer Holidays’. As we did this every September while teacher’s blood alcohol level returned to normal, I had planned diligently and spent my summer holiday in Palma Nova collecting things that I might stick in my project book when I got back. Unfortunately for my parents and to the delight of my male classmates (and Laura Shaw, always wondered about her) I had been collecting flyers for wet t-shirt contests and Spanish prossy cards from phone boxes.
Our family holidays were just that, the whole family of uncles, cousins, aunties, nanas, great nanas and assorted school friends who’d somehow gotten the impression that this would two weeks of whores and nipples. We’d go on two of these a year, one with my mum’s side and one with my dad’s. We did once talk about assembling the entire clan into one nightmarish holiday but that fell through due to the lack of 28 bed cottages in South Devon. Mum’s side of the family are all noticeably calmer and less nuts than the Walkers so that holiday was usually at the latter end of the summer, like a gentle pear sorbet after a skunk balti.
Departure day on Walker holidays was always a bit like the opening scenes of Home Alone, with half a dozen mental kids belting around my nan’s house screaming whilst Dad, uncles and granddads got pissed and argued about the best way to drive. Satnavs have removed this problem but in 1990 it was just four blokes and a 1956 AA road map trying to decide which A road to go on to find the Dead Zone, otherwise known as our holiday destination. Because there were nearly 20 of us we could never find a big enough house and so ended up in some weird backwater with some questionable ‘rooms’ which were clearly cupboards before we arrived.
One house we stayed in was known as ‘the spooky house’ by the locals because it was a foreboding gothic mansion with 5 floors and sat on top of a hill overlooking Perranporth. It looked like the previous occupants had just been shipped in from Transylvania in wooden crates with a bed of their native earth. All of the door handles fell off, leaving you regularly trapped inside rooms, and all seven of us kids were placed in the top attic room which had no stairs, just a step ladder and a paper sign saying ‘Stairs Broken’.
In some posh hotels and villas there’s a lovely welcome basket with locally sourced produce laid out for your pleasure. In Castle Dracula Perranporth my mum opened the fridge to find a whole sea bass staring back at her and was informed that the people in the house before us had been on a fishing trip and that we were welcome to enjoy this bounty. The woman showing us round told my Aunty Janet to ‘whack its head off and just boil it’. Once she’d gone to feed the wolves my uncles went and slung it into the sea and it really did take two of them, wobbling down the hill with the creature from the deep while the townspeople laughed their tits off .
First on the agenda for any holiday taken in the UK was to find a pub with a skittle alley. For some reason my dad and his elder brothers prioritised this above all else, I have a theory that it was because it was cheap entertainment that everyone could get involved in and was just gay enough to stop them coming to blows during the inevitable final round grudge match. In Stogumber, Somerset, we had a local pub which advertised its skittle alley, but we were dismayed to learn that it was in an outbuilding that was full of tractors. The landlord promised to clean it out if we came back the next day, and sure enough we played skittles in a barn with a row of tractors staring at us and rats scuttling about whilst my nana screamed to God to save her from these unholy minions.
Holidays abroad were always just as chaotic, with the added trump card of an international airport. My uncle Stuart would always find what he called ‘a smashing hotel’ by only booking places which were advertised in German. He had an inkling that these would be the best because Germans are so stereotypically demanding, and he had a point, we stayed in some nice places. The most obvious exception was the Don Bigote, which we thought must mean ‘Mr Bigot’. It was half finished, looked nothing like its picture in Das Ferien and was packed to the rafters with German businessmen. One night we were all playing Trivial Pursuit (not even the travel version, the big original box which my grandad insisted on bringing everywhere) on the balcony of the biggest room whilst a few metres below a few dozen Germans were waiting for a coach. They kept looking up at us with suspicion every time we laughed, and at one point grandad was taking ages to ask the question on the card he had. When challenged he got flustered and started whispering “Which German city took most allied damage during the second world war?” Giggling ensued and through some fluke every question that followed was about the war, leaving the Germans below glaring as the words Kristallnacht, Goering and Rhineland floated down to them punctuated with hysterical laughter.
I won’t go into the myriad ‘incidents’, the goose stepping by my 6 year old brother in the dining room, my mum being thrown out of the Green Parrot bar in Magaluf for taking a swing at a guy selling photos with a chimp, and the night at the Spanish Evening which we now refer to only as ‘Black Fiesta’. Suffice to say that I managed to make ‘My Summer Holiday’ a thrilling read, and it eventually passed the censors with an 18 certificate for nudity and chimp related violence.
One of my finest school moments came in the first week of 2nd year juniors when we were asked to do a project entitled ‘My Summer Holidays’. As we did this every September while teacher’s blood alcohol level returned to normal, I had planned diligently and spent my summer holiday in Palma Nova collecting things that I might stick in my project book when I got back. Unfortunately for my parents and to the delight of my male classmates (and Laura Shaw, always wondered about her) I had been collecting flyers for wet t-shirt contests and Spanish prossy cards from phone boxes.
Our family holidays were just that, the whole family of uncles, cousins, aunties, nanas, great nanas and assorted school friends who’d somehow gotten the impression that this would two weeks of whores and nipples. We’d go on two of these a year, one with my mum’s side and one with my dad’s. We did once talk about assembling the entire clan into one nightmarish holiday but that fell through due to the lack of 28 bed cottages in South Devon. Mum’s side of the family are all noticeably calmer and less nuts than the Walkers so that holiday was usually at the latter end of the summer, like a gentle pear sorbet after a skunk balti.
Departure day on Walker holidays was always a bit like the opening scenes of Home Alone, with half a dozen mental kids belting around my nan’s house screaming whilst Dad, uncles and granddads got pissed and argued about the best way to drive. Satnavs have removed this problem but in 1990 it was just four blokes and a 1956 AA road map trying to decide which A road to go on to find the Dead Zone, otherwise known as our holiday destination. Because there were nearly 20 of us we could never find a big enough house and so ended up in some weird backwater with some questionable ‘rooms’ which were clearly cupboards before we arrived.
One house we stayed in was known as ‘the spooky house’ by the locals because it was a foreboding gothic mansion with 5 floors and sat on top of a hill overlooking Perranporth. It looked like the previous occupants had just been shipped in from Transylvania in wooden crates with a bed of their native earth. All of the door handles fell off, leaving you regularly trapped inside rooms, and all seven of us kids were placed in the top attic room which had no stairs, just a step ladder and a paper sign saying ‘Stairs Broken’.
In some posh hotels and villas there’s a lovely welcome basket with locally sourced produce laid out for your pleasure. In Castle Dracula Perranporth my mum opened the fridge to find a whole sea bass staring back at her and was informed that the people in the house before us had been on a fishing trip and that we were welcome to enjoy this bounty. The woman showing us round told my Aunty Janet to ‘whack its head off and just boil it’. Once she’d gone to feed the wolves my uncles went and slung it into the sea and it really did take two of them, wobbling down the hill with the creature from the deep while the townspeople laughed their tits off .
First on the agenda for any holiday taken in the UK was to find a pub with a skittle alley. For some reason my dad and his elder brothers prioritised this above all else, I have a theory that it was because it was cheap entertainment that everyone could get involved in and was just gay enough to stop them coming to blows during the inevitable final round grudge match. In Stogumber, Somerset, we had a local pub which advertised its skittle alley, but we were dismayed to learn that it was in an outbuilding that was full of tractors. The landlord promised to clean it out if we came back the next day, and sure enough we played skittles in a barn with a row of tractors staring at us and rats scuttling about whilst my nana screamed to God to save her from these unholy minions.
Holidays abroad were always just as chaotic, with the added trump card of an international airport. My uncle Stuart would always find what he called ‘a smashing hotel’ by only booking places which were advertised in German. He had an inkling that these would be the best because Germans are so stereotypically demanding, and he had a point, we stayed in some nice places. The most obvious exception was the Don Bigote, which we thought must mean ‘Mr Bigot’. It was half finished, looked nothing like its picture in Das Ferien and was packed to the rafters with German businessmen. One night we were all playing Trivial Pursuit (not even the travel version, the big original box which my grandad insisted on bringing everywhere) on the balcony of the biggest room whilst a few metres below a few dozen Germans were waiting for a coach. They kept looking up at us with suspicion every time we laughed, and at one point grandad was taking ages to ask the question on the card he had. When challenged he got flustered and started whispering “Which German city took most allied damage during the second world war?” Giggling ensued and through some fluke every question that followed was about the war, leaving the Germans below glaring as the words Kristallnacht, Goering and Rhineland floated down to them punctuated with hysterical laughter.
I won’t go into the myriad ‘incidents’, the goose stepping by my 6 year old brother in the dining room, my mum being thrown out of the Green Parrot bar in Magaluf for taking a swing at a guy selling photos with a chimp, and the night at the Spanish Evening which we now refer to only as ‘Black Fiesta’. Suffice to say that I managed to make ‘My Summer Holiday’ a thrilling read, and it eventually passed the censors with an 18 certificate for nudity and chimp related violence.
Saturday 14 June 2008
KW Senior
My dad is stood on the doorstep in the rain with a dazed look on his face and a sprig of privet hedge in his hand. He looks up, with his usual visage of incredulity and gives the feed line to what I know will be a night full of coffee drinking and gasping for air as the laughter stitch leaves us both bent double and crying ; “You’ll never guess what just happened to me!”
My dad’s blond with blue eyes, and I am not. Because of this, throughout my life I’ve been told that I’m ‘exactly’ like my mother. I am not. If you have to draw parallels between parents and their offspring you have use a better starting point than their colouring because it’s the personality traits that really hit people. Anyone who really knows me knows that I am virtually the same person as my dad. This is immediately evident to anyone who sees us drinking together. I’m basically him in a dress, which is a chilling visual to say the least.
When I was born, my dad was 19 years old. I’ve got a picture of him with shoulder length hair and a cheesecloth shirt which was taken when I was about two months old and he looks barely out of nappies himself. He was at art college studying photography, a job he does to this day. I think a lot of the foibles I picked up from him were a symptom of his youth; the obsession that he had for The Beatles and Paul McCartney fed my obsession for Suede (my Dad used to have a guilty stash of magazines that I used to think were porn but were actually issues of Record Collector) and the reason that I have always found it so easy to embark on hare-brained schemes definitely comes from his attitude of “What’s the worst that could happen?”.
Dad’s schemes ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. He’s good with this hands (something I haven’t inherited in the slightest) and once made my grandparents a wardrobe. He then decided that this would be a first rate business venture, though that one wardrobe was all he ever produced. For a whole summer in about 1993 he helped his friend set up a crazy golf course next to Pickmere Lake, which was functional but lacked aesthetic value, in fact it looked like something from Disneyland Chechnya. It was made completely of unfinished concrete and you risked serious injury in trying to retrieve wayward balls because of the bits of broken glass and nails that were lurking inside every hole.
He was also adept at spotting new technologies that would become quickly obsolete. He bought a toploading Betamax video recorder in 1982 and quickly amassed a collection of taped off the telly programmes which he carefully labelled and filed. He used to spend hours sat in front of that machine fast forwarding to accurately document what was on the tape and for how long. To this day he insists that Betmax was the higher quality format, and I have to agree with him. He had a carphone in 1988 which my friends thought was the height of sophistication, even thought it was only used about three times because the calls were 50p a minute. In 1992, four years before the first DVD players came onto the market, he had a Kodak PhotoCD player, which was possibly the most useless piece of equipment ever invented. Only professional photographers have ever heard of them for they were designed to play back photographs from files that had been digitised, and only professional photographers wanted to do that. It was never popular and was quickly replaced by a technology we now know as the ‘computer’.
Our computer was an Acorn Electron, which my dad played on for hours. His favourite game was called Sphinx Adventure which consisted of a small, badly rendered elf character trying to reach a sphinx. A typical moment of game play is as follows:
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO LEFT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO RIGHT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO FORWARD
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO BACK
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
YOU HAVE BEEN SLAIN BY A WIZARD
GAME OVER
It took him nearly four years to complete, and was rewarded by a screen saying ‘THE END’. He also enjoyed ‘Tree Of Knowledge’, a quiz game where you had to actually input all the quiz data yourself. You could spend hours building a database on Neighbours characters or Manchester City Players 1964 – 1984, only for the game to formulate questions based on this data, which you obviously already knew the answer to.
It would take me a long time to run through all of the things that make my dad my dad. I attempted it when I was best man at his wedding to my stepmum, but the speech ended up being a testimonial to the man and I binned it, thinking that stories about the notes he used to leave in my lunchbox featuring poems about the headmistress’s underwear, or the time he took payment for some photography work in the form of a rabbit would say more about my relationship with him than his with his new wife.
I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the opening paragraph – so there’s my dad, privet hedge in hand and relates to me the following tale;
“I was dropping off some photos at a woman’s house, and came back to find the car was gone. Now, my first thought was ‘The car’s been nicked’, so I went to go back inside and call the police. Just then I saw the car at the bottom of the hill parked in someone’s drive, so I went down there to see what they were playing at. The next thing, this old fella comes out ranting and raving at me, saying that my car’s ruined his hedge. Turns out I must have left that handbrake off and the car’s rolled right down the hill into the guy’s drive and only been stopped by his privet hedge. Before I know it, he’s blocked me in with his car and is getting me to sign a written confession that I have damaged his ‘valuable’ hedge. He wouldn’t let me go until I’d signed it and taken some pictures.”
“So why did you bring some of the hedge with you?”
“This? This is my evidence.”
And so goes another normal night in the life of Keith Walker.
My dad’s blond with blue eyes, and I am not. Because of this, throughout my life I’ve been told that I’m ‘exactly’ like my mother. I am not. If you have to draw parallels between parents and their offspring you have use a better starting point than their colouring because it’s the personality traits that really hit people. Anyone who really knows me knows that I am virtually the same person as my dad. This is immediately evident to anyone who sees us drinking together. I’m basically him in a dress, which is a chilling visual to say the least.
When I was born, my dad was 19 years old. I’ve got a picture of him with shoulder length hair and a cheesecloth shirt which was taken when I was about two months old and he looks barely out of nappies himself. He was at art college studying photography, a job he does to this day. I think a lot of the foibles I picked up from him were a symptom of his youth; the obsession that he had for The Beatles and Paul McCartney fed my obsession for Suede (my Dad used to have a guilty stash of magazines that I used to think were porn but were actually issues of Record Collector) and the reason that I have always found it so easy to embark on hare-brained schemes definitely comes from his attitude of “What’s the worst that could happen?”.
Dad’s schemes ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. He’s good with this hands (something I haven’t inherited in the slightest) and once made my grandparents a wardrobe. He then decided that this would be a first rate business venture, though that one wardrobe was all he ever produced. For a whole summer in about 1993 he helped his friend set up a crazy golf course next to Pickmere Lake, which was functional but lacked aesthetic value, in fact it looked like something from Disneyland Chechnya. It was made completely of unfinished concrete and you risked serious injury in trying to retrieve wayward balls because of the bits of broken glass and nails that were lurking inside every hole.
He was also adept at spotting new technologies that would become quickly obsolete. He bought a toploading Betamax video recorder in 1982 and quickly amassed a collection of taped off the telly programmes which he carefully labelled and filed. He used to spend hours sat in front of that machine fast forwarding to accurately document what was on the tape and for how long. To this day he insists that Betmax was the higher quality format, and I have to agree with him. He had a carphone in 1988 which my friends thought was the height of sophistication, even thought it was only used about three times because the calls were 50p a minute. In 1992, four years before the first DVD players came onto the market, he had a Kodak PhotoCD player, which was possibly the most useless piece of equipment ever invented. Only professional photographers have ever heard of them for they were designed to play back photographs from files that had been digitised, and only professional photographers wanted to do that. It was never popular and was quickly replaced by a technology we now know as the ‘computer’.
Our computer was an Acorn Electron, which my dad played on for hours. His favourite game was called Sphinx Adventure which consisted of a small, badly rendered elf character trying to reach a sphinx. A typical moment of game play is as follows:
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO LEFT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO RIGHT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO FORWARD
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO BACK
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
YOU HAVE BEEN SLAIN BY A WIZARD
GAME OVER
It took him nearly four years to complete, and was rewarded by a screen saying ‘THE END’. He also enjoyed ‘Tree Of Knowledge’, a quiz game where you had to actually input all the quiz data yourself. You could spend hours building a database on Neighbours characters or Manchester City Players 1964 – 1984, only for the game to formulate questions based on this data, which you obviously already knew the answer to.
It would take me a long time to run through all of the things that make my dad my dad. I attempted it when I was best man at his wedding to my stepmum, but the speech ended up being a testimonial to the man and I binned it, thinking that stories about the notes he used to leave in my lunchbox featuring poems about the headmistress’s underwear, or the time he took payment for some photography work in the form of a rabbit would say more about my relationship with him than his with his new wife.
I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the opening paragraph – so there’s my dad, privet hedge in hand and relates to me the following tale;
“I was dropping off some photos at a woman’s house, and came back to find the car was gone. Now, my first thought was ‘The car’s been nicked’, so I went to go back inside and call the police. Just then I saw the car at the bottom of the hill parked in someone’s drive, so I went down there to see what they were playing at. The next thing, this old fella comes out ranting and raving at me, saying that my car’s ruined his hedge. Turns out I must have left that handbrake off and the car’s rolled right down the hill into the guy’s drive and only been stopped by his privet hedge. Before I know it, he’s blocked me in with his car and is getting me to sign a written confession that I have damaged his ‘valuable’ hedge. He wouldn’t let me go until I’d signed it and taken some pictures.”
“So why did you bring some of the hedge with you?”
“This? This is my evidence.”
And so goes another normal night in the life of Keith Walker.
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