Poem of the Month: 'Normality' By Oxford University Professor Emeritus of Poetical Evocation and Whimsical Euphony Sir Barnard G. Fentonthwaite

I miss this.

My former colleague Andrew Suction, the current Shadow Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and a close, personal acquaintance of mine dating back 40 years, introduced this new poetry column last month to great fanfare. I won't lie to you, dear readers, he's become so successful from that one column that cocaine has developed an Andrew Suction habit. 

He's not been seen in his Kensington office in over a month (yes, we poets have offices. Lord Byron used to be that boss who leans over his female colleagues inappropriately whilst helping them on the computer, Percy Shelley would lob balls of paper into the bin and celebrate over-zealously, pissing off his co-workers, and John Keats was the office weirdo who nobody knows outside of work and can often be heard crying in the office toilets) and people are starting to worry.

Let me reassure you, he'll return to his perch when he has one of his 'visions'. Ah yes, the legendary Suction visions. To adequately describe what he looks like when having one of these visions, one needs to cast their mind back to the end of Captain Phillips when Tom Hanks is rescued from the Somali pirates in a traumatised and catatonic state. Imagine that, but without the heroic and intensely moving backdrop of a man having gone through hell to save the lives of his crew, and replace him with a man who hasn't been published in 15 years and cannot please his wife. 

I know I sound bitter, but I can assure you I am not. We two go back a long time. He knows my acid tongue, I know his buttons, he knows mine. We fight, we go back and forth like an old married couple, just like him and his wife, whom he cannot please. 

I cannot stop myself. OK, I'll come clean. I hate his guts. 

But, lest we get carried away, i'm not here to talk Suction. I'm here to provide this month's NNNN 'Poem of the Month'. Last month's poem was terribly underwhelming, and that's not just another shot at old 'Sucker' as we used to call him. It had no recognizable rhythm or flow, it was full of cloying, vapid, nonsensical appeals to emotion, and i'm pretty sure he stole from Auden in one of the verses. It was the work of a man desperate to put his stamp on the 'COVID poetry boom'. Every poet I know has written about the blasted pandemic. It's become a whole category in and of itself, just like WWI poetry. Everyone's spilling ink and jostling to become the COVID era's answer to Wilfred Owen. Suction, at best, will become this era's Ivor Gurney, not because of his poetry, but because Gurney was suspected to have had syphilis, and I regularly see debates on poetry forums about Suction having it.

So let me try and write something that has absolutely nothing to do with COVID, social-distancing, hand gel, toilet rolls, loneliness, grief, despair, numbness, misinformation, depression, addiction or face masks. As Caius Martius Coriolanus so eloquently put it before banishing the plebs for banishing him from Rome (knobhead), "There is a world elsewhere".

Normality

People, everywhere.

Wading through watery crowds,

Waiting for a lull,

I yearn to scratch my back. 

People, everywhere.

Mashed on the tube like Play-Doh,

This is an orgy,

I yearn to scratch my back.

People, everywhere.

I long for solitude and smoking,

My heels are aching,

I yearn to scratch my back.

People, everywhere.

Pungent whiffs of body odour,

marijuana ghosts outside Ladbrokes,

I yearn to scratch my back.

People, everywhere.

I cannot catch my breath,

"Pay as you go with O2",

I yearn to scratch my back.

People, everywhere.

Blurred faces on Millennium Bridge,

Busker plays Ed Sheeran song,

I yearn to scratch his face off.

People, everywhere.

Evening Standard abandoned on bench,

George Osborne's ectoplasm,

I yearn to scratch my back.

People, everywhere.

Waterloo Station pigeon flurry,

Upper crust businessmen with headphones,

I yearn to scratch my back.

People, everywhere.

Everyone respects each other,

This is the facade economy,

I yearn to scratch my back. 

-Barnard G. Fentonthwaite

 

Aural Reminiscences: Devin O' Shaughnessy of Fruit Bat Annihilator

Fruit Bat Annihilator's logo showed a bat hanging upside down holding a flail, with bloodshot eyes. This is not it. 

Aural reminiscences will invite famous and infamous names from the anarchic annals of punk rock history and many other musical genres to reminisce about their experiences of life in the music industry. Everything our subjects say is their own opinion, and doesn't represent the views of News, News, News, News. We will not edit, cut, sanitize or refrain from printing anything our subjects say, no matter how lewd, tempestuous, coquettish or unsavoury. This week we welcome Devin O' Shaughnessy, the controversial front man of Glaswegian cyberpunk band Fruit Bat Annihilator. 

NNNN (News, News, News, News): Devin, when our readers see your name in our paper, they'll immediately think of 'the incident'. Do you know which 'incident' i'm talking about?

DO (Devin O' Shaughnessy): Aye, I think so, yeah. 

NNNN: What does it feel like to have something like that constantly following you wherever you go? It must feel pretty hard constantly being defined by that one moment of madness. 

DO: Aye, but I take codeine, you know? A lot of the stuff I see in the papers and that is false anyway, you know? It's fake and that. It used to make me angry, you know? But not anymore. I'm used to the bullshit, i'm used to the lies. I just figured, you know? These people have a job, and i'm interesting to them, i'm like their cocaine, their amphetamines, their Nightol. They need me, you know? So if they want to write about me, I don't care, you know? 

Fruit Bat Annihilator were one of the most popular cyber-punk bands of the 1980s. This is not them.

NNNN: But it must feel infuriating to be constantly misrepresented in the press?

DO: It used to be, you know? This one journo at the Daily Star printed this story about me years ago that was utter dogshit. He said I lip-synced my performance at the Queen's Silver Jubilee and made a big thing about how I was unprofessional and a massive fraud. I broke into my brother's dental practice and stole his tools, you know? All cordless flossers, forceps and that pink liquid and shit like that. Then I went to the journo's house in West London and fucking went to town on his big mouth. I sewed his fucking mouth shut, but not before forcing him to eat the Times Literary Supplement whilst singing 'Take On Me' by A-ha. Not only did the guy eat his words, he ate better words. The fella's face was weeping and that. It was classic, you know? But, as I said before, I've mellowed and matured with age I think. I look back on all the shit that I did in the late 70s and I don't regret it, I relish it. I miss it. But I'm older, you know? If I could go on being disruptive and chaotic, I would, but it's a matter of survival. Most punk rockers aren't as self-destructive as people might think, you know? We know when to stop and we know when we're too old to set stuff alight, you know?

NNNN: But that destructive impulse is still there?

DO: You're too fucking right it is. You wouldn't believe how much I want to look you up on Facebook, find where you live and come to your house and scream at you and your family. I had to bang my head against the wall before I came on Zoom to meet you, that's why I was bleeding profusely. People think i'm too much of a live-wire and too over the top, but what they don't realize is, the person they meet is fucking soft. They have no idea what i'm like at maximum capacity. 

NNNN: So would you say people see around 30% of who you actually are?

DO: Aye, no. More like 24%, but i'd have to check those wee numbers there. I did a spreadsheet a while back and figured it out, but the vagaries of time and repression have made the number much lower. I now show a lot less to the world and that will surely be represented in statistical data. But, who has the time these days, you know? 

NNNN: What percentage of your inner life projection to the outside world would you like to reach? What would be a healthy figure for you?

DO: Aye, so 42% is my target. Anything over that would be dangerous though. There was a brief period in the early 80s where I was at 49%, it felt like I was clinging on to a bullet train, everyone who met me experienced me, experienced me, emotionally. They experienced me in ways most people never experience their own family. Within 10 minutes of knowing me, people would either be repulsed and want to murder me or they'd want to marry me and keep me locked in a dungeon out of  toxic love. There was no middle ground, people's reaction to me was extreme and fanatic. It was like everyone I met was acting out their own private apocalypse and trying to drag me along with them.

O' Shaughnessy is also a keen painter. This is not one of his paintings. 

NNNN: So this would have been the early 80s, around the time of your fourth studio album Do Psychopaths Dream of Electrocuted Sheep? Great album, by the way. How much of this time do you remember and how much is a dirty haze?

DO: My memories of the time are surprisingly clear. I kept a diary, which shocks people, for some reason. They think of us punk rockers as illiterate hooligans, but in reality, there's nothing we like more than the smell of a fresh paperback, or the uphill battle of sitting in front of an empty Word document, you know?

NNNN: Can we take a sneak peek at a random diary entry, say, 19th January 1981?

DO: That's not a random date at all, and you know that, you wee shite. That was the night I crowd-surfed into the wheelchair section of my audience in Leipzig. The right-wing press called it 'Cripplesurfgate' and the left-wingers wrote a series of opinion-pieces about ableism, disability rights and the history of crowd-surfing and the underlying discrimination against wheelchair users perpetuated by the activity. What really happened was I broke my neck and wore this anarchic, cyberpunk neck brace for 2 months. It was painted matte black and was adorned with little robot skulls and middle fingers. People signed it with their favourite swear words and their own blood. I was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine wearing it, you know? But here's the diary entry for the 19th:

19th January 1981

Fell off the stage tonight attempting to crowd-surf, ended up falling into the lads in wheelchairs, was performing 'The High Man in the Castle' from my latest album. Performance was legendary, thought i'd top it off with a crowd-surf as It usually turns out OK, it did in Stockholm, London, New York and Guernsey. But my aim was poor and my neck's in agony. The local hospital were lifesavers, I gave all the nurses a copy of my first LP 'Please, Sir, I Want Some Alan Moore'. Will be about 4 months before I can crowd-surf again, i'll have to find a new hobby, flagellation maybe. I once knew a musician guy, a real avant-garde, outsider type. He used to self-flagellate on stage, directing the whip according to the audience's whims. It was real 'event theatre'. Venues that allow this kind of extreme acts are sadly disappearing. The Narcotic Beaver in Islington is still going strong though. Anyway, this particular guy died from anemia, lost too much blood in the end. Characters like him really form the backbone of our collective creative unconscious. We are all animals, all savages. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

NNNN: So, looking back at this diary entry, do you think you predicted the decline in independent, anarchic venues like 'The Narcotic Beaver'?

DO: Aye, they shut down a year after I wrote that! It's heart-breaking, most of my 20s were spent in places like the Beaver, The Chaste Maid in Cheapside, MK Ultra +, Cromwell's Fanny, The Chernobyl Experience & Wet Fred's Barnstorming Hickory-Doodle Shakin' Booty Dance Ranch. I was born in Glasgow, but I was made in Cromwell's Fanny. If you weren't there, there's no way you could know. I remember being in this strange experimental bar in Holborn, the whole place was tilted at a 50 degree angle and all the bar staff were naked and completely hairless. I was playing crazy eights at this table which also happened to be a fish tank, the guy opposite me pulled out a machete and some shaving foam and proceeded to shave his wee handlebar moustache off in a seductive and salacious manner. This all sounds unbelievable to people who weren't there, but there's thousands of stories like this I could tell, you know? My point is, all these places have shut down. They've been replaced with fancy new chain restaurants and 'trendy' cocktail bars. People argue that they're an 'upgrade' on what stood before, but we don't see it that way. You won't ever hear someone begin a story like "I saw a guy ride a Tapir through a ring of fire in All Bar One", nothing interesting happens in All Bar One. I did see a guy ride a Tapir through a ring of fire, by the way. The wee Tapir was unharmed, but the lad who rode him was badly burned. 

A common sight of patrons donning animal masks would have greeted any weary traveler who happened to stumble upon 'The Narcotic Beaver' in the late 70s/Early 80s. This is not 'The Narcotic Beaver'.

NNNN: Do you think I personally would have survived this era?

DO: Fuck no, you're a wee sissy. You wouldn't last 10 minutes in The Chernobyl Experience. No, you're of the Wetherspoons generation. The 'sit down, drink, take a few selfies and call it an experience' generation. People like you consider Johnny Depp or Russell Brand to be hardcore partiers, but they're like Mary Whitehouse and Jacob Rees-Mogg compared to some of the people I know. I once knew a guy who could make people overdose just by looking at them, imagine Prince Harry doing that.

NNNN: And this lifestyle complemented your music career?

DO: Aye, It fuelled it. People always look at people like me and say "What could have been?" But It's not like that, you know? I don't want to be the person you think you see, there's no such thing as wasted potential in my opinion. 'Potential' is a construct, you know? The music we've made may be niche and only suitable for a limited audience, but why should we have to want to make it into the 'big time', I don't care about appealing to a wide range of people. I don't care about appealing to any people. People shouldn't always have to be catered to, you know. Art shouldn't be made to reinforce people's prior tastes, it should disrupt, it should heighten your senses, it should bother you. I like to bother people. We made it our mission in the 80s to not give a fuck, there's an art to not giving a fuck, you know? You can put that on a fucking fridge magnet.

NNNN: So speaking of the band, let's delve into the origins of how you all met. I believe Tommy Trott and Wayne 'Lucy' Ferr were the two founding members, then you and Nigel Orgy came later?

DO: Aye, me and Nige upset the apple cart a wee bit when we joined up in 79'. Tommy and Lucy were doing quite well touring various small farming villages throughout the Highlands, they weren't punk rockers then though. They were still outrageous, but in a folksy kind of way. They used to perform a beautiful rendition of 'The Parting Glass', before literally 'parting with their glass' by throwing their glass of bitter into the audience and provoking a riot. People got used to this and used to throw their glasses at Tommy mid-song. He's be sitting on a stool, guitar in his arms singing "Goodnight, and joy unto you a-" then he'd have to duck to avoid bottles being lobbed at him. He loved it though, it was his bread and butter, you know? Ye wouldn't see anything like that nowadays, imagine Ed Sheeran or Hozier lobbing a Carlsberg into the audience at Wembley. I don't know if Ye knew this, but Martin Carthy was briefly in the previous incarnation of Annihilator. He was too depraved for us though, too fucking violent, too roguish, there's a line, you know? 

NNNN: So how did the band transition from the previous incarnation, I believe you used to be called 'Twisted Harlot', to 'Fruit Bat Annihilator'? And how did you come up with the name, does it have meaning?

DO: Well, me and Nige joined. It kind of happened organically, you know? They were in dire straits and needed more members to continue touring and to pay the rent etc. Nige wasn't that talented musically, we used to nickname him Ringo Starr because you could get away with insults like that back then, but he learnt the drums and has done a serviceable job, you know? I was a passable singer, so we both joined and bonded quite quickly. We all decided a name change was appropriate though. I don't remember, if i'm honest with ye, how we came up with Fruit Bat Annihilator. We were getting fucking twatted in a pub, a real stone-cold, hardcore drinking session, we even wore chain mail and carried spears, it was that intense. My theory is the name came to us subliminally. There was like 5 fruit machines in this pub, and another arcade game called 'Alien Annihilator' or some wee shite like that. Then, as we were stumbling home, all hammered and mauled like shit pugilists, Lucy claimed to have been attacked by a cauldron of bats. So I guess all this just came together.

NNNN: The name got you into a spot of trouble though, didn't it? Once you reached the big time?

DO: Aye, a load of animal rights groups claimed we were encouraging the annihilation of fruit bats. It hurt us quite badly that publicity, not because of our image, but because we've all four of us devoted a significant amount of our spare time working with bat conservation societies. We love everything about the creatures, they're charming, mischievous, highly intelligent, crafty, bizarre, macabre, all the things that spark our curiosity as Humans. We've had a shared fondness for the little buggers since before we named our band after them. To respond to those critics who claimed we were encouraging violence, we held a kind of 'Fruit Bat Live Aid', The Sex Pistols performed, so did The Clash. Engelbert Humperdinck even contributed a dozen knackered 6-strings which arrived in a soaking wet shipping container. It really took off, I hear they're doing it again in 2021, fruit bats have taken a hit due to this COVID shite. Paloma Faith is performing I hear. The wee lass understands the fruit bat hype, good on her!

Engelbert Humperdinck maintains a keen interest in fruit bats, especially their mating habits. This is not Engelbert Humperdinck, this is Paul Anka. 

NNNN: It's clear from this interview that you're fairly defiant about the criticism you've received. What do you think your legacy is?

DO: I don't care.

NNNN: You must care a little?

DO: I care nowt'.

NNNN: Do you at least see a reunion down the line? When the pandemic is over?

DO: I see a reunion happening during the lockdown. That's the most punk rock thing I can think of, holding a punk rock concert in a claustrophobic underground location to an orgy of human scum spreading their droplet seeds around in wonderful, chaotic harmony. It's a real middle finger to the Tories, and to COVID. 

NNNN: And you won't bat an eyelid if the papers find out?

DO: Aye, i'm dying anyway, I had a liver transplant a few years back, had a hip replaced last year, and i've become addicted to Russian literature, it won't be long before I kick the bucket, I just want to make sure the bucket is kicked into a rabid, screaming audience of knucklehead bastards gathered in a poorly lit cellar. It'll be Fruit Bat Annihilator's last hurrah, you know? 

NNNN: I look forward to that, Devin. Finally, what's your opinion on the conflict currently afflicting the Tigray region of Ethiopia? 

DO: Aye, I was reading about that the other day in The Financial Times, terrible situation, you know? My hearts go out to the people caught in the conflict. I said as much on my Twitter the other day. People are surprised that I have a Twitter, they assume I'd loathe it, but I actually quite like it. It's a worthy distributor for chaos and ill-informed, half-baked musings of destruction, and you can do it all on the toilet at 2am. It's mental. If it were around in the 80s stuff would have been sanitized though. But we're the old guard, we need somewhere to spew our angst-ridden diatribes, and Twitter does quite nicely. I called the Starbucks CEO a cunt the other day. Isn't it amazing that ye can do that nowadays? You used to have to go to their house and throw a brick into their children's window with a wee piece of paper attached to it saying 'cunt', but now ye can just @ them online. They won't see it, but it's the feeling that counts, you know? Fucking wee Starbucks corporate shite. The modern world isn't so bad, I guess, but we all want 'our day' back. This day will be someone's 'our day' someday, so I guess i'll have to make do with their day, even our day was better and you're all cunts. We all want to feel young again, to feel light as air. We owned it all, we lived like kings, because we were fucking kings. 

NNNN: Devin O' Shaughnessy, thank you for talking to us. 

Next time on Aural Reminiscences we'll be welcoming jazz/demolition fusion artist Azure C. Blend. Jazz/demolition was a musical genre which arose in the early noughties by combining free, experimental jazz with demolition derbies, popular in the US. Audiences would gather in an arena and watch cars mercilessly attempt to annihilate each other and create unlimited destruction whilst hundreds of jazz musicians would line the arena trying to provide frantic and chaotic musical accompaniment. The sound of brass instruments and the experimental rhythmic harmonies juxtaposing with motor vehicles being molested in an orgy of steel was found to be an oddly pleasing, fresh new sound for an American audience. Blend will join us to reminisce about his aural experiences in the Deep South. 

Keith Brown (From the Theatre Desk) Reviews Some Television

Ha! They call this a theatre? Wankers.

Despite what the News, News, News, News editor seems to think, television and theatre are not 'basically the same thing'. Theatre is like the Flying Scotsman to television's Schienenzeppelin (Google it), Tarrant to TV's Clarkson, or the 19th century to TV's 20th. It may steal our beloved stage actors from time to time, Timothy West was in EastEnders for 9 months and eviscerated the other cast members with his mammoth classical acting chops, but the entire essence of theatre as an art form is drastically different to TV's. Of course, you, my readers, will know that I, as one of the UK's leading theatre critics, scholars, academics, authorities, exegetes, wizards, if you will, have a considerable amount of bias when it comes to deciding which side to pick in the debate between TV and theatre even though this is not a debate between TV and theatre and the editor explicitly told me to stay on topic.  

It was a welcome relief to see that TV is still..well.. a thing. I hadn't watched it since April last year. I was watching the coronavirus daily briefings everyday, almost religiously, and started dreaming that I was the naked lady strewn in white satin sheets in Gustave Courbet's 'La Sommeil', but Chris Whitty was the other woman embracing me, our legs were entwined and his supple breasts rested on my stomach, it was strangely comforting and this is what concerned me. I gather most British people were having these quasi-erotic, lascivious dreams about Whitty and Vallance around this time.  Americans must've had the same for Anthony Fauci or, for Republicans, Mike Pence. It's only natural, they provided answers and we all needed a saviour to provide us information at some point last year. 

I think it's brave of me to admit I had these dreams about Whitty. Phwoooooar!

This alternated with another dream where I was being eaten alive as a baby by Boris Johnson as Cronus, like in Francisco Goya's 'Saturn Devouring His Son', this is when I decided to stop watching TV and let the Internet fill my gaping addiction slot. 

But alas, there are several new shows to get through, so, without further ado, i'm Keith Brown (from the theatre desk), take my hand, and let me be your Whitty: 

Heartbreak Isle (ITV, Thursday, 19:45)

It's a well-established fact that when your heart is broken, you lie on the floor like a drawn outline of the body at a murder scene.

I've never seen Love Island, but even I can see that this is a blatant rip-off. 

OK, so the premise of this show is nearly identical to Love Island, but instead of contestants having to couple up with someone to escape eviction, they instead need to break as many hearts as possible. Whoever destroys someone in the most brutal and sociopathic way wins. The rules are totally incomprehensible and lacking in any sort of nuance. Keith Lemon presents and is his usual cluster headache-inducing self. 

The show rewards predatory behaviour and endless deceit. It's a truly abysmal and horrific concept, and I only sort of liked watching it. The episode I watched featured Chris, an IT manager from Chester, and Chantelle, a beautician from Rotherham. Chris initiated the relationship with a lot of enthusiasm. Chantelle was quickly smitten by his boyish charm and steampunk sensibilities. 

But when Chantelle chose to open up to Chris about how she felt, Chris revealed he was only chasing after Chantelle to be closer to her friend Maurice, a French male model and pastry chef. Maurice himself was still reeling from an unexpected Snapchat dumping by Natalie, a Liberian fortune teller.  Chantelle experiences 'moderate' heartbreak on the heartbreak-ometer (the device used to measure the magnitude of the heartbreak), but Chris has done enough to fend off eviction. Chantelle is then evicted by the public in a vote. According to a YouGov poll, the public didn't like her 'manic, unfettered stoicism', it's unclear what this means.   

The heartbreak-ometer, in case you were wondering, was invented by pop singer Adele. She created five different settings: 'it'll pass', 'moderate', 'I need to re-evaluate my life', 'I must record a new album of break-up songs' and the most severe heartbreak of all, 'O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain'. 

You'd think this show would have spawned a flurry of complaints to Ofcom and ITV, but no. Apparently watching the show allows people to face up to pain they've experienced in their own lives. It has a seemingly cathartic effect. This surprised me, I must say. I'd read about the suicides linked with  Love Island and assumed this show would be no different, or even worst.

It makes sense when one thinks about it though. Heartbreak Isle is honest about what it is. It's self-aware. Love Island on the other hand is a plastic shitshow which rewards bottomless shallowness and feeds people's worst impulses for self-criticism and self-hatred. It will distort your perception of a healthy body, a healthy life, and it will sink it's teeth into you. 

In fact, Heartbreak Isle, in it's own way, does us a service. It brings love's pain kicking and screaming to the surface for all to see, whereas Love Island twists it and buries it, allowing it to fester and ultimately kill you. Maybe the creators of this show didn't create it to piggyback on Love Island's success, maybe they created it to hold a mirror up to a capitalistic, brutal, human-baiting show that basically amounts to broadcast-able psychological torture porn.

Covidiots (BBC, Tuesday, 18:40)

Great British Bake Off presenter Prue Leith. She's a Tory, phwoa.. oh. 

How does one create a hidden camera prank show for COVID times? This is how. Covidiots invites celebrities (this week it was Danny Dyer, Romesh Ranganathan & Prue Leith) to undertake a series of risky and dangerous challenges which put the public at serious risk. These challenges usually involve covertly licking people on park benches, standing and breathing near elderly pensioners, or coughing into a giant fan mounted on the top of a 4x4 then driving around and spreading their droplets around the town centre dressed in camouflage.

One scene showed Prue Leith spit into a specially-designed 'COVID grenade' then throw it into a local Londis and watch it explode her toxic enzymes into every Tom, Dick and Harry who was unfortunate enough to be shopping there. 

In another scene, Dyer sets off a fire alarm in a Gap clothing store, then quickly gets into his COVID fan truck before a swarm of frightened people leave via the fire exit. He then proceeds to drive alongside the gaggle of people, blowing his giant, corona fan in their helpless, screaming faces, all the while laughing and firing an AK-47 into the sky. Ranganathan assisted by driving up on a quad bike and slapping the hoard of petrified Gap shoppers with a giant synthetic tongue laced with a shit tonne of COVID.  

Still, I enjoyed watching this, and judging by the lack of complaints, the great British public did too. This is apparently what we pay our license fee for now, watching Prue Leith lick a bunch of cereal boxes in the hope that someone will pick it up and catch the virus. Funnily enough, in this case, someone did, Romesh Ranganathan. He decided to lick every single box of Cheerios that Leith had not 15 minutes before graced her tongue with. Karma's a bitch.

It's clear that these long lockdowns have made people into immoral zombies, baying for blood. People have reverted back to the Colosseum days where entertainment involved actual human sacrifice and endless bloodshed. Still, as referenced in the previous review, shows like this aren't really any worst than your Love Islands or your Big Brothers. 

Next week, it'll be the turn of three new celebrities to find creative ways to spread the virus to an unsuspecting public (footballer Jimmy Bullard, former Home Secretary Alan Johnson & rapper Tinie Tempah). I'll be back to watch, i'll admit it. I know you'll be back too. Does that mean we're all savages? 

Panopticon (Channel 4, Sunday, 20:00)

 

Reminiscent of Shakespeare's Globe, one might say. Phwoaaaaaaar!

Oh, Channel 4, you're so daring. 

So to understand Panopticon, a new Sunday night reality show, one needs to know the work of 18th century English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. Bentham is regarded as a key thinker in utilitarianism, a loosely connected family of theories that espouse widespread social utility, welfarism, freedom of expression, animal rights etc. The whole shabang. He wrote extensively on these theories and is currently ensconced in a glass cabinet in University College, London, frightening the living shit out of squeamish undergraduates. 

Bentham sitting dignified and at peace within University College, London. Phwoaaaaaar!

The show's name refers to an idea Bentham had relating to prison reform. He proposed a new type of circular prison building, with the prisoner's cells arranged around the outer wall, with a watch tower stationed in the centre. From this central tower, the inspectors would be able to look into the cells and converse with the prisoners via 'conversation tubes'. The prisoners would never be able to see the prison staff.

Bentham theorized that the knowledge of always being observed would drastically alter the criminal's behaviour, and further their rehabilitation. 

"Morals reformed-health preserved-industry invigorated-instruction diffused-public burthens lightened-economy seated, as it were, upon a rock-the gordian knot of the poor-laws not cut, but untied-all by a simple idea in architecture!"

It's an interesting concept and has been debated extensively by reformers to the present day. But you get the jist of it. Circle building, conversation tubes, always being watched, social experiments, great fuel for some thought-provoking telly, huh? 

WRONG!

It's shit. contestants serve as prisoners in the makeshift panopticon building. They are being watched, unknowingly, 24/7 by prison inspectors in the central tower. These inspectors are made up of retired prison wardens and criminal justice activists. Their theories differ wildly as to how the contestants will respond to certain tasks and stimuli fed to them via the conversation tubes. The goal for the prison wardens is to coerce the contestants into believing certain facts and creating complete division between all 32 cells among the prison populace, who are able to communicate only with the cell next to them. 

The contestant's goal is to sort fact from fiction and somehow form a united front and organize themselves efficiently in order to ascertain which nuggets of information are true. 

In theory, this sounds like an interesting show, but it's just so convoluted, so dense and unwieldy. The central themes of the show are very stimulating and ask some very potent questions, "how does one separate fact from fiction?", "How can people organize effectively to challenge higher powers?", "How does manufactured division stifle people's ability to improve?" All very valid questions, but this is not reality show material. Between shots of the wardens speaking through microphones, and the contestants attempting to communicate with each other whilst moaning about their toilets, the show just doesn't live up to it's initial promise. 

One scene saw Adam, a farmer from Suffolk, attempt to experiment with a new method for passing along information to his fellow contestants. The prison wardens have fed him some false information about the number of hours they've been in their cells. Remember, the contestants have to somehow coordinate themselves via crafty and ingenious methods to present a united response. Adam thinks Chinese whispers is the answer. "This here (sic) lil' (sic) nugget is a lie. I have a perfect sense of time, I does (sic), we've been here 12 hour (sic), nun' (sic) more, nun' (sic) less". 

Adam believes if he somehow passes on information by whispering to his neighbouring cell mate, it'll escape the surveillance of the wardens, who won't be able to influence the other cell mates with differing information anymore. 

They haven't thought this through. It makes no sense and it makes for some tedious television. 

"Ah, who's been a silly billy?" Seriously, you can imagine him saying this to a prisoner.

The show is narrated by Ray Winstone to give it some 'edge', but that 'edge' is completely squandered when Gyles Brandreth shows up as the show's presenter. He is not a great fit for a show like this. At one point he literally goes up to the bars and says to a contestant, "Ah, who's been a silly billy?" I mean, for fuck's sake. Also, when he's talking with the wardens up in the central tower, he keeps interrupting them to look at the camera and talk about the history of English borstals. Apparently Dermot O' Leary and Sandi Toksvig turned the gig down. At least Toksvig would have actually listened to the contestants rather than correct their grammar every few seconds like Brandreth did. 

Undercover: Attenborough at Exxon Mobil (BBC, Saturday, 19:43)

Utter bastards

Just like 'Panopticon', this new series sounds exciting in theory, but the reality is duller than watching paint dry in a room with Theresa May playing a triangle.

The series places various left-leaning public figures undercover into conservative and capitalistic institutions, with the express goal of tearing down said institutions from within. This week it's naturalist, broadcaster and intergalactic treasure David Attenborough burrowing his way into a highly lucrative position with American oil and gas corporation Exxon Mobil. 

The show opens with Attenborough presenting a montage explaining who Exxon are, why they're massive arseholes, and why he wants to obliterate and defenestrate them and their children. I came into this programme thinking Attenborough was a calm, good-natured gentleman who only wished to educate and inform, apparently he's become jaded in his old age and now seeks to mercilessly annihilate all the rich bastards who are destroying the environment. 

It then proceeds to show Attenborough under-going an extensive prosthetic makeover to disguise himself before starting his new job as an Exxon Mobil social media spokesman. He's fitted with a luscious strawberry-coloured wig, his eyes are made to appear drooped and full of melancholic dread, and he's given mutton chops and rounded spectacles. Quite why Exxon would employ this interviewee as their social media spokesman is beyond me. 

With the stage set for destruction, Attenborough attends his first Exxon board meeting. The other employees are told the cameras are filming for a corporate documentary, made to help Exxon's image. Attenborough right away suggests a new social media strategy to increase Exxon's positive publicity, but is really meant to harm and degrade them.

He suggests gathering a group of Nuns, African children, paraolympians and Albino grandmas and filming them being shown round an oil rig smiling and laughing and drinking Pepsi. Attenborough tells the company's executives that such a promotional film will help foster Exxon's image as a friendly, open, caring, forward-thinking institution. "You could even show the nuns jumping and splashing about in a pool of oil whilst some Sudanese children fire Nerf guns at them". 

A young David Attenborough. Phwoaaaaaaar!

Now, most people would suggest an idea like this and be fired on the spot, but Attenborough, being 94 years old and wiser than a baked Noam Chomsky in the Bodleian library, is able to get away with it. 

The board gives Attenborough's idea the green light, and sit back and watch as the doomed promotional film causes an international outcry and PR disaster for Exxon. 

The executives choose to back Attenborough (who's disguised as 'Abraham Cambridge') because whilst the PR disaster was happening, he managed to steal some highly confidential and explosive information about the corporation, and threatens to release it if he's fired. 

The rest of the programme sees Attenborough slowly chip away at the company's credibility via social media, producing scandal after scandal, and forcing the executives to make stock market decisions to the detriment of the company and the oil and gas industry as a whole. 

A lot of the programme is explosive and pretty enthralling, but these moments are all too fleeting. The last half hour is literally Attenborough holding a gun to an executive's head whilst he sits and watches Bloomberg markets on his laptop. He hopes to see the company collapse in real time and the BBC clearly think this is an acceptable way to fill the dead air time. Instead of being the nail-biting, tense countdown they were hoping for, it just turns out to be a massive anti-climax as the company goes into liquidation and causes unprecedented tremors in the global financial markets. 

Attenborough closes the programme with a monologue about climate change and environmental disasters caused by companies like Exxon. He's right about it all, but as a result of this programme, the US government has bailed Exxon out, in many ways making them a far stronger and more impenetrable institution. Perhaps the US government itself will be the next institution to be ransacked by revolutionary impostors. 

It certainly isn't on the list of episodes of the shows we can expect in the coming weeks. Next week will see Greta Thunberg disguise herself as a buxom blonde and go undercover at the Trump organization, hoping to slip some arsenic into Eric's morning camomile. Jane Fonda will attempt to infiltrate UKIP playing a sewer-mouthed alcoholic Tyneside fascist and Gary Lineker will take a crack at freemasonry disguised as a balding, obese carpet salesman. I look forward to those. 

BBC News: Anywhere But Britain (BBC, Tuesday, 18:00)

This is actually Bacari Biai, don't worry.

So apparently the BBC think that the news in Britain is too Britain-centric, so they've decided to set themselves a challenge to present news coverage for all 196 countries for one week each. 

The task, which will end with Zimbabwe's news week on 9th November 2024, has been described as a mammoth-undertaking by the BBC's new Director-General, Tim Davie. "We conducted several focus groups and found that people know more about what's happening half way around the world than in their own country. We believe the British people naturally look outward and are inquisitive about what happens in the world."

Just to make it clear, this programme is not going to be shown alongside the usual BBC news. This will replace it. The organization will not report on events in this country till late 2024, even on their 24-hour news channel. Some conservative commentators have claimed this was 'inevitable'. Lord Perrer-Striker, a former Tory minister for blue bins, argues the BBC has had nothing but contempt for the British way of life for years. "I'm not surprised at all, the BBC no longer represents British interests, it cares more about what happens in Guinea-fucking-Bissau than what happens in Stoke-on-Trent."

The BBC have responded by announcing Guinea-Bissau as the first nation to be covered for a week, just to rile up the disgruntled Lord. The first programme has already caused controversy over the title, 'Anywhere But Britain: GB News', with 'GB' standing for Guinea-Bissau. GB News is an upcoming 24-hour right-wing news show, destined to become the UK's Fox News. Confusion between the two will lead right-wingers to become well-informed in Bissau-Guinean political affairs by mistake. Twitter will be abuzz with opinions about the country's new National Director of Interpol, Bacari Biai and what it means for his ousted predecessor Melancio Correia, who is being accused by former Prime Minister Domingos Simoes of attempting to issue an international arrest warrant outside legal boundaries. Spicy stuff. 

I, for one, look forward to this new approach to global news. At least it will mean Boris Johnson won't be given any air time on the BBC. Instead we'll get used to getting used to a country for one week only, then moving on to a completely different country (in alphabetical order, apart from Guinea-Bissau), in an entirely different part of the world. The country will be split down the middle on Honduran gun policy, toxic and spiteful discourse will put a strain on relationships, then be immediately mollified after the coverage of Honduras ends and moves on to Hungary the next week. Political anger, manufactured and encouraged by both sides, will ebb and flow as the weeks go on. The country will get used to crisis after crisis, country after country, continent after continent. Andrew Neil will provoke dinner table conversation about Omani Minister of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion Qais Mohammed Al Yousef's qualifications for the job. 

So, that's telly for you. 

Auditorium of the Old Vic, Waterloo, London. Phwoaaaaaaar!

I would happily burn every single TV in the world if it meant getting theatre back. I miss everything about it. I miss the audience laughing at the wrong moments in a scene that's supposed to be serious and sombre. I miss the cast giving a speech to the audience after the curtain call asking for donations to a charity, then feeling guilty for not carrying any spare change. I miss being spat on by actors as they launch into an astoundingly intense Shakespearean monologue about bone-deep guilt. I miss buying a programme at the interval and smelling it, that smell is like cocaine to me, though I save that for when I see a butchered production of Chekhov. I miss it with an intensity no TV show could ever match up to. And I think I speak for all theatre lovers when I say i'm deeply unsettled, uninspired and unstimulated without theatre in my life. So yes, fetch me the propane, let's burn us some flat screens.