March of the Lemmings Page 22
The Daily Telegraph clickbait trap is set. Watermelon is its mouse-murdering cheese. The paper’s front-page news headlines duly re-trumpet the controversy. And this controversy was fuelled by the falsehoods of the Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson column that the Daily Telegraph’s own editor chose to run inside. It is an endless loop of lies.
In the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, the state-sponsored assassin–rapist 007 thwarts an evil, global, multi-platform news agency that uses covert actions to generate newsworthy crises, which it then profits from by covering them. Twenty-one years ago, this plotline seemed as implausible as Roger Moore’s third nipple. But it now appears to be the actual modus operandi of the Daily Telegraph.
And who can blame the paper for paying Watermelon £275,000 a year to disseminate lies, to drive the sewage of its readership through the sluice gates of both its print and online editions? These are tough times for newspapers, and before the Daily Telegraph re-employed Watermelon as a lifeline, it was pinning all its sales hopes on our humble friend … water.
For years, it seemed, whenever I tried to buy a bottle of water in a railway station WHSmith’s, the cashier would suggest I bought a copy of the Daily Telegraph instead, which cost less than the water and came with free water. But taking the free water while buying a copy of the Daily Telegraph increases the apparent circulation figures of the Daily Telegraph, and by association its financial clout and its power to influence and manipulate the vermin that read it.
As someone who has suffered personally as a result of the Daily Telegraph’s half-truths,1 I would like to pay for the water and not take the Daily Telegraph with the free-water gift instead. Even though, as the confused WHSmith’s assistant always insists, as if reciting a script she was forced to learn at gunpoint by Charles Moore, buying the Daily Telegraph and getting the water free is less costly than buying the water alone and not having the Daily Telegraph with it.
When I finally cracked and demanded, at Paddington’s WHSmith’s in October 2016, to take only the water and not the Daily Telegraph also, the poor assistant – an innocent victim here too, let’s not forget – had to call her manager over. She explained to him that she had tried to sell me the Daily Telegraph, as instructed, but that I would only take the water, as he looked on disapprovingly, an unwanted copy of the Daily Telegraph flapping on the counter, like a dying and poisonous fish.
It was a Kafkaesque situation. Much of what I write in these columns is exaggerated for comic effect (I am not, for example, a confidant of a Danish man who supplies 85 per cent of the semen imported into Britain, as I claimed last week), but this went down just as described. The frightened young girl was eventually absolved by the manager, and I was allowed to refuse my compulsory Daily Telegraph purchase.
But surely a world where innocent children are forced to buy the Daily Telegraph, when all they wanted was water, is exactly the kind of authoritarian, anti-individual society the libertarian think-monkeys of the Daily Telegraph don’t want? Take back control!
Tragically, the unsustainable mania for marketing bottled water that the Daily Telegraph exploited to peddle its lies is one factor driving the planet towards being a lifeless, arid wasteland. One day, the only way you will be able to get water will be by buying a copy of the Daily Telegraph, which, after the cockroach and the comparably resilient Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson, may be the last recognisable traces of the world we knew. It’s typical of the strange contradictions of Brexit Britain that the Daily Mail’s anti-plastic-straw campaign makes it a definable defender of the very world the Daily Telegraph seems determined to destroy.
But the tide may yet be turning against the planet-murdering, lying Daily Telegraph and its lying public face, as the Overton window2 of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson’s accession to the throne of broken Brexit Britain narrows. Last Monday, Watermelon’s latest empty, anti-EU Daily Telegraph missive barely even provoked outrage, just looks of tired despair in the faces of those charged with delivering the impossible Brexit Watermelon himself once promised.
Boris and Trump are a lot funnier than most of today’s comedians. Humour is often offensive, even cruel, unfortunately today’s professional comedy isn’t very funny. Morrisseysmiff
Wasn’t it Scaramanga who had 3 nipples? This is just another example of the left wing misinformation that the Telegraph protects us from. Geomann9336
Not entirely fake, in the movie bond has a fake third nipple to assume scaramanga’s identity. Coppered
Silly article really, especially the bit belittling 007. Stopped reading when you started that. Neosio
I had a similar problem when I tried to buy The Guardian without the Remain half-truths. I wanted to remove those and buy the rest but I couldn’t. CufC01
It would be interesting to know how old you are. I would hazard a guess that you are 11. Brotherlead
‘When I demanded, at WH Smiths in October 2016, to take only the water the poor assistant had to call her manager’ – could you not have just taken he paper and binned it? Do you really have to virtue signal at every opportunity? We will be leaving the EU. We had a debate and a referendum and yiurside lost. MrDW1968
Laugh? I nearly started. Idopas
1 In November 2013, the Daily Telegraph ran a review of my live show, under the heading ‘Why I Walked Out of a Stewart Lee Gig’, which chose, presumably deliberately, to misrepresent my acted act as the work of a vindictive man genuinely undergoing a temperamental mental breakdown, a conceit the rest of the crowd understood and laughed heartily at. Despite having left at half-time, the critic filed the review: ‘If Lee had a shred of interest or insight into the working lives of other people, he’d realise that those who give up an evening at the end of a week to see him deserve his thanks not his toxic scorn.’ It has taken me three decades of painstaking practice to manufacture that level of convincing toxic scorn, and I offer it to the audiences with the greatest of love and respect, and at cheaper rates than any comparably acclaimed act. And the punters were eating that scorn out of my hand! Nonetheless, this shit hung around in the top ten Google hits of my name for years, portraying me as some kind of unhinged psychopath, and I suspect it cost the kids a few playdates. The following week, after facing mass ridicule online from people who were at the show, and who all got the idea, the critic returned and filed a more balanced report.
2 This is the second mention of the Overton window in this book. And yet, as I sit here writing these footnotes, I can’t even remember what the fucking Overton window is. You look it up. I’ve got early-onset Alzheimer’s, I reckon. It’s thirty years of gigs and never sleeping. I don’t even know what the me from a year ago was talking about. Fuck! Fuck! I’m fucking … Fuck!
Don’t drag Abba into Theresa May’s Dead-Cat Dance
5 October 2018
The only available room in Birmingham last Tuesday night was an Airbnb on Edward Street. Usually, the Birmingham tourist board is giving them away free, with incentivising jars of Bovril1 and vouchers for the legendary Hurst Street café Mr Egg. ‘Eat like a king for under a pound!’2
But tonight, Birmingham was buzzing. There was a heavy police presence, and Ladypool Road had run out of balti, which I assumed was because I was the opening comedian for local blue-collar Beefheartian post-punk survivors The Nightingales at the Hare and Hounds in King’s Heath.3
However, when I got into the room, I found I was overlooking the International Convention Centre, the home of the room-gobbling 2018 Conservative Party conference, which was in progress beneath my window. After last year’s stand-up stage-invasion debacle,4 I was surprised security checks had allowed a comedian like me within sight of the conference, and would like those responsible for this oversight to be spanked senseless in Josef K’s broom cupboard.5
Perhaps I avoided being on the radar of security staff looking out for comedians because I am ‘about as funny as a bonfire in a burning orphanage. I thought comedy was sposed 2 b funny
’, as you will doubtless say in the below-the-article comments online, Mr TrueBritExitEuropeKremlinbot19.
On Wednesday morning, staring over my laptop at the Conservative Party conference venue, I assumed it would be easy to shit out Sunday’s thousand-word screed of liberal elite humour, but I was sick of laughing at the Tories, so I trawled the papers for other stories. Tuesday’s Independent newspaper headline ‘Planning Glitch Delays Sex Robot Brothel’, a sentence in which almost every word suggests a story in its own right, seemed promising. But then I saw a photo of a sad-faced blonde sex robot staring blankly out of the page, and I felt she had suffered enough ignominy without me adding to her woes.
I had the same feeling of mercy when I witnessed a mousefaced Michael Gove eating wasabi peas alone in a Costa Coffee at Knutsford services last week, and quietly binned my latest Govemocking tract.6
Then, that afternoon, in the van from Birmingham to Hackney’s fashionable Moth Club, Nightingales guitarist James Smith showed me a clip on his phone of Theresa May prancing uneasily to an Abba record, like a mantis with an inner ear infection.
Dead-cat strategies attempt to distract the public from some impending political disaster, but this was off the scale. Theresa May hadn’t so much thrown the dead cat on the table as slit it open, scooped out its guts, swallowed them whole and worn its eviscerated feline body as some kind of hideous hat of gore.
Nonetheless, her idiotic Dead-Cat Dance was received with loyal approval by the usual snap-on tools of democracy.7 James Cleverly, Conservative MP for Braintree, who despite having the word ‘clever’ in his own name and the word ‘brain’ in that of his constituency, found time to tweet, stupidly, ‘Great to see Theresa May dance on to the stage to Dancing Queen by ABBA. Classy.’ This was something no one else anywhere in the world was thinking, as they watched, cringing with embarrassment, through their splayed fingers.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph, a monochromatic shit-sheet which is given away free with water in WHSmith’s, opined: ‘Journalists gasped. Politicians burst into applause and laughter. Abba’s Dancing Queen played loud, and Theresa May shimmied her way to the podium.’ Presumably, I have spent my entire life misunderstanding the idea of shimmying. If I am ever hit by a car and have to crawl towards the edge of the road to die, trailing my guts behind me, I will be sure to think of myself as ‘shimmying’ into the gutter.
And while her colleagues continue to nail Corbyn hard to the floor for his shortcomings, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg remains a friendly face that Theresa May visibly looks for in a difficult press conference, knowing she will throw her an easy question bone. Kuenssberg tweeted, ‘PM massive sense of humour alert – comes on to Dancing Queen, jigs about – hall loves it.’ But I thought humor woz sposed 2 b funny.
If May’s ill-advised advisers were hoping to use her Dead-Cat Dance as a distraction from the impossibility of reaching a satisfactory Brexit solution, they may have misjudged the situation. Mung bean-munching musicians hate it when Conservatives appropriate their work. Johnny Marr commanded David Cameron not to like The Smiths, and presumably must now have extended that embargo to For Britain poster-boy Morrissey too.
ABBA have already expressed concern about the abuse of their work for political ends, and threatened to sue the farright, anti-immigration Danish People’s Party for appropriating ‘Mamma Mia’. Former Hep Star Björn Ulvaeus himself has described Brexit as ‘a disaster’, and as the Eurovision Song Contest’s most famous winners, Abba embody the spirit of pan-European cooperation that anti-immigration, anti-European Tories on the far right of the party seek to undermine.
Avatars of the ’70s Keep Britain Tidy campaign, Abba were early adopters of the sort of environmental concerns that the Tories’ drive towards a deregulated post-Brexit Britain will abandon. And in featuring such historical arch-rivals as a yellow-haired woman and a brown-haired woman, and a fat bearded man and a thin clean-shaven man, working in perfect harmony, Abba showed that different people could cooperate for the common good, rather than fight their fellows like horrid Brexit rats.8
It’s highly likely that Theresa May’s Dead-Cat Dance will end in Swedish pop anger, and the spin-wazzocks who talked her into it will soon distance themselves from their suggestion. There is no solution to the Conservatives’ impasse. Theresa’s Dead-Cat Dance aimed to ensure that people talked about her moves, however humiliating, rather than her speech. And you fell for it. ‘The Winner Takes It All’ would have been better walk-on music. All the cards are played and there is nothing left to say.
On a point of infomation, Bjorn was not a member of the Hep Stars it was Bennie, Bjorn was in The Hootenanny Singers a sort of folkish group based on the early 1960s US style folk bands including their characteristic liberal/leftish earnestness. Who can forget their first hit Jag väntar vid min mila (translated as ‘I’m Waiting at the Charcoal Kiln’)? Poppa Alcohol
1 Hmmm. I am going to drink some Bovril right now, I think, and then carry on with these footnotes.
2 Mr Egg is still there, but has reopened as a Chinese street food café, and doesn’t only serve eggs. What’s the point of that? It’s political correctness gone mad.
3 I went on tour opening for The Nightingales. Michael Cumming (Brass Eye, Toast) and I are trying to make a film about them. I had first played the Hare and Hounds in February 1990, on a stand-up bill with Frank Skinner, Steve Coogan and Henry Normal. This meant that when opening for The Nightingales, I was able to use, and attribute, Ian Macpherson’s famous and much-copied opening line, which has been theorised about at length by the writer Robert Wringham: ‘They say you play [the Hare and Hounds] twice in your career. Once on the way up. Once on the way down. It’s good to be back.’
4 The comedian Simon Brodkin had managed to get near enough to the conference stage to hand Theresa May a P45.
5 I keep mentioning Kafka as well, don’t I? Kafka, the golem, ’60s/’70s Marvel comics and King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. As I read back over all these pieces in one go, it’s as if I’ve hardly ever read anything. I’m a fraud with an English degree and an Honorary University Fellowship.
6 A few weeks previously, early on a Saturday morning, I was queueing up alone in an empty Costa Coffee at Heston services on the M4, where I had previously been smirked at by Toby Young. Suddenly, someone joined the line behind me. It was Michael Gove, unaccompanied and vulnerable. I suspected he might remember me from when I wrote on Stab in the Dark, nearly three decades ago, and I knew from her Daily Mail column that his wife Sarah Vine was aware that I had written in the Observer, and subsequently said in my live show, that Gove having sex with her was worse than David Cameron supposedly having had sex with a dead pig. I assumed Gove would know this too. I realised I had to seize the initiative. ‘Hello, Michael, how are you?’ I said, taking him by surprise. ‘Stewart Lee!’ he said, immediately. ‘Where are you off to this early, Michael?’ ‘I am going to an agricultural show,’ he said, plausibly. There was a pause. ‘What was that show I wrote for that you were on?’ I asked in a mild suppressed panic, genuinely unable to recall its name. ‘It was Stab in the Dark, a long time ago now,’ Gove answered, before adding, ‘I see your Content Provider show is on the BBC.’ ‘Yes, it’s still hanging around.’ Then there was another big pause, during which I realised I would probably never get the chance to speak to Michael Gove ever again, so I asked him, ‘What are you going to do about the mess you have got everyone into?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Gove, looking genuinely bewildered, and against my better judgement, I felt sorry for him. Gove hadn’t intended to win the referendum. It was a public-school debating club exercise writ impossibly large, meant to give the rugger buggers he had hated since his teenage poetry days in Independent Voices III a scare that went rather too well. And having won it, Gove hadn’t realised the disastrous chain of events it would set in motion. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you don’t want Brexit to be your legacy.’ ‘Everyone seems to want it to be,’ Gove answered, meaninglessly. I took my coffee, shook
his hand, said ‘Good luck’, shrugged at him and left. My wife and kids were hiding in the WHSmith’s, suppressing themselves. In the car, I said to my wife that as I had met the sorry-looking Michael Gove unexpectedly on neutral territory, where he had acted as dignifiedly as possible, it wouldn’t be fair to write up the encounter anywhere, funny as it was, as what happens in Heston services stays in Heston services. But since that strange encounter, Gove has continued to be a grade-A bell-end and a lying, self-serving div, whose theatrically manipulative speech about Corbyn after the Labour Party’s no-confidence motion on 16 January 2019 was, I think, a new low in the dishonesty and vindictiveness of parliamentary politics. So fuck him, the stupid Heston services, Brexit-causing twat.
7 When I was a kid, my mother let out our box room to students at Solihull Technical College and cooked them two square meals a day, as well as teaching medical shorthand at night school and doing a full-time job in the doctor’s. One of the girls used to be picked up by her boyfriend in his company van, which had ‘Snap-On Tools’ written on the side, which my mother found very funny. I never understood why, until, when I was about seventeen, I managed to get really drunk in a pub in Solihull on Christmas Eve and went home in a state of disarray, unequalled until the night before my wedding, when I tried to shit in a drawer. My mother said, on Christmas morn, ‘Were you drunk last night?’ And I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Oh, it’s just that you came into my room, got your tool out and pointed it at the teasmade, and I said, “Do you want to go to the toilet?” and directed you to the bathroom.’ In my mother’s mind, ‘tool’ was post-war ’50s slang for a penis, and so the van with ‘Snap-On Tools’ written on it had amused her, because it suggested a penis which could be clipped on to the owner’s groin.