The only good thing about pop stars going classical is that it’s quite funny seeing them trying to look the part. Maybe it’s the tuxedo (with basketball boots so people know they’re still rock and roll). Maybe it’s the constipated look as they try to conduct a 72-piece orchestra when they’ve only ever told a drummer what to do before. But mostly it’s the bloody silly bow at the end. Look at me! I’m classical! I must be, I’m bowing!
PEOPLE WHO HAVE MEETINGS IN STARBUCKS
Or Caffè Nero. Or Costa, or any one of a million identical coffee ‘houses’. You see them, these sad would-be entrepreneurs, sitting around a too-tiny table crammed with laptops and empty sandwich wrappers, projecting flow charts for 08 and all this meaningless gobtoss. They’re always so earnest about their meeting, largely because they realize one thing: that nothing says I AM A LOSER! more loudly and more clearly than having a business meeting in a café. Why not just have it at a bus stop? Or in your mum’s front room? Nobody is ever going to believe that you have the ability to raise millions of dollars and run an international corporation if a) you haven’t even got your own office, and b) you’ve got latte down your trousers.
TALKING HEADS
Those people on television who give their opinions, mostly on ‘list shows’. There are three types of talking heads:
1. THE EXPERT KIND. Sometimes these are real experts in things like military history or stunt driving. Generally, they are experts in agreeing with the interviewer. Sometimes this is all too obvious, as when some 22-year-old nitlet professes a detailed knowledge of and love for the films of Buster Keaton, or when some TV presenter (see TV PRESENTERS) says he’s read a book.
2. THE PROFESSIONAL TALKING HEAD. When they start off, they can be quite endearing, largely because they begin their ‘careers’ talking about things they might actually have some interest in, like pop music or comedy. But as the years go by, they become corrupted by the lure of money and the chance to be almost recognized, sometimes. So they will appear in any show about anything. Heavy-metal photographers will try and look knowledgeable about lesbian cinema. Molecular scientists will suddenly find themselves having a favourite Benny Hill sketch. And, worst of all, political pundits will try and look as though they actually enjoy anything at all.
3. REAL FAMOUS PEOPLE. These can totally scupper a talking-heads type show. Because while it’s brilliant that some researcher actually managed to get Steven Spielberg or Keith Richards or Lenin, the viewer can’t concentrate on the interview for thinking, Why are they doing this? Are they secretly broke? Or are they just so vain that every time they see a TV camera they just have to talk to it?
PEOPLE WHO CALL THEMSELVES ECO-WARRIORS
Yes, actually call themselves that. While there’s nothing wrong with saving the planet (there are surely very few things wrong about keeping the world going, although we could lose, say, the people who wrote My Family along the way and no harm done), the people who seem to have volunteered for the job are frequently tossbadgers.
Eco-warriors have all the virtues of the traditional British prat – smugness, self-satisfaction, lack of any sense of humour, being a bit too thin and healthy – combined with something new: the desire to Do Good but at the same time to Look Cool. That can’t be right, surely. But no, off they go, driving into the jungle to save a lemur, hurtling across the sea in jet launches to protest about Japanese whale pies, dressing up as pretend soldiers to storm the walls of a factory. They’re warriors! Eco-warriors! They have sexy sunglasses! They own accessories from camping shops! They work out! You want to punch and kick the whole sodding lot of them, you really do.
And why does everything they do have to be dramatic and eye-catching? Why is it all jeeps and powerboats and abseiling? It’s just James Bond (see JAMES BOND) for prats. And with all those boats and jeeps and exciting helicopter stunts, they must be buggering up the environment at a rate of knots.
PEOPLE WHO SAY, ‘SO MUCH FOR GLOBAL WARMING’
This can happen at any time. You’re out walking the dog and it’s a bit nippy out, or maybe you’re in the pub’s beer garden and it rained a bit earlier. And then suddenly, from nowhere, somebody walking past or sitting at the next table or (ideally) being dragged towards a waiting van by burly male nurses will look at you, shake their head, and say, ‘Huh! So much for global warming!’
Yes. Because that’s how it works. If we had global warming and it wasn’t just an idea put about by communists, then instantly everywhere would be hot all the time and it would never rain or be a bit nippy ever again. That’s science, that is. You knobs tones.
VOLUNTARILY BALD MEN
Going bald is rubbish. Having all your hair fall out makes you look like, at best, a former leader of the Tory Party or, at worst, a pervert from another planet. It’s not alluring, it’s not sexy, and as a reminder of fast-disappearing youth and time’s winged chariot, it’s only slightly less effective than sending yourself a telegram every day that reads ANOTHER DAY NEARER THE GRAVE!
So it seems slightly bizarre that for some sections of society – most notably builders, homosexuals and members of far-right organizations – baldness is a very cool and sexually attractive thing. A big shiny pate gleaming in the moonlight is apparently a massive turn-on. The look that blighted the middle years of Philip Larkin is cultivated by the chicer van driver. It’s all very strange and makes about as much sense as trying to get women by knocking your own teeth out and replacing them with dentures.
PEOPLE WHO SAY, ‘WOW! HAVE YOU BEEN TAKING ACID?’
Well, it doesn’t happen that often, but if somebody does say, ‘Wow! Have you been taking acid?’ in that special voice it means only this – ‘Wow! I dislike either your idea or what you just said and in fact find it so alarming and shocking to my world view that the only way I can take it on board, or rather dismiss it, is by assuming that you were on drugs when you had/said it.’
In place of striking this hypothetical buffoon to the ground, why not remind them that most great ideas come from people who, at the time at least, were completely sober. That even in rock, where narcotics and ideas are often combined, the best and certainly the weirdest bits were invented before the drug pie was consumed. And that it is the crutch of a scoundrel to assume that just because Bozo Boy couldn’t have an unusual idea if his brains were on fire, that you or anyone else needs a crack sandwich to come up with something different.
And then strike them.
PEOPLE WHO HATE AMERICANS
All right, yes, fair enough, there are Americans who really do wear tartan golf hats and call themselves Hiram Hockenbocker III and say ‘War Cess Tear Shear’ when they mean Leeds and all that. And some Americans start wars and own hamburger companies and act in bad movies. So there is some cause for complaint, America-wise.
But this surely doesn’t justify the kind of British twit who goes round saying that they hate Americans and they’re all stupid and don’t know where Africa is (it’s underneath Corsica). Partly because a) who cares what you think, you’re a maths teacher (see TEACHERS)? And b) this sort of person is in all other ways mad desperate keen to show how liberal and tolerant and not-racist they are. But if someone’s wearing a tartan golf hat and holding a map of Luton upside down in the middle of Oxford Street, then it’s okay to make wild generalizations and be a complete racist.
Of course, doing the same thing about Germans is unfair, but funny.