Weekend television: Take Me Out

ITV’s new dating show Take Me Out is car crash television at its very best. But in car crash terms, it’s more like the ‘Nasty Accident Causes a Ridiculous Traffic Jam’ scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend; preposterous, yet strangely compelling.

Two friends of mine recently Tweeted their curious enjoyment of the show. @tommct described it plainly and simply as “Broad Street TV”, which is just about as accurate a description as you’re ever likely to read. While @dancingwombat confessed: “I watched it last week and had to shower afterwards to wash away the shame I felt for actually rather enjoying it.” Their comments pricked my curiosity, so I decided to watch last week’s episode of Take Me Out to see what I was missing.

The basic premise of the show – filmed in another one of ITV’s gargantuan amphitheatre’s of misery – is for 30 single women to judge a variety of potential suitors, who arrive on stage in ‘The Love Lift’ (a sort of dumbwaiter that delivers constant mediocrity). Hosted by Greggs founder, Paddy McGuinness, the aim is for the women to walk away with a date and for the men to walk away with their dignity still intact.

The women standing in judgement of the men parading before them are a truly mixed bunch. There are women that look like male-to-female transsexuals; women that look like crack addicts on a makeover show (where the experts are mortuary cosmetologists); women with names like porn stars (e.g. Lia-Jay and Blue); women that look like they’ve eaten some of the other contestants backstage; and women with such ridiculously coiffured hair, it looks like they’re trying to conceal a freakishly misshapen head.

There are a few, though, that you might be able to take home to meet your parents (or perhaps leave in your car at the end of a long driveway so that you can at least point them out to your folks from a distance).

The first male contestant on this week’s show was an Essex boy called Joel, who emerged from the ‘Love Lift’ dancing to ‘Boom! Shake the Room’ by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince. He was roughly the size of Hervé Villechaize, so when Paddy McGuinness stood beside him and placed a firm hand on his shoulder, it looked like he was about to make a lost child announcement to the audience. Joel looked nervous. Would he impress?

Round One of Take Me Out appeared to be a test to see if Joel could remember his own name and home town. Once he completed that simple task, the girls standing in judgement then made a snap decision to either remain in the frame for a possible date or turn their light off and count themselves out completely. Joel passed with flying colours, with only five girls turning off their lights (i.e. coldly rejecting him).

Round Two started with Paddy McGuinness informing the girls about Joel’s talent for speed rapping. But rather than allowing him to demonstrate his talent on his own terms, McGuinness handed him a Chinese restaurant menu and instructed him to speed rap that instead. The girls were then reminded that if they didn’t like what they saw or heard, they could turn their lights off at any time. Of course, as they were about to hear a man speed rapping a Chinese menu, the chances of them liking what they heard were slim.

Joel then speed rapped through the menu – which felt a bit like a task on The Moment of Truth – while several of the girls extinguished their podium lights at a rapid rate. It was a like a power cut hitting the neon strip of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. The task was acutely random. I’m surprised Paddy McGuinness didn’t piss in a cup and instruct Joel to gargle ‘Rapper’s Delight’.

Round Three consisted of a pre-recorded VT, in which Joel had already done a magnificent job of making himself look like a massive cock. Leaning on the bonnet of his Y-Reg BMW (which was parked in front of a drab semi-detached house), Joel said confidently: “Don’t miss out, girls, this could all be yours.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this triggered another round of lights being hastily turned off.

Joel’s fate was sealed when he announced that he still lived with his parents and that he was forbidden from bringing girls back home. It made me wonder why he’d bothered with any of the cockiness and bravado in the first place, when his final revelation was about as appealing as showing the Take Me Out girls his scrapbook collection of past girlfriend’s pubic hair. And for all the good flaunting his nine year old BMW did him, he may as well have been stood in front of a Dimma-converted rickshaw.

When all of the girls lights were out, Joel left the stage – alone - with Eric Carmen’s ‘All By Myself‘ ringing in his ears. Humiliating and soul destroying, I’m sure.

The penultimate male contestant out of the ‘Love Lift’ was the former drummer from Marmalade, Alan Whitehead. Now in his sixties, Alan strutted and wiggled confidently embarrassingly about the stage, while the girls clapped along like excitable parents watching a toddler dancing to a ringtone for the first time.

To be fair, Alan actually had it a lot easier than Joel. He flew through round one (the remembering your name and where you live task), losing only nine girls in the process. And for round two, all he had to do was play the drums and mime to ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da‘.

Miraculously, Alan actually managed to walk away with a date. (You could practically hear Joe’s muffled screams backstage, as salt was slowly and painfully massaged into his wounds.) The aforementioned Lia-Jay (a care worker from Rossendale, so not quite as porny as she sounds) was the lucky lady. However, I couldn’t help but think that she probably just decided to sacrifice herself in order to make a swift exit from the show. The alternative was to crack the casing on her podium and plunge her head into a nest of live wires.

The rest of the show is very much in the vein of Blind Date, whereby we get to see how the dates went for last week’s couples. However, due to obvious budget constraints we no longer see couples playing crazy golf in Llandudno or riding the banana in Mallorca, because every single date on Take Me Out is held in the VIP area of a Manchester club called Fernando’s (the recession is biting hard).

This means that we, the viewers, get to watch close-up shots of fleeting neck strokes, flirty leg touching, occasional kissing, and quite simply the dullest conversation you could ever imagine. It would be more entertaining if the couples had to bring in stool samples, which they then analyse and discuss over a cocktail. (Watching the guy playfully sticking a cocktail umbrella in his date’s colourful log, before advising her to cut down on leafy green vegetables and M&Ms, would be a massive improvement.)

Anyway, I suppose I’d better wrap this up. Basically, Take Me Out isn’t something that you’ll stay in for on a Saturday night. And if you’re popular enough to have plans at the weekend,  it’s not something you’ll record while you’re out either. But in all likelihood, you’ll probably find yourself watching the ITV2 repeat on a Sunday afternoon, with a fine cup of coffee, a filthy bacon sandwich, and a heavy sigh of relief that you’re not Joel…speed rapping a Chinese menu…in the face of cold, hard rejection.

Detox January: An exercise in misery

There’s no other time of year when it’s deemed ‘normal’ and acceptable to polish off some soggy battered prawns, a small plate of shrivelled chipolatas, half a tube of Texas BBQ Sauce Pringles, and a handful of Roses…for breakfast. But it’s Christmas, so the rule book has been tossed onto a roaring fire. Conventional meals, be damned! If there’s one thing that Santa taught the baby Jesus – when he brought some Rusks and a Baby Einstein DVD to the stable – it’s that we should all eat like animals around the time of his birthday.

The amount we eat and drink during the festive period is bordering on the obscene. We start hoarding Christmas ‘party food’ from about June, as if we’ve heard rumours that Santa has coldly executed Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen, and instructed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to pull his sleigh across the wintery skies instead. Our ridiculously full cupboards seem to reflect the nation’s determination, not to eat, drink and be merry, but to survive a nuclear winter.

Then, when Christmas finally arrives, we gorge ourselves to the point of becoming the focus of a Bodyshock documentary (The 80 Stone Man who Sweated Prawn Rings). Even more disturbing would be a documentary about two children who, by Boxing Day, had become entwined in their whale-sized father’s navel lint. When they’re finally discovered – weak and tearful, and with pallid complexions - it’s like the scene in Aliens when Ripley and the Colonial Marines first discover the cocooned colonists of LV-426.

Eating whatever the hell we like “because it’s Christmas” can feel quite liberating, but it’s not a lifestyle choice that can be sustained; lest we become a nation of obese monsters, welded to motorised carts.

I’ve certainly filled out a little over Christmas, but a daily power-walk has largely kept the excess pounds off. I’m still slightly more rotund than I’d like to be, though, so I’ve decided to do a January detox thing. I’ve never done one before, but I’m going to give it a go. The rules are: no chocolate, no crisps, no alcohol and no coffee during the week. I’m also going to make my own sickeningly healthy sandwiches for lunch, drink lots of water, and maybe even go for the odd run.

It sounds shit, doesn’t it?

I’ve always thought that detoxing throughout January is like self-flagellation for people with low pain thresholds (but a natural ability to embrace misery). But seeing as we spend December happily debauching  ourselves with food and drink, it seems quite fitting that January (a dismal month by anybody’s standards) provides the backdrop to sensible eating, moderate portions and abstention from anything even vaguely interesting and tasty.

It’s amazing what we choose to put ourselves through after such a wonderful period of gluttony and general excess. It’s like Calum Best powering down his conveyor belt of blonde fuck-bots and making a conscious decision to engage in frottage with Susan Boyle throughout January instead. Gone are the curvaceous, sexy women, daily lapdances and wild sex sessions. In their place, Calum commits to enduring the SuBo wiggle on a nightly basis (singing ‘Wild Horses’ as she shimmies before him). Furthermore, the risk of contracting STDs is replaced by exposure to nothing more serious than stubble rash.

It’s all a necessary evil to purify Calum’s soul, banish his sex-filled days from the memory banks, and make him feel pure, righteous and at peace with the world once again. What detox is all about!

I don’t know if I’ll survive my January detox, but I’ll give it a go. I really will. First things first, though, I must demolish my Cadbury selection box. Hmmmm, chocolate, goodbye old friend. See you again in 4-6 weeks.

Road Rage Toots

If I end up dying young (and for the sake of argument let’s just agree that 35 is young) I can see myself slumping lifelessly behind the wheel of my car, as a deafening chorus of car horns drown out my wheezy last breath. Yes, that’s right, I’ll die during my stressful commute to work. And due to the fact that I’ll probably expire while my lips are curled tightly around a particularly vicious expletive, mouth to mouth resuscitation will be impossible. The paramedics will have no choice but to let me go.

But God help Saint Peter if there’s sluggish or tailbacked traffic at the pearly gates (or, worse, an elderly woman in front of me driving a Rover 25).

I’ve been driving for 18 years, but I’m getting increasingly more aggressive and impatient as I get older. I’m actually quite a pleasant chap in my day to day life. But when I get into my car and click on the seatbelt, I often become possessed by the spirit of ‘Road Rage Toots’ (a nickname that I think was coined by either Emma Jones or Alex Hyrniewicz - or maybe neither).

Road Rage Toots is very similar to Competitive Toots; the former just uses the word cu*t more often.  

Only recently, I spat out the words “Citroen Saxo Cu*t!” with the same vitriol and disgust that one might save for heckling a perma-tanned old Nazi, returning in cuffs from South American exile, with a rap sheet of heinous crimes against humanity. Admittedly, my reaction was slightly disproportionate to the driver’s offence – suddenly cutting into my lane without signalling - but there’s rarely time for balanced reasoning during the heat of the rush hour.  

Similarly, I once spent about ten minutes intermittently shouting at woman who cut me up at a roundabout (probably quite innocently). The hook for this particular incident, which enabled me to stew over it for so long, was the fact that I thought she bore a passing resemblance to serial killer Rose West.

I’m like the Haley Joel Osment of the road rage world: “I see serial killers…driving inconsiderately.” It probably won’t be long before I’m tailgated by a Dr Harold Shipman look-alike in a BMW 5 Series. Or maybe I’ll be forced to make an emergency stop by Peter Sutcliffe’s doppelganger, jumping the lights in a Kia Picanto. The possibilities are endless.

My worst road rage moment happened about four years ago while I was driving to work. A gold Mercedes estate aggressively overtook me - when I’d only just negotiated a chicane coming out of a village, and was also trying to accelerate uphill in my 1.2 litre Fiat Punto – so I gave the driver my middle finger. I even turned to look at the driver while I did it, wearing an expression that just said: “Yeah, that’s right, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. Fuck you!”

I actually felt a little embarrassed when I saw that the Mercedes wasn’t being driven by an arrogant businessman in a suit, but rather a homely-looking blonde woman in her late forties. I’ll never forget the look of total disbelief that washed across her face, before her features contorted into a sort of Frank Spencer “Ooh, Betty!” expression. Shortly after that, she swerved dangerously in front of me and performed an emergency stop, which forced me to slam on my brakes and scream like a little girl to prevent my car from disappearing up her exhaust pipe. (Embarrassingly, my girly scream was marginally louder than the screech of my tyres.) 

I ended up hitting the kerb and stalling my car. My legs then began shaking uncontrollably, as if I’d just been pulled from the Baltic Sea after an ill-advised skinny dip. A strong smell of rubber then began to seep through my car’s vents, before the Mercedes driver accelerated away at speed, leaving me emasculated at the side of the road.

I occasionally emasculate myself, which is fine (in moderation). For instance, only the other week I found myself happily watching ‘Being Erica’ whilst munching through a pack of chocolate HobNobs and drinking Baileys. But it’s far less enjoyable when you’re emasculated by a crazed, Mercedes-driving bitch in the cold light of day.

Still, I took the incident as a sign that I should calm down and stop overreacting to every little traffic misdemeanour I spot. And I should certainly stop making enemies of fellow motorists.

It’s now four years on and I’m still trying to calm down in the car. On my way home from work in the evening I now listen to Margherita Taylor’s soothing voice on Classic FM’s ‘Smooth Classics at Six’, which is the middle-class equivalent of listening in to a conversation on Babestation. It sort of works. It calms me down. But every now and then, when I’m just about to lose myself in something beautiful, like Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’, I’ll suddenly hurl a torrent of abuse at another driver. It’s like watching a sufferer of night terrors switch from peaceful sleep one minute, to strangling a pillow – while frothing at the mouth and mumbling incoherently about intruders - the next.

Another cure for my road rage has been to drive my girlfriend’s company car: a Jaguar XF. It’s such a sleek, sexy and frighteningly fast car that I simply don’t care what other drivers are doing. And if anyone does come racing up behind me, kissing my bumper, I just laugh quietly to myself at the futility of their actions. I laugh like a man who might take a drag from a cigarillo, knock back a brandy, and then calmly press the ‘oil slick’ button on the steering wheel, before glancing in my rear view mirror to see several little shits (driving a Dimma converted Fiat Tipo) slide off the road and burst into flames after hitting a tree.

There’s something wonderfully relaxing about the fact that very few cars on the road have the ability to take you on…and win. It’s like taking an M1A2 Abrams battle tank onto the country’s congested A-roads - no one’s going to fuck with you. So maybe ‘Competitive Toots’ and ‘Road Rage Toots’ have more in common than I first thought, and driving is just another competitive sport. If so, there’s little hope for me. So here’s a word to the wise: don’t meet me during rush hour.

Wot, no blog posts?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog (and I’m hopeful that there are a few) you might have noticed that there’s been a distinct lack of blogging over recent weeks. The reasons, if you’re interested, are as follows:

1) I got Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the PS3 a few weeks ago. Recently, whenever there’s been a choice between sitting down quietly and getting some writing done, or, alternatively, trying to quell a childish tantrum while getting butchered in a variety of chaotic, war-ravaged virtual landscapes, the latter has won out.

2) My laptop died a horrible death several months ago, so I’m currently sharing a laptop with my girlfriend. Unfortunately, it’s usually quite late at night before I can get my hands on it, at which point, I usually fall asleep and flood the keyboard with several litres of goopy dribble.

3) There’s not been an awful lot to blog about lately. Work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep…well, you get the idea. It just doesn’t make for a very interesting read. (Although, does anything on this blog make for a truly interesting read?)

4) I’m lazy.

 Anyway, if any of you have read the ‘About Me’ section of this blog (the page with pretentious black and white photo) you’ll notice that I occasionally contribute blog posts to Grrrblogr, which is a fantastic additional outlet for my [very occasional] misanthropy. My posts there are a lot shorter (like I’ve taken a pipette and extracted tiny, ranty droplets of this blog and then dropped them onto someone else’s).

So, to make up for the fact that I’ve been a bit slack writing my own blog lately, you can always check out Grrrblogr and read my thoughts on Tesco cashiers, average speed checks, overseas call centres, moronic drivers and old people at self-service supermarket tills. There you are, see, I wrote something!

Flashback

There’s an awful lot I miss about my student days, but communal living isn’t one them. I was recently reminded of this fact when a friend very kindly provided me with a sofa and sleeping bag following a night of Guinness, Sambuca (and a random whisky-based cocktail).

My friend isn’t a student himself. But after only a few minutes inside his house (which he shares with three or four other people) it was damn near impossible to escape the conclusion that he must at least live with students. My addled brain had just enough Columbo left rattling around inside to enable me to spot the following key signifiers:

1) There was a Jules and Vincent Pulp Fiction poster on the wall above the fireplace (with a poster of A Clockwork Orange on the wall opposite). I dare say there was also a Betty Blue poster somewhere in the house, and maybe one of those Beer ones. You can’t actually study for an undergraduate degree in the UK without owning at least one of these posters.

2) The kitchen was reminiscent of something post-Hurricane Katrina. If I’m completely honest, I felt a little rude turning up without a search and rescue dog.

3) It looked like one of my friend’s housemates had been abducted while preparing a pasta meal, as there was a full pan of abandoned penne on the hob. We carbon dated it to only a few hours earlier, but it had already become weaponised. The pasta could easily have been tipped out of the pan in a solid frisbee shape, with a jagged edge of lethally sharp penne tubes. If necessary, it could then have been thrown like Oddjob’s bowler hat to scythe through the flesh of a hapless burglar. Half eaten (or abandoned) meals and snacks are the mainstay of any student kitchen.

4) Perhaps the most bizarre thing I discovered was one of those origami fortune teller games. (Giggling girls often used to thrust these in my face at primary school, ask me to pick a number or a colour, then lift the flap and announce with glee: “You Stink!”) I’m absolutely certain that the fortune teller game in this instance was the accompaniment to a bizarre student drinking game; conceived, no doubt, at the height of intoxication.

Like no primary school fortune teller game I’d ever seen, the outer options on the folded paper object were: Tits, Bottom, Tounge (sic) and Feets (sic). Each of those options then revealed a number, which mercifully took me back to familiar territory. However, when I then unfolded the object further, beyond the numbers, it revealed a bizarre mixture of insults, accusations, instructions, portentous statements and generally bizarre word combinations, such as:

Shit Yourself
There are some instructions you should obey unquestioningly, but some you should perhaps raise objection to.

You are a Terrorist
I understand that key members of the Bush administration were all issued with paper fortune tellers shortly after 9/11.

You will die soon
At least you know it’s going to be soon.

Mother Bummer
The kind of headline you’d expect to grace the front page of Chat magazine, alongside other tales of depravity, murder and an excitable cover model with a beaming smile.

Wonderful Garland
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this is some kind of gay reference.

Siamese Twins
This sounds like some kind of conjoined twin challenge, which I’m not sure the world is ready for.

Total Fail
This would undoubtedly be one of the funniest ways to learn that, after three years of higher education, you didn’t even scrape a Douglas. (“So, I bum my mum and I’ve failed my degree? Oh god.”)

Sonic Boom
This sounds like either a drinking challenge or a sexual position….like, say, the Pile Driver. (You can find your own links for the latter!)

This game had “students” written all over it (metaphorically speaking). It certainly didn’t seem like the kind of game that a couple would unveil to their dinner party guests along with a cheese-board and some fine wine. No, this just had to be students.

I was surprised to learn, therefore, that no students lived in the house with my mate all. Not a single one! I was so shocked I nearly fell over (though, admittedly, that could’ve been the sambuca). But even without the students, it was a completely authentic student living environment. And it really took me back to the nightmare of living with other people.

I never quite took to communal living during my student days. When I was in halls at university I had the misfortune of having the room next to the toilets and across from the kitchen (where everyone used to gather in a pissed frenzy after a night out).

I distinctly remember, after a couple of weeks of constant late night disturbance and banging doors, that I decided to use my sleepless night to write an appeal to my tormentors, which I stuck on the kitchen door. When that was subsequently ignored, I then proceeded to write a series of ‘humorous’ threats which I again put up on display. (I recall one in particular which stated that, if everyone didn’t shut the fuck up, I would hang their coagulated arteries like fairy lights along the hall).

I do cringe when I think back to that first term at uni, because I sounded just a teensy bit like a psychopath who’d slipped under the UCAS radar.

Much to my surprise, some of my hall mates actually told me that they looked forward to my notices on the kitchen door and asked if I’d be writing more of them. It felt a little bit like someone asking me to punch them in the face repeatedly because they admired my balletic style of boxing and dizzying uppercuts. I carried on writing quite happily until someone scrawled “Fuck off! You sad bastard!” all over one of my kitchen notices. I then retired them with immediate effect.

Even though the chances of my ever returning to a house-share situation are slim to nothing, the very thought brings me out in a cold sweat. I currently reside in a flat with my girlfriend, but I even find living in the same building as other people difficult. Why? Well, my neighbours’ cars all look like they’ve been valet parked by Stevie Wonder on our small driveway; I’m one step away from announcing a door-closing master class for the idiots who constantly leave the security door ajar; and the new guy downstairs can’t go in and out of his flat without slamming the fucking door every time.

Thank god I have my flat to retreat to.

But if I ever had to live so closely with other people again – with their inconsiderateness and 24/7 homage to A Life of Grime – I just know I’d end up instigating a drunken round of the fortune teller game, where every player would unfold the paper object to discover the message: “You Will Die Soon”. I’d then go mental with a penne frisbee.

I couldn’t thank my mate enough for giving me somewhere to crash after our night out drinking (he’s a top bloke), but the experience took me back to a way of living that I’m glad I’ve left behind. Really glad.

Let’s break The X Factor

I watched John and Edward Grimes’ second live performance on the X-Factor last night, which was a laughably awful version of Britney Spears’ ‘Oops!…I Did It Again’.

The two talentless Johnny Bravo’s pranced around the stage in one of the most confused choreographed performances I’ve ever seen. Dressed in shiny, wipe clean PVC suits, they were pushed around on hotel lobby luggage trolleys by a female dance troupe (who were all dressed like the crash helmet girl from the Zovirax ad). It was acutely random.

In an effort to compensate for the complete lack of any discernible talent, Brian Friedman’s choreography for the twins is becoming increasingly bizarre. I see a future performance when the dynamic duo will be made to wear Spandex leotards, while they strain their little voices delivering a painful rendition of Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’. Meanwhile, all around them, dancers will slink about dressed like Maureen Lipman (as Beattie Bellman in the British Telecom ads). Viewers and judges will be so perplexed by the performance it will slip under the radar as one of the worst things to ever be broadcast on prime time television.

Still, last night’s busy performance wasn’t enough to distract anyone from the fact that, yet again, it’s blatantly obvious that they simply cannot sing. They’re not even karaoke good. Furthermore, they have all the timing of two people who’ve arrived late to an aerobics class, whereby they’re constantly two moves behind everyone in a fruitless attempt to catch up with the session.

Surprisingly, Simon Cowell, Danni Minogue and Cheryl Cole all described John and Edward’s performance as “entertaining”. Although, I’m assuming they meant it in the same way that watching this is entertaining. To be fair to the judges, though, the veneer of saccharin positivity was delivered in such a deadpan and slightly bewildered fashion, it completely failed to disguise the fact that they all thought the performance was, at best, a ridiculous novelty act. (I love the reactions of this viewer who watched J&E’s performance last night.) 

As usual, it was left to Simon to deliver a brutal (but accurate) assessment of their performance, saying: “In the same way I reacted to the first time I watched The Exorcist, I didn’t like it but I wanted to watch it again. And that’s sort of how I feel about you.” John and Edward both smiled as if they’d just been signed to Sony BMG for eighty squizillion pounds.

When Dermot turned to the boys and said: “It was weird, but did you enjoy it?” John immediately offered what sounded like a serious explanation for the performance, saying: “The thing that happened was…in the middle [of the act], my microphone came off because Edward boxed me in the face.” OK, that explains about half a second of the performance, which few people will have noticed, but how does it explain your basic lack of talent? 

In general, John and Edward’s live performances have been so bad that the judges have been scraping the barrel for ways to respond. After their first live performance, Danni and Louis (the twins’ mentor) both sat on the fence and went with: “The whole country is talking about you.” That may well have been true. But the whole country has also previously talked about things like Dr Harold Shipman and swine flu. Being a water cooler topic of conversation doesn’t automatically make you popular. 

Perhaps one of the most absurd things I’ve heard so far was during the first live show, when host Dermot O’Leary said of John and Edward: “You know what? These are 17-year-old guys, [they've] come over from Dublin. For that, they deserve a round of applause.” Did I miss something? Since when did a ferry journey from Dublin to Holyhead become deserving of national recognition and applause?

The X-Factor’s ‘creative director’, Brian Friedman, is apparently now tipping John and Edward to win the competition (describing them as “so bad that they are good”). Only last week, Simon Cowell said to the twins: “I just had this horrific thought…you winning the competition. What it would do? I mean, it would be a disaster.”

So, I was thinking. Seeing as we, the British public, have the ultimate power to either crush the hopes of X-Factor contestants or deliver them their dreams, can we not do our utmost to keep John and Edward in the competition? In fact, I’m going to go a step further – let’s engineer it so that they win the fucking competition!! Let’s orchestrate the victory of an act so untalented and undeserving of a multi-million pound recording contract that it ultimately makes a mockery of the whole programme. I think we have a unique opportunity here to shake up a boring, repetitive talent show format.

I’m so sick of the X-Factor’s formidable PR machine plaguing us every year, with the competition winner performing vocal gymnastics everywhere we turn (and making Simon Cowell a fortune in the process), that I want to see them scrabbling around trying to market an appalling act like John and Edward instead.

With great power comes great responsibility. So let’s make this happen, people of Britain! Let’s break the X-Factor!

What the hell did I just see?

I recently saw a young girl in Tesco (about 12-years-old) wearing towering, strappy heels, a pink and black basque-style top, belt-sized skirt and diamanté headband. She was also coated – head to toe – in so much fake tan that she may well have been undetectable by thermal imaging camera (she was a sort of Cuprinol ‘rustic brown’).

Far from being a reluctant and visibly embarrassed clothes horse (perhaps dressed for a party by a shameless or partially sighted mother), she actually packed her shopping bags with a modicum of attitude and a discernable smirk. And her slightly older, fatter sister – wearing a similar diamanté headband, but more in the way of elasticated clothing – was grinning so much, I thought a Speedo-wearing Take That had just entered the store pushing a dessert trolley stacked with cake.

At the time, I was waiting for a self-service till in Tesco at nearly 4pm on a Sunday afternoon, so it was like queuing for the last chopper out of Saigon. Consequently, this pre-pubescent party girl had the biggest audience imaginable. And judging from the incredlous looks around me, I obviously wasn’t alone in thinking that we were witnessing something ever so slightly inappropriate.

There’s probably never a good time to gently tap a parent on the shoulder and politely inform them that their daughter looks like a slut, but everyone was thinking it.

When the young girl, teetering in her ridiculous shoes, finally left the store, even the shop assistant manning the self-service tills said: “She can’t even walk in them bloody heels. That was ridiculous.” (For the record, this shop assistant would probably ignore a spontaneously combusting customer in favour of chatting with her Woodpecker Cider-toting chavvy mates, so I naturally assumed that she knew the young girl and her family. But if she was appalled, then things really were bad! )

I was actually quite astounded by what I’d seen. And I couldn’t help but think that the young girl was heading off to meet her classroom sweetheart at a tweenage party (a 12-year-old boy called Simon, dressed in arseless leather chaps and a PVC waistcoat with nipple clamps).

I really didn’t want to come over all Daily Mail about it, but I was genuinely shocked that (a) the girl’s mother let her out of the house dressed like that, and (b) that those kind of clothes even exist in that age range. What happened to just being a kid? Why the urge to dress like WAGzilla at such a tender age?

When my sister was this girl’s age (back in 1987/88) she was still a kid. In fact, she’d only just stopped playing with Barbie dolls. If my sister had been keen to dress beyond her years with what she knew of fashion at that point, she’d probably have hit the school disco wearing a ruffle neck ball gown with a shimmering tulle overskirt and tiara. (Thanks to the frequent involvement of my Action Men during my sister’s Barbie time, she was also conditioned to believe that all afternoon tea parties had to end in a violent siege, where people were executed mid-scone and their lifeless bodies tossed from the penthouse suite.)

I like to think that the young girl I saw in Tesco was just an anomaly and that girls her age don’t really dress like they’re planning to fall out of a club at 3am with the likes of Danielle Lloyd and Jordan (ending up in an undignified heap on the pavement; a mélange of fake tan, cellulite and garotted vagina).

At least, I hope she was an anomaly.

The art of conversation

I’ve never been great at conversing with complete strangers. It just doesn’t come easy to me. I was subsequently reminded of this fact a few weeks ago during a rare taxi journey, when my opening gambit to the sexagenarian taxi driver was: “Your car smells nice.” We then spent the next ten minutes sitting in uncomfortable silence.

The awkward silence was only broken when the driver proudly revealed that several passengers had recently commented that they thought his taxi was a brand new car, even though it’s actually one year old. “Well, you have kept it immaculately maintained,” I replied (dying a little inside). I sounded like a robot who’d just had a brand new formality chip installed. Had I appeared at the taxi driver’s window in the nude, saying: “Salutations! I regret to inform you that I need your clothes, your brogues and your Vauxhall Vectra,” it would’ve been like a mediocre version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to talk much for the rest of the journey because my kind comments about the taxi driver’s car triggered a demonstration of the wonders of his sat-nav: “There we are, you see [points at screen]. But if we go right at this roundabout…there you go, the road name’s now changed to the one I’m driving on.”

I’d arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon on the 20:30 train from Birmingham Moor Street, but he clearly thought I’d materialised in a ghostly fog aboard a steam locomotive from 1830. Still, I think I managed to successfully feign interest and gasp with astonishment in all the right places.

I eventually called time on the taxi journey and walked the rest of the way home in the pitch dark, occasionally stumbling over the mangled carcasses of unidentified road-kill. However, it was preferable to persevering with my awkward taxi journey. In fact, it was something of a relief to be stumbling around in the dark (rather than mentally doing so, in a strained effort to generate conversation).

My apparent inability to chat casually with strangers makes me think that, in the [hopefully unlikely] event of my abduction, I’d be completely immune to the Stockholm syndrome. I imagine that after telling my abductor that his car boot smells nice, I’d be fresh out of ideas. Upon my surprise release nearly 20 years later, I’m fairly confident that my relationship with my abductor wouldn’t be any further advanced.  

I went for a hair cut at the weekend, which is always a conversational black hole. I’ve been going to the same hairdresser for about five years now, yet we still converse like two mismatched singles on a buttock-clenchingly awkward first date. At one point, in order to sidestep a moment of deafening silence, I seized upon the fact that my hairdresser has a 10-year-old son. I then embarked on a brief, but alarming, conversation about how swine flu was set to ravage schools again now that the summer holidays are over.

Unless I was unknowingly channelling the spirit of Dr Hilary Jones, I can’t claim to have said anything even remotely factual. However, I did manage to fill at least 35 seconds with something that sounded like a conversation (in spite of suggesting that my hairdresser’s son was on borrowed time).

When there were other painful silences later on during my hair cut, I’m surprised I didn’t say: “Have you heard about the Ebola virus spreading virulently among pre-teens? Yeah, once they’ve haemorrhaged from every orifice it’s pretty much over. Finito! My hair feels so much better now you’ve taken the weight out of it. Thank you.”

My inability to chat confidently with strangers was painfully apparent at a wedding earlier this year. It was the wedding of my girlfriend’s university friend – who I’ve only met once or twice – so the people in the wedding party were a complete mystery to me. At dinner I had the misfortune of being seated next to the most boring man I’ve ever met in my life, so getting the conversation going was like trying to start up a Morris Marina that had been parked under a tree for 30 years - it sputtered a little, but there was essentially nothing there. In the end, I suffered the indignity of the aforementioned boring man making his excuses to escape me! It did make me wonder how dull I must be for this super-dull man to have felt so unfulfilled after an hour at dinner with me.

I recall dying my first conversational death in about 1983, while chatting to the daughter of one of my dad’s work colleagues (who I fancied). She was older than me by about 2-3 years and looked a bit like Elizabeth Shue from ‘Karate Kid’. My most embarrassing moment was trying to woo her with an impression of Megatron from Transformers, which saw me adopt a nasal, faux-robotic voice, then saying: ”My – name – is – Megatron.” (The worst impressions are always the ones where you have to explicitly state who you’re impersonating.) Understandably, she looked quite embarrassed for me. I genuinely don’t think I ever saw her again after that moment.

Nowadays, every conversation I have with someone I don’t know feels as ineffectual as a poor impression of Megatron…and every bit as cringeworthy.

It’s a sad state of affairs when I can chat to strangers more confidently on Twitter than I can in real life. In fact, I’ve often wondered if  it would be possible drag this chatty online confidence into a real-life social situation, and I almost attended my local Twestival this year to test out the theory, but ultimately bottled out. Maybe next time. 

Oh, who am I kidding? There isn’t really going to be a “maybe next time”. Unless, of course, I can hire Dr Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesiser for an evening, so I can hold conversations without physically talking to anyone. Actually, no, scrub that thought. That’s just silly. I’m almost entirely…well, fairly sure that I’d never go to such lengths to avoid conversation with strangers in a social situation. Tempting, though.

Twitter’s just made me feel like a teenager again (and not in a good way)

Between 1989 and 1991 – my formative teenage years at school – I was dumped three times by three separate girls. In 1989, I found solace in New Order’s ‘Technique’ album (I haven’t listened to it since), while 1990-91 saw Joy Division’s ‘Closer’, R.E.M.’s ‘Green’ and ‘Out of Time’ albums, and pretty much everything The Cure had ever written (though, I spent a lot of time with ‘Disintegration’), all acting like a great, goopy musical adhesive to hold together the shattered pieces of my tragic adolescent life.

Not only did I seem to revel in the melodrama and the misery of my break-ups, but I also scrawled every self-pitying word in a diary (which had a lock on it). I didn’t know it at the time but I was a walking teenage cliché, with a face almost theatrically white from the thick coating of Oxy10 I kept almost permanently applied. Still, at the time, being dumped felt like the end of the world. It also caused hairline fractures in my already fragile self-confidence and brought about persistent periods of self-doubt.

Fast-forward 18 years and I’ve been dumped again. Well, sort of. Someone that I really liked on Twitter has stopped following me. And to be honest, I feel like I’ve been dumped all over again.

I started following this person a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised when they followed me back. However, ever since that time I’ve sort of been waiting for them to leave me, which is exactly the kind of behaviour I engaged in during my teens (i.e. too miserable to actually enjoy the moment because, from day one, the end is nigh).

Every time my follower numbers have dipped over the last couple of months I’ve anxiously scanned my follower list to check that this person’s avatar was still present. And, yes, I secretly breathed a sigh of relief every time I confirmed that they were still with me.

But when I checked my follower list the other night, they – she – had gone. Now, I should stress that my affinity for this particular person isn’t anything romantic. I just find them funny, feisty, occasionally quite acerbic (which I like) and wonderfully intelligent. A great person to follow and be followed by. So I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d done to turn this person off. 

Am I boring? Is that it? Did she find me boring? Oh, God, please don’t tell me that she found me boring! I’d rather be appallingly offensive than boring. Maybe she didn’t find me funny? Oh, GOD, was I not even mildly amusing? Not even perfunctory smirk amusing? And do I really have the time to trawl through over one thousand of my tweets in order to confirm or deny these horrendous possibilities? Well, yes, maybe.

Of course, I’ll never know the reason why she unfollowed me. And that’s sort of the problem. It means I’m left with a guessing game, while pangs of self-doubt return. What’s worse is that she unfollowed me after a few months, which means that she actually grew tired of me. I don’t think I’d feel as bad if she’d rashly unfollowed me after only giving me the benefit of a couple of tweets.

I absolutely adore Twitter, but you’ve really got to leave your feelings at the door if you’re a sensitive soul like me. Thinking too hard about why people choose to follow you, and then later abandon you, can drive you mad.

Before I signed up to Twitter I would never have envisaged actually becoming fond of complete strangers (in fact, not even strangers – the words of complete strangers). But I really do enjoy seeing the same people appear in my timeline every day with interesting links, observations, jokes and general musings. I am still following this person (in the Twitter sense of the word; I don’t mean I’m stalking them, keying desperate messages into the bonnet of their car and sending them road-kill in jiffy bags), but I guess I’ll just have to accept that I find her more interesting to follow than she does me. Jesus, that stings.

Right, I’m off to pull my fringe down over my face, apply some Oxy10 (for the purposes of authentically recreating my grotesque teenage self) and then fish out a suitable album to play while I wallow in misery in my bedroom. Being dumped never gets any easier.

“The aliens are coming!”

Three orange lights travel silently across the sky over Henley-in-Arden (12/09/09).

I went out for a fantastic Thai meal with my girlfriend and her mum and dad tonight, which was absolutely lovely. However, as belt-poppingly amazing as the evening was, it isn’t the reason I’m writing this blog post. Because in spite of the gorgeous food and wonderful company, it was the short walk to the car after the meal that things started to get really interesting.

As we were all walking to the car (up Bear Lane in Henley-in-Arden) we spotted a bright orange light travelling silently across the sky above us. It was significant enough to draw our attention, and we were all baffled as to what it could be. However, what I thought would be a fleeting moment of bafflement – before conversation swiftly returned to the superb Thai meal on which we’d just gorged ourselves - subsequently developed into bewildered excitement, as one…two…three…four orange lights followed silently behind in relatively quick succession.

For the next 10 minutes we all stood in the road, eyes transfixed on the clear night sky, watching several bright orange lights travelling silently overhead, one after the other. (I checked my watch after the sixth light flew over and it was 10:35pm.) All in all, we believe we saw approximately 21 orange lights. My girlfriend’s dad estimated that they were perhaps flying at 1,000ft, but I really couldn’t say. One thing I can say, however, is that they seemed to be travelling at a fair speed, but were completely silent. None of us heard a thing.

To our surprise, at one point, a man pulled up alongside us in a black Audi and announced: “They’ve been coming over all night; all going in the same direction. My mother’s counted around 35. I’m going to follow them.” He then drove off at speed into the night. To be honest, the fact that a complete stranger believed that these lights were something out of the ordinary simply added to the weirdness of the whole situation. It also confirmed that the lights weren’t a side-effect of the Singha beers we’d just drunk. About five minutes later another car drove past us with the windows down, shouting: “The aliens are coming!”

We eventually retreated to our own car and set off for home, while trying to keep our eyes on the 21st orange light as it travelled across the sky above us, eventually flying out of sight.

Unfortunately, all I had with me was my iPhone, which is capable of so much – but taking photos isn’t really its forte. Nevertheless, I snapped away furiously as the orange lights travelled across the sky. Some of the photographic results, while typically inconclusive, are included in this blog post.

Two more orange lights (2 of 21) fly silently across the sky over Henley-in-Arden.

I hit Google as soon as I got home and discovered that there have been several sightings of unexplained orange lights in the sky all across the UK over the last few months. The most recent (and relatively local) report ran in the Halesowen News on September 1st. It’s been suggested in some of these news reports that the mysterious orange lights could in fact be Chinese lanterns, which may well be true in some cases (or maybe in all cases).

Whatever we saw flew in a controlled manner across the sky. The orange lights appeared in twos and threes and maintained a perfect distance from each other as they travelled overhead. They were completely silent, moving at speed across the sky, and they didn’t display any blinking or flashing landing lights that one might expect from a conventional aircraft. 

At one point, I could see four orange lights flying into the distance in a near perfect straight line. They can’t possibly have been helicopters. And in my opinion, they were going too fast to be balloons. As has been suggested, it’s conceivable that they could have been sky lanterns. Who knows, maybe they were flying over from a wedding at Henley Golf & Country Club? They did appear to be flying from that general direction.

I’m not saying that I’ve witnessed extraterrestrial guests arriving at Gordon Shumway’s son’s Bar Mitzvah, but I’ve definitely seen several Unidentified Flying Objects. If anyone has seen anything similar (or even saw these very lights over Henley-in-Arden tonight), then by all means drop me a line.