If it IS him [00:13-00:16], then it goes a long way to explaining how Black Wednesday unfolded just four years later when he somehow found himself working in the Treasury.
“I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire. Alright!”
The indefatiguable Richard Madeley is “sitting in” for Sarah Kennedy this week on Radio 2.
It’s comedy gold – compulsive listening.
This morning:
Never, ever, EVER Google yourself.
This is Bananarama.
Fucking genius: the man’s channelling Alan Partridge!
YOU MOTHERFUCKING, HYPOCRITICAL, SHITEHAWK, CHANCER CUNT!
Former Home Secretary David Blunkett says the government should scrap plans to introduce ID cards for all in favour of mandatory biometric passports.
Speaking at InfoSec 2009, a security conference held in London, the MP for Sheffield Brightside said biometric passports could do the job.
He said he had put the idea to the current Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.
It is something of a u-turn for the MP who first mooted the idea of ID cards when he was Home Secretary in 2001.
Wave goodbye, the spineless, pathetic fucking lot of you.
Perhaps the most interesting section of PBD’s “age of austerity” speech at the weekend has gone largely unreported.
It’s the section sub-titled “Technology“:
There’s one more way to combine financial discipline with our positive vision.
Today, technology means everyone can have the information that was once kept by the privileged few.
In the hands of a party like Labour, that believes in central control, this opportunity is stifled.
Just look at computerising the NHS.
Labour say: let’s call in the expensive consultants. Let’s commission a massive IT project. Let’s make the state more powerful with a new, centralised computer to store everyone’s health records.
The result: NHS Connecting for Health, costing over twelve billion pounds.
One part of it is the Electronic Patient Records system – a central state-run database designed to let GPs, hospital doctors and nurses share your medical notes.
Now I want you to imagine how we’d have gone about it, if we’d had the chance.
We would have said: today, you don’t need a massive central computer to do this.
People can store their health records securely online, they can show them to whichever doctor they want.
They’re in control, not the state.
And when they’re in control of their own health records, they’re more interested in their health, so they might start living more healthily, saving the NHS money.
But best of all in this age of austerity, a web-based version of the government’s bureaucratic scheme services like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault cost virtually nothing to run.
So this is where some really big savings could be made.
Not just shaving a bit off this budget here; that cost there.
Instead replacing whole chunks of the expensive, bureaucratic government machine with more modern methods – for a tiny fraction of the cost.
But it will only happen if you have a government that actually believes in giving power away.
So it’s clear: when the Eton Trifles are elected next year, they will trust unto Google’s and Microsoft’s “cloud” servers Britain’s medical records.
Because it’s cheap.
We’ll be in the very safest of hands.
What could POSSIBLY go wrong…?
Is a direct descendant of King William IV – a man who is the fifth cousin, twice removed, of the Queen; a man who is the grandson of a Baronet; a man educated at Eton College; a man married to a woman who is herself the daughter of a Baronet and directly descended from King Charles II – really best placed to lecture the country about “thrift” and “pathetic piece[s] of class war posturing”?
The Eton Trifles: 403 days and counting…
Last Friday night I recorded the first episode of Reggie Perrin.
Yesterday I watched it.
Now I’m out of touch with British sitcoms. I can’t remember the last consistently good British sitcom I saw. The first series of Green Wing was good. The short-lived Freezing certainly showed promise. There was the occasional chuckle to be had in Free Agents. Extras was a curate’s egg but when it was good it was bloody good. The first series of The Office was obviously superb.
The other British sitcoms I have seen in the past decade have been so mediocre as to have made no lasting impression on me. Any supposed golden age long behind us, perhaps “anonymnous mediocrity” is the standard by which British sitcoms should now be judged.
Still, however, I can’t remember seeing anything so woeful as Reggie Perrin.
Reggie Perrin makes Paul Merton’s remake of the Hancock scripts look like a good idea.
Reggie Perrin was so bad that I do not believe there to be sufficient hyperbole in the world to express just how cosmically wretched it was.
Throughout the never-ending 28 minutes’ running time I not only didn’t laugh or chuckle once, I didn’t even smile.
I am a fan of the original Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin from the 1970s: I own the two series on DVD. My complaint, though, is not that something untouchable has been remade or even that it is not as good as the original, simply that Reggie Perrin is so irredeemably poor in every aspect that it should never have made it to broadcast had an even remotely effective quality control process been in place.
The pre-broadcast interviews were keen to point out that this was a sitcom filmed before an audience. If that’s the case, the audience in question must have been either watching a different performance, stoned or a combination of the two. The “laughs” came a good couple of seconds after the “punchlines” and their intensity bore no relation to the strength of the gag.
Having sat open-mouthed in disbelief through the entire car crash, I invited The Minister’s Wife to dip her toe into the waters. She lasted less than three minutes before deleting the recording from our Sky+ box in horror.
Yet perhaps we have been spoiled by the likes of 30 Rock because – remarkably – the programme did not get a total flaying in the papers.
Damian Thompson in the Telegraph hits the nail squarely on the head:
The updated Reggie Perrin [is spectacularly] worse than the original… There aren’t enough sofa cushions in the world to cover viewers struck by chronic embarrassment after tuning in to the remake. “Have a good day at the office,” says Mrs Perrin as Reggie heads off to the railway station. “I won’t,” he replies. Cue cackle from the audience, little realising that it has just heard the best joke of the episode, if not the series.
At least now we know why Clunes seemed defensive in the interviews he gave for the show. The revamped Reggie Perrin belongs in the annals of comedy disasters.
It’s nowhere near enough, but at least Thompson made an effort.
Sam Wollaston in The Guardian managed to critique the programme without once referring to its content, instead choosing to lament the paucity of imagination behind the commission.
I wish I could get paid for avoiding doing my job but at least he didn’t say it was good.
Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent comes dangerously close to that crime by concluding that, “it’s not a disaster, by any means, which may be the best you can hope for from such an unimaginative commission.”
Like the studio audience, Sutcliffe was clearly watching something else. I shudder to think how bad something must be for Sutcliffe to consider it a disaster: by this measure the World Glass Coffee Table Shitting Championships hosted on Sky 3 by Elton Welsby, Matt Lorenzo and a naked Keith Chegwin might just about qualify.
The war criminal, though, is Andrew Billen in The Times.
HE GIVES THIS PUTREFYING CORPSE OF A PROGRAMME 4 STARS.
OUT OF 5!
It is… very funny, largely because of Martin Clunes as Perrin who lumbers through home, his daily commute and his office life, like a giant suffering the early stages of pathological disinhibition. Clunes must have been wary of stepping into Leonard Rossiter’s shoes. He is funnier than Rossiter was in the part.
“Funnier than Rossiter”?
What the buggery fuck is Billen on?
My unbridled outrage is let down by my inability to express just how dire this programme truly is.
Anyone can say that something was an unadultered disaster, but that doesn’t do this anything like justice.
This dreadful, awful, abysmal programme is so thoroughly poor on every level that anybody who laughed at it should be sectioned for the good of the rest of the community.
That something so bad could have been produced without the involvement of Simon Cowell is a very worrying development.
Roget’s entries for “execrable” are:
accursed, blasted, blessed, bloody, confounded, cursed, damn, darn, infernal
None are remotely strong enough to describe how inept Reggie Perrin is.
The adjective “poor”, defined as “deficient, inadequate” Roget brings us:
base, below par, common, contemptible, crude, diminutive, dwarfed, exiguous, faulty, feeble, humble, imperfect, incomplete, inferior, insignificant, insufficient, lacking, low-grade, lowly, meager, mean, mediocre, miserable, modest, niggardly, ordinary, paltry, pitiable, pitiful, plain, reduced, rotten, scanty, second-rate, shabby, shoddy, skimpy, slight, sorry, sparse, subnormal, subpar, substandard, trifling, trivial, unsatisfactory, valueless, weak, worthless
Add them all up and you still only get 7.38% of the way towards appreciating how desperately appalling Reggie Perrin truly is.
It is so bad that in any walk of life other than The Arts, the Chancers responsible for passing off such substandard produce would lose their jobs.
Before facing a public flogging.
And being imprisoned.
For life.
Imagine that Microsoft ad for that music software I posted the other month. Triple its paucity. And extend it to 28 minutes…
YOU’RE STILL NOWHERE NEAR REGGIE MOTHERFUCKING PERRIN.
The first episode was so bad that you have to watch it to understand.
It’s on iPlayer – the gizmo that makes “the unspeakable unmissable”.
Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Fuck me senseless.
Redknapp leaves door ajar for Beckham
Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp says it would be a ‘great idea’ if the club recruited David Beckham
On Sunday 2 September 1990 Melvyn Bragg finally confirmed he’d permanently lost the plot by devoting a South Bank Show Special to George Michael in celebration of the release the next day of Yog’s second solo album Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.
Nearly two decades on, that album is remarkable mainly for its mediocrity. The singles tanked – in turn reaching numbers 6, 23, 28, 31 and 45 in the UK, in no small part thanks to Precious’s oh-so-artistic decision not to appear in his own videos – after which Bubble promptly lobbed his toys from his pram where his record company was concerned, all but retiring from the studio for six years until Virgin bought out his deal with Sony.
The best tracks on the album remain a Stevie Wonder cover (They Won’t Go When I Go) and a single with an annoyingly-infectious chorus that performed much better on the charts when Robbie Williams covered it six years later (Freedom ’90).
For much of the album Michael bangs on about the awful state of the world and, in particular, just how unbelievably horrific it is to be a multi-millionaire, multi-award winning singer and songwriter with never-ending access to all the drugs and groupies you can eat.
The sentiment is about as easy for the average punter to swallow as was Bono whining a couple of years earlier about how he Still Hadn’t Found What He Was Looking For. (Perhaps the diminutive Dubliner simply couldn’t see it hidden behind all those enormous piles of his cash.)
Yog won’t even let that particular bone go on the album’s closing track, Waiting (Reprise). The difference here, however, is that this slowed-down, stripped-back version of the album’s torpid third single, Waiting For The Day, contains the best lyric and most soulful vocal of Michael’s career.
It being the one track from the album remaining on my My Top Rated playlist, Waiting (Reprise) has always held something of a fascination for me, echoing as it does an interview I read with ABC’s Martin Fry from around the same time saying that even on the night he celebrated The Lexicon Of Love album reaching number one he felt empty, realising that his ultimate musical achievement was leaving him hopelessly unfulfilled.
(It came as little surprise that Bubble chose Waiting (Reprise) to open his recent 25 Live tour; it not only builds to a crescendo of “Here I am!”, but that final note is still comfortably within Michael’s increasingly limited range.)
The feeling when listening to Michael soulfully crying Waiting (Reprise) is that the singer genuinely doesn’t know the answer to the artfully-constructed, if self-pitying, question: “You look for your dreams in Heaven, but what the Hell are you supposed to do when they come true?”
Having achieved everything he thought he wanted and everything he strove for years to attain, it made him fucking miserable. A story old as time – having been awarded the ultimate prize, the prizewinner simply didn’t know what to do with it.
George’s answer was to smoke so much weed that he became a Flowerpot Man. While I can certainly see the attractions of that, it’s not a route I can necessarily condone for today’s equivalent, the Right Honourable James Gordon Brown MP.
It took the poor miserablist 14 years from election as a Member of Parliament to enter government. It then took a further decade before he could make the short walk from 11 Downing Street to the neighbouring abode. While he was – broadly speaking – a solid enough Chancellor, he never even tried to hide just how badly he wanted the Premiership or how little he felt Tony Blair deserved the crown.
Rightly or wrongly (and I never saw too much evidence to substantiate the claim) Brown was perceived as all gravitas and sincerity to Blair’s Chancerite philosophy of smiling vacuously and talking bollocks like a Hughie Green for the 90s. The feeling was that after Brown had done Waiting For That Day, he would herald a new dawn, a serious antidote to the complete and utter fluff of the Blair era.
As he finally stood outside Number 10 in June 2007, the nation wanted to believe that it was going to get its credibility back. As we had in May 1997, so we demonstrated – at first – a willingness to believe that things were now, finally, going to get better. I, too, was prepared to go with the flow.
The shit sandwich he has served up to the British population since late September 2007 has been a rude awakening for us all. But at least he found time to pay tribute to Jade Goody, eh?
As Arrivederci would have known if he’d listened to Waiting (Reprise) more attentively, “There ain’t no point in moving on until you’ve got somewhere to go.” Yet, remarkably, the man who had been so consumed for so long with the pursuit of the Prime Ministerial office seems never to have thought about what he would do with the power once he got it.
Blown this way and that by the vicissitudes of life the poor wretch has lurched from crisis to crisis, attempting to patch up his administration with populist utterance after knee-jerk initiative. Nobody is fooled anymore – he just isn’t up to the job.
(Not, I should add in all fairness, that there is anybody else in either of the two main parties that inspire anything remotely approaching confidence that they could do appreciably better, with the sole possible exception of professional Tory leadership election loser Kenneth Clarke.)
The man who claimed he went into politics to help the poor is the man who as Chancellor and Prime Minister has overseen a situation whereby people earning as little as £6,400 a year now pay income tax. The minimum wage is £5.73 an hour: you therefore only have to work for 21 hours a week at minimum wage to pay income tax. More than two millions of Britain’s poorest taxpayers face marginal tax rates in excess of 60%, a situation that will only become worse when VAT shoots up to 20%, as it surely now must at the end of this year. Keir Hardie’s fairly glowing with pride.
While the introduction of the 50% income tax band on the highest-earning 1% of the population is welcome and grabs some easy headlines, it does nothing for those most in need and raises (in terms of the stratospheric debt mountain we must now scale as a nation) sod all in revenue.
The man who built his reputation as a fiscal colossus on three pillars – deregulated wholesale financial services markets; open-to-all consumer finance; and a domestic property bubble – now oversees a financial services sector in tatters, with neither banks lending nor individuals borrowing, and a ruined housing market which still has far further to fall than the 20% already lost over the past year.
The ever-reliable Vince Cable was right this week to point out that it’s more than a little sickening to see Brown and Darling shoring up the same mortgage-backed securities that got us into this mess with public money that doesn’t exist, legitimising bribery to try to get consumers to buy foreign cars, and hiring the same former investment bankers who fucked us all over to try to convince foreign lenders to buy the country’s debt – particularly when the administration still clings to discredited white elephants such as the ID card scheme, the nationwide NHS IT project, a replacement for Trident, and so on.
We couldn’t afford follies like these before the ship hit the iceberg: there is now no excuse at all for Captain Darling having stood up (albeit briefly – Wednesday’s was the second shortest Budget speech since 1945: precisely the sort of leadership we need when everything’s going to so swimmingly…) and failing to kick them firmly into touch.
Today’s Bloomberg pen portrait of the Downfall-like scene apparently playing out behind that black, shiny door in SW1 is heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measure. There’s no doubt in my mind that Arrivederci is a fundamentally decent enough bloke who has been dealt a bum hand – the staplers, computer printers and mobile phones he’s launching around Downing Street are simply a manifestation of the frustration that must be steadily eating through his soul. But it’s not good enough.
George’s last, most heartfelt question in Waiting (Reprise) is: “is it too late to try again?”
Sadly, Gordon, it’s now much too late for anything but goodbyes and – to Labour’s eternal shame – another decade of Tory government.
OK, now I’m confused:
Antarctic ice cover ‘increasing due to hole in ozone layer’
Antarctic sea ice is growing rather than shrinking as a result of the hole in the ozone layer, scientists have said.
Aliens exist and UFOs are covered-up by US government, says ex-astronaut
Alien life does exist but the truth is being covered up by the United States government, former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell has claimed.
A month ago I had to perform a 24-hour urine test.
This involves urinating over the course of 24 hours into a 5-litre plastic container supplied by my GP’s surgery.
(I didn’t fill it: I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing.)
I delivered said semi-full plastic container to my local hospital’s pathology lab as instructed.
The hospital lost the sample.
Two weeks ago I therefore had to perform a second 24-hour urine test.
(Again, I didn’t fill the container. I’m not particularly competitive but for some reason this made me feel slightly guilty.)
The Minister’s Wife delivered second said semi-full plastic container to my local hospital’s pathology lab.
The hospital rejected the sample.
The hospital’s pathology lab claims the sample was in the incorrect plastic container.
My GP’s surgery sources plastic containers for 24-hour urine tests directly from, er, my local hospital’s pathology lab.
At least my GP had the decency to sound a little abashed on the phone this morning.
Meanwhile we’re a month down the path and nobody knows one way or the other whether my kidneys are working even semi-properly.
Fucking magnificent.
Anybody got Bupa’s number?