I can make you hate (10 page)

It’s a good show. It’s also a road map for Labour. The party’s condition is similarly terminal, so it might as well go for broke by announcing a series of demented and ill-advised election pledges in an openly desperate bid to retain power. Who knows? It might just work. And if it’s having a hard time choosing some
make-or-break
policies, I’ll be only too happy to provide a list. Starting now.

On the face of it, this sounds terrible. No one wants to see David Miliband rising to his feet in a silver bodysuit so tight you can make out every facet of his groin in topographic detail. They don’t even want to read that description of it. But while it might
be hard on our eyes, it would be uncomfortable and humiliating for the MPs. And think about it: they have to wear it every day for at least four years. They’re not allowed to take them off either, so by the end of the term the House of Commons would reek. I’d vote for that. Come on, it would be funny.

Suggested campaign poster:
Ed Balls in horribly tight leotard.

Slogan:
‘
SEE BALLS PUSH FOR GLORY
’.

This would be desperately unfair on Cowell, who would be arrested, held in the Tower of London, and beheaded on live television should Labour get back in. No matter how low your opinion of
Britain’s Got Talent
, the man has clearly done nothing to deserve that kind of extreme treatment. But extreme treatment grabs headlines. And the recent Christmas chart triumph of Rage Against the Machine over Joe McElderry’s
X Factor
single indicates a hitherto-untapped, steadily expanding groundswell of anti-Cowell discontent which a cynical and desperate party could exploit for its own nefarious ends. Barbaric and cynical, yes – but on balance marginally more humane than scapegoating an entire minority and establishing death camps or anything quite as horrible like that.

Poster:
Photoshop of Cowell’s head on pole.

Slogan:
‘
BRITAIN’S GOT PAYBACK
’.

Yes it’s lame, but it’ll get people talking far more than yet another dull promise about education spending or the like. Not only can the voter imagine it actually happening, they can virtually smell it in their mind’s nose. And that feels good during a cold snap. Come on, Labour. Go for it!

Poster:
Mouth-watering close-up of warm croissant.

Slogan:
‘
MMMM
!’

Let’s face it, no matter what we do the environment’s knackered, the deficit’s insurmountable, and
Britain’s Got Talent
will return in the summer. The future’s bleak, so rather than face it, why not encourage the entire nation to go out in a frenzy of nihilistic excess? Step one: legalise everything. Step two: sell all remaining national assets to the Chinese. Step three: spend everything we have on chocolate pudding, narcotics and sex toys. Step four: announce the beginning of a year-long mass public orgy during which absolutely anything goes and participation is compulsory. Step five: on New Year’s Eve, we congregate naked around a massive bomb and nuke ourselves out of history forever.

Poster:
An explicit orgy photo.

Slogan:
‘
HEY, WE MIGHT AS WELL
’.

Anyway, there you go. One or more are probably worth a try. In
Breaking Bad
, the protagonist uses his grim predicament as the catalyst for a string of crazy actions that leave him feeling more alive than ever. Perhaps embracing an equally hopeless situation with similarly mad gusto is the only actual hope Labour has left.

Oh, how it snowed. It snowed like a bitch. It snowed so hard you could be forgiven for thinking God had decided planet Earth was an embarrassing celestial typo and was desperately trying to Tipp-Ex it out of existence. The build-up was unrelenting: everywhere you looked compacted strata of white powder looked back at you. It was like being trapped in one of Shaun Ryder’s nostrils circa 1992. But colder. Much colder.

It was so cold your breath hung in the air before you, then froze, plummeted and broke your foot. And icy. Did I mention it was icy? It was so icy that if you lived in a south-facing house in Edinburgh and slipped outside your front door, you’d slide all the
way to Plymouth and fly off the edge of Britain without passing a single frictional surface along the way.

Not that you’d drown: the sea was frozen too, so you’d simply carry on skidding, all the way around the entire circumference of the globe, eventually ending up back where you started. Where you’d find a news crew waiting to interview you.

You may think I’m exaggerating. So do I. But I’ve been watching the saturation news coverage of Britain’s cold snap and consequently it’s hard not to view the snowfall through apocalyptic eyes. The thick layer of snow received, quite literally, blanket coverage. As far as the twenty-four-hour rolling networks were concerned, this wasn’t a freak weather condition. This was war. Death from the skies. Earth versus the Ice Warriors. Snowmageddon.

Actually, ‘Snowmageddon’ would’ve been a good name for it. Every news crisis needs a snappy name. The BBC initially christened it ‘Frozen Britain’. Sky opted for ‘The Big Freeze’, and everyone else eventually fell into line. The Big Freeze it was.

The minute the government started issuing guidance about not making journeys unless strictly necessary, the reporters hit the road. Every five minutes we had to go live to some poor sod standing outdoors in Benson or Brome or Bromsgrove or Birmingham, shivering like a man with a vibrator in his pocket, telling us how cold it was through his chattering teeth. Not that you could actually see him: chances are he was obliterated by an alabaster flurry.

Presumably at some point the British climate had promised to behave and then unceremoniously reneged on the deal, because everyone kept referring to the weather as ‘treacherous’. The phrase ‘treacherous conditions’ was repeated like a mantra, like a catchy tune the news couldn’t shift.

Every witch-hunt has its victims, and before long the accusing finger pointed at roads and pavements: the reporters screamed that these too were ‘treacherous’, and presumably had been in cahoots
with the weather all along. Icy patches on pathways provided the news with chucklesome footage of people falling over and agitated soundbites in which aggrieved pratfallers complained about the lack of grit on pavements. You can’t please some people. One minute they’re whining about the mollycoddling nanny state, the next they’re insisting the council employs a man to walk directly in front of them, shovelling grit beneath each potential footfall.

Not that there was grit to spare for the pavements. The news was neurotic about dwindling grit. When they weren’t throwing live to a man with snow up to his balls, they were linking to a woman in a Puffa jacket close to tears at a gritting depot.

Gritting depots don’t usually get this much prime-time TV exposure. There’s never been a rough-and-tumble comedy drama starring Jimmy Nail set in a gritting depot, or a ‘Live From the Gritting Depot’ variety hour. Why? Because gritting depots are unbelievably fucking boring, a fact the news did its best to prove for several thousand hours.

At the time of writing, the Big Freeze began to thaw – or at least it did in the south, where the news lives – and consequently fell off the running order. Still, it was fun while it lasted. But only if you prefer gazing into a snow globe to actually watching the news.

According to technophiles, experts, and that whispering voice in your head, 2010 will be the year that augmented reality makes a breakthrough. In case you don’t know, ‘augmented reality’ is the rather quotidian title given to a smart, gizmo-specific type of software that takes a live camera feed from the real world and superimposes stuff on to it in real time.

Being a gadget designed for people who’d rather look at a screen than the real world, the iPhone inevitably plays host to several examples of this sort of thing. Download the relevant app,
hold your iPhone aloft and gawp in astonishment as it magically displays live footage of the actual world directly in front of you – just like the real thing but smaller, and with snazzy direction signs floating over it. You might see a magic hand pointing in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, for instance – a magic hand that repositions itself as you move around. It’s incredibly useful, assuming you’d prefer to cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavement while staring into your palm than to stop and ask a fellow human being for directions.

The Nintendo DSi has a built-in camera with a ‘fun mode’ that can recognise the shape of a human face, and superimpose pig snouts or googly eyeballs and the like over your friends’ visages when you point it at them. You can then push a button and save these images for posterity.

For a while, it’s genuinely amusing (‘Look! It’s dad with a pair of zany computerised bunny ears sprouting from the top his head. Ha ha ha!’), until you realise there are only about six different options, two of which involve funny glasses. If you could customise the options, you could make it automatically beam a Hitler moustache on to everyone in sight, which would improve baby photos a hundredfold – but you can’t customise the options, probably for precisely that reason. You could print the picture out and draw the Hitler moustache on yourself with a marker pen, but that wouldn’t be very 2010.

But while current examples of augmented reality might sound a tad underwhelming, the future possibilities are limitless. The moment they find a way of compressing the technology into a pair of lightweight spectacles, and the floating signs and bunny ears are layered directly over reality itself, the floodgates are open and you might as well tear your existing eyes out and flush them down the bin.

Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the
conscience-pricking sight of abandoned heroin addicts shivering themselves to sleep in shop doorways, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny snoozing dreamily in hammocks. London would be transformed into something out of
Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

What’s more, the goggles could be adapted to suit whichever level of poverty you wanted to ignore: by simply twisting a dial, you could replace not just the homeless but anyone who receives benefits, or wears cheap clothes, or has a regional accent, or watches ITV, and so on, right up the scale until it had obliterated all but the most grandiose royals.

At the time this seemed like a sick, far-off fantasy. By 2013, it’ll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.

And don’t go thinking augmented reality is going to be content with augmenting what you see. It’s a short jump from augmented vision (your beergut’s vanished and you’ve got a nice tan), to
augmented
audio (constant reactive background music that makes your entire life sound more like a movie), to augmented odour (break wind and it smells like a casserole), and augmented touch (what concrete bench? It feels like a beanbag). Eventually, painful sensations such as extreme temperature and acute physical discomfort could be remixed into something more palatable. With skilful use of technology, dying in a blazing fireball could be rendered roughly half as traumatic as, say, slightly snagging a toenail while pulling off a sock.

Some people will say there’s something sinister and wrong about all of this. They’ll claim it’s better to look at actual people and breathe actual air. But then they’ve never lived in Reading. And anyway, even if they’re right, we’ll all ignore them anyway, because the software will automatically filter them out the moment they open their mouths.

In other words, over the coming years we’re all going to be willingly submitting to the Matrix, injecting our eyes and ears with digital hallucinogens until there’s no point even bothering to change our pants any more. Frightening? No. In fact, I’ll scarcely notice.

In which Paddy McGuinness gets flushed down a tube, the Cameron era creeps closer, crisps are eaten and newspapers are likened to a narcotic.

Anticipation is everything. If someone tells you to close your eyes and open your mouth while they feed you a slice of the most delicious chocolate mousse you’ll ever encounter, only to spoon a helping of mouldy mashed cat onto your tongue, chances are you’ll vomit. You’d vomit anyway, of course, but the contrast between what you were expecting and what you actually got would make you spew hard enough to bring up your own kidneys.

This also works in reverse. Over the past few weeks, several people have emailed imploring me to watch
Take Me Out
, ITV’s new Saturday night dating show. They described it using the sort of damning language usually reserved for war crime tribunals at The Hague. I rubbed my hands together, like a sadist approaching a car crash, settled in to my sofa and watched an episode. And you know what? It’s not bad.

Okay, it is bad, obviously, but only if you compare it to
something
worthy or suave or less shrieky. On its own terms, as a raucous chunk of meaningless idiocy, it succeeds.