I can make you hate (15 page)

Something doesn’t add up. But in lieu of explanation, we’re treated to a hysterical, obfuscating advertising campaign for a substance that will presumably – thanks to the furore – soon only be available via illegal, unregulated, more dangerous, means. If I was fifteen years old, I wouldn’t be typing this right now. I’d be trying to buy ‘plant food’ on the internet. And this time next year I’d be buying it in a pub toilet, cut with worming pills and costing four times as much.

Personally speaking, the worst substances I’ve ever encountered are nicotine (a senselessly addictive poison) and alcohol (which spins the inner wheel of judgement into an unreadable blur). Apart from the odd fond memory, the only good thing either really have going for them is their legality. If either had been outlawed I’d probably have drunk myself blind on cheap illegal moonshine or knifed you and your family in the eye to fund my cigarette habit.

But then I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to narcotics. Like I said, I’m a lightweight. I can absolutely guarantee my experience of drugs is far more limited than that of the average journalist:
immeasurably so once you factor in alcohol. So presumably they know what they’re talking about.

It’s hard to shake the notion half the users aren’t trying to ‘escape the boredom of their lives’: just praying for a brief holiday from society’s unrelenting bullshit.

This being Easter Monday, what better way to celebrate than a column devoted to describing the flavour of assorted novelty snacks? It’s what Christ himself would’ve wanted. Although I suspect even the messiah himself might prefer crucifixion to the horror of tasting Walkers BBQ kangaroo crisps. The moment the first sliver of fried potato hit his tongue, delivering its payload of marsupial flavouring, he’d moan ‘forgive them father, for they know not what they do’ through a mouthful of wet crumbs.

Last year’s ‘Do us a Flavour’ campaign, in which the company launched six temporary new varieties, was eventually won by the hideous ‘Builder’s Breakfast’, which tasted like a fried egg in an envelope. This year, they’re celebrating the World Cup by launching fifteen – yes, fifteen – new flavours, each ostensibly representing a different nation. I was alerted to this exciting development by an email from Walker’s PR agency – I’m presumably on their radar after reviewing the ‘Do Us a Flavour’ varieties last year. On that occasion, I went out and bought the crisps myself. This time I’d get them for free. Following a brief phone call, a courier delivered a mock suitcase full of crisps to my door. So you can view everything that follows as essentially free publicity for Walkers, albeit the kind of publicity that explicitly states that their new crisps taste revolting. Well, most of them. A couple of them are quite interesting, as you’ll see in a moment:

The first ones I tried, and not a good start. There’s no identifiable teriyaki element – just a whiff of chicken stock. They should’ve tried tackling a sushi-themed salmon-and-wasabi flavour. Instead they’ve created something that tastes about as authentically Japanese as Lenny Henry. Cowards.

After a bad start, another step down. These tasted of nothing, yet somehow managed to make that ‘nothing’ deeply unpleasant. It’s like a small piece of fried potato failing to recall a repressed abuse memory while sitting on your tongue.

At last a vague stab at accuracy: there’s a faint whiff of steak, although identifying the ‘flame-grilled’ aspect would require a leap of the imagination so vast you might as well use it to imagine something more exciting, like sex with a movie star or a holiday on Venus. Still: the Argentinians take the lead.

Did Rio Ferdinand create this himself? The beef hits you first: not dreadful, but quickly overpowered by the oleaginous ‘yorkshire pudding’ element. The result is a mixture of cold Sunday roast and stale grease: like inhaling from a pub dustbin on Monday morning. Also, it’s surely not wise to use the word ‘roast’ in any product that notionally represents the England World Cup squad. It’s not looking good for our boys.

Ah. These actually taste like sausages. Not suitable for vegetarians either. Glancing at the ingredients reveals no pork, although they do contain the downright sinister ‘poultry extract’. What exactly is ‘poultry extract’? And how is it ‘extracted’? Walkers must tell us. Preferably in the form of a televised re-enactment starring Gary Lineker.

Yeah, whatever: these are both just ‘cheese flavour’. The former is mild, but still tastes more like ‘real’ cheese than Edam itself does. The rarebit offering tastes like a flattened Wotsit with a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Perhaps that’s a traditional Welsh dish too.

South African what? They’ve made this one up, surely. It’s actually OK-ish: a bit like spicy ketchup flavour.

Tomato time. These both taste like scratch’n’sniff pizza aroma: a lame committee meeting of watered-down herbs. The ‘Brazilian salsa’ has a slightly more sugary feel, but otherwise I couldn’t tell the difference. My face was openly sobbing by this point, mind.

It would’ve been fun to have annoyed the Spanish by releasing ‘maltreated donkey’ or ‘slaughtered bull’ flavours instead, but no: chicken paella it is. Amazingly, these actually taste like rice. And slightly like chicken. But they don’t taste like chicken paella: more like chicken fried rice. Maybe Walkers were expecting China to qualify.

No.

Garlic bread diluted by a factor of approximately 10,000. So weak and ineffectual, it’s almost homeopathic. They missed a
trick: a novelty ‘snail’ or ‘frog’s legs’ flavour would at least have grim curiosity value, much like …

See? You want to know what these taste like, don’t you? Answer: watery barbecue sauce with a dim hint of meat. There’s no actual kangaroo in them, so the ‘kangaroo’ is delivered entirely by your subconscious. They could call it ‘boiled pilot’s leg’ and the effect would be similar.

By far the most interesting entry, if only for the sake of accuracy: these precisely capture that instantly recognizable McDonald’s aroma. Not Burger King, not Wendy’s: McDonald’s. If they were an official McDonald’s product, you’d begrudgingly admire their authenticity. Instead, you’re left wondering whether Walkers will get sued.

So that’s the lot. If these crisps are in any way representative of their associated national squads, the World Cup itself will be an underwhelming kickaround which the US will eventually win on points. Presumably the company’s crisp technicians are already working on a series of stunt flavours to honour the 2012 Olympics. Here’s hoping they steer clear of yet more bastardised takes on national dishes and go for topicality instead. How about American tea party flavour? Iranian uranium? Chinese dissident? Give it your best shot, Walkers, and with any luck you’ll start a war.

Mad Men
is one of those rare shows you just don’t want to end. Thankfully its pace is so languid, it almost doesn’t start, let alone finish. Eighty-five per cent of each episode consists of Don
Draper staring into the middle distance through a veil of cigarette smoke. Sometimes so little appears to be happening, you have to fight the urge to get up and slap your TV to make the characters start moving again.

Hypnotic visuals, lingering pace:
Mad Men
is television’s very own lava lamp. I’m exaggerating, of course, as anyone who’s been absorbing the show on a season-by-season basis will attest. And I use the word ‘absorb’ deliberately: you don’t really ‘watch’
Mad Men
: you lie back and let it seep into you. It works by osmosis.

David Simon once explained that
The Wire
’s deliberate refusal to decode cop jargon and street lingo was a conscious ploy to force the viewer to ‘lean in’; to make an effort, to engage, to pay close attention to the dialogue.

Mad Men
plays things differently. It makes the viewer lean back.

The programme’s glacial tempo is startlingly alien to the average modern viewer, accustomed to meaningless televisual lightshows such as
CSI Miami
– all winking lights and trick shots and musical montages telling you what to think with such detached efficiency they might as well issue a bullet-pointed list of plot points and moods and have done with it. Shows in which the story is secondary to the edit, edit, edit: where any sense of meaning or even authentic emotion is doomed to death by a million tiny cuts.
Mad Men
’s tranquility and poise makes it resemble a still photograph by comparison. The viewer has to calm the fuck down to even start appreciating it.

But the notion that nothing happens in
Mad Men
is bullshit. Every scene has a pay-off; every line has momentum. But like life, it’s often not clear in the moment quite what the direction is. Go back and watch a season again from beginning to end and the trajectories are startlingly clear. Even moments which appeared entirely aimless are suddenly sodden with purpose. There’s constant churning activity – but it’s largely happening inside the characters’ heads. Everyone in
Mad Men
hides a secret, often
a driving force they’re scarcely aware of themselves. They don’t know who they are or what they want. Unlike many characters in TV drama, they don’t verbally telegraph their motivations: in fact they couldn’t if they tried. This is what gives the series such a steady pull: there’s a mystery at the core of every character, and they’re trying to solve it at the same time as the viewer.

If you’ve been following the third series – and if you haven’t, stop reading now and go rent the box set, and
LOOK AWAY NOW
because I’m about to start coughing out minor spoilers – Don Draper’s gradual disintegration this year has been fascinating to behold. It’s a measure of how composed he usually appears – sailing through countless pitch meetings and illicit legovers like some kind of Brylcreemed, priapic luxury cruise liner – that the sight of him nervously fumbling the act of lighting a cigarette in his kitchen has provided one of the most startling single images of the season. His perpetual adultery suddenly looks less like the devilish behaviour of a rogue who just can’t help himself, and more like the desperate flailings of a sad, confused human shell whose mojo is deserting him.

This week’s season finale answers the question of whether he’ll get it back or not, and it’s one of the most electrifying hours of TV I’ve seen in a long time. By the time the credits roll you’ll be craving season four like a starving bear craves meat. You can gauge how addicted to
Mad Men
you are by working out how much of your body you’d be prepared to slice off, fry and eat in exchange for a five-minute sneak preview of the next season. I’m currently standing at one little finger, which might not sound like much. But if pushed I could raise it to a thumb. A thumb, goddammit.
Mad Men
really is that good.

Last week, Mattel caused distress by apparently announcing that Scrabble would shortly be accepting brandnames and proper nouns as words in a bid to attract younger players. The prospect of some feckless nineteen-year-old gumpo winning a game by placing the word
JEDWARD
across a triple-word-score hotspot led to mass nerd anguish. Have you ever heard mass nerd anguish? Imagine the sound of one freelance graphic designer whining because their iPad can’t find a wireless connection, multiply it by 20,000 and garnish with the occasional wounded sob. It’s like a choir with backache, and it’s what the internet sounds like if you hold an empty tumbler against its walls and squint really hard with your ears.

Anyhow, it soon transpired there was no cause for alarm. First, the hardcore dweeb contingent was quickly silenced by the launch of an insanely advanced Apple-approved version of Scrabble, in which you use an iPad as the board and up to four iPhones as tile racks. (I’m not making this up: it’s just like the real thing, but more expensive and less eco-friendly.)

Second, it turned out Mattel wasn’t going to mess with the rules of original lo-fi 3D real-world Scrabble at all; it was merely launching a zany limited-edition called Scrabble Trickster, which as well as permitting entries such as
YAKULT
, also lets players place words backwards or in floating, unconnected spaces, because hey – it’s kerrr-azzzy! You can play it on the table! You can play it on the floor! You can even play it at one o’clock in the morning – if you’re mad!!!! Look out! It’s Scrabble Anarchy!

Pfff. Anyway, harmless though it is, Scrabble Trickster does represent a missed opportunity. Look here Mattel, if you must launch a new version of Scrabble aimed at youngsters, why not create one called Scrabble Corrective in which players can indeed use the names of products and celebrities, but doing so earns them one hard punch to the face or chest for each point scored? That
JEDWARD
gambit might win the match, but the victor wouldn’t be conscious for long. Forget a return to National Service, just make every kid in the country play Scrabble Corrective at gunpoint once a week for the next four years. And televise that instead of football. I’m sure we’d all feel better.

Actually, forget it. We don’t need any more Scrabble mutations. What started out as a simple word game already comes in various bastardised flavours, ranging from My First Dora the Explorer Scrabble (for toddlers) to Scrabble Scramble (in which the tiles are replaced with dice). At this rate, Scrabble risks falling victim to the same greedy function creep that has hopelessly diluted the Monopoly brand.