I can make you hate (16 page)

Monopoly isn’t really a board game any more, but an outsized cardboard souvenir coaster. There’s an officially licensed Monopoly board promoting almost everything you can think of, from
Coronation Street
to the US Marine Corps, not to mention insanely specific localised editions (the Northampton edition, for example, features Lodge Farm industrial estate in place of The Strand). And those are just the ones you find in shops. Many businesses have their own officially licensed Monopoly vanity boards, hence such pulse-quickening oddities as the BBK Clinical Research and Development Edition. What next? An official Monopoly board celebrating former Channel 4 continuity announcer and current Smooth Radio drivetime DJ Paul Coia? I hope so.

Still, Monopoly hasn’t got its claws into every intellectual property going. Say what you like about the
Britain’s Got Talent
franchise, but at least it’s taken the trouble to invent an original game of its very own, albeit one whose contents make for sobering reading if you envisage a scenario in which it’s the only form of entertainment left following a nuclear apocalypse: ‘1 x board with electronic unit. 6 x playing pieces. Game cards with 300 talents. 1 x microphone with echo effect. 1 x Kazoo. Magic playing cards. Plastic cups. Balls. Origami paper.’

A kazoo and some origami paper (i.e. a square piece of paper). And if you can’t think of a talent to demonstrate with that lot, just stand in front of the judges and tear random bits of your face off. Order today, before your family enters the bunker.

But no. Wait. There’s something even more suited to
post-apocalyptic
bunker-fun than that. Behold The Logo Board Game (rrp £29.99), in which players have to ‘identify images and answer questions based on logos, products and packaging of the UK’s most well-known brands’. The box art features the corporate identities of Shell, Burger King, Walkers, Pampers, Heinz, Alfa Romeo, Wrigley, Birds Eye, Kellogg’s, Interflora, Uncle Ben’s, The Chicago Town Pizza Company, Sun-Maid Raisins and National Express coaches, flanked by Homepride Fred and Churchill the nodding insurance dog.

Again, I’m not making this up. This is a genuine product. Popular too, going by the number of five-star Amazon reviews. ‘We play lots of family board games but this has to be the No. 1 of all time … The whole family played this from aged 14–85 and what fun we all had – we thought we knew our logos but boy did it make us use our brains!!’

It includes questions (‘How many different flavours are there in a tube of Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles?’), visual trials (‘What type of Mr Kipling cake is this?’), and performance-related challenges in which dad hums an advertising jingle and the other players try to guess what it is.

And if everyone in the bunker tires of that but there are another three months until the all-clear sounds, there’s always Operation. Not the board game version, but an improvised real operation, in which everyone crowds round the body of whoever died last and takes turns carving bits off with a butter knife in exchange for corks or chunks of tin or whatever you’re using as currency. It’s fun for all the family! Apart from Amy, who’s a bit squeamish. And Brian. Who’s the dead one.

If the leadership debates were supermarkets – which they’re not – ITV’s would be Tesco, Sky’s would be Morrisons, and the BBC’s offering would be Waitrose. The ITV debate felt like a 1990s gameshow whose rules required Alastair Stewart to bellow ‘Mr Clegg!’, ‘Mr Brown!’ or ‘Mr Cameron!’ every thirty seconds; the Sky studio was a poky black cave cluttered with discarded British Airways tail fins dwarfed by an immense Sky logo. With its mix of cavernous space and high-tech backdrops, the BBC debate resembled a cross between
Songs of Praise
and current Saturday night talent-show splurge
Over the Rainbow
: I half expected the loser to hand his shoes to Dimbleby at the end before jetting off into the sky on a rocket-powered podium.

The chief topic was the economy, a subject of which I have such a poor grasp that from my ignorant perspective all three men may as well have been debating the best way to kidnap a space fox. Cameron proposed ‘efficiency savings’ which seemed to boil down to a war on unnecessary leaflets; Brown boomed that this would shrink the economy by £6bn and risk a
double-dip
recession. Clegg didn’t care what happened as long as it was fair. He proposed some kind of cross-party economic fairness committee, which as secret fellowships go, sounds about as much fun as a clandestine cardboard-licking society.

Clegg was big on fairness generally. Fairness and difference. He used so many distancing tactics – references to ‘these two’, phrases like ‘there they go again’, constant calls to ‘get beyond political point-scoring’ – he may as well have thrown in a ‘hark at these arseholes’ at the end for good measure. It’s a tactic that largely works: he sometimes came across as a slightly exasperated translator sadly explaining to his fellow earthmen in the audience that these two visiting Gallifreyan dignitaries were well-meaning but essentially wrong.

Brown’s ears are amazing. I think they’re made out of sausages. And he still can’t smile properly, which is hardly surprising given his ongoing luck allergy. Following the overblown ‘Bigotgate’ media piss-fight, which saw him force-fed fistfuls of shame, it was vaguely impressive to see him standing at a podium instead of screaming on a ledge. Just as Cameron likes to shoehorn the ‘change’ meme into every sentence (or rather did, before
Clegg-mania
flared up), so Brown mentioned ‘the same old Conservative Party’ so many times he began to sound like a novelty anti-Tory talking keyring.

According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to piss through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.

One of the most fascinating sights I’ve witnessed thus far during the coverage of the 2010 election campaign is Gordon Brown’s visit to a branch of Tesco in Hastings on 16 April, which was broadcast live and uninterrupted for about five minutes on Sky News.

‘Hello, good to see you,’ says Gordon, shaking someone’s hand. ‘It’s great to be here,’ he continues, waving at a wellwisher.

He looks around. ‘This is a good store, isn’t it?’ he enquires of no one in particular.

He spots a young boy. ‘How old are you?’ he asks. The boy is eight. ‘That’s a good age,’ Gordon concludes. ‘Which football team do you support?’

As he continues walking through the supermarket, the pictures carry on moving, but the sound appears to be stuck on a loop, because Gordon’s repeating the same words.

‘Hello, good to see you.’ ‘It’s great to be here.’ ‘This is a good store, isn’t it?’ ‘How old are you?’ ‘That’s a good age.’ ‘Which football team do you support?’

The same handful of phrases, over and over again, for five minutes.

When you watch the footage repeatedly, as I have, distinct patterns start to emerge. Throughout the visit, Brown looks marginally less comfortable than a horse crossing a rope bridge, and his internal dialogue tree is starkly visible. Whenever he meets a boy of eight years old or older, for instance, Gordon briefly asks which football team they support, then chuckles, whatever the answer, before moving on to say ‘Hello, good to see you’ to someone else. That’s the way he’s been programmed.

(He occasionally breaks up his repetitive mantra with brief statements of the obvious: at one point, he glances at a shelf full of produce and says, ‘There’s a lot of produce here.’ It almost makes you wish he was being shown around an orgy instead. Almost.)

The footage is funny, yet somehow heartbreaking. Brown looks clumsy, ungainly and chronically unsure how to behave around everyday shoppers. He reminds me of me. I can scarcely look people in the eye in supermarkets either. But I’ve learned to survive in demanding public situations – such as standing in front of an audience of expectant strangers – by adopting a babbling, deliberately awkward, vaguely nihilistic persona that is 50 per cent me and 50 per cent comic construct. It’s a shield of radioactive bullshit that hopefully provides just enough entertainment value to stop the crowd physically attacking me, and just enough psychological distance to stop me crumpling to the floor and ripping my own face off at the sheer uncomfortable weirdness of it all.

Thing is, this performance wouldn’t withstand five minutes of serious scrutiny. I could open a supermarket, no problem, but sit me opposite a combative Jeremy Paxman and I’d have a massive nervous breakdown within five minutes.

With Brown, it’s the other way around. In the supermarket, he looked so anxious I half-expected him to climb inside a freezer compartment and refuse to come out until everyone else had left. In his interview with Paxman, held in the wake of the preposterous Bigotgate storm and a widely criticised final debate, he was frighteningly confident. At times, he even seemed to be enjoying himself.

Technical in the social situation, sociable in the technical situation? That’s the hallmark of a nerd. And most nerds are simply too gawky – gawky, not aloof – to connect with the general public.

So he’s not endearing. The press held up Brown’s Bigotgate outburst as evidence that he’s two-faced and contemptuous of everyday people, especially those who mention immigration, a subject so taboo in modern Britain that even fearless defenders of free speech such as the
Mail
and the
Express
only dare mention it in hushed capitals tucked away on the front page of every edition.

Two-faced contempt is the basic mode of operation for many newspapers: mindwarping shitsheets filled with selective reporting and audacious bias. The popular press is a shrill, idiotic, bullying echo chamber; a hopelessly poisoned Petri dish in which our politicians seem resigned to grow. Little wonder they develop glaringly artificial public guises. Picking a modern leader boils down to a question of which false persona you prefer. At least Brown’s is almost admirably crap. It’s easy to see through it and catch hints of something awkwardly, weakly human beneath.

Clegg’s persona is roughly 50 per cent daytime soap, 40 per cent human, and 10 per cent statesman. Cameron is 100 per cent something. He isn’t even a man; more a texture-mapped character model. There’s a different kind of software at work here, some advanced alien technology projecting a passable simulation of affability; a straight-to-DVD retread of the Blair ascendancy re-enacted by androids. Like an ostensibly realistic human character in a state-of-the-art CGI cartoon, he’s almost convincing – assuming you can ignore the shrieking, cavernous lack of anything approaching a soul. Which you can’t.

I see the sheen, the electronic calm, those tiny, expressionless eyes … I glimpse the outlines of the cloaking device and I instinctively recoil, like a baby tasting mould.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t see a power-crazed despot either. I almost wish I did. Instead, I see an avatar. A simulated man with a simulated face. A humanoid. A replicant. An Auton. A construct. A Carlton PR man who’s arrived to run the country, and currently stands before us, blinking patiently, blank yet alert, quietly awaiting commencement of phase two. At which point, presumably, his real face may finally become visible.

In which Katie Price takes on the afterlife, some white supremacists show off in prison, and cows stare at you. Just stare at you.
*

* What are they up to, those cows? What are they thinking? No one knows. Maybe they’re not thinking anything. Maybe cows’ heads are made of wood and filled with tar. Can you prove they’re not? Right now, without access to a cow or Wikipedia, or a cow’s head with some Wikipedia stuck to it, can you prove a cow’s head is not made of wood? No, you can’t. So don’t come the fucking smartarse with me. Shut up and read your fucking book. You heard me. Shut up and read it. Stop reading this bit. This bit isn’t here. You’re imagining it. Seriously, your mind is projecting these words onto a blank page. You’ve gone mad. Totally mad. In a moment, these words will disappear and be replaced by a brightly coloured three-dimensional landscape filled with spinning, screaming dolls’ heads. That’s how mad you’ve gone: like, proper mad.
**

So the other day I had to appear on live television several times throughout the evening, as the polls closed and the votes were counted and my guts turned to cold cream. Not because of the exit poll (although that was pretty depressing), but because appearing on live television is so profoundly scary.

Since most of my contributions were prerecorded, I didn’t have to do much except turn up, state my name and introduce some VTs – but nevertheless the fact remains that you, sir, are on
LIVE TELEVISION
.

And this does very strange things to your brain. Having lived through the experience, I can now only assume that every single one of the nation’s favourite live telly faces has the
ice-blooded
, psychotic personality of a long-range military sniper. That nice Christine Bleakley? Bet she could emotionlessly blast a hole through your forehead while linking to a report on wind farms.

On the morning itself, I was fine. I’d been up until 5 a.m. in an edit suite, where we were cutting one of the VT packages I’d written (to make two of them, totalling just over eight minutes, took roughly forty hours; viewers, of course, are blissfully unaware of the slog involved, and often assume it takes as long to create something as it does to watch it). Therefore I was too knackered to really think about the
LIVE
aspect of the
LIVE
show that I was taking part in.