I can make you hate (19 page)

If the fans want to enjoy their sport, fair enough. Judging by their rapt faces, I’m the one losing out. What puts me off isn’t the game itself, but the accompanying patriotism; or, more specifically, the hollow simulation of patriotism used to hawk products throughout the contest.

Take the current Carlsberg campaign featuring an insanely jingoistic dressing room ‘pep talk’ which blathers on and mindlessly on about national pride. ‘Know this,’ the voiceover whispers
portentously
, ‘that shirt you’re wearing? Your countrymen would give
anything
to put it on.’ Really, Carlsberg? I wouldn’t put down a sandwich to lift the World Cup, let alone pull a sweat-sodden sports jersey over my head. And would even the most committed fans really do ‘anything’ to wear it? Would they saw their own feet
off with a bread knife dipped in cat piss? No. They wouldn’t. So stop lying.

Having grossly overestimated the cachet of said hallowed shirt, the ad treats us to a cameo from virtually every notable English sporting hero of the past fifty years, pausing briefly for a patronising moment of silence for Sir Bobby Robson, before depicting an ethereal Bobby Moore, bathed in heavenly light at the top of the tunnel, standing proudly beside a lion. The whole thing plays like a masturbatory dream sequence for Al Murray’s
Pub Landlord
character, the punchline being that the whole thing is a sales pitch for a Danish brewing company. The tagline should be: ‘Carlsberg: as English as Æbleskiver’.

The American confectionery company Mars is also keen to pat our patriotic behinds. It’s paid John Barnes to jokily recreate his notoriously poor rap from the 1990 New Order single ‘World In Motion’. And – ha, ha! – it’s hopeless. But if you’re not familiar with the original, it just looks as though we, the English, have absymal taste in music. Tourists watching this advert in their hotel rooms will spread tales of our cultural ineptitude on their return home. Thanks for that, Mars. Incidentally, Barnes’s lyric has been altered, so he’s now rapping about ‘three lions on a Mars’, which rather implies that the sacred England shirt that Carlsberg was getting religiously excited about is, in practice, interchangeable with a calorific chocolate-and-nougat slab.

Japanese technology giant Sony is also capitalising on the World Cup. It’s got an advert starring Brazilian star Kaka which aims to convince viewers to trade in their old TV sets for shiny new 3D ones. It’s an exciting prospect, only slightly undermined by the fact that the World Cup is being transmitted in the UK by the BBC and ITV, neither of whom will be broadcasting any of the matches in 3D. In fact, if you want to watch the World Cup in three dimensions, you’ll have to go to the cinema, where Sony plans to show it, in 3D, on around fifty screens. That’ll mean leaving your brand-new 3D telly at home, of course. But
never mind. You can watch
Avatar
when you come back. In 2D. Because the 3D version won’t be out until months after the World Cup. So you might as well not bother getting a 3D TV till then. And come to think of it, it’s probably best not to bother anyway, because
Avatar
is rubbish. (I couldn’t stand that tribe of pious, humourless, surly blue luddites. Fuck their stupid tree. I was cheering on the bulldozers.)

There are other adverts of course: Coca-Cola, Nike,
Pepsi-Cola
, BP, Blackwater Security, the Tyrell Corporation, Damien Thorn Enterprises and so on. All hitting the same phoney note of concord, all somehow cheapening the fun that millions will extract from the tournament itself. Not me, though. I’ll be out of the country for the whole thing. When I think of all the adverts I’ll miss, I’ll try not to sob too loudly.

Flippantly putting the grave environmental tragedy of it all to one side for a moment, the Deepwater Horizon oil leak isn’t just causing extensive damage to the Louisiana coastline. What about our accents? Our lovely British accents? Thanks to the BP link, they’ve been destroyed too. Don’t know about you, but whenever I’m around Americans, I tend to exaggerate my Britishness in a pathetic bid to win their approval. Those days are gone.

The first time I visited the US, I ran into trouble at
immigration
. Half the group I was travelling with decided to get drunk on the plane, which probably would’ve been fine with all the other passengers if it hadn’t been for the unrelenting cackling and yelping and removal of trousers. I was fairly drunk too, incidentally, but only because I was so terrified of flying I’d decided to blot out the whole of reality by glugging myself into an inflight coma. From my slumbering perspective the flight was a warm fifteen-minute snooze. To the other passengers it must’ve
felt like a thirty-year sentence in baboon prison.

Upon arrival, we were identified as troublemakers and hauled off one-by-one for a comprehensive bothering. Instantly I realised my only hope of avoiding immediate deportation was to behave like a minor royal – not an aloof, chilly posho, but a genial
gosh-what
-a-wonderful-country-you-have Hugh Grant-type, one who smiles a lot while using slightly formal language.

I apologised profusely by saying, ‘I apologise profusely.’

The officer started out prickly – one of his opening gambits was, ‘You could be spending the night in jail, wiseguy,’ which simultaneously impressed and scared me – but several minutes of profuse apologies and crikey-I’m-sorry delivered in an
embellished
British accent appeared to disarm him, and I was released without being subjected to gunfire.

That’s my recollection, anyway. Perhaps he just got bored with watching me grovel. But from that point on, my dial was set to 150 per cent British for the duration. I said ‘Good day’ to receptionists and ‘I beg your pardon’ to waiters. At one point I think I even said ‘Toodle pip’ to a cabbie.

Incredibly, rather than calling me a dick, they said they loved my accent. The US was a magic country where strangers liked me on the strength of my voice alone, unlike cold anonymous London where, rather than break their stride, pedestrians would blankly step on your face if you were dying on the pavement, quietly tutting at the blood on their shoes.

On a subsequent trip I discovered mockney was just as useful, and deliberately roughed my accent down in gas stations or bars, saying ‘blimey’ and ‘bloke’ and ‘bleedin’ ’ell’, even if I was only asking the way to the toilet (sorry, ‘bog’). This was even more popular than my Little Lord Fauntleroy act. Thank God I can’t do a Liverpudlian accent. I’d probably have adopted a Beatles persona in music stores.

But now, as a company with the word ‘British’ in its name pisses apocalyptic quantities of oil into the ocean, and CEO Tony
Hayward pops up on the news to make tactless statements in a British accent, anglophilia is shrivelling. Things must be bad when gimpy Cameron has to reassure us that BP wiping its arse on the Gulf of Mexico won’t disturb the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK. Of course it will.

Never mind that BP is an international company. Never mind that 39 per cent of its shares are held in the US, that half its directors are American. It’s got the word British in the title, and that’ll do. It genuinely feels like our fault. Like you, I’ve never supervised the offshore drilling policy of a major oil company, but I can’t help feeling responsible. It’s like watching a news report in which someone with your surname has been caught having sex with a hollowed-out yam. The disgrace is shared, however irrationally.

And to be honest, the Americans are thus far admirably restrained about the whole thing. If a company called Texan Gloop belched a carpet of black gunk over Norfolk, we’d be surrounding the US embassy and burning sarcastic effigies of Boss Hogg within minutes. And that’s just Norfolk: flat earth and windmills. Having vandalised Louisiana and laminated thousands of pelicans, the BP spill now threatens to disfigure the Miami coastline, corrupting its relentlessly cheery blue-and-yellow colour scheme with a sea of rainbow black. Congratulations, people of Britain. Even though, strictly speaking, it isn’t your fault.

Clearly a rebrand is in order if we’re to maintain any national pride whatsoever. Trouble is, BP’s already had one: ten years ago it changed its name from British Petroleum to BP following a merger with a US oil company. Since that’s not enough to dissociate it from Britain, Britain itself will have to change its name. It’ll still need to feel quintessentially British, mind. For the tourists, like. How about London Kingdom? Great Crikey? Yeoman Island? Hobbiton? Churchill-on-Sea?

Let’s face it: to recoup our cultural value, it’s either that or we all head over there and start cleaning the mess up ourselves, while
muttering ‘blimey’ and ‘gosh’ and doing our best to be charming. If you’ve got a fly-drive holiday booked, start practising that Hugh Grant act now. Chances are you’ll need it.

Man, I love being white. It’s great. I love my fine white skin, my stretchy alabaster bodysuit. I wear it every day. Sometimes I’ll be on my way to the shops, and I’ll catch sight of my own pallid forearms and I can’t help it; I stop dead in the street, stroking them and weeping for joy. They’re so damned pearly. Hooray for whitehood!

Could do without the sunburn, mind. It’s hard to get the balance right. I only have to gaze at a blank sheet of A4 to start sizzling, but if I avoid sunshine completely I wind up looking ashen and sickly. Little wonder there’s a multi-million-dollar industry creating creams and lotions for us to smear all over our superior white skin in a desperate bid to protect it from the sky, and another multi-million-dollar industry devoted to turning our superior white skin brown so it looks better.

Despite these drawbacks – and its propensity for showing up pimples and ageing quickly and going wrinkly – there’s no doubt that white skin is the best, in the same way green Smarties are the best. Simple logic.

No one in their right mind would begrudge a green Smartie the right to celebrate its own identity. So what if a group of green Smarties wants to organise a green pride march and demand the immediate expulsion of all the other colours from the tube? You can’t expect them to mingle with the others. Some of them are pink, for Christ’s sake. Trace the history of that tube and you’ll find a green Smartie was dropped in first, maybe. Therefore that tube is green land. Greens should call the shots. To think
anything
else is just madness. And it’s the same with white skin.

If only there was some sort of club I could join to celebrate my whiteness, I’ve wondered many times, while masturbating over paintings of Hitler. Well there is! It’s called the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (or ABT), and this week it’s celebrated in a documentary called
Inside The Aryan Brotherhood
. Heavily tattooed, spouting hate speech, bragging about their appetite for violence and openly boasting about their crystal meth-smuggling business, they’re the kind of people you’d expect to find in prison. Which is probably why they’re in prison.

Despite being in prison, they’re a force to be reckoned with, according to this documentary, which in no way glorifies them unless you think intercutting violent CCTV prison fights with menacing soundbites from masked members of the Aryan
Brotherhood
underscored with dramatic music counts as ‘glorification’. Anyone who thinks those sequences look like precisely the sort of thing the ABT might edit together themselves is mistaken. For one thing, the captions are spelt correctly. And for another they’re not allowed to use Final Cut Pro in prison.

They’re allowed to do push-ups, though. Lots of push-ups. We see one of them doing push-ups in his cell and he looks pretty cool, if you ignore the seatless metal toilet in the corner which he has to piss and shit in every day with no privacy because he’s in prison.

They’re not all in prison. Some remain outside, including a one-legged member called Lucky, and a man who wears a bandana to protect his identity but fails to cover up the huge, immediately identifiable tattoos on both his arms. Maybe he thinks a black man invented the sleeve.

The programme hasn’t noticed how funny this is; it’s too busy hammering home the notion that the ABT is a terrifyingly huge organisation, although when you Google ‘ABT’, the first things that pop up are American Ballet Theatre and the Association of Beauty Therapists, which is probably almost as annoying for the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas as being in prison.

This could be a desperate tragedy about wasted lives and
misplaced
rage. Instead it fetishises an angry, misguided prison gang furiously clinging to their own whiteness as the one source of self-esteem they have left. When your skin is the only thing you feel truly proud of, it’s become a prison in itself. A cell of cells. Whatever the colour.

Advice for anyone wanting to become a TV presenter: stop trying to become a TV presenter. Instead, become an expert in something. Anything. Ghosts. Wool. Glass-blowing. Then you’ve got at least a fighting chance of shoehorning your way on screen as part of a specialist programme, before eventually becoming ‘the face of’ ghosts or wool or glass-blowing.

Forget cookery, though. It’s oversubscribed. Throw a rock at any catering college and you’ll hit an aspiring TV presenter who only signed up in the hope of becoming the next Gordon Ramsay.

If I ran a catering college – which I don’t – I’d reflect this social shift by offering courses on how to slice an onion while doing a piece to camera without hacking off your fingertips. It’s a vital skill: any wannabe TV chef who carelessly lops off half a digit has ended their future showbiz career right there. Creating an aspirational BBC2 cookery series is an uphill struggle at the best of times, but when the director has to frame out a stumpy knuckle each time they want a close-up of their star chopping coriander, it becomes nigh-on impossible.

Play your cards right and you can become a TV ambassador for any profession. Take pig farming. Specifically, take Jimmy Doherty, Britain’s first celebrity pig farmer. He started out as the subject of a fly-on-the-sty-wall documentary about the trials and tribulations of pig-rearing and has risen to become the designated frontman for virtually any series with a hay bale in it.
Now, having presented shows about GM food and farming, he’s back with a natural history series about animal behaviour. Ever wondered what goes through a chicken’s mind? He’ll tell you. But not right now. Because the first episode is about cows.