I can make you hate (20 page)

The Private Life Of Cows
(BBC2) is one of those subjects you’d never wondered about until someone draws your attention to it. There’s something creepy about cows. They’ve got the blankest face of any animal. A dog pulls expressions. A cat bares its teeth. What does a cow do? It just looks at you. It doesn’t even stare, because staring implies some kind of effort on the cow’s behalf. A cow just stands there with its dumb face angled in your direction. Its huge eyes somehow combine approachability with a terrifying lack of any discernible sentient feeling whatsoever. Cows are ultimately unknowable.

If you fell in love with a cow, the lack of emotional feedback would slowly drive you mad. You’d never know whether your feelings were reciprocated. You’d know if the cow thought it was going to rain, because it’d lie down. But you’d never know if its heart skipped a beat when you whispered its name. That is the tragedy of human–cow romances. That and the locals beating you to death with hoes.

But it turns out there’s more to cows than emotional blankness. The programme points out that cows can be dangerous. It includes a dramatic montage of news reports about cow attacks, including footage of a bleeding, battered man being treated by paramedics after taking a beating from some cows. Having frightened you, it then offers tips on how to avoid being trampled to death by cows. The key lies in developing a rudimentary understanding of cow psychology, and not running near their offspring with a snarling dog.

It’s a good show, full of informative nuggets. You’ll learn how to build a bond of trust with a cow (honestly), learn to identify their individual personality traits, and how to teach a cow to ring a doorbell. Mainly, though, you’ll learn that cows are faintly more
interesting than you previously thought they were. You won’t look at a cow in the same way again. You’ll tip your cap out of respect.

And ultimately the cows are allowed to maintain an air of mystery. At one point, over footage of slumbering cows in a state of REM sleep, Jimmy explains that they’re dreaming. Then he tells us rather sadly that we’ll never know what the cows are dreaming about. Probably just as well. Bet it’s something boring involving cud.

Sorry to talk about technology again, but there’s really no escaping it, especially when you work in the media and spend more time gazing at screens than into the eyes of people, thank God. Furthermore, my subject is the iPhone, which demands a second apology.

To sweeten the pill, I’ll stop calling it the iPhone right now. Instead, for the remainder of this article, it’ll be known as the Jabscreen. A better name in any case.

Several times over the last year I’ve attended meetings which started with everyone present gently placing their Jabscreen
face-down
on the table, as though commencing a futuristic game of poker. It wasn’t rehearsed, wasn’t planned, it just happened; a spontaneous modern ceremony.

There’s something inherently nauseating about the sight of a roomful of media types perched reverentially around their shiny twit machines, so each time it happened, a vague discomfort would hang in the air until, in a desperate bid to break the tension, someone would mumble a sardonic comment about the sinister ubiquity of the Jabscreen, likening it to a scene from
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
.

This would in turn prompt a twenty-five-minute chat about apps and gizmos and which level of
Angry Birds
you’re stuck on. Sometimes there wasn’t much time for the meeting at all after that. But never mind. You could schedule a follow-up on your Jabscreens.

If you didn’t have a Jabscreen, it was hugely alienating, like being surrounded by new parents swapping baby anecdotes for an hour. There’s no way in for the outsider, no conversational foothold. That partly explains why I eventually caved in and got one myself. A Jabscreen I mean, not a baby. What’s the point of a baby? You can’t even play a rudimentary game of Tetris on a baby. Not without taking hallucinogens.

But once I had a Jabscreen of my own, I soon discovered the novelty lasts six months, tops. There’s a limit to how many conversations you can have about it before you reach burnout. Have you seen the app which takes your photo and makes it look like you’re really fat? Yes. And the game where you land all the planes on the runway? Yes, that too. Hey, how about this thing with the funny red monster that repeats everything you say? Go now. Go. And leave me here to die.

Thoughtfully, just as Jabscreen owners everywhere were running out of apps to compare – and by extension running out of anything to talk about – the nice droids at Apple Castle gifted them a whole new branch of conversation: the launch of the Jabscreen 4, which apparently is miles better than a regular Jabscreen, although no one can really explain why. Its most impressive feature is this: simply by existing, it suddenly makes your existing Olde Worlde vanilla Jabscreen seem rubbish. How can you enjoy sliding the little icons around on your Jabscreen 3 when you know that if you had a Jabscreen 4, those very same icons would be slightly sharper?

The answer is you can’t.

The Jabscreen 4 also functions as an HD video camera, which is ideal for capturing precious moments in your life you’ll want to treasure forever. You could capture them on your existing Jabscreen, but they wouldn’t be absolutely pin-sharp, and that’s the important thing about memories: being able to make out individual nosehairs.

Of course, by the time your HD Jabscreen 4 footage is old enough to qualify as nostalgia, you’ll be viewing it on a Jabscreen 20, so rather than enjoying the memories, you’ll be whining that it’s 2D and odourless and doesn’t let you walk inside the image and rearrange the furniture. Also, it’s full of gross nosehair. Everyone went
au naturel
back then.

Speaking of nosehair, the new Jabscreen has an additional camera on the front, so you can conduct video calls in which you and a friend stare at each other from an unflattering angle, counting the seconds till this misery ends.

Best of all for Jabscreen 3 owners, however, is the news that the Jabscreen 4 also has a minor flaw. According to some reports, it can appear to lose reception under exceptional circumstances, such as a nuclear winter or someone holding it. Apple zealots were quick to point out that you can get around the problem entirely by placing the device on a velvet cushion and gazing at it and breathing through your nose and masturbating instead of making any calls.

Thing is, even if the Jabscreen 4 was reportedly biting users’ ears off and spitting them into a ditch, every Jabscreen 3 user is going to wind up buying one anyway. One day soon, a meeting will open with the familiar synchronised clunk of Jabscreen 3s being placed on the table, except one of the clunks will sound slightly newer, slightly weightier, slightly more HD. The winning hand will be a Jabscreen 4.

Everyone will ask what it’s like. The owner will affect
nonchalance
. It’s OK, they’ll say, while stroking it longingly. And the following week there’ll be another one. Then another. Then another. And still the world will have failed to improve.

Although on the plus side, no one will have to put their phone on silent at the start of the meeting. Just hold it in your left hand and bingo: no incoming calls.

Until this week the one thing I knew about the
Twilight
saga was that it had vampires in it, which was enough to put me off. I didn’t realise it was a romantic fantasy aimed at teenage girls. Turns out it’s possible to be put off something twice before you’ve actually seen it.

The central theme, apparently, is abstinence; the heroine, Bella, is contemplating whether she wants to lose her virginity to a vampire or a werewolf. She’s not allowed to try them both out, or get to second base with one and third with the other. And she’s certainly not allowed to take them both on at once, although that would clearly make for a far better film.

Whichever one she picks is the one she’s stuck with forever. In some quarters the films and books are lauded for their wholesome message, which is weird considering Bella is essentially deciding whether she’d rather fuck a bat or a wolf.

She’s got zero interest in honest-to-goodness human-on-human action. No. It’s magic farmyard creatures or nothing for her.

Oh, and apparently she chooses the bat in the end, which is the worst possible choice, because being a vampire, he’s not just any old bat, but one that’s hundreds of years old and isn’t even properly alive. If the final film doesn’t culminate in a
twenty-eight
-minute shot of her lying spread-eagled on the marital bed tearfully rubbing the leathery, disintegrating corpse of a 200-
year-old
bat against her marital sector, the entire saga has been a
cop-out
and a lie.

But even if you weren’t boycotting the film on the basis of its disgraceful necro-bestiality theme, boycotting it on the basis of its vampires is reason enough. Vampires are the worst monsters ever created, as the following list of the worst monsters ever created, in ascending order of badness and culminating in vampires, will prove:

Mummies. Zombies – mindless human-hating reanimated corpses – are brilliant monsters because their motivation is brutally simple: they’re very hungry thick people. Yet mummies – who are effectively zombies in medicinal giftwrap – are laughably non-threatening. Since their teeth are covered up, they’re reduced to stumbling around with outstretched arms trying to hug you to death.

If they had erections, they’d be scary. But so would Goofy.

Ghosts. At its most ambitious a ghost might appear in your bedroom in the guise of a glowing holographic figure, loudly complaining about the circumstances of its death, particularly if you killed it. But that’s the worst a ghost will do: whine about its own misfortune, like someone writing to
Watchdog
to moan about their broadband provider. And they usually don’t even manage that. Instead, they make intermittent knocking sounds or slam the odd door in a huff. I’ve had neighbours worse than that. In fact there’s a guy a few doors down who’s been loudly practising the drums every weekend for the past five years with no sign of improvement. I’d gladly swap him for a ghost. Even if it walked through the walls and tried to stop my heart with its gaze every couple of nights it’d still be an improvement.

Serial killers. Real serial killers are genuinely frightening. You wouldn’t catch me on a log flume ride with John Reginald Christie. No siree. But fictional serial killers are usually more pretentious than frightening, perpetually quoting Milton or arranging their victims in poses designed to evoke the martyrdom of St Sebastian. What are you, a cold-blooded murderer or the controller of Radio 3?

Proper maniacs are too disturbed to complete a Sudoku, let alone conduct an intellectual game of cat-and-mouse with an existentially minded detective. Put your cryptic crossword down and just strangle people. Or don’t bother.

Vampires. See? Worst. Vampires are the only monster that’s actually grown less brutal and frightening as time has passed.
Early vampires were stiff and aloof, with a cold sexual intent which was, at the very least, slightly creepy. Now they’ve got bloody feelings. They’re lonely and tortured and all messed up inside. They spend more time staring at their shoes than killing people. Proper monsters only stare at their shoes when they’re stamping on a villager’s windpipe.

There is one good film about a meditative, troubled
postmodern
vampire:
Martin
, directed by zombie supremo George Romero in 1977. The main character is a disturbed young man who roams Pittsburgh by night, chemically sedating his victims with a syringe before razorblading their wrists and drinking their blood. But that’s far too nasty and unsettling to pass muster as a vampire movie in today’s wussy world.

No. Contemporary vampires come in two flavours, if you’ll forgive the expression. Sexless wimps (
Twilight
) or smouldering hedonists (
True Blood
). Morrissey or Michael Hutchence. Both troubled. Both dreamy-eyed frontmen with nice hair. Forgive my pants for remaining unshitten.

It’s a humiliating climbdown for a monster originally inspired by Vlad the Impaler, a man who’d happily eat his lunch while watching a skewered peasant slide down an immense wooden spike, being slowly and agonisingly dragged towards the ground by their own kicking, flailing body mass. Vlad would sit among entire forests of screaming human kebabs, chuckling and munching his oxburger or whatever the hell they ate back then.

Confronted with that kind of visceral horror, Robert Pattinson wouldn’t make it through his asparagus and shaved parmesan starter. Even if he was only watching it on a four-inch LCD screen. The pussy.

Twilight
? Pisslight, more like.

Must be difficult for news teams, struggling to shed light on this immense planet peppered with stories. Where do you start? You determine which current event is most likely to affect your audience, and place that at the top of your agenda. Then you methodically explain said event, so your viewers or readers retire for the night with a clearer sense of the world, and their place in it.

Unless there’s a gunman on the loose. Then you just shout like a wanker.

That masturbatory term is a fitting one. When it develops an obsession with a particular kind of story, the news turns into an idiot with an erection. Its IQ plunges fifty points and it can’t stop till it’s satiated.

The hunt for Raoul Moat got the news so flustered, it shrieked its reports at a pitch several hundred octaves above satire. Beneath a photograph of Britain’s Most Wanted Man as an infant,
The Sun
ran the caption ‘Cute baby … but two-month-old Moat clenches his fists’. On the front page, his estranged mother apparently wished him dead.

Moat was so enraged by this kind of coverage, he threatened to kill a member of the public for each inaccurate report he came across, like an extremist wing of the Press Complaints Commission. The police requested a news blackout on stories relating to Moat’s private life. Soon the rolling news networks were reduced to filling hours of airtime with speculation about what kind of campsite he might have built. To make this seem exciting, they’d yabber that ‘the net’ was ‘closing’, or read out exhaustive lists of how many guns the police had.