I can make you hate (23 page)

Yep, like most dweeby types, I hated having to ‘do’ games at school, mainly because of an inherent physical laziness, but also because of the psychological challenges involved. In my eyes, PE was a twice-weekly period of anarchy during which the school’s most aggressive pupils were formally permitted to dominate and torment those they considered physically inferior. Perhaps if the
whole thing had been pitched as an exercise in interactive drama intended to simulate how it might feel to live in a fascist state run by thick schoolboys – an episodic, improvised adaptation of
Lord of the Flies
in uniform sportswear – I’d have appreciated it more. But no.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of sporty kids weren’t bullies at all – but like a bigot blaming anyone vaguely brown for the actions of nineteen arseholes on 9/11, I developed my prejudice long ago and still enjoy feeling it fester.

Thus I harbour a deep and unwarranted suspicion of anyone with the faintest interest in sport. If you can glance at a shuttlecock without being sick, I will never truly like you. That’s what school sport did for me.

And I wasn’t even bullied on the pitch myself, not being quite wimpy enough to be the very last pick (towards the bum of the list, yes, but not the absolute final quivering cheek hair). But I watched the more hopeless specimens being shoved around, threatened, and insulted simply for being ‘bad at games’, and understood I had more in common with them than their aggressors. If – as seemed likely – the big kids finally managed to kill their prey, they’d start on me next. And what then? How could I avoid a thumping? What did I know about bullies?

Not much. My only significant run-in with a bona fide thug occurred during an entry-level metalwork class, when a rough and intimidating boy demanded the immediate use of a lathe I was operating. Having been taught by every children’s TV show ever made that the best tactic with bullies is to stand up to them, I gruffly told him to wait his turn.

He stared at me with a sort of bored, affronted blankness for several seconds before hitting me unbelievably hard on the arm with an iron bar.

As I rolled around on the floor in agony, watching him blithely operate the machine, I decided it would’ve been far smarter to meekly relinquish control of the lathe, then get revenge  twenty-nine years later by paying a henchman to burn down his house while he and his family slept inside. Not that I did that, you understand.

I have absolutely no conception of how exhilarating that might feel, nor do I know whether you’d victoriously punch the air upon receiving an emailed cameraphone snap of his terrified wife leaping from an upstairs window with her hair on fire.

Anyway: back to the football pitch. Standing up to the bullies was no longer a viable option, but nor was magically becoming brilliant at sport. So I quickly adopted a cloaking strategy. Like any nerd worth his salt, I’d spend entire matches psychically commanding the ball not to roll anywhere near me – but whenever it did, I’d do my best to appear willing to participate by 1) charging straight at it, and 2) pulling a disappointed expression when I inevitably failed to do anything worthwhile. Incredibly, this half-arsed pantomime was enough to let me off the hook. The kids who did nothing to mask their terror were the ones who got belted.

From within my protective pantomime bubble, the
self-defeating
stupidity of the bullies became fascinating to behold. I realised that, in a sense, their motives were pure. They genuinely cared about the outcome of the game, the idiots. Hence their rage at being forced to work with substandard squad members.

But they had no grasp of basic psychology. They couldn’t see that each time they monstered a wussy team-mate, they merely reinforced the role of the ball as a harbinger of terrible consequences, thereby increasing the likelihood that said wuss would continue to shy away from it, subsequently causing more frustration for themselves.

I tried politely explaining this to one of the boot boys once, during a brief fit of self-righteousness brought on by the sight of him booting a mute, shivering weakling hard up the arse. I pointed out that they both looked equally unhappy, and that he was essentially kicking himself. He contemplated this for a 
moment, then flobbed at me and kicked the weakling slightly harder. I’d have been a crap Jesus. But at least he didn’t have an iron bar, thus unwittingly sparing his family from an inferno decades later.

All of which means the sole concern I have regarding the current enfeebled state of competitive sports is that fewer school football matches means fewer boys learning how to outwit dunces or feign rudimentary competence in the workplace.

On the flipside, apparently more kids are doing weird
non-team
sports such as archery and golf. Yes, golf. Sixty-six per cent of boys get to play golf at school these days. Striding around the wilderness wielding a club? On school time? Never played it myself, but God I envy them.

Messing up in the workplace is never a pleasant sensation, but the very worst kind of boo-boo is the silent-but-deadly variety: a dizzyingly serious error you realise you’ve committed long before anyone else.

First comes the awful moment of realisation. In this instant, you’re the loneliest person in the world. As the scale of your
cock-up
sinks in, you feel a cold egg of dread being cracked open over your skull, its chilled albumen seeping down your temples, the icy yolk quivering atop your crown like the frozen cherry on a tortured metaphor. This is followed by a brief period of indignant disbelief: how dare the Gods of Fate allow such a terrible thing to happen to a nice person like you, the idiots?

This defensive psychological distancing lasts about nineteen seconds, before being swept away by a burst of intense
self-recrimination
, during which you feel like pulling your own brain out and spanking it over your knee. And then finally, an unreal calm takes hold while you weigh up your options: will you
immediately own up (the honourable thing to do, although you could get fired)? Or will you slyly wait, you snake, to see how things pan out, in the hope that maybe – just maybe – you’ll dodge the culpability-bomb when it all comes to light?

Maybe they’ll mistakenly blame Tom. You know Tom. Nice bloke. Works hard. Keeps his head down. Recently became a dad for the first time. Hope they sack the fuck out of him.

Presumably, a similar scenario played out in someone’s mind last week, when it transpired that 80,000 copies of the wrong draft of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel
Freedom
– a 576-page whopper, hailed by some critics as a masterpiece – had inadvertently been printed, bound and distributed. Someone, it seems, had picked up the wrong digital file of the book.

At first glance, this looks like an almighty disaster, albeit an understandable one. Like anyone who’s ever suffered the traumatic loss of the only copy of a crucial file, whenever I’m writing scripts I tend to end up saving about 1,500 different versions along the way, leading to a directory full of bewildering titles such as finalscript2a.doc and finalscript1b-ignore-all-others-and-use-this.doc and finalscript1c-i-am-spartacus.doc.

Sometimes the documents themselves are radically different; sometimes the differences consist of a few missing commas here and there. Disappointingly, it seems the disparity between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ drafts of Franzen’s book chiefly consists of minor typographical errors and typesetting changes. It’d be far more interesting if they’d accidentally printed a version in which, halfway through the nineteenth chapter, the whole thing ends abruptly with the words
MORE BOOK TO GO HERE
. But that didn’t happen.

Early drafts are rougher and baggier and less disciplined than the polished final product, but can be more entertaining as a result. For instance, the first draft of the children’s classic
Mr Tickle
is rumoured to climax with the hitherto cheery long-armed orange blobman horrifically molesting a cow from the other side of a
duckpond, just because he can. Also, the original cut of Ridley Scott’s recent retelling of the Robin Hood legend contained a puzzling interlude during which Russell Crowe recited the URL for a pornographic website. The scene was dropped from the theatrical release at the last minute when it was discovered that a script supervisor had inadvertently pasted the contents of their clipboard into the script while trying to find the keyboard shortcut for ‘print’. Neither of these stories is true, incidentally, but that doesn’t necessarily make recounting them here any less worthwhile.

I’m assuming the Franzen error doesn’t affect readers who bought digital copies of the novel to read on Kindles and iPhones and eReaders and the like – but then again, even if it did, it should be possible to remotely and automatically update them all without anyone really noticing. In fact, the advent of digital books blurs the whole notion of ‘final drafts’ and ‘revised editions’ into a confusing futuristic smudge.

Freed from the physical limitations of a paper-and-ink edition, authors can continue tinkering with the text way beyond the date of publication, maybe even for ever. Perhaps before too long, you’ll be midway through an especially underwhelming
paragraph
, and it’ll start deleting itself before your very eyes, just like this one should have. Or your favourite character will die or reappear under an assumed name and have sex with themselves. Any notion of permanence will be a thing of the past. Even the individual letters will crawl around while you look at them, like agitated ants.

Worst of all, without the crushing finality of a concrete deadline looming over them, authors won’t be forced to make up their minds about anything any more, and before long all books will open like this: ‘James Bond strode into the casino. Actually, no he didn’t. He walked into a blazing warehouse. Except he wasn’t on foot. He was in a car. Or on a horse. Whatever. The important thing is, it was all really exciting.’

MORE COLUMN TO GO HERE.

That’s it, I’m off. Kind of. After over a decade of scribbling weekly TV reviews for the
Guardian
’s Saturday supplement
The Guide
, I’m hanging up my hat – the hat with ‘Screen Burn’ stitched into it.

Since I started writing the column, back in August 2000, TV has changed beyond all recognition.
Big Brother, The Wire, 24
and
Friday Night With Jonathan Ross
came and went.
Doctor Who
, Noel Edmonds and
Battlestar Galactica
returned. Celebrity humiliation became a national sport. Johnny Rotten fought an ostrich. Timmy Mallett drank a pint of liquidised kangaroo penis in front of Ant and Dec; Jade Goody received her cancer diagnosis in a Diary Room. Ambitious US drama serials with season-long story arcs enjoyed a renaissance.
The Office, The Thick Of It
and
Peep Show
popped up. Stewart Lee got a BBC2 series. The cast of
The Inbetweeners
sprouted sex organs. Glenn Beck occurred.

The way we watch changed, too: from peering at a cumbersome box in the corner of the room to basking in the unholy radiance of a fifty-two-inch plasma screen buzzing quietly on the wall. The images leapt from SD to HD and now 3D. Time itself began to collapse as YouTube, Sky+ and the BBC iPlayer slowly chewed the notion of ‘schedules’ to death.

At the start of the decade, I was receiving shows to review on clunky VHS tapes. By around 2005, roughly half the offerings arrived on DVD. Now online previewing is the norm. In five years’ time, most shows will probably come in the form of an inhalable gas which makes visions dance in your brain.

So why quit now? Well partly because I’m afraid of that future, but mostly because eleven years of essentially rewriting the phrase ‘X is an arsehole haw haw haw’ over and over until you hit the 650-word limit is enough for anyone.

See, I was never a proper critic. In my head, a ‘proper critic’
is an intellectually rigorous individual with an encyclopaedic knowledge of their specialist subject and an admirably nerdy compulsion to dissect, compare and analyse each fresh offering in the field – not in a bid to mindlessly entertain the reader, but to further humankind’s collective understanding of the arts. True critics are witty rather than abusive, smart rather than smart-arsed, contemplative rather than extrovert. I, on the other hand, was chiefly interested in making the reader laugh. And the quickest way to do this was to pen insults. Oh, I tried to make the odd point here and there, but the bulk of it – the stuff people actually remember – consists of playground, yah-boo stuff.

I was horrible. I fantasised about leaping into the screen and attacking a
Big Brother
contestant with a hammer; then, without a hint of irony, announced that Nicky Campbell exuded the menace of a serial killer. I also claimed Jeremy Kyle (who struck me as ‘a cross between Matthew Wright and a bored carpet salesman’) was the Prince of Darkness himself – almost (‘Look at his eyes: there’s a spine-chilling glint to them … Not that I’m saying Kyle himself is an agent of Satan, you understand. I’m just saying you could easily cast him as one. Especially if you wanted to save money on special effects.’).

The moment anyone appeared on screen, I struggled to find a nice way to describe their physical appearance. David Dickinson was ‘an ageing Thundercat’; Alan Titchmarsh resembled ‘
something
looming unexpectedly at a porthole in a Captain Nemo movie’; Nigel Lythgoe was ‘Eric Idle watching a dog drown’. I called Alan Sugar ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle’ and said he reminded me of ‘a water buffalo straining to shit in a lake’. What a bastard. And I’m no oil painting myself, unless the painting in question depicts a heartbroken carnival mask hurriedly moulded from surgically extracted stomach fat and stretched across a damaged, despondent hubcap. I think that constitutes some form of justification.