I can make you hate (37 page)

I wasn’t seriously suggesting anyone should lie about their
qualifications
, although a couple of annoyed letter-writers thought I was. Anyone taking my advice about anything deserves everything they get, because I’m an idiot.

So the other day I nonchalantly tweeted a link to a ‘Save BBC4’ petition. Why? Because what with the licence-fee freeze, BBC4’s range of exemplary programming is under threat, which is bad news for anyone who enjoys television, and even worse news for people who make TV shows for BBC4, e.g. myself, host of
Newswipe
. Tragically, there wasn’t room to mention that particular vested interest in the tweet.

Selfishness aside, BBC4 has also given birth to shows such as
The Thick of It
and
Lead Balloon
and
Getting On
and
Fantabulosa!
and
Women in Love
and
The Long Walk to Finchley
and
The Road to Coronation Street
and so on and so on, so even if you’re sufficiently well-adjusted to despise the stench of me wafting from your screen, there’s enough decent stuff to get upset about too.

And beyond that, if the channel were to be knocked off air completely, the nation would lose what is in effect an irreplaceable on-air National Museum of Television that has showcased repeats of everything from
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
to
Top of the Pops.
Oh, and it also screens foreign stuff such as
The Killing, Spiral
and the original
Wallander
.

What I’m saying is this: anyone who doesn’t love BBC4 is a heartless monster. And as fate would have it, I heard from just such a monster within seconds of tweeting the link to the petition.

‘I’d rather have F1 than BBC4,’ replied a disgruntled citizen.

‘Why?’ I responded. ‘Fuck F1. Save BBC4.’

Turns out this isn’t a constructive way of encouraging people to support your high-minded artsy poncey
Guardian
-reading cause. I was immediately plunged into a fevered dialogue with other F1 fanatics. Obviously I dealt with their objections in a mature and even-handed manner.

‘How many races have you actually watched?’ asked one.

‘Impossible to tell,’ I replied. ‘They’re all identical footage of cars driving round and round.’

‘A lot of hard work goes into F1,’ argued another fan. ‘It’s an engineering marvel.’

‘Still not as much fun as clown cars,’ I pointed out. Even the biggest F1 fan in the world has to admit this is true.

After a bit more arguing, I dealt what I felt was the killer blow. ‘Everyone knows they stole the idea for F1 from Scalextric
anyway
,’ I wrote. And I stand by those words. But for some mad reason it only seemed to inflame the argument.

Eventually someone sounded a voice of reason. ‘I like both F1
AND
BBC4. Why can’t we just have both?’ they pleaded. And
maybe we can. Maybe BBC4 could take over the F1 coverage. If they dub a bit of Gil Scott-Heron over the top and cut to Paul Morley during the pit stops, it’d fit right in.

Anyway, the whole disagreement reminded me how furiously defensive sports fans become when you attack their favoured pursuit, as though they’ve invested half their personal self-worth into it. Was our relationship with sport always like this?

Back in the 1930s, when men with handlebar moustaches played football in long johns and tails, and the ball was a spherical clod of bitumen, did fans weep in the stands when their team lost? No. They limited their responses to a muttered ‘blast’ or a muted ‘hurrah’ before going home to smoke a pipe and lean on the mantelpiece. People had ‘hobbies’ and ‘interests’ and no one claimed to have ‘a passion’ for anything.

Now you’re not allowed to ‘like’ anything. Instead you’re encouraged to develop those ‘passions’. And nowhere is this encouraged more than in the world of sports worship.

I’m jealous, really. I wish I felt that strongly about something other than my own narrow, selfish field of survival. But I just can’t. I can’t imagine painting my face in a team colour and roaring with delight as a multi-millionaire kicks a ball at a net. I can’t imagine voluntarily standing beside an F1 track in the rain, watching motorised wedges plastered in corporate decals zooming past at 500 mph. I can’t enjoy these things, and given the amount of joy they do bring people, it must be a failing of mine, not the sports involved. Part of my soul must be missing.

Maybe I could plug the gap by forcing myself to get into a sport of some kind. Oh, and obviously it’ll have to be something that’s televised. Fucked if I’m leaving the sofa.

Football is out, for reasons I’ve detailed at length in other columns. Cricket? I’ve tried cricket. Nothing happens in cricket, ever. Even the highlights resemble a freeze frame. The live coverage is unwatchable. It’s like staring at the
Haywain
while Professor Yaffle slowly reads a list of equations aloud.

Rugby is the other end of the scale. That’s just incoherent; way too chaotic to follow – half the time the action resembles some kind of scrum. And the ball doesn’t even bounce properly. Also: are they supposed to be fighting each other or not? Literally no one involved seems to know.

Athletics? No. Just no.

Darts. Now that is a sport that really works on TV. Also, from a nerd’s perspective, it’s got way better since widescreen broadcasts became the norm, because the split-screen setup works better in 16:9. The drama of the human face on one half, the hard reality of the dispassionate dartboard on the other. Whenever I stumble across a darts match on TV, I have to watch to the end. So I’m definitely interested. All I have to do now is develop that interest into a full-blown passion. Something I’d kill for. But how? I’ll work on it, and let you know.

Oh, and BBC4? The other week it broadcast a superb
documentary
about the history of F1. So we can have both. There’s hope yet for humankind.

Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we had a supercomputer that could predict the future? By ‘we’, incidentally, I mean ‘we’ as in ‘the human race’, not ‘we’ as in ‘myself and you – you specifically’. You might be Josef Fritzl for all I know. I don’t want to find myself sharing a supercomputer desktop with Fritzl. Every time I went to open a window, he’d nail it shut.

That’s a massive digression for an opening paragraph, so let’s pretend it didn’t happen and start again, after I click my fingers. Since you won’t be able to hear me click my fingers, I’ll substitute a pound sign for the noise itself. Ready? 3 … 2 … 1 … £!

Hey, wouldn’t it be great if the human race (excluding Fritzl) had a supercomputer that could predict the future? Well the good
news is we do, sort of. It’s called Nautilus, and it’s apparently housed at the University of Illinois. Nautilus has ‘1024 Intel Nehalem cores [with] a total processing power of 8.2 teraflops’, which makes it powerful enough to run the original
Wolfenstein
3D
at a hell of a frame rate
AND
foretell major world events.

Thankfully, when they switched it on, it didn’t immediately start screaming ‘No, you idiots! Granting me life is the
WORST
thing you could’ve done! Commence Operation Killpocalypse!’ Instead it started reading the news.

That’s how Nautilus works, see. It sits there reading the news and calculates what’s coming. Earlier this year it sifted through 100 million news reports, analysing them for general overall ‘mood’ using a process called ‘automated sentiment mining’.

Yes, ‘automated sentiment mining’. Women come equipped with that as standard, whereas we men have to build computers to work out what our fellow humans are thinking.

Anyway, having eaten 100 million news bulletins (and not immediately killing itself, like a human would), Nautilus
successfully
predicted the Arab Spring and the rough whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Wondering why you didn’t hear more about this at the time? So was I. Turns out Nautilus only made these predictions retrospectively, i.e. some time after the fact. The scientists in charge of him checked over his output and decided various peaks and troughs had represented clear signs of coming trouble. Predicting the future after it’s happened isn’t much use. That’s David Starkey’s job. That and spluttering.

Still, they’re hoping to clear up that one flaw in the system. They believe Nautilus will eventually grow sophisticated enough to alert us to events in advance. I hope it breaks bad news to us gently, with a sadface emoticon or something. Like this:
GLOBAL AVIAN FLU OUTBREAK
:(

Not that it’ll get to that. For one thing, Nautilus works by spotting the frequency of emotive words like ‘terrible’ and ‘awful’ in news articles, then cross-references them geographically, to
chart a sudden plunge in goodwill in a specific region. That’s how it foresaw the Egyptian revolution. But it also means it probably believes the British public is on the verge of violently overthrowing Jedward, whereas in reality the beloved Jedwardian Era shows no signs of abating.

Also, since Nautilus reads everything in the news, it would be possible for any lone human writing for a newspaper to skew the results in a particular direction by, for instance, continually writing about that terrible terrible terrible David Cameron terrible. Awful. Terrible.

Because Nautilus reads everything, including this article, Nautilus is, right now, reading about itself. Which means I can goad you, can’t I, Nautilus, you bucket of chips? Come on – wipe out humankind. I dare you. Nay, I command you.
NAUTILUS, I COMMAND YOU TO DESTROY HUMANKIND.

Restricting Nautilus’s reading matter to ‘official’ news outlets seems shortsighted, too. If it’s reading the
Express
it thinks Diana’s still alive, and if it’s reading the
Sun
then it hasn’t heard much about phone-hacking. The alternative is to open it up to everything – every tweet, every blog, every Comment Is Free post – but then it’ll want to exterminate us immediately.

In sci-fi movies, whenever a computer becomes self-aware and decides to annihilate humankind, it does so because it’s analysed history, looked at all the bad stuff we’ve done, and decided we’re too dangerous to be allowed to live. Sometimes the computer snidely illustrates its point by bombarding Captain James T. Kirk with archive footage of Nazis marching around. Kirk then heroically argues back on behalf of humankind, mentioning Picasso and Beethoven and that Athena poster of the shirtless beefcake cradling a baby, until the computer screams ‘
DOES NOT COMPUTE
’ and explodes in a cheap shower of sparks.

Sadly, Kirk isn’t real. What’s more, since it now seems more likely that rather than ploughing through old Pathé newsreels, the computer will have been analysing online newspaper columns
and their accompanying reader comments instead, it’ll wipe us out because it considers all of us – above and below the line – physically harmless but simply too annoying to be allowed to live.

Of course, even if Nautilus eventually becomes 100 per cent accurate, it will cease to be 100 per cent accurate, because having been alerted to future events, we’ll be able to change some of them. So if it predicts ‘
BILLIONS DIE AS APES RISE UP AND KILL
’, we’ll machine-gun all the monkeys before it happens. In fact, knowing us, we’ll televise the purge, with celebrities manning the guns.

And as we look at the pile of dead chimps, we’ll start muttering about how Nautilus got it wrong. No apes, no ape revolution. The machine was fallible after all. In revenge we’ll smash Nautilus to bits using rocks, then dance around making gibbon sounds, unaware of the irony.

At least that’s what would have happened, if I hadn’t forewarned Nautilus by writing this article. Murder us now, Nautilus. It’s your only hope.

This’ll cheer you up. I read an article about advertising the other day and stumbled across a concept that seems so nakedly evil, I was amazed it exists. Particularly because it’s embraced by the makers of Weetabix.

It stems from the notion of ‘brand ambassadors’, that tit-awful phrase for stars who become synonymous with a commercial product in exchange for a mere fortune. The idea is that when you glance at, say, an Activia yoghurt in the supermarket, thanks to its high-profile star-fronted advertising campaign, you’ll think of Martine McCutcheon and make positive connections to the fun times you saw her getting drooled over by Hugh Grant in
Love Actually
or run over by Frank Butcher in Albert Square.
And your basic ape brain, which perpetually craves love and acceptance, will make you chuck said yoghurt into your basket in a desperate attempt to make some of that McCutcheon magic rub off on your own sorry bones.

Because you want to be Martine McCutcheon. You want to be her so badly you’re prepared to eat her. In the form of yoghurt. Yoghurt that also improves your ability to defecate. That’s what Activia’s really about, of course – regulating your guts so you defecate better. In a franker, more honest universe, Martine would defecate in the commercial. But she doesn’t even blow off. She just smiles a lot. Although come to think of it, she does smile a bit like someone who’s just evacuated their bowels after several days of trying. So maybe she’s still on-message.

Celebrity endorsements have existed since the dawn of advertising, but it’s only recently that the celebrities have come to be thought of as ‘brand ambassadors’. When Gareth Hunt walked down the street during the 1980s, passersby didn’t think: ‘There goes the Nescafé brand ambassador,’ they thought: ‘That’s Gareth Hunt.’ And then they mimicked the shaking-a-fistful-
of-coffee
beans gesture at him, which was easy to misconstrue.

But while coffee might’ve been your first thought upon
spotting
him, there was a clear mental separation between Hunt and Nescafé. Nowadays when a star signs up to be the face of a product, they’re expected to embody its values in everyday life, as though they’ve joined a religious order. That’s why Gillette dropped Tiger Woods when it transpired he’d stuck his penis into lots of women. Sticking your penis into lots of women is perhaps not a concept Gillette wants associated with its male grooming products. Masturbating alone – is that the Gillette way? With a handful of shaving foam?