I can make you hate (39 page)

Basically anyone. Anyone in a car. Or near a car. Or who looks like they’re thinking about cars.

Hey, I’m just trying to offer solutions here. If you don’t like it – leave. Leave now. Get out. Get out of this article this instant.

In which David Cameron is a lizard.

Being a pitiless blank-eyed hell-wraith summoned by the Dark Ones and instructed to walk among us spreading fear and misery, David Cameron loves the thought of the BBC being reduced in size and scope. In fact he famously described the very notion of BBC cuts as ‘delicious’. He said this openly at a press conference, but also repeated it later, in the quiet confines of his lair.

It was a pleasant yet unremarkable evening for Cameron; bathed in the warm light of glowing book embers, he had already shed that day’s temporary humanlike epidermis as part of his nightly skin-sloughing ritual, and was preparing to dislocate his lower jaw, all the better to ingest the live sacrificial foal the terrified local farmers had left tied outside his cave in a desperate bid to stop him preying on their herds at night.

As Cameron approached the foal, turning the air dry and bitter, the creature’s fur stood on end, and it kicked and bucked in instinctive awed fear; yet there was no escape for the petrified beast, since Cameron’s lizard handlers had taken the precaution of nailing it to the hard rock floor by hammering thorns through its hooves earlier that afternoon before their Master returned from His Work.

Cameron paused for a moment, to observe and enjoy the spectacle of the animal’s futile writhing. And as he watched it squirm on the floor below him, as he felt the cold blood of
satisfaction
course through his twisted genitals, he briefly recalled that day’s discussion about the freezing of the licence fee, and a baleful smile flickered around the approximate area of his headlike section upon which a pair of frighteningly convincing decoy humanoid lips usually sat during daylight hours, as part of his ingenious disguise.

‘Deliciousssssss,’ quoth he, and a shimmering slick of
anticipatory
saliva dripped from his reptilian maw and splashed upon the foal’s cringing face, instantly dissolving both its eyes.

Anyway, Dave (as we must call him while the sun still hangs in the sky) will presumably have been delighted by the BBC’s
Delivering Quality First
report, which outlines all the exciting ways in which it plans to prune a fifth from its overall budget. On the face of it, there’s no huge incendiary headline within, apart from the loss of 2,000 jobs.

Yes, 2,000 jobs. If the Stig was being sacked, there’d be 2,000 misspelled Facebook groups demanding his immediate
reinstatement
. But 2,000 behind-the-scenes posts? There’s a
widespread
suspicion the Beeb has too many managerial layers anyway, so few tears will be shed. And aside from that, most of the other savings seem to come from actions it’s hard to imagine the general public getting worked up about: prunings, reshuffles and repeats rather than outright closures.

That’s on the face of it. The reality is that with more pressure on the BBC to be seen to be delivering value for money comes more pressure to please as much of the crowd as cheaply as possible. Which potentially means a resistance to taking risks. Sounds logical on paper, maybe – except ‘risks’ have traditionally delivered some of the BBC’s most remarkable successes, from
That Was the Week That Was
to
Doctor Who
to
Monty Python
to
The Young Ones
to
The Day Today
and so on. Risk also throws up things like
Bonekickers
, but that’s how creativity works, innit: sometimes you’re going to push out a stinker.

Anyway, among all the articles detailing which bits of Radio 1 Extra will be shared with Radio 1, and which daytime shows are likely to be axed and so on, the one thing I can’t find is any mention of how much the BBC spends on promotional trails. I’m not talking about the on-air trails consisting of edited highlights. I’m talking about the bespoke mini-movies encouraging me to watch such little-known broadcasts as
Strictly Come Dancing
; ads
created not from footage from the shows themselves, but from specially shot glossy nonsense.

These things turn me silver with rage. Yeah, silver. 1
TURN SILVER
. And they turn me silver not because they’re bad – on the contrary, they’re often very well made indeed – but because they have absolutely no right to exist in any civilised universe. It’s like watching the BBC shit money into a big glittery bin.

To shoot the recent
Strictly
trailer, for instance, in which celebrities lead a crowd of ‘ordinary folk’ in a patronising
pied-piper
dance, I’d guess they had to close a couple of streets for several days (including one very tricky night shoot involving lots of pretty lights). It’s glossily made and quite complicated, so there’s also a big crew to pay. And as well as the stars themselves, all of whom require costume and makeup, I’d say they also had to hire about fifty extras. And a shitload of catering.

All these people should be employed to make shows, not adverts for shows. That’s like paying Heston Blumenthal millions to design a bespoke scent that’ll tempt people to your soup truck, which only serves bargain soup made with cheap ingredients because that’s all you can afford, having blown all the money on the smell.

All that time and money to advertise a show which everybody knows about anyway. You could hold a bit of cardboard with ‘
STRICTLY’S COMING BACK
’ scrawled on it in front of the lens for ten seconds and it would have ten times the impact. Madness.

And it’s not just madness in the short-term: what about legacy? If all that time and money and street-closing and dancing and filming had been used to create a show instead of an advert, they might’ve created something they could broadcast again, or sell on DVD, or flog to the Swiss and the Kenyans. Instead they blew it on a promo that’ll air for a few weeks before getting tossed on to the ever-mounting stack of other never-to-
be-shown
-again adverts, which sit there gathering dust in nobody’s memories – pointless visual epics informing you that the BBC
sometimes broadcasts football and has radio stations.

I wouldn’t mind if they used the money to sew some shiny new buttons on Ian Beale’s shirt. Or maybe a bunch of pitchforks and flaming torches for those terrified farmers round Cameron’s way. Film that. At least it’s money spent on the right thing.

Last week, during the opening preamble to a fairly pedestrian whinge about glitzy BBC promo trails, I called Prime Minister David Cameron a ‘pitiless blank-eyed hell-wraith’ and described his familiar evening ritual: a stomach-churning rite which opens with ceremonial skin-shedding and climaxes with the swallowing of a live foal.

So far, so utterly reasonable. But Graeme Archer of the
Daily Telegraph
was less than impressed. In a riposte entitled ‘Charlie Brooker and the Tragedy of the Modern Left’, he wrote that he was appalled that ‘Mr. Brooker felt the need to spend four
paragraphs
to tell us that the Prime Minister is, in fact, a lizard [and] that he is served by lizards who aid him in the consumption of live flesh once the sun goes down.’

He went on to criticise the article’s ‘quite repellent imagery, deliberately deployed in order to de-humanise a perfectly
reasonable
Conservative’, before complaining that ‘to describe a political opponent as a blood-sucking lizard isn’t amusing; and even if it were, it is depraved’. In conclusion, he wrote: ‘Neither good people who vote Tory, nor their honourable opponents who vote Labour, are less than human: they are just people who happen to disagree on political objectives and tactics.’

Archer has a point. It isn’t fair to imply someone is ‘less than human’. It would be unfair, for instance, to describe Geoff Hoon as ‘an overfed, self-satisfied cat, oozing smugness’ or to describe Labour MPs en masse as a ‘legion of dead-eyed Brown spawn’, as
Archer did in his Conservative Home blog, presumably as part of some strange unconscious typing accident.

Archer writes vividly and from the heart and, if his byline photo is anything to go by, appears to be a perfectly reasonable man (specifically, Ross Kemp). He deserves the benefit of the doubt. But I fear in his rush to reprimand the ‘Modern Left’, he has overlooked one key fact: David Cameron is a lizard.

Yes, David Cameron is a lizard. A lizard that devours live foals in its lair. And as far as Archer is concerned, it’s perfectly fine for this limbless, non-human, Cameron-reptile-beast-thing to squirm across the stone floor of its den merrily excreting the bones of its victims, yet I’m ‘depraved’ simply for writing about it. This is the tragedy of the Modern Right. They’re idiots.

Well, let me spell it out: you cannot dehumanise a lizard. Not without humanising it first, by giving it a little top hat, say, or a monocle. Maybe put some lipstick on it. And a wig. Teach it to walk sexy. That’s the way. Now confess: you already feel like getting to base three with the thing. But don’t! It’s still just a creature.

But that’s a standard lizard we’re talking about. Sadly Cameron is no standard lizard. He can’t even be classified as a conventional reptile, because that would require him to have some kind of quantifiable earthly form – which, as a malevolent paranormal entity continually shifting between dimensions, he simply doesn’t have.

I know this sounds crazy. But don’t take my word for it. Last week I asked the online community if it had further proof of Cameron’s true nature. I was immediately inundated with
terrifying
eyewitness accounts.

Twitter enthusiast @djamesc wrote: ‘I went to school with Cameron. He used to curl up next to the radiator during lunch. He only ate once a week.’

Steve Hogarty said: ‘I once saw him behind a branch of
Wait-rose
using both hands to squeeze a swollen pulsating neck gland (or ‘sac’) into a dustbin.’

Pianist Stephen Frizzle ‘witnessed Cameron slice off his finger whilst preparing vegetables, and it just grew back. No word of a lie.’

Rob Carmier from Brighton recalled that on the day the lift wasn’t working at the G8 summit, Cameron ‘merely climbed the glass exterior with flattened palms’.

Gareth James explained the recent hot weather was caused when Cameron ‘surrounded the UK with glass walls because he needs to live in a vivarium’.

While a few of Cameron’s lizard properties sound almost charming – as Betsy Martian pointed out: ‘if ever he thinks his backbenchers are conspiring against him, he can turn his head a full 180 degrees to check’ – others are less attractive.

For instance Paul Yates recalled: ‘I went to a business lunch with Cameron once and he ordered spiders. We all laughed, but he just stared at us.’

This chilling behaviour was merely the tip of a deeply unsettling iceberg. Pete Strover encountered ‘a pack of feral dogs gathered in an underpass’ which ‘barked Cameron’s name in unison’, Dave Probert ‘once saw Cameron vomit up his entire skeleton to avoid having to admit he doesn’t know where Wales is’, Tom Bain ‘saw Cameron put his entire hand through the hole in the middle of a CD’, while perhaps most damningly of all, Darren Smith said: ‘I heard he strips completely naked to have a shit.’

Hundreds of similar reports flooded in. I did my best throughout the week to alert everyone on Twitter to Cameron’s reptilian ways, but after several hours of unrelenting lizard warnings from me, they grew bored. Some begged me to ‘be funny again’. Others asked me to ‘drop the lizard shit’ or ‘change the record’ or ‘STFU’. Undeterred, I bravely persisted, all week long, repeatedly tweeting that Cameron was a lizard. Or maybe two lizards. Or some sort of ghost. But definitely evil and definitely not human. Yet still, thousands unfollowed me. It was almost as if they simply didn’t want to be told that David Cameron is a reptilian daemon that
enters our realm each morning by slithering through a haunted mirror in order to feast on human souls.

No one wants to know. They’re in denial, or maybe hypnotised by the sulphurous mind-control gas Cameron emits from a series of gummy, puckering apertures along his underbelly. At least here you get the truth. Which is that he is a lizard. And by ‘he’, I mean Cameron. David Cameron. Who is a lizard. David Cameron is a lizard.

You know how occasionally someone you know will suddenly do something so wildly uncharacteristic, you begin to question whether you ever really knew them at all?

You’ve known Jane for fifteen years. She’s always been a vegetarian. And now she’s married a human being made of meat. You’re confounded and slightly hurt. Who exactly was this ‘Jane’ you spent so much time with? What other surprises might be lurking within the Jane-shaped shell you once called a friend? Where was she on the night of the 5th? Is that her real leg? Who is Keyser Söze? Etc., etc.

Still, if it’s slightly creepy when a friend behaves atypically, it’s borderline terrifying when the person behaving out of character is wearing your shoes and your haircut and looks like you and is you. Take me for instance. For years, I thought I knew vaguely who I was, and the kind of things I liked. And one thing I’d definitely class myself as is ‘un-sporty’. I’ve never had a gym membership and have always been profoundly suspicious of
anyone
who willingly does anything more physically demanding than wiping their arse.

So imagine my shock, in recent weeks, to find myself running around a local park. Not once, not while being chased in a waking nightmare, but voluntarily and often.

I confess: I have become a runner. I go running. I run. Like a runner. Which is what I have become. A running runner. Forgive me. Oh Christ. Forgive me.