I can make you hate (47 page)

Yes, yes David. I’ll detest you in a minute. I’ve got to finish detesting all these other people first.

But now his decoys are spent. Clegg, in particular, absorbed so much bile, he underwent a startling physical transformation: from buoyant Geoffrey-off-
Rainbow
type to watery-eyed totem of misery. It was as if he had somehow been bitten by a radioactive puddle. He’s so depressing to look at, they really should erect some kind of protective awning whenever he’s out in public, like they do around grisly human remains. Hating him isn’t simply a cliché; it actually feels vaguely cruel. So he’s no longer of much strategic use to Cameron.

Ditto Lansley, who provided months of angry distraction in the run-up to the NHS reforms, but now seems like a villain from last year’s movie. Attacking Osborne is far more fashionable. The trouble for Cameron is that he’s fused with Osborne in the public brain: a high-born pantomime horse with two back ends. The tittering double dips.

Add to that the rising whiff of sleaze emanating from Leveson, which is finally beginning to curdle in the air around Cameron, and little wonder he has been losing his temper in a series of rather pathetic outbursts, like a man instigating a minor
road-rage
incident after rear-ending a milk float with his bumper car.

The further Cameron’s stock slides, the less unelectable Ed Miliband appears. Miliband, unfortunately, looks and sounds like a dork. And not just any dork either, but the dorkiest dork in Dorking; someone you wouldn’t cast as a dork in a drama-documentary for fear of looking implausible. But in a fight between the school dork and a dim, angry prefect with a warped sense of entitlement, only an absolute sodpot wouldn’t root for the dork.

Assuming, that is, said sodpot had bothered paying attention to the scrap in the first place. If neither side really grabs you, you might just stay at home, like the majority of people last week. Only nine people actually voted in last week’s local elections. 
Nine. And three of them only followed the signs to the polling station in the hope it was some sort of knocking shop euphemism. The low turnout has been blamed on bad weather, which was almost certainly a factor – but on the other hand, if you won’t vote because of drizzle, you weren’t that arsed in the first place. People will queue in the rain to see Kasabian in concert. They’ll queue in the rain to enter Abercrombie & Fitch. They’ll queue in the rain for any old shit, as long as it isn’t democracy.

Someone recently told me that politics enjoys a level of media attention that’s seriously disproportionate to its actual relevance or popularity. It should really only get about as much coverage as golf does, they argued. Both golf and politics have a core of hardcore fans surrounded by a healthy-sized cloud of casual followers. But most of the population doesn’t really give a toss unless there’s a big personality involved.

The more I think about it, the more that analogy rings true. The problem for politicians is that their chosen sport looks increasingly weird and arcane in the present day – like water polo or lacrosse. The uniforms are antiquated, the rules are stifling, the action is boring, and they’re constantly terrified of upsetting their sponsors. The spectators don’t understand the lingo, don’t think there’s much skill involved, and suspect the game’s rigged anyway.

Increasingly, in order to succeed, MPs have to transcend the sport entirely by becoming celebrities first and politicians second. As Boris Johnson and George Galloway indicate, the public responds when it encounters a strong flavour, simply because it at least
has
flavour. In Edinburgh’s Pentland Hills ward, an independent candidate calling himself Professor Pongoo – who claimed to come from outer space and campaigned inside a giant penguin costume – won more votes than the Liberal Democrats.

Jarvis Cocker recognised that the best way to turn your weaknesses into strengths is to magnify them: rather than trying to disguise his inherent gawky perviness, he accentuated it at every
opportunity until he became a star. Maybe if Miliband overly emphasised his slightly peculiar and nerdish persona it would pay dividends. If he started collecting
Magic: The Gathering
trading cards and riding to the Commons on a little blue tricycle, with his knees all sticking out like a doofus.

After all, the more Cameron drops his guard and displays his temper, the less robotic and the more true to himself he seems to appear. Except in his case, that’s a problem. No wonder he always used to come across as a robot. His software was trying to keep him in check. And much like public enthusiasm, that licence has now expired.

When a monk takes a vow of silence, is he still allowed to post messages on the internet? Chances are God won’t find out. Being ancient, God probably can’t work computers. He holds the mouse gingerly, like it’s made of fine china. Sometimes he accidentally minimises a window and can’t get it back. LOL what a noob #GodFail

Things change so rapidly these days it’s easy to get left behind, no matter how powerful you are. Much online tittering occurred last Friday when King Charles II (played by Rebekah Brooks) told the Leveson inquiry that David Cameron used to sign off his text messages with the acronym LOL, in the mistaken belief that it stood for ‘Lots of Love’ instead of ‘Laugh Out Loud’, the idiot. The great big lizardy berk. The scaly, reptilian, basking-
on-a
-rock-to-raise-his-body’s-vitamin-D-level nincompoop. LOL what a noob #CamFail

Actually, it’s vaguely refreshing that he didn’t know what it means. Cameron is forty-five years old, which means he has been allowed to not know stuff for at least a decade. He’s a few years older than me, but I got a head start by wilfully deciding
to ignore huge chunks of popular culture as far back as 1999. That was the year the film
American Pie
was released. Lots of people seemed to be talking about it, chiefly because a teenager has sexual intercourse with a dessert in it. Being twenty-eight years old in 1999, I considered myself too old and sophisticated to watch such a thing. As a result,
American Pie
is forever tagged in my mind as a ‘new’ film for ‘youngsters’.

So imagine my horror on seeing a poster the other day for
American Pie: The Reunion,
a film in which the original cast reconvene after thirteen years, presumably now in their thirties and dealing with kids and mortgages and paunches and
OH SOD EVERYTHING
. It’s a piece of nostalgia cashing in on something I was too old for first time around.

That’s how you know you’re really getting old. That and the way your eyebrow hair goes all wiry and starts sprouting away from your face like it’s afraid of something, which to be fair it probably is, considering how knackered you look.

Youth fare aside, I’ve generally always been interested in what’s going on, culturally. But recently I’ve undergone some kind of involuntary detox. In particular, I seem to be developing a serious aversion to almost every example of mass-appeal entertainment I spent most of the previous decade writing about in disparaging terms.

I don’t write a TV column any more, partly because doing so was driving me mad, but sometimes it’s fun to watch something junky while snarking about it on Twitter. I tried getting into this year’s series of
The Apprentice
for precisely that reason, but only managed one-and-a-half episodes before my brain rejected it. It was like staring into the cogs of a pointless machine. I couldn’t remember any of the contestants’ names, even when their names were being clearly displayed on the screen in a caption.

I haven’t seen
The Voice,
can’t name anyone in
Britain’s Got Talent,
don’t use Facebook any more and, thanks to the magic of modern telly, I fast-forward any adverts I stumble across, so I
don’t even know which commercials are annoying people right now. It’s like I live overseas, in a small sealed cube.

Not that I’ve replaced lowbrow enjoyment with more refined pleasures. Right now I rarely listen to music, don’t have any books on the go, and can scarcely get through any kind of written article without wandering off for a sandwich.

I don’t fully understand what’s caused this hardcore cultural detox, although I suspect it’s got something to do with becoming a parent and having to spend hours gazing at a tiny bellowing human instead. Apparently the next stage involves getting up-
to-date
on kiddywink culture by proxy, as soon as your offspring’s old enough to give a shit about
Peppa Pig
and so on.

This will never do. At least when I used to enjoy hating rubbish, it was rubbish aimed at adults, and I’d chosen it myself. So I’m trying to get back into mainstream culture. It’s just that everything popular seems so … childlike. This week I’m going to carve out a few hours and go see the new
Avengers
movie, which I understand is wildly popular, just so I can feel more in touch with my fellow man.

I’ve already done my homework by attempting to sit through Kenneth Branagh’s
Thor
(2011). If you haven’t seen
Thor
, it’s a ‘motion picture’ in which a
Swap Shop
-era Noel Edmonds wanders around claiming to be a Norse god and waving a hammer. He also kisses Natalie Portman on the hand. He’s a dick.

The film cost $150m to make and is less entertaining than an episode of
To Build or Not To Build
. The final twenty minutes consist entirely of shouting and lights and made me feel so infinitely tired, my mind left my body and manifested itself as a small clear crystal floating beyond space and time. Unless I dreamt that bit. It is the worst film that has ever co-starred Anthony Hopkins and Stellan Skarsgård, unless they’ve teamed up to make
Vileda Supermop: the Movie
while I was sleeping.

I’ve been told it’s not essential to have seen Thor in order to enjoy
The Avengers,
but it helps. I guess I’ll get a lot more out of
it now I understand Thor’s complex relationship with his brother Loki, who I also couldn’t give a shit about.

Once I’ve got
Avengers
under my belt, I’ll try to catch
The Voice
before it ends. Possibly while eating jelly and ice cream and dribbling. I’ve been left behind by popular culture for weeks now, but boy am I looking forward to getting back up to speed.

It’s not regressing. It’s not. LOL.

Last Monday, because I’ve been feeling out of the loop, I resolved to catch the new
Avengers
movie.

I call it ‘the
Avengers
movie’ – in fact, the word ‘Assemble’ was added to the UK release so it wouldn’t be confused with the 1960s TV series of the same name. Thus the film I saw was called
Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D
, which sounds like a badly translated Japanese videogame from the mid-nineties. Or something you might oil and push up your arse while wearing a confused look on your face, a bit like civilisation has failed.

No visit to a contemporary multiplex is complete without a bit of shit being rubbed in your eye right from the start, which happened in my case when the automatic ticket-printing machine spewed a rectangle of air at me instead of a ticket. Pathetically, I looked around for human assistance, only to find a big queue at the box office, where a solitary staff member was gradually processing incoming fleshbags with the joyous gusto of a woman forced to slowly count dust motes in a jail cell forever.

A nearby sign claimed I could purchase tickets from the popcorn counter instead, so I rode the escalator to the brightly coloured ripoff desk, where another lone staff member had been sentenced to life imprisonment. He called a manager, who spent five minutes trying to retrieve my ticket from an uncaring and unco-operative operating system before giving up and
commanding the usher to wave me through before the computer found out and had me destroyed.

‘Where do I get the 3D glasses?’ I asked the usher, who looked at me as though I’d asked whether the film would have colours and shapes in it, before explaining that I’d have to go to a different counter and buy a pair separately for 80p.

When I arrived there, a customer was trying to buy pick-
n-mix
with a credit card, thus hopelessly crippling the cinema’s IT system. I asked the cashier if I could simply put cash in his hand for the glasses, but no. Apologetically, he explained that everything had to go through the computer. So I stood there and waited.

Cameron’s Britain.

Finally I entered the auditorium just in time to enjoy an
anti-piracy
commercial depicting an abandoned cinema wreathed in cobwebs, accompanied by a doomy John Hurt voiceover saying what a shame it would be if all the cinemas closed.

Yeah, imagine that. I’d have to approximate the experience by punching myself in the kidneys and eating a £50 note each time I put on a DVD.

Then
Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D
began.

Some scientists were worried about a glowing blue cube they kept underground, so Samuel L. Jackson had turned up to make things easier by shouting at them.

Then the cube went bonkers and spat out a bad guy called Loki, who looks like a cross between Withnail and the sort of grinning pervert who’d have sex with a fistful of Mattesson’s liver pâté in the window of an apartment overlooking a hospice bus stop.

Then some vehicles raced around and everything blew up.

Then Samuel L Jackson gathered some superheroes together on a sort of impossible flying aircraft carrier, and they spent some time mocking each other’s costumes in a post-modern fashion before Loki’s henchmen arrived and everything blew up again.

Then they all went to New York and some aliens in hovering chariots flew through a hole in the sky and everything blew up for the third and final time.

And then, because the Avengers had won, the film decided to end.