Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (12 page)

Half a million pounds for the winner –
Britain’s Got Talent
is the only place left in the country where the mentally disabled actually get some money. This year they opened the series in the contestants’ houses to explain why they’re auditioning. How are they going to top that next year? Go back one step further and explain it by showing the contestants’ mothers downing vodka in pregnancy? It must be a weird job for David Walliams, slowly realising that every character he’s created has been surprisingly sane and realistic.

After a fourteen-year-old boy with cerebral palsy did a stand-up routine, Alesha Dixon said, ‘You were great. You made me laugh before the act even started.’ Good one, Alesha – and people said you were just a face on a stick.

Saudi Arabia’s version of the show,
Buraydah’s Got Talent
, isn’t going to allow singing, dancing or women. It sounds restrictive, but technically Subo could still have won it. I can’t wait for the Saudi Simon Cowell – a controlling, power-hungry man with a dislike of women.

Thailand’s Got Talent
went the other way and shocked viewers with a contestant who paints using her breasts, something I’ve tried with my partner to spice things up in the bedroom. Way more trouble than it was worth, so we switched to rollers for the lounge. It’s double standards. This woman paints with her tits and gets worldwide recognition, yet when Susan Boyle does it she gets tasered outside her local chip shop and charged with graffiti.

I was sad that ITV and the BBC decided to schedule
The Voice
and
Britain’s Got Talent
against each other, because I was worried that I might finally run out of hate. I suppose it’s not a big deal because we’ve all got hard-disc recorders now. If they’re both on at the same time you can just watch something good you taped earlier that week.

If it weren’t for
The Voice
then judges like Danny Wotsit would be nobodies today. It’s the show where the judges turn their backs on the contestants. A bit like
The X Factor
a week or two after the final. If they want music-industry realism surely they should have it so contestants perform with the judges only being able to see the top of their heads.

Not being able to see contestants is an interesting format tweak. If they can just eliminate the other four senses, too, they’ll have really nailed it. Not looking directly at contestants is hardly original. Even now when Simon has a meeting with Susan Boyle I hear he reverses up to her using the reflection in the back of his highly polished shield.

People get snobby about watching
The Voice
and say, ‘Oh, I want to see REAL singers.’ Go out, then! Go out! You’re watching a reality show where the judges have been picked purely on their ability to grunt in slightly different ways. Danny O’Donoghue said he needed coaching to stop himself swearing on the show. I just have one thing to say about that. Who the fuck’s Danny O’Donoghue? Whoever he is, he has a brutal 80s flat-top. Like Skynet built a special Terminator to infiltrate Cork’s gay community. I think there should be another celebrity on the back of the chair and the chair should keep spinning really fast, so they kind of strobe into a single entity. What a thrill for contestants to have their career ended by a hybrid of Christina Aguilera and Mr. T, who has never even seen their face.

Jessie J looks like someone has pitched the elixir of youth on
Dragons’ Den
and didn’t mention it had side effects. Bless Jessie for getting her head shaved for charity; but she’s afflicted with a bit of a man-face – she now looks like Action Man has moulted. I believe her when she says it’s ‘not about the money’, so she must be a judge on
The Voice
because she genuinely hates music. But it does need that Susan Boyle moment, doesn’t it? Someone hitting a note so high that the rest of will.i.am’s hair pops out of his head.

Viewing figures for
The Voice
started high and then dwindled after they stopped the spinning chairs. To combat this, next series they’re going to keep Jessie J in a centrifuge machine like an inarticulate tranny kaleidoscope. Of course, being on
The Voice
did wonders for the career of its first winner, Leanne Mitchell – mainly because she now works in MFI as a revolving-chair saleswoman.

I don’t need to watch people recruiting young women on to a ‘team’ without having seen their real faces – that’s just an evening on Twitter for me. Viewers liked it when the judges couldn’t see the acts, so they’re going to speed through the singing and finish the series with a close-up of Tom’s cataracts slowly taking hold. Tom rarely gets all of his favourite singers on his team, as he kept accidentally pressing the large red button on his emergency necklace.

The ‘battle’ round is always very exciting. Last year I watched a fat bloke in a Hawaiian shirt scream ‘Sign, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours’ into a middle-aged dinner-lady’s face and I’ve never felt more alive.

• • •

The BBC had high hopes that
The Voice
would put it back on the map in the face of ITV’s dominance of the reality TV space. But for the BBC to flourish it needs its biggest supporters to get behind it. Maybe it’s time to accept we’ll just have to sell it to a group of wealthy paedophiles. Yes, it’s radical, but they’d only have to paint over the bottom bit of that first ‘B’. Toilet signs were among hundreds of items pilfered by souvenir hunters after BBC TV Centre’s final broadcast, as people filled their houses with objects covered in paedo DNA.

Vernon Kaye was escorted out of the BBC when security caught him trying to steal a dressing-room sign. At least, that’s the reason they gave him. You didn’t need that sign, Vernon, you’ve been stealing from the BBC your whole career. I took a lifesize model of George Alagiah, which I keep in my wardrobe. But it’s started to make knocking and sobbing noises so I might have to chuck it out.

George Entwistle resigned as director general. He’d only been in the job for fifty-four days. To be fair, I’ve been in jobs longer than that and still not known where the toilets are. It must have been an awkward leaving do to arrange. I don’t think they do cakes in Patisserie Valerie that say, ‘Sorry, you got the paedophile wrong.’ Trust has been lost in the BBC now. To be honest, I thought that it was lost after the first series of
The One Show
.

The BBC’s sloppiness reflects badly on all journalists. Not least tabloid ones, as when trawling the internet for stories they often end up copying and pasting from
bbc.co.uk.

Tell you who you don’t hear much from lately – that woman who insisted she was the illegitimate child of Jimmy Savile. It seems that almost every day for a couple of years a new, well-known face is unveiled in the relentless Advent calendar of sexual abuse. I, for one, look forward to the mass trial of Britain’s celebrities at some paedophile Nuremberg. Honestly, the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard that Dave Benson Phillips used to wank into the gunge tank. I was never into the celebrity paedo parties. I’d stand in the corner and simulate the experience by having Jeremy Beadle give me a handjob. Once, Mike Reid gave me a Reacharound.

When I heard Rolf Harris had been arrested I thought it was for his performance at the Royal Jubilee. If Rolf goes on trial then at least the courtroom artist won’t feel under any pressure to do a good job. They’ll probably find it hard to resist drawing him with the body of a kangaroo.

The owner of the first time-machine will have a moral dilemma about whether to kill Hitler or bomb the 1988 Royal Variety Performance. It seems when it comes to TV, the author L. P. Hartley was right: the past is a foreign country. Paedoslovakia. Ironically, the only non-paedophile on telly in the 80s was Ian Krankie. Perhaps evidence will emerge that Britain itself is a paedophilic landmass and when we’re all drunk at Christmas, it rams Anglesey up Ireland’s arse.

Footage emerged of Savile defending Gary Glitter. So, he might have been a predatory paedophile but at least he wasn’t a hypocrite. The pair actually invented the platform shoe together, purely as a way of seeing children who were slightly further away.

For those conspiracy theorists who say these scandals will one day be shown to involve our politicians, well, who knows? They kill kids, so there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t be fucking them. There are quite feasibly politicians alive today who took to fucking kids just to try to give themselves the stomach required for the real business of government.

The
Sun
’s front page reported ‘Gary Glitter’s 10 hour sex quiz’. Finally, a show you could imagine Justin Lee Collins hosting. I have to say, Glitter didn’t do himself any favours when questioned over child sex offences by trying to bribe police with Top Trumps cards and a Kinder Egg. Officers aren’t expected to question him again for a while. As it’ll take them months to chip open his laptop with a toffee hammer. Savile’s cottage in the Highlands was vandalised. It appears that they’ve scraped off so many of the hundreds and thousands you can now see the gingerbread walls beneath. Jim Davidson said, ‘The Jimmy Savile witch hunt is going a bit silly.’ It’s not a witch hunt, Jim. Remember, witches never existed.

Jim Davidson was cleared of historic allegations that he sexually molested two women. He says he’s ‘a gentleman’ who once gave up his bed for a drunk dancer. ‘I never laid a finger on her, even though she was completely comatose and wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on.’ I always thought a gentleman ‘never tells’ but it appears that a gentleman is someone who could have raped someone but didn’t.

Davidson says he’s not a Jimmy Savile figure. True. People used to like Jimmy Savile.

Davidson was once voted Britain’s funniest man. I can understand this, as when I first heard the news of his arrest I couldn’t stop laughing. He’s previously had brushes with the law after he was banned from driving following a speeding offence. If I were the judge I’d let him keep driving. But ban him from using his seatbelt or his brakes. When he was caught by police and asked if he was the driver he said, ‘Can I nominate someone I don’t like?’ Good luck pinning three points on the entire Pakistani population of the UK. Jim, if the system really allowed us to nominate someone we didn’t like you’d currently have two and a half million points on your licence.

I must say Stuart Hall does look very sad. Either he feels guilty or he used up all his laughter in the 70s. Stuart began his career on
Look North
. Unfortunately, while you were looking north he’d be going south. Stuart Hall had a room set aside at the BBC where he could entertain ‘lady friends’. No wonder he always appeared animated and excited on screen. He knew he was only seconds away from heading back to his whore-filled room.

Hall got fifteen months. The judge couldn’t have given him fifteen years because there was a worry he’d ejaculate on hearing his sentence. He said there was a vendetta against famous people. Hey, if you don’t want a vendetta against you, maybe don’t abuse so many people they can form a mob. As he was sentenced his victims cried, but he showed no emotion; arousal doesn’t reach an eighty-three-year-old’s face for a good ten minutes. The sentence was lenient because he had to be tried under the 1956 Act. Shame he didn’t have consensual sex with a man. We could have thrown the book at him.

When I think about 70s television one of my major memories is that test-card girl who used to sit really still for hours on end playing noughts and crosses with the clown puppet. Looking back, I think she sat there all night on her own because she was too scared to return to the BBC dressing rooms. You begin to look back at these shows in a different way, now. Was Mr Benn constantly changing outfits just to evade capture from the police? One minute dressed as a Native American, the next as an astronaut, simply to make it harder for his victims to pick him out of a line-up?

Making nostalgia programmes is going to be tricky now.
I Remember the 70s
will just be full of people crying, with a helpline number at the end. People of my age can’t look back on the 70s with any enjoyment. At least teenagers nowadays can look back at an innocent world of kids’ presenters going on coke binges and hanging themselves. A lot of the guys from the 70s are saying, ‘We didn’t ask the girls’ ages.’ To be fair, the fact she’s telling you about her pets and her favourite princess means you don’t really have to.

With all the scandals, everyone involved in
Children in Need
must be walking on eggshells. Or sitting in a bath of beans. Whichever raises the most money, I guess. They’re not even allowed to hold any big cheques anymore in case behind one someone is being sucked off by a teenager. Jimmy Savile was banned from
Children in Need
. Which is lucky, as no one would want to see Pudsey using himself to show the cops where Jimmy touched him.

I must say, I prefer the old
Blue Peter
appeals. There was one for stamps when I was a little boy. There’d been a famine in Ethiopia, and the great thing was, once the target had been reached they kept the viewers involved by sending the presenters out to show the work of the appeal. I remember they took a jumbo from London to Addis Ababa, then a little propeller plane that landed on an airstrip where the forest had been cleared. Then into a Jeep for a day and a half, with the last twenty miles on foot. I can still recall them now, arriving in this simple of village of mud huts and being met by the grateful chief, who took them into his own hut, which was a little larger, the doorway topped with the feathers from colourful birds. You know something? I think he had the biggest stamp collection I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing like a hobby to take your mind off your appetite.

• • •

Ricky Gervais was cleared of breaking Ofcom rules for calling Susan Boyle a ‘fucking mong’. Quite right, too. Sometimes a joke has such skill in its construction, such heights of imagination and poetry, that it transcends our petty linguistic taboos. I read a columnist describe him as a moron for saying it and adding that she didn’t need to explain why she could use the word ‘moron’ and he couldn’t use ‘mong’. Because that’s where our culture is at in terms of debate – a kind of secondary-school level.