Not everything Glinner touched was gold

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Graham Lineham causes consternation on the right, not just because he’s reputedly the ‘worst person on Twitter’, but also because he writes comedies that everyone, even evil right-wingers, love, like Father Ted, and Black Books (which I was always lukewarm about). But before we get too carried away with the ‘how can a comedy writer who’s so good be such a creep?’, let’s not forget that he co-wrote one of the most unfunny sketch shows ever, or at least one of the most unfunny in that golden era when comedians weren’t deliberately trying to be unfunny. Big Train is currently getting a lot of stories written about it as it’s twenty years since it made its sad debut.

Big Train had its own approach to sketches: ludicrous “what if” concepts – what if a 40-year-old man entered a schoolgirls’ gymnastics contest?

It wasn’t funny then. It’s even less funny now:

What if a woman fell in love with some temporary traffic lights?

This is like Monty Python on the back of a cereal box.

What if Jesus and Satan worked in the same office? – but played totally straight.

The sort of sketch idea I’d expect from a 12-year-old.

“We were very impressed by On The Hour and The Day Today,” says Linehan. “What they seemed to do was take ridiculous ideas and treat them extremely seriously. In such a way that you could say there were no gags.

You certainly got that bit right.

“We borrowed the Armando Iannucci super-realism thing. Stupid ideas but performed very naturalistically.”

And you showed that that quickly became dull. Each and every such sketch.

Across both series, Big Train retained another key principle: no returning characters or catchphrases.

 

“I like sketch shows that are constantly different, or if they have running characters they parcel them out sparingly, so you don’t get sick of them,” says Linehan. “I had a theory that the reason people like sketch shows is the novelty and excitement of what the next one’s going to be. Running characters can be relied on too heavily – often the same joke with tiny variations.

Okay, let’s see how that avoidance of using the same joke with tiny variations worked out in reality:

The 43rd World Stare Out Championship Finals
“I found the principal so funny. It was just the same panel again and again and again with different commentary beneath. We just came up with tiny variations.

Oh dear.

The ‘staring competition sketch’ was an exploration of comic tedium that suceeded way beyond the creators’ wildest dreams.

Prince Hunting Jockeys

 

“Prince stalking Jockeys, that’s all it is!” says Matthews.

Yes, we noticed that’s all it was.

“It’s the jockeys’ innocence… they’re simple-minded and Prince is a devious animal.

In theory it’s a laugh riot… well, actually, it’s not even funny in theory.

Jockeys are funny aren’t they? They’re small and dress in an unusual manner. You get the impression you could throw them around.

It’s a good thing you’re not a right-winger and saying this, Arthur, you’d never work again. An angry and influential man called Graham Lineham would call for you to be strung up.

Bee Gees Vs Chaka Khan

 

Perhaps the ultimate “what if” style Big Train sketch. The Bee Gees and Chaka Khan (Llewella Gideon) are reimaged as wild west gunslingers and locked into a OK Corral-style shoot-out.

Perhaps the ultimate shithouse Big Train sketch.

Sweary Florence Nightingale

 

Nightingale (Amelia Bullmore) pays the hospital manager a visit. She has the heart of a saint but the mouth of a hard-drinking sailor, and assaults the poor man’s ears with a tirade of (beeped out) profanity. “The Lady with the f_____g lamp” (as she describes herself) is eventually dragged out by security.

Wow, nobody’s ever thought of having a nice character swearing, have they?

Hall and Oates On The Estate

 

The pop duo (played by Simon Pegg and Kevin Eldon) are sent to clean up a tough estate – scrubbing graffiti off the walls, picking human excrement out of the lifts, and getting tips from the Eurythmics. The residents are not amused by Hall and Oates’ efforts.

I think you get the idea by now. Reading these outlines is like reading a comedy article about sketch ideas that are so bad it’s comical. Let’s make some of our own up, following the Big Train patented instant-shitty-sketch formula:

Michael Parkinson and Billy Connolly are management consultants sent in to improve a firm run entirely by oompa-loompas.

Thor tries to go to work in his office in a swanky high-rise building, but the jobsworth at the door won’t let him bring his hammer in.

Martians land on the Earth, but they get into a series of comical misunderstandings with some inarticulate ordinary people in regards to the aliens’ desire to be taken to Earth’s leader, and so they end up at the local council offices, where they totally get the runaround, eg. they have to wait outside an office so they can see some minor departmental head, who ignores the fact that they’re aliens, and he fobs them off onto some other department. [Actually this idea is quite good.]

All the sexes at work have to share the same toilet… oops, that one’s now real.

Not everyone hated Big Train, so please feel free to defend them in the comments if you like. (Yes, I know the cast was good. It was the writing that stunk.)

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 48

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2000-01

Semester 2

Week 9

Saturday

 

An uneasy feeling gradually comes over Ren as manic dreams flit through his head. He feels like he is unable to lie down. Try as he might, he cannot make his body stretch out. He realises that he is running, or jogging, in a stooped-over fashion, and has been for hours. He can’t stop. He can’t stop because he can’t unbend his body at the thorax and make himself stop. He is permanently stooped from being bent over while running. He’d give anything to be able to straighten out properly. Or even bend all the way so he falls over, but he can’t bend any further either. He tries to will himself to fall to the ground, but it just makes the stoop more rigid. He’s going to be stooped for years, as a result. Perhaps even forever. He starts to cry at the thought of this. It’s so awful. His body has been disfigured, just when he’s in his prime.

Hours later, he wakes. There’s something not right with the way he’s lying down. Maybe he really can’t bend any more. Maybe he has got a permanent stoop. His legs feel wrong, like they’ve changed weight. They hurt too. Everything hurts, especially his head. Something very heavy must have fallen onto his head, and crushed the back of it.

He opens his eyes. A blazing light torments them, but he can just make out a word: ‘Options’. Indeed. What are his options? He can stay still and remain in pain. He can try to move, and risk disaster. He can try to die now, to escape this personal torture camp, but in the absence of anything like a cyanide tooth that’s a tall order. ‘Options’: it’s not much of a message.

Then he makes out some more words: ‘Robert Sheckley’. Oh. It’s a book spine. He opens his eyes more fully. He’s looking at the bottom shelf of the bookcase on the landing halfway up his stairs, before the stairs turn right. He’s lying on the stairs, his upper body on the mid-stairs landing, his lower body on the steps below. It’s morning. He’s been asleep halfway up the stairs all night. How did he even get home? Gradually he drags himself up the rest of the stairs, trying to ignore the throbbing in his head, and the cold stiffness in his body – he suspects he hasn’t moved a muscle all night – and into bed.

Then he wakes again, to find the future is upon him. Three hours later in the future, to be precise (or as precise as we need to be.) He feels terrible, but at least he’s no longer in mind-rending agony. Eventually he drags himself downstairs and takes some codeine and paracetamol tablets. It’s such a shit, he thinks, how great days, days that are so great that you celebrate them, end up being followed by the worst days of your life. Like the day he finished his final undergraduate exams. The day after that was so bad that he would have gladly thrown himself into a pit of spikes just to end his suffering. He would have gladly bashed his own brains in with a hammer had there been one lying nearby. Except that he wasn’t capable of moving at all that day until 6pm, even to get up find some painkillers. In what way does the Universe deem that a suitable reward for someone who worked so hard to do his exams? Not that he actually did much work himself. But even if he had, the result would have been the same: a blinding, killer headache. A scant reward for effort.

He thinks of those poor bastards who get vomiting hangovers, something he never does. Why should a student who’s been studying hard all year and going easy on the booze until after exams be rewarded by the Gods with a morning bed covered in foul-smelling brash? And then have to run to the toilet all day for technicolour yawns, which makes their headaches even worse? If the Gods do exist, they must be those Greek buggers.

If he could only catch that bastard who’s always fucking him over. Ren the Celebrator, he’s the bastard. Boozy Ren the Celebrator, always celebrating something or other with alcohol. Oh, I got another paper accepted, let’s go to the bar and get hammered. Oh, I just bumped into an old friend, we must celebrate with firewater. Oh, it’s Friday, such an unusual occurrence cannot be allowed to pass without an alcohol-based celebration. Give the guy an inch and next thing you know he’s destroying my head and liver. If I could only catch him… but I can’t. He’s never there to be caught. I’m never around when he acts up. I leave messages telling him not to, but he ignores them. It’s like trying to see the back of your head in the mirror, as Tanja would say. It can be done, but only with an elaborate system. And Ren the Celebrator is good at evading systems. Especially when he’s with that other bastard, Miles the Other Fucking Celebrator. My friend Miles the Done-In also hates Ren the Celebrator and Miles the Other Fucking Celebrator, but he’s also powerless against them. Ebriection is the last thing on their minds when they start knocking them back. (Well, in a way it is on their minds when they shout, ‘Let’s get fucked up.’ But it’s Miles the Done-In and I who get fucked up, not them.)

Then he thinks about what happened last night, and the PPP descends upon him. The dreaded PPP, scourge of the over-imbiber. The PPP is the ‘post-piss paranoia’, a term from his undergraduate days. He buries his face in his hands. God, the embarrassment. Is he going to be sacked? Raked over the coals?

It’s that asshole Ren the Celebrator again, fucking him up in public.

No. Stop it. He can’t go that way, evading responsibility for his own actions, even his own drunk actions, like a leftist who says, ‘Social forces made me do it.’ Or a drug addict who says, ‘I found myself taking drugs again. They were too strong for me to resist.’ Or one of Theodore Dalrymple’s shifty criminal patients: ‘I watched as the knife went in.’ It was him, all along, all him. He’s Ren the Celebrator. A stronger dose of paranoia sweeps like a wave over him. He can’t show his face in public ever again. He can’t even show his face in his own kitchen. He goes back to bed and hides under the sheets.

After another nap another future arrives and he feels a bit better again. The codeine has now kicked in. He feels a bit happier when he reflects on the details of what happened last night. He did little wrong. Harry jumped on him. Attacked him. That’s assault. Not that has any interest in prosecuting Harry for a bit of argy-bargy. As for himself, all he did was engage in mild self-defence, while trying to make light of it all. Yes, he did sort of provoke Harry, but a bit of light-hearted parody doesn’t excuse being jumped on and strangled. He’s in the clear, surely? Anyway, is there likely to be any complaint made? He isn’t making one. Harry won’t be making one. None of the academics there will be either. The students are unlikely to, it was good entertainment for them. Rumours will spread, sure, but even if he gets hauled in he has witnesses to say he was jumped, and he did nothing wrong. So he’s in the clear, right?

But then what happened later on in the evening? He remembers more frenzied drinking in the bar for a while, as people bought him vodka, but at that point the grainy Super 8 runs out. He’s tried to tell Ren the Celebrator before not to get plastered in the student bar, where students can see him, to move on somewhere else, but Ren the Celebrator doesn’t always listen. Or maybe they did move on somewhere else. He just can’t remember. He tries to clear his mind and relax, to let his memory improve its retrieval tasks, but there’s an irreparable fault with the access to his later memories. Or perhaps the relevant memory slots got wiped overnight. Or perhaps they were never laid down in the first place.

He calls Miles to get his view on the public perception of the wrestle with Harry, and to see if he remembers the later events. And to see if he knows how Ren got home. But there’s no answer. He thinks about calling Lily, but remembers that she’s seeing Jason today. And she disappeared anyway. Depression and paranoia sweep down on him again like an unwanted afternoon shower when you’re out walking on the dales. He’s acted like a buffoon in front of Lily. Even if she and Jason ever split up, which seems a remote prospect, he’s surely put himself out of contention with his tomfoolery. Ren the Celebrator strikes again. Bastard.

Ms Theresa Topsy Turvy

Hector Drummond Posted on by

For Ms Topsy-Turvy every day is opposite day. The British public voted to regain their sovereignty from the EU, but silly old Theresa Topsy Turvy is trying to do the opposite, taking even more of our sovereignty away and giving it to the EU. Everything she does is the wrong way around!

In her younger days the Prime Minster was featured in a popular series of children’s books. However, the Ms. Topsy Turvy title was soon withdrawn following legal action from the young Ms May.

It’s like Ms Topsy Turvy lives in Upside Down World, along with her 350 Mr and Mrs Bumblehead friends, who are all Tory Remainer MPs, including Little Miss Drinkalot, Mr Hand-on-Knee, Little Miss Open Primary, Mr EU-as-Substitute-Religion, Little Miss Thicky, and Mr Views-Set-in-Stone-in-1976. They don’t trust the silly old British public, most of whom are Mr Troglodytes and Little Miss Hen Parties, to make the right choices, so they want to see the wise old wizards of Brussels have even more power, like Gandalf when he takes over from Saruman.

So Theresa and the Bumbleheads have tricked everyone with their mischievous upside-down plans, which they worked on in their secret bunker when everybody else was working on what they thought was the real plan. Theresa’s always up to no good! The plans make no sense, of course, but Theresa and the Bumbleheads want them voted through anyway, because in Theresa’s back-to-front world of silliness they make sense. Naughty old Theresa! Will everyone else realise in time that she’s not on their side, or will it be too late?

Stalin’s other forgotten son… and the underage girl Stalin impregnated twice

Hector Drummond Posted on by

If you know your Commie history then you may know that Stalin had a son called Yakov with his first wife, in addition to the rather better-known boy and girl, Svetlana and Vasily, who he had with his second wife.

But did you know that Stalin had another son as well? And that the mother was an underage girl? Not many people know this story.

In his mid-thirties Stalin lived in forced exile in a tiny village called Kureika in Siberia. While there he started shagging the underage daughter of the family he was living with, Lidia Pereprygia, who he got pregnant. She was 13 when he started with her. He promised to marry her to avoid prosecution, although he reneged on this.

He lived like a feudal knight among the Pereprygia family and took what he fancied whenever he liked. He acted as if he had rights without obligations. He had contempt for all human conduct but his own. (Robert Service, Stalin, 2004, p. 107).

He took advantage of his status in the impoverished area to bed a lot of other women too, including a 16-year-old runaway, generally acting like a cad towards them.

Lidia gave birth to a child in Dec 1914, who died in infancy. But she then gave birth to another Stalin child, Alexander, in April 1917, who lived. Hardly anything has ever been written about this forgotten Stalin son — even Robert Service’s biography doesn’t mention him. These sexual escapades in general have rarely seen the light of day in print. Rumours about all this had been around since the 1920s, and came out again after his death, but for years many assumed these stories were the work of Western or White Russian propagandists. But they were true, as even Khrushchev knew, because he ordered an investigation into them after Stalin’s death.

Simon Sebag Montefiore has the fuller story here.

Update: Found a Siberian newspaper story about one of the grandsons whose genetic link to Stalin has been confirmed by a DNA test. There’s also a photo of the young Alexander:

 

Is there any conservative media left?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Jack Buckby, a columnist for The Rebel, complains on Twitter:

No conservative media outlet has covered the story of how Antifa made false tips to the FBI about me, a conservative, and how it got me banned from the US as a result. And those who made the fake tips weren’t arrested. Not. One. Media. Outlet.

This seems shocking, until you realise that there aren’t really any conservative news sites left. Not in the old media, anyway. Certainly not in the UK. In terms of newspapers you have centrist and leftist papers. There are no right-wing TV channels, or radio stations. There are very few right-wing radio broadcasters like you get in the US and Australia. Even in the US Fox News is moving to the centre.

If you say ‘What about the Telegraph in Britain’, well, that brings to my point today. Let’s have a look at who the Telegraph now hires. Sure they have Fraser Nelson and Alistair Heath writing columns for them. But who are the new bread and butter young working journalists? For today we’ll take a look at a young man called Greg Dickinson, who works for the Travel section. Greg has just written a piece called ‘The year tourism broke the world – and why the worst is yet to come‘. This is what he manages to put into the start of an article that’s supposed to be about overtourism.

Today Collins Dictionary announced its 2018 Words of the Year. ‘MeToo’, ‘single-use’, ‘vegan’, and ‘gammon’ all made the cut

Isn’t nice to know that Collins Dictionary has become woke as well? (For the record, they also included ‘gaslight’ and ‘whitewash’; ‘whitewash’ in the new political sense, of course.)

Collins is on the money with its selection

So Greg thinks that ‘gammon’ really is a word worthy of Collins’ endorsement. Would he think the same with a pejorative aimed at the left? ‘Cuck’, for example? Or would that cause a media storm and resignations at Collins??

no doubt the cultural history books will remember 2018 as the year that we finally became ‘woke’ about single-use plastics,

That rather depends on who wins the culture wars, doesn’t it? ‘Single-use’ is a word which no-one outside of media millenial circles uses. (So, of course, it was the overall winner.)

started to discuss the shocking prevalence of sexual misconduct in the #MeToo movement

Because sexual misconduct is not an issue that has ever come up before.

and (like it or not) saw the notion of an animal-free diet enter the mainstream.

Media millenials don’t seem to know about anything before 2011, do they? We’ve had to put up talk of the vegetarian breakthrough for nigh on forty-five years now.

To be fair, judging by his Twitter account Dickinson isn’t a Corbynista, or anything very radical. He’s just a clueless Millenial with, I suspect, another worthless Humanities degree and a mindset he’s just absorbed like air pollution at his University. But these milquetoast soyboys now fill up the ranks at newspapers like The Telegraph, and as a result the Teleguardian is now more likely to be concerned with the latest mobile phone release than, say, the machinations of the civil service.

I mean just look at this guy:

I don’t normally criticise people for their looks, but it’s not his looks I’m criticising here. (In fact, if it’s any consolation Greg, if you’re reading, you’re very good-looking). It’s the look on his face that gets me. He has that modern millenial set of the face down pat. It’s the look that tries to reassure you that he’s a non-threatening, inclusive kind of guy, who sees the good in everyone, at least everyone who’s on the approved list. He’s light-hearted, but doesn’t like jokes that pick on people. He’ll stop drinking when he starts to feel light-headed. He’s not quite leftist enough to do the head-tilt that Tim Blair has so often featured on his blog, but he’s not far off.

In fact he reminds me irresistably of Obama’s famous pyjama boy — it’s the very same look:

Good luck getting the pyjama boys interested in your plight, Jack Buckby. As the days get colder they’re going to be spending the next few months drinking hot chocolate and talking about state-funded health insurance.

(Hat tip for the Jack Buckby story: James Delingpole.)

How To Be Wrong

Hector Drummond Posted on by

I must be a lucky man, because I’ve never heard James O’Brien on the radio. But I was unlucky enough, or stupid enough, to read a glowing story on him in the Independent. The idiocy of the man is astounding.

“I genuinely thought it would turn out that these people do actually know what they’re doing, people like Hannan [the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan], who’ve spent years insisting that this needs to happen, but they’ve all fallen apart like cheap suits.

Apparently James O’Brien has failed to notice that Daniel Hannan is not a part of the government, and has little influence with Theresa May’s gang.

Every single one of them has ended up either resigning once reality has begun to bite, like Davis or Johnson, or going into self-imposed purdah rather than actually address the problems that they’ve caused.”

He’s really not an observant chap, is he? He hasn’t noticed that the Remainers have hijacked Brexit and are derailing it, and Davis and Johnson were forced to resign because of the betrayals of a PM who was secretly plotting with the EU behind their backs, coming up with a completely different plan than the one her Brexit ministers thought they were working on. That one completely passed him by.

“No deal is the only way that these people, these Rees-Mogg types, the only way they can avoid admitting that it’s all going to hell in a handcart is by saying, ‘No, it’s absolutely fine, here is another unicorn on the horizon’.”

Is he the most unobservant person in the country? Rees-Mogg does think that Theresa May is ruining Brexit. Rees-Mogg has wanted a deal all along, just not the terrible deal that May is proposing.

O’Briend started out on the gossip pages:

His one shot at redemption was a press reception for British Oscar winners the next day, where it was rumoured that Sean Connery might attend. “…he’s really rude. He turns up, marches past us, completely ignored all the journalists present, and starts stalking down the corridor towards the bit of the party that we weren’t allowed into.

What a solipsistic man. He can’t get into the mind of someone else to understand that a guy who’s been pestered by journalists for years might not wish to be pestered again by them. O’Brien is like those salesmen or chuggers in malls who get offended when you don’t respond to them trying to get money off you. People who can only see life through their eyes, and can only understand their own immediate reactions.

Everyone’s calling after him; I had done a bit of research and knew that his son had just made a film of Macbeth, so I shout, ‘Have you seen Jason in Macbeth yet, Mr Connery?’, which I thought was a nice question.

You’d think that at this point O’Brien might have started to twig why Connery was trying to avoid the press.

for reasons I will never know, and I wonder to this day whether or not I would have got into journalism if this hadn’t happened, I called after him, ‘What’s wrong, Mr Connery? Are you a bit jealous that you never got the chance to play the part yourself?’

I think we know the reason why you acted like a prick in asking that question. It’s because you are a prick.

And he stopped, turned around, all the other journalists suddenly noticed that Connery’s coming back up the corridor, and he comes up to me and he hits me, two fingers, on the end of the nose in a way that actually makes your eyes water. And he goes, ‘I played the part before you were born. Do your f*****g homework, sonny.’

Yes, Sean Connery is not a nice man and he shouldn’t have done that, but does it now occur to O’Brien that there really was a good reason why Connery tried to avoid the journalists?

On Farage:

I tell people the truth and I don’t encourage them to hate their neighbours.”

This is what a Remain hero thinks? That Farage encourages people to hate their neighbours? That’s Cathy Newman-level understanding.

His callers, he says, have taught him a lot. We talk about one conversation in the book where a woman rings to talk about the time that a senior partner at her law firm told her in a lift that he loved the way she filled out her jeans, recalling how much it had upset her.

These are his listeners. No wonder they think he’s great.

“When I was growing up you could talk about anything – and our dinner table is the same

I’m sure you’ll converse sympathetically with your kids if they express disagreement with you.

A whole chapter of the book is devoted to Donald Trump. On the show, O’Brien has been known to describe him as “basically a fascist in the White House”.

I didn’t know radio was such a bastion of sophisticated analysis.

Does he really believe Trump is a fascist? “Yes, of course he is. He’s said himself he’s a nationalist, you can add very simply ‘white’ to that word.

Ah, so that’s how you do it! That’s how you become a left-wing radio star. You just add words to what people say. Let’s have a go. Jacob Rees-Mogg says he’s a ‘Catholic’. Let’s just make that ‘Catholic torturer’. What a bad man he is! Boris Johnson says ‘he wants to see Britain prosper’. Let’s add the word ‘Nazi’ to that: Boris Johnson ‘wants to see Nazi Britain prosper’. What a fascist! James Delingpole says ‘he loves fox-hunting’. Let’s change ‘fox’ to ‘nigger’: James Delingpole says ‘he loves nigger-hunting’. Ban him immediately!

There’s a frankness to O’Brien that his audiences will recognise, as well as a willingness to listen.

Excuse me while I go throw up.

Update: I should also mention that this twat stole the title of James Delingpole’s brilliant book How To Be Right.

Carry a tow chain in the trunk of your automobile

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Where would lazy dim feminists be without a 1950s ‘advice for women’ book or article to complain about? The latest one supposedly causing a social media frenzy — although an internet search suggests that’s a bit of an exaggeration — is a 1958 article from McCalls magazine that contains 129 bits of advice for snagging a husband. Feminists are falling over each other in their haste to tell us all how stupid the 1950s were because of the dumb and offensive advice in this column. Female journalists, meanwhile, found themselves an easy column to write:

Modest Honesty:

At the peak of McCall’s popularity, the dynamic between men and women was in a very different place.

 

The 1950’s and 1960’s are often viewed as a period of conformity, when both men and women observed strict gender roles and complied with society’s expectations. After the devastation of the Great Depression and World War II, many Americans sought to build a peaceful and prosperous society. However, even though certain gender roles and norms were socially enforced, the 1950’s was not as conformist as is sometimes portrayed, and discontent with the status quo bubbled just beneath the surface of the placid peacetime society.

 

Although women were expected to identify primarily as wives and mothers and to eschew work outside of the home, women continued to make up a significant proportion of the postwar labor force blah blah blah

The UK Telegraph:

Do you find yourself carrying hatboxes around, mining the obituaries pages of newspapers for eligible widowers and starting whispering campaigns about how desirable you are? If not, and you are minus a spouse, therein lie the reasons why, according to a 1958 article from McCall’s magazine. Published in the (now defunct) women’s monthly 60 years ago, an article listing 129 ways to get a husband has resurfaced, providing both a window into history and, perhaps more crucially, something utterly hilarious for us to wring our hands at/take notes from.

The Poke:

If it sometimes feels like women’s rights haven’t moved on since the Stone Age, never mind the 20th century, these images of an article from a 1958 magazine will be an eye opener, because there’s no way it would be written unironically now

Thing is, quite a few of the entries read like pisstakes. Apparently modern feminists haven’t twigged that people had senses of humour back then. More so than now, in fact. Consider the following entries:

2. Have your car break down at strategic places.

19. Get lost at football games.

21. Get a job demonstrating fishing tackle in a sporting goods store.

31. Stumble when you walk into a room that he’s in.

33. Carry a hatbox.

50. Practice your drinking with your women friends first.

58. Get a sunburn.

111. Go to Yale.

113. If your mother is fat, tell him you take after your father. If he’s fat too, tell him you’re adopted!

114. Stow away on a battleship.

115. Rent a billboard and post your picture and telephone number on it.

116. Paint your name and number on roof and say, “Give me a buzz, pilots.”

117. Start a whispering campaign on how sought-after you are.

119. Ride the airport bus back and forth from the airport.

120. Bribe Ferris-wheel operator to get you stuck on the top of a Ferris wheel.

121. Stand on a busy street corner with a lasso.

123. Ask your mother to take in male boarders.

124. Make and sell toupees – bald men are easy catches!

125. Advertise for male co-owner of a boat.

126. If you see a man with a flat, offer to fix it.

127. Carry a tow chain in the trunk of your automobile.

128. Let it be known in your office that you have a button box and will sew on bachelors’ loose buttons.

Were the writers really suggesting a lonely woman buys a boat and advertises for a male co-owner, like the femis think? Or were some of the writers — apparently there were sixteen in all — having a laugh? Well, what do you think?

A lot of the other advice is, needless to say, quite good. It is, at least, much better than any of the idiotic articles you’ll see in modern feminist magazines.

Quote of the day

Hector Drummond Posted on by

From Jim in the comments: (concerning the attack on Roger Scruton):

The first rule of dealing with bullies is come out fighting. Literally in the case of physical bullies, and intellectually in the case of the fascist Left. The attitude to have is ‘I don’t care what happens but I’m not going down without a fight’. Never apologise for anything, double down, re-state your beliefs in clear terms and damn the consequences. Trump has taught us this much, and it got him the Presidency.

I agree, and it’s good to see that Scruton has come out fighting.

Mind you, his doing so has been made much easier by the fact that the evil pieces of dog leavings behind this attack have so obviously twisted his words and taken them out of context. Guido has more on this.

 

One club to rule them all

Hector Drummond Posted on by

There was a discussion a while ago on Orphans of Liberty — can’t find the exact post any more — about thinking up a new name for the left. Personally I quite like ‘clubmen’, because basically leftists want their little club to rule the world. That’s actually how Lenin and the Bolsheviks thought, they saw themselves as a club who would seize power. Seize power in the name of the people, yes, but the important bit there is ‘in the name of’. They were the ones who would wield the power, not the people. Not the proletariat. The state would only ever be run by one party, and that party would be the club. The club may or may not be vaguely democratic internally (Lenin was more keen on this than Stalin, in theory at least), but the state would definitely not be the slightest bit democratic. The club would rule all.

The club-like nature of the Bolsheviks wasn’t hidden at the time. It was supposed to be part of the appeal of joining the Bolsheviks that club members would benefit from being in the Bolshevik club if the club took power. Joining the Bolsehviks in the mid-teens last century was risky, more risky than joining the Mensheviks or the Socialist Revolutionaries, both of whom were more popular, and who looked to be better placed at the time. You either joined the Bolsheviks because you were a true believer, or because you thought it would benefit you in the long-term, or both.

After the Bolshies took power obviously many people flocked to join them because of the benefits to be gained by being in the club, and not so much because they were true believers. Stalin soon had to start getting rid of members — this was before the mass deaths and imprisonments of Party members happened in the 1930s — partly because he recognised that too many new members didn’t really believe in the club’s values, and were just in it for themselves, but also because he and the other party leaders didn’t want the club to get too big. If the club is too big then the benefits to be derived from being in it get too diluted. While they wanted everyone to be forced to accept the party line, they didn’t want everyone to get their share of the spoils.

The EU, I note, is also something like a club along these lines. Sure it’s not rampantly bloodthirsty and ruthless like the Bolsheviks, but it’s very much a club that like to run things its own way. It allows as minimal an input from democratic processes as it can get away with. It prefers club members, ie. the EU apparatchiks, to be like-minded people; you won’t get in if you don’t have the right mindset. It furiously resists attempts to take any power away from it — the explicit plan is for more power to flow to it. And those in the club benefit from the many perks available to club members.

Many Western left-wing parties, even democratic parties, such as the UK’s Labour Party, and the US Democrats, have got noticeably more clublike in recent years, a process that shows no signs of stopping.

So ‘clubmen’ sums the progressive left up pretty well, I think. Unfortunately as a name it doesn’t really have a forceful impact, so it’s not one I’m going to be using regularly. But maybe now and then.

Support me, if you like

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Just a quick note to say that I’ve added Patreon and Ko-Fi buttons to my page (on the right-hand sidebar), so if anyone is inclined to throw a bit of money my way just click on one of those. Obviously don’t feel obliged (as I’m sure you won’t).

Actually the best way you can support me is to buy my book, because then you get a good read in return (or a book you can throw at the fire. But I suggest you get the hardback vesion, not the Kindle version, if you’re likely to do that.) But if you want to donate a bit more than the cost of a book, or if you’re too busy at the moment to read a book, click on one of those donate buttons.

I have noticed quite a few commentators on various blogs over the last year saying that they like giving to charity but there are now no charities they can give to because they’ve all become taken over by SJW execs. Even the RNLI. Well, you can rest assured that I have not been, and never will be, taken over by SJW execs.

I have also noticed recently that various well-paid lefties like James O’Brien have been having a go at the likes of James Delingpole and Raheem Kassam for using Patreon, which they describe as ‘begging strangers for money on the internet’.* But, speaking as a novelist and musician, getting money from strangers is exactly what we do. Novelists don’t know the people who buy their books. Musicians don’t know the people who buy their music, or who buy a ticket at the door. Your income always comes from strangers who take an interest in your work, and you have to interest them, not just the people in your circle.

On the other hand, we don’t have the security of getting a regular paycheck. (I don’t like to say the ‘luxury’ of a regular paycheck, as some arty types who’ve never worked do, because 99% of people who get a paycheck work their arses off every week to get it.) I have no problems with admitting that the wolf is never far from the door. Since when did the left become the ones who mock the artists for struggling?

*It’s funny to think that the left is now mocking the very same right-wingers they accused of being in the pay of big oil, or big whatever, for not having much money. I guess we can assume that all those slurs about being in the billionaires’ pockets were nonsense.

Roger Scruton and the long-term aim of political correctness

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The long term aim was always to end up in the sort of situation where no-one with the wrong views could ever get hired or prosper in any sort of serious job. We’re starting to get to that sort of situation now. Roger Scruton is the latest figure whose new appointment as chair of a government housing commission is being threatened by the left for some of the things he’s said in the past. The left is trying to pretend that he’s anti-Semitic, because

he had described Jews in Budapest as forming part of a “Soros empire”.

They may have picked the wrong man, though, because firstly he’s one of the few people from academia who are unlikely to cower before a mob, and also because everything he says is deeply considered and entirely serious. Not necessarily right, but thought through. So it’s important that the Conservatives hold firm on him. I don’t hold out any great hope with that, but it’s also important that he doesn’t back down even if the Tories let him down, and for that I do have great hope.

The Weekend at Bernies’ version of Dr Who

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Dr Who actually died in 1981, although that fact wasn’t apparent until much later. He died when Tom Baker was replaced by Peter Davidson. Davidson was clearly an inferior actor, at least in that role, but Dr Who fans thought that the show would rise again. Of course it didn’t, with more and more unsuitable actors taking on the role, and the writing got more and more left-wing to the point where even the ordinary viewers could see that the show was essentially about politics rather than science-fiction.

Some Dr Who fans are still very upset that the BBC killed it off in 1989, but the show had become an idiotic waste of money, and had to be put out of its misery. It had become obvious that Dr Who was no more. He was an ex-Doctor.

When Russell T. Davies revived the show in 2005, it seemed like the good Doctor was reborn, especially when the unsuitable Christopher Eccleston was quickly replaced by David Tennant’s more traditional interpretation. But the show went gradually downhill, and then politics started to take over again. The best episode of those years was Blink, the first weeping angels episode, but it was noticeable that that hardly featured the doctor.

I started to gradually lose interest, especially after episodes where the moon turned out to be a giant egg, which made me hide behind the sofa, not in fear but in embarrassment. And when they started to overdo the historic episodes where the doctor turns out to be great buddies with famous historical figures. Plus the new episodes had relationships and romance in them, and that just wasn’t Dr Who. And they messed with things you shouldn’t mess with, like the Neil Gaiman episode where the Tardis turned out to be a madwoman. Oh, and the Doctor turned out to be married to the most annoying woman in the Universe, except perhaps for Polly Toynbee. It’s making me pissed off just recalling this stuff as I’d sort of repressed it.

Jon Pertwee as Doctor Who, pictured with android companion K-Lee.

I vowed not to watch the new series with a female Dr Who. I’m not saying that a female Dr Who couldn’t ever work, but I don’t want to watch a female Dr Who if it’s just been done for the sake of politics, especially seeing as how fed up I had become with the politics in the previous episodes. But my wife was watching last week, and I ended up watching twenty or so minutes of Jodie Whittaker. Who was absolutely abysmal. Dire. As was the rest of the cast. And the writing.

I’m not saying Whittaker is a bad actress. I’m happy to accept that she is great in the right role. Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy are, I’m sure, good actors in the right role, but they weren’t right at all for Doctor Who. Peter Davidson we know is a good actor, but he was no more Doctor Who than Martin Clunes would have been. I’m sure that there are some female actors who could pull off Doctor Who, at least as well as some of the past actors have, but… Whittaker isn’t one of them. It was like a Catherine Tate sketch. In fact, the whole thing was depressingly piss-poor, and I snuck off.

At that point I realised that Doctor Who really had died with Tom Baker’s departure in 1981, thirty-seven years ago. Russell T. Davies’s Doctor Who was really just a pastiche, and a vehicle for Davies to do some play-acting, living out a childhood dream while bending the whole thing for his own purposes. Everything since then has been a Weekend at Bernies’ version of Dr Who, with various producers, directors and writers propping up the dead doc for their own — either political or financial — purposes.

Terry Kiser, who played Bernie, was recently linked to the Doctor Who role before current showrunner Chris Chibnall decided that was taking the whole pale, male and stale thing a bit too far.

I also realised that Dr Who had become like Star Wars: a depressing, ham-fisted, increasingly desperate exercise that has no point except to make money, indulge some big egos, and, increasingly, to push a woke agenda. It’s flogging a dead horse creatively, but it’s very convenient to the people behind it for those reasons. Star Wars, as has now become clear, also died in the 1980s, in 1983 to be precise, at the end of Return of the Jedi. (In fact, before the end, because it actually died when all those cutesy little Ewok bastards crawled out of the undergrowth.)

What has appeared under the Star Wars name for the last thirty-four years is people like George Lucas and JJ Abrams and various others playing the Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman roles, holding up the rotting corpse of the Star Wars’ equivalent of Bernie and pretending everything is great and Bernie’s got at least forty more good years left in him.

A version of Weekend at Bernies featuring Jar Jar Binks has long been talked up in Hollywood.

But the corpse of Star Wars is starting to smell. And so is Doctor Who’s. But Bernie still has more work to do, so the smell is going to get a lot worse.

Quote of the day

Hector Drummond Posted on by

From Sam in the comments:

In addition to what you’ve mentioned I think the reason for a lot of the downplay is that Communism is on the “other” side, and that the Left reflexively defends and gravitates towards anything Anti-Western/American/Conservative.

 

It’s the mark of a simple mind (and something I see from the Right as well) to feel like you MUST defend anything that the other guys hate (or the converse). Hence the hilariously dissonant defense of Islam, or a radical open borders position, or demanding that abortion be celebrated not merely tolerated, etc.

 

The Right’s sudden love affair with Putin is another example. In fact, Russia is basically a ball that is batted between the 2 major US ideological factions as needed.