The Cutprice Guignol

I’ve done several new things of late. One of them was going to a club for the first time. Predictably, I didn’t like it. The glamorous establishment, known as “Dusk”, was the purveyor of one-pound drinks and pumping choons. I wouldn’t have minded, but the one time I did elbow my way into the slithering pit of writhing bodies and practically liquid pheromone (the dance bit), me and my male friend were forced into comedy slow-motion mime falling over by a couple getting to a Canadian third base right next to us.

On a related note, I am currently festooned with club paraphernalia. It was given for me to free and, in my defense, they were quick and I was hungover. In addition to a stubborn wristband, flyers and badges, all adorned with the bright neon Refreshers Week logo that makes my eyes smart a little, they also have themed condoms. Normal condoms have been snazzed up with these bright stickers, so you can catch a glimpse as you go to use it at some point during the week and remember that you’re probably going to get an STD anyway.

I’ve also started listening to Aim & Ignite, which is an excellent album that I heartily recommend. It’s the 2009 debut album by your band fun. (of We Are Young fame), and you should listen to it. And not just the singles. I’ll know.

The third and final thing is this:  my blog (two words that strike fear into the hearts of rational men) recently hit a thousand views after being around for four months. I assume that means someone somewhere is reading it. If this person is you, and you like what you’ve read, it’d be just the tops if you’d point people in the direction of The Cutprice Guignol or subscribe or some shite. Writing is what I do for money and the more popular this blog is the better. Cheers. To continue the theme of pulicity whoring, here are a list of famous porn websites to trick people into reading: redtube, youporn, pornhub, redporn, youhub, redhub, porntube.

Here’s something I’m a little embarrassed to admit: I was cautiously looking forward to The Carrie Diaries. Although I’m not one of the apparent army who’d lay down their life for Sex and The City, I’d quietly enjoyed most of the series and, when I found out there was a prequel with Doctor Who actress Freema Aygeman in the works, I vowed to watch the pilot with interest.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I actually saw it. What made Sex and The City such a success, and what sets it apart from other programmes skewed towards the fairer sex, is the wise decision to focus on the titular city as almost a fifth character; New York looked, by turns, glamorous, dilapidated, unbearably modern and attractively quaint. Another major player in the shows success was-and let’s be honest about this- all the graphic-for-populist-TV sex. There was still a mild novelty in the explicit banter about the sex lives of the lead characters (and apparently everyone else they even had a casual acquaintance with), although it’s difficult to imagine anyone in this day and age who would need to have the function of a rampant rabbit explained to them. It was a pleasant, slightly risqué drama-comedy, the televisual equivalent a cheeky seaside postcard wrapped around a dildo. And that was fine.

So what do you get when you replace New York with high school, assured thirtysomethings with bellybutton-staring teenagers and people who can actually act with Freema Aygeman? A big, sloppy mess. The majority of the actors grapple commendably with the disgraceful writing, in particular the teen cast, who go at it (the acting, you gutterminds) with a wide-eyed gusto the adults can’t seem to muster. Matt Letscher as Carrie’s recently widowed father is particularly weak, less phoning in his performance than texting it in from the inside of a tunnel. And who can blame him? Featuring characters that are essentially a cross between a flashcard with a stick figure on it and a particularly lingering fart, the set-ups for the stories for this season were about as compelling as gluing your fingertips together and the direction apparently nonexistent. They’ve simply transplanted the characters from Sex and The City- the outrageously camp one, the comedically promiscuous one, the sensible one, Carrie- from somewhere where their characters made sense, stuffed them into a pigeonhole marked “High School Drama” and hoped no-one would notice. When the characters first appeared they were at least moderately fresh and witty, and seeing, for all intents and purposes, what is the same cast in an eighties high school scenario is blisteringly silly. The moral of The Carrie Diaries thus far? Let sleeping dogs- and Rabbits- lie.

Firstly, I’m not offering any excuses for finding myself so frequently on the Cosmopolitan magazine website. Like my quiet enjoyment of prawn cocktail crisps and porn parodies, it’s simply not something I can even begin to defend on any kind of intellectual level, save for to laugh at the spelling errors and awful writing which make this blog look like The Origin of Species by comparison. A publication built on a precarious tower of articles about celebrity hair, attempts at serious journalism and blowjob tips, it essentially summates to an Amnesty International flyer with a crudely drawn cock scrawled on it in lipstick. After several deeply taxing visits to Blowjob Central, I’ve compiled a list of reasons why none of us should ever return. Be warned.

1. The across-the-board comedy dating advice.

Think about the last person you dated, or slept with, or got to second base with outside a pub in the drizzling rain. Chances were they weren’t hewn from molten sexy in the fires of Mount Take Me Now (myself excluded, but then I’ve never settled for anything less than a ripped Adonis hung like a rhino on steroids). So can you imagine “pretending to fall against him, then saying “Wow, your pecs are so hard it’s like falling against a wall””? The likelihood of that being even slightly believable are lower only than the chances of not accidentally faceplanting when you “pretend to fall” on him. Fuck’s sake.

2. They use too many distracting euphemisms for vagina.

Fanny. Hoo-ha. Ladybits. Not only do these all sound like potential Americas Next Top Model contestants, but beg the sentence I hoped I’d never have to say again: stop trying to sugar coat your genitals. Call a vag a vag and be done with it.

3. They relate everything to Fifty Shades of Grey.

Like a demented labyrinth built by a madman that only leads to one conclusion, the Cosmo staff have been squawking hysterically over the book in every article since it’s release. Find your Christian Grey! Spend £318 on nipple clamps! Jiggle balls! Jiggle balls! JIGGLE BALLS! Yes, what was once a throwaway joke on Scrubs has now become the crest of a sexual wave that Cosmo is surfing with one hand down it’s wetsuit. Terrific.

4. The writing is dire.

“…and have an orgasm that is both intense and powerful!” No, you can’t just use a synonym to bulk up your word count. It might look like bastard nitpicking and it is; but this is one of the most internationally recognizable women’s magazines in the world. They could at least write like professionals and spell things correctly. “God, Lou, you look peaky, sick, nauseous and additionally under the weather!” “Probably all this fucking Cosmo”.

Now, run away and never look back.

Xamping began as a simple twist on the usual abseiling sport somewhen in the sixties, the pastime of the genteel and elderly. By the mid-nineties, it had developed into what some critics would have called a brutally sadistic Battle Royale amongst insane toffs if they hadn’t been murdered by the so-called Extreme Xampers.

The rules were few and the deaths were many. What started as basic hand-to-hand combat moved onto various, more creative variations; some of the  most popular being horse Xamping, jet Xamping, and the self-explanatory Nightmare on Xamper Street. Unfortunately, some were combined to detrimental effect: the mess of Xamper Wars was, some argue, outweighed by the splendor of the Xamper Deathlympics, including the ever-popular Gattling-gun 100 Metres and High Jump into a Neverending Pit. Most weapons and forms of combat were permitted; only balloons had been actively banned due to the original creator’s dislike of them. Although it was only permitted into the Olympics once (a horrific and deadly misunderstanding with the Olympic Torch in Bristol), it has had it’s effect on the world of sport, with Daryl “The Xampmeister” Haroldson being named Sports Personality of the Year in two nonconsecutive  years.

After arousing the suspicion of the RSPCA after the lavadog death match, Extreme Xamping was reviewed and reluctantly banned, causing outrage nationwide. Although many illegal Xamper pits are in action today, many are still campaigning for the re-institution of what was truly the pride of Britain.

I think I’m suffering from university withdrawal. I’ve been home three days and have spent them in bed, writing, drinking beer and in a state of perpetual almost-readiness- if something terrible happened, you’d just have to give me ten minutes to sort myself out. For some reason, I’ve felt slightly hungover for the last week or so; I think your average layman would call it flu, but I refuse to admit weakness so have decided it’s all the hangovers I should have had when  first started drinking come to haunt me. Overall, it’s a pain: much as I love my home, I do miss my small corner of a foreign university campus and the central heating forthwith.

I’ve spent much of my time drinking San Miguel in front of the food channel (which one, I’m not sure; the slightly less classy one with far more American programming). There are some true gems of shows to be found therein- from The Spice King, which, considering the presenter is channeling a particularly camp Kenneth Williams, should be re-dubbed The Spice Queen, to the outrageous grease-inhaling antics of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. But nothing has outdone the jaw-dropping obscenity of Man v. Food Nation.

If they made you watch sin-appropriate programming in hell, this would be the show for gluttons (incidentally, lust would be punishable by Micheal Winterbottom’s 9 Songs on eternal replay). The “food reality” show (because, as we all know, most food is only hypothetical) features hyper-gurning Adam Richman baiting an iron-stomached madman/woman (one of whom is my Nascar crush Joey Logano, inexplicably) into eating some huge plate of food: six-pound burgers made with buttered beef, five pounds of nachos smothered in melting cheese, twelve-egg omelettes….

The attitude towards the food is almost pornographic; close-ups of dripping dairy products being slathered on sandwiches and slabs of meat sizzling in grease seem more suited to a potential new Redtube category than a food show. Suspiciously, Richman is often only seen from the waist up, so perhaps his presenting role has more to it than a scholarly grasp of shite puns and describing all food as tasting like some kind of sandwich.

If food is sex, then the whole show is a bizarre exercise in populist snuff movies. It certainly does look like some of the contestants might die- they usually end the competition (I use that in it’s loosest sense considering the opponents are inanimate and edible) pouring with sweat, looking like they want to be quite sick and possibly die. It’s like watching cardiac arrest in fast-forward.
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I’ve had two tragically humiliating experiences involving sandwiches this week. The first came in a dash to Subway tonight. My companion, being the  socially adept Londoner he is, ordered competently and literally. After I had blundered through asking if I could use my card, I then announced a filling in panic, and the sweet girl behind the desk pointing questionably at the bread, at which I felt I had to pretend I cared and spent at odd amount of time leering at the loaves. Like a fool.

The second came last night. After waking up mid-afternoon, realizing I had guests, powered through disinfecting my room to the best of my abilities, had a shower, changed, made-up, I had not eaten. Sprinting to the bus, I grabbed the first sandwich I saw in the Union shop and proceeded  to eat one half on the bus and accidentally get up two stops early. Let me get this straight; this was the worst thing in bread. It had curry, brie, mango chutney and tomato, and tasted like snorting crack off the floor of an Indian restaurant toilet. But, as I began to glance at my watch and realize I needed to start running again, I decided to down the whole thing like Gatorade. As I ran past a young family, the remains of that sandwich began to disintegrate, and that pulpy, spicy, sweet, vegetable-laden bready mush in my hands brings me neatly onto my topic today- America’s Next Top Model.

I have watched almost all the seasons in the last three weeks, with three failed blog posts in sheer disbelief. Settle in, lads; it’s a long one. ANTM is hosted by Tyra Banks, supermodel and national forehead, and, as the name suggests, has a collection of girls doing modelling challenges to win a lucrative modelling contract and loads of good shit. It starts with fourteen girls, with one eliminated after two challenges and a sort of camp Apprentice-style board meetings each week.

I’ll start with the contestants. I mean, the show does really fuck with the girls. This episode I happen to have on has a sequence in which a girl is put  in a sexual situation with another woman for a photoshoot, and it all gets uncomfortably, intimately sapphic. Lots of very sexual shoots with some surprisingly handsy male models, more shoots than I could count where they portray corpses; a lot of it is kind of ludicrous. There’s a lot of vicious editing, casting specific heroes and villains every cycle. Although most of the bitching looks petty and relatively surface, but some of them seem to be going through genuine emotional distress, which is pretty uncomfortable. The girls who cry over their makeovers, though? Pish. I cut half my fringe off by accident last week. My reaction? Not possible to register. But what’s most unpleasant is the body issues some of the girls evidently have; even the curvier women (who aren’t all eliminated in the first round, actually) looking a little unhealthy. I’ve lost a lot of weight recently and am now at the thinnest I’ve been in several years, and I look at these women and wonder what they had to go through to get that, because only the lucky few just have it. Some of them do seem genuinely stupid, too; not just vapid but sometimes vehemently defending a cause they don’t totally understand, and it makes me want to batter people with my laptop.

Then there’s the judges. Different series have different collections of judges each time; the golden age of ANTM featured handsome photographer Nigel Barker, seemingly intersex Miss Jay, Mr Jay, the masculine equivalent (using masculine in it’s loosest form here), Tyra, and Janice Dickinson,   apparently an ex-supermodel, but really a leatherbacked offending machine that spends almost an infinite amount of time with her tongue in Barker’s ear. Janice was a complete provocation device and naught more, but she occasionally sledgehammer insulted the girls in a way that I agree with, delivering a verbal equivalent of beating someone to death with an old can of Budweiser in a rainy backstreet in Glasgow. I love  Miss Jay too; the wild fashion choices, copying the models screwing up and attempts at comic relief make him the try-hard toddler of the show, and that’s kind of endearing.

Then there’s Tyra. TYRA FUCKING BANKS. She rose from being a benevolent judge, to a mother-figure, to an actual demi-Goddess. The prizes have gotten worse and worse each year, because meeting Tyra has become half the winnings. Girls weep upon meeting her, they receive the sinister TyraMail to inform them of their missions for the day, and nobody laughs at her when she tries to demonstrate two slightly different expressions and both times her face looks the same. I piss myself every time this happens so it must be fear of being struck down by her wrath. Maybe they’re right and I’m doomed. We’ll see.

But I can’t stop watching. It’s somehow compelling and with properly argument-worthy results, and the passion for such ludicrous bits and scenes and outfits and people it’s heartening. So you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to walk to Tesco, buy a sandwich, and watch the season 15 finale.

Reasons why politicians should start acting like Doctor Who.

1. He remembers people’s names. Nick Clegg took inspiration from the Time Lord during the election debates, standing out as the candidate with the most social aptitude. Unfortunately  this wannabee Galifrean turned out to be more of a Martha Jones- poorly acted, permanently twitchy, and endlessly inviting ridicule.

2. He always has a spunky female sidekick. Imagine all the little sub-Cleggian types, but played by  shouty, nostril-flaring Billie Piper or leggy Scotswoman Karen Gillan. Much as she’s tried, Ann Widecombe just hasn’t been up to assistant standard yet. Replacing her with Emma Watson would help.  Or Nigella Lawson,who’ve I’ve always seen as this assistant from some soft-core, erotic porn parody called Doctor Whore.

3. He dresses well. Imagine David Cameron sweeping up for parliament in a knee-length suede jacket, hands rammed in pinstriped pockets with his hair swept off his face like a  Kerouac who ended up teaching English at high schools. I’d hate him half as much.

4. He’s sexually ambiguous. Though William Hague apparently tried to fuel rumors about his sexuality, it all looked a bit seedy and not as swishy and rollicking as the Doctor makes the rough and tumble of homosexual activity seem. Solution: Replace William Hague with John Barrowman.

5. The theme tune. They could play it while everyone was filing into their seats at the start of Government. Doo doo doooo…..