Ooh, offensive comedy

I was just reading Chortle and the Daily Mail Online (I know! I’d gone to incredulate at the Jan “tissue of lies” Moir article) and I saw that Jimmy Carr has been in trouble, for one of his jokes. So I clicked on the story, because apparently there’d been “tabloid outrage” and I thought, well this has got to be serious. I mean, if the tabloids are outraged.

Obviously, I wanted to disagree with the tabloids, but the thing is though, I kind of WAS expecting it to be an offensive joke. I mean by his own admission his comedy is offensive, and even if he didn’t ever make any such admission, I’m sure he won’t give a fuck that I do.

OK, maybe now you’re expecting something actually soulful and nice. Obviously it wasn’t. It’s Jimmy Carr. But I’m also a big fan of comedy that isn’t soulful and nice. Give me as offensive as you like as long as there’s guts and conviction behind it.

So anyway, with no run-up, one of the jokes from his current tour show was: “Say what you like about these servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a fucking good Paralympic team in 2012.” Now to me, that is a darkly funny joke. It draws attention to wars that most of us seem happy to forget are even happening, let alone how the nation sleepwalked into them. It raises this ridiculous yet subversive idea that it might actually be part of a cynical government plan (can’t win the war, well we’re going to win the fucking Olympics then) – and also it’s quite positive, really. “Fucking good Paralympic team?” Blimey, we only got the Falklands out of the Falklands War. And it doesn’t demean the troops. To me, it actually highlights what they are doing, and the way they are neglected and manipulated by the public and the government.

Of course, I might be reading too much into it. That might not have been how he wrote it. Or said it. I don’t reckon Jimmy was expecting his comedy reviewers to give his jokes an academic dissection: ”Despite the almost archaically traditional nature of his opening gambit – the well-trodden “Say what you like about…” – Carr goes on to prove that he is not only in the comedic debt of the music hall tradition, but may be compared to such satirical greats as Pope, Swift and Peter Cook with their visceral reminders of inconvenient truths, and plangent use of the F-word”.

Actually, what bothered me most about this episode was one of the Mums of the seriously wounded troops, who was quoted as saying “Soldiers are fighting for freedom of speech. I hope Mr Carr remembers that when he makes offensive jokes ridiculing them.” Firstly, I don’t think he was ridiculing them. Unless you think it is inherently ridiculous to be in the Paralympic team. Secondly, they are fighting for many things, but I fear that freedom of speech isn’t one of them. Mary Ann Evans used her freedom of speech to read out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq (while her friend read out the names of dead Iraqi civilians) at the Cenotaph in central London, and she was arrested and found guilty of breaching Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. Because she’d bothered to try and draw attention to what is actually happening, she was silenced. So the government could continue to fail to equip the troops properly for a war on a country whose Islamic institutions proved unconquerable by Genghis Khan and the Soviet fucking Union. So yeah, I liked Jimmy’s joke. It’s the way I read far too much into ‘em.

Tosser

I WANT A PRIME MINISTER WHO SAYS, I REALLY DON'T CARE THAT MICHAEL JACKSON HAS DIED; I HAVE QUITE A BIT OF WORK ON.
AND A LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION WHO DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT IT EITHER WOULD BE GREAT.

I'b sorry, I have a cold

Wow! I feel normal again! For the first time in a week. This week we've been doing the radio recordings for Shappi's new Radio 4 show. I do a guest spot every week... except we ended up recording all of my spots on the same night, due to "Radio 4 Compliance Issues". I don't know exactly what this means, except they are draconian. The very phrase "Radio 4 Compliance" strikes fear into the heart of every producer.

One of my bits involved a song which I call The Racism Song except when I'm on public transport. Anyway, we'd already recorded it once and it was all fine. It references idealistic songs like John Lennon's Imagine, Nina Simone's Ain't Got No... I Got Life and (terrifyingly) 4 Non-Blondes What's Up? (it was my own tune, but there were musical jokes in the middle where you can hear the other songs in it - I mean come on, Jammin' does this all the time, right?). But three hours before the second recording I was on the phone to the producer who was going, "it does WHAT? Oh my God, I had no idea. Oh... oh God, we're fucked. Sorry, but the whole thing's fucked. It's... Radio 4 Compliance."

I said, "no, it's fine, I can just rewrite that bit, it'll only take me..." and he was just going "Oh God, oh God, no, we're completely fucked, you don't know what they're like, I mean, it's RADIO 4 COMPLIANCE". I started to get the seriousness of the situation. You do not fuck, apparently, with Radio 4 Compliance.

So I re-wrote the song, got myself to the Drill Hall and arrived to the producer going... "erm, you know the Unconventional Parents song? Well, we have to re-record it and change the ending because of..." at which point I whimpered, "Is it... R4 C?" We'd done a bit at the end for Shappi to sing "Oh, My Old Man's An Exiled Iranian Satirist"... and even though it's an old music hall song, apparently Lonnie fucking Donegan had recorded it and so there might be all sorts of compliance issues, so we rewrote the song into a generic Chaz n Dave style knees-up with about half an hour to go, whilst drinking more red wine than is feasibly good for me on the basis that "it might bring my voice back" (see aforementioned cold), I popped three Nurofen and applied a nasal spray and then wandered on stage thinking, "well, I can't see how this can go wrong."

It was ace though. Radio 4 audiences are the yin to their Compliance yang. And Shappi, John Gordillo, Felix Dexter, Paul Sinha and Aval Vidal totally rocked. Even my Religion bit, which I'd been very worried about under the circumstances, went fine, with the audience joining in like a proper congregation drunk at Midnight Mass. I would also like to thank Shappi for providing me with so many non-controversial topics to write songs on. I'm hoping next series we can do the Holocaust and abortions. Yeah!

Dude, what is this, like "recession"?

I am trying to work out what the hell is going on with the recession, and if any of us are going to have any money ever again.

And then I found something in my brother's shared items: an article written by my Dad a long time ago, which predicted exactly how and why this recession would happen. It was passed around the family quite a lot at the time, and we all giggled at what my brother Rich described as its predictably intemperate style. But the point is, it has incredible foresight. It's a brilliant article. And I can say that because my Dad is now too ill to blow his own trumpet, or indeed do anything. He certainly won't be writing articles like this again. Anyway, I think it's pretty impressive, given that this was written in 1998...

When he sent the article to me years ago, it was called "Angry With Gordon Brown". When he sent it to my brother he said "RB: Expect Errata" - but there really aren't many errors. This was written in 1998, after Brown's first budget.

Anyway. Here's Dad...

"Last month I heard the announcement that pension funds were to lose
their fully-tax-exempt status, hidden quietly in the corporation tax
"reforms". I was very shocked and angry. This plan formed no part of
the Labour Government manifesto. It will hit hardest on the working
men who voted Labour; they can least afford this loss of pension. The
abolition of the pension funds' exemption from the payment of advance
corporation tax amounted to a theft (not manifesto-announced or
electorate-approved) of at least 4.5 billion pounds per annum. This
was 4.5 billion pounds per annum that was to be taken from an industry
that was already weakened by a series of weird and inept legislation
(most of it Conservative).

The consequences began to occur to me, and I am truly shocked. To
begin with no industry or business or country can cope with any
unplanned-for disaster. When it is so huge - and Government-caused -
it seems to me that Brown must be incapable of thinking beyond next
week, incapable of working out what are the logical and inevitable
social and economic consequences of his actions. (Where did he go to
school? Belmarsh?) In contrast, I am thinking of the vicious circle
or inescapable downward spiralling consequences. Further thinking
makes me realise that the results are myriad, intertwined and
self-fuelled. They could amount to the swansong of a once wealthy
nation.

The irony is that this stealth tax will eventually be self-reducing:
the more revenue it raises the more damage it will cause to the goose
(the hybrid goose that is the pension/stock-exchange) until soon it
will stop laying golden eggs.

Beyond the lack of short-term wisdom, the ignorance of common
knowledge is startling. A child could work out that this is "not a
good thing". Only the mad or the very ignorant have not heard about
the demographic changes that everyone (and not just those in the life
and pensions industry) have known about since WWII. Why doesn't Brown
know?

The pension funds theft will cause lower fund yields - which will result in:-

I. Defined benefit schemes will have liquidity problems and face
wind-up. Previous (Tory) legislation penalised schemes which built up
big reserves for lean years. It is just possible, but unrealistic,
that the Tories did so not anticipating such a future degree of
planned destruction.

II. Increase in money purchase membership with smaller benefits:
amounts to a future load on state benefits.

III. More pensioners become state dependent.

IV. Taxation will increase to pay for the above.

V. Less enthusiasm for pension saving.

VI. Thus less new money to invest - will further badly weaken stock market.

VII. Weaker stock market will exacerbate liquidity problems of smaller
schemes. May also adversely affect insurers with strong equity bases.

VIII. Membership withdrawals from schemes - less new money invested,
schemes further weakened, increased apathy (another vicious circle).

IX. Publicly funded defined benefit schemes will overcome shortfalls
(as revealed at their tri-ennial valuations) by increasing costs to
public e.g. local rates will have to increase by several times
inflation.

X. The sort of companies likely to be worst affected would include the
former nationally-run and Government-funded, but now privatised
companies. Often these are nationally important in providing services
and utilities. Traditionally staffed by bolshie loony lefties, these
workers are "hardline" on any changes or reductions in the perks that
they regard as their right. The pension tax will place their new
private employers in an invidious position. They will be unable to
maintain pension fund viability. A strike or national disaster of
some sort is virtually inevitable.

[On the hard-copy he sent me, point X was ringed with an exclamation
mark. It was the Grangemouth strike that had prompted him to dig this
out.]

XI. Will mostly affect poorer ratepayers and poorer future scheme
pensioners who will becomes even more state-dependent (more tax
increases).

XII. Will weaken the insurers and will put financial strains on their
funds' ability to meet pensions in payment - resulting in poorer
annuity rates - resulting in even less enthusiasm to buy pensions
schemes among the young, further weakening the insurers (another
vicious circle).

XIII. People will look elsewhere to invest: one result will be an
increase in buy-to-let house purchases - will further fuel house-price
inflation.

XIV. A potential problem would be the over-enthusiasm of domestic
property investors. The over-taxation of all other legitimate
investment might drive more people to try investing in domestic
housing.

XV. Combined with a political desire to have low inflation (as Joe
Soap will be told, based on the cost of VCRs, candles, 8-track players
and scythes, ignoring the costs of real items used by real people),
most people will see the only way out to be buy-to-let.

XVI. Joe will be encouraged by the lenders. Low borrowing rates will
possibly fuel borrowing on domestic property. Fringe lenders could
see profits based on lending to short-sighted people (starved of
pension fund savings growth) sums of un-repayable money secured
against freehold property which will probably be over-valued by the
lenders living in cloud-cuckoo land.

XVII. Fringe lenders (and usurers) might get fingers burnt, especially
those in the "buy a shit car on finance" market or the "we do dodgy
120% loans on over-valued shoddy houses" type of market.

XVIII. Tinpot lenders, the "fringe", will continue to lend, or
over-lend, on the assumption that inflation will continue as in the
70s and defend that lunacy by over-valuing freeholds, maintaining
their interest rates regardless of LIBOR or UK base rates. Such rates
will become a political ideal but a commercial irrelevance.

XIX. A possibility that the deemed financial inadequacy will cause
minor banks/insurers to fail/merge/de-mutualise, especially those
strong enough now to have such large equity exposure that they cannot
disinvest without causing further damage to their funds. [!]

XX. Financial inadequacy will result in the purchase of fewer equities
leading to more likely failures leading to greater financial
inadequacy.

XXI. Stock exchange may fall by 25-30% and will take many years to
recover to 1996 levels unless a major reversal enacted. Flying pigs
proposed.

All these possibilities are a direct chain of result leading back to
the raid on pension funds. Bless you Gordon. It is an inevitable
downward spiral, typical of 19th century socialist thinking: i.e.,
kill the independent spirit and force people into state dependency and
thus, as paupers, to vote for the lazy man's misery system. Snag is,
how are the wealth creators going to survive in this lunatic system?

It is possible. Having seen it before in the 70s my fears may seem
inevitable. If they bluster enough about "New Labour" it may keep us
immune from fiscal reality and we may have four/five years "growth".
The only winners will be the ultra-rich and the politicians who pay
themselves based on the sort of economics used by [moderately well-known local crook businessman]. Amazing how such a
fraud works over and over again."

Pretty good hey?

The Pianist and other crazed late night thoughts

Coming in from my gig tonight I watched what I thought was going to be the end of the film The Pianist, but it’s such a long (and brilliant) film it turned out to be another two hours of unremitting Nazi-inflicted hell. There’s this one point in it where Szpilman, Brody’s character, is hiding out in an apartment after the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. He has to be deadly silent or it will alert the neighbours to the fact that he’s hiding in there (and therefore is Jewish – obviously). He drops a shelf full of plates and within 30 seconds there’s a knock and the neighbours are shouting, who is in there, we’ll call the police. Later on, he tries to escape quietly, but as he’s in the hallway there’s a scream and this woman has seen him. She is shouting, show me your ID card! Where are your papers? I’ll call the police! And I thought, hey that’ll be Britain in about 20 years’ time.

OK, I know how this sounds. I start comparing the machinery of the Nazi state to the joys of life in modern Britain, and I come across like one more raving terrorist to deal with just when we’ve got a boat load from Guantanamo. But hear me out.

If things go the way it’s looking and pretty soon we all have to have an ID card to prove who we are at all times, we are fucked. We have learned no lessons from the war. We have learned no lessons from any war, from any experience of how terrorism works or how totalitarianism works. I’m not even sure we’ve learned how to be human. If we start expecting people to produce a card before they can rent a flat, get a bank account, have access to healthcare, a card that tracks all their movements and data… then you could just as easily turn that card off and make that person a non-person. ‘Sorry, everybody with this type of card issued after this date may not have access to certain types of jobs and is only allowed to live in X area. It’s for the good of the country and to avoid terrorism. These people’s activity patterns are suspect and we think they may be dissidents. They must be sent for interrogation and water-boarding in Liverpool.’ Might not sound harsh to you, but I’ve gigged there.

So I’m well aware of the irony of writing this pro-privacy stuff on a social networking site. But given that I’ve registered to refuse to have an ID card if they introduce them and paid money into the legal fund working to oppose the idea, it seems logical to say these things in public and normalise the idea of opposing the scheme – and other surveillance phenomena. For example, I read a letter in the Guardian last week, from a man who’s just taken over a pub in Islington. He needed a new licence for the pub, which had to be approved by various organisations, including the police. The police agreed to approve his application on the condition that he install CCTV cameras that capture the head and shoulders of everyone coming into the pub, and that the police could see this on request. This guy wrote to the local Labour MP to challenge it – and obviously she didn’t reply – then spoke to a friend of his who is the licensing officer for another borough. “Not only did he tell me there was nothing I could do to overturn this, he also strongly advised me not to blot my copybook with the police by even questioning the request; I would not want them against me in the future, he said”.

The guy (Nick Gibson) finished his letter by saying that even though he has been in a silent rage since he first heard of this request, “at every turn I am alternately advised to keep my head down or laughed at for my naivety for thinking that the world was not ever thus. When was it that the constant small erosion of our liberties became irreversible?”

This sounds familiar. First, it sounds like Animal Farm, when the pigs in charge try and tell the other animals that things have always been this way, that bad is good, that quality of life is improved, when you know in your heart that this is just a FUCKING LIE you are being told, but you no longer have the energy to challenge it. Because you have been told so many lies you become exhausted by their quantity, and where do you start? Secondly, everyone is afraid of being thought stupid, or credulous, and looking like some conspiracy theorist raving nutjob if they start saying, hang on, isn’t this all a bit mental? Just how paranoid are we and just how much more police state does it have to get round here before we’re all living all our lives as though we were being watched at all times, just in case, and informing on our neighbours?

Thirdly, the real interesting thing is the apparent impossibility, and dangerousness of being seen to challenge any of this legislation. If people don’t start doing it soon, and all the time, and not thinking that this will make them look like a terrorist, or suspected of committing a crime, then the moment will be lost and we will truly be living in hell. Challenge the encroachment of CCTV – my boyfriend, a photographer, was interrogated by the police the other month for taking photographs! – write to your MP, refuse to have an ID card, vote for any party that will get rid of them, find out what the Magna Carta was, work out that there is now basically NO RIGHT OF APPEAL against unlawful imprisonment under current terror laws… Cos that’s where all this is leading. Towards the situation where YOU, an innocent person, can be arrested, in case you are not innocent.

That’s why I say, to the stupid, stupid woman Catherine Conroy who wrote in response to Nick Gibson’s letter in The Guardian that CCTV is not a threat to freedom and is only “a threat to freedom to commit a crime” – you are part of the problem. And you clearly haven’t the imagination to understand what kind of grim future world you are dumbly helping to create.

Good God, I need the light of dawn, don’t I. And it is also possible I shouldn’t have given up drinking. I just have a shit load more reading time now.