Tales of Rad: 6 Game Show Hosts That Hindsight Proved Were Irreplaceable

Tales of Rad gets a nine letter word every time. And it rhymes with Bingeclap.

In 1938, the Beeb aired the very first televised game show, Spelling Bee, and the genre kind of went downhill from there. Although certainly not the worst fixture of the media industry's lowest creative form, game shows have been plagued by cheating (on both sides) from the very beginning and laboured with the responsibility of being the afternoon entertainment for bored housewives and since the fifties, students and the unemployed. A tough crowd.

Most are nothing more than the desperate answering questions for money so ultimately, it's the host's job to provide any kind of entertainment from the whole mess unless of course, it's a panel show with three to five of the out of work desperate answering questions for renewed fame. I.e., if you hadn't quite grasped that, a celebrity panel show. 

Either way, producers have a problem. You have five or six potentially unstable morons on camera for half an hour. How do you turn flailing pub quiz voyeurism into entertainment? And so was born the very real necessity for the right host. 

The perfect host has to do a few things. Control the more aspergery contestants, generate warm, harmless banter with them and provide a safe, nutritious environment for the guests' young. It isn't easy. But some entertainers managed just that. And not only that, were such a natural fit or pervasive influence on their show's formula that when they left, for whatever reason, their programs just couldn't thrive without them in quite the same way.

N.B.: It is merely a happy coincidence that none of the following are the subject of many violent, racist and sexual convictions. Humour doesn't always have to focus on personal tragedy. It just helps. 

On the face of it, Never Mind the Buzzcocks was a quiz show featuring and about pop music and its stars. But really, it was just three intellectually superior comedians ganging up on shitty artists. Together with captains Jupitus, Hughes and from season ten, Bailey, Lamarr nailed the misanthropic culture cynic so well that to this day, Charlie Brooker has to pay him royalties every time he's an arsehole in broadcast.

It was beautiful. And totally compounded by the BBC's budget. For every legitimate star on each episode, there'd be at least one guest dredged up from opening act on a P&O cruise obscurity with enough humiliating decisions in their past for six highlight reels worth of insults, let alone a half-hour post-watershed slot. Although the show did gestate in the 90s, when you couldn't walk down the street without tripping over a boy band getting their chests waxed.

But when Lamarr left in 2005, he took every pretense of subtlety with him. Not that there was all that much to begin with, since he made about three death threats per episode and is probably most famous for calling one-time guest Chris Moyles a 'fat c*nt' on air. Nevertheless his replacement, Simon Amstell, saw his predecessor's most obvious defining feature: snarky prick, and took it as a challenge. Every episode became a desperate grasp to outdo Lamarr's scathing dismissal of his guests, co-stars and their achievements. 

"It gives me no end of pleasure to give you no points."

Taking over from Lamarr, who'd become legendary for making Buzzcocks what it was, must have been daunting. Amstell was presented with the choice of try to continue in the same vein as before, or try to bring his own angle and make the role his own. And seeing as 'gay and Jewish' don't really count as performance traits, you see where I'm going with this. 

It was almost tragic, really. Especially in comparison. Lamarr was such a celebrated dickmotron that trying to outshine him in the same department wasn't just futile, but pathetically obvious. Sure, Amstell made his name at Popworld "making pop stars uncomfortable", but how could he live up to Lamarr's one-minute diatribe against Phill's impressionist talents? Because it remains one of the single greatest moments in television. As they say in the biz, fuck following that. Behold.

Poetry. Seriously. I've watched that clip maybe twenty times in the last two days alone. 

In the early 1940s, mad Nazi television scientists tried to create a propagandic contest by mixing the eugenic traits of mathematics, Randism and javelins. They were ultimately unsuccessful due to a few fatalities and one disastrous video game sequel, but their experiment lived on in spirit in ITV's Bullseye, a show about darts. Except without all the glamour of our nation's beautiful game. 

But damn it if this show didn't rock. Contestants came on in pairs and took turns to throw darts and answer questions. Which was probably the first time producers realised that getting couples on was an invitation for howling, marital drama and presumably thought that would make for better television than one person being slightly disappointed when they got a question wrong. Oddly enough, this was also the first case of tv execs being right about anything. The second and last being airing The Wire. 

"That will teach you to give a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck."

If you want one reason to explain why Bullseye wasn't a total snore then you must have misread the title and big picture of his face and name two paragraphs up. Jim Bowen brimmed with swarthy, Northern charm. He bled Fray Bentos gravy and confused Etonites. He kept eight whippets and two of them were cats. And like many on the game show host circuit, was a fount of immortal catchphrases.  

Without doubt, his best known is 'BFH [n. Your bus fare home]'. And isn't that a benevolent concept? "Here's what you might have won" but at least you won't have lost anything on transport costs. Wait. Maybe I'm confusing benevolent with sadistic. I'll get back to you on that. 

Brucie's been around so long that the original pitch for the Price is Right was done in cave paintings. He's been inside so many women that Russia declared him their leading feminine hygiene product for two straight centuries. But apart from mocking death and harvesting our young, Bruce Forysth is known for appearing on television more often than advertising.

What's his secret? Many desperate elderly have asked. Well I don't want to scare you but he's been crawling into your bedroom in the dead of night and holding his mouth over yours since you were five. Every time Strictly Come Dancing announces a new series, that's because Brucie reduced a newborn to a husk. And every time a buxom assistant was replaced on the Price is Right? That was because the last one was worn down to a bloodied point.

And what do points mean...?

If you ever stooped low enough to ask my mother for psychiatric help, she would prescribe you two things: a suicidally aggressive exercise regime and one to two episodes of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, to be taken in the evenings but not mixed with confection. 

Did you know that this 41 year-old radio comedy was the inspiration for this blog's title? Of course you don't because you never take any interst in me. I swear, I do all the work in this relationship. 

I suppose it's now irrelevant to point out that this show is dear to my heart. Or was, rather. Because, in a classic case of nerd aversion to change, this show died for me with Humphrey Lyttelton. 

Let's give some context. ISIHAC began as a parody of straight-lace quiz shows. And let me be absolutely clear about this: they didn't give a fuck. If your finger accidentally slipped in the car and tuned Radio 4 and you didn't immediately scream and flick back to Radio 1 for fear that the mere act of listening to the otherwise ponderous, elitist dickrot would cause every driver around you to instinctively try to run you off the road, you would have no goddamn clue what was going on. 

Games often had no objective with the famed example being 'Mornington Crescent', where the contestants just named random Tube stops in an effort to confuse the non-enlightened. Exactly like the drinking game, 'Black and White' now that you mention it, yes. 

"Aha. If I'm reading this correctly, yo bitch ain't shit."

But the absurdist non-games and onslaught of puns paled in comparison to Humph's constant, acidic commentary. He opened every episode by insulting both the host town and his guests and relaying the kinky exploits of his entirely fictitious assistant, Samantha. 

Now, I imagine actually seeing a sweet septuagenarian make tissue-thin innuendos about his sexy, yet imaginary scorer could have been awkward but over the radio, it was fucking golden. He insinuated that she gave handjobs to the teams. That she spread her legs for science. That she gave it up for the local high society. And your plumber. And to the gamblers. And the IT technicians and the butchers and the bakers and candlestick makers in a way that wasn't at all horrifying, but hilarious. Compare that to fellow fossil, Forsyth, who these days would be less sexually awkward if you found him replacing all your children with changelings.

And Lyttelton was also a sweet jazz musician. Deal with that, your brain. What have you done today? Recorded an elegant trumpet solo and hilarious quiz show episode? Or spent another day at a menial job you hate to come back and read some shit on the internet? What's that? You only plan on doing that until you're 70? Well Lyttelton worked in these two uniquely kick-ass jobs until he was 86. Check and mate says Humph. From beyond the grave. Because he's better than you.

Back in the far off, pre-Socratic age of 1986, there was a failed American quiz show about piss-poorly animated cliches that proved a hit in dear old Albion. Catchphrase proved to be that specifically satisfying kind of show where shrieking the answers at home wasn't just limited to the remedially educated. Because the answers were always common-as-muck turns of phrase, here, even the dullest of wit could excel. Yet during the first few episodes, something happened that no-one had quite intended.

I'm sure inadvertently, ITV had created the world's first Freudian Slip production line. They positively milked contestants for parapraxises. Catchphrase's catchphrase, which I've waited my whole life to not type, was "say what you see" about some, I'm sure I already pointed out, Parkinson's studio animations. The answer was always something that was, unless you were the victim of some severe head injury, or living in a cave, truly inconceivable that you wouldn't know. The only barrier was the schizophrenic artist's idea of what that thing might look like. 

"Is it ham-fisted?!"

Here's where the magic happened. Under pressure, the human brain is known to panic and make, to the bemused bystander, truly deranged assumptions about what it's seeing. Catchphrase practically forced that. It was an avalanche of pressure on perfectly normal contestants in no way prepared for it. And my did they say some truly stupid shit under all that pressure. It was public humiliation masquerading as competition.

What set it apart from obvious analogue, reality tv of course, was Roy Walker. 90% of the time, he took random peoples' projectile word vomit completely in his stride. Deflecting it with his classic: "It's 'good' but it's not right." But on a few beautiful occasions, the extent of the contestant's answer's absurdity utterly broke him. I've seen Davina McCall bounce off responses that would barely register as the chimp language for 'throw shit/make autobiography', and yet something about Roy Walker's total inability to give a shit while he's howling with laughter at a contestant's retarded answer, strikes me as nothing less than blissful. 

A bliss not equaled by Brylcreamed, pseudo-Cockney ponce Stephen Mulhern. Because when he laughs at the contestants, it just seems mean.  

"Eh. You're kind of a dick when you do it."

Now, I know that Fry isn't dead or been replaced on the game show he's most known for but hindsight will, eventually, prove my right on this. It isn't his fault, but no-one will ever match Fry's contribution to QI, ever. The whole point of the show is proving people wrong about things they were sure about. Have you ever tried that? If not, speak to anyone who has ever met me. People hate being contradicted and when it's something they believed was common knowledge, pointing out their mistake is like offering them half a grand to break your jaw. It's not only unpopular, it's full-on fucking dangerous.  

Guests often voice their disgust at the intellectual egotism that is QI down to its privileged, Oxbridge core. I'd sum it up to the kind of culturally bankrupt cretin that might not have seen it like this: Think you know when the sun hits the horizon? Well then you get to eat shit, retard. You couldn't have been more wrong if you'd just screamed for your nurse while evacuating yourself. 

No human could tell you you're wrong about what you thought you knew like Stephen Fry. He is the only human being in the entire world who could explain why black is in fact, white and not make everyone in earshot rush toward whatever fucking said that and try to kill it with whatever they're holding. He once made my idol, Phill Jupitus, almost cry with the question in the last paragraph. And even I don't hate Fry for that. He's provided me with more opportunities to be a complete bastard than Wikipedia and a Grammar school education combined. Maybe I'm biased. Because if there's one thing I love...

No-one will ever prove a replacement for Fry. I'm willing to bet real money that the show will be cancelled long before Fry leaves or dies, and should he, the BBC will see sense and, like Bullseye, just cancel the show. Because otherwise, they really would be running the risk of a triple homicide on set. And even a heartfelt apology from Forsyth couldn't get you out of that.

6 Video Games That Failed At Greatness But Succeeded At Hilarity

In the film industry, there's a rarely used technical phrase used to describe a movie (see above) so tragically awful that watching actually becomes entertaining. Like a puppy pissing in its own mouth or a sandwich so old that biologists use its tenants as evolution studies. The thing's source of interest wasn't what the creator intended, and in fact has failed so hard as to be remarkable and failing failing that, pretty funny.

Games don't tend to reach the same pinnacle of failure known as 'so bad, it's good' because when you think about it, a game can be racist, nonsensical or phoned in over a dodgy signal from the lead's champagne sex yacht and still be rad. Provided it's functional. The simple fact is, if a game's fun to have in your hands, no matter how egregious the voice acting, narrative, art design or build quality, it'll get a pass and in fact, people like Capcom have been banking on that for decades.

But on truly special occasions, studios will release something so utterly broken and incomprehensible, something that reaches such a nadir of quality in any number of areas, that just like The Room or my flatmate's sandwiches, experiencing them becomes a must.

The following are some of the most worthless consumer products and yet some our most priceless artifacts of failure.

Mixing youth pursuits like music and cartoons with Jesus has led to some of Western civilisation's gravest mistakes and Bible Adventures is what you'd use to teach your kids that. And that makes it a masterpiece of failed intention. It's like a porno set at a funeral home or your doctor choosing Leslie Nielson to break the news of your malignant colon cancer to you. Such an absolute disaster of education that it ends up teaching the exact opposite intended message. Religion has caused a great many problems throughout history and all of them are this fucking game.

If only I could use the singular. This is in fact, three miserable brainwashing attempts in one. Through three episodes: Noah's Ark, Baby Moses and David & Goliath, young Christian gamers learnt important lessons like how many animals a grown man can carry and not to trust their Nintendo. A steal for would-be parents looking to ensure their young spawn grows up to firebomb abortion clinics or at the very least, hide peoples' cigarettes but by any other metric, a uniquely misguided stain on gaming history.

WARNING: This game is not to be confused with the Bible Adventures my local church ran, which didn't need a NES controller as it was run exclusively with the vicar's hands and mouth.

For all of Dead Rising's many and myriad mechanical failings, it kicked a lot of ass. Few games offer the cathartic pleasure of scotch-taping a hedge-trimmer to a croquet bat and wading into a horde of undead to reconstitute your shambling neighbours into chunky soup. It was so zombie-murder-spectacle-driven that it led many people to abandon their dry, non-suicidal zombie survival plan in favour of an apocalypse spent entirely in pursuit of badass mayhem.

You ever see Zombieland? With the brilliant Woody Harrelson, alright Jesse Eisenberg and slammin' Emma Stone? Because they touch on this brilliantly retarded idea constantly. That if you're left alone with a nation of flesh-eating Americans, you might as well spend what precious moments you have left being creatively awesome in killing them.

Dead Rising is entirely about that. Sure there's some nonsense about landlording a crew of survivors in a mall with your daughter, but those guys were mostly dicks and weren't going anywhere. Whereas there was a whole state of meatbags shambling around who weren't going to mutilate themselves with a chainsaw-bat in a dress.

This is a questionable entry because it was specifically designed to control like one of those fairground bicycles with the steering reversed but that comparison only holds if the bikes are also being ridden by adorable seals in blindfolds. That are also drunk. But if it was the developers' goal to fail, then mission fucking accomplished. It's such a mess of hand-eye coordination you'd think the developers were trying to make fun of amputees.

You play Nigel Burke, a surgeon who must have to replace his watch and wedding ring every other week. If you've ever played the browser game, QWOP, you know roughly what the deal is. Purposely muddled and confusing navigation key setups and little else. Except this time, failure doesn't mean you go home to your country without a special Olympics medal for trying; the result is a patient's kidney flopping onto the floor like an unwanted goldfish.

Daikatana is probably superior to most games on this list by virtue of being merely bad. Sure it was buggy and uninspired, but at least functional. No, it was the lead up to release that immortalised it. And to understand the extent of Daikatana's legendary failure, we'll have to do a little history. So please take out your 'Big Ol' Book O' Gaming' textbooks and turn to section 'Headshot', page 'Red Barrel' now.

In the far-off space year nineteen-ninety-something, Ion Storm studios released an ad prominently declaring that 'John Romero is about to make you his bitch' and suggesting you 'Suck it down'.

Really.

Now, video game marketers have stooped far lower than this before and since. Publishers Acclaim in particular, just went completely off the rails when the internet showed up and changed everything. They offered parents ten grand to name their kid Turok, tried to paint pigeons and release them at Wimbledon to promote Virtua Tennis and even put full-page ads on gravestones. They didn't give a shit, they'd do anything for your money. On the occasion of this bitchifying ad though, they were not involved. It was Ion Storm, a small team that had grown up around two former employees of id Software but one in particular.

John Romero's work at id Software had, in a way, made him one of the first real celebrities of game development. While he was there, id Software released Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. Three games that PC gamers sill treat like jewel-encrusted blowjobs. And Romero was ostentatious in success. He drove Ferraris, attended upper crust shindigs and talked trash at conventions. His fame has only really been matched since by Peter Molyneaux's fanatical optimism or the tightness of Cliff Bleszinski's t-shirts. And that fame led to this advert.

To say it was doomed would be both a critical understatement and a really shitty pun. The game ended up bombing so hard the corpse of Arthur Harris shot into the fetal position. It didn't help that this obnoxious advert had many people actually hoping for failure but even they were surprised at how badly it missed even the most unambitious expectations. An important lesson for game developers about reasonable forecasts and not comparing fans to prison rape victims.

If you're even the slightest bit involved in video game news, then you saw this coming like a peaceful resolution to a G.I. Joe episode. For the less unsexed members of the audience though, allow me to explain that Ride to Hell: Retribution did for games what the mention of chlamydia does for anything. It failed in so many directions at once that the pentagram the developers drew on the studio floor summoned Wile E. Coyote and a crate of TNT. It truly was a disaster in every conceivable way. But quite possibly, the most remarkable disaster ever to happen in video game development.

It was astonishing. We live in a time when the worst games are usually a result of depressingly safe, committee-designed, lowest common denomination so in a way, it was actually quite refreshing for a relative unknown to screw up quite this bad. Despite what the image above might suggest, this wasn't a game developed ten years ago for an ailing PS2, but a full console release in late June this year. And it's not just the graphics that're dated. The gameplay for example, would have been more at home during the Spanish Inquisition.

It's not often that phrases like 'not a single redeeming feature' get thrown around but from the way critics talk about Ride to Hell, you'd think it would have been easier for the developers to just fill game cases with wasps and photos of the lead designers fucking journalists' mothers.

When I started this, it was kind of my intention to make fun of some of the industry's most beloved Japanese game designers. Though I may not trace my ancestry back through ten generations of tentacle like many in the world of video game criticism, I'm not Phil Fish. But I was still sure a compilation of the industry's best worst games would hail mostly from the land of dirty panties vending machines. Their devil may care approach to translation and remedial grasp of rad has resulted in many hilariously awful products but I find it humbling that most of the most genuinely awful were seeded right here in the West.

Still, nothing has failed to be good quite like the Resident Evil series. Yes, 4 was the first, glorious perfection of the third-person camera. But it was also a testicle-dissolvingly camp descent into melodrama after a few majestic hours of Spanish peasant-fleeing intensity. And by the time you were facing off against midget zombie Napoleon, it became pretty clear that Capcom have all the maturity of a ten-year-old pulling the legs off a spider and arranging them in the shape of tits. The employees in the charge of the company 'self control' budget must have been being violently digested in a nuclear iguana's colon at the time.

I mentioned The Room at the beginning of all this, and if you're a true scholar of failure, you would know it as possibly the greatest catastrophe of script and acting in history. But it really does have nothing on the original Resident Evil. Characters discuss deadly threats like their latest bowel movement and insignificant details like Terence Stamp trying to outham a sandwich. The game introduced three of the most fan-beloved characters the franchise would hold onto forever but you couldn't fucking trust anyone involved in this.

The moment you're in any danger of immersing yourself in the experience of walking slowly down a corridor hoping the camera isn't hiding something even more immune to bullets than usual, you'd be dragged back to reality by someone's laughable monologue. Jill Valentine might say: "what COULD have make all these... stick webs?" while a giant spider is laying its eggs in her forebrain. In fact, if everyone on STARS team alpha was host to alien space eggs, it would make their actions make more sense. STARS are meant to be professional special forces like SWAT but you wouldn't trust them with a particularly pointy stick, let alone a firearm.

Their speech is so separated from reality and they're so dangerously stupid that I'm not entirely convinced the events of Resident Evil aren't the delusions of escaped psychiatric patients sheltering in an old folks home. It would certainly explain the 'zombies'' motor skills.

***

Arnie vs Sharktopus will be in cinemas late October. 

Tales of Rad: 5 Manly Men & Their Great Deeds Of Masculinity

Let me tell you about awesome. Awesome is being ambushed by thirty ninjas while you wait for the train and considering it an inconvenience. Awesome is speaking entirely with your fists when the only word they know is murder. Awesome is deciding it's easier to just flying wheelhouse kick a door open, even when it's automatic. And awesome is seemingly a thing of the past.

Action movies have become damp, limp spectacles in the last two decades. With the advent of CGI, stuntmen populations have exploded because it's become cheaper to let them dive around on trampolines in front of a green screen than let the pyrotechnics explode them for real. Plus, JCVD, Arnie and Seagal have mostly withdrawn from the limelight and they did a great job keeping stuntmen numbers in check. I remember a time when action films used to be about killer chefs, kidnapped daughters, sassy journalists and racism. Special thanks to Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon for reminding us all of that.

But real life tales of rad beat fictional every day of the week with a cue ball wrapped in a bar towel. Fleshlights, Youtube comments and moisturisers may have some thinking that the culture of manliness croaked its last when vampires were reduced to glittering commitment issues, but masculinity prevails in the greatest of adversities. We just drink harder to compensate.

These are great men. And these are their deeds.

[WARNING: The following contains many of the manliest tales of manliness. Women. If you feel you must continue, shield all 7,825 parts of your genitals from the page now. These guys ruled so hard, just reading about them will grow you six inches of ball hair. On your chest.] 

Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Knighthoods have a storied history. They started out as a proclamation of your inbreeding but came to be affirmations of a man's feats of daring do: Jousting, hunting or pouring boiling oil down a murder hole onto Frenchmen. But the honorific title has attracted some bad press in the last few years because of accusations that a few toffs just bought them. Which is a lot like bragging to your friends about your foot-long beard and then admitting you paid a Filipino rent boy to shave his own back hair and tape it to your face. Humiliating for all involved but ultimately denigrating the proud tradition of beards more than anything else.

Now, Sir Fiennes didn't buy his knighthood. He received it by virtue of being born to the 2nd Baronet of Banbury, i.e., the regular way. But as soon as the training wheels came off his openings, he busily set about retrospectively earning his manly title.

He left Eton (incidentally the academy we Brits use to train our politicians in bathroom stall handjobs), joined the British Army and was quickly seconded to the SAS. Which you may know from Call of Duty as the academy we Brits use to train young lads with terrible cockney accents how to die most heroically. While there, he specialised in demolitions, adding 'blowing stuff up' to a CV that would already make a female employer limp for days after reading. My research was inconclusive as to whether there was a training module dedicated to pointedly looking in another direction and walking away after detonation so I’m forced to assume that he just didn’t need it.

This was all in his mid-20s, by the way. After leaving the armed forces, he must have decided that angry people with guns weren’t threatening enough so turned his attention to adventuring. He took a hovercraft up the Nile in ’69, led a trip round the polar axis and crossed the Antarctic unsupported in 93 days. Famously, in 2000 he attempted the same expedition solo, when thin ice couldn’t support the weight of both his sled and gigantic balls and collapsed. Digging the sled out by hand rewarded him with a nasty case of frostbite in his left hand, but if his fingertips were going to be such pussies about it, he thought to himself, then they could damn well bugger off. So he cut them off himself with a fretsaw. Weeks later. When there was a qualified surgeon on hand to do it.

It didn’t end there. Sir Fiennes’ biography reads like a couple of dozen biographies of still pretty righteous badasses got mixed up and printed together. In 2003, at the age of 59, his own heart betrayed him. Four months and one double heart bypass later, he ran seven marathons in seven countries over seven consecutive days. Somewhere nearby, a shadowy figure in a floor-length black cloak was cursing while stuck in traffic. Or maybe Death is still just too scared of Sir Ranulph to make his appointments.

Theodore Roosevelt

These days (with a few notable exceptions, tee-hee-hee), politicians tend to be doughy, privileged gasbags and little else. But there was a time when standing for office was something you did only after leading a few glorious charges on enemy lines. And that time was everytime pre-1900. You just weren’t fit to hold any political power in the western world unless you’d run a few Carthaginians through with a pilum or depopulated a small town and salted its fields for your country. Politicians used to kick-ass is my point and the textbook example is Teddy Roosevelt.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt begins young, because the question of how this handsome, if slight, asthamatic young lad:

Became this grizzled, severe frontiersman whose mustache alone looks capable of lethal beatings:

Is an important one.

You can truly tell how radically thinking has changed in the last two centuries when you think that young Teddy was indeed a weak, sickly child (including suffering form the aforementioned asthma) and to overcome this, he decided the best thing to do was take on as many dangerous, outdoor pursuits as he could think of. And this is a time period in America when there were a whole bunch of those.

He dedicated himself to natural science, I'm guessing, in order to preemptively know thine enemy. After graduating Harvard magna cum laude he gave himself up to the emotional threshing machine of politics as a State Assembleyman in the Republican party. Quickly disillusioned by the rampant party politics, he did what any sensible 26-year-old asthmatic with heart problems would do, he became a cowboy of the Badlands of Dakota. I didn't call them 'badlands' for emphasis, that is really what they were called, which should give you some indication of what a stupidly dangerous and therefore awesome decision this was.

After making a living hunting and skinning things with far too many teeth and taste for frontiersman flesh than is generally considered safe, he became a deputy sheriff, during which time he became fast friends with Sheriff Seth Bullock and as any viewer of Deadwood would know, living to tell the tale of any encounter with a character played by Timothy Olyphant is a notable achievement.

After returning to NY, Roosevelt began his rise to the presidency. Once there, he won a Nobel prize for negotiating a ceasefire to the Russo-Japanese war and then another Nobel prize, this time in Badassery during his campaign for third term, when he was shot during a speech and instead of running, screaming for medical attention, just stood there and finished speaking. Leaking profusely through the very recent hole.

His slogan was "speak softly and carry a big stick", which seems at odds with his personal practice of carrying a pistol wherever he went and a black belt knowledge of jujitsu. But then again, you don't know what he could do with that big stick. 

Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin is the only politician from the last fifty years who can really command any respect with perhaps one exception. If you're the kind of misogynistic little dick-spurt that measures his self-worth in vaginas invaded, that is. This is due to the fact that to do any good as a politician nowadays, it is your prerogative to be mild of temper and policy in order to seem as inoffensive as possible to as large a demographic as possible and this is something that Putin understands as well.

Though Vlad exhibits all the traits of a man's man: he appreciates the thrill of high-powered engines between his legs; pitting his wits and reflexes against nature's deadliest hunters and motherfucking judo, not to mention the many, many photo threads of him holding firearms like he knows something about them the rest of us don't, he has a soft touch too. This clip here, features his tripartite performance at a charity event where he plays piano and sings a cute duet with a child. And it isn't just me that's wide open for Putin. Female students of the Moscow State University send him tasteful nude calendars and looking at stuff like this, it's easy to see why. The guy is lousy with musky, masculine radness. 

This is starting to take a direction I'm not sure I intended.

Jackie Chan

Jackie Chan hasn't even heard of your dishonorable, western concept of 'fuck', so couldn't give one even if he tried. He has so little regard for his own safety that the vultures following him around established their own pension scheme and life insurers attack him on sight, even when they don't have kung fu training.

He reaches a pinnacle of masculinity not just because he performs his own stunts, but more because those stunts seem specifically designed to overload the studio's health and safety cyborgs' logic cores. He's dangled from objects in a way that managed to insinuate gravity has a tiny dick and sustained more helicopter-related injuries than zero, making him only slightly less improbable than a sex genie. And he's accumulated these impossible achievements as part of a 40-year plus career covering more than 150 films. That is a hell of a long time to avoid very real drug cartel kicks and rotary saw blades. 

But it's Jackie Chan's professional relationship with high places that cements him as mankind's leading fear hormone mistake. In Project A, he let go of a clock tower to freefall three stories through two flimsy awnings. Three times. Because he wasn't happy with the mild concussion he got the first and second attempts. And of course, there's the famous skyscraper slide from Who Am I? which of course you already knew about seeing as how you're a good person and all. 

Jackie wrote and directed the whole thing and you can tell. Even the plot doesn't have any sense of self-preservation. It culminated in a sequence atop the roof of the Willemswerf, a famous skyscraper in Rotterdam. Jackie Chan's character, simultaneously named Jackie Chan and WhoAmI? In an effort to confuse critics applied to every single thing about this film, attempts to escape with a vital disc that I can't remember the importance of. Something about aliens, arms dealers and African tribesman. You fucking wish I was kidding.

Long story short, he slides down the side of the building. Without even a crash mat. And jumps up to jog and somersault a few feet along the way. Seriously. It took a man with the value for his own mortality as a spelunking espresso in my mouth two weeks to work up the courage to do this thing. No fancy camera tricks. No CGI. This scene is exactly what it looks like. One man daring dozens of stories of sheeted glass to shed the tiny Asian scampering over them and shrug him off to his doom. Which just goes to show, sheer balls beats sheer inclines, every time.

Brian Fucking Blessed

Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a golden age of the strange. But also of the beard. Facial hair has made its ascension once again. And no-one, be they greasy hipster trash or light beer sodden, ZZ Top mountain man, rocks the man fuzz like the arbiter of all that is gentlemanly, Brian Blessed.

That magnificent tangle is the crucible, from which the powers of masculinity are drawn. This man is more than man. He is legend. He is the oldest living person to make it to the magnetic north pole on foot. He climbed Everest not once, not twice but three times, never making the summit as he had to go back to save his friend's life, as well as Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro. He is the only known human to have impersonated Pavarotti and not looked absolutely ridiculous. He owns a black belt in judo and is a championship boxer, but it isn't like he really needs either as he could just roar any opponent to death. And anyone who could command the hawkmen in that outfit, is deserving of all the respect you have to give.

This is, quite simply, the most awesome man to ever hold a Y chromosome.

Worst Things Ever: 7 Colossal Failures at Cuteness on the Internet

Boring.

NOTE: This article is dedicated to one of my best friend's two cats, somewhat hilariously named Doggie. Recently the victim of an attack by some bitch stray, despite now missing a section of tail and a worrying tendency to belt harmless chocolate labs about eight times his size around the chops, he is still demonstrably both more awesome and adorable than anything you're about to see.

And cute as a button.

If the internet’s good for one thing it’s photos of cervices but if there had to be a second place, it would go to the culture of ‘cute’. The human race has amassed millions of photos, GIFs and videos of babies, animals and road signs imitating adult human behaviours, pulling funny faces or simply existing in an area with some arbitrarily designated adorableness, like a shoe or KFC family bucket.

Whether this landslide of supposedly charming images was a response to the generally more mature material (read: filthy, filthy cervices) that ruled the internet waters, or just another diversion that wasn’t masturbating or laughing, most of these images succeed in their goal of bringing a little ray of joy into the vapid lives of vapid people and a few that were laughing and masturbating anyway.

But not always. Sometimes, the easiest of tasks produce the most glorious of failures and catching your pet being cute is really fucking easy. It doesn’t have to learn any complex skills like 1960s jingle singing or playing video games, all you have to do is get it to wear a bow tie for the fraction of a second it takes to snap a digital or just find the last empty KFC bucket you used to poison your family you witless piece of human trash. 

Failing to catch your baby or tiny animal being cute is like going into the kitchen to make instant ramen, burning your hand on the fridge, setting fire to the sink and impregnating a fruit flan. And my how these images failed to be cute.

Ripper Roo, Passive-Aggressive Dick

Now traditionally, kangaroos aren't among the accepted canon of cute things. Joeys maybe. And even then the adorableness typically stems from the kid being inside his mother's pouch, the defining example of cuteness attached to a sense of place. It's the zoological equivalent of a chinchilla poking its head out of a tuxedo pocket. 

Seriously internet? I'm the first person to think of that? Well I never.

Maybe the other reason you don't see kangaroos around the repositories of cute is that not many people have access to them. We're not all boxing promoters or the spawn of criminals living on an island where natural selection was too scared to make an appearance and just left monsters to rule (incidentally, in politics we call this scheme 'Thunderdome'). But the owner of Rippa', for that is how I imagine his name being pronounced with his owner's stupid, larcenous mouth, not only owns a 'roo but a camera too! And a back garden you wouldn't keep a fucking war criminal in.

And you can see the amount of planning that went into making this hilarious screw-up. Lots. It is so lots.

Rippa's owner: "C'mon Rip! Oi got the camera ready! Let's play ball! Fosters and barbies and deadly poisonous snakes!"

Ripper: [wordlessly] "Fuck you."

This is such a violent swing away from cute that it makes it all the way back around to goddamn hilarious. It looks like the mardy kid in the playground steadfastly refusing to have fun. Except he has big fuzzy ears instead of gothy makeup. Maybe kangaroos are just assholes too but I'm not going to lie, they're becoming increasingly appealing as pets. 

Echo the Dolphin, Convicted Sex Offender

Ah, dolphins. The graceful brainboxes of the ocean. Patron animals of strippers and eight year old girls alike, humans can't get enough dolphin in their lives. They're many people's definition of a perfect creature: smart, pretty and callous, cannibalistic rapists. 

Seriously, fuck dolphins. Overrated doesn't cover it. They're the Coldplay of the animal kingdom but they're on our jewellery, mascotting our American football teams and in our burgers and worst of all, now they're taking our women. 

Glossolalia, Sleep Enchanter

OK so kangaroos are kind of a long shot. They're not for everyone, I get that. And people have had entirely the wrong idea about dolphins for years. But puppies? Who doesn't love puppies? Well not me anymore.

Did you notice when the camera panned out a tiny bit that this little guy isn't tucked up in his plaid-lined doggy bed, but planted in some dude's crotch? And the kind of dude that likes to keep wee little dolls near his junk while he's trou-down? Because I really wish I hadn't. 

If you were wondering why this steamy situation didn't give 'Legs Akimbo' a rager, it is worth mentioning that he's Japanese. They're into some weird shit over there. Just sayin'. I mean if you told me that this man had undergone radical transformative surgery to replace his genitals with a plush puppy toy possessed by the spirit of Lee Evans, I'd thank you for making sense of his video. 

Otherwise, it's your standard puppy that takes Congress with the Beast in its sleep and in Japan, that is the way, way less likely option. Every time. 

McFluffles, The Great Maw

Right, so now puppies have failed us too. But how about two puppies playing? Surely that couldn't go too badly? I mean they can get a little rough sometimes but that's what makes it cute! It reminds us of how we were as youngsters; bumping, jostling, howling racial epithets it speaks to us is my point. 

Feel free to speak to me (I'm reachable by phone, email and carrier pigeon) and explain how, in the seven burning hells, someone thought a picture of one puppy devouring the head and presumably soul of another qualified for a photo thread on a cute collection website. It's not even uniquely psychopathic behaviour, there are loads just like it. I really hate to do this although not really, I present to you... Silence of the Puppies! In 4D and coming to an Internets near you! [For optimal experience, please press play on the mp3 player that came with your patented Silence of the Puppies 4D goggles now. It should only play Yakety Sax.]

 

 

 

"But they're just kissing!" said a nearby retard. And right then, the sheer, cosmic emptiness of their head caused their bulletproof-thick skull to collapse inwards on itself like a dying star and me to in no way reverse my belief that these images are completely bonkers.

Nekomata, Juvenile Hellcat

Christ, there's no way a kitten could fail to be cute, right? They're like rainbows and teddies stuffed with candy an- oh fuck it. Surprise!

Look at that face. That's something you'd expect to be a terrified poacher's last vision. And it only gets worse when you start watching. 

For all of you with difficulty reading, the owners of this video titled it 'Kitten sounds like a squeaking door' with all the literary flair we've come to expect from Youtubers. But that thing doesn't sound like any door any human would make without in some way violating an ancient burial ground. My issue is, why aren't Nekomata, the Dread's owners more concerned about that fact that their doors are clearly all made from powderised banshee bones? 

Bomchicka-Wa-WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?

That's right. That's a ginger tomboy railroading another cat. If your cute receptors just overloaded with revulsion and you instinctively vomited starlight, that's perfectly natural. Well, your response is. It doesn't sound like your digestive system is perfectly natural. I mean starlight's mostly radiation but anyway the fact that a photo of some alley cat straddling a tabby qualifies as cute in some maniac's mind is pretty jarring. To put it lightly.

Think of it this way: replace the animals, complete in the positioning and relative interpreted race or background that you can get from this, with humans. Now, would Google allow this under a Safe Search? Of course it fucking wouldn't ergo, this is perverted to an extent even a furry elbow-deep in the Marquis de Sade couldn't empathise with.

Look how still she's lying too. Man, I bet she gives cat head by kneeling down and blowing raspberries at it. Now not only have I forgotten the sensation of 'aww' but my erection's gone too. Frigid bitch.

Max Charger, Snake Charmer

So cuteness has become but a faint, foggy memory replaced by horror, confusion and sexual depravity. Well, welcome to adult life, star traveler, the rest of us were well aware of the world we hu-mans live in. But babies. Babies, babies, babies.

We are biologically programmed to not despise these things. Evolution gifted us the ability to drown out all the squealing and spraying of bodily fluids from every opening that these things do, provided it is our own. And that you're a man. Women seem to find even others' positively enthralling. Well congratulations on doing literally the one thing that you are hardwired, down to your fucking core, to do at each and every opportunity. You made a baby. Nice work. Now point a camera at it and let the magic happen already.

Ok, that one was kinda cute. I'm not a monster. 

Why 'Defiance' is the least original show on TV

You might have heard of the new and original sci-fi drama Defiance from the internet or SyFy's fastidious marketing campaign or during sex with me because for the last week it's all I've been able to think about. And after finally getting around to watching the feature length pilot, a few things have struck me.

Truly, the SyFy channel has produced nothing of note since its inception. Nothing but a parade of low-budget, throwaway shite tailored for nerds without the eye for cynical, critical judgement so endemic to our kind. Let's face it, TV is not the medium for fans of sci-fi and fantasy. Barring Game of Thrones (and that's just HBO's Rome with more dragons), we're tragically under-served on the small screen. So it came as a pleasant surprise to me when I heard that a rollicking star odyssey with a little money behind it was on its way.

Let's get the boring stuff out of the way first. I have a lot of time for the ambition on show here. It doesn't just reflect the budget; if Michael Bay has taught us anything it's that pouring a developing nation worth of cash into visual design is never a guarantee of good looks but there's a particularly good use of colour here. Too many post-apocalypses are all muddy brown and dismal grey vistas of ruined buildings and dust. I live in London, I see enough of that even without all the rapey bandits.

Sure I could go on pointing out Defiance's already detailed lore, decent character designs and other ways in which it's pretty good, but isn't it more fun to just rip on it for stealing from Firefly? Of course it is and it does. It's a Firefly clone without shame is what it is. True, there are worse programs to plagiarise from but sadly, SyFy copied all of them as well.

'Evil' red lights, fake curse words and rampant softcore sexuality from Battlestar Galactica.

This might get me spat on in the street (except only outside Comic-Con) but Battlestar Galactica was just Hollyoaks in space. Or, err, what do you guys across the pond have? The Brady Bunch? That should upset some people. Anyway, it was conceited, repetitive and looked worse than Bill O'Reilly after a drunken amateur face painting session devolved into a knife fight.

No doubt it was an effort to be faithful to the original '78 version that no-one remembered or cared about. But the only attempt to bring the formula into the modern day was to occasionally show Starbuck's meaty thighs while she pranced around in Ripley's cryo-sleep outfit from Aliens. Let this be a lesson to anyone thinking of rebooting classic nerd TV: they all looked like arse back then because the tech wasn't there to prevent everything from looking like arse. You're only doing it as fan service and they'll all complain anyway regardless of what you do so you might as well make the Cylon Centurions not look like brushed stainless steel kettles or the Raiders like Fisher-Price toys.

Don't get me wrong, Battlestar Galactica was still fun. I remember a few, sparse moments with something resembling fondness and clearly so did the producers of Defiance. Main protagonist Nolan is in the titular town less than ten minutes before PG-13 screwing the madame (with a terrible misunderstanding of how brothel management works) in a sex scene with all the eroticism of trainspotting and less nudity. Nolan has already been established as a character that thinks with his dick at this point but his doesn't have the problem-solving talent of Don Draper's. He's a clutzy Casanova now and in one season's time still will be. But maybe with a few more scars and a thousand yard stare.

Because he'll probably have seen shit, yo. 

I feel like I've spent too long belittling Battlestar so let's speed this up. The Votan race's ships all have the ridiculous crimson lights that are the international sci-fi sign for 'owners of this technology are evil' and the ludicrously named Irathient race of aliens have some swears that sound just enough like boring Earth curses to carry a modicum of weight when Nolan or his Irathient ward, Irisa expel them and to avoid the interstellar wrath of the frackin' censors.



Aliens with make-up and protagonist unconcerned by lack of Earth vagina from Star Trek.

A wise man with a sexily silky voice once said that 'Commander Worf's head looks like a fanny' and not only was he right, but welcome to touch me wherever and whenever he likes. Look I get it, CGI is expensive and if you want to have recurring characters with a lot of face time that're non-human, you need a cheaper way to announce that fact to the section of the audience that's too drunk to listen to the script.

Sci-fi has taught us that aliens are just like us. Except with the minutest variance in face skin. The Irathient (Christ, I can feel my genitals taking my use of that word as proof that I don't need them) have smaller noses, dumber contact lenses and a circular tattoo at the bridge. If you were a speciesist, it wouldn't take many space beers for you to make a terrible mistake at the town of Defiance's silent disco.

I will never blame you. Sometimes even I forget. 

But of course, Nolan ain't no bigot. He adopted an alien as his daughter so it's only a matter of time before he gets space fever and beds one of the series's seven non-human races. I swear, the only reason none of the more boneable aliens have blue skin is because Shatner's legal team would fast wire down onto the set and mow down all the writers with photon rifles.

Literally everything else from Firefly. 

Please, can you spare any change? We haven't eaten in weeks. 

Defiance doesn't exactly play its themes close to the chest. Once you've given a grizzled stranger a 'lawman' badge you've officially given Subtlety license to take the rest of the season off.

Sci-fi is no stranger to the whiskery and whiskey-soaked insertion of Spaghetti Western influences. It could be argued that it all started with the bloated father of all modern space shenanigans, Star Wars. The ne'er-do-well smuggler, the conscience-lacking bounty hunter in the employ of the nebulous invader, the damsel in distress; it might not have been intentional but the tropes of Sergei Leone were there.

Of course it was Joss Whedon who made it stylistically prevalent. The crew of Serenity are outlaws. They carry glorified six-shooters, yada yada. So when you make a sci-fi TV series with even the slightest horsey-whiff of Old West, you expose yourself to comparison to Firefly. And one of the things I oddly love about Defiance is that the creators don't give a fuck about it. They approach their Western themes with outright enthusiasm. They gleefully introduce racial disharmony amidst aliens and humans as if it's in any way original. They've created a civic society whose dynamics are so utterly derivative, it's almost charming. Almost.

I don't know about you, but I'm putting this juvenile theft down to genuine excitement that people have thrown actual money into SyFy's mouldy cage for once. And you people don't have Dr Who, so whatever anybody says about Defiance, it's worth keeping. For now.