Worst Things Ever: The 5 Most Hated Things In Britain

If the British excel at anything, its thinly veiled references to fucking but in our defence, we had to focus our powerful, yet sensual, national energy into something other than marching into someone else's country and taking all their tea or cardamon. Especially since that kind of thing became a bit outmode. But since we can't realistically spend all our time enjoying Kenneth Williams or George Formby come up with cute synonyms for banging we fill the rest of our time whinging. Also rugby, I suppose.

As a nation, we've narrowed the art of complaining down to a sleek, delicate little dance -- the rustle of a newspaper, the derisive snort rippling across the milky surface of a cup of Yorkshire tea, the tedious stereotyping -- all I'm saying is there's a reason so many people declared war on us throughout history.

Despite our inherent negativity though, we remain a generally courteous people. Not given to especially public acts of intolerance or criticism, unless you're in a pub and badmouth the local football team in which case, fuck that. But otherwise, we mask the ubiquitous undercurrent of hatred with that stutterey, oafish charm absolutely no-one that's ever been at war with us falls for, with one exception of course.

L-l-l-ladies.

Stoicism is one of the great, surviving philosophical creeds of modern Britain, which is why the typical things other nations and indeed our own yokels with no capacity for self-reflection think we despise just don't hold true. Take queue-jumping, for example. Our most tedious standup comics discuss it all the time as some kind of anathema to British morality. And while we're certainly never happier inwardly fuming at some tosser cutting in line at Starbucks with absolutely no sense of irony, no-one ever does anything about it. It's a tic. A pet hate. Whereas the following heinous crimes against our great United Kingdom generate genuine hostility.

Jimmy Savile

"Now then, now then. Eviiiiiillllll."

Before Jimmy Savile was outed as the unholy union between Hitler's left and only bollock and Sauron's ring finger in a test tube to the music of Gary Glitter, he was one of the nation's most beloved and quoted entertainers. Needless to say, the second he was in the ground the allegations began. And it was a tragically textbook case of ethical advertising. Politicians and personalities fell over themselves in desperate attempts to condemn his actions firstest and hardest:

"Paedophilia is the worst crime in the world!" The entire world commented.
"And I'd also like to go on record as saying malaria and Hitler and a colossal meteor made of butt cancer smashing into NW London would all be bad things! We say no! The shockwaves created by the impact of a meteor made of butt cancer is not I repeat not, an acceptable way for good British people to go!"

Not to undersell the obvious horrors of child molestation, but morality isn't some kind of sliding scale with Nelson Mandela at one end and Jimmy Savile at the other. It was just the blind eagerness of everyone unconnected to him shamelessly milking it that was upsetting. But not nearly as upsetting as the fact that these same allegations had been going for decades and just mothballed.

Speaking as a cynic (the only way I do anything, apparently), the worst thing about the media's furious and universal demonisation of this terrible sex criminal is that none of our comics are allowed to imitate him anymore. Es-fucking-specially on a show aired by the BBC. That's like a ban on American comedians making gay jokes about Phil Collins because it was discovered he was into unisex grave-robbing. Or jokes about Republicans eating babies because their poll predictions are actually based on kindergarten necromancy.You're pulling maybe half of an entire nation's comic material.

The French, The Germans

"Oui. Je suis le Francaise typique. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir? You detestable, tea-drinking, food-ruining, boilerplate sheep-fucker? Oh, désolé, I mean, madame?" [I will never forgive you for Agincourt].

Britons have been in more wars than Fox News but with a success rate that I'm not embarrassed as an actual historian to find makes me a little tumescent. Granted, my field was Imperial Rome and its transition to the Western centre of Catholicism but to anyone still awake reading this a tightness in the trouser is a natural result of national pride. I'm not going to lie. I love the fact that Britannia really did use to rule the waves. Mostly. If weren't for those pesky French and Dutch and Portuguese and so on.

But herein lies a strange paradox. We, at least politically, denounce imperialism and warmongering! All up in imperialists' faces! Take that despots of the world! Forgetting, please, how much of that shit we were up to pre-conclusion of WWII. But we don't stand for any of that nonsense these days. No sir! Right up until the moment someone mentions old Bones-Apart Napoleon and we grin knowingly to ourselves, thinking: "Damn right, France. Try that kind of shit again. Please. It would make our day. We're only too happy to get the dusty old cane out of the cupboard and give you a damn good thrashing all over again." In the international community, we're Clint Eastwood and you're the bank robbing punk.

We glorify our military victories over France and Germany so much you'd think it was some kind of centuries-old competition and it would be, if we could get those fuckers over the Channel to care about it. And that's the ultimate reason we hate those guys: we beat them. In our heads, they're foaming over it. Livid, that a tiny island mostly comprised of swamp and inbreeding with the cultural elegance of cattle rape and a cuisine of same could best the homeland of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire and glorious Prussian kingdoms. But they don't. They could give a toss. And that irks us like you would not believe.

Sure, we justify our dislike of our most immediate continental neighbours with more superficial reasons - like our general image of the French as lazy, alcoholic cowards riddled with hideous, flesh-eating STIs but I think we'd forgive them all that if they declared war on us again or we could just beat them at football.

Morris Dancing

I'll admit that I came into this draft knowing absolutely that I'd be plonking Morris dancing down here somewhere and yet equally certain I know absolutely nothing about it.

I still don't know anything about it, except that, trust me, we can't stand it.

Piers Morgan

And fuck this guy, apparently.

The Daily Mail

In the spirit of honesty, I actually do read The Daily Mail, a newspaper written for intolerant nutbars destined to one day patrol the docks at Folkestone with a sniper rifle. And that single admittance just instantly lowered my sexual capital with any British woman more liberal than fucking Galactos with an audible clunk. But I read it because its hilarious. However, if I were an actual advocate of The Daily Mail, this article would be entirely different.

With entries like lowering house prices, benefit fraud, brown people, terrifying livestock diseases carried by brown people and all the ways those disease-ridden brown people are going to sneak into the country disguised as blue-collar furniture, the whole article would have sounded like a paranoid right-wing shut-in screaming for help from his bomb-proof basement because he spilt his canned chilli. Or at least, more so.

You may not think multicultural tolerance is something a decent person would have to learn and you may also have heard that Inuits have more than twenty words for 'snow' and while that isn't strictly true, it is that the Daily Mail have more than seventy words for 'immigrant' and you pronounce every one of them with a blood-curdling scream.

An Ode To Being Fat

You could fit an entire goddamn gateaux down these. And don't think I haven't tried it.  

Everyone has their own preferred charity or cause they like to support and mine is being 25% beer and batter by volume. And that isn't even the first reason birds attack me on sight. Clearly, this is a subject very close to my cholesterol-choked heart so when I'm not busy planning a suicide Jackie Chan would be proud of, neglecting my family and friends and being generally awful, I like to make my weekly exercise quota waving goodbye to the Domino's delivery guy. But hey, if you want my life to hold some greater meaning or purpose so bad, feel free to have me rendered down into glue.

If you don't, or just want some absolution for the KFC or whatever you're stuffing down your cake socket at this moment in time, then good news: I'd like to take a moment away from whinging about how most of the luxurious trappings of modern life are flailing shit and reflect, however briefly, on the silver lining to be found in being something that 19th Century sailors could be tricked into fucking. 

My therapist, should he or she ever materialise, would probably vindicate thinking positive at least. As would anyone else lucky enough not to have suffered some recent and severe head trauma that smashed out all their common sense. 

This belated episode of I'm So Sorry is brought to you by Gloucestershire's Primary Mental Health Service! At time of writing, only left eight fucking months with nothing but the cold, numbing mercy of gin for support! And nothing has ever made me hate superscript more!

All the maybe five regular readers here will know that among other things, self-deprecation, cynicism and fat jokes aren't at much of a premium here. They'll also be aware that the title up there is a tad misleading. I know as much about odes as I do electrolytes and it may have been on my English syllabus a decade ago, but I still think iambic pentameter is Latin for Five Guys Burger & Fries. So there won't be a whole lot of poetic elegance in the following reasons being overweight kind of rocks. Albeit slowly and with a good deal of wheezing. 

[Special Note: If like me, you've already just accepted the myriad and sweaty joys of being portly and just want to enjoy the simpler things in life like bacon, cheese and auto-tune, you can just skip this whole thing and watch the following. Vaguely Interesting, Non-Vegan Note: No matter how much you think you like anything, you will never love anything even half as much as this guy loves fast food.]

1. Fuckitism.

Using the gift of 'absence of head smash', I'm able to hazard a guess that if you care deeply about your weight: every decision you make hurts. Every slip from your horrible, masochistic regime is all the more crushing because you know exactly how many calories that delicious ham and Emmental croissant set you back from your tragic daily cou-MHNHNHMNHM.

I'm not saying that these people necessarily deserve the Seppuku-ish agony they put themselves through every time they inevitably fail to meet the impossible standards they set themselves, I'm just saying it's Schadenfreude. And also funny. Because to a normal person, having the odd moment of weakne-Oh Christ. OK look, I'm well aware that the 'normal person' identifier barely means anything at the best of times, let alone this context, so in the name of simplicity, let's set some ground rules before we go any further. 

Nobody's denying that there're people out there who unironically go to spin classes and make packed lunches out of 'Superfoods' and count calories and measure their entire worth as humans by their body fat index so let's just call these people 'twats' and be done with it, OK?

I'm also not saying that dedicating yourself to building the body of a Grecian god is a bad thing, it's just that mythic figures like Hercules managed to do so without the dumptruck full of whey and self-importance. Plus they had personalities. Ah, but I guess I shouldn't be shitty. Artists like Michelangelo proved these meatheads burn half their daily calories alone just fretting about their tiny cocks. 

[LEFT] "This finger smells like your girlfriend, fatboy."
This could be you!
Enrol at your local gymnasium today!
We promise not to laugh at it!

This idiocy, thankfully, isn't the norm. What is the norm, is a more difficult question. So let's just attribute normalcy to anyone who on occasion aspires to being a straight-lace twat and on most others is like you (maybe?) and me; having sensibly realised that food stops becoming food the second you start over-analysing its chemical content and just accepts that much of what makes life worth living in this first world where our every basic, life-perpetuating need is met, is not going to bestow one with everlasting health. Curiously outdated notion that that is notwithstanding.

Personally, I thought the great benefit of humanity's sentience was that, yes, we're all aware of our immediate mortality but we developed things like Star Wars and Nutella waffles and poetry or whatever so that we didn't have to spend every minute of the day weeping about it. So basically what I'm saying is that anyone who takes any interest in their own health is evolutionarily backward. 

Which leads me, in an oddly roundabout way given our subject matter, to my point. If you have even the slightest bit of self-awareness, you should have realised that the odd peanut butter and fudge ice cream doughnut tower garnished with Baconators isn't going to kill you at this point, but a million fucking other things out there are only too happy to. So why the Hell wouldn't you get your fill before one of them succeeds?

I mean, I could be behind you right now with a bucketful of venomous scorpions. So, would you rather that or Dauphinoise potatoes with extra Riserva and Grana Padana? Because I have those too. Unfortunately, if you work in recruitment, they're all in the same tupperware. And while you were Googling those cheese names, the whole delicious and poisonous mess is in your bed and your screams only make it funnier.

2. The Boring Sociological Kind Of Stuff Underachievers Study When They Can't Make The Grades For Real Degrees But They're Always Annoyingly Good-Looking & Likeable So You Just Fucking Know They'll Do Fine. The Shits.

"Hi! We're plus size models!
So in other words, some twisted specialism for deviants who like their humans to look like normal humans normally do." 

Time was, looking like ancient mummy wrappings stretched over a rake was the be all and end all. Of modelling and therefore acting; reacting, advertising, archaeology, pathology, mixology - you name it. Of course, it still is but thankfully someone with enough cultural stopping power and basic human dignity recognised that women could still be sexy even if they couldn't fall down a drain without hitting the sides. Naturally, regular, non-awful men were done masturbating to the emerging photos of these radical new 'plus size models' long before liberal journalists were hacking out articles about how progressive they were. 

So why don't we call that one a draw.

3. Fate.

Deal with it. 

If you're one of those insufferable types who believe anyone can be fit with a few small lifestyle changes and can-do spirit then you clearly don't know anything about genetics or psychology or physiology or even those mystifying shapes those weaklings you see at the gym struggling to care about jazzercise call 'words' but in the spirit of inclusivity, I'd like to call your attention, you people, to a paragraph up there where I proactively called you a twat and as a bonus, congratulate you on making it this far down a page not dedicated to protein shake recipes.

Everyone is different and not just in the drum-circling hippie sense. We all know that one lucky bastard who appears to be able to eat whatever they want and do nothing but smoke sticky and watch 60s Batman reruns yet not be sufficiently chocolate-based to have the melting point of human mouth. That isn't some kind of trick. Some people can just do that. Which by the same token, means some people are not going to go from flotation to fucking aid in a matter of months, dingbat.

Forgetting, for the moment, any kind of persecution you may have suffered within your family unit for soaking up extra gravy with your lovehandles as a child, being overweight has still got this weirdly medieval stigma attached to it in mass media as well as the obvious health and fitness circle jerks. You'd have to be pretty goddamned deranged to think 'enjoying pasta and cheese a little too much' should morally rank down there with bonking a whore to death with a condom made of glaives but I'm not here to make fun of Catholics. There are just, ha, just literally so many ways to go about that I don't have the time.

Just in case you didn't get that. 

Ultimately though, in some ways, if you were overweight as a child and young adult, things may have picked up for you in later life. For example, while the naturally hale, healthy and handsome kids were out socially and sexually experimenting and apparently learning that no possible achievement in life is greater than clumsily fucking a higher number (in either sense) than your friends; us mentally healthy types were out (and I use the both the terms 'out' and 'healthy' quite wrongly) cultivating rich inner gardens.

Exciting mental landscapes full of fledgling hopes for the future and awareness of our feelings, motivations, strengths, weaknesses and strange, schizophrenic fan fiction ideas like if Optimus Prime had shown up during the Renaissance and declared that if he were to fail to woo the Doge's daughter before Carnivale then Megatron would declare war on the Orc-pal States and Pope Palpatine IX would have no choice but retaliate with the Vatican Star doom fortress and ad-libbing this kind of paint-by-numbers 'random' nerd shit makes my head hurt.

But that's the point. Not that it makes my head hurt. Freakin' everything does that ever since I went off my meds weeks ago. No, human potential is in the mind. No-one's done anything impressive with their loins since that first, scared and presumably sticky lad sweet-talked a jar of peanut butter into anal. And there'll always be some species of flea that can triple jump higher relative to its size or tiger that's better at mauling or being adorable.

Doesn't matter how many miles you can go on a rowing machine, I will pick Mr Whiskers here over you everyday and twice on Sunday. 'Cause that's when the two of us go round the houses of people who bullied me at school and I laugh as he poops out their household pets and children onto their front lawns. 

We've risen to the top of the global food chain not because a select few of our species can bench press three Oprah Winfreys or even bring three ninjas to orgasm with the backend of a kunai, but because we can write operas and odes and stirring porno narratives. Also assault rifles.

Someone came up with the idea of being able to shoot anyone who looks at us funny with a thousand missiles from space, with iPhones. You think that guy managed that by working on his core strength whatever that means - (spoiler) nothing? No, doing anything even remotely impressive with your fleshy, mortal body these days is best left to Olympians, future Guinness world record holders for number of bees on any one face at one time, and porn stars.

The human form has limits and we reached the extents of most of those in the last century. Which makes the absolute mental and physical torture of denying ourselves the few corporeal pleasures left in the culturally stagnant and cynical corporate dystopia we live in all the more pointless. I would have said fruitless there, but I don't want to disparage the many wonders of fruit by associating it with the last sentence, plus, it may have sent the wrong message. God. Who knew being so privileged could be so simultaneously boring and depressing? Apart from, you know, every even remotely successful society throughout human history.

4. Superiority. 

And The Will To Dominate All Life. Provided It Has Lasagna & Moules E Frites & Tacos & Those Fun, Multicoloured Pickles You Get With Most Japanese Meals. Ooh, And Amaretti Morbidi. Love Those.

Kneel! Kneel you mewling quims. Don't make me retcon you out of this whole mess with my magic space stick. Because I will. See if I don't. 

If you're anything like me: handsome, talented, completely dissociative and longing for a death that might at least merit the odd retweet from the Darwin Awards, then I am just, so, so sorry but more relevantly you may have gone your whole life shrugging off shitty comments about your weight.

This may seem strange since I obviously have so much wisdom to offer from a life totally not typified by catastrophic mistakes, alcohol, bagel and Bioware abuse but I only realised this point a few days ago. Namely, that the single fraction of a second it takes some mouth-breathing, lowest common denomination, inbred marsupial-fucker to choke out the word 'chubby', or make suggestive motions towards the latest set of office reports as if that in some way insinuates you'd eaten the last is more than enough to prove that you, the arbitrarily 'inferior' party are in fact infinitely superior to this malignant rectal wart in absolutely every meaningful way. 

And this is not flouncey revenge fantasy. All you normals have to do is redirect a little energy away from lifting a heavy object and putting it down again to your malnourished brains to see that making a pejorative comment about someone else's weight in this day and age (provided you're not fucking twelve of course) instantly marks you as, for one thing, utterly lacking in imagination. And also duller things like emotional maturity, empathy, intellect, I could go on. So I will. Wit, independent thought, decency, pride, good looks, testicles and/or clitoricicles un-riddled by STDs and insects and so forth.

Remember how an entire US State voted this guy Governor on the basis that he could 'lift heavy things up and put em' down real good'? Not that I wouldn't. Three words: Real Total Recall. Also Running Man. And Commando. And Predator and True Lies and Last Action Hero oh my. Hell, I'd vote this guy Chancellor of the Exchequer if he dropkicked George Osborne in the tits first. 

I mean if it was me you were hissing porcine noises at, there're at least a dozen other things you could rightfully take the piss out of me for purely at face value. Like how I'm inanely giggling to myself in the street having come up with one of these strange 'jokes' your instincts say are at your expense in the preceding paragraphs. Or the strange and powerful erection I have right now for the print on my desk of Jack Lemmon mixing Manhattans in a hot water bottle and dressed as the hooker the rest of the trailer park evicted.

Making a fat joke in person is such a culturally low and intellectually unchallenging feat that if, after the last few days, you were to aim one at me, it would have the opposite intended effect. And, somewhat confusedly, I'm medicated for that not to happen [I think? They all look like Skittles at this point]. I would actually feel better about myself and you would become the butt of the real joke. That I came up with with my smooth, throbbing brain-on. Such as:

"Hey, Chubby".

"Oh hey, you. You know it is so heartwarming to know that you learned to read and write. I should let your mother's abortion doctor know that the worst mistake of his career is doing so well. Maybe he could pin your dried-out hippocampus opposite the broken condom and Kopparberg Mixed Fruits that led to your birth in the family scrapbook?" 

Totally monopolised by shitheads.
Not that they're not welcome to cough medicine that tastes like Type 2 diabetes. 

It was a long but I hope at least uniquely pointless road to get here, but if you hadn't guessed already: I suck at advice (not to mention not being full of Caesar-flavoured things). Even on something I know as inherently well as being overweight. Sad isn't it? I've gone my entire life knowing literally no alternative. But whatever, I'm going to have a concluding crack at this anyway. Maybe it could count towards my next community service in advance. 

'Being thin' can eat a bag of low calorie dicks. 

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.