From Ross Noble to Johnny Vegas: Comedians of the Year

The best Christmas TV wasn’t Christmas TV but catching up on a series I hadn't managed to see on its first or subsequent runs. Ross Noble’s Freewheelin reminded me of a kind of television they generally no longer make, except, perhaps, by accident. It is TV straight from the 1980s, when Channel 4 earned its reputation for innovation by simply making room in its schedule for the unexpected.

In Noble’s show, he travels around the UK based on random suggestions made to him via Twitter. In one episode he even travelled as far as visiting St Helens, though I can’t say I recognised the parts he visited. Unlike his visits to other towns, Noble avoided the shopping district. St Helens was portrayed as an utter dump. Perhaps it is, though that will be particularly evident if you choose to look at one derelict shop in some backstreet away from the centre of town.

In a way, it was a bit of a disappointment but not unexpected. This region has a reputation and you don’t often hear people talk about the famous writer, wit, or intellectual from St Helens. In the national psyche, we’re the stuff of twisted rugby players, boxers with flattened senses, and the comedian Johnny Vegas.

Vegas made a welcome appearance in the St Helen’s episode, though I suspect that was down to his friendship with Noble rather than the producer trying to fill the show with celebrities. Unfortunately, they did that also, which was the series’ one failing. The format’s strength is that it actually involved real people in everyday situations which Noble warped with his brand of spontaneous comedy. It’s actually gave a little attention to parts of the county that rarely get included in the TV schedules. Yet I guess it’s unsurprising that even the best show should betrays its ethos by sadly conformed to the usual TV formula of replacing real people with celebrities. Does a tour of the UK always have to involve a stop off at Paul Daniel’s house? It’s as though a tour of the UK couldn’t be complete without involving some luvvie from that other world. I’ve said it before that celebrities ruined Twitter but must they also ruin a TV based around Twitter. It seems that they must.

The other thing I’ve found myself watching over Christmas are Dave’s repeats of Have I Got News For You. In many respects, I agree with people who say its lots its edge and it’s a show that desperately needs a revamp. If it does, I don’t think it need be a huge change. Simply getting rid of the guest presenters would be a step in the right direction. By its very nature, satire is the comedy of the outsider. It’s the stuff of the alternative point of view. It’s why HIGNFY rightly belongs on BBC2 and not on the nation’s main TV channel. Like the alternative Queen’s speech, it should be about standing apart from the herd, directing scorn where scorn will sting. Now on BBC1 and hosted by many of the people it should set out to mock, the show has been co-opted by the establishment and it now rarely bites. Although I don’t like the man’s comedy but perhaps ideal host would be Frankie Boyle simply because he might upset a few people in the process. An even better host would be Stewart Lee, though I doubt if it would be his thing and he probably wouldn’t do it anyway. The problem with so much satire in the UK is that it’s become safely contained within establishment rules, appropriated by the establishment as if to control disenchantment. Gone are the days when politicians would step in to try to stop the broadcast of an episode of Spitting Image. Indeed, it’s a sign of how bad satire has become that I actually miss Spitting Image, which in its later years was itself a twisted version of its former self.

It also reminds me that over Christmas, I watched a biography about David Frost. Among the few things I took away from the show was the degree to which Frost was himself always destined for an establishment role. Although he made his name in satire, he wasn’t by nature satirical or, for that matter, either a writer or performer. The great Peter Cook was said to have resented the way Frost took the Fringe out of theatres and put it on TV.

It’s why I hope Ross Noble remains on the outside of that world. I hope he manages to stay disconnected from the London establishment. I had worried that Johnny Vegas might have become ‘too London’. When Noble met him, he was in a London pub, hundreds of miles away from where his career began in the St Helens Citadel. Then I read about him laying into the establishment at the typically woeful British Comedy Awards. You need to skip to four minutes to get the meat of the business…


Of course, part of this might just have been his usual shtick and I worry that the London set laugh because of the way he says things rather than the things he says. But what he says has real significance to me given I spend most of my days lamenting about the state of comedy writing in the UK.



Is it any surprise that the elected king and queen of British comedy should be Jack Whitehall and Miranda Hart? It makes me even more jaded and I have even less desire to write comedy or drawn cartoons, hence the reason I've spent most of my time over Christmas drawing bad caricatures on my upgraded Note. I don’t think I’ve ever been this frustrated in my own work, when my writing, typified by my Stan book, gets nowhere but two extremely unfunny but establishment figures are lauded as comic geniuses. It sickens me to watch Miranda claim Eric Morecambe as her own, somehow associating her mediocre talent to his unequaled star. I suppose it frustrates me that Johnny Vegas is laughed off as if he’s the eccentric uncle spoiling the party when he’s actually speaking truths from the heart that should be acknowledged as wisdom. If I’ve been critical of Vegas in the past, I suppose it was out of my own sense of frustration that my local area should be associated with the Vegas character. It seemed to play into all the southern prejudices that people around here are uneducated, boorish, and borderline alcoholic. Yet Michael Pennington has more humour talent in his little finger than Whitehall has displayed in his entire career. Whitehall, however, is the son of Michael Whitehall and there you have the truth of the world. So, for that one moment of sublime genius, Vegas wins my vote for comedian of the year. Not that it matters.

A Small Town Cyclist Going Green At Tesco

There’s nothing glamorous about being a small town cyclist. There’s no talk about carbon alloy frames, cadence, or even how great my buttocks look in Lycra. I don’t wear Lycra. I cycle in my jeans, wear an old coat, a rucksack and a shabby NY Giant’s baseball cap. I have an old bike with twenty four gears but only sixteen that work. I don’t clean the bike as often as I should yet it can go at a good rate, climb some pretty steep hills, and occasionally overtake some recent convert to cycling dressed as a Wiggins and riding some spank shining new Claude Butler racer.

I’m the sort of cyclist that rarely gets talked about when people talk about cycling. I don’t cycle into cities and I don’t jump red lights or make taxi drivers shout obscenities about the Lib Dems. I don’t ride hundreds of miles a week, though I do cycle a few miles most days. I’m not a cyclist who wears a camera on his head and then gets featured on the BBC news moments before he goes under a cement wagon. I don’t have my articles published as part of the The Times’s 'Cities Fit For Cycling' campaign explaining why cyclists are victimised and how government transport policy is misguided. I think those things and believe The Times’s campaign one of the best things done by a major newspaper in a very long time but I don't live in a city. I also don’t have a bell on my bike and would feel too much of an enthusiast if I wore a helmet.

I’m just a small town cyclist, one of many you might recognise but not really notice. We don’t protest that we want more cycle lanes. We’d be happy if the local council gave us just one. Our concerns tend to be so meagre that they’re not considered newsworthy: less glass on roads, fewer dead hedgehogs by the curb. I’d like my council to leave decent gaps beside speed bumps and people to stop hanging plastic bags filled with dog shit from the trees and bushes along the routes I take. I’d like wide T-junctions to be properly marked for the safety of cyclists who are too often forced to stand in the middle of the road and are liable to be hit by the lazy bastards who confuse Murray Walker with the Highway Code and think they have his permission to clip the apex of every corner.

Most of all, I’d just like a safe place to leave my bike when I’m shopping at my local supermarket. And if this last thing sounds trivial, it’s also this crazy dream that has recently caused me to put in some serious miles on my keyboard.

If Tesco has perhaps unfairly gained a bad reputation for some things, then it’s probably equally true that we don’t give them credit for other things they do so well. Irrespective of what grievances we might have, Tesco’s dominance in the market is a sign that lots of people like the services they provide. I’ve always been of that mind myself. Like they do in many small towns across the country, Tesco own and run our main local supermarket. Even though we do have a small Morrissons, Tesco is where most people do their shopping. It’s ideal for those of us without a car, especially when I can go and pick up most things we need on my bike. I can cycle there three, four or five times a week and keep the cupboards reasonably well stocked.

Yet my local Tesco really hates cyclists or, at least, probably think we’re some kind of inconvenience. I suspect their local management think we’re overly demanding, indicative of a middle class attitude in this staunchly working class town.

At the front of our Tesco, benches line the taxi pick-up point. Most days, the benches are full of customers waiting for their rides and most of these customers are smokers sucking on tar-heavy cigarettes. Dead tabs lie at the feet of these people with their corrugated skin and voices like smashed accordions. And this wouldn’t concern me too much except Tesco, in their wisdom, chose this very same spot to put their bike stands.

Locking my bike usually involves a fair degree of second-hand smoke and my overhearing more than a few grisly tales of medical procedures. I got rid of my old combination lock so I could shave seconds off the time I have to spend listening to these old croaks explaining their last lung op. Packing my bags is the worst part. Ever listened to a lifelong smoker describe the variety of their morning mucus when you’re trying to stuff a loaf into an overfull pannier? It’s rare these days that I get to eat bread that hasn’t been hammered into a bag just so I get away from the gorier details.

If locating the bike stands next to the smokers wasn’t bad enough, Tesco have another way of showing their disdain towards cyclists. They don’t provide adequate cycle stands.

A year ago, my local store had three cycle stands. Three stands meant room for six bikes. That was just about adequate and you’d be unlucky to turn up and find all six slots being used. But then, without apparent reason or explanation, one of the stands disappeared. There was then only room for four bikes and most days it was a fifty/fifty chance if you’d have somewhere to leave your ride.

After the third stand disappeared, complaints were made. My sister was the first person I know to take the bull by the horns and send an email asking if we could have more bike stands. She was told that Tesco themselves agreed that the bike stands were insufficient and that the problem would be addressed at the store upgrade in July. So we waited and when June arrived, just to be certain, she emailed again. Yes, she was told. The bike stands would be improved.

Then it’s July and the store upgrade begins. On Monday, the store upgrade was complete.

I arrived there on Tuesday and discovered that little had changed. The same two inadequate bike stands were still in the same place but a new bench has been situated to the left of the bike stands, providing room for up to four additional smokers. On Tuesday there were only two women sitting there but hawking enough phlegm for four and puffing away between Eastenders gossip. They didn’t move when I tried to put my bike in the stand and they laughed as I cursed when I realised that the bench was about three inches from the stand and the gap too narrow for my wheel.

I hate confrontation and I rarely complain in person about anything. Yet, Tuesday, I found myself standing at the Tesco customer service desk explaining all this to a woman who was wonderful: helpful, polite, and sympathetic. She was exactly the kind of person you think should be working at a customer service desk. I’d nominate her for an MBE if I could.

I explained about the lack of stands. She nodded and noted the problem. ‘And I’m tired of being forced to breathe in second-hand smoke,’ I said. She looked aghast. ‘Then that’s a legitimate complaint right there,’ she said. I felt lifted. My complaint was being taken serious. She thought for a moment and said she’d go see if the person in charge of the upgrade could talk to me. She disappeared for a few minutes. When she came back, she looked deflated. She had a message from the guy in charge. The bike stands weren’t going to be changed. I would have to learn to put up with them. End of story.

I couldn’t have had a more indifferent response. The guy couldn’t even come out and tell me that himself.

The whole thing is now descending into farce. I complained by email and was told I’d get a reply by Wednesday evening. Wednesday evening came and went without hearing anything.

I emailed for an update again yesterday and received an apology but little by way of understanding of the situation. Every time I email, a new person replies. One reply implied that I’d misled them. They said I’d suggested there was only one bike stand when I’d actually said there were two but with only three usable spaces. More emails were exchanged and we are now on amicable terms again but I’m still left waiting to hear if anything will be done.

Yet isn’t this how it always goes? It’s not the customer service people in the middle I’m angry with. It’s the local store who make feel like I’m in the wrong asking them to move their bike stands out of the designated area for smokers and to provide enough stands so I can actually go into their shop and spend the small fortune I spend there every a month on behalf of myself and others.

It’s a typical trivial matter faced by small town cyclists everywhere. There’s no inherent drama in it. You couldn’t interest a newspaper in a story this boring. Yet the green agenda is too often about the huge world changing events: power stations in China and flatulent cattle. The green agenda should really be about quality of life. We shouldn’t pollute because it makes our surroundings unpleasant, not because science is having a high-level debate about consequences. We should be driven as much by common sense as by science.

I live in an area that is routinely listed as one of the UK’s worst areas for quality of life. In 2009, a nearby town, Warrington, was named in a government report as having the worst quality of life in the country. That was news to me. In these parts, Warrington has always been considered a classy place to go, with the best shopping (it has book shops!), a big library, museum, a rugby ground, and even (hold your breath) cycle lanes. If that was the worst place to live, I don’t know what government inspectors had made of my home county of St Helens, which has always been one of those grim examples of northern life.

And that’s why Tesco’s attitude is so galling about the bike stands. It’s these small things that can change the underlying nature of a town and help establish a better ethos and quality of life. Good bike stands encourage more people to cycle. Cycling promotes health. It takes cars off the roads. It encourages people to use the countryside and the council to improve cycle routes. I’ve seen more people cycling this year than I’ve ever seen cycling in my life. It’s probably why there are never enough cycle stands. I’ve even noticed the council making some small changes to help cyclists. In parts of the town, they have even painted whilst bicycles on the floor amid all the crushed glass. It’s almost like cyclists are welcome.

Welcome everywhere, that is, except at Tesco, where going green takes on a quite different meaning when some ancient shrew is blowing smoke in your face and cackling at your through walnut teeth because you didn’t think it funny that she tied her dog to your bike so she could enjoy a quick fag. Most days I’d laugh something like that off. Other days you just see it as symptomatic of a bigger problem that everybody recognises but nobody does anything about.

The Great Slag Heap

Privilege fascinates me. Not in terms of how people inherit it. That’s not so interesting and seems predictably simple. Privilege interests me in terms of the psychology of actually having life expectations and the way we subsequently value our experiences, moments, and opportunities.

I suppose I’m writing about this because of my current gnarly situation but I was thinking about privilege whilst watching Glastonbury over the weekend. It felt like I was witnessing a generation that had gone to the festival as children and who were now attending it as adult performers. The two things seemed linked, perhaps even destined. Everybody seemed to be either a Mumford or a Son.

Even the conspicuous amount of naff art on display somehow seemed normal, accepted, and appropriate. But it struck me that there are certain classes of people who know how to waste money in a way that seems right. Here in St Helens, the council paid nearly two million to stick a squashed stone head on a slag heap. It’s imaginatively called ‘The Dream’. Few people like it and I know of no locals who have even visited it. It was an example of political art; art voted on by committees of clueless people making political points with public money. It’s not art that speaks about the people or was wanted by the people. It’s not even the work of a local but an artist called Jaume Plensa from Spain. But why is that?

My theory is that the working classes don’t understand art as it is generally understood by the middle class and I say that as somebody deeply working class. Without privilege, we have no real understanding about how to waste money in a meaningful way. We have to import these ideas. Working class art (a term that itself is even questionable) must have a point, a purpose, or at least some financial rationale behind it. If it cost a million, it must make a million and change. It’s why probably the greatest expressions of working class art are those that translate to money. They’re by the Rolling Stones and Beatles and artists like Jack Vettriano whose work translates into the ringing of a cash register. The alternative is art that fulfills a social purpose: hence the woeful drama workshops and poetry projects for ex-miners. There can be no giant spider made from rubble breathing fire out over revellers. That is just a beautiful expression of middle class thinking. Instead, we pretend to know what we’re doing but end up with a big lump of stone which people though would be symbolic but which locals just drive past and grumble about.

Take another example. Today’s hot ticket was for the Murray / Youzhny match which has just finished on Wimbledon’s Centre Court. A nation of tennis fans slipped out of work early to catch it on the BBC and, on the bank of grass known as Henman Hill, ordinary punters were squashed elbow to sweaty armpit simply in order to watch the match on the big screen. Yet as the match got under way inside centre court itself, the Royal Box was empty; row upon row of the best seats in the house vacant except for a few loyal administrators of the game, their cottons and flannels immaculate, their eyebrows untrimmed.

Many of the tickets for the Royal Box are apparently now in the gift of the BBC which perhaps explains why it’s so often full of their first, second, and even third rate talent. It’s a symbol, as though symbols were needed, that we’re no longer a nation that defines itself according to our royals. The true nobility are the quiz show hosts, the petty and preened presenters, the botoxed uber-mums and the trippy-heeled ballroom dancers.

Somebody at the BBC or officials at Wimbledon had failed to fill the box but it passed without explanation. Perhaps the celebs were still necking their champagne flutes. Perhaps they were all stuck in traffic. Perhaps they were suddenly called into the BBC to get another huge lump sum which the country didn't need to pay them but somebody at the topped initialed the cheque. It really doesn't matter why it was empty. The point is that it’s not just celebrities who exhibit this failing. The same happened last year at the Olympics when seats gifted to corporate sponsors were not filled by corporate backsides. The new Wembley is plagued by the familiar spectacle of empty seats in the premium central block, unavailable to the public. It’s often a big red embarrassing emptiness when corporate guests continue to enjoy corporate hospitality after half time.

Rather than seeing this as an example of the growing banality that privilege affords to special events, I see it as another symptom of a system that knows how to be profligate. The super-rich find value in copious waste but so too do people lower down the economic ladder. There is perhaps a sadistic pleasure to be had in not using a ticket for a special event. It’s like the Bullington Club’s initiation ceremony where they burn the £50 note in the face of a beggar. That story might be true but it might equally be apocryphal s but it is definitely resonant because it says that some human nature is governed by childish delights. It’s almost Freudian in its symbolism; as though privilege demands that it be occasionally expressed in wanton terms.

So, I don’t see an empty royal box. I see spaces representing people who need to be wasteful and to glory in that waste simply because they’re psychologically directed in a way that won't be dictated to by material things. To the working class part of my mind, it’s just waste. It’s like relatives who wrap up uneaten food at restaurants or won’t leave food on their plate. Waste not, want not. We heard it from the crib. Those seats could be filled by people enjoying every moment. Why do people buy tickets they don’t use? It has no point! What a waste! Like art, like my cartoons, my work, my writing, and even this blog. No better than a great squashed head sitting upon the slag heap of my mind. Just a dream. Just a wasteful dream.

Republican Talk

I’m not exactly a republican but neither could I be called a monarchist. I don’t want to be ruled over by anybody, so if somebody is going to presume to do so, I guess I prefer it if that person isn't some vampish celebrity troll voted in by the British people. I’m not happy that our ruler is the descendant of some brutish psychopath who in the dark ages of English history used their might to seize power and oppress the people but, when the alternative is Vernon Kay, it really doesn't seem that bad.

Yet I read this morning that HMQ is about to come into some money. The Times reports that the Queen is to receive ‘£37.89 million from the State, a 5 per cent increase on this year’s Sovereign Grant of £36.1 million.’

Yesterday our Chancellor changed the rules so that jobseekers would have to wait seven days, not the previous three, before claiming benefit. It seemed spiteful, mean, and calculated yet typical of the man who once belonged to the Bullingdon Club where an entry requirement was supposedly to burn a £50 note in the face of a tramp.

The disparity here is of course a matter of scale. In terms of government spending, even £37.89 million is a sniff whereas Osborne will no doubt say that the changes to the rules will save the country hundreds of millions. To give it some scale: in 2006, the British Army bought 67 Apache helicopters for £2.5 billion, which works out at about £37 million each. So, one year of monarchy costs the same as one gunship.

It all makes me deeply angry, of course. As austerity bites the poor around the ankles, those at the top continue to get even more. Here in the north, we feel austerity more because the Tories know that locally their votes don’t matter. St Helens (which is my electoral constituency) has voted in successive Labour candidates since 1983 when the constituency was first created. Tories can squeeze us until we no longer have the energy to squeal and they know it won’t affect their vote in the rest of the country. In fact, it might make them even more popular among many who increasingly think that London and the South West should declare independence from the poorer parts of the UK.

Fractures like these become more obvious when times are tough. We’re all told to tighten our belts because a few pounds saved here and there will make a difference. Yet, a few million extra slipped to the Queen isn't supposed to count…

But there is, of course, an obvious solution.

We could simply replace the Queen with an attack helicopter. Not only could an Apache hold its own flyovers, it has a certain natural awe attached to it, plus it has more firepower than an 87 year old lady. Not only that, at £37 million a year, we could have a brand new Apache each year. And it’s surely a truer representation of what monarchy is about: an artificial sense of belonging imposed by a privileged few whose ancestors were at one point willing to back up the force of their arguments with the sharp end of a stick.