50 Shades of Moronic: Sex, Culture and the Jackass Jihad

If this planet had an ejector seat and if I hadn't already pressed the red button a long time ago, then I'd be hammering the little bugger right now.

For millennia, artists have tried to imagine what the End of Days would look like. From the splendor of Michelangelo's Last Judgment to the nightmare visions of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, they had the entire gamut of hellish ends covered. Or so they probably thought. Yet not one of them ever bothered to include Phillip Schofield in their little festival of doom. Not one of them thought to paint the day when the gates of Hell would open up and the grey-haired incubus came forth to reap souls whilst giggling and grinning and acting so damn virtuous and up for fun.

Because let's face some hard facts: Phillip Schofield is an odious little prick. He's Mr Sunshine and Candypop. He's the clean TV smile, nice with the ladies, not an offensive bone in his perfectly proportioned TV body. Yet there he is hosting a feature about sadomasochistic sex at ten o'clock on an ITV morning. And why is he hosting a feature about sadomasochistic sex at ten o'clock on an ITV morning? Because 50 Shades of Grey has just been released as a feature film and that nasty little show feels obliged to promote that nasty little film based on that nasty little novel.

I've written before about the pornification of our culture but whether you're for that or against it, it's the snivelling hypocrisy that I can't abide. It's the chuckling and the playful giggling and pretending to act a little shocked as he's taught about bondage for beginners by some middle class Annabelle, a so-called 'sexpert', whose claim to fame seems to be a line of vibrating knickers available at Amazon. This is TV made for the Daily Mail generation: people who claim to be disgusted at the very same time as they're voyeuristically enjoying the intimate details of a person's private life. They're the moral guardians who seem to have more of an interest in the prurient details of sleaze than the very worst pornographer to whom the whole thing has become a boring flaccid reality. It's TV made by people who have no moral code. They have no notion of decency. They simply want to drive standards down and turn everybody into the same type of vapid consumerist arsehole you see crowding the fast lane into every cheap burger drive-through on their way to a pseudo-American sized coronary.

What kind of witless desk cracker comes up with this stuff? No doubt it's some snivelling wine bar Charlotte  with a glandular filofax and a hectic social life, shuffling between meetings with promoters and agents and advertisers and who never once looks at her own life and sees it for the abyss of moral turpitude it really is. She is well paid and happy in what she does because she can afford veneered hardwood floors and chandeliers that hang over the long dining table in her cramped London flat. It's a shallow life of fifty shades of shallow dream and even shallower outcomes. The product of her life is a society that is more indolent, less educated, but ever more subservient to Chinese corporate capital and vapid American stupidity which passes for internet culture.

Oh Lord! How far have we fallen! Monday 29 June 1987 was a terribly dark day in our country's history. That was the day when the 1972 Broadcasting Act was obliterated by the second Thatcher government. 'Thatcher Thatcher the Milk Snatcher' snatched educational TV away from the children and put it on in the hands of the capitalists who promised to maintain standards. To think that we scoffed at the ITV of my youth. From morning to lunch, it was devoted to educational shows. At school, our teacher would wheel in the big cathode ray TV and plug it in so we could all cram around and watch ITV schools programmes on the amazing 22 inch colour screen. The whole timetable was set so we could catch the start of yet another rerun of 'How We Used To Live' or ' Stop, Look, Listen'. Compare that with the current diet of nipple clamps and men who ejaculate 100 times a day or the woman with the world's biggest tits. Now seriously try to tell me that we've not regressed as both a country and a society.

We live in a world of freakshow everything. Yesterday ISIS burn a captured Jordanian to death in a cage over a pool of oil and we wonder from where that sickness might derive. It derives from a world that has lost all sense of moral limit because, make no mistake, this wasn't simply a rehash of punishments written in ancient texts. That was murder by psychopaths who are deeply entrenched in the Youtube generation. That was death as a meme and it is so toxic because it is so pervasive. It extends beyond the reach of censors or nations or even the choice of individuals. It's the horrific images that appear unbidden in your inbox or pop up behind your current screen or in your Twitter feed. It is a sickening death culture that becomes tomorrow's animated GIF or the comic trope on some forum where the juvenile mix with the serious deranged. This is murder by men who sit around imagining their next outrage in exactly the same way that teenagers try to imagine up the next stunt they can play for their Youtube subscribers. What we are witnessing is the Jackass Jihad.

And yet we in the West think that it's all very 'over there' and somehow we're better than that, whilst never once recognising that those extreme ends might have begun here at home. They say that the British Jihadists are some of the worst and most brutal. Maybe it's wrong and simply misguided to draw a causal link between those brutal acts and the decline of our culture. Yet the truth is that we have allowed our TV to descend even further into the bastardly and the bland where only the gratuitous gimmick is noticed and given time.

Meanwhile the wine bar Charlottes turn up on TV to extol the virtues of spanking and it's just a little bit of fun to break the tedium of the morning. Yet the pattern is set. Big tits this week is the guy with the enormous penis next week. There's playful giggling and claims that it's educational. But the truth is that it's a sickening demonstration of what we've become. It's shock for the sake of being shocking. It is a despicable form of exploitation given a veneer of 'niceness' by Schofield who seems quite happy to be part of this spectacle so long as it continues to fund his new wine and food twitter channel.

Well, excuse my language but fuck Philip Schofield's wine and food channel. Whatever rights Philip Schofield had to portray himself as sophisticated doyen of London society were lost the moment he signed on to represent bitch-slap TV.