Does The Internet Have A Phillip Schofield Filter?

Yesterday was a bad day for reasons I can't really go into. Things happened to somebody very close to me but they're not my grievances to air. All I can say is: kids, if you're watching, don't believe anybody who tells you that life is fair and that hard work is rewarded. It took me far too many years to learn this hard lesson. In fact, if I could rewind my life and give my young self some good advice, it would be this:

Be shrewd and calculating in everything you do. Play the system. Remember that it's not what you know, it's who you know. Be devious and deceitful if you can get away with it. The rest of the time simply keep your mouth shut. Never express an honest opinion. Opinions can come back to hurt you later. Never devote yourself to being good at your work. Push for promotion even if that means hurting the people around you. There are no friends in business. There are just competitors. Keep on the good side of the people above you and make sure that they owe you favours. People beneath you are simply beneath you. Treat them accordingly. Life rewards you if you're a cruel bastard. Knowledge is worth nothing unless you can use it to harm a competitor. Above all know that the only thing that is worth anything is power. Seek power and wield is ruthlessly. And should the people at the top ever realise that you're bad at your job, a cruel and bitter tyrant, make sure you have enough dirt on them that they can only get rid of you by paying you off generously.

Hmm... That sounds depressing cynical but it's genuinely how I see the world. I know I'm not the only one who sees it that way. All the talk in the newspapers about the state of the economy, our hospitals, schools, universities, prisons, police departments, legal system... All of it is meaningless waffle. The truth is that we have a system that widely promotes fools over people good at their job. The system rewards failures. It rewards people who are shrewd enough to play the system. The result is a system that fails us on every front.

I guess that's why I've worked hard to keep myself out of that environment. Despite my cynicism, I'm an idealist but I wouldn't last ten minutes. Mine would be flesh that simply snarls up the gears for a few moments before spitting me out. I don't know how other people do it. Everywhere I look, it seems that witless sycophants persevere. People of quality, depth or personality are made abject; the system shaming them into silence.

For example, I see this morning that the deeply cretinous Phillip Schofield has been mouthing off again. Is there any greater symbol of the national mediocrity than Schofield? Singularly without a talent other than his personability, he is a smiling shill of a human being. He's merely the bland filler between advertising opportunities. I'd consider it a shameful way to live a life; creating nothing other than opportunities for corporations to exert control over the masses. Take, for example, the way he's been defending 'This Morning' after viewers complained about the feature they did about S&M a few weeks ago.

“Obviously I’m not saying the bondage is going to save anyone’s life but what we did was reflect on what everyone else was doing or talking about at the time.

“Everyone went to see the movie and if you look at the stuff we had on there, it was very innocent stuff and also spectacularly when the item had finished the things we had were all sold out in moments.

“So behind those closed, outraged doors of middle England, what they were secretly doing was going to buy this stuff online.”

He's right, of course, except for a couple of very slight flaws in his argument.

1. Not everybody was doing or talking about it at the time. The way he talks about this is truly staggering. He's portraying it as though they were covering a sudden fad for a new type of biscuit. What he's talking about is sadomasochistic sex being heavily marketed by companies who cared about nothing other than making money. Just because a horrible film based on an equally horrible novel is made, doesn't not mean that everybody is our there sticking butt plugs up each other's arseholes. If you want to do that, then that's fine. Just don't be so hypocritical about it.


2. Not everyone went to see the movie. I never want to see the movie. If you want to watch porn, you should be more honest about it and watch something properly erotic. Not something that hints at something you're too uptight to genuinely look at.


3. Nipple clamps are innocent stuff only if the same is true of any other S&M sex toy.


4. Just because you advertised products on one of the nation's main TV channels, to an audience of millions, many of whom are illiterate dopes with more money than sense, it's obvious that whatever shit you're selling would be sold out in moments. It's not proof of your moral righteousness. It's simply the business of large numbers.


5. I'm not of middle England. I wasn't secretly buying this stuff online. I thought the show was vile.

Sigh. I give up. Sometimes it's not worth arguing. The world is beyond reason. One blog doesn't make any difference compared to the hundreds of millions spent in advertising stupidity to the world.

 

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.

Bile: The Essence of the Rant

I had a slow uninspired Sunday and consequently don’t have much new material for this morning. Searching through my old files, I came across this which I drew some time ago. If I were drawing it now, I think it would be cleaner and with stronger lines. I’ve never known quite what to do with it or why I even drew it. Comics don’t seem to have an obvious outlet. I enjoy drawing them but they always seem a waste of effort. The eleven panels here could have been eleven single gag cartoons, eleven chances to get something published somewhere instead of just one.

Incidentally, the woman with the large breasts was featured on ‘This Morning’ but a year or so ago when I originally drew this, so don’t go looking for her on TV CatchUp...