I Do Occasionally Hold My Tongue
Must do a post sans foot after foot of quiz question (do not fret: they are coming in a word-drenched onslaught I prepared last night). So. I was going through my gmail drafts (obviously if they've been in their eight months they are going nowhere) and spied a trivia-related one. Aha! My mind whirled with the notion of using it to fill a pap-sized hole in my blog. Brilliant. You see I had been outraged to the point of my head inflating like a balloon animal (rage takes strange shapes) and my face turning a sickening shade of scarlet striped with bulging lines of puce by the factual inaccuracies and cultural mis-diagnoses peddled by a pair of no doubt ultra-kule, dapper but undeniable fools from the otherwise brilliant and magnificent publication that is The Idler. Their heinous crime? They didn't really bother watching the quiz shows they stacked in a class-pyramid (Top of the Class at the top, Bullseye at the bottom; no real insight there) and probably used a ragged back issue of the TV Times and a Television companion they summoned from 1987. The basic hypothesis that just demanded to be trampled with boots weighed down with a righteous and unforgiving fury? The upper classes watch UC, the proles watch shows with big, shiny prizes and blizzards of banknotes. Yawn. Say something original, if you are going to take up hallowed Idler page space. This is what I wrote, obviously when I had aching oodles of pontification and prognostication time on my rage-possessed typing hands.
"Having been a devoted fan of your publication for about five years now, I was just flicking through your latest issue when I alighted on your article British Quizzes Ranked By Classes. Great idea, I thought. This guys know how to do a job on a hitherto ignored area of socioanthropology. Then my face fell faster than a News of the Screws reporter's draws in a bordello. It was all wrong. I read closely. I knew this feature had to be taken apart with the surgical efficiency of a blindman with a chainsaw of the kind that was seen on that film The Running Man. My opinion on the actual execution? Slipshod and cackhanded. No worse than that. Like the writers squeezed a fat dung bomb all over the page and felt incredible, swelling pride as they smiled and nuzzled the faeces-smeared pages with their smug pointy 45 degree noses.
First: Round Britain Quiz. Er, I think you mean Brain of Britain don't you? Presented by one Robert Robinson, not Robert Robertson. Having appeared on it three times with my confusing j-becomes-y Nordic moniker I'm pretty sure I know what I'm on about. Poor Robert, he's just had a quadruple bypass heart operation. You don't want to upset him do you? And, of course, the real Round Britain Quiz is only listened to by batty cryptic numpties who really miss the baffling ways of 3-2-1 (Ted Rogers RIP)
Also, I'm assuming that the article was commissioned before Ask the Family was resurrected with the help of Dick and Dom on BBC2. Tragically, this brightly coloured abomination was not aimed at the milquetoast Home Counties middle-class masses who aspire to eating ponies in the Tuscan sun, as it once was, but instead had shifted its now deranged focus on to an under-underclass kingdom where Morlock lookalikes wear multi-coloured Y-fronts on their hollow bonces and feed like starved, giant locusts on mashed-up back issues of Heat magazines, whilst always dreaming that the surgical wand-swipe of some breast implants will breath wondrous magic into their horrid and mammary deficient lives. Nostalgia about Robert Robinson's version have been permanently stained with what is probably chocolate cake, but from the look of channel programme commissioners may as well been splattered with deadly, toxic brown turds, so lethal were the TV programme skillz of Dick and Dom and their resurrection production team to the chances of a once proud institution ever rising from the kids TV graveyard again. (Having said that, I like Dick and Dom. I watched their last show. I saw Neil Hamilton, Brian Conley, Al Murray and that black showjumper get covered in creamy muck muck as everyone sang very loud goodbye songs like PCP-steamed paedos at the biggest bukkake party the BBC has yet dared to broadcast. It was good. It was also fun. What did you expect me to say? That I was moved to tears. Purr-lease. But, you know, if it was the last episode of Life on Mars, and I hadn't seen it before.
Lastly and most petulantly, University Challenge has not suffered a decline in status, not when Brian Sewell, a man so exalted in the status stakes that he probably sleeps on freshly killed mink-skins every night and owns a fine art collection whose net worth is more than the GDP of Wales, is a captain on a celebrity special series, and not in the least bit shamed of being on a quiz show. Not when he can taste the tantalising and addictive thrill of smashing the opposition, then crushing their spirit by ensuring a 100-point margin of victory so he can be sure of enjoying a truly epic and hearty laugh enlivened by the sounds of the beaten foe crying and sobbing until their tear ducts run arid dry of saltwater. He can taste those tears. That sodium chloride tang is taste of UC triumph. So, how dare you, you awful, awful scumsucking gibber-monkeys for such brazen presumption! I'm going to quote somebody now because it makes me feel so much better for stealing other people's ideas. Didn't you read James Delingpole writing in The Spectator about it becoming the faultline for civilised and uncivilised society? You didn't because you are a liberal mountebank (hey, had to get that word in there ... un petit homage to HL Mencken), far too busy performing partial birth abortions and lobbying for the release of sex-killers to know that the "lower orders" will always be watching Eastenders on the other side.
UC, as the purists and arsey alumni such as myself call it, has become far more sophisticated (yer big eejits, yer). For a start, it's got science no will ever understand and actually dares to ask starter questions that it knows none of the eight players will answer, purely because they are not insano trivia nerds and also because the setters are utterly amazed with what they have dug up, like famished moles who have lost touch with reality, from the deepest pits of their archaic, dust-chugged sources. I know I would if I set questions for the show. If I could get away with it, I would make all the students look stupid with obscure humdingers on Albanian poets and Japanese physicists, just so us ex-contestants can have enough physical evidence, albeit completely loaded and blatantly silly in nature, to let us shout our bitter, quarter-final-losing heads off and relentlessly, ceaselessly rail against the ever deteriorating quality of each series's student intake until our vocal chords snap from the terrible strain caused by the spit-flecked ferocity of our utterly misplaced vitriol. So you see: I'm begining to dislike young(er) people.
Oops, I went off the point. I think that the point of the previous outburst can be paraphrased as such: "You can't handle the truth about University Challenge, and its strange and fiercely loyal and always aspiring audience! No. No University Challenge truth handler, you! Bah, I deride your UC truth handling skills. And so on."
Okay, I'm not so angry anymore. I'm obviously a little bit silly, maybe a bit nutty and will now stand on a street corner and say inappropriate things to myself, like "wibble me with sorrow" and "chocolate-smothered cow udders" while I dribble uncontrollably over any bystanders who come in flobbing range. May I reiterate: great magazine. If it was a woman ... well, let's just leave at that eh ... aright, you may go about your business, as long as it has nothing to do with writing about quiz shows you never watch.
So there you have it... *whistles to distract your attention, in fact everybody's attention*
(I also read the entry in their infamous Crap Towns book for Little'Ampton, it was written by a daytripper and someone who got the character of the town totally wrong: yeah, swingers and mediocracy run riot in such a place, but it's the stink of potential violence that is always hanging in the air, the wild gabby youth and their idiotic fashion sense and easy alcoholism that renders this coastal town its unique, hopeless character, one I love in my own sado-masochistic way. Why am I here while I could be in London watching Michele Haneke films and eating sushi that was not purchased on the cheap shelves of a 24-hour Tesco? Because home is family, home is my many boxes and rooms full of CDs, books, videos and pop cultural guff, and home means never having to do any cleaning. Yep, I realise. My LA home is like a warm but slightly rubbish hotel. Come to think of it, I even steal other people's toiletries. I think I need some kind of moral rejuvenation. That is the kind that does not involve seeing the light, but probably requires scorching sun and hours to read all the hundreds of books I've promised to read since forever ago. Right. Back to the grindstone. The reviews won't get written on this blog. More's the pity.)
"Having been a devoted fan of your publication for about five years now, I was just flicking through your latest issue when I alighted on your article British Quizzes Ranked By Classes. Great idea, I thought. This guys know how to do a job on a hitherto ignored area of socioanthropology. Then my face fell faster than a News of the Screws reporter's draws in a bordello. It was all wrong. I read closely. I knew this feature had to be taken apart with the surgical efficiency of a blindman with a chainsaw of the kind that was seen on that film The Running Man. My opinion on the actual execution? Slipshod and cackhanded. No worse than that. Like the writers squeezed a fat dung bomb all over the page and felt incredible, swelling pride as they smiled and nuzzled the faeces-smeared pages with their smug pointy 45 degree noses.
First: Round Britain Quiz. Er, I think you mean Brain of Britain don't you? Presented by one Robert Robinson, not Robert Robertson. Having appeared on it three times with my confusing j-becomes-y Nordic moniker I'm pretty sure I know what I'm on about. Poor Robert, he's just had a quadruple bypass heart operation. You don't want to upset him do you? And, of course, the real Round Britain Quiz is only listened to by batty cryptic numpties who really miss the baffling ways of 3-2-1 (Ted Rogers RIP)
Also, I'm assuming that the article was commissioned before Ask the Family was resurrected with the help of Dick and Dom on BBC2. Tragically, this brightly coloured abomination was not aimed at the milquetoast Home Counties middle-class masses who aspire to eating ponies in the Tuscan sun, as it once was, but instead had shifted its now deranged focus on to an under-underclass kingdom where Morlock lookalikes wear multi-coloured Y-fronts on their hollow bonces and feed like starved, giant locusts on mashed-up back issues of Heat magazines, whilst always dreaming that the surgical wand-swipe of some breast implants will breath wondrous magic into their horrid and mammary deficient lives. Nostalgia about Robert Robinson's version have been permanently stained with what is probably chocolate cake, but from the look of channel programme commissioners may as well been splattered with deadly, toxic brown turds, so lethal were the TV programme skillz of Dick and Dom and their resurrection production team to the chances of a once proud institution ever rising from the kids TV graveyard again. (Having said that, I like Dick and Dom. I watched their last show. I saw Neil Hamilton, Brian Conley, Al Murray and that black showjumper get covered in creamy muck muck as everyone sang very loud goodbye songs like PCP-steamed paedos at the biggest bukkake party the BBC has yet dared to broadcast. It was good. It was also fun. What did you expect me to say? That I was moved to tears. Purr-lease. But, you know, if it was the last episode of Life on Mars, and I hadn't seen it before.
Lastly and most petulantly, University Challenge has not suffered a decline in status, not when Brian Sewell, a man so exalted in the status stakes that he probably sleeps on freshly killed mink-skins every night and owns a fine art collection whose net worth is more than the GDP of Wales, is a captain on a celebrity special series, and not in the least bit shamed of being on a quiz show. Not when he can taste the tantalising and addictive thrill of smashing the opposition, then crushing their spirit by ensuring a 100-point margin of victory so he can be sure of enjoying a truly epic and hearty laugh enlivened by the sounds of the beaten foe crying and sobbing until their tear ducts run arid dry of saltwater. He can taste those tears. That sodium chloride tang is taste of UC triumph. So, how dare you, you awful, awful scumsucking gibber-monkeys for such brazen presumption! I'm going to quote somebody now because it makes me feel so much better for stealing other people's ideas. Didn't you read James Delingpole writing in The Spectator about it becoming the faultline for civilised and uncivilised society? You didn't because you are a liberal mountebank (hey, had to get that word in there ... un petit homage to HL Mencken), far too busy performing partial birth abortions and lobbying for the release of sex-killers to know that the "lower orders" will always be watching Eastenders on the other side.
UC, as the purists and arsey alumni such as myself call it, has become far more sophisticated (yer big eejits, yer). For a start, it's got science no will ever understand and actually dares to ask starter questions that it knows none of the eight players will answer, purely because they are not insano trivia nerds and also because the setters are utterly amazed with what they have dug up, like famished moles who have lost touch with reality, from the deepest pits of their archaic, dust-chugged sources. I know I would if I set questions for the show. If I could get away with it, I would make all the students look stupid with obscure humdingers on Albanian poets and Japanese physicists, just so us ex-contestants can have enough physical evidence, albeit completely loaded and blatantly silly in nature, to let us shout our bitter, quarter-final-losing heads off and relentlessly, ceaselessly rail against the ever deteriorating quality of each series's student intake until our vocal chords snap from the terrible strain caused by the spit-flecked ferocity of our utterly misplaced vitriol. So you see: I'm begining to dislike young(er) people.
Oops, I went off the point. I think that the point of the previous outburst can be paraphrased as such: "You can't handle the truth about University Challenge, and its strange and fiercely loyal and always aspiring audience! No. No University Challenge truth handler, you! Bah, I deride your UC truth handling skills. And so on."
Okay, I'm not so angry anymore. I'm obviously a little bit silly, maybe a bit nutty and will now stand on a street corner and say inappropriate things to myself, like "wibble me with sorrow" and "chocolate-smothered cow udders" while I dribble uncontrollably over any bystanders who come in flobbing range. May I reiterate: great magazine. If it was a woman ... well, let's just leave at that eh ... aright, you may go about your business, as long as it has nothing to do with writing about quiz shows you never watch.
So there you have it... *whistles to distract your attention, in fact everybody's attention*
(I also read the entry in their infamous Crap Towns book for Little'Ampton, it was written by a daytripper and someone who got the character of the town totally wrong: yeah, swingers and mediocracy run riot in such a place, but it's the stink of potential violence that is always hanging in the air, the wild gabby youth and their idiotic fashion sense and easy alcoholism that renders this coastal town its unique, hopeless character, one I love in my own sado-masochistic way. Why am I here while I could be in London watching Michele Haneke films and eating sushi that was not purchased on the cheap shelves of a 24-hour Tesco? Because home is family, home is my many boxes and rooms full of CDs, books, videos and pop cultural guff, and home means never having to do any cleaning. Yep, I realise. My LA home is like a warm but slightly rubbish hotel. Come to think of it, I even steal other people's toiletries. I think I need some kind of moral rejuvenation. That is the kind that does not involve seeing the light, but probably requires scorching sun and hours to read all the hundreds of books I've promised to read since forever ago. Right. Back to the grindstone. The reviews won't get written on this blog. More's the pity.)
posted by That Quiz Guy at 1:24 AM
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