The Hell of It All (11 page)

Presumably the aspirational list writers are engaging in a last-ditch attempt to stave off their own gnawing sense of pointlessness. What’s that? You swam with dolphins? Hiked round Machu Picchu? Swigged cocktails in Vegas? Wow. Thanks for sharing. Now shut up and tie your noose.

Thing is, for all their faults, the lists work. It’s hard not to get drawn in. There’s so much crud and shod surrounding us on a daily basis, so many fair-to-middling fartclouds of ‘content’ and ‘lifestyle
choice’, we’re all desperate to get our hands on something actually, authentically good. And that’s what the lists promise: a handy cutout-and-keep guide to what’s worth bothering with. In practice, however, they merely inspire feelings of inadequacy. No matter how cynical or detached you are, you can’t help experiencing a pang of shame at not having seen Venice for yourself, even when the writer boasting about it is clearly a prick of the grandest magnitude.

As a result, it’s hard not to walk around in a permanent state of guilt. Right now, I’m feeling vaguely guilty for not having seen
The
Sopranos
beyond season two. I watched the first season, then fell behind and never caught up. The other week, as luck would have it, a PR company promoting the box sets sent me all six seasons in their entirety. Hark at me. Now they’re sitting on my shelf, making me feel bad for not having watched them yet. And what about all those books I haven’t read, meals I haven’t eaten, countries I’ve never visited? How am I going to have time to fit all this stuff in? I can scarcely get it together long enough to perform the simplest of household chores, never mind all this extracurricular homework set by our cultural arbiters.

Besides, the more someone tells you how incredible something is, the more disappointing the reality turns out to be, largely because of the drum roll that preceded it.

Take the Grand Canyon. I visited the Grand Canyon in my mid20s. Hark at me (again). I stood on a ridge and gazed out and waited to have my mind blown. All I experienced was yet more guilt. I’d heard that it was breathtaking. I’d read florid descriptions of its life-altering majesty. But it was these descriptions, not the canyon itself, that were at the forefront of my mind as I stared at it.

‘Come on, you shallow idiot,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re supposed to be feeling something here. What’s the matter with you?’

Then I went back to the car, ate crisps and fiddled with the air-con, feeling box-empty inside. Call me shallow, but I’ve had more impressive trips to the toilet.

Not long ago, I bought a coffee machine. You pop in a cute little metallic coffee pod, push a button and hey presto: you’ve made an espresso without having to faff around spooning coffee powder into a receptacle and banging it about and getting grit all over the sideboard and shouting like a sailor in a thunderstorm, which is what baristas do. It’s made by Nestlé. I’m dimly aware they’re supposed to be monstrously evil … but look, I hadn’t made the connection at the time, and besides, I need my coffee, OK? I’m a heartless monster.

Annoyingly, you can’t just walk into a shop and buy the special pods. You have to order them online, via an impossibly snooty website full of blah about the ‘subtle alchemy’ of coffee and so on. On handing over your details, you’re inducted into a mysterious ‘club’, the consequences of which were lost on me until this week, when a glossy magazine plopped through my door. Turns out that by buying a coffee machine, I’d inadvertently subscribed to a ‘lifestyle’, and this magazine would regularly arrive to congratulate me.

I like free magazines because they’re hilariously desperate, and the classier they purport to be, the more desperate they are.
Nespresso
magazine is the most acute example I’ve ever seen. It’s as hateful as
Tatler
, but with an overbearing and whorish emphasis on coffee pods bunged in for good measure. Let’s take a walk through the latest issue. The cover is a black-and-white photo of official ‘Nespresso ambassador’ George Clooney sitting at a table with a couple of coffee pods on it. They’re tastefully out of focus, so you don’t notice them at first. But they’re still there. Inside, there’s another huge photo of George balancing four coffee pods on top of each other.

The contents page is broken up with little colour photos of coffee pods, and snapshots of the contributors, including ‘legendary star photographer Michel Comte’ (posing pretentiously with his hands on his chin). Best known for snapping superstars, Comte has recently ‘taken a humanitarian bent’ by covering ‘war-torn
locations such as Iraq, Chechnya and Afghanistan’. But this week he ‘joined George Clooney for a coffee and the latest Nespresso campaign’. Beneath Comte’s photo is a bright blue coffee pod. Next, several pages showcasing the latest Nespresso coffee machines, which are intensely coloured because ‘intense colours are the rule on the catwalks of the season’. Another inspiration is ‘rock legend David Bowie, whose alter ego Ziggy Stardust defined both glam rock and its look in the 1970s’. To underline how fashionable the machines are, they’re accompanied by photos of Louis Vuitton shoes, Chanel bags, the Bilbao Guggenheim museum, and some coffee pods.

Then, a series of full-page Q&A sessions with five ‘Nespresso Coffee Experts’, each posing with a cup of coffee and spouting bumwash. (Sample: ‘Q: What elements or setting do you need for your own personal coffee moment or ritual? A: An open mind and sharpened senses.’) Coffee pods in this section: nine. Now we’ve arrived at the George Clooney profile proper. ‘My parents brought me up to read and to ask questions, and to constantly question authority,’ he reveals. ‘Because authority unchecked, without exception, corrupts. Always.’ Something to contemplate there, while you gaze at more photos of George and the pods.

Next, a guide to festive entertaining ‘dos and don’ts’, in which the letter o in the word
dos
is replaced by a photograph of a coffee pod, upended and shot from above. By now, I’m actively enjoying this relentless pod barrage.

Pages 32–37: a piece on the Keralan coastline, accompanied by exotic photos of natives (and coffee pods). Page 38: upmarket ski destinations (and a coffee pod).

Page 40: a profile of the mastermind behind Swiss watchmakers Chopard. ‘A true epicurean, Karl-Friedrich Scheufele’s passion drives him to pursue excellence in all aspects of life,’ reads a caption beside a photo of Karl, his hot wife Christine, and three more coffee pods.

Page 42: a feature on milk. Real milk, you understand, not that powdered formula gunk people in the developing world mix with unclean water and bottlefeed to babies, causing diarrhoea and
vomiting. For some mad reason, that’s not mentioned at all. No pods, either: a double oversight.

Pages 46–51: Indian recipes inspired ‘by the flavours of the Nespresso Grand Crus’. Coffee pods next to the food and, in one case, balanced on the edge of a plate. Brilliant.

Pages 54–59: fashion spread starring a man who looks about 50 and a sexy woman who looks about 25. Cups, machines and Nespresso logos are visible. But boo: no coffee pods.

The unexpected pod drought continues throughout a feature on ghastly overpriced crud to put on your coffee table, a guffy peep about yachting, an advert for Chopard watches, and a self-celebratory piece on sustainable farming practices in Costa Rica, the last page of which is suddenly improved immensely – at last – by a minuscule photo of a coffee pod in the lower right-hand corner, serving as a full stop at the end of the article. Finally, the home straight: several pages of chinaware from the Nespresso range, a deluge of coffee pods and an order form. And that’s it.

I went back and counted. In total, there were 281 visible coffee pods – 281 tiny bullet-shaped reminders of the bizarre, anxious banality of marketing. On the one hand, it’s a pointless free mag. On the other, it’s the by-product of an entire industry peopled exclusively by desperate, snivelling lunatics. And most damning of all, it’s put me off my coffee.

Heat
magazine – the tittering idiot’s lunchbreak-pamphlet-ofchoice – has caused a bad stink by printing a collection of comedy stickers in its latest issue. Said stickers are clearly designed to be stuck round the fringes of computer monitors by the magazine’s bovine readership in a desperate bid to transform their veal-fattening workstation pen into a miniature Chuckle Kingdom and thereby momentarily distract them from the bleak futility of their wasted,
Heat
-reading lives.

Most of the stickers are baffling to anyone who isn’t a regular reader – there’s one of Will Young sporting a digitally extended
chin, a shot of a man’s head on a crab’s body accompanied by the words ‘Roy Gave Me Crabs’, and a photo of the editor looking a bit like a monk. So far, so hilarious.

But one consists of a shot of Jordan’s disabled five-year-old son Harvey, with the words ‘Harvey wants to eat me!’ printed next to his mouth. In other words, we’re supposed to find Harvey’s face intrinsically mirthful and/or frightening. Ha ha,
Heat
! Ha ha!

Jordan herself is on the cover of the same issue, as part of a montage depicting Stars Who Hate Their Bodies (‘Jordan: SAGGY BOOBS’), so chances are she wasn’t in an especially upbeat frame of mind when she later stumbled across the snickering point-and-chortle demolition of her blameless disabled son nestling in the centre pages. She immediately lodged a complaint with the PCC. Personally, I’d have caught a cab to their offices, kicked the editor firmly in the balls, taken a photo of his stunned, wheezing, watering face and blown it up and hung it on my wall, to be contemplated every morning over breakfast.

Of course,
Heat
’s always had a psychotically confused relationship with celebrities. On the one hand, it elevates them to the status of minor deities, and on the other, it prints clinical close-ups of their thighs with a big red ring circling any visible atoms of cellulite beside a caption reading ‘Ugh! Sickening!’ This is what the misanthropic serial killer in
Se7en
would’ve done if he’d been running a magazine instead of keeping a diary.

This might seem a bit rich coming from someone (i.e. me) who regularly says cruel things about public figures for comic effect. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I scrawled some fairly abusive things about Jordan myself in a recent
Screen Burn
column in the Guide, for instance. Isn’t
Heat
effectively doing the same thing, only with more gusto, not to mention photos?

Good question. Thanks for asking. My defence, in as much as I’ve worked it out, runs like this: people on TV aren’t real people. They’re flickering, two-dimensional representations of people, behaving unnaturally and often edited to the point of caricature. They’re fictional characters and it’s easy to hate them. Everybody hates someone on TV. But you never really hate them the way you’d
hate, say, a rapist. Because they’re not really there, and with one or two exceptions (TV psychics, say), they’re ultimately harmless. Put Vernon Kay on my screen and I’ll gleefully spit venom at him. Sit me next to him at a dinner party and I’ll probably find him quite charming, unless he does something appalling. That’s not hypocritical, it’s rational.

In fact, in my limited experience, the more unpalatable you find someone’s TV persona, the nicer they turn out to be in real life. Recently I was walking down the street when someone I’d written something nasty about suddenly darted across the road and introduced himself. Almost immediately, I started apologising for the article, explaining (as above) that people on TV aren’t real people and so on. At which point he looked faintly crestfallen. He hadn’t read the piece at all, but he’d seen a TV thing I’d done and just wanted to say how much he enjoyed it. Then he asked what it was I’d said that was so bad, so I found myself sheepishly repeating it while staring at the ground. There was an uncomfortable pause. And then he laughed and said it was all fair game and not to worry. And I thought, who’s the dickhead in this scenario? Because it sure as hell wasn’t him. I’m the dickhead. I’m always the dickhead: always have been, always will be.

Even so, and speaking as a dickhead, there’s surely a world of difference between tipping cartoon buckets of shit over someone’s TV persona, and paying a paparazzo to hide behind a bush to take photos of their arse as they stroll down the beach in real life, so you can make your readers feel momentarily better about themselves because ha-ha her bumcheeks are flabby and ho-ho he’s bald and tee-hee she’s sobbing. And even if you accept that degree of intrusion, on the basis that these people rely on the media and yadda yadda yadda, how insanely superior and removed from reality do you have to be to invite your readers to laugh at a photograph of a small disabled boy whose only ‘crime’ is (a) being disabled and (b) having a famous mum with ‘SAGGY BOOBS’?

Each week,
Heat
opens with a featurette called ‘Everyone’s Talking About …’ detailing the latest showbiz scandal. Last week, it was ‘Everyone’s Talking About … Marc Bannerman’. This week it
ought to read ‘Everyone’s Talking About … What Total Cunts We Are’. And maybe it will. We shall see.

So let’s get this straight. A US intelligence report decides that Iran isn’t as big a threat as once feared, and Bush decides this proves that, actually guys, I think you’ll find it is. You’ve got to admire his steadfast refusal to acknowledge anything that doesn’t complement his monochromatic world view. He’s a true tunnel visionary. Awkward facts simply ricochet off him, like peashooter pellets bouncing harmlessly from an elephant’s hide. He knows what he wants to believe, and he’ll carry on believing it until it kills him. Or us. Preferably us. He can always recant and say, ‘Oops, I was wrong’ in his bunker. We’ll be long gone by then, so what does he care?

Very little, in all probability. Bush is a bit like an unhinged iconoclast who has arbitrarily decided he doesn’t believe in cows, and loudly and repeatedly denies their existence until you get so annoyed you drive him to a farm and show him a cow, and he shakes his head and continues to insist there’s no such thing. At which point it moos indignantly, but he claims not to hear it, so in exasperation you drag him into the field and force him to touch the cow, and milk the cow, and ride around on the cow’s back. And, finally, he dismounts and says, ‘That was fun’n’all, but dagnammit, I still don’t believe in no cow.’ And then he shoots it in the head regardless, just to be on the safe side. Just so it isn’t a threat.