The Hell of It All (30 page)

They didn’t even try to cover it up properly before they were rumbled. The ‘cheer squads’, for instance, were hardly subtle – they were decked out in bright yellow shirts and huddled together in conspicuous clumps. They couldn’t have been more noticeable if they’d had searchlights for faces and foghorns for hands. All of which provides an effective blueprint for us to follow circa 2012. First up, the opening ceremony, in which a volcano rises from the Thames, spewing flaming Olympic rings into the night sky while Big Ben – or rather, a genetically enhanced version of Big Ben, one with straighter teeth and bigger tits – pirouettes in the background, miming to the Kaiser Chiefs’ latest single. This goes on for 15 hours or until the nearest superpower threatens to bomb us. Then the events themselves begin. None of them takes place in the Olympic
stadium because there is no Olympic stadium. We’ve not bothered building one. Instead, we’ve got a host of exciting made-up CGI sports. Moon Snooker! Unicorn Wrestling! Quantum Deathball! Dissenter Beheading! Pac-Man with Guns! Naturally, none of the other countries has been allowed to practise any of these games, whereas we’ve had four solid years to develop and perfect them. So we’re guaranteed, ooh, at least three bronze medals. We’ll thrash Paraguay, that’s for damn sure.

And as our virtual athletes (who aren’t really there) take their place on the podium (which isn’t really there either), thousands of specially trained spectators will loudly voice their appreciation at gunpoint. Then we’ll kick the shit out of one or two overseas journalists and claim the whole thing’s been a roaring success. Again and again, till we’re blue in the face. Bish bash bosh. Job done. As a twat might say at the end of a column.

There’s a little-known and decidedly average George Romero movie called
Bruiser
which, despite turning rubbish and hysterical at the end, has a creepy and intriguing premise. In it, Jason Flemyng plays a successful young marketing exec who wakes up one day to discover his face has inexplicably transformed into a smooth, white, featureless mask. He stands horrified in front of the mirror, trying to remove it but failing because it’s fused to his head. He has literally become a blank.

That’s the best bit of the film. After that it all goes a bit daft, as Flemyng’s newfound anonymity sends him doolally and he runs around Los Angeles killing people left right and centre (mainly centre) until you just don’t care any more. I’d have preferred him to stand weeping in front of the mirror for the remaining 90 minutes because I found that bit exceptionally creepy. And you know why? Because I can relate to it, that’s why. Thanks for asking.

I could relate to it not because I’ve got a smooth, featureless face – sadly, it’s more like a lumpy relief map charting myriad disappointments – but because in the past few months I’ve grown
increasingly concerned that deep inside, underneath, in my heart, at my core, in my bones, within the very centre of my soul, lurks a terrifying, all-consuming, awful, echoing blankness.

Just to be clear, this is not the same thing as depression, which would manifest itself as an actively negative mindset. Rather it’s an absence of any definable mood whatsoever. It’s not like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-empty; more like glancing at the glass of water and seeing it as half-full, but shrugging indifferently and staring at the wall instead of running around giggling and setting off party poppers. And to be fair, vacant indifference is the only sane reaction to a mere glass of water in the first place. It’s hard to muster much enthusiasm or despair either way. Which leaping great cretin at the Department of Psychological Metaphor decided your opinion vis-à-vis a glass of water should be the barometer of character anyhow? If you want to find out who’s a pessimist and who’s an optimist, don’t faff around filling tumblers – water’s a precious resource, for Christ’s sake. Just ask them. Or issue them a form with OPTIMIST and PESSIMIST printed on it, and see which box they tick. It’s not rocket science.

Anyway, back to my thudding personal blankness. It’s probably a bonus. On the one hand, I take absolutely no pride whatsoever in whatever meagre professional achievements I can muster, take little interest in anything outside work and am essentially just a blinking, shuffling mannequin watching events in his life merely drift past like underwhelming prizes on the
Generation Game
conveyor belt. And on the other, I just don’t give a shit. It’s a win-win situation. Or it would be, if I had any concept of ‘winning’ in the first place.

Apparently this condition is known as ‘anhedonia’ – the inability to derive any pleasure from things that would normally be considered pleasurable. Hand someone truly anhedonic a slice of chocolate cake, and at best they’ll think, ‘Hmm, my tastebuds indicate this cake is delicious,’ rather than simply enjoying it. They subject it to Spock-like analysis, swallow it, shrug, and then crap it out a few hours later, wearing a neutral, unchanging expression throughout. Well, that’s me, that is.

And it’s hard to see what the cure might be. If you’ve fallen out of love with life – not to the point of actually disliking it, you understand, but to such a degree that you merely tolerate rather than welcome each passing day – it’s surely impossible to get the spark back. Any suggestions? Religious epiphanies and extreme sports are out. And I could do without raising a family, thanks: that looks like an almighty pain in the arse and to be honest I couldn’t be bothered. I’d immerse myself in a hobby but they all look so pointless. You might as well sit alone in a shed counting numbers. I’ve tried cultivating a passion for the arts but that didn’t work either. I mean, I quite like plays, live music, exhibitions, museums and paintings, but not enough to spend more than 25 minutes journeying to see them. Reading’s all right, but be honest – turning the pages isn’t ultimately worth the effort. Perhaps serial killing would help. Yeah. That’d give everything a welcome bit of edge. Although I’m prepared to believe even that gets boring surprisingly quickly: within two weeks I’d be yawning my way through yet another humdrum strangling.

Still, it could be worse. Having listlessly Googled anhedonia, I see it’s related to a hilarious spin-off condition called ‘ejaculatory anhedonia’. Apparently it mainly affects men, and as the name suggests, the unfortunate few who suffer from it are incapable of deriving any pleasure whatsoever from orgasms. They squirt a nut-ful of mess while staring impassively into the middle distance, like the human equivalent of a pushdown soap-dispenser, and that’s it. Now that would be depressing.

According to a pointless piece of eye-rolling anti-EU extrapolation that appeared in a number of newspapers, a smattering of MEPs are calling for the introduction of strict new advertising guidelines that could eventually lead to Eva Herzigova’s breasts being taken out and shot.

At least that’s the gist of it. As far as I can ascertain, the story largely represented a brilliant excuse to print the supermodel’s
infamous Wonderbra ad for the 80 millionth time, on this occasion under the headline ‘Goodbye, Boys’. Even though the Hello, Boys campaign ran 14 years ago, editors just can’t let it lie. Rather than fading into obscurity it has, if anything, grown to represent some kind of sexual Year Zero which still haunts their collective mind’s eye to this day. Just as Philip E. Marlow from Dennis Potter’s
Singing Detective
was obsessed by visual memories of his mum enjoying a bit of off-piste afternoon dick in a forest, so the image of a semi-naked Eva gawping with awestruck joy at her own overflowing cups is forever frozen in their consciousnesses, and they’re doomed to reproduce it again and again in a bid to help themselves and their readers come to terms with its sheer psychological impact. It wasn’t just an advert. It was the 9/11 of tits. And now some killjoy EU busybodies want to travel back in time and ban it! Or something like that! Boo! Typical! Let’s bomb Brussels! Or maybe just France! Etc!

But wait, it doesn’t end there. As the
Daily Mail
goes on to explain, ‘This being the EU, it is not simply raunchy advertising that is in danger … It wants anything which promotes women as sex objects or reinforces gender stereotypes to be banned … Any campaigns which are deemed sexist might have to go … [such as] the bare-chested builder with a can of Diet Coke in 1996 … Even famous adverts such as those featuring the Oxo family, with Lynda Bellingham as the housewife, might be deemed sexist.’

Inevitably, the minuscule conker of reality at the heart of this shitcloud is markedly less interesting than all this talk of a wild banning outbreak might suggest. Once you remove all the ‘mights’ and ‘coulds’ and other weasel words from the article, you’re left with nothing but a report from the EU women’s rights committee (doubtless a barrel of laughs at parties), which merely suggests governments should use their existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to regulate advertising.

Nonetheless, ‘The EU vote on the report is not legally binding but it could be used by governments to justify the biggest shake-up in the industry for years.’ Or it could not. Who knows? Uh-oh, we’ve accidentally printed that photo of Eva again. Argh! Only one thing
for it: we’re all going to have masturbate our way back to sanity together. Right, readers? Three … two … one … go!

It’s safe to predict this ‘shake-up’ will have as much impact as all the other quasi-fictional EU bans and regulations the press enjoys harping on about in pieces headlined ‘OXYGEN TO BE OUT-LAWED’ or ‘NOW EU BUSYBODIES SAY MILK MUST BE SERVED IN CLOGS’, and so on. Partly because all such stories ultimately turn out to be knitted from wisps of translucent flimflam, but mainly because the only way to ban advertising that ‘reinforces gender stereotypes’ is to ban all advertising whatsoever.

What’s the alternative? Only allow commercials that actively challenge gender stereotypes? I can scarcely picture what kind of patronising hell we’d be creating for ourselves there. And what if it worked? What if all our ads were suddenly filled with ladylike men eating chocolates and butch ladettes swigging beer, and these images proved so influential that everyone started behaving that way in real life, until these brave new anti-stereotypes had become stale old actual stereotypes, so we had to start all over again by subverting our old subversions? And so on and so on. Don’t know about you, but I’d shoot myself some point around 2011. Probably while wearing a dress.

And besides, anyone with more than four atoms of cranial glop in their skull already knows that adverts don’t provide a realistic field guide to the genders. In adverts, women are carefree sex kittens. In reality, they’re just annoying. Especially the ones who whine on and on about gender stereotypes through the strange flapping hole they use for expressing simple-minded notions which is apparently located somewhere above their chests. (The
Guardian
has asked me to point out that this is a joke. Which indeed it is. Although, cleverly, it’s also an optical illusion, because to uptight enemies of fun, it doesn’t look like a joke at all, but a heinous slur. Still, at least complaining about it will give them something to do before they all die early of joylessness, leaving the rest of us to swap off-colour gags at their spartan little gravesides.)

When it comes to being objectified in ads, men lag way behind women, although they’re gradually inching closer thanks to the
aforementioned Diet Coke hunk and the Aero Bubbles guy and so on. Mainly, though, they’re portrayed as gurgling dimwits whose sole reward in life is to be occasionally granted the opportunity to stare at a football through a pint of piss-coloured beer.

In other words, both genders are routinely insulted in adverts, but that’s because adverts are inherently insulting to anything more sentient than a footstool. Of course they’re demeaning, dum-dum. They’re adverts. That’s what they do. And attempting to regulate them further would be as big a waste of adult time and resources as telling a four-year-old not to make giggly jokes about poo.

Just as well that isn’t going to happen, then. Cue Eva Herzigova photograph. Article ends. Goodbye.

The other day I was enduring
The Sex Education Show
on Channel 4, in which a self-consciously ‘liberated’ presenter called Anna ran screeching around the place like a one-woman hen night, banging on about boobs and willies in a bid to ‘get Britain talking’ about sex. And the script essentially ran as follows:

‘Hey, Britain! Let’s all be honest and open, yeah? Penises! There! I said it! Some are big, some are small! Here’s a photo of one! Are you shocked? You mustn’t be shocked! Although it’s OK to be amused! Tee hee! Aren’t we pushing back the boundaries? Isn’t this healthy? Come on, we’re all adults. This is good for us! Celebrate it! Vulva! Wow! Can you believe I just said that? Condom! Orgasm! Clitoris! Etc!’

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for snickering nob gags and frank images of nudity, but I’d rather not have them accompanied by some tissue-thin justification about ‘healing the nation’ or ‘getting people talking’. Just tell us a joke, show us your bum and piss off.

Anyway, as luck would have it, Anna did show us her bum. Sort of. In a mirror. While she was trying on lingerie, because this was a modern documentary, see? Just as in London you’re famously never more than 4 feet from a rat, so in 21st-century factual entertainment shows the presenter is never more than four minutes
from a pointless TV stunt. Like trying on some frilly pants. Or getting a bikini wax.

The bikini wax section caused me some anguish. After braving a ‘full Hollywood’ (where they suddenly rip the whole lot clean away, like DLT having his face pulled off), Anna held a little chat with a studio audience, encouraging them to help heal broken Britain by loudly discussing their pubes. Things were ticking along predictably – ie a 50/50 mix of words and chortling – when something upsetting happened. They asked the men in the studio whether they trimmed their pubic hair, and almost every single one of them put their hands up.