Homophobic Messiahs and the Sinister Rise of Fences

Jesus “The” Christ

I’m back in Wells. My friend Mark is here visiting his Mum, sorting out her furniture and what to take and get rid of before the move to Portishead. We’ve decided to go to Glastonbury for the day - the town not the festival.

Both of us have a fondness for Glastonbury from our youth. For me it was the legendary shop Gothic Image, which sold Dungeons and Dragons accessories in the eighties, which I would cycle to on a Saturday morning or even after school and buy miniatures and even the odd adventure.

Well Gothic Image is long gone, and every shop now is an identikit of New Age tat.

Today Glastonbury is a rather unpleasant meeting of Middle-Classed New Age hippies (the ones who live on the foot of the Tor in beautiful houses with Buddhist names and electric 4x4s), acid-casualties and surly drug addicts, and the working class townies. A bit like Brighton as a village. Without the sea.

I realise you might find this monstrously reductive, but it’s what I do best.

So after witnessing a stand off between one middle-aged hippy and an OAP tourist, we wandered up the High Street to The Shambala Centre to bleed our chakras.

Ricky Gervais’s less attractive older brother

Anybody who’s ever claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ has almost always been up to no good, and so a friend then alerted me to the window display a few weeks ago that the Messiah was asked to take down by the police. What a very naughty boy! (Python reference.)

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to his shop front when Glastonbury Pride goes past in the coming weeks…

Fences 

When I was a little boy all the houses in the street were relatively new. A garage was an optional add-on to the house build, and was a separate building altogether. The back gardens were separated by 3 horizontal galvanised wires going through uprights every 4-5 feet. You could go in the garden and talk with your neighbours, and just step over the ‘fence’ if you wanted to, to play with the kids next door.

Come the eighties and 2 metre high fences enclosing everything was the norm. Fewer neighbourly chats and no admittance to hedgehogs, while rats, squirrels, cats and foxes were the only ones who could make it through.

I think it’s really sad. The older I get the more I’m aware what an innately social animal human beings are, yet money and delusions of status prohibit us from interacting naturally with each other.

In historical terms, 5 minutes ago we were operating in groups of 30 hunting and gathering, working 3 hours a day and socialising for the rest, telling stories, singing, eating, laughing, reminiscing - all ages. Then we started farming, destroying biodiversity, psychopaths and their hordes created tyrannical systems of government, the vast majority of us were oppressed for centuries, we fought and died for the  rights we now take completely for granted and here we all are, in an age of total misinformation and another terrifying technological revolution we’re now trying to put a lid on with AI, all the while having wiped out more species than any meteor impact in the history of the planet, and in doing so making it more uninhabitable as the climate changes.

No wonder we’ve never been visited by aliens. I think any ‘intelligent’ life-form would have wiped itself out of existence way before it could ever develop the means to escape its planet by its own selfish needs to ‘survive’.

And it all starts with fences.

Ommmmmmmmmm

That being said, I am really chilled at the moment (for me). I’m happy about myself, all my crimes and misdemeanours from my dim and distant past I beat myself up about I just laugh at now. It’s always a way to defeat your enemies - they taunt you and you laugh. When they know they aren’t getting the reaction they wanted they soon tire of it.

I actually like myself. I’m in a good place. I feel like I did when I first met J. I have a ton of friends. I have fun. It’s beautiful weather at last. I’m really chilled.

It’s so verdant everywhere - exacerbated by the blue, blue skies. The verges aren’t mown anymore to encourage wildlife. Great to see wild flowers everywhere. I’m going to Nerys’s for lunch. They have a puppy called Tomos I’m meeting for the first time.

Don’t let the voices get to you. I don’t.

Oom Shanka.

 

Televisual Offal

 Homefront down the Toilet

Many years ago when I was barely a lad, I worked for 2 years at The BBC. It was a funny place. A culture of moaning, appalling pay and even more-appalling hours.

If you've ever seen W1A it's pretty accurate. Well-meaning yet sinisterly insincere types making creative decisions they really weren't qualified to make for programmes that were too awful to watch.

I was there working in 'lifestyle' programming in a pre-internet age. 

As a researcher I used to beg and borrow any product for the show. Product-placement was rarely mentioned but it was rife. After the 'talent' and the cameraman were paid, there was almost nothing left in the budget. My wage in 1999 was £14.5 K/annum. 

This is why the children of the wealthy go into the media: few can afford it or have the connections to go in anywhere other than at the very bottom as a runner. I had saved up money to come to London with and eventually sold my car to keep myself going. It was tough.

At least in the BBC they treated runners better than they did in the private sector. (Shivers...)

The department wanted to expand the 'brand' (which was the latest buzzword) of Home Front. They'd done Home Front in the Garden and now they wanted to do a non-transmittable pilot for a new show.

Our Series Editor, the Cambridge-educated Franny Moyle, had a big meeting with us to impart the great news of the new branch of the brand!

"It's going to be called Home Front in The Kitchen. It's a half hour show, where we design and make a kitchen, then make a meal...in that kitchen!"

Tumbleweed.

Somewhere in the distance a dog howled.

I could just imagine these over-educated Oxbridge types, high on coffee and biscuits, managing to convince themselves the worth of this mediocrity.

I looked around the room, incredulous at such nonsense. Everyone looked resigned and exhausted, albeit partly due to the 80 plus hour weeks some of us were enduring. 

My mate Fergus looked at the floor for the entirety of the speech.

At the end of it, I said to Franny "Can I NOT be involved in Home Front in The Kitchen?" Career-suicide I know, but someone had to say something and that's where yours truly came up trumps.

Makes me laugh to this day.

So the premise is basically welding a design and build show onto a cookery programme. I wonder if a visual metaphor would elucidate further?

Home Front in The Kitchen

So you have the designer doing their bit, then hairy-arsed builders put the cabinets and worktop together, plumb it all in with grease and dirt, then someone cooks a lasagne. 

You could even have one of those wipe cuts or transitions from the plumber's arse to a board full of minced beef to signify the natural blend of the 2 genres. The possibilities are endless.

So they spent £120k of licence fee (possible £160K but here my memory is shaky) on a programme which it was obvious to me and others would never work. They then showed it to a focus group who hated it.

I should be running the country, me.

Time to take the pills...