1pm, Christmas day…

Well it is almost time for the Queen’s speech. Sadly the Queen couldn’t make it today, something about being on TV and having to unwrap huge amounts of pressies and so you will be stuck with good old Fluffy Bunny (Oi.! Less of the old thank you very much). This year I shall be doing this as a review of the year, like my normal New Year thing, but I have something different planned for that. Anyway, on with the fun.!

So what have we missed in the past twelve months. Well music for a start, a distinct lack of it at work has led to way too much out of control/tune singing and daft dancing to no sound. Then again, having seen the Chart line up from last weekend maybe not having access to a radio may very well be a good thing. If we all thought music had put on a thick coat, some winter shoes and a scarf in 2009 then in 2010 it packed its bags and fucked off to Argentina on a Latin American holiday (and has subsequently been kidnapped in Bolivia and is now being held hostage by Justin “No dick or balls” Bieber and Lady “Massive dick and two balls” Gaga). Finding Rihanna four times in the top 40 just made me wince and Matt “Smex Factor” Cardle at number one whilst “Fairytale of New York” the GREATEST Christmas song ever written languished at number 19… well I was already loading both barrels and throwing some grenades in the jeep.

Then I remembered last year and Rage Against the Machine and calmed down a bit.

Now what else tickled us in this past year.?

January: the tallest building in the world opened in Dubai, specifically so they could see the top of their huge pile of money (Which they then lost… down the back of the sofa). A big earth-a-shake in Haiti caused George W and Bill Clinton to pop over to help sort if all out. Haiti has now reverted to pre-stoneage technology and hunting sabre-toothed animals.

February: The Winter Olympics were held in Canada, next time they will be held in Qatar (if FIFA gets enough money shoved through it’s letterbox).

March: Someone sinks a boat off the coast of South Korea and then 7 months later someone retaliates. Talk about delayed reactions.!

April: Greece runs out of money and sells off all it’s olives and feta to pay it’s debts. I bought it all. ALLLLL. *Burp*. Oh and BP left a tap running in the Gulf of Mexico and coated most of the Southern United States coast with oil. Never have so many chips been fried for so many by so few.

May: Scientists discover that humans and neanderthals probably shagged like dogs. A quick look at any advert with Kerry Katona and Danny Dyer would have saved them years of work.

June: We lost the world cup. Again. But so did the Germans so yay.!

July: Wikileaks starts pumping out information that the world wants to see (and with far less danger than the British Media) and pisses off just about every diplomat going.

August: Swine Flu goes the way of Bird Flu and leaves us all alone.

September: Nothing much happened in September, I think it may have been my month off and so news was unimportant, clearly. I suppose Katy Perry probably released a single. Maybe Jordan Andre shagged someone new.

October: The International Space Station celebrates the longest inhabited space occupation. Records show that it still has more atmosphere than most of the nightclubs in Weston.

November: CERN scientists and their huge hardon hadron collider trap antimatter for a sixth of a second. Almost as long as FIFA took to decide whether to give the World Cup to an ex-Communist country full of mafia bosses with deep pockets or us.

December: Nasa announces the discovery of a new arsenic based life form in California. Within 24 hours three people have tried to eat it, nine have tried to hump it and seventy five per cent of the population of Sacramento claim to have been abducted by it.

Not much happened in 2010 it seems. We have had a lot of snow though. More than I remember since about 1981 so something must be amiss somewhere.

We did lose some important people sadly, Leslie Nielsen, Gary Coleman, Malcolm McLaren, Alex Higgins, Dennis Hopper, Tom Walkinshaw and Norman Wisdom.

More sadly we didn’t lose the following people… Simon Cowell, Davina McCall. Katie Price. Cheryl Cole (although almost, must try harder Mr Mosquito), Jonathon Ross.

What would we like to see during 2011 then.? Jensen or Lewis lifting that championship again would be good. Bloody good season apart from the first race, some top notch racing.! I would love to see a Raoul Moat lookalike get hold of a sniper rifle and hunt down some of the stars of Eastenders. Maybe 2011 will be the year that Madonna realises her age and gets rid of those bloody leotards… look love, the crotches of those things must be honking by now. Bin them and buy yourself some leggings. More television commercials with ducks in them. Less television commercials with fat irritating psuedo-Italian singers and/or music by La Roux. Oh and we would all love to see Milton Keynes flattened by a nuclear explosion preferably between 9am and 5pm on a weekday.

AAAAANNNNDDDD finally, I have a problem. I need to define my record of the year and I cannot. Despite this year being fucking wank with regard to mainstream music, there still have thankfully been one or two shining stars. This is where I have the trouble. I am simply unable to separate the two tunes I consider most worthy of the “StitchingBastard Music Award 2010″ and therefore, hereafter and forthwith I name both Little Big Town AND Gabriella Cilmi as my winners (and anything involving those cunts Florence and the Machine as the biggest losers since Hitler shot his cyanide ridden self and then got burnt up lots by them SS geezers, like). So I leave you with both of the above.! Enjoy, and a very Merry Christmas to you all.!!

ps… Actually I just noticed that the Record of the Year (according to fuck-knows-who) was awarded to Owl City and the song Fireflies. May I suggest that you dear viewers have never had it so good.! OWL CITY.? I will take his keyboard and push it so far up his arse that not even Rakhmaninov would be able to get a decent tune out of it. *descends into whimpering and moaning*

I am sure you have all seen the new festive adverts for a certain fast food restaurant well I decided to make it a bit more, well, real…

(To the tune of “Deck the halls”)

A bag of fries with too much salt on,
and a coke, no ice, with no fizz.
Over cooked, rubbery quarter pounders,
and a cup of tea that tastes like piss.

Heaven forbid they assemble an order and put in the bag all the things…
that I paid for 20 minutes ago whilst they fucked about and the whole place mings.

A filet-o-fish that resembles a car crash,
box of six nuggets that taste of chimp.
A big mac built by a blind epileptic,
cooked an hour ago and gone all limp.

So I end my fast food adventure,
wishing I had gone for a curry instead.
Bollocks to you Mcdonalds restaurants,
with your shoddy meat and mass produced breaaaaad.

(I love you really… no I do, well more than Burger King… I would rather lick Gillian McKeith’s sweaty fanny after a massive attack of the squits than eat at BK).

Whilst sitting back and enjoying the DVD entitled “Jimmy Carr… Telling Jokes” the other night I whipped up the special features menu and put on a show he performed for Comedy Central over in the good ole US of A. Aside from the fact that he had to dumb down a lot of the jokes for a market where literal humour is far and away the best way of getting a laugh (as that way the audience doesn’t have to think, which is usually a struggle, let’s face it) it was the quantity of jokes that took something away from the performance.

You see for some reason American audiences are extremely easily pleased.  I noticed this when I watched Jeff Dunham’s live show as well, the assembled crowd don’t just laugh, appreciate the joke and then maybe politely clap for a decent gag, ooohh no, they instantly turn to each other as though the joke is personally expressed towards them and do the Homer Simpson thing (that is to say they slap their foreheads and say “Yes, oooh yes, oh god yes” before their ‘tired from laughing’ arms sag to their sides). That is the point at which they start clapping. They clap at every little thing. Like a beach full of sealions they slap their hands together at the slightest funny line and it totally destroys the flow of the comedy.

A good stand up show is funny, cleverly and wittily written but most importantly well timed. Jimmy Carr is certainly all of these but no comedian should have to face a group of people, no matter how well armed with top notch material he or she is, and put up with a barricade of over the top whooping and applause when there is no call for it. I always did wonder why I found American funnymen less funny than their UK equivalent and now I realise that it really isn’t because all Richard Prior’s jokes are about being black. It isn’t because all Eddie Murphy’s jokes are about being black. It really isn’t because all Ruby Wax’s jokes are about being American and female. It is purely down to the people sat watching them turn the atmosphere into one of a brawl in a laughing gas factory.

Just think of the comparison between US TV and UK TV, especially in the Ricki Lake/Jerry Springer/Trisha/Jeremy Kyle vein… Ricki Lake is a good starting point as her show was one of the founders for the later efforts from the other three and since the mid 1990s when I first started watching it I always was amazed at the crowd chanting ‘Ricki Ricki’ at everything she said. Then Mr Springer arrived and put forward the notion that you didn’t need a normal show to make things odd, you could turn the place into a freak show and slide in a moral tale at the end and THAT makes it weird. Both of these shows are way over the top when it comes to audience participation. Us in the UK seem to be able to reign in our desire to ‘put our hands together’ every third sentence thankfully. Rarely on JK or Trisha do you hear anyone shouting out or anything apart from some good old booing when some slag comes out or some wife beater.

Maybe it is just down to our innate sense of composure, something a lot of students apparently lack, and the upright air that generally gets picked up by every impersonator around the world. Or maybe it is because no matter how much beer we swill, no matter how much we fail to cope with an inch of snow that melts after one night, no matter just how many 11 year olds get knocked up by their cousins (Bridgwater and Norwich I am looking at you) we know how to behave when in a theatre.!