Poke-ing fun at politicians

It’s always a bit of a surprise to hear a politician admitting they got something wrong, and apologising.

I understand there have actually been more confirmed sightings of rocking-horse poo.

So when the Deputy PM, Nick Clegg, did his earnest to-camera apology regarding tuition fees, you could have heard a penny drop. If any of us actually had any pennies left to drop. Strangely, this apology seemed to be more about the fact that the Lib Dems had stated that they were going to do something, not the fact that they hadn’t. Which is a bit like saying you’re aren’t apologising for forgetting to put the bins out, you’re just sorry you said you’d do it in the first place. Still, Nick is darn sorry, and stared forlornly down the lens at us with big, sad, eyes (like the cat in Shrek) whilst saying so.

Luckily, the wonderful world that is the internet was on hand to immortalise this awkward moment, capturing it forever with millions of YouTube viewings, where otherwise it would have been rapidly replaced in our consciousness by the next daft thing an MP did. Or said. Or appeared to have said. Or might have appeared to have done or said. Allegedly.

What could be more appropriate in the disposable-pop age of reality TV and X-Factor ‘talent’ contests that autotuning Cleggy, putting his speech to a catchy song, and flinging it back out into the webosphere?

Handily, website The Poke curates a fantastical world of idiocy, amusing human frailties, ‘Epic Fails’, Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and the obligatory amusing animals. Plus many other items that cause you to shake your head, smile wryly, and think to yourself “Muppets!” They brilliantly had this masterpiece of cringeworthiness online the next day, and it went viral rapidly, and was soon being reported by all the major TV news channels in the UK, on the radio and in print.

Spotting that the fragile tide of public ambivalence might be about to turn and drown him, His Cleggness hastily agreed that it could be released as a single, as long as the money raised went to charity. Hey presto! Chart hit.

By the time you read this, it will probably already have started to fade from our collective consciousness, so rapid and mind-boggling is the rate at which something new grabs our miserably short attent... sorry, what was I saying?

Still, look on the bright side. Politicians are prone to being gaffe-magnets, so another hapless soul will be caught, rabbit-like, in the headlight-bright glare of public scorn and scrutiny before you can say “I WILL answer your question in a moment, Jeremy...”

What we could do with right about now is a posh politician to try and cycle the wrong way out of a gate at Downing Street, and then get uppity with a policeman.

Have a, politically correct, weekend.

If you can.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 28st September 2012. This is the unedited version - you can view the printed/online version here Amazingly, it's another victory against the sub-editor at the NWEM this week, in that they just add 'our' to my suggested title. At this rate, I might actually look like I know what I'm doing by about 2018.

A fairly substantial 105 words got edited out this week, which hurts a bit, but hey - life's a bitch, right?

(Freeform abstract noodling from Monstrance is wafting moodily around my head this evening. Yeah. Cool.)

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog