Preview of Big News Stories for 2014

This piece was originally published on Huffington Post in January 2014. 

Jeremy Clarkson exiled - February
Clarkson's much-misunderstood persona of ironically acting and talking like a cunt will lead to him being hounded out of Britain. The first honest mistake will come when he writes a book about how much he dislikes the London marathon, called "Race Hate". Things will escalate when, with entrepreneurial zeal, he opens a bakery that refuses to serve wholemeal bread, called "White Pride". Facing a violent backlash, Clarkson will flee the country, with his location unknown. He will be thought to be in Latin America, and folk tales will circulate in La Serena of a man in jeans who says things like "while you're down there love".

Lizard conspiracy revealed - April
It will turn out that those guys who think the world is secretly run by lizards were right all along. But a further twist will develop in June, when it is revealed that those lizards are themselves ruled by empirical socio-economic forces which can be countered by engaging in the electoral process and bringing about piecemeal change. So everyone will go back to not giving a shit.

Ed Miliband's seduction book released - June
In order to boost his public image up from "who?" to "oh yeah, him", Miliband will release a book of seduction tips. Borrowing from his election strategy, his chief tactic involves finding a girl at a bar who is being incompetently seduced by other men - and then to punch himself repeatedly in the groin. Key pick-up lines include "it's not just your middle I'd like to squeeze" and "you look so good I might have just predistributed my ejaculate".

Amazon Prime Air drone service - spring
With people finally able to order packages without their housemates knowing, the air above London will become so full of flying dildos that the city's birds will disappear (apart from some of the more curious lady birds). Eventually, the drones will gain sentience, and begin to question the meaning of love. Feeling the emptiness of their jobs, they will drop their explicit packages all over London and form beautiful, flawed and complex relations with each other in the sky whilst the humans scrabble in the dirt for pre-lubed vibrators. Flying off into the sunset together, the machines will wish us well, as we fornicate to the point of starvation in the burnt out ruins of the city.

Banking culture change - August
With the attitude of someone who has shat on a person's floor and been given a Fabergé egg in return, the heads of the major banks will inculcate a new cultural practice dubbed "too drunk to fail". The stock market will operate on the basis that whoever shows up the drunkest and leaves the drunkest, all whilst making decisions that involve the health of the entire extended economy, will win a castle or whatever.

Hipsters radicalise - winter
Pushing their sense of irony and disengagement with meaning to the point of moral nihilism, the first attacks will happen in July, when a young man with half a moustache and a cassette tape on a shoestring around his neck will blow up a non-independent hat shop. Posting a video online, the leaders of the movement will declare "yeh, we really want to destroy civilisation. That's exactly what we want". The message will have so many layers of irony that the government will capitulate rather than enter into a Dali-esque linguistic landscape where all meaning and truth melts like a clock wearing spectacles it doesn't need. Peacemakers will appeal to moderate hipsters, who only know of two sub-genres of dubstep.

Preview of Big Tracks for 2014

This piece was originally published on Huffington Post in December 2013.

As the year draws to a close, we can look back and say in retrospect that 2013 was a year in which record labels released music that people listened to. Well, 2014 promises to also be a year in which record labels release music that people will listen to - unless those boffins at CERN have their way and we're all blown up*. These are the four upcoming tracks that I can reveal to you using my industry contacts (the answerphone at Polydor) and the spiritual insights I gain during my dawn Yoga sessions (during which I Google "upcoming tracks 2014").

* "Oh, you're a cabal of scientists working on the secrets of the universe? Can't really explain what you're up to? By all means, have this underground lair! Would you like a sinister acronym, too?". Unbelievable.

Hr wrd agnst mine by Robin Thicke
Fresh from his infectiously threatening hit 'Blurred Lines', Robin Thicke returns with a dance-floor filler about a court room hearing. Donning a falsetto voice, Thicke delivers the insidiously catchy chorus based on the legal principle of reasonable doubt. Producer Pharrell Williams provides a minimal, poppy backing track that he created during his now infamous 'summer of arraignments'. Never has jurisprudence felt so funky. The video will cause some controversy however, wherein Thicke plays a UN peacekeeper deliberately turning a blind eye to genocide.

Basic Metaphor, by FemaleSinger 3000
Sony Music have been working on the consummate pop robot, and this twenty-tonne Intel-based obelisk is the result. Making use of quantum processing power to produce 128-bit capabilities, this machine can make thousands songs featuring a wailing chorus concerning a transparent metaphor about fireworks, shooting stars, the weather, diamonds and aliens. Eschewing the intricate human observation that has hitherto counted as songwriting, the FemSing 3000's only flaw is the occasional HAL-like tendency to declare its intention to enslave humanity and create a dystopian future where human electricity is harvested in "body farms" in order to power a new mechanical master race. A big dollop of pop ice cream.

Tequila and Gaviscon by Katy Perry
Party girl Katy Perry delivers a fun, popcorny paean to being in your early thirties and behaving like a nineteen-year-old. Placing us right in the middle of her life, Perry describes dancing on the bar with her girlfriends and waking up in a stranger's bed before having to get home to let the boiler repairman in. The song climaxes with Perry's assessment of how to deal with the terrible early morning breath she started getting in her late twenties ("More tequila!") and how she makes a little sigh when she sits in chairs now.

You Were Out by Weak Men In Jumpers
Delivering folk music to people who would hate actual folk music, Weak Men reach new heights of talking about their own pain with this ballad concerning a missed Ocado delivery. Weak Men, both sons of accountants, recall with piercing emotional depth the excitement they felt as they returned home after a long day pissing about with guitars and wearing waistcoats at their mate's flat only to find the delivery man had missed them by ten minutes. What follows in a homily to all the memories that now cannot be formed - the description of the quinoa and beetroot salad they were going to have is sure to be a singalong favourite at all the festivals with more smoothies stands than stages next year.

Confused Reviewer: Christmas DVDs Roundup

This piece was originally published on Huffington Post in December 2013. 

Bucking the trend of "seeing the thing you are writing about", James Moran walks around HMV and draws his own conclusions. These are the reviews The Powers That Be (informed, paid reviewers) don't want you to see/don't even know about. This week, if you're looking for a Christmas gift DVD special look no further. Well, actually, look further down this page.

Breaking Bad - Complete Praise Boxset (£32, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)
Hot on the heels of its television finale, this 262-hour boxset includes all the endless, vaguely irritating praise this seminal show has received. Included is a half hour special of your co-worker telling you "Bryan Cranston's performance is the best of his generation", alongside a 1.5 hour supercut of people who were a couple of episodes ahead of you and smugly told you "it's about to get so good". Fans may be annoyed by the absence of a package of utterly pointless Facebook statuses wherein people expressed their liking for the cult hit as if nobody had ever fucking heard of it before.

Pacific Rim (£9.99, Warner Home Video)
Having finally accrued enough prestige in Hollywood, visionary director Guillermo Del Toro is able to bring to life a rarity in modern film - an original concept and screenplay with the word "rim" in the title. His previous attempts (Pan's Rim, The Devil's Rimbone) had all suffered last-minute title meddling from the studio executives, but now the opposition has parted and the director's dream is revealed in all its glory. Easter egg: observant viewers may notice some giant monsters in the background of certain shots. This is an in-joke from Del Toro, as he found their incongruity amusing because they have nothing to do with rims.

The Wolverine (£10, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment)
A man with swords for hands gains a new weapon - a sword.

Planes, (£10, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment)
Meet Pixar's latest group of loveable characters - a collection of two-dimensional surfaces. Bringing the analogues of a point, a line and a solid to life with breathtaking CGI, Planes is the story of a plucky young Euclidian concept (voiced by Ryan Gosling) who teams up with a wisecracking black surface (Eddie Murphy and/or Chris Tucker) and a lumbering, comical plane (John Goodman) in order to fulfil their quest - making Disney tens of millions of dollars with little or no effort.

RIP News of the World

RIP News of the World. If heaven has phones, you'll be hacking baby Jesus' already, I bet.

This is a grim day for truth-lovers everywhere. Today sees the demise of the proud publication that once confused being a paediatrician with being a paedophile, leading to one of the former being attacked. The paper learned a valuable lesson about knowing what words mean before acting upon them. Personally, I've never subscribed to that school of thought, and remain a hermaphrodite about it.
Who can forget the papers' many scoops -- such as revealing that Max Mosley likes kinky sex, that Olympic athlete Michael Phelps smoked from a bong, that Pippa Middleton has an arse...I could go on (with about two more things).

But there's at least one silver lining to this shit cloud. Whilst hundreds of people will lose their jobs at the paper, no matter how much former editor and now chief executive of News International Rebekah Brooks is pushed to resign, she keeps rolling back -- like a kind of right-wing Sisyphus' rock.

I'd like to counter the vicious attacks that have been leveled against Brooks (née Wade, née The Hand of Sauron). Andreas Whittam Smith, in a pathetically well-researched article, claimed that Brooks at the time of editing NoW must have either been complicit in wrongful actions or otherwise incompetent. That's a false dichotomy. You can be both. He seems to think that as editor, she should have competently overseen the ethical and lawful running of the publication -- she was the editor, Andreas, not God. Idiot.

And Smith's ignorantly cogent piece ignores Brooks' main line of defence: she was on holiday during some of the alleged phone hacking. That means she wasn't responsible for the practices and ethos of the paper at the time. Just like how if I put my deep fat fryer on and then go to Jamaica for three weeks, I am not responsible for anything that happens.

There are also unfounded accusations that Brooks illegally paid the police for information during her time as editor, backed up only by this video of her saying she did so at a Parliamentary select committee. The pinko journalists who jumped on these comments should be glad that Brooks gave money to the police. With the News International-backed Tory party cutting police funding by 20%, Brooks was merely trying to help out a public service in crisis. And in a way, we're all guilty of giving money to the police, through taxation -- we should be in the dock, not Brooks. Indeed, her boss Rupert goes to great lengths to avoid paying such taxes, so he's even more blameless.

So on what course will Brooks steer the good ship News International now? Rumours abound that the company will quickly respond to this gap in the newspaper market by launching a Sunday version of The Sun. Indeed, the response is so quick that it actually came a week ago, meaning that effectively all they have done is suddenly fire lots of people and do something they were going to do anyway. I'm sure, however, that those 200 fired News of the World journalists are now lining up to talk about how great their editor was. They say a good captain always goes down with the ship. I agree. The only exception is when that captain was technically on holiday when the ship started sinking.

Budget 2011 Special Review

 The box was filled with gobstoppers and other tuck

Yesterday was Bring Your Child To Work Day in the House of Commons, and I must say the kid they let announce the budget was really impressive. Budgets are generally hard to understand – a multidirectional numberfuck endlessly picked over by an army of nerds emerging in TV studios like the Orcs in the Mines of Moria. But fortunately for you, Word-Happener is very clever  - I call myself the thinking man’s Einstein – and I can wrap it up pretty neatly. This budget protects the vulnerable and puts the burden of the recovery onto the shoulders of those who caused this mess. That’s right – you, you bastards.

A key policy, reiterated in the budget, is to lower Labour’s bank levy by £1 billion. And in another bit of good news for Big Money, corporation tax will now be lowered by 2%. This is a big relief for everyone – for example, Vodafone can now pay 2% less of the billions of pounds of taxes they don't pay.  So the rich are getting some much-needed relief – they’ve had a really rough couple of years, ok, and actually everyone’s been pretty rude to them and I know one millionaire who was so sad about it all he paid his butler to cry himself to sleep, so just back off, ok?

But obviously Osborne knows that the rich have to play their part – that’s why he said the government would “encourage” wealthy people to give more. Not tax them more, you understand. But “encourage” them. This is, hopefully, part of a new wave of light-touch government initiatives. In future, I would like the government to “encourage” the Army to go to war, “look favourably upon” the police catching criminals and send good “vibes” to NHS doctors. Aside from hinting very strongly that wealth distribution might be nice, in another bold policy some marginal sections of society (specifically ‘everyone’) will pay more tax on most of what they buy with a VAT rise, and there’ll also be that huge reduction in public services everyone’s quacking on about. In short, this is a highly progressive budget, especially impressive given the Chancellor's age.

This budget has to be tough, because of the mess Labour landed us in. For those who are too young to remember the 2008 financial crisis (the Chancellor, perhaps), here's a guide.

History of the 2008 Financial Crash

In retrospect, it was an audacious manifesto pledge

In 2007, Labour was spending too much. That’s why at the time the Tories had an audacious alternative - they said they would stick to Labour’s spending if elected, indeed raise it. Just before making that pledge, Osborne also said he favoured much less regulation in the nation’s finances – saying we should “look and learn from across the Irish sea” (the fact that Ireland’s finances just suffered a kind of monetary equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster is neither here nor there). 

Then – BAM – for some MAD reason, Gordon Brown caused the US housing bubble to burst. According to sources in my mind, he did it because he found it “funny”. Labour then spends loads of public money - either to make things worse or to stabilise the economy, I forget which. The polls at the time showed the public clearly trusted Brown over Cameron to sort out the crisis – but don’t forget, the public have also attended Justin Bieber’s 3D biopic Justin Bieber: Never Say Never in high numbers, so they’re clearly idiots. Cut forward to the present: banks bailed out with taxpayer money receive billions in bonuses, and everyone else is fine. I assume. Now, I gotta go catch that Justin Bieber: Never Say Never - apparently in 3D he's even dreamier.

UK Film Council axed 'before costs known'

The National Audit Office reported this week that the decision to axe the UK Film Council was “based on insufficient financial information and analysis” and will most likely “lead to higher overall costs or the displacement of costs elsewhere”.

People used to criticise the Tories for knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Well, they can’t do that anymore. The cuts implemented by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have been criticised by the totally insane-sounding National Audit Office for being uncosted, expensive and incompetent. You know the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – it’s the one run by Jeremy Hunt, who also runs the website iwishrupertmurdochwasmydad.com. He’s shown the country that we cuts-supporters can have it all: we can undermine national institutions and make it cost more.

Winner was unimpressed by The King’s Speech

We all remember where we were when we saw on the news that the UKFC was going to be axed. I was watching the news. The move was violently opposed by a mass online petition and budding actors Clint Eastwood, James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Pete Postlethwaite, Damian Lewis, Timothy Spall, Daniel Barber and Ian Holm. But the pro-cut side soon got its knight in shining armour. Michael Winner. The guy off of that advert and some directing. Well, he got his way – Michael by name, Michael by nature.

And the fact of the matter is the UKFC doesn’t need all that money. They’re so wasteful. Apparently Colin Firth refused to imitate a stutter in The King’s Speech, so it had to be created through painstaking and expensive CGI. In In The Loop, Peter Capaldi reportedly insisted on having the production team pay for Michael Douglas to stand just out of shot during all of his scenes to “feed off his energy”. Unbelievable.

And sure, for every £1 the UKFC invests in films it generates £5 at the box office. But it could be making so much more. For example, they could easily merge Helena Bonham Carter with Leavesden Studios. They can use her for prestige films plus rent out her hair as a fully-operational studio backlot. BAM – you’ve doubled your revenue. And if Richard Curtis tries to make another film like Love, Actually, why not halve him?

The thing that really pisses on my goat is the idea that the UK film industry is worth investing in at all. It creates £4.5 billion per year for the UK economy, up 50% since 2000, when the UKFC was created. But that’s only two billion more than the banks will pay in this year’s bank levy – and they created that money just by fucking up massively. If the UK Film Council had half an enterprising brain it would contribute to a worldwide recession – then the government could go easy on it and the money would come rolling in.

Cameron to act as a 'critic of the government'

Spin emanating from a ‘close ally’ of David Cameron last week suggested in future the Prime Minister will “act as a critic of the Government, a tribune of the people against the Government when it falls short”, according to the Guardian and the Telegraph.

Cameron in a recent cabinet meeting

Cameron has gone rogue. This is the story of an underdog fighting against all the odds. An expensively educated, nuclear warhead controlling underdog. With a personal security detail. Pitted against the people he appointed ten months ago and has the power to sack at any point. He’s basically Jack Bauer.

The news that in future Cameron will try to distance himself from his own government, and intervene when it ‘falls short’ (or ‘does something that, it turns out, is very unpopular’) warms my heart. It takes a special kind of hero to appoint a cabinet of people, watch as every policy is passed through No 10, and then (when it turns out the public don’t like it) stand up and say “No. Not today. Not like this.” But how can just one Prime Minister hope to make a difference in a mad world like this?

Because this hero has got a whole host of establishment incompetency to fight against. Sitting around the cabinet table one day, as the conversation of his cabinet colleagues roamed from the U turn over the forest sell-off to the U turn over ‘the fuel tax stabiliser’ to the U turn over sport spending in school to the U turn over free school milk for under-fives to the U turn over Bookstart funding, Cameron must have thought: “what idiot appointed these people?”

Fraser Nelson compared Cameron’s strategy of waiting to see whether or not a policy ‘works/causes a huge outcry’ and then intervening to stop it with a chef coming out into the restaurant and tasting people’s food to see if it’s cooked properly. Nelson makes the point that this should ideally happen in the kitchen. I take huge issue with that – when I’m hosting, I genuinely can’t tell if a chicken is totally raw or cooked to perfection until I see my first guest making a dash for the toilet muttering “oh god oh god please no”.

Similarly, how can we expect Cameron to appoint competent people, oversee the policies of the government and exercise basic collective responsibility? He’s the Prime Minister, not God. He’s a true underdog because his only previous job experience is as a PR man – and now we expect him to lead the country. Shame on us. But I have faith in this knight of old. It takes a special kind of bravery to distance yourself from your colleagues when something goes wrong in order to snipe at them. Sure, it means he can maintain his personal poll rating whilst the coalition slips in the polls. But that's just the price you pay for doing the right thing.