March 2007: The Celtic Underbelly - Back, Craic and Sac

There aren't many things more rubbish than women, but men definitely qualify. Men are, it must be said, a bit shit. Okay, that's not strictly true since men are quite clearly better than women at a whole bunch of things, but these are usually the nerdy things that your average woman has far too much sense to be involved in. Take politics, for example: every now and then you get people being all het-up because there aren't enough women in politics. The easy thing is to blame it on some sort of male conspiracy to oppress the masses of females out there but this ignores two things: firstly that your average man is nowhere near devious or intelligent enough to come up with such a dastardly plan, and secondly that women do quite a good job oppressing themselves thank-you-very-much - and before anyone starts complaining the prosecution I would like to cite that godawful Bridget Jones ooh-she's-so-great-with-her-shallow-manipulative-clingy-duplicitous-boring qualities, which was endlessly offensive even before they went and cast Renee Zellweger as loveable oul' Bridget (and irritatingly, nobody made the "Frigid Tones Diary" jokes that Renee's accent begged for, although that does at least mean that I can make it now). But the truth is that... well, politics is for geeks, really, isn't it? It's for lonely socially-inept nerds who need to establish it as an old boys club in order to rationalise all that time they spend sitting around in a chamber trying not to piss themselves as they fall asleep rather than doing something productive and useful. This is a profession in which Mo Mowlam's habit of taking her shoes off at meetings was seen as something incredibly eccentric and daring, rather than just a fairly obvious way of making herself more comfortable. And Mo Mowlam's a good example, or rather she would be if she wasn't a bit too dead to be truly current - she was simply far too sensible, far too well-adjusted, far too smart to waste her time with all that political bollocks, which was why she was a: so good at it and b: never as successful as she should have been. Because she's a woman, and your average woman just doesn't have the requisite borderline autism to be in politics. It's not that they're not let in, just that they're too sensible to be arsed jumping through the requisite hoops. Good for them.

The point being that the geeks have taken over the earth, they just bought suits beforehand and we don't notice. It's the same in culture, which is now founded on the core principle of "demographics"... but again, only a completely sad Trekkie in disguise would buy into something as pathetic, as dull, as completely and irredeemably sad as the concept of demographics. It's a male thing, reducing a multiplicity to that sort of abstract quantifiable pattern, the same way that trainspotting or making matchstick models of the eiffel tower or remembering the result of every Grand Prix since 1991 is a male thing. Women, in the best possible way, just can't be arsed. They've got better things to do with their lives.

("Better things" , sadly, appears to qualify as "buying shoes", but all theories fall down somewhere.)

The point of all this is that there is, as ever, no conspiracy so no hope of changing anything. The reason that women aren't heavily involved in cinema or television (the tiny proportion of female directors was the subject of a great big spread in The Observer lately, although the same paper has also devoted four pages to discussing What It's Like To Be Tall so that doesn't necessarily mean it's important) is because, to become a TV playah (more phonetically-transcribed Gangsta Lingo for the fans), you've got to be a sad obsessive who can tell you the plot of everything from Citizen Smith to Survivors. What woman is that sad? So obviously our culture still stinks, really stinks, of a subtle, insidious maleness. Even the women who are involved are the ones who subscribe to the worldview in the first place, and produce shite like I'm-Not-Going-To-Talk-About-Desperate-Housewives-Again as a badge of emancipation, and where does that lead you? Men suck, Women suck worse, and Men suck even worse than them. It's like rock-paper-scissors but without the middleman.

Corrections to the Last Issue

• More podcast-related stuff - those who listened may recall that the Outspan "small ones are more juicy" adverts were discussed at one stage, although not really described. The advert that sticks in my memory is a little hazy, but if I remember rightly it was something to do with a bunch of schoolkids eating oranges in class and juice squirting everywhere in a sort of golden-orangey fountain beneath which they all drenched themselves (look, I said it was hazy). However I have been informed by a very trustworthy correspondent more mature in years than myself that this was not the only Outspan advert. The other was a poster, featuring a small girl (around the age of eleven). According to the correspondent in question - I say for legal reasons - the girl was heavily made-up, and was wearing a grown-up woman's "going out" clothes although they were, obviously, much too big for her; and the tagline was unaltered, i.e. small ones are more juicy. I don't have any independent verification for this, but still... surely it goes beyond "ooh it was a more innocent time" and just becomes plain weird. No matter what Life on Mars may tell us, surely no-one in the seventies was that fucked up? They were in the eighties, obviously (hey, cocaine had taken off) but at that point they simply weren't that creative. I'm therefore, sadly, still not convinced that this can ever have happened. I searched for independent verification on the internet, but take this on trust: typing "small ones are more juicy young girl" into Google brings you to places you never, ever want to go.

• A(nother) correspondent has sent in a couple of emails picking holes in Hot Fuzz, particularly the A-Team style no-kill bullet at the end. He has also postulated that Hot Fuzz is not a Miss Marple adaptation but actually a retelling of Sleepy Hollow, with the foreign cop coming to a sleepy backwater town, a big family tree, and the father of the love interest being behind it all. This might suggest that the neighbourhood watch thing isn't, in fact, that important: it's simply there to achieve the you-are-being-watched feel of the Irving novel, which leads to a... to a... oh look, fuck it mate. You want to get all analytical, get your own sodding website. Sheesh.

• Patchy instalments have been due to technical difficulties, i.e. I-had-my-laptop-stolen-along-with-all-my-programs-so-I-had-to-steal-sorry-I-mean-buy-them-all-again, and these things take time. The podcast being late posted is down to nothing more than sheer stinking laziness from my interviewer, on the other hand. Slappings have been administered as necessary.

television

Heroes

Big, brash, stupid, and good fun: finally we've got a much-hyped US show that doesn't make me want to rip out Tori Spelling's throat with my teeth (not that she's to blame for any of them, except in the way that a country which can produce Tori Spelling is obviously going to churn out reams of shite TV). It's airing on a great big heap of channels, all at once, as is the way with these things: those in DigitalLand can steal a march on everyone else by having a peek at the SciFi channel, which does at least make a change from them rescreening Angel on a loop all day (that's the vile, navel-gazing, self-dramatising bollocks Buffy spinoff rather than the Neil Jordan film). What they'll find is...

Hmm. You know X-Men? Well it's that.

Which sounds derisory, but it's not really meant to be. One of the things that America does have to be proud of - and let's face it, the list isn't particularly long (although most Americans will try and tell you they invented freedom as a concept, as if no-one else had ever thought of it before or after. The single word "slavery" does a decent job of squashing that particular argument, but even if you do accept the America-is-the-birthplace-of-freedom as true - and why would you, really - it's a bit like saying Isaac Newton invented gravity) - is that it's a country where they still attempt, albeit mostly fail but at least they attempt, to actually create new mythologies. It's not entirely unexpected - Europe's a place where there's a road to everywhere, where your car breaking down is a minor inconvenience, and with a few exceptions the environment is under control. America has vast swathes of practically uncharted country. It's actually got deserts, you know, proper ones. And if your car breaks down in the wrong place in America, you might die. In that basic climate it's not surprising that they come up with mythologies that are fundamentally individualistic, one-man-against-the-world, own-bit-of-homestead stuff. Which sounds quite nice and romantic until you realised that the same ethos got us the Administration (which is what Americans say instead of "greedy idiotic warmongering fundamentalist Christians telling the world what to do") that we got today. Oh well, nothing's perfect.

There are a lot of criticisms you could level at Heroes. It's melodramatic, overblown nonsense, obviously. It's based on the idea of supermen as a race, which has obviously repellent subtexts. And it has that male version of strong female characters, which is always leads to the same place - women who are Women rather than just People, with woman-y jobs which they can transcend in a display of marvellous feminine strength. Here we have man who are politicians, doctors, policemen and artists and ordinary non-specific office workers (although the non-specific office worker is Japanese, obviously, since they're all the same over there so they don't need and actual recognisable profession). The women are cheerleaders or pole-dancers who actually earn a lot of their money on the tinternet. The notion that you take the young 'n' pretty cheerleader and make her indestructible is unbearably hideous, as it comes from a mentality that assumes that all pretty girls become cheerleaders, and then that cheerleaders are automatically fragile and airheaded. It traces back to that American notion that school society is divided into the Freaks and the Geeks, which is in fact complete bollocks - kids and teenagers hang out with pretty much anyone. But that's only true over here, obviously - because this is America, where the notion of genetically superior people who are here to lead all the ordinary mortals is seen as something aspirational and fantastic rather than fascistic and a bt scary.

So: Heroes is macho and American, and its worldview is unpleasantly macho and American. It's obviously based on X-Men, but whereas X-Men recast its mutants as persecuted, imperfect and hunted creatures, Heroes wants to make us think they're special - which means, by extension, that everyone else is ordinary.

And yet.

And yet it's really rather good. It's overblown, but that's part of the joke - essentially it's a comic-book put on telly, so obviously it will use the melodramatic structure of comic books. It may treat the only foreign hero as a bit of a joke, as if Americans simply aren't allowed to be geeky, but the joke is actually funny. And more crucially, it's actually well-told. The pilot is a the standard tour-of-all-the-central-characters and the cast (like Lost) is too big to get a story that progresses at any great pace, but at the same time there is a dramatic focus. In six weeks the world's gonna get blown up, and all these people who don't even know each other have to stop it. Even if it does lead to a lot of join-the-dots connections which are more than a little contrived, there's an obvious story to be told.

Better yet, it's got scope. It is, admittedly, all about America (even if it does have the aforementioned Japan bloke, and will also star the last Doctor Who as a bloke wot can go invisible, but these are obvious anomalies that are treated in much the same way as if they came from Narnia) but it's about big things happening in America - and the good thing is that, whereas something about 24 was all about people trying desperately to control the country and make it small and secure and safe, Heroes is about embracing the unknown and the strange. On the one hand, you've got Jack Bauer trying to convince us all that actually, funny dark people aren't all terrorists and should be treated like human beings before going and showing them all to be terrorists anyway; on the other, a tale about how people can be anything. Heroes is also very aware of its own silliness and goes for it with its teeth. It's certainly not perfect, and if we're talking "Native Mythologies" then it ain't Doctor Who - fuck it, it ain't even Blake's 7 - but it's fun, freewheeling and well-plotted nonsense. I have a strong feeling that I should dislike this, and may well come to do so; for the time being though, it's worthy of recommendation. If you like the sort of thing.

How Low Can You Go

How far can you piss off, more like it.

One of the things that reality television does - really, properly does - is capture some sense of society. This was in a very obvious way the point of Big Brother, which was why the criticisms that it only ever focused on a certain segment of individuals were missing the point entirely. Most of the meaningful storytelling in our society comes from people under the age of forty, if you view meaningful as being mainstream (which isn't that much of jump, because things that aren't mainstream don't really matter because nobody sees them by definition), so obviously these are the people who Big Brother is going to focus on. What provides the interesting view of society isn't the sight of a few boring people arguing with each other in a house - rather it's what goes on around the people arguing in a house, such as the dried-up celebrity arsecakes trying to justify their own inanity by coming up with "intellectual" reasons to watch it or - and here's the nub of the matter - who actually gets chosen to appear on these things in the first place. Watching some stupid fat Encapsulation-Of-Everything-That's-Wrong throw insults at a Rather-Dull-Bollywood-Actress-Who's-Apparently-Quite-Famous-If-You-Like-That-Sort-Of-Thing is not even vaguely interesting. Rather, it's the outcry and the machinations that put them together in the first place - the cold hard truth that, unless you're a complete dunderhead, you can't ignore the fact that putting them together in a house in the first place was pointless unless you wanted something like this to happen. Big Brother the programme doesn't reflect society, but Big Brother the engineered product does.

How Low Can You Go is, it should be stressed at this point, absolutely abysmal. RTE can't do reality programmes anyway so this isn't in itself surprising. Within two minutes of watching you know what you're going to get - three first-rate penises travelling to various interesting places, putting themselves irritatingly in front of the camera and thereby blocking my view of the rather interesting things that are going on behind them. Occasionally they stumble onto something that could almost be classified as diverting, but then arse this up as well by just talking right the way through it and thereby making the whole thing pointless. It's like watching an episode of the Jonathan Ross show in which he's got quite interesting guests, but spends the five minutes interrupting them so he can make a daring joke which might even contain a word like "wank". How Low Can You Go can only be survived by muttering I Hate You I Hate You I Hate You I Hate You I Hate You under your breath as these magnificent laddish hi-jinking specimens of manhood grin at the camera every three seconds, with all the charm of a shit-and-earwax salad that's been dressed with urine. It's about as much fun as watching Ann Widdecombe using a gerbil to climax herself.

It's only momentarily surprising that these... these... these people (sorry, but after much searching I couldn't find an epithet sufficiently insulting. Craven cum-drinking shitnavelled fuck-mannequins was a close as I got, but it was nowhere near good enough) have been deemed worthy of cavorting around my television screen. They are, after all, our alpha males of choice. It doesn't take a giant leap of imagination to picture them in a particularly expensive and fashionable pinstriped shirt, grinning charmingly at fake-tanned succubi in Ron Black's as they pretend they give a flying fuck what branch of PR their quarry works in. We're talking about people who say their favourite film is American Beauty because it sounds suitably intelligent and sensitive, and saying The Fast And The Furious would just not be acceptable in that context. It's long been the case that the saving grace of Ireland is basically the immigrants, and if there weren't all the Poles and Lithuanians to liven the place up then all we'd be left with would be these terminally dull bodysnatchers who demand two hours of bland what-do-you-do conversation before they'll actually reveal anything about themselves or allow you to do likewise. The thing about the Celtic Tiger is that it's lead to a generation of dullards who've never actually had to worry about where the money's coming from, and in its place comes the ritual Irish Social Dance to keep things busy. Thank god there's actually people in the country who know what real poverty's like and don't bother with any of that arse.

It's worth mentioning at this point that once, some time ago and purely for the purposes of social experimentation, I went speed-dating. This was about as successful a pursuit as I would have expected, i.e. not very. But of the first five people I spoke to, three of them actually told me that they like "socialising". At the third I finally managed to ask the most pressing question on my mind - what does that even mean? How is talking-to-people actually a pursuit? I'd missed the point, of course - if you subscribe to the Celtic Conversation-Dance then of course it becomes a hobby that you have to get better at, like football or model-making or pederasty.

I bet those tossers on How Low Can You Go are great at socialising. I bet they wouldn't bat an eyelid at the phrase. And I bet that, for the brief periods that my telly was forced to show them, that it was begging for me to turn over and possibly scrub the inside of the screen with Dettol. This is a year in which RTE has made No Experience Required and Trouble In Paradise, but this is still quite comfortably their worst programme of the year.

film

Venus

It's maybe worth mentioning something else at this stage: namely, that I pretty much hate men in general. I think the thing that really bothers me isn't the constant pretence at being interested in women with big tits, because bluntly it's an interest I share with the majority of the male populace. Nor indeed do I have any objections to the other stereotypical things that men talk about, such as football, or sport in general, or women in general for that matter. I'm not interested in cars, it must be stressed, which can be a slight problem but I don't think most men are really interested in cars either, since they're more likely to talk about Top Gear than actual real cars (indicating a slightly worrying Jeremy Clarkson fetish, but hey). The fact that I can't have sex with men unless I go through a rather major lifestyle change is obviously a drawback too. But none of these are actually the problem - rather it's the tiresome bullying nature of yer average man, the absolute refusal to talk about anything that may lead to them seeming even slightly vulnerable, the need to shit on just about everything else in order to validate themselves. This isn't always apparent since most men now compartmentalise their personalities between The Bits Wot Women Get To See and The Bits For Uvver Blokes, and I hate this too. What's even more depressing is the way that the preening malodour of machismo is just a smell that everyone has gotten used to - it's now somehow acceptable or desirable for Men to be Men, as if it's just a natural order of gender that no-one should bother trying to correct. People now just accept the fact that Maxim and FHM exist as if it's something perfectly ordinary, in a vague shrug of yeah well hey it's stupid but Men like that sort of thing, they need magazines with naked women and pages upon pages of Bondesque consumer hardware, because that's what men are naturally like. We seem to have just jettisoned the idea that men are rational creatures and can actually be more intelligent than this if they want. We shouldn't.

And so to Venus, in which Paddy O'Toole leches endlessly at some teenage girl for ninety minutes. By rights, this should be horrendous. And yet it's quite easily the best film of the year so far. Even if the poster is stupid enough to say "By the director of Notting Hill" like that's actually a recommendation.

Much of what makes this so good is the incidental stuff. O'Toole and Lesley Phillips are both playing aging actors, and their luvvy-ish interaction is a treat. The first scene features them swapping their medication in a cafe, and much of it runs in this vein - a whistle-in-the-dark attitude about their age and the proximity of death. It's all torn up when Phillips finds himself living with his young niece, who guzzles all his alcohol and generally behaves like teenage girls do. O'Toole, on the other hand, rather likes her. Or at least, he likes her tits.

The leching and the perving aren't disguised or glamourised - rather they're something that's just there, like the wrinkles in O'Toole's face or his laboured breathing. The two settle down into a weird parody of a relationship - O'Toole taking this girl out and making no secret of how much he wants her (although thanks to a recent operation he's hors de combat as far as that goes anyway). She tolerates this rather than embracing it, and in return for the trips to film sets and the good meals she lets him touch her occasionally. It's a sex-thrills for niceness relationship and it should be sordid - in fact it is sordid - but it works because they so obviously get much more out of each other than just the cheap thrills they're after. He gets the companionship of someone who isn't luvvy-ish or educated, who just walks around being rude and vulgar and stupid and magnificently, beautifully alive. And she - as is actually said at some point - gets someone who is actually nice to her. There may be all sorts of bizarre offers involved, such as the truly surreal bits where she allows him to kiss her shoulder and then specifies the number of times he can do it, but what the film suggests is that this really isn't that much of a stretch. It's a world in which everyone uses everyone else, in which Lesley Phillips wants the girl to stay with him so she'll be his pseudo-nursemaid, in which the girl's boyfriend is obviously using her for sex - why aren't these things sordid? Yes, it's uncomfortable. But good films should be.

There's also a glorious physicality to the whole thing, a sense of flesh growing old and atrophying. It's a film about aging; a film where we see bodies breaking down, prostates failing, people doing simple things such as helping each other, old men scanning the obituaries for the deaths of their friends. It's a film about youth; a film which shows the selfishness of youth, the brutality and weariness of it, the infinite possibilities and the powerful energy, the stupidity and intelligence and glorious directness of being young. But more than that, it's a film that is about a strange love between two people, one starting a new life, the other coming to the conclusion of his. O'Toole's last words in the film are simple: "Now we can really talk." All the lechery and the machismo stripped away, and the simplicity of two people in each other's company left behind. It may have got good reviews, but Venus has been two easily dismissed as a little film that's chiefly about watching O'Toole and Phillips spark off each other. This doesn't go far enough. It's a moving, affirming, gorgeous piece of work and if you didn't go and see it then buy the DVD as soon as it's out. In fact, buy two of them and give one to a friend. You both ought to be ashamed of yourself.

adverts

Special K

I suppose one of the weirder things about men / woman stereotypes is the duality that people will quite happily except when characterising men and women. Not many people will have any difficulty at all with accepting the fact that all men are useless buggers who can’t even finish putting some shelves up, but at the same time they’re all semi-autistic nerds who tot-up football scores and pursue everything out of a sense of completism. It’s the same way that women are simultaneously loveable scatterbrains who never remember to do anything, and hyper-organised homemakers who understand things like “dusting” in a way that men never will.

The thing is that – and here we might as well state the obvious, for the sake of it – it’s not actually possible to construct a male or female ideal model. If you asked a woman to describe to you what a man is, in general, like, they would obviously look at you as if you were a five-star idiot. And yet there’s no problem with a woman saying “oh well men are like that” upon being told that her best mate’s ex-boyfriend has broken into her house, pissed on her bed, and spray-painted the word BITCH BURN IN HELL all over the kitchen. Or, alternatively, forgotten her birthday.

It’s difficult to explain why I find this so objectionable. I’m not averse to stereotyping myself, and the fact is that stereotypes becomes stereotypes for a reason. Men are prone to being more nerdy than women, and that’s all there is to it; and very few men get excited about shoes, and that’s all there is to that too. But identifying and laughing at a stereotype is one thing; actually expecting it and legitimising it is another. It’s an acceptance of another person’s crapness bound up as some sort of battle-of-the-sexes argument, but there’s simply no meaningful insight to be gained from studying how men and women view tidying the kitchen.

Not so long ago there was a study which people still refer to – you know, the one that revealed that women can multitask and men can’t. It should be mentioned that I’m typing this in work during lunch, eating a salad, drinking some water, wishing fervently it was whiskey, listening to a slightly-rubbish German band which a friend gave me to listen to, trying to work out how to communicate the slight-rubbishness to her when she asks me how I liked it without being offensive, and debating whether I can get away with farting at my desk or not (I’ve been eating a lot of vegetables lately so it might be relatively odourless), and if all that doesn’t qualify as multitasking then I don’t know what does. The point is that all this multitasking bollocks was accompanied by all sorts of things about how men and women are different, and why women can’t read maps because they used to pick berries 1 million years B.C., and a whole bunch of evolutionary insight.

What all this misses is the glaringly obvious fact that humans are blessed with things like intelligence and rationality, and no matter how a woman sees the world she can get it together to read a map if she makes an effort. Similarly, that “no I’m not mad at you” thing that women do when they’re mad isn’t because that’s what women are like… it’s because they’re allowed to be like that, and actively encouraged to be like that in order to sell them more copies of Cosmo, because we’re being trained by marketing stereotypes to accept that particular idea as some sort of universal trait of womanhood.

This, for what it's worth, is why I object to Bridget Jones’ Diary so much. It's not so much the obvious reasons – like the unalterable fact that it's not even slightly funny and that's all there is to it – but the fact that every perceived “”female”” trait is stuck together and depicted as a picture of perfectly normal womanhood. Making the point to a woman, any woman, that Bridget Jones is shallow, self-obsessed, whiney, dull, egocentric, vapid, stupid, idiotic, duplicitous, manipulative, Weltschmertz-wallowing harpie even before you factor in the fact that she's played by Renee fucking Zellweger, will just get the inevitable response of “Oh, but women are like that.” Hit them with the obvious counterthrust, i.e. that no they bloody well aren't, and you'll get “Oh but they are really.” Ask them to just stop for a moment, think about it, and name a single person who's actually really properly like that and they'll usually look at you blankly, back away, and ask you to just pay for the Mars Bar and leave their shop.

It's rabidly obvious in the latest Special K advert, in which a bunch of women sit around drinking half-caff frappamoccacappachoccacinos as one of their number approaches. She looks great, they opine; what's her secret? A new guy? A new haircut? Whatever could it be? As it turns out it's Special K, because eating breakfast blah blah metabolism blah blah lose weight blah blah healthy lifestyle. This doesn't happen.

Who actually made this? The answer is obviously “an American”, since it's another one of those adverts which is overdubbed in Irish voices for no apparent reason. This has always seemed like a pointless activity, partially because it's always badly done (most spectacularly in the Kinder Bueno adverts, but there's usually a good level of voices and lips doing entirely different things), but mostly because even if it was absolutely seamless there'd be no point – Americans are obviously American, and there's no way in the world you can mistake a-bunch-of-Americans for a-bunch-of-anyone-else. Their teeth are too shiny and their clothes are too fashionable, and the roads are too wide and clean and everyone smiles too much. And yet none of this – the Americans who aren't American, the dialogue which is at odds with mouth movements that appear to be quoting the lyrics to Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants – is actually the least plausible thing in the advert. In fact, it's the idea that women sit around discussing the calorific effects of eating breakfast or not. And nobody, at any point, mentions the proper reason for not eating breakfast; namely, that it's a valuable twenty minutes you could be spending in bed masturbating, and why on earth would anyone decide against that?

singles

The Proclaimers and a shitload of other people: 500 Miles

Oh god, it's that time of year. Comic Relief has reared its ugly head yet again, with the same fug of two-bit cast-offs clogging up television screens – bad enough – and radio airwaves to boot. Fact is that there's simply far too much charity around these days, and there comes a point where you simply have to say enough. No nation, especially not Britland, can absorb both Comic Relief and Children in Need, surely? Sick as I am at the sight of that bloody bear – and let's get it straight, any head-wound it may once have sustained would either have healed or killed it by now, so continuing to wear that bandage is nothing but Poor-Me-ism – that's nothing compared to the merest sniff, the slightest hint, of the arrival on my telly of Comic Relief. At least they seem to have dropped those red noses, and the other thing it's got going for it is a certain self-awareness in the name; it really does relieve telly of any degree of comedy for several hours per year.

The song, for what it's worth, is 500 Miles by The Proclaimers. This is perfectly acceptable in and of itself, in fact it's ideal Comic Relief fodder – great to jump around senselessly to at weddings, but also rubbish enough that no-one could get all that bothered about Comic Relief doing what it normally does to these affairs, i.e. slaughtering them. It's worth mentioning 2005's effort at this point, the unexpected re-issue of Amarillo, which bucked the trend and was actually rather good – simply because they didn't do anything to the song at all, just got Peter Kay to mime along with a cheesy grin while a bunch of intrinsically funny celebrities trotted along behind him. And Ronnie Corbett fell over, for gawd's sake. If you're going to produce a Charidee track that's entirely predicated on a bunch of no-mark once-were-famous people bopping around making idiots of themselves, then you might as well a: produce people who were completely rubbish anyway, thereby making the whole thing obviously a joke and b: keep the buggers quiet.

Peter Kay features this year as well, this time in the guise of that bloke in the wheelchair from Phoenix Nights. It's worth dwelling on Peter Kay for a moment, if only because he's one of the few people who can actually make the Comic Relief thing work. Peter Kay is the sort of comedian who's relentlessly safe and traditional, churning out the usual shtick about people dancing at weddings and the funny thing your mum says to answer machines, but it somehow works because he's just... you know... funny. Doing routines about your dad's shock at the concept of garlic bread should not by any standards be even vaguely amusing, but Peter Kay manages it by sheer dint of his delivery.

For all that, Phoenix Nights wasn't particularly funny – certainly not in the same league as Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere, and that wasn't a comedy masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination either – and having him roll out as that-character-whose-name-I-can't-remember isn't exactly something to fill you with joy. This sinking feeling then turns into a plummeting-to-the-very-depths-of-hell one when he's joined on stage by Lou of Little Britain fame, i.e. the bloke in the wheelchair who says “yeah I know” in a funny voice. Between them they sing 500 Miles with Lou interjecting “Yeah I know” and “What's haver?” between the lines, while a whole slew of people who used to be famous wear party hats and basically act like the glorious imbeciles we know them to be. If nothing else, it's a good reminder of how unfunny the 80s were. Hey look, it's Frank Spencer! Hey, it's Basil Brush! Oh god, is that the annoying-nonagenarian-woman-pretending-to-be-an-annoying-schoolkid from The Krankies? My, look how far we've come.

Not that that's all. The implicit hilarity here is obviously the sight of two people in wheelchairs duetting, and just to clarify this I'm all for offending anyone in the pursuit of humour and wheelchairs are as fair game as anything. The fact is, though, that a bloke in a wheelchair isn't all that funny. The joke of the Little Britain thing – which was funny for the first three or four episodes, but had definitely palled by number seventy-four thousand – was that Lou wasn't actually wheelchair-bound at all, just lazy. And Phoenix Nights was refreshing simply because it didn't make a big deal of the guy being in a wheelchair, just dealt with him as another character – it was a show in which the Bloke-With-The-Disability was actually treated as just another person rather than a Minority.

The tone of this, on the other hand, is similar to that “little fella in a wheelchair” thing that Ricky Gervais does at the start of his Politics show, but without the irony. I'm not aware of any furore over this, but maybe the People Wot Can't Walk lobby are feeling too patronised to actually complain. Or maybe they don't want to sound like that “This is serious you wanker” woman from the Ali G video. Or maybe they're delighted with this ooh-look-they're-so-perky-and-funny-those-wheelchair-people-they're-a-bit-like-Smurfs portrayal. Or maybe it's just because I haven't been watching the news lately. But the bottom line is that, lurking beneath the usual male oh-we're-having-a-laugh attitude – because this is the sort of thing that only male minds could come up with – is a belief that taking the piss out of disabled people is actually hilarious, provided it's done in the right preapproved way. The chorus – in which Pete 'n' Lou sing “I would roll 500 miles, and I would roll 500 more”is the point at which this becomes the Raspberry Ripple version of The Black and White Minstrel Show. This is just the most stinkingly horrendous indictment of where were at that you could hope to see for quite some time, and everyone deserves to be skewered through the groin with the spokes of Stephen Hawking's chair for even going anywhere this steaming pile of elephant-shit.

But hey. It's for charity, right?

Gwen Stefani ft. Akon: The Sweet Escape

Well when it finished, I felt like I'd escaped from something.

What is it with Gwen Stefani? What's gone wrong with everyone that they can't see what a completely worthless coughed-up furball of humanity this woman is? What's with her prancing around pretending to be all gorgeous and what have you, when in fact she looks like a horse with dyed hair? What's the big deal with everyone thinking her music is, like, really, like, great pop music and all, when in fact it's all obnoxious toss with synthetic strings twanging all over the place and a drumbeat that sounds like two hippopotami having anal intercourse on a sound-stage? What, in short, is the big deal?

Actually, while I'm at it... what's the deal with Akon? How in the name of arse did he ever gain some semblance of credibility? Why didn't he gracefully die in the public eye after that godawful So Lonely song – yeah, that one where the chorus sounded like a mobile phone? And why, since releasing the drippiest song of the decade, has he tried to portray himself as a shit-cool double-hard Gangster Wrapper, and ft.-ed for people like Eminem? And what the fuck is he doing in the Gwen Stefani song anyway? What is all this?

The song, as one might expect, is the usual Grim Fatani arse about escaping with some bloke or other, presumably so he can do what all her other men do and buy her lots of shoes. The video is something else. Presumably in keeping with the 'Escape' ethos it opens with Grim in a jail cell, dressed in curiously photogenic prisoner gear. The interesting thing about the jail cell is that it's made of gold. Given who we're talking about this shouldn't be as surprising as it is, but it's at least interesting that she sees jail cells as glamorous blinged-up locations rather than places full of nasty muggers. After this the focus shifts to Gwen being locked in a tower, in which everything is yet again made of gold, and she attempts to do a Rapunzel by letting down her hair. This enables two midgets to climb up the tower – no, really – and do a little dance around the room, before cutting Gwen's unfeasibly long locks of hair off.

No, really.

Actually, this is by far the most interesting bit of the video, since it just doesn't make any sense at all. The thing that really nagged at me was the fact that the two midgets must actually weigh about forty grams each, since – although we see shots of two long pigtails leading out the window – the pigtails remain disappointingly slack throughout. A shot of Grim roaring in pain as two heavy people actually climb up her hair would at least have provided a flicker of amusement, but no such luck. Instead she drives off in a car with Akon to somewhere or other. Maybe Bundoran. Or better still Galway, where hopefully they'll be encouraged to drink lots and lots of tap water.

Avril Lavigne: Girlfriend

Oh for fuck's sake. Are you kidding me? Are you having me on? Is this some enormous dream from which I'll be waking up at some point? I'm prepared – just about – to acknowledge that Avril Lavigne may once have served some sort of purpose, if only to annoy me, but now... dammit, it's like God has just decided he hates music this month and shat out all the most horrendous things he came up with over the past few years. All it needs is Russell Brand doing a cover version of Stutter Rap to make the whole thing complete.

April Levene or Ian Levine or whatever her name is has obviously been intensely annoying since Day One – which was, for those blocked it from their mind, that “Complicated” song which opened with a sixteen year-old announcing that “Life's like this” before complaining that her boyfriend was being a dick for a bit. All of which would be fine if it didn't feature April being irritating in a shopping mall, and also (for no apparent reason) mangling the pronunciation of “clothes” to a degree that's unforgivable even if she is from Canadia. If all that wasn't enough her follow-up hit was called Skater Boy, except she spelled it Sk8r Boi, with no apparent irony whatsoever. This is the sort of thing that has incontinent McDowell-voting pensioners talking about the merits of National Service.

This is, quite comfortably, the worst thing she's done yet and it's not like this isn't a competitive area. For all the sheer stinking shitness of her previous stuff, at least her songs actually had, y'know, melodies before now. This is just Ian shouting “I don't like your girlfriend I should be your girlfriend what about your girlfriend” over and over again. Ugh.

The thing about Arial is that she's the classic male-created feminist – all attitude and snarling faces at the camera, but killingly conservative and always singing about some bloke or other. She's also adopted the other trait of male music, namely to show no vulnerability whatsoever. Sneering and having a larff and taking the piss out of the weak is increasingly a male trait, and we accept that, and that's why the overwhelming majority of music made by men is so desperately bad these days – nothing really good comes without someone being just slightly vulnerable during its creation. Part of the reason I don't mind the Frames, even if it is a load of moany old toss, is that at least Glen Hansard sounds like he's giving something of himself away. Part of the reason that all the other DWGs out there in the Oirland are so shit is that they're unable to sing about the guy-loses-girl thing and sound like they actually mean it, because men are now programmed to be bulletproof in all walks of life. The problem is that woman aren't as good at music – which is a shame but there you go – but it's still true that an awful lot of the more interesting music today is made by girls, and Nina Hynes is worth ten Paddy Caseys and that's all there is to it.

This though.. the video shows it up best. It features Arlene's intended bloke swanning around with some girl or other, who has the cheek to both wear glasses and have red hair. This implies she might do various other things that are reprehensible, such as reading for example, and this simply isn't acceptable. It's one thing to have a girl who might not play guitar, but for to not even have the good grace to be good-looking...

No way, this can't be allowed to pass. It's bad enough to have to put up with these corporate-bitch-child-obnoxious-teen-harpies pretending to be singers at all, but seeing them laughing at other people for not being pretty or rockin' enough goes beyond irritating to just downright wrong. As Ardal carries out a fair few hilarious japes – at one point she makes the girl in question fall into a pond, and it's well-known that getting someone wet is shorthand for stealing their dignity – in the name of getting her man, and it's difficult to express how much you hope that the guy in question will tell her to fuck right off.

Her hair's also black for some reason, possibly to denote her Look-At-Me-I'm-A-Rebel qualities. Which is the point, really – she's nothing of the kind, just another whining child who thinks that any means are justified in order to get what she wants, who's quite willing to shame and humiliate in others to give her the “freedom” to achieve her goals, another silly dull cow with no ambitions beyond I-Kind-Of-Likes-Him, just another corporate tart opening her legs to the fat, sweaty, sell-more-records fifty-something mentality. Really, it's enough to make you wish Britney Spears would make a comeback. At the end of the video she gets her bloke, by the way. I hope he gives her syphilis.

albums

Kings of Leon: Because of the Times

So it starts with the obligatory quiet bit of guitar feedback, before the slow, throbbing bass kicks in. It's about a minute before the vocals start, and the whole while the sound is slowly building. Then it's that voice, the most frighteningly recognisable voice in rock that almost like somebody doing an impression of him... but had an edge, and a darkness, and a menace. "I don't care what nobody says, she's gonna have my baby," says Caleb Followill. Yeah, you think. Too fucking right she is. Whether she likes it or not. And before you know it your drawn into a world that feels frighteningly, disturbingly real; it's the voice of a man who views his girlfriend as the only he thing he really possesses, who's got nothing but this girl and this baby, who's motivated not by love but by some desperate, grasping need. If you want to hear a man singing - the raw, bullying, frustrated voice of stinking manhood - then look no further.

Lay it on the line early, then; "Knocked Up" is seven minutes of solid gold, the best song the Kings of Leon have ever done by miles, worth the price of the album alone, all that sort of stuff. It also has the distinction of being the only Kings of Leon song I can actually remember, which tells you something about them.

On the surface of it, there's not much to dislike - and if nothing else they're distinctive. A bunch of brothers from the Deep South of America who formed a band, presumably because they didn't have a sister to have sex with and had to amuse themselves somehow; an unapologetically retro bunch of lads who don't actually sound like they're pastiching anything; a lead singer who can actually sing, you know really sing rather than just saying words vaguely in time with music.

Like everything else they've ever done, this album is consistently enjoyable. It never touches the heights that Knocked Up reaches, not even close, but it's not like it's anything less than Really Rather Good. And let's get something else straight; The Jarvis Cocker Record is kick-ass, and listened to it a hell of a lot, oh yes sirree bob I have, even though I was decidedly lukewarm about it when it first came out, so...

Actually, forget that - I was trying to make it sound like the following sentence is somehow my problem, but why in the world should I bother? Fact is that, like most of the other things they do, Because of the Times is curiously unmemorable and difficult to engage with. It's the sort of album that I want to like more, but it doesn't seem to be happening. The problems all sound curiously nit-picky, but they mount up.

First up - Deep South antecedents are all very well, but the saturation point with this sort of rockabilly shtick tends to be hit pretty quickly. For me it tends to kick around track five, when I've heard more or less all the different types of yelling "woo-hoo" that I think I can realistically deal with for one day, and the novelty of the lead singer of a rick band sounding strangely like a preacher is wearing off, and the jangle of guitars is starting to tip over the fine line between edgy and cacophonic, and my attention starts to drift into wondering how they'd go down with the residents of the towns where they come from. Then I start to wonder if this is based entirely on prejudice on my part, to which the answer is obviously yes. And then I start to wonder if prejudice is really a bad thing, and the answer to that is obviously yes. And then, oh shit, the album's finished. Hang on, better listen to it again. Actually, sod it, maybe I'll read a book instead. Oh fucking hell, is Garrett Tubridy on the telly again?

It's obviously great to have The Kings of Leon in existence, because they're what bands used to be like - organic, and distinctive, and actual real musicians. But for all that there's something lightweight and... well... ineffectual. If they made more songs like Knocked Up I'd change this attitude pretty quickly, but they remain firmly in the curate's egg category and this album doesn't change that.