TV REVIEW: Have a Butcher’s at this! (BBC3’s Best Young Butcher 2010)

(For more hilarious TV reviews like this by myself and others, head over to Shouting at Cows. It really is the best thing on the web that doesn’t contain full frontal nudity).  

Reality TV dominates the television. In this past week, we have seen the climax of X-Factor, Strictly Come Dancing and The Apprentice. People lap this stuff up. These programs are fine, but they cater for an already popular crowd. X-Factor? Singers are idolized! Strictly? Dancers are adored! The Apprentice? Suit + Talking incomprehensible garbage = cash! What about shows for the unsung heroes of society? Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome; ‘BBC3′s Britain’s Best Young Butcher 2010′.

The show takes place in a glammed up aircraft carrier. It’s essentially a hanger with a few hobs in, but to try and spruce it up a bit, the set-designers have put chandeliers up and made a little lounge-bar area for host George Lamb to do summaries from. The hype levels are epic. Think X-Factor set in an abattoir. Four of the finest carvers in the UK battling it out tooth and nail. There are the usual characters involved; the emotional back-story (one guy is in training to run a marathon for charity) the lad who dreamt as a child to be a butcher (half expecting his mother to appear and say ‘well we knew from a young age he wanted to be a butcher. We’d come down in the middle of the night and find him slicing the ham wafer thin, stuffing the chicken and moaning about EU regulations’).

The judges are ‘industry pros’. The first looks like a Toni and Guy rep that has never even stepped foot in a butchers, whilst the other is described as a ‘sausage champion’. Have you ever heard of a nickname with such homosexual connotations as that? He’s also described as a ‘pie pro’, so basically the producers think he’s a fat man of a certain persuasion.

It works as a simple round system. In round one they are given half a pig – sorry – a side of pork (proper lingo you see), and told to carve as much out of it as possible in an hour. The judges spot an ideological flaw with the show straight away; ‘The thing is, it’s a timed task, so it’s probably not the best way to really judge these guys’. Well this is an utter waste of time then!

George Lamb is the host and has a look on his face of forced sincerity crossed with utter boredom. See, when you sign a contract with BBC3, you think you’ll land the prime, high-end gig of hosting ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’, but instead you get lumped with pratting around an old airfield with a load of pre-pubescent butchers. He tries to get involved with the ‘meat banter’, but ends up looking like some ponse that has wandered onto the set. Chatting with the judges, he states he’s impressed with the contestants ‘finger dexterity’. Finger dexterity, George? Seriously? It may have sounded slightly more convincing if the prat wasn’t dressed like an ultra-flamboyant snooker referee. But turn-ups, woollen waistcoats and oversized bow-ties are the fashion in ‘that there London’, and if he wants to host series 4 of Celebrity Scissorhands, he needs to be on the top of his game.

The second task is to make the perfect pie. Lamb stars the build-up with the utterly appalling ‘it’s pie do or die, now!’ pun, and the judges taste the concoctions. It rather resembles that part of master-chef where the budding cook does a soft-focussed, slow motion close up of their confit de canard, but instead; it’s an apple and cider pork pie. The judges mull over the contestants;

‘We’re here to find young butcher of the year……not young pie-maker of the year.’

……Is there a difference? With tension at breaking point, they do a surprise quiz on each contestant in homage of Dennis Hopper ‘pop quiz hotshot!’ style. They take each contestant into a secluded room that wouldn’t look out of place on the set of a Saw film, and bark at them questions about, like, beef and stuff. Did you know a baby female pig is called a Gilt? I didn’t. Both judges get the hump because none of the contestants knows some fact about grouses, and seem on the verge of grabbing the young butchers by the collar and shouting ‘YOU’RE NOTHING! YOU’RE LIGHTWEIGHT! YOU’RE SCUM! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!’

Two are kicked off and the remaining two compete in the final for the prestigious award of ‘BBC3′s Best Young Butcher in Britain’. They are given 2 hours to assemble 12 different foods from a larder of meat. Honestly, if Morrissey saw this he’d been having fatal seizures. Bryce, finalist A, becomes possessed by the spirit of Francis Bacon seemingly, as he turns all the produce into slightly perverse meat sculptures. He makes a Christmas Tree out of the turkey, worded signs out of sausages, and pumps a pork loin full of offal like some sort of massive, meaty condom. George and the judges (sounds like a late 70s ska band that) do a sort of play-by-play from the lounge bar. The tension is now reaching fever pitch. Lloyd, finalist B, is less ambitious, and feels that the way to win the final is to mummify a squirrel with strips of Bacon. Turns out, he’s right, as he’s wins (insert something witty here about the dilution of British creativity).

The climax of the whole thing lacks any sort of X-Factor style razzamatazz. No fireworks or screaming fans, just the realization dawning on them that they’ve spent the last 48 hours in a hanger dicing meat for the right to say ‘yes, I’m 2010′s Best Young Butcher in Britain (In the eyes of BBC3)’. Not very snappy is it?

My rant against The Sun, and its celebration of everything that is mediocre

Wahaayy The Sun! Sport, footie, babes, goss, pics, geezers! Nah what i mean, m8! Erm yeah….

Anyway, this farce of a news paper is really getting in the Christmas swing. I don’t know about you, but I hate everything about Christmas, except Christmas. What I mean is, I love catching up with the family, eating loads of food, having my first drink at 11am and watching countless films. What I hate is the mass consumerism, tinsel, Christmas songs, Christmas singles, tinsel again; in fact everything that tries to get money out of you at this time of year. The Sun, however lurrrrrrves the festivities, and to get you in the swing of things, they release their 12 songs of Christmas;

Christmas wouldn’t be complete without our very own festive soundtrack.

I think I’d soilder on. The Sun have assembled a collection of utter musical no-marks to cover already done-to-death songs, the worst part being; tinsel. FUCKING TINSEL EVERYWHERE! I HATE TINSEL!

Now I consider myself a bit of a musical snob. The kind of person that like to name bands no-one has ever heard of and walk off all smug, while everyone else thinks to themselves ‘…tit…’.

However, the people assembled here seem to have appeared from some sort of black hole or vortex in time, as I have neither heard of them, nor would I have the faintest idea who they were if they slapped me the face.

On the ensemble we have:

Missing Andy? Nope, no idea.
Foster and Allen, who have a combined age of about 230.
Labrinth?……the f**k is Labrinth? Some sort of David Bowie tribute act?
Olly Murs?….I wanna say; Fame Acadamy runner up?
Jessie J? (I starting to think they’re making people up).
The Wanted? They look like 5 mannequins that have escaped from River Island.
Elisa Doolitle? She’s quite lovely, so i’ll let her off
Hurts?………

That leaves Ellie Goulding, Duffy, GLC and, wait for it, Santa. Yeah, a man dressed as santa gets a namecheck. They were probably so desperate to make up the 12 that they nipped in to the nearest shopping mall and dragged him out the grotto.

GLC are that novelty, welsh rap band, who had a hit about your mother (yes, that’s YOUR mother) having a penis. Duffy, is a lady who owes her entire career to Amy Winehouse and has a voice so nasal that she has seemingly learned how to sing directly out of her nose, and Ellie Goulding, receiver of the most undeserved push in living memory. Interestingly, she is also dating Radio 1 DJ Greg James. I’m not saying anything……

All the acts say how they plan to spend their perfect christmas. ‘Geezer Olly Murs’ (seemingly as much a geezer as Matt ‘I smoked a spliff once’ Cardle’);

Wants to find KATHERINE JENKINS in his Christmas stocking. He told me: “She is gorgeous but I know she’s seeing someone. All pretty girls are it seems.”

The rest of the ensemble ramble some similarly dull rubbish.

Anyway, I’d rather spend Christmas with the Third Reich than this lot, but at 22 years old I feel like I’m the target demographic for this stuff. So, I’ve assembled my own anti-Christmas 12 (became 15) song play-list of upbeat punk tunes to get you in the mood for, I dunno, eating and stuff…

I call it ‘Fuck Tinsel’ (God I hate Tinsel).

And because I’m so bloomin’ nice,  here’s the spotify link:

Fuck Tinsel

Rancid - Ruby Soho
Bad Brains - Salin’ On!
Black Flag - TV Party
Pixies - Here Comes You Man
Los Camposinos! - These Are Listed Building
Juliette & The Licks- Comin’ Around
Flogging Molly - Drunken Lullabies
The Distillers - I am Reverent
NOFX - Monosyllabic Girl
Misfits - Last Caress
Minutemen - Corona
Love Is All - Busy Doing Nothing
Iggy and The Stooges - Shake Appeal
The Gamits - Falling Apart
be your own PET - Zombie Graveyeard Party!

Merry Christmassssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!

News: It’s a Snow news day! (fnarr) 23/12

You know how, like, when it snows and stuff, roads get icy. Did you? Well the government didn’t! Why didn’t you tell anyone you silly git! -10 temperatures have left roads “incredibly treacherous with snow and ice”, as people in the know failed to realize that a few inches of snowfall would leave our piss-poor roads and train-lines like ice-rinks.

There are numerous cancellations and delays on East Coast, First Great Western, ScotRail and First Capital Connect services due to snow and ice.

Network Rail, will be under intense pressure to complete the work on time after the fiasco of Christmas 2007.

The biggest disruption this Christmas will see no trains from Essex and East Anglia running into London’s Liverpool Street station closed from Christmas Day until Tuesday Dec 28. Services will resume for three days, before stopping for the New Year Bank Holiday weekend.

Think we need the vikings to re-invade to sort the mess out. I’ll get the Swedish embassy on the phone.

But its not just the train-lines; airports have canceled flights en masse.

Heathrow was forced to cancel two thirds of flights on Monday and Tuesday, effectively cancelling Christmas for hundreds of thousands of passengers.

According to internal BAA documents obtained by the Daily Telegraph, the airport also had fewer snow ploughs than Gatwick, despite being more than twice its size.

But its not all bad news:

Colin Matthews, the chief executive of BAA, yesterday relinquished his annual bonus and admitted that Heathrow had not been adequately prepared for a bad weather which grounded more than a third of flights on Monday and Tuesday.

But Mr Matthews, who earned more than £1m last year, is still likely to receive a separate six-figure payout based on the company’s financial performance this year.

Oh well thats alright then! Good for you Mr Matthews, you epic, epic, twat.

Most people - well, most sane people anyway - will point to climate change as the reason for the freak conditions.

Official UK climate projections published last year predicting hotter and drier summers, warmer and wetter winters, rising sea levels and more floods, storms and heatwaves, provide a basis for analysing many of the risks threatening vital infrastructure. But URS a global consultancy and management company, also warns that ports and airports could face as yet unquantified threats from changes in prevailing winds, although it admits evidence on which such predictions could be made is, as yet, scanty.

Furthermore, “an estimated 18m motorists were urged to take proper precautions”, so who knows, Christmas may be saved after all! Hooray! It would make a good film actually: man meets girl, girl likes man, man makes epic cock up somehow (they always do in these films), he drives home for Christmas, so does she, they both get stuck in traffic and see each other gridlocked at the junction 21 turning for Bedford; they kiss! I think I’ll call it; Love on the M1. Now me personally, I’d rather have a lobotomy than watch it, but idiots out there lap this shit up. I caught my sister watching ‘Boyfriend for Christmas’ yesterday. I was sick a little in my mouth.

Anyway, here’s some high-vis sheep:

The Daily Mail Website’s petrifying front page headlines (21/12)

These are all the stories circulating the front page of the Daily Mail’s website.

Britain braced for SIX INCHES of Snow in next 24 hours as Government admits ‘we might run out of salt this winter’

Christmas plans of thousands more in tatters as Heathrow cancels two-thirds of today’s flights

‘Crossbow Cannibal’ admits to murdering three prostitutes as police say he may have killed more

Swine flu winter: 200 fight for life as number of patients doubles in a week to put strain on intensive care units

Congratulations it’s a boy…no a girl: Couple told bay with rare condition was wrong sex

Paramedics tell crash boy, 8, with double skull fracture ‘you’ve only bumped you head.

Crazed groom guns down wife and best man at wedding reception before killing himself

Mother of two, 26, is jailed after being caught naked in bed with 14-year-old schoolboy lover

Merry Christmas………yeah?

Natalie Cassidy’s number one fan hates me!

Right, so a while ago I wrote an article on Natalie Cassidy becoming mum (for those gorgeous, sexy people over at shoutingatco.ws). It was the most appalling TV show i’ve ever had the misfortune of watching (You know Natalie Cassidy, right? She played Sonia from Eastenders, and…………Sonia from Eastenders!). Anyway, 3 weeks later, someone left me this comment:

You’ve obviously got some personal hang ups. You’ve taken quotes from the show and written them in a different context which just makes you look like a bit of a snob. It’s not prize winning television, but you seem to concede to the pre-conceptions of what the tabloids have written about certain celebs, without any kind of original or personable level.

I don’t care that I wrote this comment poorly, got my point across.

That is the first time anyone has ever described me as intellectual.

Madame, I think we could be great friends. Or possibly lovers. Lets just start with lunch, yeah?

The Daily Mail; making you feel unapologetic about your middle class lifestyle since 1896! (20/12)

Daily Mail EXCLUSIVE! In the most shocking expose since ‘grass; green in colour’ and ‘water makes things damp’, the Daily Mail run with the report ‘charity warns homeless will spend money on drugs’. That, ladies and gentleman, is investigative journalism done properly.

Basically, The Daily Mail has a series of people they hate. Immigrants, Unemployed, Hoodies and the Homeless make up most of this list. The problem with the homeless is that they don’t really have any negative effects. Immigrants ‘TAKE RR JERBS’, unemployed ‘Just claim a living off bloody soft-touch Britain!’, and hoodies ‘do awful things like……graffiti!’. The homeless are relatively harmless, and seeing someone in a doorway at Christmas is a pretty harrowing sight, even for the most stone hearted of people. The problem is that people who read the Daily Mail don’t like giving their money away, so need a way to balance this with their pangs of conscious watching someone begging for change. This is where stories like this come in! Yeah, if EVERY SINGLE HOMELESS PERSON ACCORDING TO THIS STORY is just gonna spend all their cash on drugs, then I’m not going to give them my hard earned money! BINGO! Reader keeps their money, and is free of feeling any sense of guilt from leaving someone freezing to death in a doorway, whilst they decide which make of brandy sauce will best compliment their christmas pudding this year.

Anyone moved by seasonal generosity to hand cash to a beggar is most likely to be helping them only to harm themselves, its staff said.

Yeah if anything, your helping them by not giving them cash. You’re so bloody kind sometimes, you know that? 

The charity suggested that beggars in central London can make between £300 and £400 a day, a high share of it from tourists. They also hope for a ‘big drop’ - a particularly flush passer-by, sometimes a successful gambler - who will hand over thousands of pounds.

Well these homeless have it a bit good haven’t they. Tax free as well! Think i should get involved in this ‘begging’ lark.

While I’m not doubting that drug use is rife in homeless circles, the main throb of this article seems to do nothing more than to demean homelessness as ‘not a bad as people make out’. I couldn’t imagine anything worse, especially considering nights in the south of England that have reached -6 degrees, and -15 in the north. You don’t why these people are there, you don’t know what they’ve been through. You self absorbed journalists have no right to demean them from behind the safety of your fleet street desk.

Naturally when reading the Daily Mail, for the big laughs you have to look at the readers comment sections. Neil from Kent offered this compelling thought;

Bearing in mind the ridiculously generous benefit system in this country there is absolutely no need for anyone to beg and the act should be criminalised!

Genius stuff from Neil there; managing to both describe homeless people as criminals and have a pop at the ‘ridiculously generous benefit system in this country’. That my friend, is a Daily Mail reading pro.

He clearly hasn’t read the article though, and clearly isn’t aware of how selfish he’s being by giving them money. My favorite opinion however, was posted by ‘my opinion, here’ (already know its going to be good from the name) who states;

You. Bloody. Trooper.

Pitchfork’s ‘The Year in Photos 2010’

Some good snaps:

Broken Social Scene

F**ked Up

Arcade Fire

See the full list here!

NEWS: Drugs are…good? Mmkay? (16/12)

People say newspapers are dying media form, but I disagree. The other day I bought a paper and It gave me a voucher with which I can send off for a free DVD of either Season 1 of Alf Garnett’s Mind your language, Season 3 of Steptoe and Son, or Carry on Celopatra! Beat that Internet!

Sorry? What’s a ‘download’?……

…Top story today center’s round MP Bob Ainsworth’s comments concerning the legalization of drugs in the UK. Mr Ainsworth described the war on drugs as ‘nothing short of a disaster’ and that the country needed a ‘grown up-debate’ on the subject of legalization.

Hold on; are you telling me that mass expenditure on police crackdowns of drug users is still not stopping people selling drugs (these people often from poverty stricken backgrounds with little or no education) and is not stopping people using drugs (mainly people using them as escapism from real life trauma, or for purely recreational purposes at harm to no-one else but themselves)? Well I, for one, am gob-smacked.

In terms of the procuring of drugs, Ainsworth said that his time as defense secretary when he oversaw trouble in Afghanistan;

“showed to me that the war on drugs creates the very conditions that perpetuate the illegal trade, while undermining international development and security”.

His solution to the issue was; 

“an independent, evidence-based review, exploring all policy options, including further resourcing the war on drugs, decriminalizing the possession of drugs, and legally regulating their production and supply”.

So before the reactionary diaspora of the country claim that he wants a needle in every British arm, Ainsworth is merely calling for an government inquiry into the issue.

Ainsworth went onto add:

“Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harms to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit…it is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation, to make the world a safer, healthier place, especially for our children. We must take the trade away from organized criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists.”

No-one could argue that the governments crackdown on drugs has been an abject failure. As the late Bill Hicks once said abut the war on the drugs;  ‘You know what that implies? There’s a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it.’

We are not the first country to call for a review, however. California recently held a statewide ballot proposing the legalization of ’marijuana-related activities’ (proposition 19). The ballot was defeated by 5,333,359 votes (53.5%) to 4,643,751 (46.5).

An example of somewhere that people often cite as the success of a progressive drug police in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Amsterdam has some of the lowest use of hard drugs in the world, but even the legality there is very murky. It is still technically illegal, but decriminalized. Certain premises are allowed to sell it, but not allowed to buy it. Possession isn’t legal, but there is no penalty for having a minimal amount of it. Still following? Basically, as far as I can tell from my time in The Netherlands, speaking to Dutch people and my own research, the approach is; ‘You’ve got drugs? Meh…’

There is often the argument rolled out about Marijuana/Cannabis being safer than already legal drugs, and no can argue with Alcohol and Tabacco being the cause of widespread deaths in Britain. But there are always opposing arguments to this. People have cited ecstasy as being the safest of all drugs, with Richard Brunstrom, the chief Constable of North Wales, claiming in 2008 that it was ‘safer than asprin’. However, any conversation on ecstasy is routinely followed by the example of Leah Betts; a schoolgirls that took an ecstasy tablet and died of water intoxication. The rebuttal to this is that she consumed 7 liters of (15 pints) of water within 90 minutes of taking the drug, which is what killed her. However, this won’t stop people feeling (rightfully or wrongfully) that it was the ecstasy tablet that remained the catalyst of her death (one must point out though, that if you drank 15 pints of water arbitrarily, you’d be feeling a bit, lets just say, queesy).

Another argument for legalization is that having government and state controlled ‘drug farms’ would take the revenue from drugs away from the dealers and pushers. However, studies in California pre-cursing prop 19 claimed that all this would do is shift these people to push the harder, more addictive drugs, causing more detrimental effects than had they continued with the softer drugs.

I mean I could, literally, go on forever, and this is an argument people have had 100 times before. There is also the point that it would be a source of revenue for the government (brilliant, if we can raise 60 million from drugs sales then we could get 8 votes in our next failed world cup bid! LEGALIZE LEGALIZE LEGALIZE!). 

No-one could argue that we don’t need a comprehensive review of the UK drug policy, but it is long-game process, that wouldn’t be solved overnight. However, if The USA adjusted perfectly fine after prohibition ended, there is no reason to say attitudes would also change in this country if government policy towards drugs altered. Saying that, any review may be ultimately futile if it fails to convince the public like Prop 19 in California did.

Ainsworth in his plan also pushed for ‘the most dangerous being proscribed by doctors’, and any plans to legalize hard drugs in the country would be VERY hard to pass both the public and politicians’ opinions.

So, thats pretty much all i’ve got on the drugs debate. Whatever opinion you form on it is up to you. To lighten the mood, here’s a picture of indie rock band The War on Drugs.

TV Review: Phil and Kirsty’s (Im)Perfect Christmas

(For more hilarious TV reviews like this by myself and others, head over to www.shoutingatco.ws. It really is the best thing on the web that doesn’t contain full frontal nudity).

I, like everyone, want the perfect Christmas, and in times of need I always turn to the host of my favourite property programme; Location, Location, Location. Sarah Beeny? No, that’s Property Ladder. Jasmine Harman? No, that’s Place in the Sun. Dominic Littlewood? That’s Don’t Get Done Get Dom! That’s not even a property show, you cretin!