If you tolerate this

In the dreamy trance of Saturday morning, lying in bed, I thought I heard Tony Robinson on the radio urging people get down to London for a big 'march against the environment'. Well as you know, the environment has always got on my nerves. As I have often said, this world would be a fine place if it wasn't for the environment. And when I got up, there Tony was on Time Team (which Dave had put on) grinning demonically as he presided over yet another hole he'd had dug solely in order to scar the landscape. I needed no further encouragement: off I went to London.

However it seemed that I'd got it wrong. The march, it turned out, was against everything except the environment! I think. I just saw the tail end of it snaking past the entrance to the Mall. It was all going off peacefully: clearly, these were not professionals.

Disgusted, I went to the ICA to see Turkey Shoot, an 'Ozploitation' classic made in 1982. Turkey Shoot is, as they say, well bad. From the director of BMX Bandits! With music by Brian May! I was giggling before the opening titles had finished ('with Michael Craig as "Thatcher'"). The film is set in a future in which 'deviants' are put into prison camps for the heinous crime of 'doing what they want'. The motto of this society, as written on the walls of the camp, is something like: 'Freedom is obedience, obedience is work, work is life.' I did wonder whether they might have used something a bit catchier, a bit more 'feelgood'. Maybe then they would not have had so many deviants.

Anyway, Michael Craig (looking like he must surely be Adam Buxton's real dad) is the head of the camp, strolling about with a pipe and a glass of brandy and playing chess on a giant board with carved wooden pieces and generally acting like it's the last days of the British Empire instead of the future. In order to please his superiors he invites some rather camp visitors over to hunt down selected deviants, one of whom is of course the hero, who then turns the tables on the hunters, ensuring that they are killed in gory ways. Then the air force come in to wipe out the camp while curiously leaving the deviants (who have wisely decided to stand some distance away) intact.

This film also involves a creature who looks like a cross between Noddy Holder and a bear but with cat's eyes ('It's a freak', is the only explanation we get) which is eventually cut in two by a mini-bulldozer.

I suppose the point I'm making is: that's what you end up with if you don't protest. Totalitarianism, prison camps, music by Brian May... Although, Brian May aside, it all looked quite fun.

Next to Godliness

Just what is it with Kleeneze? Their representatives shove their catalogue through your letterbox solely so that they can instruct you to put it back out on the front doorstep again on a certain date. It is the very definition of futility. And it's really annoying. Yes I know the idea is that you're going to buy something but let's be realistic, that isn't going to happen. Nevertheless it is with a version, almost, of civic pride that I do actually remember to put it out on the correct date, as I did this Monday morning, returning home in the evening to find it duly gone. Only for a note to be stuck through the door on Tuesday demanding the catalogue back. This was troubling. I seemed to remember that the original catalogue had come from 'Mark and Wendy'. Whereas this note came from 'Jermaine and Victoria' (an improbable-sounding couple if ever I heard one). So now we were embroiled in a Kleeneze turf war. What next? A brick through the window? With a note wrapped round it asking us to throw it back two days later?

No, the next thing was another note from 'Jermaine and Victoria' suggesting that we ring them if we wanted to give the catalogue back or if - miracle of miracles - we wanted to order something. 'Otherwise, this was our last visit'. Their last visit! I felt terrible now. I felt guilty for not returning the catalogue which I didn't have. I missed them although I'd never seen them. What did they look like? Did they do everything together? Were they going to kill Mark and Wendy? Or, after this rejection, themselves?

Or perhaps there is no rivalry. Perhaps the slaves of Kleeneze are as blandly interchangeable as the members of a religious cult.

Now I will never know. But what makes me really sad is that my guilt is not severe enough to make me even consider the purchase of a pack of dusters.

Frightmare

The day of the interview arrived, as days do. The night before, as I left the office, my boss - soon to be ex-boss - assured me that the only way I could fail to get the job was if I 'stupidly cock up'. 'Like you did', some wag offered, to general laughter.

'Stupidly cock up', I repeated as I walked out of the door, as though it was going to become a mantra.

I arrived ridiculously early. On my way to the toilet I managed to get lost, and was directed there by someone who, when I swivelled round to thank her, turned out to be the new director. There she was, the instigator of all this! It was not a good omen. It was like she was already assigning me a place in the restructure. At least she didn't hand me a brush.

The interview was a weird experience. The questions were so long and complex and expressed in such stilted, formal English that they might as well have been in some strange futuristic tongue; neither did many of them seem to relate to the job in hand. It hardly helped that I already knew one of the interview panel - in fact, it made the experience all the more peculiar. The closest analogy I can come up with is being abducted by aliens. Although without the anal probes (as far as I can remember, anyway - I'm still having flashbacks).

And then it was over, and could be consigned to that dark place in the mind reserved for traumas of this kind. For a while at least, until memories start thrusting themselves like daggers into your consciousness as you lay awake fretting. Did I really say that? Did I really take my trousers off? What point was I trying to make?

Despite all this I have got the job. My reward? To continue to sit in the seat I have occupied for the last six months, doing all the same stuff, but slightly more of it. Everyone else from the office who was interviewed that day got their jobs too. It is as though there never was anything to worry about in the first place. But part of me wonders if we really are the same people as we were before we went into that interview room. I have these strange thoughts...

The thing to do is just remind myself of what I'm here for, as it's written in the revised job spec: 'ensuring the continued supply of fresh human blood to the beings beyond Alpha Centauri'. If that doesn't inspire me, what will?

Ken Bruce Ruined My Life

'Where else would you hear that?', asked one of the Smooth Radio DJ's this week, as though he'd just played Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, in its entirety, in the middle of the day. Instead of what he'd actually done, which was play She's Gone by Hall and Oates. Perhaps he is banking on the fact that most Smooth Radio listeners are too scared to go looking for another station. What if some nasty jungle pirate station jumps them as they are making their way to Heart? Best stick with what you know.

But it is amusing to hear Smooth DJ Mark Goodier attempt topical - satirical, even - jokes. It is as though he is waging a war against his own blandly generic DJ voice. It is not a war he will win. Goodier could suffer attacks of Tourette's syndrome on air and nobody would notice.

Alone in the office on Friday, I dared to switch back to Radio 2. What a rebel! It isn't that I'm such a big fan of the station, it's just that Ken Bruce's Popmaster has become part of the structure of my working day. Without it I'm a bit lost. Or more than usual, anyway. One of the 'issues' discussed by Jeremy Vine was whether parents should take their kids to see noted, I mean suspected, paedophile Michael Jackson. Yes, apparently people have nothing better to worry about in these days of economic collapse. I mean, they are going to be in an enormous space among thousands of other people, and Jackson a tiny figure on a stage a long way away. It's not like they are pimping their kids out to him (although: why not?) It's not like he's going to swoop down from above to molest them (although that might depend on how far he's got with the plastic surgery, I mean shouldn't he be able to fly by now?)

But apparently parents are worried that in later life their kids will turn to them and accuse them of exposing them to a monster. Only, I would suggest, if they are working up a court case against Mummy and Daddy and are really desperate for material.

Well, next week I have my interview. Three people this week have been interviewed and all three got their posts. It's enough to make you feel positive! But let's not get carried away. Lorraine has been having anxiety dreams about having to appear in court. She is envisioning the interviews as being something along the lines of the Russian roulette episode in The Deer Hunter. Me, I'm not quite so optimistic.

madhouse

There was still time, as it turned out, for just one more crap horror film before I went back to work. This was a rare screening of 1974's Madhouse at the Barbican. Vincent Price plays a horror movie star (not the greatest challenge of his career, then) who suffers a mental breakdown after the decapitation of his wife, and then goes to stay in a creepy old house with only Peter Cushing for company. Oh, and a madwoman brooding over a colony of spiders in the basement. Not quite what the doctor ordered then. Almost, in fact, it's like he's trapped in a bad horror movie... Amazingly, the man behind me, judging by the mobile phone conversation he was having just before the film started, had walked in off the street just because he had a couple of hours to kill, and had no idea what he was seeing ('I dunno... some old crap.') Possibly he was even under the impression that this was a new release.

Maybe he thought he'd gone back in time. Not a luxury I can afford: I returned to work to find that conditions had deteriorated somewhat. The office nextdoor has been opened out and repainted, and when I walked in it was to be confronted by a vast white space full of a glaring light that lent its occupants a ghastly aspect... Worse, Radio 2 is no longer the station of choice in the admin department, and has been supplanted by Smooth Radio, home of all the DJ's that were thrown off Radio 2 for being too inoffensive. My colleagues find it more 'relaxing' and indeed it's hard to be deeply annoyed by it, or to focus on it at all really. The only thing I find difficult is when they say the name of the station. For some reason that's like fingernails down a blackboard every time. But at least they don't introduce the Smooth News or the Smooth Weather. That would be too much to bear.

Nevertheless, perhaps it is an essential means of combating tensions in the office. Interviews have been scheduled, so everybody has been plunged into gloom. Especially as the interviews are in London, in the Chief Executive's boardroom, and are thus more formal affairs than the ones that got us these jobs in the first place. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if I ever did get the job. Maybe this has all been a dream. I do hope I won't have to wake up.