Cold Pasty Assassination

George Osborne, someone on the radio was saying, 'has dug a hole for himself and then fallen into it.' Having once worked with him, I have to say that this sounds like exactly the kind of thing he might do. But you can't help feeling a little bit sorry for him, when even the Daily Mail are attacking him, and what they called the other day his 'insane child benefit plans'. Insane? That's a bit strong. I mean, it isn't like he's taken child benefit away from parents and given it to mice. That would be insane.

Instead he has come up with the idea of telling taxpayers exactly where their money is going. This would be quite exciting if everybody's money went on something different - if, for example, mine went on nuclear weapons and Dave's went on free cheese, and we could swap if we wanted. But apparently it isn't like that.

Also oozing out of the radio was Dennis Waterman's controversial idea that some women (specifically Rula Lenska) deserve a good slap. This prompted one listener to ring in and say that his wife had 'spent fifteen years trying to make me hit her.' Yes, I think I went to a dinner party round theirs once. Bit of an atmosphere, as I recall.

gay marriage

I was fairly indifferent to the idea of gay marriage ('Who cares?', as Boy George said on 10 O'Clock Live) until I saw a full-page ad in the Telegraph (I got it free with Time Out, if you must know) exhorting the reader to add their name to a petition calling for marriage to be allowed to 'stay as it is'. Adorning it were lots of pictures of just-married couples exchanging gooey-eyed looks - none of them were Jordan and Peter Andre, I noticed - and the overall impression was of a creepy smugness so vast it made me want to support marriage between anything and everything - ants and people, people and vegetables, fish and trees - anything.

The anti-gay marriage guy on 10 O'Clock Live came out with that old chestnut about marriage being 'the glue that holds society together'. The argument seems to be that if you hand this glue to gay people they will make it less sticky somehow, perhaps by adding some specifically gay fluid to it. Or perhaps the argument is simply that if you give the glue to gays, there will be too much glue in circulation and everyone will get high on the fumes and say: 'Fuck marriage! Let's just have a massive orgy!'

I don't really know, but if they are worried about gays turning marriage into a camp, meaningless spectacle, they needn't be concerned - celebrities have already accomplished this.

As for 10 O'Clock Live, it gave me a startlingly novel idea - why not record the show beforehand and edit out the crap bits and embarrassed pauses? I think the technology to do that is available now.

George Kuchar

I never knew much about George Kuchar before the other week's Flipside special at the BFI. In fact, I somehow got the idea from a cursory read-through of the programme notes that he would actually be present at the screenings. As it turned out, his death last year made this unlikely, but the documentary shown here - as rough and ready as any of Kuchar's movies - brought him to life quite splendidly. He was a funny guy, like a knowing idiot savant (and yes, I know technically that's a tautology, but what you have to realise is - when I do it, it's clever), and in fact I seem to have got him slightly confused with Harry Hill in my mind. But Kuchar's films could only have been made by him, in as much as they were made by someone and not (as you might possibly imagine from watching them) by accident.

But he is far from precious about his work. In the documentary, he and his brother are looking at old photos of themselves along with the actress playing a 'sasquatch detective' in George's latest film, and she wonders aloud what the future holds for them both. 'I don't know', says George. 'Weight problems?'

As for the films themselves, they're quite demented. There was Eclipse Of The Sun Virgin, which invents (unless I imagined this) gay tracheotomy porn. Wild Night In El Reno, on the other hand, is just a five-minute account of stormy weather over a motel in Oklahoma, originally intended as atmospheric inserts for a longer film, 'but I said no, I don't want to continue this anymore'. And Forever And Always, possibly my favourite here, in which a woman loses her husband to a woman with fruit on her head, then carts her children despairingly around a festival called 'Hooray For Kids' before they are run over by a car driven by a tailor's dummy. By the end of it, I felt like this had happened to me, and in a sense, it had.

No Likee

You know what really annoys me? Caro Emerald's album. Not the music on it, whatever that's like, but the title: Deleted Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor. This is not only a tautology (since, metaphorically speaking, 'deleted scenes' must necessarily come 'from the cutting room floor') - it is also a contradiction in terms, since (literally speaking) there wouldn't BE a 'cutting room floor' involved in the digital process implied by the word 'deleted'. In theory a tautology and a contradiction should cancel each other out, shouldn't they? But no, they don't - two wrongs don't make a right - and it drives me insane with anger every time I see it. Caro Emerald is Dutch, but I can't forgive her. Sometimes I wonder if she did it just to annoy me.

Words, though - they're a 'mindfield' (as one of my work colleagues says). Take that bowel cancer advert in which you are warned to look out for 'blood in your poo'. I wonder how many meetings it took to arrive at the epithet 'poo', as opposed to the numerous other available options? How I would have loved to sit on (so to speak) the meetings where they thrashed it out, listening to the various cases put forward by the supporters of 'shit', the proponents of 'poo-poo', and the fans of 'faeces'. I might have contributed a motion myself, just to see it flushed out. Stools? 'Too ambiguous, they'll think it's an Ikea advert.' Bowel movements? 'Too formal.' Crap? 'Too...crap.'

And then imagine the cheers when they announce that they're 'running with poo.' I can't believe that this hasn't been televised.

Then again, maybe they think that there's enough shit on TV already. I haven't seen Take Me Out in a while, but the other night even the ITV announcer, over the credits of TV Burp, described it as 'brutal'. I wonder what it's like now? I like to imagine that Paddy McGuinness' limited repertoire of catchphrases has deteriorated into surreal nonsense. As the next contestant is introduced he roars: 'Let the strawberries see the telephone!' Or: 'Let the stapler see the giraffe!' (the audience laughs just as wildly). And the couples no longer holiday on 'the Isle of Fernando's'. They go straight to Hell.