New Year Bollocks

OK. I just don’t get the whole NY thing. I mean I understand how the calendar works and I get the significance that we have moved from 2007 to 2008. Excellent. But why all the fuss? Is it really that great an achievement? Anyone would have thought that mankind had just gone through a once in a millennium moment.

Just stop and think about the money that is wasted on fireworks alone. BBC News told me proudly that £1 million was spent on the London fireworks display. Who on earth authorised that? He should be strapped to a bleeding firework and sent to hell, the wasteful bastard. Probably St Ken, the rehabilitated communist that Londoners keep failing to see through. I mean £1 million up in smoke. No lasting legacy. Just smoke. On what other day of the year would we downtrodden taxpayers say: oh yes, lets burn 1 million big ones on…smoke.

But it does not just stop there. Other things to hate about NY, not in order, just a random list:

Holiday adverts on TV – dear holiday industry, we also go on holiday at other times of the year.

Dog attack stories – dear 24/7 media, you know dogs attack small kids most days of the year. Be original, do one in June.

A policeman being shot/stabbed – I’m sure the boys in blue do great things (a topic I shall return to in later posts because a lot of what they do is not so great) but they too get shot/stabbed/injured most weeks. Why focus on it at NY?

Clergymen giving us a NY message – the media, perhaps the most immoral lobby, just love covering what the Bishop of X is telling us about the year ahead. Here’s a reciprocal message from me to all you clerics: go talk to your mostly dwindling flock and leave those of us who have opted out alone.

The Scottish bloody Hogmanobollocks thing – Now I know that the Jocks are always looking for totemic events and issues to show how very different they are from the English but WTF is Hogwarts all about? The big issue seems to be that it’s a celebration of…something that isn’t Xmas. Well whoopee doo. Well done Scotland. But why do we English need to pander to them. Now they have their own ‘parliament’ and SNP ‘government’ let’s just let them do it up there all by themselves, hating us, and we’ll do our own thing. Jools, come back to celebrate with the English. We’re bigger and we’re better.

Now what is the common link between all these, I hear you ask? Answer: the insidious power of the unbridled 24/7 media we now have.

They’re all sitting there, in their flash TV screen walled newsrooms, with fuck all to write or talk about. Nothings happening. We’re all at home, on holiday, taking time off. No news. Nothing to cover. So off they take us to ‘Jane Smith is in the New Hebrides. Jane can you hear us? Yes David, the party’s really kicking off here blah, blah’.

And we, the poor downtrodden TV licence payers have to resort to channel flipping trying to find something decent to watch because on every channel there’s a whole bunch of Jocks singing drunkenly.

I have a solution: let’s cut down the number of TV channels we have to say about 20. We should be able to cover most tastes on that number. Then we could save ourselves from drunken Jocks and endless interviews with Z list celebrities. Roll on the revolution.