TTYF! SICK REVIEW OF THE
YEAR / 2001
The year 2001 will be forever remembered as the year when a world power
was shocked to its very core by the unthinkable. A nation that regarded itself not only as
a supreme world power but more than anything untouchable on its home territory had to
endure a hated enemy inflicting a blow so massive that the nation may never fully recover.
And because this is the modern world, the nation’s humiliation took place on
television too, with the whole world watching.
Still, it was a foolish pundit who underestimated the victim’s will to succeed,
its track record of imposing its will on its opponents and, albeit by virtue of the
play-offs, Germany still managed to qualify for this year’s World Cup.
England had just 10 days to bask and Scotland to stew in the glory of England’s
convincing but somewhat fortuitous victory over Germany before the events of September 11
sent all but a few Moslem fundamentalists into a deep depression. Even Cat Stevens
cancelled plans to re-release a remix of his classic 1970 album Tea For The Taliban.
Just under 3,000 people were killed in the terrorist attack. There have been bigger
disasters in terms of the death toll. Eight thousand people were killed in 1984 in the
immediate aftermath of the Bhopal disaster and over 500,000 more were injured, but they
don’t count because they were only Indians, the event did not take place live on TV
and the company responsible for the atrocity was an American one, Union Carbide.
Will the fuss over the attacks on the World Trade Center fade away as has concern over
Chernobyl since 1991? (Ukraine's Health Ministry estimates that 3.5 million people,
over a third of them children, have suffered illness as a result of the contamination, and
the incidence of some cancers is 10 times the national average.) I suppose that all
depends on how the war against the Taliban goes. If it becomes a long running saga on a
par with Vietnam then we won’t hear the last of it for another 30 years, which will
put it several hundred years behind Ireland in the will we ever get this bloody sorted?
stakes.
Certainly thanks to the video footage the image will stay in the memory
for a long time, probably more so than a far more significant event such as the
dismantling of the Berlin wall. We’ve already reached the stage, however, when
celebrities can no longer milk easy approval from their ability to bypass the security
restrictions and visit Ground zero first-hand to "raise the morale" of the New
York Fire Department. Unless the terrorists can strike a follow-up blow we may even one
day see famous American tough-guy actors like Arnie & Bruce summon up the courage to
go on aeroplanes again.
The Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, could not be considered a lucky person except
that his execution took place before the September 11th attack; had he been
sentenced after it the US public probably would have demanded an even more barbaric form
of execution, perhaps a visit from OJ Simpson or death by suffocation under a mountain of
fat ugly trailer park trash culled from the Jerry Springer show. As Senator Gary
"Pants-down" Hart said, "Let’s give the terrorists a fair trial and
then hang them."
It’s very easy to criticise the Americans, so easy even Americans do it. We snooty
Europeans like to characterise American armed forces as being more of a danger to their
allies whilst we fondly portray Republican presidents as warmongering imbeciles. Certainly
George Dubya’s alarming ignorance of events outside of the US prior to his election
gave good cause to worry about how he would conduct a military campaign such as the one
against Al-Quaeda but touch wood, World War III has not broken out yet, unless the
skirmish between India and Pakistan is just a dress rehearsal. Suffice to say if it does
the Americans will save our arses again and we’ll spend the next 50 years moaning
about it. If you are downcast at America being the world’s supreme power, just thank
your lucky stars that Israel is not the world’s major power; there’d be no world
of which to be the major power as they seem to base their foreign policy on the Old
Testament.
Amidst all the fuss of war and terrorist attacks it was easy to forget that back in
Britain there was a general election in 2001. The result was inaccurately described as a
"landslide". Last time I checked, a landslide involves a shifting of a large
amount of stuff from one location to another. In this election the nearest thing to a
landslide was the Liberal Democrats’ advance to 52 seats, their highest total since
mutton-chop sideburns were in fashion (no, not the seventies, you buffoon). The Tories
actually gained one seat overall, and managed to nick one seat in Scotland, but it was not
enough to save William Hague, who did the decent thing and fell on his sword.
 Well, actually, the decent thing to have done would have been to
have pushed Michael Howard on to his sword - literally. Still, on the bright side it is
kind of reassuring to have insufferably smug bastards like Howard around for the next 20
years knowing his party will probably not get back into power because a slicker bunch of
Conservatives appear to have the keys to Number 10 locked up for the foreseeable future.
Hague completed the usual transformation of previous Tory hate figures such as
Parkinson, Norris and Portillo (but not Howard, who patently spent far too long wearing
Sauron’s ring in his youth) and became human, even likeable. His resignation speech
in the Commons was one of the few occasions, outside of Dennis Skinner and his Bumper Book
of Heckles, when TV coverage of Parliament proved interesting.
Having got shot of a bald europhobic weirdo as their leader the Conservative party took
an absolute age to replace him with .... a bald europhobic weirdo. Ian Duncan-Smith has
achieved the impossible by having an even lower profile since becoming leader than he had
before .
The election campaign was, by common consent, about as interesting as a 1980's re-run
of Arsenal versus Jack Charlton’s Middlesbrough. Had it not been for John "Two
jabs" Prescott responding as any fat northern working class bloke would after being
pelted by an egg ("Back in t’war my father would have worked for a week down
t’pit to afford a real egg,") then the only abiding memory of the campaign would
have been Tony Blair getting hand-bagged by some 15 minutes of fame woman outside a
hospital.
Thank God Birks had some decent chilli dips and tortilla chips on hand on election
night to occupy me because it really was the dullest Election Night I can recall.
Screaming Lord Sutch was sadly missed.
Of course, Peter Mandelson did his best to liven up proceedings with his "I am a fighter, not a quitter" speech; a rant which more or less
confirmed that the only real source of opposition for the Labour party these days comes
from within its own ranks. After such a display of wild-eyed nuttiness it is barely
conceivable that Mandelson will ever be recalled to the Cabinet but it would be
entertaining if he were, if only to see how he could fuck up his career for a third time.
For a bloke who was supposed to be the Prince of Darkness and the master of spin he has
always been a terrible TV performer and he should stay in the background, preferably
behind a brick wall.
On a personal note I was chuffed to see Portillo’s conqueror, Stephen Twigg,
increase his majority in Enfield North, if only because the Conservative candidate
opposing him (John Flack) was a twat from my year at school. There’s already one
objectionable Tory in Parliament who used to be in my year at school (Andrew Lansley) but
at least he is intelligent, although given that he was the mastermind behind Hague’s
electoral strategy perhaps he is not so bright after all.
I remain convinced that the Tories’ main aim in this election was to avoid
annihilation. They knew they could not win so instead of attempting to do so and moving to
the centre they instead shored up their core vote and moved further to the right. By the
time of the 2009 election Britain will probably have joined the euro, the British way of
life will have been barely altered and the Conservatives will have to come up with a whole
new nightmare scenario with which to attempt to frighten the voters.
John Flack, failed Conservative parliamentary candidate for Enfield North, is not the
only repellent thing to have come out of Essex. There’s me and Kev, for a start.
Jamie Oliver for, hopefully, a finish. Early in the year, however, the nation’s most
reviled county sparked off the outbreak of foot and mouth disease which brought much of
Britain’s tourism industry to a standstill. In order to protect the sale of 20,000
carcasses of beef to Europe the (now disbanded) Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and
Fuck-Ups decided to authorise the mass slaughter of around six million animals, most of
whom were completely unaffected by the disease.
Much of the countryside was declared out of bounds, a decision I am happy to see never
repealed, except for tourists - and only then because it makes the towns less crowded and
makes it possible to get on the London Underground in the summer.
The handling of the outbreak became this year’s Millennium Dome botch job. Some
pundits thought it might even cost Blair the election, but short of him being filmed
buggering a heffer (the corpse of Eric Heffer, possibly) it is difficult to conceive of a
scenario whereby Labour could have lost the election.
This year’s Millennium Dome/Foot & Mouth botch-up could be Railtrack, a
company beset by "institutional paralysis", according to Lord Cullen’s
report on the Paddington rail disaster. Like the Millennium Dome, the
"de-privatisation" started out as an idea with potential populist appeal, but
the handling of the change of ownership is not proving popular with the media or the
skilled personnel of Railtrack who are, reportedly, leaving the company in droves.
I, personally, could care less about the bleating complaints of the denizens of the
stock market who as ever seem to expect the government to waive the rules of capitalism
whenever it involves the investment banks losing money? Who can forget the complaints of
the investment banks who underwrote the BP share issue before Black Monday back in 1987?
The whole point of underwriting share issues is that you receive a handsome fee for taking
on the risk that not all of the shares might be bought at the offer price. When the stock
market suffered an historic slump and the investment banks were facing massive losses on
the BP share issue the government stepped in and put a floor on the BP share price. Now
with Railtrack the fat cats in the City were trying it on again.
"It’s not fair," they whined, "we thought you’d carry on
giving hand-outs to Railtrack for ages so they could promptly pass the money on to
shareholders. If we’d known the company could go bust we would have invested in other
companies such as Enron ... oops."
I have some sympathy for the rank and file staff who have lost out on their share
options and who might have been relying on them to see them through retirement. I would
support any move by the government to compensate these people but
I’ll be blowed if the fat cats in the City should be given a penny. Don’t they
read their own small print on their literature?
Sometim es it is the small changes which end up
having the greatest effect. David Blunkett’s first steps down the road to
decriminalising cannabis could lead to a massive source of revenue for future governments
and might encourage the troubled young residents of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley to chill
out a bit. New Labour seems to have gone cold on the idea of associating itself with icons
of Cool Britannia, otherwise Ali G would surely have been appointed as the new Drugs Csar.
Early in the year it emerged that Princess Margaret is paralysed and practically blind.
I took no notice as I thought the newscaster said she was "paralytic and blind
drunk", which would not be news at all. If she lives as long as her mother
she’ll spend almost 3 decades in near darkness - something she could have achieved
earlier in her life by moving somewhere such as Blackburn.
My own theory about the Queen Mother’s longevity is that she is such a bedrock of
the monarchy’s rapidly diminishing support that they can’t afford for her to
die. As a result they have used a succession of look-alikes over the last 30 years to
maintain the myth of her enduring vitality. I can’t think why the Soviet Union did
not think of this earlier with Stalin.
 Jill Dando - no longer with us
In the USA they electrocuted the Oklahoma Bomber; in Britain we imprisoned Barry George
for the murder of Jill Dando. This was a premature imprisonment, in my view, as there was
so much more work for him to do - Cilla Black, Vanessa Feltz, Carol Smiley, Anthea Turner,
Carol Vorderman, Anneka Rice, Gloria Hunneford and Graham bloody Norton.
Carol Vorderman - always bloody with us
One imprisonment that was long overdue was that of Jeffrey Archer. He was in danger of
surpassing Robert Maxwell in the Getting Away With It For An Unfeasibly Long Time stakes.
As every wag observed, the downside to his imprisonment is that he could emerge from
prison with a new book. Seeing as I seriously doubt whether he writes his own books anyway
I don’t think this is a worry and besides no one forces you to read Jeffrey Archer
novels. The real downside is that he is not sharing the prison cell with Graham Bloody
Norton.
Archer really is a shameless shit, but even I was surprised at him persuading his
mother to pop her clogs so he could go for the sympathy vote when the sentencing came
around. Which brings us on to the Celebrity Snuff List.
DEAD FAMOUS
Actors etc.
Jack Lemmon (the Tom Hanks of his generation, only much, much better)
Caroll O’Connor (Archie Bunker)
Michael Williams (Mr. Judi Dench)
Nyree Dawn Porter (actress, best known for her part in the Forsyte Saga)
Anthony Quinn (not a great actor but still ful of spunk at 70)
Charlotte Coleman (actress, Four Weddings And A Funeral)
Nigel Hawthorne (star of Madness of King George and victim of one of the most
pointless "outings" ever perpetrated on a gay actor)
Stanley Kramer (director of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and others)
William Hanna (of Hanna-Barbera cartoon fame, creators of some of the worst low-rent
cartoons ever seen on TV)
Thuy Trang (the yellow Power Ranger. Died in a car crash; not wearing a seat belt)
Dale Evans (Mrs. Roy Rogers)
Jack Haley Jr. (film producer, once married to Liza Minelli. Was son of Jack Haley, the
Tin Man in Wizard of Oz)
Musicians
George Harrison (all things must pass, even an immortal member of the Beatles)
Perry Como (so laid back he practically sang in his sleep)
Sir Harry Secombe (one of those voices that always had me reaching for the off switch,
but a marvelously jolly man)
Isaac Stern (violinist and occasional chat show guest)
Chet Atkins (was once told by a man who stopped to listen to him play,
"You’re good, but you’re no Chet Atkins")
Glenn Hughes (Village Person, the biker)
Joey Ramone (more influential than he was given credit for)
John Phillips (driving force behind the Mamas & The Papas)
John Lee Hooker (Boom, boom, out went the lights)
Larry Adler (raconteur and mouth organist)
Aaliyah (rising hip-hop star who died in a plane crash)
Novelists
Gordon R. Dickson (a favourite SF novelist of Kevin Warne’s)
Poul Anderson (another SF maestro)
Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over Seaman’s Head The
Cuckoo’s Nest)
Auberon Waugh (genial old foey)
Robert Ludlum (am I the only person in the world not to have read one of his novels?)
Douglas Adams (may have only had two real moments of grand inspiration but that’s
two more than most achieve)
Miscellaneous famous people
Hank Ketcham (creator of American comic strip character, Dennis the Menace)
Dr. Christian Barnard (his hearts were always in the right place)
Emilie Schindler (wife of famous list keeper; should have married Nick Hornby)
Victor Kiam (liked death so much, he bought it)
Sport
Lord Cowdrey (not for nothing was Michael Colin Cowdrey given the initials MCC)
 Sir
Donald Bradman
(probably no sportsman was so superior to his international peers. A test average of
99.94, for Christ’s sakes!)
Michele Alboreto (enjoyed a long largely unsuccessful Formula One career
Joey Maxim (former Light-heavyweight World Champion)
Sandy Saddler (former Featherweight World Champion)
John McKay (first coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers)
And so to the awards |
