No Future

Nothing has concerned me more in the last few weeks than the passing away of Humphrey Lyttleton. Like most people in the world, my knowledge of Humphrey Lyttleton stretches minimally beyond a) being a jazz trumpeter and band leader I've never heard a single note of, and b) being the presenter of I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. The latter reason is reason enough to mourn, as It'll result in one of two modifications to I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. Either it will stop altogether, or it'll continue with 'guest hosts' a la Have I Got News For You. Right now I'm thinking I'd prefer the show to end altogther. Lyttleton, apart from Willy Rushton maybe before he passed away, the key ingredient that made the show unique. In the earlier episodes, with the 'classic' line up of Barry Cryer, Tim Brooke Taylor, Willy Rushton and Graeme Garden, although obviously the entire thing was invariably hilarious, that Rushton and Lyttleton had the stand-out voices: Rushton with his slightly surrealist and less pun-orientated one liners, and Lyttleton, as host, providing all the perfectly timed put-downs and disparaging comments, particularly in the direction of pianist Colin Sell. These are my favourite elements of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, these links, because they turn what could, in the wrong hands, be looked at as a lot of RP jollies at the pleasure of their own puns, the self concious and generally self-deprication made it perfect. The other option, having a guest host, just won't work for me. Not only is it too big a chair to fill, it's not the sort of show where you can bring in newcomers and have it work from that side. Whilst it's OK to have people like Ross Noble on the panel and playing Mornington Crescent, the only people I'd be confident in chairing a game would be one of the original panel themselves. Which seems unlikely. A new host altogether won't work in my opinion either. So whilst it's sad that Lyttleton has passed over, it's as equal a tragedy that without a doubt the funniest radio show, which can lay waste to any number of television shows with it, might pass away alongside him. The biggest reason to mourn is that when one of the great literate, intelligent musicians and personalities ended his days, I was watching 'Balls of Steel' and drinking cider from the bottle.

Breaking news. There's a thunderstorm happening right now. I've just sneaked into my housemates bedroom to watch the sheet lightning and enjoy the thought that lots of people who were previously out drinking and wearing sandals and surfwear are now dodging the raindrops and thunderclaps trying to get home before they get trenchfoot. Hopefully they all do. Anyway, luckily my housemate is in some part of Europe right now and not in some part of his bedroom, so I've moved into his room with the lights off and typing by the light of the storm. And this white page.

So what else has happened lately? I'll condense it into a paragraph and then a list. A couple of weeks ago, massively inept and testament to how fuck-for-brains a cinema experience can be, waste of everbodys time and life purpose shit flick extraordinaire 'Pathology' became the third film I've ever walked out of. Even though it was only a fortnight ago, I literally cannot think of a single solitary split second of an idea why I went to see a film I actively knew I'd hate, but there you go. It starred the dopey Connor Oberst thicko moping spatula of a bell-end from Heroes as a twat with a scalpel, and also featured a wealth of boring beards and the slag from 'Lie With Me'. Megabad. Meanwhile, I did manage to make it to the end of 'The Hottie and the Nottie', a bungled waste of time comedy 'starring' Paris Hilton which was every bit as bad as it looked, yet strangely worse in every single way.

I can't believe that A Question of Sport is still on TV. It's probably one of the few shows that's still on that I can remember watching on Friday nights what I was at school. I think of the other shows from that era; Red Dwarf, The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor, Ground Force. Even Top of the Pops went, yet somehow A Question of Sport has survived multichannel television. I was in a chip shop on the way home from work about a month ago and the owners of the takeaway were watching Sue Barker drooling over Matt Dawsons what-ho humour and Phil 'Tuffers' Tufnell's munchies-schtick, who has inexplicably replaced superniceandcuddly Ally McCoist and thus completed a full house on his bingo card of appearing on every half-baked crummy TV show he posssibly can. Next stop, "Tuffers Top 10 wicket-bad rock moments' on The Hits. With 'Rock Star' by Nickelback at number five, a song which I can't decide if it's operating on nineteen different tiers of irony, or whether it's just plain idiotic. When I got home from the chip shop, my housemate was watching it with the same emotionless expression the people in the chip shop were. When I asked him why he was watching it, I got the reccommended response. "I don't know". It was on again tonight. It hasn't changed at all. It's still an excuse for dunder-headed sportspeople who can't tie their own shoelaces sat on a desk in a suit their agent chose them, answering pointlessly easy questions about their own sport which nobody would know the answer to. I swear once they had an international canoeist on there, who had to answer questions about canoeing, It was even worse than when contestants choose obscure specialist subjects on Mastermind. Tonights guests were a footballer I'd never heard of, a rugby player I'd never heard of, Jermaine Defoe, and someone I can't even remember. I think the forgettable nonentity was the one of offered the predictable 'Hurr hurr it'd be easier if you'd got rid of the tennis racket!" to a picture-round question with a tennis player obscured by the racket they were holding. This joke is, I believe, made every week. The mystery sportsman round has got worse, and even easier as well. Presuming you know who they are in the first place. And is no match for 'Neg's Urban Sports' on Balls of Steel, anyway.

I still hate everyone. Currently top of the pops are: Students (usually female) who don't bother to get dressed out of their pyjamas to go to the supermarket on Sundays, people who shop in Borders and who expect to receive discounts off damaged books when the same book is in perfect condition elsewhere in the building, people who go to 'Bait Shop', a preposturously trendy night club, and dance to CSS but leave the dancefloor whenever anything actually good comes on like Johnny Foreigner, and are so inept at life they don't even know a Cure song when they hear it. Oh yes, people who deem it necessary to ask me if I'm "meant to look like Robert Smith'. I've concluded now that the more time goes on, the more I might actually try to look like Robert Smith so I can say "yes" and hopefully defeat the point of them asking me in the first place. I could go around and start really annoying people by being agressively goth in their direction. Very intreguing. Very Balls of Steel.

I've come to the conclusion that 'The Airing of Grievances' by Titus Andronicus is probably the best album I've heard in a long long time. Other music I've enjoyed recently hasn't even come close, because this album, and especially 'Fear in Loathing in Mawhaw, NJ', the opening track, are unbelieveable. They sound like every band I like crumpled into one ball. I've so far detected the following references in there

The Arcade Fire ('Tunnels')
Neutral Milk Hotel ('Holland, 1945')
The Dropkick Murphys
Explosions in the Sky
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead
Los Campesinos!
Bright Eyes
Desaparecidos
The Walkmen
My Chemical Romance
The Hold Steady.
The Pogues

Elsewhere on the album there's a song that sounds identical to 'Promised Land' by Bruce Springsteen, a song which borrows the riff from 'Bankrobber' by The Clash, and then they play it in the style of The Ramones, and then in the style of Explosions in the Sky. There are spoken word intros and outtros that quote from Shakespeare and Albert Camus, and then the last song is also called 'Albert Camus'. There's a song that sounds like The Rat by The Walkmen, and another than uses 7 seconds of a Strokes song and then wipes it's nose with it. I can't stress how good it is.

I am still unhappy.