NOSTALGIA
LUV – Cor, the past. Wonnit brilliant?
Trains used to be brilliant. Do you remember? In the past, they made proper chugga-chugga train noises, and had smoking carriages and slam-doors, and this lent the everyday a frisson of danger of death from fire or decapitation. It was a simpler, more exciting time.
Last night, whereas, I was on a packed train, jammed into the armpit of a man who was watching Mock the Week on his iPad. He was wearing earphones, which meant he couldn’t hear that he was a) giggling girlishly and repeating “oh Frankie Boyle, Frankie Boyle.” or b) producing the wettest, most rattling, snot-filled sniffs I have ever had the misfortune to listen to in close proximity. For about an hour.
This couldn’t have happened in the past. Five years ago we wouldn’t have had the technology. Ten years ago people would have habitually carried hankies, and forcibly offered the man one. TWENTY years ago, he would have been burned as a witch.
THE PAST IS BRILLIANT.
Look, I grew up in the 1980s. I had a hot-pink onesie, day-glo socks, a giant candy-striped hula hoop that, for reasons beyond my comprehension, was scented with peppermint. I also had a BMX, a pair of ACE red suede rollerboots, AND A FUCKING PONY. Of course I’m going to reminisce.
It was a wonderful time to be a child. I got to enjoy Transformers the first time round; Battle of the Planets and the fuzzy-felt Moomins the second time round; AND I had plenty of opportunities to learn to deal with casual and inaccurate racism!
The 1980s made me the adult I am now. I thank them for it, and I often think back nostalgically to these days.
But that’s sort of all I do. I’m not the sort of dickhead who honks on and on about fucking deelypoppers and space hoppers. My ideal nostalgic conversation would go like this:
THEM: “Hey Robyn, do you remember Button Moon?”
ME: “Why yes I do. Thank you for reminding me. Now please go about your day.”
Because I don’t need to endlessly reference the past in conversation. That’s why we have nostalgia TV specials featuring Stuart Maconie and Gina Yashere.
Wait, do they even make those any more?
– Robyn Wilder
HAT – Remember when all your Facebook updates had to be clunky present-tense third-person eyesores like ‘Stuart is wanting porridge’? Remember how funny that was? You do? Well fuck you then, you dreadful nostalgia arsehole.
I hate nostalgia. I hate comedians who’ve built entire careers by remembering what a Rubik’s Cube was. I hate people who walk around with Lomo cameras even though THERE’S A BETTER FUCKING CAMERA ON YOUR PHONE NOW, YOU MINDLESS DIPSHIT. I’d rather cut my eyes out with a pair of garden scissors than acknowledge that Boy Meets World was ever a thing.
I’m quite fastidious about my hatred of nostalgia. For example, I’ve become convinced that my entire childhood was spent eating brown poison in a hole. If I had my way, I’d build a time machine and use it to destroy every single thing that has ever happened in the history of the planet. Yes, that’d mean undoing millennia of human progress – including the moment that I built the time machine itself, ultimately leaving me stranded in a hellish limbo for all of eternity – but it’d probably be worth it never to hear the fucking Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme tune ever again.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that the only person who hates the past more than me is that A Child Called It guy, and he’s probably nostalgic for the time he got rich from writing that book about his rubbish childhood. On the other hand, I’m never pleased with anything I’ve done. I even hate that last sentence I wrote, because I wrote it 15 seconds ago, back when EVERYTHING was SHIT.
Most of all, I hate Facebook nostalgia. Almost without exception, my old schoolmates have grown up to be angry, illiterate, immigrant-hating Uncle Ricos desperate to return to the mid-1990s, because back then they weren’t trapped in a meaningless job to support their loveless marriage that only happened because of an accidental teenage pregnancy. And this has meant that they now spend their days filling up Facebook with guff like this:
Oh boo hoo, now is so terrible because there are more television channels and you can use telephones outdoors and computers exist (even though they existed back then anyway) and sweets are more expensive (but only if you ignore inflation) and kids don’t sing at schools any more (although they obviously do, you ridiculous backwards-facing shithead).
Look, it’s 2013. Everything exists at the same time now. Want to be nostalgic? Knock yourself out. Gladiators is on Challenge TV most days. It’s terrible. It looks like it was filmed in an abandoned carpet showroom, everyone wears nylon and John Fashanu keeps saying ‘Awooga’. Want to buy some penny sweets? Go into literally any branch of Top Shop and you can remind yourself how inedible they are. Miss Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex? Go and watch it on YouTube. Also, you’re a cunt.
And this will only get worse. Soon, people much younger than you will start reminiscing about how Britain was great back when Take Me Out was on television and none of One Direction had killed themselves in horrible jetski accidents.
So you’ll retreat further back into your own past, sharing Facebook posts that say “If you remember sharing that Facebook post about remembering watching Baywatch, then you remember when Britain was not quite as great as it was back then but still better than it is now” and then you’ll all start wearing nappies and pooing a lot because you’ll don’t like the responsibility of being an adult in the present day. In summary: fuck you.
- Stuart Heritage
CANDY CRUSH
LUV - Modern games are far too complicated. I got Hitman: Absolution for Christmas, and I’ve still only played it once. I got put off by the bit where you have to crouch under a counter for 15 minutes, then kill a chef, then clear up all trace of his murder, then dress up in his clothes, then hang around somewhere else for an hour – by which time you’ve forgotten what all the buttons do, so you accidentally shoot someone in the face and then, instead of running away from all the people who are now shooting at you, you just end up crouching down again and again like an angry idiot trying to fart on an ant.
I don’t have time for shit like that, which is why I’ve fallen so hard for Candy Crush. It’s the simplest game in the world. There are no people, just row after row of brightly-coloured sweets. Arrange them into groups of three and they disappear. Make enough of them disappear and you win the level. That’s it. Remember Bejewelled? It’s just like Bejewelled, except there are sweets instead of jewels so it isn’t really the same at all.
The beauty of Candy Crush is that you make order out of chaos. Everyone likes order, don’t they? A place for everything and everything in its place. Sometimes even the knowledge that there’s an app on my phone containing a load of jumbled-up sweets is too much to bear. When this happens, I have to get my phone out immediately and start playing. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing. The sweets are more important. There must be order.
And then sometimes I’ll close my eyes and all I can see are rows and rows of brightly-coloured sweets. All they want is to be slid into place. That’s all they want. So, regardless of what I’m doing – watching TV, operating heavy machinery, listening to a loved one tell me something important – I’ll start frantically arranging the sweets. They can’t be left as they are. They can’t. They’ll hurt me if they are. They’ll crawl into my dreams and dance around, dressed up as evil clowns, laughing and stabbing me in the back of my eyes with their flaming tridents of vomit. I have to put them into place. I HAVE to.
And sometimes, just to play a trick on you, Candy Crush will tell you that you have to stop for 30 minutes to, I dunno, wash or eat or something. Those jokers! They know that every second not spent organising sweets into beautiful little rows is like spending an entire lifetime being slit open and sprayed with vinegar in hell. They know that.
Oh, sure, Candy Crush will let you play again sooner if you tell all your Facebook friends that you’re playing Candy Crush. But you won’t do that because you don’t want everyone to know that your entire existence has devolved to the point where you’re constantly alone and hungry and covered in your own shit, fruitlessly shoving a never-ending stream of pixels around with your fingers forever to absolutely no gain at all. Oh god, this is agony. Send help.
HA HA, just kidding! I love Candy Crush! I LOVE IT! HA HA HA!
(No, really, I mean it. The sweets are making me say this. They said they’ll hurt me if I don’t. I can hear them, you know. SEND HELP)
- Stuart Heritage
HAT – Fucking Candy Crush. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I hate it.
I hate it partly because it’s turned me into a twitchy, swivel-eyed Candy Crush junkie. The sort of person who takes her phone into the toilet, then spends twenty minutes in the loo. Several times a day! By now my phone must be encrusted with poo spores, but that doesn’t matter. Dysentery can be treated. Even cholera can be overcome. But I’ve been stuck on fucking level 35 of Candy Crush for over a week now, and I cannot. Let it. Beat me.
I keep finding myself humming the opening bars of the Father Ted theme, because it reminds me of the Candy Crush song. Even tapping out these letters on the keyboard is difficult, because my fingers naturally want to float up towards the screen and swipe them across the page instead. It is a PROBLEM.
The worst thing about Candy Crush, though, is how neatly it brings home just how stupid I really fucking am.
I don’t strictly know my nine times table, or what a gerund really is (even though it’s sort of my job), but I’ve fudged through life under the impression that I’m at least reasonably intelligent because I can (sometimes) complete (children’s) crosswords, and I read books (or used to, before I downloaded Candy Crush onto my Kindle).
But Candy Crush has forced me to accept my own idiocy. It began so simply – line up three sweets on a grid and they go pouf. Ooh, fun! I remember thinking, Exploding Skittles Tetris! But, now I’m progressing up the levels and have to create longer lines of sweets on boards that are increasingly shaped like Swastikas, I realise that:
1. It’s not Exploding Skittles Tetris at all. It’s Exploding Skittles Chess.
2. I’ve never learned to play Chess.
In Chess you need to think at least two steps ahead, and I don’t have the brain power for that. I’m so ignorant that I think one of the Chess pieces is called a ‘horsie’. I’m so stupid that, if I’d been Harry Potter I would have died playing Wizard Chess at the end of the first film. That’s right, I said ‘film’, not ‘book’ – THAT’S HOW MUCH OF A DUMKOPF I AM.
Genuinely, the lowest moment of my life was when I Googled ‘Candy Crush level 35 cheat’. Then I encountered a lower moment when I watched the video and realised it was made by a bored eight year-old. Then there was a lower moment still, when it occurred to me that I didn’t understand the video or how to beat the level.
I am basically a Neanderthal. I just want to make sweets go pouf. But I can’t because I’m too stupid. That’s what Candy Crush has done to me, and that’s why I HAT it.
- Robyn Wilder
SATURDAY KITCHEN
LUV - Saturday Kitchen is brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant and I will not hear a word against it. End of story. That’s how this site works, right?
Fine. I suppose if you want REASONS why spending every Saturday morning in a souring bed, watching a shark-eyed man in a peach-coloured shirt chiding minor celebrities for julienning vegetables incorrectly isn’t the epitome of civilisation, then FINE.
I’ll give you reasons.
1. James Martin’s way with people
I don’t know why I enjoy watching chillingly avuncular TV chef and northern lothario James Martin interact unsuccessfully with human beings, but I do, very much. Too much.
Watching him greet his guests – no matter who they are – with a smile that says “you’re late” makes me smile. Watching him visibly bristle if the guest is an attractive male makes me clap my hands with joy. When asks female guests questions about their careers then, as they start yawping self-consciously about how they “gave life to a role”, suddenly starts barking CHOP THOSE NOW and DON’T LET THAT OVERBOIL at them until they cry, I roll around giggling like a toddler.
I realise that this says more about me than James Martin. I think it might be some sort of problem.
2. Rachel Khoo
If you find the excerpts of Rachel Khoo’s Little Paris Kitchen so twee that your jaw starts to hurt, just do what I do – tune out until she’s stopped saying actual words and is just emitting a series of adorable clicks and trills and coos. And then you can pretend that Zooey Deschanel and Pikachu got married, and that this is a stop-motion Claymation show about their daughter.
3. The Wine People
Who are these jolly, intrepid people they dispatch off to Lidls in Basingstoke and the really crap Waitrose in Bracknell town centre to find wines for the dishes they cook on the show? Why are they never in the studio? Why do they raise a glass to the chef at the end of their desperate little comedy vignettes? Why is there such fear in their eyes? WHAT AREN’T WE BEING TOLD? It’s a mystery.
4. The Celebrity Masterchef Voiceover Woman
She is Liv Tyler’s whispery elf from Lord of the Rings and I claim my five pounds.
5. Sally Field
Last week, the actress Sally Field was due to be a guest on Saturday Kitchen, but she got stuck in the snow on the way to the studio. So they just got some bald bloke in a grey jumper to stand in for her, and addressed him as Sally Field for the entire show, THEREBY WINNING MY RESPECT.
6. I’m tired on Saturday mornings, okay?
With its nice food, chef bonhomie, and gentle joshing with guests, Saturday Kitchen is a an endearing, undemanding start to the weekend. It’s basically Take Me Out for the morning-time, before your tolerance levels for fake tan and bullshit are at full capacity.
7. It’s not Sunday Brunch on Channel 4
Thank fucking god.
- Robyn Wilder
HAT – Saturday morning TV was fun once. There were shows where you could phone up popstars and call them wankers. There were adverts for toys, marketed so aggressively that your parents invariably ended up feeling like miserable failures because they couldn’t afford to buy them for you. There was The Raccoons, which made you sad even though you couldn’t really pinpoint why.
Now, though, Saturday morning telly is SHIT. And you know whose fault it is? It’s all Saturday Fucking Kitchen’s fault. Once there was Muppet Babies, now there’s a fat dead-eyed bloke with a shit haircut pointing at some meat and nodding at it like it’s the lost temple of fucking Akhmim. IT’S NOT THE LOST TEMPLE OF FUCKING AKHMIM, YOU DOZY WAZZOCK, IT’S JUST SOME FUCKING MEAT.
If you’ve never seen Saturday Kitchen, then a) know that I would happily trade lives with you, even if you’re covered in sores and smell like cat food, and b) here’s what happens in every single poxy bloody shitting episode of it:
1) James Martin turns up in some sort of horrific pastel-coloured sweater and doesn’t immediately set himself on fire out of shame.
2) James Martin asks a visiting chef what they’re cooking and then – regardless of what they tell him – looks at the camera, makes a funny face, says “Beef and chips, then”, pulls another funny face and then pauses for a moment, knowing that if anyone used the same reductive tactics to disparage any of his accomplishments, he’d crawl away and roll around miserably in his own fecal matter for a week.
3) A 50-year-old man rings up and asks James Martin how best to cook fallow venison, even though GOOGLE EXISTS NOW YOU PREENING SHITBAG WHY DON’T YOU JUST LOOK IT UP ON GOOGLE INSTEAD OF GOING TO ALL THE TROUBLE OF LITERALLY RINGING A NATIONALLY BROADCAST TELEVISION PROGRAMME? IS IT BECAUSE YOU CRAVE ATTENTION? IS THAT IT? IS THAT HOW IMPOSSIBLY EMPTY YOUR LIFE IS? JUST GOOGLE IT NEXT TIME, JEREMY CONSTABLE FROM SHROPSHIRE OR WHATEVER YOUR FUCKING NAME IS.
4) A segment of a Rick Stein television programme that consists of nothing but Rick Stein going to another country and then saying “Isn’t it a shame that we don’t do this in Britain? Isn’t it a horrible shame? I hate Britain BUT I REFUSE TO LEAVE IT BECAUSE SECRETLY I HATE MYSELF.”
5) James Martin cooks some food while interviewing someone from Casualty who he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about, by reading out questions and then rendering their answers meaningless by deliberately switching on a blender whenever they start talking.
6) The Omelette Challenge, where visiting chefs have to make something that looks like a xenomorph’s afterbirth in six seconds while James Martin reads out exactly the same egg-based puns as he does every single week and the crew has to groan at every single one of them like they do every single week because they know that, if they don’t, James Martin will do everything in his power to make the rest of their lives an impossible labyrinth of misery.
7) You realise that it’s 11:30 and you’ve just spent another precious 90 minutes of your life actively hating something that you could have just as easily ignored and that, by doing so, you’re effectively just as bad as Rick Stein; the man who you have implausibly started to hold up as a totem of everything that’s ever been wrong with the world. Damn you Saturday Kitchen. Damn you to HELL.
So, in short, no.
- Stuart Heritage
CHIPS
LUV – I have been alive on this planet for over three decades. I’ve resided in three continents. I’ve met kings and paupers and people from Bracknell and Jeff Brazier. Once I even almost got a TATTOO. In WALES. So I think we’re all agreed that I’m basically a suave cosmopolitan motherfucker.
And yet, through all this rich tapestry of florid human experience, I have never encountered anything lovelier than a chip.
By ‘chip’, incidentally, I mean hot rectangles of deep-fried potato, and not CRISPS which, although excellent, come further down the list of lovely things. In fact the list of lovely things goes like this:
1. CHIPS
2. NEW BEDLINEN WITH A HIGH THREAD COUNT
3. ORGASMS, probably
4. RANDOMLY TURNING ON THE TELEVISION AND SEEING A FRIENDS EPISODE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE
5. KITTENS
6. CRISPS
7. SNOW DAYS WHEN YOUR KITCHEN IS FULLY STOCKED
8. RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS
9. CHOCOLATE
10. LOVE OR WHATEVER
Chips are amazing. There is no comparable joy to eating chip shop chips outside in the frosty air when you’re hungry. The weight of the wrapped chips in your hand, heavy and warm like a delicious baby. The steamy, tangy vinegar smell that SPANGGS your saliva glands into overdrive. Unwrapping the paper and plopping a too-hot chip onto your tongue. Fanning your face as the sizzling potato sears the very meat from the roof of your mouth. Grinning like an idiot as you plonk fat squashy chips into your body, like salty edible friends who hug you from the inside.
And there are so many TYPES of chips:
OVEN CHIPS
Frozen chips you just throw into a baking tray and stick in the oven! And the challenge is finding the uncooked chip on your plate. There’s always one. It is the law.
CURLY FRIES
Mandelbrot spirals of Möbius potato perfection that, at 18, I genuinely thought came from one giant potato. At EIGHTEEN.
McDONALDS CHIPS
Chip perfection. Tossed in a secret blend of chicken salt, ambrosia and devil spunk before frying.
FRITES
Like British chips, but Belgian. So, thinner and slightly more snide.
MICROWAVE CHIPS
Like oven chips, but with extra carcinogens that allow you to go from zero to chip in 30 seconds!
Chips are wonderful. Chips are hot salty slivers of pure sunshine. At least I think they are. I’ve been on a diet for six weeks and haven’t seen a chip for months. Am I confusing them with bananas?
- Robyn Wilder
HAT – I’m not anticipating a very positive reaction here. Because they’re chips, right? Everyone likes chips. Who wouldn’t like chips? A paedophile?
I’m expecting this reaction because I get it a lot. Admitting that you don’t like chips is the same as admitting that you don’t like puppies, or admitting that it was you who decided to start calling Dime bars Daim bars and also you’re Kim Jong Il returned from the dead disguised as Jimmy Savile and you have a giant tattoo of Justin Bieber doing the Gangnam Style dance stretching all the way across the entirety of your back. It doesn’t go down well is basically what I’m saying.
Whenever I’ve told anyone that I don’t like chips, there’s been a uniform three-stage response. First, because I have a bit of a tummy and a near-permanent smear of ketchup across my face, people initially think I’m joking. Then, when they realise I’m not, they get suspicious. “Why don’t you like chips?” they ask. “Are you some sort of murderer? Or Chinese? Is that it? You’re a Chinese murderer?”
This suspicion eventually gives way to outright fury. Somehow, because I don’t like chips, I’ve managed to mortally offend them. I may as well have flung their baby off a motorway bridge. I may as well have shat out a swastika onto Barbara Windsor’s forehead. But it’s no good. They can shout all they like, but I can’t help not liking chips. Because chips, admit it, are a tiny bit shit.
They’re just so nothingy. When you’re presented with a plate of chips, you’re essentially being challenged to take the exact same mouthful of bland, quickly-cooling starchy nothing 30 times in a row. You may as well be eating polystyrene. You don’t get this with other food, you know. With a pizza, every mouthful’s an adventure. When you bite into a scotch egg, you’re guaranteed egg yolk, egg white, breadcrumbs and probably about 17 different bits of mashed-up animal organ. But when you eat a chip, that’s all you get. A chip.
And it doesn’t matter what sort of chip you get. Buying a portion of chipshop chips means joylessly trudging through fistful after fistful of soggy potato until you’re lying face-down in a coma brought about by equal parts guilt and boredom. Buying chips from McDonald’s means committing yourself to stuffing your face with a neverending procession of flaccid, pencil-thin slivers of freezing salt. Even if you go upscale and order Heston Blumenthal’s triple-cooked chips, you’re still getting a plate of flavourless nothing, albeit flavourless nothing that appears to be made of glass.
So fuck you, chips. Daddy or chips? Daddy, every time. Even if my daddy was Jack the Ripper. Even if my dad was Justin Lee Collins. Even if my daddy was you, you big-nosed arsehole. That’s how much I hate chips.
- Stuart Heritage
DOCTOR WHO
LUV – Look, I don’t mean to be a dick about this, but disliking Doctor Who is kind of unpatriotic.
Calling him “Dr Who” and not “Doctor Who” is unpatriotic. Filtering out all Doctor Who-related tweets on a Saturday night is so unpatriotic that you might as well give up and just become a French tabloid photographer. And the HAT section of this post is basically Stuart Heritage shitting and pissing all over the Union Jack*.
Because, no matter how you actually feel about Doctor who – despite the fact that the dialogue is hokey; you can’t shake the feeling that child Amelia Pond would make a better companion than adult Amy Pond; only sweaty-palmed Forbidden Planet loyalty card holders really like Daleks or Cybermen; it seemed unlikely that Rose, in love with Doctor Who, was happy to waltz off with just David Tennant; apparently every distant corner of spacetime looks like the toilets in John Lewis; and you inevitably find yourself shouting YOU COULD JUST GET IN YOUR FUCKING TARDIS, GO BACK IN TIME AND FIX THIS, YOU TWEEDY BRIXTON HAIRCUT PONCE during every episode – it is your DUTY AS A BRITON to love and endure Doctor Who.
Doctor Who, you see, is the closest thing we have in this country to Superman – and he measures up pretty well:
1. Both Superman and Doctor Who are from dead planets.
2. They both go on and on and fucking on about how they’re the last of their kind. Then people like Zod or John Simm turn up and it gets a bit awkward.
3. Superman has been played by a series of strapping, virtuous-looking actors. Doctor Who has been played by old men, mad men, scarves, Scottish Hamlet, and now a social media intern.
4. Neither has a catchphrase, although Superman’s could be “Mind how you go”; Doctor Who’s could be something about tea and equations.
5. They both love humans just the way we are.
And Britain needs a Superman. Our Olympic glory is already fading, leaving us with a monarch who has to be pushed out of a helicopter before she cracks a smile, and a prime minister who a) looks and acts like a potato and b) walks around with a simpering potato-apologist attached to his hip.
What terrible role models for the British yoot. I suppose there’s always Tinie Tempah and Stephen Fry, but they won’t be around forever, and Doctor Who – thanks to his handy regeneration shtick – will. So here’s my list of preferred future Doctor Whos:
1. Stefan Gates from Incredible Edibles
2. Helen Mirren (feminism)
3. Johnson from Peep Show
4. Brendan Brady from Hollyoaks
5. Bane
So, to sum up, if you love your country you must watch a kidult with attention-deficit disorder dick about with three Welsh aliens every Saturday and at Christmas, and you must love it. And maybe make shitty gags on Twitter when it’s on. It’s your duty.
Unless of course you’re American. Talking of which, hey, Americans jizzing themselves with glee over Doctor Who. What’s that about? You don’t even have to watch it. You’ve got Community.
*Although to be fair, he does this every Thursday.
– Robyn Wilder
HAT – Right, bloody hell, look. I know I’ve already lost this argument. This is the internet – worse, this is Tumblr – so slagging off Doctor Who is obviously a huge crime up there with slagging off Sherlock, or slagging off Tom Hiddleston’s face, or slagging off shit fan art of Harry and Niall from One Direction kissing with tongues in the rain. But you know what? Fuck it. If you like Doctor Who, you’re wrong. Doctor Who is a massive puddle of animal bollocks.
There’s a reason why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, you know. It’s because if you ever found yourself trapped inside an actual police box with Doctor Who for any length of time, you’d end up bouncing his head off the walls as hard as you possibly could until he’d smashed through all his remaining regenerations and was dead – properly, forever dead – just so that you could have some peace and quiet for a fucking second.
Because Doctor Who is basically a gap-year student, isn’t he? A gap year student with a fucking Qype account. All he sodding does is drone on and on and on about all the amazing things he’s ever seen, and all the places he’s ever been that are, like, totally inspiring and shit? At any given moment, Doctor Who is a nanosecond away from showing you a picture of some poverty-stricken aliens and saying “These people have nothing, but they look so happy. It was almost, like, spiritual?” which obviously makes him a colossal shitbag of the highest order.
And, you know, he’s WAY too old to spend his life like this. By rights, Doctor Who should be working in an office now. An office where everyone hates him because he’s the wacky prick who wears a bowtie to work and shouts ‘Geronimo’ at everything and keeps singing the Ghostbusters theme-tune in a Scooby-Doo voice and probably sends out company-wide emails containing nothing but links to photos of cats wearing sunglasses. No wonder Amy and Rory are his assistants – they’re the only two people alive too busy being such self-consciously zany dickpieces themselves to notice what a twonk they’re hanging around with.
But you can see why Doctor Who is such an insufferable attention-seeking git. He knows one day the BBC will realise that his only enemies are bobbly sex-toys, Iron Man’s paste-eating nephews and some garden gnomes – and that he can beat them all in three seconds because he’s got a sonic screwdriver that magically solves everything anyway – and they’ll stop giving him money.
So instead he’s doomed to wander the galaxy dressed up like the presenter of the Open University’s Shoreditch module, getting into tedious scrapes that you can’t hear anyway because the incidental music has been turned up far too high. Truly, Doctor Who is the second biggest arsehole who ever lived, after anyone who gets upset when people call him ‘Doctor Who’ and not ‘The Doctor’. So he’s the second-biggest arsehole after you, basically.
- Stuart Heritage