It
has come to my attention that The Only Way Is Essex has, apparently,
boosted the economy by more than one billion pounds. I am aware that
this news is a couple of months old now but I was probably reading a
book or something at the time, and thusly it passed me by. I will
resist the urge to draw comparisons with James Bond Bad Guy evil
organisations, mostly due to the fact that they don’t really work,
but I wanted to get ‘evil’ into the opening paragraph because it
seems apt. So, how has all this extra revenue been unlocked, I hear
you all ask in a quiet, slightly confused and frightened voices.
Presumably people have been panic buying basic literacy and numeracy
tuition, in order to avoid a fate similar to the zoo-animal like
idiots. Or maybe stock piling weaponry with which to defend from
attacks during the perma-orange uprising of late 2013, the best of
which being a sawn off with a small vanity mirror attached to the
end, causing the enemy to stop and stare lovingly at their profile
just before you have to wipe bits of it off the metal work.
Neither
of those seemingly likely examples are correct. Sadly. Instead, sales
of vital life products have soared. Fake Tan is up 89%, so nearly
twice as many people now look like they definitely haven’t got a
normal, natural, healthy glow, opting instead for an all over satsuma
effect that leaves onlookers thinking, “from a bottle, unevenly
applied, can’t afford a holiday, looks a bit like those knobs off
of the telly”. Fake Eyelashes have exceeded even that growth, with
a 249% increase that brings to mind the statistical eruption of an
ocular toupee volcano. My mind anyway. This means that a) more people
than I could ever imagine watch this shit, and b) that a lot of them
seek to emulate what they see on screen. As far as I can tell this
means that a terrifyingly large cross section of society wants to be
an oddly luminous mahogany colour, vapid, unable to string sentences
of more than six or seven words together – even then with several
of the words used having been made up that morning – and completely
void of any point or interest or dignity, charm or appeal.
I
can try and convince myself that at least some of the increased
purchasing can be attributed to the war on terror – sorry, War On
Terror – and the need for undercover agents to darken their skin in
order to fit in with their quarry. Or the importance of convincing
eyelashes on a camel costume. Ultimately though, I can see that some
of these funds may actually be produced by the show, as a side effect
if nothing else, and this leaves me somewhat conflicted.
£1.4
billion is a lot of money, the sum of which many may speculate could
only be produced by a dark, malevolent force, but it is the kind of
sum the dark, malevolent force we voted in could use at the moment.
It’s not like we don’t need the cash: nothing works, including
most people, our services are being slowly dismantled and reassembled
by Daleks or Lizard People or Cybermen or something, stamps have gone
up 14p, bringing the cost of maybe getting a letter to someone
several days late to 60p, and most of us have been in debt so long we
now think that it is the seventh sense (the sixth being the ability
to not see a hugely obvious plot twist coming). We could use the
money. They could stop melting down hospitals and teachers to make
butlers. So on that hand I suppose even I have to concede that there
is an element of good in The Only Way Is Essex. Accidentally, you
understand, but it’s there.
I
prefer the other hand though. It’s the one I used to write with,
turn pages in books other than a Speak-N-Spell, and gesticulate with
when having conversations about things other than how the word Goat
must have come from the fact that they look like they’re sporting a
Goatee beard. Yeah, I can see why you’d want to be like these
people. Morons. This hand is somewhat concerned that the problems we
face as a country, and indeed planet, are more likely to be solved or
eased by intelligent, educated, eloquent folks, than by a group of
designer cocktail swilling, mild fame courting twats. A great deal of
television seems intent on phasing clever out, operating with a
steely determination to reduce everyone to an ineffectual, dribbling
mess. At the very best those in charge are scheduling programmes that
will reduce our capacity to think and feel, out of some kind of
misguided sense that they are protecting us from our own potential to
realise how terribly wrong everything is going. Like a common sense
inoculation that removes the humanity in the knowledge that the virus
is too strong. Well that seems silly to me, surely it’s better to
go out fighting than to have all your interesting bits removed so
that you can cope with the increasing banal simplicity of life. We’ve
all seen One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, yes?
Of
course, that sort of money is not generated by Tan and Lashes alone,
that would be ridiculous and we do not yet live in a world that
ridiculous. Vajazzling has gone up 400%, and we need to take this
into account when holding our heads in our hands and audibly weeping.
Now, hard as this may be to believe, the working knowledge I have of
the Vajazzle is slight, so I am unsure how much the service costs. Or
why. Just why. Whatever the price, I feel fairly safe in assuming
that no matter how much St. Tropez or NaturaLashes you have shifted,
that is a bucket load of Vajazzles, if you’ll excuse the pun. Could
we all aim a little higher, not for the stars or the heavens, just
above groin and tit height perhaps. It is better to stand in the
gutter looking up, for sure, but these people are sitting in an
orange puddle, looking at their tinsel and baubled junk. Kids used to
want to be spacemen and magicians, dancers and brain surgeons,
knights and dragons, bullet proof and made of chocolate and twelve
feet tall. Things that they’d probably never achieve, but it’s
better to aim high and fall short than to aim low and succeed. I
don’t want to live in a world in which Vajazzles outnumber library
cards.
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