Emotional Atrocities

It caused a minor splash in the press recently when a girl from a quiet Durham estate recently reduced her parents’ house to the condition of a Lebanese bomb-shelter with a party advertised on myspace. The apparent inspiration for the party? Television. Late night, pornographic, hedonist television? No. Youth television.

My, how things have changed. I used to be so innocent as a kid that I’d flinch if someone said “bloody” on TV. Memories of watching The Snowman on a grainy screen in assembly hall seem impossibly tame in the age of Grand Theft Auto. And it’s a little disconcerting how readily kids’ broadcasting has given the finger to its Blytonesque innocence, ripped off its Blue Peter badge and replaced it proudly with an Asbo and an 18 Certificate. Youth TV now goes around nutting old grannies and kicking in bus shelters. Drugs, sex, violence – what happened? Kids programming today seems to have as much sense of childish wonder as a visit to a crack house.

Is it just me who finds this transition strangely unnerving, like finding one of the Newsround correspondents hunched up in a corner cooking up heroin? Given today’s nonplussed kids, for whom anything less than carving the limbs off their sleeping grandparents with a Braun Plus while video-messaging the whole thing to their friends hardly even counts as an evening’s entertainment, it’s not surprising that the taste bar got raised. And it certainly has, hasn’t it? In my day the worst that could happen was Ant and Dec getting caught sniffing glue round the back of the Byker Grove bikesheds. These days if the Sunday evening family treat doesn’t feature a seventeen-year-old buggering his pet rabbit while mainlining crystal meth through his testicles, it’s considered a bit tame.

In the past most youth programming suffered the affliction of the Generation Gap, whereby ex-public school producers working in broadcast centres would try and ‘think down’ to the kids – a bit like watching David Cameron grab a skateboard and perform backflips at the local parking lot with a spliff in his mouth. Cue drug-addicted ‘Zammo’ being found dead in a car boot on Grange Hill (remember that, 20-somethings?), a storyline so reactionary it could have been written by Margaret Thatcher.

Then a few years ago the producers behind Hollyoaks tried out a show called ‘Hollyoaks Moving On’, a fascinating experiment in which characters who’d spent the daytime edition humorously chasing a stolen turnip round Chester or whatever would now face savage beatings, drug overdoses and gang rape in the evening special. The only time I happened to turn it on I caught the sensitive arty one with earrings beating his girlfriend into a bloodstained smear. It was actually horribly uncomfortable, a feeling of something previously trusted revealing a darker side – like inadvertently catching your much-loved uncle rubbing his cock on the crease of a Daily Mail, or watching the Chuckle Brothers whip their own bare nipples in a sadistic black and white porn video.

A measure of just how much things have changed is recent offering ‘Skins’, in which self-obsessed teenage scum run around committing emotional atrocities on one another whilst snorting the entire output of a starving Colombian village off their GCSE coursework every breaktime. Written with the ‘help’ of ‘young people’, it comes across like the myspace page of an acutely suicidal teenager extended into a full hour of drama. Can you imagine a song by Razorlight in 3D lasting over eight episodes? It feels like that.

They’re fucked, basically. Because life’s fucking fucked up. They’re coping with life and dealing with a whole load of issues and shit. Needless to say everyone is, of course, a vain, manipulative and narcissistic arsehole… Well what do you expect, role models?

What’s interesting is the cult popularity the series garnered despite being kept out of harm’s way on the leftfield E4 channel. Is kids TV really so hardcore that it needs the late night Freeview treatment? Apparently so – and God knows what that means for times to come. At this rate future episodes of Postman Pat will feature the famous mailman dragging a rabies-infested Doberman round a council estate while he yells drunken abuse and urinates through letterboxes. CBBC Newsround will be broadcast from under a mountain to a live Slipknot concert, while several atomic bombs are detonated nearby and the bulletins are projected onto the backs of naked dancing strippers.

After all you wouldn’t want to patronise the kids, would you. They might come and trash your house.

Give Me That Powerpoint Presentation, Bitch

At the news that Endemol were planning a show where a terminally ill woman decides which recipient she’d like to donate her kidney to, I was shocked but unsurprised. It may have been a hoax but it wasn’t unthinkable. Reality TV’s come a long way since the early pantomines. I still remember the first Big Brother, seven years ago. How different things were then: just consider the innocence of a national audience who were enthusiastically prepared to watch an eleven week show where the runner-up spent much of his stay in the house fondly tending to a chicken.

That just doesn’t cut it today. Reality TV now is faster, nastier. I write this as eleven women in a converted house filled with strip lights and hidden cameras are currently brewing an oestrogen timebomb to levels that would fail a Hans Blix inspection. We’re no longer content with the bright lights and bubbly furniture. We want grit, hell and pissing rain. We want scrumpled fivers and Mayfair traders. We want limos splashing the tears of a crying contestant into the gutter. Dragon’s Den, The F-Word, Kitchen Nightmares – today’s shows are played for high stakes with the kid gloves off. Out with the cute sets, in with a cold fist of realism slamming you in the stomach like a Monday Morning you didn’t want to wake up to.

Yes, ‘nasty’ reality shows are cleaning up right now. Shows depicting people working all hours of the day for shitty bosses, going demented with stress and dreaming about money have proved enormously successful with a population, strangely enough, that spends its life working all hours of the day for shitty bosses, going demented with stress and dreaming about money. Ah, us Brits and our Protestant work ethic. Blame it on that drizzle that hammers like a headache on the windows of our offices… Because right now the most popular of these reality shows is – of course – The Apprentice, where a bunch of marketing consultants all but mud-wrestle one another in the nude for the chance to stack the toilet paper at Amstrad.

The Apprentice is all about money. You want money? Then you’ve got to do anything. Screw over your co-workers. Blame them in the boardroom. Come on, man, friendship is for pussies. This isn't friendly competition – this is a full-blown gladatior arena, and if Sugar suddenly ordered them to strip naked and ride around on enraged bulls hurling bloodstained scythes at one another they would. Or was that last week’s task? No wonder it gets high ratings. It certainly ticks all the boxes. Satisfies a widespread desire for personal wealth at any cost? Check. Contains semi-pornographic glimpses of obscene wealth for frustrated middle-managers to masturbate to? Check. Packed with macho, swaggering business-speak? Check. That’s why it’s got the loyal attention of a nation of undergraduates doing ‘Marketing’ or ‘Business Studies’ or any of the other subjects shorn of all traces of humanity to train a compliant workforce of cell-centre operatives to spend the next fifty eight years of their lives selling holiday insurance through an earpiece.

And how satisfying it is! All that ritual humiliation… Personally I love the way the odds are always stacked absurdly against the participants in each task, like selling icecream within the sub-zero penguin tank at London Zoo, or being given a pocket full of 50p trinkets and being forced to hassle the entire executive board of Goldman and Sachs to buy them. And just watch the way the slightest sidecrack from Sugar is met with a round of sycophantic laughter from the contestants, who obviously have their tongues so far up his arsehole that they could regurgitate his digestive tract. Go on, watch it. It’s hilarious.

But is there something problematic about all this deliberate nastiness? Sugar’s barking, Ramsey’s abuse, even Simon Cowell’s pantomine put-downs – great TV, but I’m not sure what it says about the people who want to watch it. All of these shows are based on some kind of dizzying hierarchy distance between slavish contestant and whip-cracking boss, a hierarchy the shows enthusiastically glamorises. See that fleet of cars? See that country house? All that could have been yours too… Now get back to licking that floor clean, you fucking loser.

Screaming abuse at stressed-out employees while a camera’s shoved in their face – now that’s cool, isn't it? Look at Gordon, look at him go. He nearly made that girl cry! How entertaining. Oh, who’s he starting on now? It’s that tired looking one, that mother of two. What did she do? Grated too much parmesan on the Cattucini?? Five seconds late with the Fettucini cutlets? You stick it to her, Gordon! How enjoyable to watch a rich middle-aged man reduce a failing employee to tears!

And all this in an age where school bullying achieves national headlines. Hmm. What was that one about the woman donating her liver again?

Why Did Colin Murray Destroy My Fucking Radio?

This might do major structural damage to my credibility, but I’ll admit it – I used to listen to Radio One. Yeah, I did. It was good for a while. From a channel that previously served up Culture like a prescription for cough medicine, you were getting a genuine slice of the underground. This couldn’t last, could it?

It could not.

Realising that actually playing good music was diverting the nation’s young away from their future punching data into computer screens for multinational corporations for the next fifty years, the blokes at the beeb quickly changed the act. The black and Asian shows were all moved to five minutes a week at 3:39 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and Satan was given a probationary contract to Destroy Music.

He chose Colin Murray to do it for him.

Murraynacht happened about eight months ago, as I recall. One morning the listener awoke to find out that all the other DJs and producers who used to fill the evening schedule had suddenly disappeared, never to be mentioned again. Any who brought the issue up were led down to the cellars of the British Broadcasting Corporation to have their brains smeared over a rusting pipe, while balding, sweating BBC Commissioners looked on through a glass wall, their glasses slowly steaming with excitement.

And so it was that Colin Murray began to spew a stream of twittering shite through the loudspeakers of the land.

Since then all leftfield indie, underground hip hop or Asian desi have been cancelled and replaced by Colin Murray – who’s on for eight or nine hours a day, from six in the evening to about three in the morning, playing the occasional bit of music but mostly just chatting, with his friend, about, well… stuff. His girlfriend’s toe operation. The time he tried to move some book-cases, but got stuck halfway through and had to wait till the removal men came round. The funny film he saw last Tuesday. Oh, it was so funny! What a funny film it was… Did you see it?

And all this in a mild, bubbly Belfast accent that could have Beatrix Potter hacking the heads off blind children from sheer rage. Because Murray’s a nice guy. Murray’s ridiculously nice. Murray’s so nice that heat-seeking missiles would stop mid-flight, turn back around and belly flop happily into the sea rather than blow him up. So fucking sickeningly nice you want to take a desklamp and ram it through his head, then twist the glass down into the gaping empty hole of his brain until a twenty foot high geyser of blood spatters the radio mixing console and his screams of pain haunt your conscience for eternity. That nice.

You remember when you were a kid and you wondered what would happen if you mixed all the colours together, and you tried it, and you ended up with a crappy muddy brown? That’s what Murray is – an insipid mix of regions, tastes, agegroups and demographics, offensive to no one, repugnant to any single person in possession of a working soul.

Personally I’m convinced it’s the product of a new sinister Blairite initiative to stop all subversive thought by drowning it out in a tidal wave of pitter-patter. Soon, no doubt, windowless cells in Guantanamo will be filled with the sound of Murray being played at three hundred decibels while prisoners scream for mercy at the thought of spending the next five years of their life hearing about his trip to Tesco’s followed by another one from the Foo Fighters. What better for the War on Terror than the kind of anodyne shite that could rot the brains of a chess champion at thirty paces? This level of stupidity is practically a military asset.

I have no doubt that in years to come, gigantic telescreens erected in every public space throughout Britain will feature Colin’s eternally Nice face waffling on in a Nice voice about which kind of chocolate he likes while lines of gawping, lobotomised shoppers drop to the ground with heads bowed in fevered awe. When we finally invade Iran he'll be there with the latest Snow Patrol track to take our minds off all those upsetting civilian casualties. There, there, your government is protecting you. Shh...

Pay-Per-Piss

“Yeah, it’s great,” my friend tells me on the phone. “My parents are clubbing together to help me buy this little flat in Islington.”

“That’s great,” I say.

“You should see it,” she says. “It’s really nice. I’m so lucky to have such wealthy, generous parents.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“So how’s your place at the moment?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s, er… great.”

Well, what could I say?

So how are things back in the flat? Recently my housemate moved one of his mates in, this relentlessly ‘cool’ girl with grungey clothes who DJs and works for NGOs and, like, regularly ‘checks out’ the UK hip hop ‘scene’. She’s so cool that her cool mate ended up coolly smashing our bathroom window. Coolly not apologising for the smashed bathroom window, she coolly mumbled vaguely about paying for it to be fixed, but so far, coolly, hasn’t. (Now that’s cool).

This has got me pissed off. I’ve only just smashed that window. This is becoming a seasonal rite. You should see it for myself. The hole’s right behind the toilet: crouch down for a session and you get a vomit-shower of freezing hail in the small of the back. Every time you go to the loo you feel like you’re doing it for a reality TV endurance contest. It’s Pay-Per-Piss, or Pissing for Public Entertainment through a 'windowcam': a horrendous, low-tech equivalent to internet porn.

Only yesterday I unzipped my flies to hear a shriek of horror from a family getting into their car. I gazed out. Children stood looking up behind tears of lost innocence, parents faces freezing with mob violence as they beheld me exposing myself. I screamed and hopped out of the toilet, pissing drips on the brown carpet, then stood shivering in the hallway with my trousers down awaiting the flaming bottle of parafin to come sailing through the window. Except that you cant terrorise us by smashing our windows. They’re already broken.

Oh, and guess what? I now have a crack in my room running directly above my head. Every time I look up, it seems like the upstairs family is about to fall on top of me. Exactly how much does a single-mother council estate family weigh? Will it feel like an especially strong Panadol if it lands on me, or might it be a bit more serious than that? These were all questions I put to Bastards Plc, the management agency in charge of the flat, when I phoned them to complain.

“There’s a crack,” I said.

“Right,” the receptionist said.

“It’s right above my head,” I said.

“Oh, right.”

“Right now, I’m sitting at my desk, phoning you, and it’s right above my head.”

“Cant you move?” she said.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean I were you, I’d sit somewhere else.”

“Oh yes… I suppose I could do that.”

“It might be a good idea,” she said.

“But are you going to do something about it?” I asked.

“Yes, sure,” she said. “We’ll look into it.”
And they did. You know what they did? They came and took a photo of the crack. Why I don’t know – perhaps they’re hoping to build up a whole album, and we can get it out when my tenancy’s up and snuggle up together to laugh at old times. But I suspect not.

What happened to me? All my friends are working their way up career ladders, buying property… What do I do every day? I pedal my way through a stream of pizza-delivery boys every day to “teach” in my Crappy Language School for a paypacket that would make a self-employed poet clap his hands with laughter and order out for home-delivered pizza and champagne. All my friends are doing better than me. A friend of mine animates ferociously complicated CGI sequences for Disney for loads of money. Another presents TV reports for an international news agency for loads of money.

I tell the sons and daughters of Asian sweatshop bosses how to say “dog”.

Sartre said that hell was being trapped in a room with other people for the rest of eternity. Well you know what my life feels like? My life feels like slowly wanking for hours into a half-empty styrofoam cup in a run-down Bristol B'n'B.

God, please. Save me.

Six Billion Brainless Fucking Monkeys

The web’s great, isnt it? A portal into the world’s consciousness, an instant ticket to lofty google rankings and an enraptured global audience… Those broadband tendrils spanning the world’s surface can bring the mention of your name to millions in a single mouse-click. Wouldn’t you like to be famous? Come on, you would, wouldn’t you?

Here’s what happened to me.

“I like your emails,” a friend told me a while back. “You know, the ones filled with your pain and suffering and loneliness and stuff. It’s good fun to read. You should try posting some of this stuff on the internet.”

“How do you mean?”

“Blogging,” he said.

“I’m not cool enough to go on the internet,” I said. “I’ve seen Myspace. It’s full of American teenagers who are all cooler than me. They all have girlfriends and take drugs and stuff.”

“You can too,” he said.

“What, get a girlfriend?”

“No," he said, "go on the internet. You just need to go on some of the boring sites, the ones for serious people with no social life.”

‘Oh… okay.”

So I try posting a blog. I email my friends about it. Then I sit back, relax and wait for those millions of people to stumble on my site with colossal advertising budgets trailing in their wake.

Nothing happens.

“What if nobody is interested?” I ask my friend. “I mean, perhaps nobody, you know, basically… cares.”

“That’s not true,” he says. “There’s a whole web community out there in the blogosphere, who discuss the issues of the day like a thriving, twenty-first century global society.’

“Oh,” I say. “Great.”

I wait for the thriving, twenty-first century global society to show up. I like the idea of a twenty thriving, twenty-first century global society.

I’d just like them to visit my fucking site once in a while.

I go back to my blog and look how it’s doing.

“0 comments,” it announces chirpily. “Views – 1.”

That’s the thing about the web. Most attempts to communicate with the world produce audience levels that would fill a failed standup comic washing the dishes in a strip-club with a sense of comparative pride. Global communication? Most of the time it feels like talking to half a room of disinterested people in the back room of a community centre while workmen drill up the road outside.

“Perhaps I should pretend to be an overgrown immature sex obsessive,” I ponder to the friend. “Then I could write a sex blog. That girl with the book got very successful doing that.”

“You are an overgrown immature sex obsessive,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “But I never have any sex.”

“That wouldn’t make a very interesting blog,” he says.

“No,” I say. “That’s true.”

“Go and have another look at your blog,” he says. “Maybe some more people have visited it.”

I look back at my blog. Six views. All people I know.

There’s one comment.

“Aha! I wonder who the mystery viewer is?” I think, moving the mouse. “How exciting!”

With trembling fingers, I click on the comment.

‘Hi, Dale,’ it says. ‘It’s Nikki from Falkland Road. Can you re-address your Time Out subscription, cos it keeps coming here. Lol.’

“Maybe I should try doing a video instead,” I think. “After all, that’s fast becoming the most effective, direct and personal way to reach a mass audience. Videos are the biggest saviour of free speech on the planet in these times of multimedia and political angst.” So I log into Youtube.

The most watched video of the day is called ‘Farting in public’.

Spencer, a Californian teenager, is in a library.

“So we’ve got spencer back there with his sound effects,” the commentary tells me. “Spencer, let’s hear a rip."

Spencer rips loudly. I feel a terrible sense of depression slowly descend on me.

“One more,” the guy spurs the young star on. “That’s awesome!”

As youthful farts fill the soundtrack I scroll down the page. Number of times viewed: 1,348,834.

“I’m fucked,” I gasp.

So this is it - twenty-first century networked society. All wit and sensitivity has been washed away and replaced by a huge televised arse farting into a planet-sized camera. This isnt dumbing down, this is a full frontal lobotomy performed in front of your eyes, to the backing of a Linkin Park track. If humanity carries on at this rate the entire race will be reduced to six billion hairless monkeys giggling and shitting the remains of their brains into a muddy hole by the year 2009.

I think I hear the sound of the future.

Sorry, I'm just not that much of a twat

‘Yeah,’ I told a friend recently. ‘Got a blog… And I’m starting to learn video editing and Photoshop… Oh, and I’m learning Flash, too. You know, so I can make cool animations, and… stuff.’

As the words passed forth from my lips and my friend made some comment, the realisation slowly dawned on me.

I’m starting to sound like a twat.

Produce your own creative efforts, master a bit of software, and - why is it? - you suddenly come off like a vacuous media prick endlessly posting bits of your 'art' into a gigantic internet plughole only to watch them disappear without trace. Unless you work in the real media, that is. But who gets to work in the real media? An industry where job opportunities for newcomers boil down to delivering roasted peanuts to the editor while they do coke lines over their Frappucinos? Oh, and that's not to mention the - pardon me - relentlessly "stiff" competition: because everyone in the media below the level of Rupert Murdoch is engaged in the kind of career fellatio that would make a Thai hooker gob up the contents of her mouth in disgust.

The media is so deafened by the sound of slurping they have had to soundproof the walls of the edit suites. And what do they call it? Oh yeah, that's right – in what is possibly the most horrendous euphemism for calculated manipulation since someone in the White House called the Iraq war a liberation – they call it “networking”.

What kind of people “network”, I wonder? Twats. That's what kind of people. Agents, groupies, wannabe stars – yes, twats. The act of standing at some party talking to people in a vaguely friendly manner in order to blowjob your way up the social hierarchy – well, you’d have to be a twat, wouldn’t you? That’s the sad truth about the media, the most powerful consciousness-shaping agency in the twenty-first century world: it’s mostly populated by the kind of scumbag whose central aspiration in life is getting a co-presenting slot on T4.

And I’m starting to sound like them.

I was reminded of this at a party I went to on Friday. Picture it: a howling February night, dark as a bad memory, me clambering off my shitty bike and into the warmth of the two-up / two-down / post-modern / retro-conversion / Victorian refit extension where chatter and electro beats were already seeping into the cold night.

The house was spotless. So was the snobbery. Everyone was dressed pure Stoke Newington. The girls wielded the kind of anti-Primark dresses that only those graduating in Theatre Studies can get away with. Blokes in tuxes milled around trying to Seem Impressive. People were in the act of committing pre-meditated style offensives. The fashion values were pure mock-Edwardian: Miss Eighteen-Sixties sipped Vodka and coke from flute glasses, twenty-somethings wandered round wondering who to be bored at next. I overheard one girl boasting that someone had written a Wikipedia page about her. Even the music was studied, somehow – the DJ was playing stuff so long out of copyright that Moby could have turned it into four or five platinum albums.

It wasn’t exactly Ibiza Nights, put it that way.

I end up cuddled by the sensual formica curves of the fitted kitchen, scrounging more drinks and chatting to the gaggle of people I’d turned up with. Ninety percent of the rest of the conversations happening were either unintelligible or fuelled by Extreme Cool. I watch a Premiere-Division Twat swaggering around the place starting fights, sexually harassing girls and injecting as much fashionable hooliganism as he could into the proceedings at the top of his voice. If you could ferment all the arrogant twattery in London, brew it up and piss it all out again into a human mould, it would look and sound something like him. You could see it so clearly: a GQ-calibre Young Bloke five years ago, now graduated to aggressive lech with alcoholic tendencies. A pissed personifcation of the Fuck You society. A tramp in Gap clothing.

What a prick.

‘He’s a prick,’ I remark to one of his mates, this annoying attractive girl.

‘He’s well safe,’ the girl says. ‘He’s wicked.’

‘I think he’s a prick,’ I say again.

‘No! You… just don’t know him.’

‘He goes around touching up total strangers.’

‘He doesn’t hurt anyone,’ she shrugs. ‘Anyway, he’s just being ironic.’

I slug back another stolen Vodka and Coke, jellify against the gleaming kitchen surface and glance around at the golden kids flirting and busily Impressing One Another.

So is this it? Is this what the cutting edge comes to? A load of Top-Shopped cokeheads barely out of their teens breathing toxic fumes of Trendiness on innocent passers-by? Are these the kind of people I need to hang out with?

I don’t stand a fucking chance.

This is where I get off. I’m not even going to try. Sorry. Because you know what? In the end, I’m just not that much of a twat. I think I’d rather languish in the faded fart-smell of obscurity instead, pissing tears of failure into a badly-lit pint. It’s got to be better than optioning your soul to E4.

Anyway, I’ve got to go now – I'm working on a few Flash video animations, and I want to get the colour right on this mashup of Rwandan children being massacred to a 1983 Wham hit.

Well weapon.

The Lube in the Tube

In our age marketing has become a form of guerilla art. Every product comes wrapped in a big fat smiley promising a better future. Phones? Skin lotion? Foreign holidays? Right now several hundred thousands of highly-paid people around the western world are working to reduce you to a slab of submental broccoli dribbling for the next Motorola upgrade. Advertising has become ‘personalised’ – how lovely. Personalised advertising? Sounds about as heart-warming as giving Rasputin a blowjob.

‘Personally’, I think it would be better if they just called themselves the Bastard Gas Company, or the Bastard Phone Company, or whatever – let’s be honest, sleek corporate branding isnt fooling anyone. Companies shaft us like they always did. Shafting customers is pretty much the foundation of capitalism, so they’re not going to stop doing it just because their TV commercial is filled with a load of fucking dolphins swimming to a Faithless remix.

But you know what? I’m used to being shafted. I don’t mind it too much. It's the pretence at some kind of friendly relationship between me and a multinational limited company that pisses me off. A brand giftwrapped in a big heartfelt hug? Well, fuck that. Shitty service I can take. It’s when the phone company starts turning up on your doorstep with a bunch of flowers for your mum that I really want to start reaching for the flamethrower.

Give me strength.

It just so happens that on a recent journey home to visit family, the Bastard Train Company failed to tell me on the phone bookings line that my London-Manchester 1-Day Advance ticket (£648, including a free bottle of water) was actually in First Class. And therefore several thousand times more expensive than it should have been. I realised this only after boarding and fighting my way in a rising apoplexy of fury to the coach where an empty carriage awaited me. It’s called business class, but I couldn’t see any businessmen. Just well-heeled men and women of leisure sipping tonic water in a pool of tranquil calm. Soft lights bathed the feathery cushions in a glow of ocean blue while name-tagged waiters tip-toed round serving up organic crumpets.

Christ.

Pleb that I am, I pushed my way back into the cattle trucks. They were overcrowded to asylum levels. People lay coughing, choking, bleeding in their seats. Several kinds of medieval plagues were in action at once. Only the buzz of mobile phones drowned out the moans of the sick. The doors kept jamming on the body of a dead OAP lying on the carpet, while the woman with the hot drinks trolley groaned as she attempted to squeeze past.

I squeezed up in a seat and watched listless drizzle speckle the windows. A vista of factory flues stared back across the scarred hills. The Virgin train shot silently onward, a twenty-first century titanium turd squeezed along nineteenth century rails. The windows were all sealed tight shut, the shitty air-con blowing multiple infections through the carriages. The intercom announced that the shop was now open to sell sealed cubes of synthetic sandwich for a fiver a pop.

So this is the twenty first century.

This is the twenty first century - couped up in big metal tubes, on planes, in buses, in trains, in trains which are even called tubes. Airtight capsules shutting out the shittiness of the world outside, sleek bubbles of airconditioned, iPod calm. Even the walkways that convey us from one kind of tube to another are tubes. Soon the entire city will become a gigantic intestinal tract, squeezing us out like stomach upsets. We’ll be a blob in the system, a wrinkle in the wrapper, the lube in the tube – ready to be smeared on the end of the cap and left there for several weeks growing mouldy.

I find it hard to be too optimistic.

Just remember, somewhere out there, on a Hawaiian island somewhere, Richard Branson’s sipping a high-class mojito thinking of a way to make the world an even shitter place still. And he will. Just you wait.