Welcome to the third instalment of my on-going project/personal journey into film hell to review Dickshark, a zero-budget horror film that is not a porn story (according to its one IMDB review).

If you haven’t done so already then you should read Part I and Part II or else you won’t understand what the hell is going on (if you do read them you won’t understand what’s going on either, but you’ll at least know why).

We left off at breasts being fondled.

The fondler is none other than our down-market Bill Bailey, last seen treating underwear-clad Vanna to al fresco dining, back in the Premier Inn, where his friend, Julian, first displayed the eponymous Dickshark.

His new lady friend seems less than impressed with his performance and tells him that his fondling isn’t exciting her. He lectures her that sexual excitement isn’t just about pressing the right buttons and getting a result. Then there’s a long pause while the pair of them have a bit of a think about whose line is next.

I must say, 2.1 scenes in, that what this film needs – even more desperately than a writer, actors who can act, a premise that isn’t stupid as all get-out or even a desire to stick to its own ridiculous continuity – is an editor.  This film is 2½ hours long, did nobody think that it might be worth editing out the missed cues, the pointless ad-libbing, or even Bill’s (obviously unscripted) “Ow!” as he walked off set at the end of the last scene?  Was every piece of this a priceless gem from the film-maker’s rich jewellery box? Answer; no. I think this is the result of somebody betting they could make a film in less time than it takes to watch.

It turns out that Bill isn’t just breast fondling because he’s the director and this was the only way he could get to touch a human female (even if his mugging at camera would lead the naive to assume that’s exactly what’s happening), his lady friend needs to be aroused so that “love vapours” will emanate from her “love canal” to entice the creature, which is, after all, a penis…albeit a shark-shaped one.  This is how  hard sci-fi should be, people.

Failing to arouse her with a from-behind fondling Bill offers to try something new, and fondles her boobs while standing in front of her. It’s hard to image who, or what, would be more aroused by being able to see Bill, so naturally it fails to work.

“I just mean that my vagina is not yet lubricated!” explains the well-fondled lady, continuing the film’s commitment to using literal anatomical words in the worst possible context.

Bill suggests that she should get into the bath.  Well, as she’s still wearing her knickers and stockings she’s clearly overdressed for this film (which, I remind you, is not a porn story).

It seems the plan is to lure the creature to the bathtub and, despite a general willingness to be fondled by somebody who looks like he might just have unstapled the chicken from his jeans, in the name of science the victim is a little concerned.

“Is it going to eat me?” she asks, not unreasonably.

“Well, even if it did, you probably wouldn’t orgasm.” explains Bill.

Well, that’s all right then.

“It has a mouth, but you probably won’t get bitten,” he adds, then, when he should really have ended the sentence, he continues, “You’ll mostly just get penetrated.”

I’m going to be using those censoring black squares a lot more, aren’t I?

“If what I’m doing with my hands isn’t exciting you […] perhaps you’ll get turned on by my personality.” says Bill, a statement which makes a living shark-penis seem massively less far-fetched in comparison.

“Humour is the way to a woman’s vagina,” he explains (after a short detour up a cul-de-sac of misremembered lines). I can’t even bring myself to report on the exchange that follows – it’s that bad – then we cut to a bath running, in slow-motion, because, as previously noted, there seems to be some contest to make this film run as long as possible.

The heavy metal soundtrack, unheard since scene 1, reappears as the unnamed lady, now divested of what few clothes she had, lowers herself into the bath and (eventually) we cut to the shark’s point of view.

Now, horror films have long tradition of female members of the cast being attacked mid-ablution, and with a good director it needn’t be gratuitous. Hitchcock had Janet Leigh viciously stabbed to death while she showered without showing enough to worry the 1960 censor, even in the slasher genre Wes Craven had Freddie Krueger’s clawed glove appear in Heather Langencamp’s bath without upsetting her modesty.

This director is not Alfred Hitchcock.  He’s not Wes Craven.  He’s not even John Craven.

As the metal music enters an inappropriately soulful section the bather wrestles with a toy shark and, less successfully, wrestles with her inability to hide that she’s simply holding it against her groin.

Still. In. Slow. Motion.

We are at least treated to another A-grade special effect, where the impression that the shark leaps out of the water is cunningly created, at great expense, by her dropping it and then the film being played backwards! See, they have got an editor…man, are they shit at their job.

Having finally freed herself of the shark she immediately throws it down the toilet, thereby undoing everything for which she was scientifically fondled and shark penetrated.

So another scene ends, without really advancing the film at all, but, hey, at least Bill got to touch a woman.

The review continues here

There can’t be a single figure in British politics about whom more has been written in the past 12 months than Jeremy Corbyn. His views, his history, his followers, his detractors have all been catalogued exhaustively, but I wonder how it must look from Corbyn’s own point of view.

He became an MP at the 1983 General Election, where Michael Foot’s Labour was deafeated by Margaret Thatcher’s conservatives party, losing a further 52 seats and getting its lowest share of the vote for 65 years.  The message that Labour took from this defeat was that Foot’s left-wing views were unpopular with the electorate, and so it began moving away from them, stranding Corbyn in a Labour party increasingly different from the one he’d joined.

He then spent 32 years on the back-bench, eating his liver (to borrow a phrase from Joseph Heller) until an unlikely victory last year propelled him to the leadership of the party and the chance to finally return it to the Labour party he dreamed of.

How terrible then to find that he cannot re-shape it effectively because of the cloud of irony that surrounds him.  His rebelliousness (he’s the 2nd most rebellious MP in Labour’s history) means that he’s never left the back-benches, which means that he has no idea how to run a political party. Because he has only ever been loyal to his own personal vision of Labour he has no idea how to instil loyalty in others. He spent so long opposing the leadership, backing every challenge to it that came along, that he never saw the valuable lessons they learned about handling the media or propagating a message.  The freedom he enjoyed as a perpetual back-bencher – that of being able to support every right-on cause he saw – now forms millstones around his neck as, time and again, words he must have imagined unheeded find their way home to him.  He is the career politician who has achieve the dream of being seen as a man of the people, only to find that he really is…that he can’t politic.

Forget being a politician, he’s a one-man Greek tragedy.

Except perhaps in reverse.

He is Prometheus, released after 30 years of liver-eating, only to find that his fire brand is no longer the hot thing.

Or Cassandra – who was cursed to speak true prophesies, only to have no-one ever believe her. Corbyn’s lifetime of protest politics give him huge crowds who believe every word he speaks, but he has only empty slogans to deliver and promises of power he can’t hope to achieve.

Maybe he’s Orpheus who has never taken his eyes off the love of his life, only to find that the pair of them have wandered into Hell.

He’s a Midas who finds everything he touches most definitely does not turn to gold.

Most fittingly of all he’s Pandora, wanting to box all the ills of the world, but crushing the hope from those who face them.

Although…you do wonder what he thinks when he looks at Theresa May standing at the dispatch box. Thanks to Andrea Leadsom she’s famously not a mother, but she’s going to fuck him anyway.

Maybe it’s the curse of great writers that they don’t get to choose which of their works carry forward and define them for future generations. It’s easy to imagine, for example, a world one hundred years hence where the Harry Potter books are still loved, by children and adults alike, as timeless classics, but the biting and heartbreaking social commentary of The Casual Vacancy is forgotten.

In the present day George Orwell has come to mean 1984 and Animal Farm, but, for me at least, his most important work is The Road to Wigan Pier, his story of the industrial North in the inter-war years.  It’s important because it is a relief map of social improvement since then. It may be heading towards the edge of being within living memory, but the conditions that Orwell describes are of a Britain alien to our own.

For the conservative (small ‘c’) at the time there was no need for this social change – the poor were poor, but coal flowed, ships were built, heavy industry rolled on. How many people have stood against that to achieve what we have now; universal suffrage, health care, provision for those out of or unable to work, care for the elderly, housing standards, education? For certain some names feature more prominently in the history books, but they were carried to their place there by a human tide of those who marched, voted, campaigned, gave speeches, wrote pamphlets, volunteered, stood for parliament, demanded better.  Without them, their unknown faces standing in a crowd that stretches back across 80 years, we’d not know the names Bevan or Attlee, Wilson or Benn.

I bring this up because this evening this meme was retweeted into my timeline:

What annoyed me about it was not its support for Corbyn – I, and everybody else, sees a dozen such things every day – but its use of Neil Kinnock’s words at the end. The critical point is that when Kinnock spoke those words he was talking of the need for Labour, not the need for Neil Kinnock.

I don’t object to anything in the Corbyn meme, other than the suggestion that without Corbyn it’s impossible.  Labour always has been, and must remain, a movement.  It shouldn’t be defined by its leader, nor reliant on one person.  Labour isn’t about being Corbynite, or Blairite, or anything else-ite. It should be about looking at the society Orwell described and saying, “That was shit! We need to keep moving away from that.”

It’s not an easy path; yes, the poor need to be released from austerity, but that has to be done with a coherent economic plan.  Yes we want a fairer society, but we also have to realise that “the rich” aren’t a money tree that we can harvest at will.  We may want to stay in Europe, but we can’t do that by simply telling those concerned about losing their jobs to immigrants that they’re racist.  We may even want to scrap Trident, but there has to be a comprehensive defence strategy to replace it.

Opposing Corbyn, as I mainly do these days, the most common question I’ve been asked is, “OK, who would be better?”  While it’s tempting to glibly reply “anybody” the truth is that I don’t know, but I feel it’s a job bigger than any one person. It needs a leader who can lead, supported by MPs who trust them and are trusted by them, it needs people who can create innovative policy, it needs people who can shape the party through persuasion, through compromise, through vision and through a genuine desire to see it continue as en effective force for good in society.  It’s not a one-man-band, and those who would make it so belittle it.

Maybe, to survive, Labour needs to think less about who leads it and, instead, where it is heading.

Without that the future…well, over to you, Mr Orwell…

In 2016 – the year they’re already calling ‘relentlessly shit’ – “Jeremy Corbyn” has been the name on everybody’s lips.  Whether you think he’s a good, decent man, a bearded trot who just won’t stop, or simply the living reincarnation of Jesus Christ everybody’s talking about him.

But just how Corbyn are you? Take our fun quiz and answer each question honestly to find out if you’ve got what it takes to do whatever the hell Jeremy Corbyn does.

Question 1

It’s annual appraisal time at work and your boss pulls you up on a number of area where you’re under-performing.  How do you react?

a. Recognise the validity of the feedback and vow to improve your performance in these areas, after all that can only help your career prospects.

b. Have a massive strop and try to blame some people who used to work at the company.

c. Host a 5,000-people strong rally in your honour, where everybody shouts how good you are and claps for ages and ages when you speak.  Maybe if they clap loud enough you won’t be able to hear your manager’s voice ringing in your head.

d. Don’t know

Question 2

You’re out in town on a bitterly cold night and a homeless guy, sleeping in a doorway, asks if you’ve any spare change. Do you:

a. Give him the tenner in your pocket; you were planning to spend it on a pizza, but his need is obviously greater.

b. Invite your artistic friend who drives a taxi and another guy with an angry voice over to watch you give him a quid, so that they can blog about how nice and generous you are.

c. Stand in front of him all night, ranting about how evil the Tories are, without letting him get a word in edgeways or ask anybody else for money, then at 3am go home to your centrally-heated house.

d. Don’t know

Question 3

The quiz team you’re on say they want to replace you, because you’re not interested in winning the quiz, or even listening to the questions. What would you do?

a. Decide that they’re right and quizzes aren’t really your thing, so you’ll knock it on the head.

b. Carry on turning up and behaving the same anyway; it’s your quiz team as well, they’ll just have to learn to live with it.

c. Tell everybody else that they’re chucked off the quiz team, then pack the team with a load of people who, like yourself, are thick as fucking pig-shit (and if any of the former quiz team happen to have their cars keyed, then that’s nothing to do with you)

d. Don’t know

Question 4

You get a massively unexpected promotion to CEO at work, but are faced with the task of regaining market share your company has lost over recent years. How would you rise to the challenge?

a. Learn from past mistakes, and also seek to understand what your competitors are doing better than you, so you can beat them at their own game.

b. Completely revamp the company to run along the lines you’ve always imagined, even if they haven’t always worked terribly well in other companies that have tried them and the staff aren’t keen.

c. Dedicate yourself to talking about how crap the old managers were, extracting petty revenge on anybody who might have supported the old management and giving jobs to your mates…who also hate the old managers.

d. Don’t know

Question 5

If you wanted to pop out for the evening who would you take with you?

a. Just your partner and make it a romantic night for two.

b. Perhaps half a dozen close friends and have a wild night.

c. At least two thousand people from the Socialist Workers Party and Stop the War, so that there’s loads of cheering every time you speak…because you’re great.

d. Don’t know

Question 6

You’re at a party with your wife, she wants to remain, but you want to leave, but you know you’ll get into trouble if you say that. What do you do?

a. If your wife’s enjoying the party then you’ll just grit your teeth and stay.

b. Grumble and grump at your wife, but ultimately stay as long as she wants to.

c. Refuse to communicate with anybody your wife’s talking to, keep mentioning all of the thing you don’t like about the party and, as soon as she mentions leaving, demand that it’s done immediately, even though you haven’t even sung “Happy Birthday yet”, then blame your friends for the decision to leave the party and say you were really up for staying.

d. Don’t know

Question 7

The PTA at your child’s school are doing a terrible job fund-raising, meaning that there’s not enough money to subsidise trips for poorer children and that the school’s supplies of sticking plasters and Calpol are running very low. You are not a member of the PTA committee, so how would you deal with the situation?

a. Create a radical plan to hold more cake sales and tombolas (even if these things annoy some of the parents) so that the PTA can offer education and care for all of the children at the school.

b. Build networks amongst the parents so that you can get yourself elected to the PTA committee, with a view to changing things for the better.

c. Hold a series of massive rallies around the country where you talk about how well run the PTAs in Venezuela are, and how evil the current committee are (nearly as evil as the committee before them!)

d. Don’t know

Question 8

At work you’ve been asked to do a presentation about eliminating bullying in the workplace. While you’re giving the presentation a member of your team starts openly bullying your co-presenter. Do you…

a. Have the bully removed from the room and then start a formal disciplinary process against them.

b. Stand up the person being bullied, stop the bullying happening and then take your team member aside to explain why what they did was wrong and warn that there will be very serious consequences if you see them do it again.

c. Sit there and watch the bullying happen then, after the meeting, apologise to the bully and send them a friendly text, like the massive, massive bell-end that you are.

d. Don’t know

How did you do?

Tot up your answers to see how Corbyn you are:

Mostly A: You’re not very Corbyn at all, in fact you’re probably the kind of cunt who voted for Thatcher or Blair. Nobody’s saying you should be killed, but if it happened we wouldn’t be sad.

Mostly B: Well, you’ve some potential. Try getting to a few more pro-Corbyn rallies and not writing any editorials for The Guardian and we’ll try to see to it that nothing bad happens to your windows, OK?

Mostly C: Wow, you could be JC himself! You’re one of the true faithful, a life-long friend, a comrade to the end and we definitely won’t blame you for Corbyn getting everything wrong unless we absolutely have to.

Mostly D: You are Andy Burnham, sorry about that.

 

 

The British legal system is known the world over for being civilised, fair and looking good on TV, in such fact-based programmes as Judge John Deed.

Why then are we welcoming a new Prime Minister who, as home secretary, welcomed the undermining of this great system?

I am talking, of course, about so called Shandy Law; the extra-legal systems of rules set up by groups of people on a night out, many of them radical young students, that govern how they can drink, what they can drink and even what words and actions they can use.

Tales of the horrific judgements in Shandy courts are common.  Jeffrey was a student at Loughborough University…

The people I made friends with got me into it. They didn’t called it Shandy Law, not at first, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into; “drinking games” they said.  It all seemed so harmless.  I had no idea that the rules they were imposing – no pointing, no saying ‘pint’, no calling anybody by their real name – had no basis in English law.

How could I know that? I was a political history student!

Over the course of his first year Jeffrey became an expert in Shandy Law and, by his second year, was even teaching it to other and sitting in judgements in Shandy Courts, hastily convened around bar-tables in pubs throughout Loughborough.

It all came to a head at the start of my third year.  The groups I was with had always been harsh but fair and penalties were mild; down the rest of your drink, buy the next round, crack an egg into your pint and so on.  Then we were joined by an extremist lot from the University of Warwick and, slowly, our judgements became harsher and harsher.

My last night of Shady Law was when I saw a fresher waddling to the bar, their trousers round their ankles and an empty pint glass balanced on their head.  Tears were streaming down his face…although that may have been the raw onion he was clenching between his buttock cheeks.

I made my excuses and left early, and then reported the whole group to the police.  It turned out that they were wanted for questioning in relation to a large number of missing traffic cones, and I had to go into the witness protection programme.

During her time in the Home Office Theresa May was dismissive of the idea of outlawing Shandy Courts. Her public speech was guarded, but she apparently asked one senior civil servant, “How do the idiots expect me to outlaw private agreements between groups of individuals to abide by their own rules and inflict their own penalties, within exiting legal limits? Do they want me to make company dress codes illegal, or bring back hanging for not following the official rules of Monopoloy?”

However Newt Gingrich, spokesperson for America’s sizeable below-average IQ population, feels differently. “The law of this great country, the United States of America,” he said recently, “Should be the one and only acceptable law anywhere…and it should be based on the 10 cocktails from The Drinker’s Bible!”

A police spokesperson confirmed that, at present, they had no power to go after Shandy Courts, and encouraged those who have failed to down their drink when required, or were the last to put their hands on their head should seek proper legal redresses through the English courts.

Next week: We go undercover at a chess club, to see what anti-British rules those geeky bastards are enforcing.

Yesterday, with a smile on her face, Theresa May destroyed the Labour party and they didn’t even notice.

Emerging as the sole candidate for leadership of the party she did something astounding and lead it in a step leftwards.  On the face of it there’s no reason to do this. Labour are in such disarray that even if she’d stepped up and announced she was going to pursue a baby-eating agenda she’d probably still have kept some of the Conservative’s current 8-point lead in the polls.

Instead she looked at the soft-left – those who’ve had a year of being called Red Tories and Blairite scum, and who’ve been told over and over to fuck off and join the Tories – and said, “Oh yes, you’re welcome here”.

Momentum have spent a year telling centrists that they’re not welcome in Labour, so somebody who actually understands politics, rather than just Facebook memes, has stepped up and made a home for them.  She also, at a stroke, killed dead the notion of Labour splitting and forming a centre party with the Lib Dems and the left-wing of the Conservatives.  Theresa May has firmly plonked herself into that political space.

If there were a general election now and, across the board, 10% of Labour voters from May 2015 decided to back the Conservatives then that translates to 36 seats lost by Labour – they’d have 169 fewer seats in the house. Hardly an effective opposition. Even if Labour clawed in 80% of the people who voted Green in 2015 they’d still be down 22 seats, 143 behind the Tories.

On top of that Labour are vulnerable to UKIP; a quarter of Labour voters were pro-Brexit and, other than tell them they’re stupid, Labour has down nothing to address their concerns about immigration.  An additional 5% of Labour supporters choosing to vote UKIP would mean, even with the Green vote, Labour would be back to 36 seats down on their current parliamentary position.

(UKIP, incidentally, wouldn’t win a single extra seat if they gained 5% of Labour’s supporters in each constituency – they’d just split the Labour vote enough for the Conservatives to win…there’s a lesson there)

The Conservatives are also potentially vulnerable to UKIP, firm Leave supporters concerned perhaps that May will be too reluctant to Brexit.  In isolation 5% of Conservative voters moving to UKIP would see the Tories drop 13 seats (11 of which would be picked up by Labour, and only 1 by UKIP itself).

This is why May is making firm Brexit noises…but as she’s a Remainer herself she gives hope to others; at least hope of a sensible, controlled Brexit rather than the mad rush that people feared from Leadsom.  She plays both sides of that game far better than Corbyn’s my-lips-say-Remain-but my-eyes-say-Leave sham.

In all of this Labour are shouting for a snap general election, not because they think they can win, but because they want the chance to clear out a few “Blairite” MPs.  If the party wants to be anything more than an ineffectual opposition party then they have a chance this week – possibly their last chance – for Corbyn to step down gracefully and throw his support behind a more moderate candidate, for much as he may dislike the right-wing of  his own party it turns out they’re needed.

If he fails to do that then he will just be the next person to self-destruct in front of Theresa and, casting ne’er a clout, May will out.

 

 

After recently burning up 1,100 words reviewing just the first 7½ minutes of the no-budget film Dickshark, I have decided to jump back in.

We left the action with a clay-like penis, moulded into the shape of a shark, being shot off and vanishing down a toilet (see, this is why it took so many words for so little film), let’s continue…

To sandwiches. On a plate.

They form the centre-piece of a picnic in the woods, where an un-bathed Bill Bailey look-a-like and his lady friend, Vanna, are dining al fresco. Actually, al fresco, may be a little classy, as they literally have a plate with 2 uncut sandwiches on, a grubby looking rug and Vanna has neglected to dress in more than her bra, knickers and a pair of heels.  If you skipped part 1 then I remind you this is “not a porn story”.

Vanna is hungry to the point where she could, “figuratively eat a horse”, yet spits out her first mouthful of sandwich. Bill Bailey is concerned that she may be choking and reassures her that he knows some manoeuvres. Tempting a lingerie model into the woods using only 2 sandwiches is presumably the most  impressive of them.  Vanna tells him that she’s fine, but the sandwich is disgusting.

“Would you rather figuratively eat a horse?” asks the disappointed musician/comedian.

“Yes! And illiterately too!”

I swear, I went back and replayed the bit of audio over and over, and she really does say “illiterately” and everybody on the production team was obviously pretty fucking cool with that.

It turns out the problem is that Bill made peanut and butter sandwiches, while Vanna wanted peanut butter.  Bill, who obviously spent so long in his enticing models class that he missed everything else in life, is confused and claims you can’t have peanut butter, because you can’t milk peanuts.

“Speaking of milk,” says Vanna, as sinister music suddenly appears, “Have you been suckling the teat of another woman?”

I wonder how many miles she trekked through the woods, in only her shreddies, thinking, “If only he’d mention something connected with mammaries, so I can confront him about his unfaithfulness”.

The conversation that follows defies description. It takes in Vanna following and spying on Bill, communism, why adults shouldn’t use metaphors or similes, what the plural of ‘metaphor’ is anyway, Bill admitting he’s cheating on Vanna with multiple woman and ends with her telling him that, “I wish you weren’t so charming. It’s impossible to stay mad at you”.

That conversation takes 56 seconds! There’s enough material there for an hour of a normal/properly made film.

As they move on to whether Bill is paying for sex he protests, “Do I look the kind of guy who has to pay for sex?” (he looks like the kind of guy who has to pay extra for sex, since he asked), “I’m not like an ageing movie director who only cops a feel by paying models to be in his movies and who writes parts for himself that have him making out and groping them.”

I’m not normally good at picking up subtle foreshadowing in films, but I’ve got a bad feeling about where this is going.

“Nor would I make clunky dialogue more palatable to viewers by having a hot woman half-naked on the screen while my character waxes poetic.”

OK, I didn’t think it was going to go that badly.

Finished with this massive, self-indulgent wink at the audience we actually get some plot! Julian (see part 1) was Bill’s room-mate, and he didn’t survive being shot in the shark by Rachel.

Rachel, however, told Bill the real story of what happened…

“His penis became an independent life-form.  Well, it was dependent, because it was attached to him. Not for long…I don’t know if it was long…probably not.”

Jesus, Bill, the girl was telling you the story of how your room-mate’s penis became a shark and you couldn’t even be fucking bothered to listen properly!  Didn’t you ask questions?  Did you at no point think, “I’d better remember the details of this story, as I’m likely going to have to re-tell them at some point…possibly at some sort of trial or committal hearing”?

Bill thinks that the Dickshark may have survived.

“That just puts the ‘dick’ in ridiculous,” quips Vanna, who’s surprisingly quick for a girl who doesn’t know the difference between “literally” and “illiterately” and who forgot to finish off getting dressed this morning.

It turns out that the penis enlargement cream, last seen in part 1, was being developed by Bill for “another purpose” (Bill deflects a question about this purpose with “that’s not the important part of the story”, and I don’t think he’s speaking in character) and he labelled it ‘Penis enlargement cream’ as he thought the shame of using it would be enough to keep everybody away from it.

A few minutes ago Bill was pontificating about the importance of adults having open, direct conversations, yet seemingly couldn’t tell his room mate, “Don’t touch that stuff, mate, it may turn your penis into a finger-eating shark”.

Actually, he may have a point. That does sound pretty irresistible.

Moving on. It turns out that Rachel has since been shot dead. Vanna gets unduly nervous that Bill may be looking for forensic evidence and explains that if she has any gunpowder residue on her it’s because she’s a marksman and she wore the bra that’s currently 33% of her clothing to the gun-range.

Vanna, love, it’s a week later, you’re in the middle of the woods and Bill’s equipped only with 2 peanut and butter sandwiches…this is not a forensics shakedown.

No, it turns out Bill thinks the penis-shark is the culprit. The immediate question is ‘How?’, but we’re distracted from asking this by it becoming painfully clear that whatever else Bill has done he hasn’t bothered learning his lines for this scene and is ad libbing like mad. Vanna has learned her lines, bless her, and it’s therefore a tragic shame that they don’t match up with the nonsense that Bill’s spouting. Through this muddle we learn that Bill tried the cream on his pet spider, which then escaped. “You need to stop fucking around with science,” Vanna advises, “It might come back to bite you on the ass.”

Ooo, there’s my foreshadowing sense again.

Bill decides it’s time to get fruity with Vanna, but has pop off first because he has to, “urinate out of my penis” (honest to god, I’m not making this up, that’s exactly what he says). He vanishes screen left and we hear an “Ow!, although it’s not entirely clear if this is a scripted cry, or simply Bill tripping over something…possibly the enormity of the crimes he’s committing against cinema.

And suddenly we cut to a pair of breasts being fondled. They’re not Vanna’s (too many tattoos), so I assume we’re in a new scene, and I’ve written another 1,100 words on 7 minutes of screen time.

I’ll be back!

The review continues here

 

 

If you ever get drunk with my mother – and you should feel free to do so – then the conversation will drift to politics and her two core views will be espoused.

The first is that grammar school were good for social mobility. Both her and my father were from working class families – her parents were a bus driver and a waitress – and became solidly middle-class because they were accepted into local grammar schools.

The second, more relevant here, is that feminism has been bad for women. Her assertion is that before feminism the expectation of women is that they would become wives and mothers and that feminism added the additional duties of having a career. When I was born, in far away 1971, she gave up her job (despite being better paid than my dad at the time) to become a full-time mother.

Her mother, the waitress, was a Labour supporter all of her life. She remembered the austerity of the depression era, particularly her family being forced to sell their beloved piano before they were allowed to claim any public assistance. My mum, by contrast, is a life-long Conservative. Her piano-moment is the union domination and control of Labour in the 60s and 70s.  The utter capitulation of our national government to the smirking shop-stewards who both exploited and represented the class she had come from.

If you cut her in half she’d say ‘Tory’ all the way through and, importantly, for her there’ll be no disconnect between Andrea Leadsom’s pride in being a mother and her talk of cutting maternity pay. That, in her eyes, could be a positive step towards re-establishing the natural order of things, where Daddy goes out and works and Mummy stays home with the children. Feminism, she’d assert, has delivered the opportunity for every woman to chose a career instead of having children; if it insists on them doing both then that is damaging.

She will also not recoil in the slightest from Leadsom’s assertion that being a mother will make her a better leader. She’ll probably even be surprised that Leadsom would disown them.

There are holes in her philosophy, to be sure, but she’ll stand by it as long as the Sauvignon Blanc is flowing. You won’t see her on Twitter, or creating memes on Facebook, she’ll never be in the audience on Question Time or ever do anything more political than reading The Telegraph, but how many more like her must there be out there, in the ranks of the Conservative party, looking at Andrea Leadsom and thinking, “I can relate to her”?

Anyway, I have to go and have my usual Saturday morning coffee with her. I’ll let you know what she thinks.

 

Thursday July 7, 2016

I’m up at 5am writing this, because this is going to be the most exciting day of my life.  Nick (Boles) has done a great job of rounding up Crabb and Goyle’s supporters to vote for me instead and sent a brilliant text that should pick off the fringes of Theresa’s supporters.  Nobody really wants her or Andrea for PM, do they?

Phoned Nick at 7am to ask how the voting was going.

“It hasn’t started yet,” he told me, which seems to be a pretty negative attitude. I asked him what happens if I get all of the votes in this round. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh?” he tells me, “You’ve been a pretty high-profile government figure for a while now – a lot of people know who you are and what you’ve done.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” I ask him.  Unfortunately the line drops then and it goes straight to voicemail when I call him back. He must have gone into a tunnel.

Moped around the house for a bit, but it’s getting on Sarah’s nerves.

“Can’t you at least do something interesting that I can write a column about?” she snapped.

“It’s 12:30,” I replied, “I’m going to make a sandwich.”

“That’ll do.” she said, happily.

Nearly three in the afternoon and Nick’s still in that tunnel! I’ve been phoning him every 3 minutes since 7am and he hasn’t picked up once.

Friday July 8th, 2016

Sarah wakes me up at 10:30 to ask if I’m going to the office.

“Why?” I ask, “Nobody wants me.”

“You’re still Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.” she reminds me.  That cheers me up a bit.

“You’re right, I am! They need me!”

“They certainly do…prison officers have staged an unofficial walk-out.”

I pull the covers back over my head.

Saturday July 9th, 2016

Andy the handyman is in today fixing the leaking tap in the en suite.  Sarah hangs around the whole time, hoping that he’ll do something Polish, so she can use it to form her opinion on immigration, but he mainly listens, nods and gets on with things.

As he’s leaving I ask if he can fit our new cooker that’s arriving on Monday. He looks a bit baffled and I apologise for not being able to speak Polish.  He looks around shiftily then discloses that he’s actually from Dagenham. When I ask him, astonished, about his surname – Szymanski – he explains that “everyone expects Poles these days, don’t they?”

He tells me you have to be a registered Corgi fitter to install a gas oven. I tell him that’s Euro-babble and that it must be basically the same as plumbing.  He says he’ll think about it while he’s having a tab.

Sunday July 10th, 2016

Angela (Leadsom) calls round for a chat. She talks about how important it is for her to win the leadership and have the right people behind her.

She grips my arm far too tightly and tells me, “God’s told me he needs me to win this, Michael. It’s his will. You understand how important that is, don’t you?”

I nod and promise her my support.

“Your support?” she laughs, “Bless you, Michael, but you’re going to publicly support Theresa,” (she almost spits the name), “If you even smile in my direction I’ll make you Junior Minister for Brexit, under Boris!”

As she’s leaving I ask if she knows a Corgi-registered gas fitter.

“I am one,” she tells me, “Time served. Want me to have a look?”

I politely decline.

Monday July 11, 2016

There’s a knock at the door at about 10pm and I open it to find Boris standing there, looking pretty dishevelled. Over a brandy he tells me his story.

“Confession time, old man,” he begins, “You know that trick where you put dog dirt in a paper bag, set fire to it and leave it on someone’s doorstep?” I nod. “Well I was going to do that to you.”

“Did you think better of it?” I ask.

“All went a bit wrong, Grover…my car’s a burnt-out shell.”

“That’s terrible!” I gasp.

“Not really. It was a government car, and I booked it out in Liam Fox’s name. I don’t think we’ll be hearing any more from him for a while.”

“Liam who?” I ask and we laugh until we cry.

Didn’t take that long, really.

Tuesday July 12, 2016

The tide’s turning, two bits of good news today! Not-Polish Andy’s wounds are mainly superficial and he’s going to make a full recovery and Andras, the Hungarian gardener from Hounslow, reckons he can “have a go” at rebuilding the kitchen wall! He’s had a look and estimated fifty quid, all in, to do the job.

10pm: Boris still asleep on the chaise lounge, he’s been there all day. The only time he woke up was when Pointless came on; we scored 200 on the first round.

“Are we pointless, Bojo?” I asked him, but he’d already fallen asleep again.

Wednesday July 13, 2016

Theresa called by to discuss my support for her leadership campaign.

“Keep your piggy little face out of my campaign, Gove!” were her opening words, as she swept into the house, looking for a puppy to kick.

“Keep your mouth shut, say how great Andrea is and distance yourself from me and I’ll see about letting you have a quiet life on the back-benches.” She spun on her heel and put her face right up to mine and whispered, “Step out of line once and I’ll stick you back in Education and eradicate the budget for your police protect!”

With that she pushed passed me and stormed out, pausing only for her and Sarah to share their usual hiss at each other.

Thursday July 14, 2016

The Brexit strain is starting to show on Sarah. “I’m going out and by the time I’m back I want you shaved and with some pants on!” she snapped at me, as I was eating my breakfast/lunch Pot Noodle.

“Sure you don’t want one?” I asked Boris, “There’s a curry flavour one left.”

“AND I WANT THAT FUCKWIT GONE AS WELL!” yelled Sarah from the hallway.

Boris fixed his eyes on me and appeared to be about to say something when Hounslow Andras came in to tell me that he’d have to up his quote.  Realising that my negotiation skills may be required by my country in the dark days ahead I took him to task over this.”

“Zorry Mr Gove,” he explained in his wandering faked accent, “But I haf only done zee first tree courses and I am spending nearly fifty pounds just on Super-glue zo far!”

“Are you just gluing the bricks together?”

“Yez, it zeems to be vorking.”

“Fair enough…shall we call it £100?”

“Probably nearer £500, mate.”

“OK”

By the time Sarah got back I’d sorted myself out, turfed out Boris and got the place tidied up. Andras had knocked off for the day, but his crazy-paving approach to a wall looks pretty good and its slope means that our kitchen is a bit bigger than it used to be.”

After a couple of glasses of Waitrose prosecco Sarah got a bit fruity, but my general melancholy and her note taken curtailed any real passion.

I read her notes as she went to clean herself up.

“What’s ‘He prodded at my ham-sandwich with the skill and enthusiasm of a job-seeker under threat of sanctions’ supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Honestly, Michael, don’t keep abreast of the zeitgeist any more?” she queried.

Dear Diary, I’m not sure I ever did. Honestly, I doubt anybody has been made more miserable than me by this Brexit nonsense.  Still, it’s early days, I suppose.

After the 10 days we’ve just had in politics you’d be an idiot to try to predict what’s coming next…so here goes.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that an act of Parliament is going to be required to trigger article 50 (the full reason why is explored in detail here, the short reason is that invoking the article changes some existing legislation, so legislation is required to invoke it).

The requirement for an act puts the decisions regarding when, how and if we Brexit into the hands of MPs and the Lords.  The public expectation is, polls suggest, that MPs should honour the referendum result we have the possibility that MPs will say that their priority is to honour the will of their constituents, not the national result.

Because the referendum votes were counted regionally, rather than by constituency, an MP asserting that their seat voted Leave/Remain is an un-testable assertion.  It may be possible to extrapolate the likelihood that they’re correct, but it cannot be absolutely proven to be the case.

The party leaders can impose a party line, but Corbyn is in a weak position to do this and the strength of the Conservative leader will depend upon how decisive the leadership contest turns out to be.  It would be a brave new PM who, fresh at the helm of a Conservative party with a slim majority and many pro-EU MPs, tries to force through a quick win of such an important act.

With the referendum so close MPs are caught between a rock and a hard place; failing to vote for a swift Brexit risks half of the country criticising them for not listening to the vox populi, supporting article 50 legislation may see them losing support from those who say the Leave campaign was based on lies and false promises and they have an obligation to protect the public from the economic uncertainty of Brexit.

The Lords, of course, don’t have to worry about re-election and there’s no legal or constitutional reason for them to support any kind of Brexit plan which they feel is ill-conceived, poorly planned or based on pipe-dreams.  Convention prevents them from delaying legislation related to election manifesto promises, but the manifesto promise was to hold an in/out referendum – a promise that has clearly been delivered – there was no promise to swiftly act on the results, or even to honour them.

For these reasons I believe that the majority of MPs will support a snap general election, with each party putting forward their Brexit plans as part of the campaign.  It’s a low risk strategy for the Conservative – Labour likely couldn’t win a general election at the moment even if only Labour party members were allowed to vote – the Lib Dems will see an opportunity to pick up a few more seats, the SNP’s position is virtually unassailable and I think even Labour would welcome the opportunity to decisively shore up Corbyn’s leadership, or to end it.

There we have it, then; a Conservative leadership election, a general election with a Corbyn-led Labour, focussed principally on each party’s EU exit (or remain) strategy.  I’m making my predictions and, knowing the week we’ve had, they’ll be out of date before I reach the ‘Publish’ button.