Bang! You Really Are Dead!

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God, it's fun being a kid in England today now that we're taken over.

Most of the restaurants in cities, indeed in the whole country, are 
geared to our tastes. Pizza Huts,, Hamburger Kings -- tuck shop food for 
all! It's wunderful being a kid in England today.

The whole of the retail industry of most towns now seems to be run by 
kids.

Some of us have taken over television. There's Willy the Whoosher with 
his patent whoosh generator. He's making a fortune on programmes such as 
Eggheads and Location, Location, Location. Just count up the number 
kiddiwink whoosh noises you hear and work out just how much Willy is 
making at 20p per whoosh.

We mustn't forget Tessa's Twiges -- bundles of sprayed twigs. She does 
very nicely thank you from renting out bundles of twigs to makers of 
property programmes. A house without a bundle of Tessa's Twigs in the 
corner isn't worth a sneer. Same with Carrie and her closet candles. A 
bathroom without a candle in a brandy balloon awaiting an unwary naked 
bum knocks thousands off the value of a house.

Then there's Jingle Jimbo and his music segments. Thousands of 'em. 
Telly can't work anymore without kiddiwinkian music segments poured over 
everything like choccy sauce. Preferably with plenty of compression to 
drive the grown-ups mad. They needed over 40 music segments on a special 
Location Location Location last week to decide that Epsom was a neat 
place to live. Even the kids making up the news programmes love music -- 
specially lots of loud drums thumping away. Gosh -- what super fun! 
'Hundreds deaded in Dafur Massacre!' Boom! Boom! Boom!

I used to think that radio had escaped this sort of but yesterday there 
was a jolly piece on a Radio 1 news bulletin about swathy dago types 
getting deaded in underground stations. There was some funky music in 
the background.

One grown-up even threatened to send 14000 of us children who run the 
BBC back to skool to have the ethos of 'make believe' educated out of 
us! Fancy sending us to skool! The nerve! On the day that he said that, 
we made a Yet Another Dreary property programme which featured a 
trilling tamponette going on about how a year ago her producers followed 
the fortunes of a couple in their search for a house 'and now we're back 
to find out how they're getting on!'. Cut to interior. Hallway. FX: 
Front door chimes. Housewife goes to answer front door, not noticing 
film crew and sound recordists in her hall. Housewife answers door and 
screeches in surprise when she sees trilling tamponette.

Even better: when we wanted to show a brunette with big tits shopping 
and cooking for her family we could've shown her hopping on a bus and be 
done with it. Wot No Make Believe? Nah... We hired a bus and recruited 
some Equity members as passengers!

During the week there was one of the BBC's expensive documentaries in 
which the novelist Alan Titchmarsh stands on a very high place in 
England and talks about how England was created. 'Not exciting enough!' 
yelled the kiddiwink producers so they got Alan to sit in a rowboat on 
Lake Ness to do a piece to camera in which he rubbished the Lake Ness 
'monster' saying that there weren't enough nutrients in the lake to 
sustain a monster. As he said that, viewers were treated to the sound FX 
of a roaring monster and the sight of Mr Titchmarsh looking suitably 
terrified.

The BBC's need to fake facts in doccies seems to be too deeply ingrained 
to be reversed.

         (NB: To avoid using the dreaded 'S' word, I've made a large area
         of the north an honorary English county. Not that they
         deserved such a fine commendation.)

Then there are our TV competitions. The grown-ups are being really mean 
about them. Instead of being allowed to dish out premium phone numbers 
and tell viewers to phone them to give us money, which would be 
sensible, the grown-ups insist that there must be some skill involved. 
The really big cash prizes are on five's property programmes. Some 
serious pocket money involved. "Q: When a property is sold at an 
auction, it is said to A: Come under the chisel; B: come under the 
hammer; or C: under the mallet?". All very silly but introducing a skill 
element keeps the grown-ups off our backs.

Worryingly there are signs in telly that the grown-ups are fighting 
back. Some years ago we dumped the awful News at Ten and the bumbling 
Trev because it mucked up re-runs of James Bond and Star Wars movies. 
Having 40minutes of Trev in the middle of The Empire Striking Back just 
wasn't on. Now the grown-ups are getting stroppy and want News at Ten 
back. The fight goes on but us kids will win in the long run.

A couple of days ago our fellow kids on BBC news drooled about how it 
was the six month anniversary since the disappearance of Maddy (cue yet 
another Maddie special report from our Maddie correspondent)

The grown-up who whibbled about how you can't have six month 
anniversaries and if we knew a smattering of Latin we'd know what the 
anni meant in anniversary was well out of order. Learn proper English 
and Latin roots? That would mean going to skool!

Squeeze and tease on end credits drives grown-up up the wall. Whoopee! 
Even Ofcom have muttered about that, and several unions whose members 
feel that they lose a screen credit. But none of us kids take any 
notice. Squeeze and tease is here to please.

Us kids are having a wonderful time being dished out with free police 
uniforms. We don't even have to learn to be policemen because that would 
mean going back to skool. Nah. We've got a wonderful scheme going. We 
get a real cool uniform and a two-way radio and we get called community 
assistance officers or street sentinels, or something like that. We can 
just stand around and watch people drown. Great fun.

We've got cool new uniforms to wear as border police. All we have to do 
is stand around at airports looking fierce and glare at hordes of 
Polands and Romanians and Estonians as they trundle trolley loads of 
suitcases passed us crammed with real guns.

Best of all are that the grown-ups now allow us kiddies to have proper 
Wendy houses in our back gardens. Until now local councils run by 
grown-ups wouldn't allow us to build profitable full-size Wendy houses 
in back gardens -- specially in Surrey which has lots of big back 
gardens. So the government brought in this appeal system. You go to them 
and they say we need lots of houses all over the country so you go 
ahead. So houses are popping up in back gardens all over the place and 
we've got lots of spare dosh to spend down the tuck shops.

Of course it's in business where us kids have had the most fun. A bank 
nearly ran out of pocket money recently, and BCCI really did have to 
yank out its pocket linings, so did Baring and Equitable Life; Lloyds 
nearly went the same way, too, as did BSB and Marconi. Of course there 
are going to be a few mistakes -- such as us kids sacking all M&S's 
experienced buyers, but a few minor hiccups are inevitable when you let 
us kids take over everything.

But our real triumph is in guns. Years ago us kids had to make do with 
toy cap guns. What a difference the Single European Act has made! 
Today's guns are very different.

Now it's more a case of: 'Bang! You really are dead!'

It's such fun being a kid in England today. It's like having a second 
set of opposed thumbs; we can break so much.

         (Right now off on an all-expenses paid freebie. After nine
         months relative inactivity and a disastrous two weeks braving
         the gota frias of the Costa Blanca, it's good to rebuild a
         career from scratch and to be in demand and fearfully busy)

-- 
James Follett. Novelist. (G1LXP) Christianity is like an old
glove kept on a radiator; always there and warm and comfortable when
you need it. Islam is much the same but there's a grenade ring-pull
on each finger.

date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 16:35:27 +0000 author: JF