Arbitrary knighthoods for all!

Bruce Forsyth though? Really?

Apologies. SIR Bruce Forsyth. Something has gone very wrong in the world. I always feel that fresh batches of knighthoods and dame-making (doesn’t have the same ring to it…) are a decent barometer of where society is headed, and on this year’s evidence we’ll all be searching out the gin and the aspirin in no time! (N.B. Rantraverelax now comes with 100% more gags recycled from the previous post. It’s for the environment.)

Our Brucie has been knighted alongside Robert Edwards, a man who pioneered IVF and thereby directly enabled a good many people to be alive, and Jenni Murray, who has been fighting for the feminist cause as well as about 15 billion others since before I was born. As far as I can tell, Brucie has achieved his knighthood simply by making it this far. How many people heard the announcement “Beloved entertainer and showman Bruce Forsyth has…” and thought the next words were “…been knighted.”

None. Everyone thought “died”. Everyone. Sorry Brucie.

But the longevity of the man is outrageous! He must be powered by the same radioactive batteries that have kept the Voyager probes going. In many ways Sir Bruce does resemble the ageing spacecraft: he’s looked way past it since the mid-1980s, he takes sixteen hours to get any kind of coherent message to humanity and the world is consistently amazed when he carries on functioning. I was genuinely shocked to find out he is only 83.

“Functioning” is actually a fairly strong term for what it is that the venerable knight actually does; which is read a simple autocue. Badly. And then try to dance. Badly. Which sounds harsh but it’s the truth. I like Our Brucie, he looks like Dick van Dyke’s long lost grandfather, and for that he should be commended, but a knighthood? Too far. Especially when said knighthood was largely the result of a Facebook campaign. I didn’t know we got to vote on who gets major honours now…

If I were Robert Edwards I’d be flinging my own poo in the general direction of Buckingham Palace right now, apoplectic at being overshadowed by the bastard love child of Dot Cotton and some wax.

“I created life you pricks!”

Sir Bruce aside, there were further comedy awards dished out by her maj this year, and they both involve cricket. Notably, Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook have been awarded an OBE and MBE respectively. Strauss is the beneficiary of the higher award, presumably for some kind of charity work because lord knows his cricket is terrible. The only possible cricket related honours he could receive would be for services to shattering stumps, perhaps services to suicidal wafts outside off stump, conceivably even services to getting trapped plumb AGAIN.

Cook on the other hand must feel rather hard done by, although if Brucie and Strauss are anything to go by then it seems the more resoundingly successful you are at your job the lower the award you receive, so if he wants an OBE or higher he’d best stop with this double century imperious batting nonsense and start working on some serious ducks.

The one thing going for Andrew Strauss, however, is that he has given possibly the most British response ever to receiving a prestigious accolade from the Queen. His thoughts:

“It is a great honour to receive this accolade. It’s one of the better items of post you get through the letterbox – certainly better than a gas bill.”

Better than a gas bill. Inspired.

Who missed out?

 

Some deserving souls who, looking at the actual list, should have been safe bets. Feel free to add your own, British or otherwise…

Sir Ryan Giggs – Services to monogamy

Dame Sarah Palin – Services to vocabulary

Sir Benedict XVI – Services to children (sorry)

Sir David Cameron – Services to society

Sir Simon Cowell – Services to modesty

Dame Melanie Phillips – Services to sanity

Sir Brian Souter – Services to tolerance. Wait a second…

No. Just no.

So it’s been a fair old while since I’ve posted anything in these parts. I could bore you with a long and frankly fabricated list of the amazingly interesting things I’ve been doing instead of blogging, but instead suffice to say: yes, electromagnets were involved.

They weren’t. I wish they were though.

In truth nothing’s particularly grabbed my attention for long enough to warrant the keystrokes, which is odd given how many significant/hilarious/rage-inducing events have occurred in the last few weeks. I thought I was becoming desensitised to most things in the world, hence the lack of any ranting.

Until today. Until this. Watch the whole thing.

Whoever doesn’t punch their screen in pure primal rage will win a delicious custard cream biscuit worth up to four pence. But I still wager I won’t be giving away too many delicious biscuits.

I really thought it was a joke at first. It’s not a joke. Oddly but understandably my first thought on realising it isn’t a joke was to wonder where I might purchase a couple of litres of gin and a few packs of aspirin on a Sunday afternoon in Falmouth; a sentiment I’m sure many of you can relate to.

I’m all for kids messing around with paint and drawing pictures and suchlike; my nephew does a mean drawing of a spider which looks only marginally less like an actual spider than my drawings of spiders do, and he’s only two! (My drawings of spiders, I hasten to add, look very little like real spiders either. The whole art thing really passed much of my family by; I tried to draw a portrait of a girlfriend a while back and I’m pretty sure I succeeded only in bringing forward the end of our relationship. It looked like I’d drawn a picture of a terrified 80-year old man with some fairly funky facial orientations who’d had a horrible accident with a chip fryer. The saddest thing is I spent ages on it. Where was I?)

Ah yes. Spiders. Much as my nephew’s squiggles are fun and certainly of fridge door quality, the last thing I’d do with them would be to PUT THEM IN A FUCKING ART GALLERY. For six thousand pounds. Actually no, the last thing I would do would be to put them in a fucking art gallery and then get the clearly deranged curator of said gallery to pontificate about how a little girl sticking paint and toys to pieces of wood constituted ‘abstract expressionism’ and ‘surrealism’ or, in fact, art.

And then have her presumed father spout some jaw-dropping horseshit about how she doesn’t feel like she’s in the shadow of Picasso or Pollock and how this brings an innocence to her work. The brass neck on the man! She almost certainly does not suffer from being in the shadow of Picasso, but I imagine she is beset by a host of limitations on the grounds of being a four year old. These limitations, if other small children are anything to go by, might well include trying not to piss yourself and trying not to fall over every twenty steps. And her innocence might well be admirable in an artistic sense, but one does suspect it might be less approvingly viewed when she decides her new canvas is the kitchen wall. Spider-drawing nephew has also branched out into these brave new worlds of what to draw on next, and has found his calling in doodling, nay, ‘expressing’, all over the square tiles in the bathroom, in what would undoubtedly be called in the art world his ‘minimalist cubism’ phase. Maybe we’ve been wrong in wiping it off and confiscating the highlighters, perhaps we ought instead to frame the ‘pieces’ and flog them to the kind of maladjusted psychopath who gladly pays six grand for children’s drawings.

Mostly I feel sorry for the kid, whose long-term life prospects look somewhat bleak given the band of morons around her, although on the bright side her mother is ‘really scared to influence her in any way.’

Which can only be a good thing.