Saturday, May 3, 2008 by Andrew John.

You can see Little Bibbling under Flossock from the other side of the M39 if you’re sitting down. It’s a strange place. It has a tyrannical councillor called Beauregard Soup who is tall and angular and thin and given to wearing dark clothes (he’s a right bastard) and a man called Mr Pingblatt, who is two science teachers. Yes, there are two of him. Hard to tell why, or how, but, then, he is the science teachers.

I’ll introduce LBuF in Bill Everatt’s The Underground Edition, which I assume he’ll be putting on the site on Sunday (4 May). If he doesn’t, Councillor Beauregard Soup will want to know why.

In fact, it’s to escape Councillor Beauregard Soup that Bill is recording his programme in an underground bunker in Much Fondling on the Grope, which is a tiny hamlet in North Glamorgan twinned with an unpronounceable town in Utah, where Bill’s other five wives hail from.

I was born in LBuF, and that’s why I have an affection for it. But I’ve done rather well from the inbreeding that tends to go on, in that only two of my relatives are my mother. It gets worses. Oh, it gets worses.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008 by Andrew John.

Hello again. Andrew John here. Hello? Anybody there? Oh, there you are!

I’ve been off the airwaves (should that be linewaves?) for a while, apart from the odd story for Celtica, but I’m rejoining Bill Everatt’s Underground Edition this coming Sunday, 20 January, to talk a bit about crap English. You know the sort: gobbledegook.

It was Bill’s idea. He stumbled (he’s always stumbling – it’s too many wine gums) across a website with some special awards for mangled English – but you’ve got to hear it to believe it.

So somewhere in Bill’s show there’ll be a two-minute (or so) slot while I bring you some of the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) of these, and I’ll be trying to outdo them with a bit of gobbledegook of my own – except that mine isn’t as polite as theirs tries to be.

So, incline your auditory modality organs in the approximate direction of the electro-acoustic transducers attached to your computational device during that specific temporal eventuality, and let’s see if we can take the piss out of the crap (if you see what I mean).

See you there next week.

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Wednesday, August 1, 2007 by Andrew John.

Clichés! Blimey, avoiding these things isn’t rocket science. I mean, we didn’t ought to go down that road. I had a go at them, anyway, in the little moan I usually insert into Bill Everatt’s Underground Edition, while he’s not looking. What brought on this particular rant was all this talk of a ‘Brown bounce’ – yet another political cliché. Here’s what I said.

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Oh, dear, here we go again. If it’s not ‘Blair’s babes’ or ‘the Third Way’ or a ‘double whammy’ or a ‘stakeholder’ or whatever other nauseating clichés politicians like to come out with to make us think they’re doing their jobs, now we get the Brown Bounce. Throughout the last two weeks or so, every newspaper has had it: there are Brown bounces all over the place.

It makes you wonder whether, each time it bounces, it leaves a little stain on the floor. Brown bounce, indeed! You can’t help but get a picture of clingfilm stretched tightly over the lavvy pan. But let’s not go down that road.

Now there’s another cliché: let’s not go down that road. You can’t do without them, really. Well, you can, but they’re hard to avoid. They’re all around us.

But it does come up a lot in politics – not just among the politicos themselves, but among the journos who report on the politicos. And there’s another form of cliché: the clichéd single-word bit of shorthand: politico, journo.

But have you noticed how the politicos like to be ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’? They’re all on message, see, but there’s that bit of religious nonsense thrown in, too. Makes us feel good about them. Unless, like me, you’re not exactly sympathetic towards religion. Or politicians.

Then there’s the road map. You can’t just do something these days: there has to be a road map.

However, sources close to the said politicos say all their clichés are in a safe pair of hands and have been ring-fenced to avoid mission creep. We wouldn’t want a Ministry of Defence cliché finding its way into the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, now would we?

That would be a recipe for disaster, after all – and we all know there are no easy answers to that nightmare scenario. So we must be absolutely clear about this, no knee-jerk reactions because lessons must be learned. Provided we stay on message there’s no need to have to think the unthinkable.

OK, that’s enough of those. The sorts of cliché that really get up my nose, though, are those that are plain illogical. One comes to mind, and I’ll bet you’ll never use this one again without thinking about this: and it’s ‘back to back’.

How many times have you heard a DJ say he’s going to play three Kaiser Chiefs singles ‘back to back’, or the BBC is running three episodes of a drama series ‘back to back’? Think about it for a moment. It is possible to have two things back to back (provided one of them is playing backwards, of course), but not three, unless the one in the middle has two backs.

Go on: think about it. It’s impossible. So why do idiots say it?

It comes from the description of back-to-back houses, of course, when the back of one was facing the back of another. That meant the front of one was facing the front of another, too.

Now if you want a DJ to play the latest from the Klaxons or the Spice Boys ‘back to back’, you’ll have to listen to one of them going schlurrp-durrp and sounding like a Klingon speaking Swedish in Russian. Because that one will be playing backwards.

So stop it, do you hear? It’s a silly cliché and I’ll hear no more of it.

‘In fact’ is another one. In fact, I hate it. But why do I need to say ‘in fact’ if what I’m stating is being stated as a fact? And if it ain’t a fact we usually say so, with phrases such as, ‘Well I think . . .’ or ‘In my opinion . . .’

‘In fact’ is used as a bit of reinforcement for something you’ve already made plain. ‘As you can see, he is in fact sitting here with me now.’ Er, yes, I can see that that is, indeed, a fact. ‘You are in fact drinking tea.’ I was rather hoping it was that, and not sulphuric acid. This word is often combined with ‘actual’, to make ‘in actual fact’. If you’re not sure of your facts, it seems, you might be better making them actual facts.

Then there’s ‘of course’, of course. This is often used by news presenters on radio and TV. ‘Cornelius Pingblatt, who of course used to play left-handed croquet as a boy . . .’ Silly me! I should have known. And if you need to say ‘of course’ you obviously think it’s well known, so why say it in the first place? You often hear it said by sports broadcasters: ‘Beckham, whose father Ted was of course a kitchen fitter and Manchester United fan . . .’, for example, or ‘Beckham, whose other given names are Robert Joseph . . .’ Now these happen to be true, but did you know that – unless you’re an extraordinarily devoted fan and sad enough to cram your mind with all the minutiae?

Of course you didn’t. In fact, neither did I – of course.

Bloody clichés. Avoid ’em like the plague, I say.

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Thursday, July 26, 2007 by Andrew John.

Hate to have a go at the BBC. One has a sort of built-in respect for old Auntie, doesn’t one. On the other hand . . . Anyway, in Bill’s Underground Edition last week I couldn’t get off my mind the fact that the dear old girl had been hauled over the coals quite a bit. Nothing like a bit of a gloat, what? So I decided to do a bit of film editing – all in my imagination, of course! Here’s what I said. Oh, I feel a moan about clichés coming on because I can’t get the phrase ‘the Brown bounce’ out of my mind; so tune into The Underground Edition on and after 29 July. The highlight of the show is of course me, but Bill plays some bloody good music before and after me. Come to think of it, you could always skip my bit. Anyway, I digress. This is was I said last week, folks.

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Good old BBC, eh? Good old Auntie. She’s really got her knickers in a twist lately, hasn’t she, what with that faked footage of the Queen and a few faked phone-ins?As for phone-ins, let me say straightaway that anyone who’s been diddled deserves all they get. Yes, I’m being a cantankerous git, because I think they have part of their brain missing – if they ever grew a brain in the first place.No, I don’t think TV companies should get away with tricking people, and they should be brought to book, yes. But, really, who in their right mind is going to spend up to one pound fifty a minute and more to enter some stupid quiz. Oh, I’m not talking about a Blue Peter quiz here – the BBC, to give it credit, doesn’t hype up any charges, or, as far as I know, even make any charges for that kind of thing. I just used that as an excuse for rant.

No, I’m talking about Channel 4 and other independent companies and these things you often accidentally come across if you’re channel hopping on Freeview, with some ditzy young thing chosen because of her curves and her toothpaste smile, as she grins inanely at you and urges you to phone in to answer a question that’s so blindingly easy to answer that it’s no wonder they get thousands of people phoning in. Of course, they don’t have to part with as much in prizes as they make from premium-rate numbers, with thousands of blithering idiots phoning them.

Can’t these viewers see what’s going on? Can’t they see that they’re being shafted right, left and centre?

As for her dear majesty, our gracious lady the Queen. Well, with a bit of mischievous tweaking of the chronology of events in some video footage, she was seen to be storming out of a photoshoot with the famous snapper Annie Leibovitz. What a corker of an opportunity to rearrange footage.I did a bit myself the other day. You know, got the odd thing off YouTube, filmed a few of my friends who’re nightclub bouncers, used a bit of CGI, as they do in Doctor Who. Great fun.Scene one. Her Majesty sits majestically, being photographed. A crown is on her head. Cut to picture of Annie Leibovitz with camera in hand. Liebovitz says something. Indistinct. Voiceover says, ‘And Ms Leibovitz is asking Her Majesty to take something off. It seems to be her crown.’Cut to Her Gracious Majesty, who is seen shaking her head. Use CGI here to disguise the fact that the background is that of last year’s Trooping of the Colour.Cut to back shot of Leibovitz seeming to rage (use stand-in double here). Cut to Her Gracious Majesty, rising from chair. Use CGI to hide the fact that this is from the end of last year’s State Opening of Parliament.

Her Gracious Majesty nods to her left. Cut to two large, gorilla-like, shaven-headed gentlemen wearing evening dress and knuckledusters. Cut to back shot of Leibovitz as shaven-headed gentlemen approach. Again, stunt double will be required, since this shot has not been agreed in Ms Leibovitz’s contract. Gentlemen with shaven heads, evening dress and knuckledusters give her a good nutting.Cut to Her Gracious Majesty nodding with approval and smiling. Use CGI to hide the fact that this was taken during a recent tour of Australia.Yes, I think I might just make it as a cinematographer. I wonder if there are any jobs going at the BBC. Perhaps they’ll organise a phone-in competition for budding filmmakers.

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Thursday, July 19, 2007 by Andrew John.

I hate dumbing down. All it does is lower standards. I had a go at it last week on the occasion of the release of the new Harry Potter movie. Here’s what I had to say in Bill’s Underground Edition.

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I’ve found myself gazing into the youthful eyes of Daniel Radcliffe this week. You can’t help it. He’s all over the Radio Times.

It’s the occasion of the fifth Harry Potter film, and the telly are doing a thing about the costumes, called Harry Potter: The Costume Drama. That’s why Dan the Man is there.

But it reminds me of one of the worst bits of dumbing-down I’ve ever had the misfortune to know about. And I didn’t know about it till recently. That’s the first book: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Now I knew it had been changed to Sorcerer’s Stone for the Americans. And I thought that was bad enough.

I mean, do they not know that the word philosopher means more than a chap who talks epistemology, ontology and eschatology all day? More than your A C Graylings and your Platos and your Socrateses? More than ethics and logical problems?

I mean, haven’t they heard of alchemy, for goodness’ sake?

So they bugger about with the titles of British literature by dumbing it down. I came across a New York Times article from 2000 the other day entitled ‘Harry Potter – minus a certain flavour’, and the word flavour is spelled the British way. Deliberately.

And this was where I learned about more dumbing-down in the world of the young wizard of Hogworts Academy.

The writer bemoans this dumbing down – not only changing philosopher to sorcerer, but mum to mom, apparently, and crumpets to English muffins. I ask you! This is crazy!

‘Why?’ asks the article’s author, Peter H Gleick. ‘Were the editors worried that some people wouldn’t buy the book because they couldn’t understand it in its original language? Were they concerned that some children would be confused by new words for otherwise familiar objects or actions?’

Quite!

He goes on to say, ‘I like to think that our society would not collapse if our children started calling their mothers Mum instead of Mom. And I would hate to think that today’s children would be frightened away from an otherwise thrilling book by reading that the hero is wearing a jumper instead of a sweater.’

Quite!

English muffins are not crumpets. Have American kids not learned about crumpets? Don’t we in Britain read of cookies when we read American novels? Don’t we know what a sidewalk is and a parking lot. Don’t we know they go to a doctor’s office, not a doctor’s surgery? Don’t we know their babies wear diapers, not nappies?

Of course we do! We’ve read their books and seen their movies – I mean films. So why can’t the Yanks look the words up if they don’t know what they mean?

What next? Shakespeare’s Much Fuss About Zilch? Or how about The Two Guys of Verona? How about The Storekeeper of Venice? How about Charles Dickens’s Hard Times? Could change the title to Tough Shit, Dude, I guess.

No. Let’s keep our words in our literature and let the Americans learn them, as we’ve learned some of theirs (and incorporated them into our own speech). What’s wrong with that?

Sorcerer’s Stone. Blimey. Don’t get me started! 

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