BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

Somebody somewhere is probably running a sweepstake as we speak, taking bets on which household name will be next to kick the bucket in 2016. Were I a betting man, I’d wager Bruce Forsyth is a good candidate. He’s 88, after all; and recent reports suggest his health isn’t exactly blooming. Should, God forbid, Brucie bite the bullet before the year is out, one doesn’t exactly require a degree in rocket science to predict the media response when he goes.

News bulletins will make the announcement of his passing the lead story. We’ll be served up a montage of his best bits stitched together by a television obituary editor four or five years ago, encompassing ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’, ‘The Generation Game’, ‘Play Your Cards Right’, ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, and – if we’re lucky – a rare glimpse of the legendary car-crash that was ‘Bruce’s Big Night’, the show that persuaded viewers going out was preferable to an evening in front of the TV set. After this, we’ll be treated to a couple of special tribute programmes on both BBC1 and ITV, featuring talking heads rhapsodising about how great Brucie was, even though he was still alive and kicking when they were asked to discuss him in the past tense.

To be honest, this has been the pattern when famous faces snuff it for decades, and the whole coverage will be rounded off by footage of a service in honour of Brucie’s memory on the news, one where spotting decrepit old entertainers arriving at the church will at some point be accompanied by a ‘I thought they were dead’ comment. However, there’s a new element to the passing of national treasures now. Barely will the soil have settled beneath the headstone before a previously silent voice from the past will emerge onto the same front pages that praised Brucie a couple of months before, declaring Brucie groped/raped/molested/murdered them in the 70s.

Rather uniquely, Brucie was captured on camera having a shifty squeeze of a middle-aged lady’s ample bosom on a 1972-ish edition of ‘The Generation Game’. The original uncut version may well still be on YouTube somewhere, but it’s here in this spoof; if your stomach can’t take the foul-mouthed festival that precedes it, fast forward to 13:42…

Now, of course, I am in no way suggesting the still-living Bruce Forsyth was a child-raping Satanic sexual deviant or that he in any way had a hand in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann when he was at the peak of his popularity; I’ll leave that kind of speculation to the Survivors™, the Victims™, the Mail and the Express, ITV’s documentary department, and the ambulance-chasing law-firms that will all have a vested interest in such flights of fancy once he’s been banished to that great game show studio in the sky. Besides, they’re too busy at the moment unburdening their bladders on other graves down here whilst TV archivists spend yet more exhausting hours hacking their way through old programmes to remove the presence of any newly-classified perverts.

It was interesting that the widow of the late Clement Freud should issue an ‘apology’ to those who were apparently exposed to his alleged sexual perversions, as though to do so was a pre-emptive response to evade Sonia Sutcliffe-style accusations heading in her direction. Of course, what happens next is out of her hands and will never be in them. Her late husband’s long life, career and reputation have been trashed overnight and – until the distant day when the sun can be sighted hovering over our dark horizon – permanently. The fresh-from-therapy accusers are, naturally, telling the truth; the police are, naturally, taking these accusations seriously (probably regarding them as ‘credible and true’); and everyone on social media bar those prepared to be showered in a barrage of bile must accept the consensus that one more dead man whose wit, intelligence and bewildering array of talents are utterly at odds with the comfy mediocrity of the present day was a despicable pervert who got away with murder for decades because his POWER condemned those who suffered at his hands to a silence that was only broken by the secure knowledge that the dead can’t sue and the living will pay handsomely for a good sob story.

Show me the next deceased celeb, and I’ll show you the next retrospective Paedo. Place your bets now.

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GEORGE THE TURD

With polls giving the Brexit camp a lead over the Remain brigade, a day when Nigel Farage and Bob Geldof exchanged certain highly apt hand gestures at each other from competing battle barges on the Thames has seen Gideon pull out his most laughable threat yet in the ongoing saga of Project Fear. The Chancellor promises an ‘austerity budget’ is being prepared should the electorate go against his wishes, punishing the people if they dare to vote leave. So, the school bully who has joined his fellow scaremongers in promising billions will suddenly shower down on all the public services he’s spent the past six years dismantling and destroying with such ruthless relish and callous disregard is now taking control of the impending apocalypse by planning to bring about a self-fulfilling prophesy.

This is perhaps the clearest indication yet that with barely one week to go to Euro D Day, the Remain team are getting increasingly desperate. Any further despicable gimmicks on this scale and more and more don’t-knows are not going to view staying in the EU as a viable alternative to leaving it. If George Osborne’s gamble backfires, part of me hopes it spells the end for him more than it spells the end for Britain’s membership of a club that couldn’t be more unattractive if it was run by Peter Stringfellow. The way things are going Osborne could well prove to be Brexit’s greatest asset, the nauseating little slimeball.

© The Editor