There's a couple of new
behind-the-scenes shows just now. Unlike drama, arts or proper
documentary, these are cheap to make - no stars, no sets, no locations,
no writers, just member-of-the-public slags and repulsive so-called
professionals locked together in a waltz of greed or grievance;
hand-held cameras, a bit of rough editing and a crude voice-over;
voila, no business like show business.
Under Offer, PBC2, lifts the lid, it
claims, on the estate agent game. The show, if nothing else, deserves
an award for assembling, in last Wednesday's episode, a trio of hideous
grotesques masquerading as worthwhile human beings. Far and away the
worst is Eileen.
A nice spaniel sits on a mongrel.
Working in a Chelsea estate agents,
Eilen Neville makes the brides of Big Fat Gipsy Wedding look genteel
and decorous; a loudmouth Paddy baggage, staggering about on slut-heels
in a microdress, unable to properly string together three words, this
loathsome trollop is feted among her colleagues for her ferocity in
closing deals on preposterously expensive Chelsea shitholes cobbled
together by poor tradesmen and arriviste developers; I wouldn't piss in
most of them yet Eilleen flogs them for millions, mainly to
foreigners who buy them sight unseen. Eilleen is proud of her role in
property racketeering and of the tarts and pimps with whom she rubs
shoulders. Nurse, teachers and social workers, of course, are many
strata below Eilleen and made, by her efforts, virtually homeless in the
capital city.
Darren or Wayne or Jason or some name like that
runs an agency in working class
Dagenham, now also set alight by the London property boom, grubby little
flats selling for a hundred and fifty grand the minute they go on the
market, superficially tarted-up by knucklehead greedy minicab drivers.
Darren or whatever he's called, had been a bouncer in another life and
he brings all the subtleties of that trade to his property business.
More than half of Wotsisname's business is in lettings and their
attendant evictions. Nah, bin evicted meself when I wuz a nipper, like,
an' you gorra feel for the kiddies like, knoworramean, but
attheenduvtheday biznessisbizness, innit, 'sworritsallabout. Unlike
with the tart, Eilleen, it's hard not to feel a bit sorry for
Wostsisname, he's as thick as pigshit and he lives, himself, in a
shithole and grinding a commission from these ridiculous sales can't be
easy money. Riding and blowing into an ultimately catastrophic bubble
is not, however, the work of a real man; parasite, carrion, call them
what you will, these people are Decency's nemesis.
The most agreeable of the bunch - and that's not saying much - was a studiedly eccentric public schoolboy,
Mark, plying his trade in the home of
the supercriminal, New Cotswoldia. I lived on the edges of the
Cotswolds, years and years ago, when it was a nice place; used to take
an old aunt-in-law out to Broadway or Chipping Camden for Sunday
afternoon tea, maybe a walk around the Rollright Stones, the locals
were nice, had lived and worked there for centuries. Now it's infested
with braying MediaMinster vermin like Jerry Clarkson and Rebekah Slag
and David fucking Cameron. Later, maybe twenty years ago, I had a mooch
in an architectural salvage yard near Broadway; they were selling,
inter alia, bits of common-ot-garden Victorian door furniture - hinges,
handles, escutcheons, catches and locks - for eyewatering prices. I
mean a hundred quid for an ordinary door lock. I had boxes and boxes of
this stuff, back in my own workshops, they were just reclaimed bits
of ironmongery which might come in handy one day; here, in this place,
they were stock-in-trade, the nouveau-riche Cotswoldian would pay almost
anything, hundreds of pounds, for what he thought was an authentic
replacement for his own rusty old lock. If he'd popped into my shop,
thirty miles North, I'd probably have given it to him. There is a
message here, I'm not quite sure what it is, something to do with what
happens after the goldrush, what always happens.
Mark, anyway, feels that he is at the
quality end of the parasite business. Drives around showily in some old
nail of a car, overdresses loudly and claims to personally know all the
houses, sorry, properties on his patch. He was vain, egotistical and an
arsehole but at least he was a qualified chartered surveyor, likely-
unlike Eilleen and Wotsisface - to know a gable from a gargoyle.
They were all equally grotesque, phoney,
stupid and self-obsessed; if they were professionals you might say that
they personified George Bernard Shaw's maxim that All professionals are
a conspiracy against the laity. But only Mark had any semblance of
expertise or probity; all of them were cheap hustlers, whoring their
arses off, red-lighting at different points on Money's Reeperbahn.
Fascinating stuff, worth a look.
ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME. POVERTY AMONG THE RICH.
The other series is Posh Pawn in which
people who - despite all the evidence to the contrary - consider
themselves rich must nevertheless strike a deal with old-fashioned
usury, the pawnbroker. In the cases featured in this episode all of
the borrowers were only borrowing, you understand, to kick-start their
brilliant business ventures, apart, that is, from Penury's sole
representative, a stupid totty who needed ten grand or so to pay-off her
late mother's funeral bill.
The pawnbrokers cast themselves more as
charity workers than money-lenders - the reality, of course, is that if
the pledge is duly redeemed they will have earned a tidy sum in
commission and if, as is likely, it is not redeemed, it will only have
cost them a fraction of its eventual retail value; heads they win,
tails you lose; that's the way it works and it was both sad and
irritating to see the self-delusion of the pledgers.
One guy, Chris, Chris
Used-to-be-Somebody, had a ludicrous business idea. He had invented, as
he put it, a kind of cinema usherette's ice cream tray but this was not
designed to hold choc-ices, it was to be worn around the waist of bar
staff whilst they collected dirty glasses, placing them into glass-sized
circular apertures in the tray before bringing them back to be washed.
It was shit design on a monumental scale. As anyone who has worked in a
bar will tell you, ten fingers will clamp ten glasses one to another,
five on each hand; alternatively six or eight pint glasses can be
stacked one inside another and carried nestling against the forearm, a
loss of balance or a slip on spillage is rendered somewhat safe by
simply dropping the glasses; Chris's round-the-waist tray was secured
to the wearer, a slip could prove lethally dangerous, who would want to
walk through a roomfull of drunks with glasses tied to his or her body?
Mind you, if Chris had any sense he wouldn't be hoping to launch his
wonder-product with the help of his local pawnbroker. He needed 25 to
50 thousand pounds, he said, for marketing his heap of shit to the
nation's licensed victuallers and so he dug out his Tag Hauer solid gold
watch and some of his mother's jewellery. Hoping for fifty, he settled
for twenty, bidding his watch and other bits not Goodbye but au
revoir. I know little about these things but the watch, in mint
condition with all the documents was clearly a collector's piece and so,
in the unlikely event of publicans not queuing-up to buy Chris's
suicide tray, I wouldn't be surprised if the solid gold Tag made the
pawnbroker six figures at auction, having allowed Chris about five and a
half grand against it.
Some other geezer had a brilliant business venture lined-up and he pawned his Ferrari
for a hundred and twenty grand; some former model,
the wrong side of forty, with a face, in
Warren Zevon's sardonic phrase, looking like something Death brought
with him in his suitcase, had, with some girlfriends, as she called
them, designed knickers which she thought would make them all rich and
she, too, only needed fifty grand to market her idea. In her modelling
days she had secreted away some goodies, bits of diamonds and notably
designer handbags, gifts from exes she called them, tactfully. Her old
Dad, enthused by his daughter's newfound business acumen threw-in some
of the family heirloom jewels, just to help-out his walking corpse of a
daughter.
There was an unintended hilarious scene, in which the pawnbroker's in-house handbag expert,
some old Cockney git who should have
found something better to do with his life took the handbags to
l'handbaggers handbagger, some old trout in a trendy store who knew
everything knowable about handbags, in order that they might lend the
client a fair amount on her Hermes bag (timeless, timeless)
but not so much on the crocodile job as the clasp was a little worn.
Fuck me, Jesus, that London, what a
place that has such creatures in it. What with Eilleen the gobby
strumpet, Darren the Eviction Enforcer and now this wretched old
haberdasher wetting her cheesy old knickers about a fucking handbag one
prayed, perhaps profanely, for another Great Fire or Black Death, wipe
these useless fuckers out.
Mrs Ishmael thought that the bint
pledging the handbags and diamonds was a ladyman. And maybe s/he was.
S/he was, after all, a friend, they said, of the pawnbroker-in-chief.
And nothing would surprise me about him.
She got the loan, anyway, fifty grand
and we must await shooting stars in the underwear firmament. If she and
her coven don't do it all on coke. I will venture that there is little
in the way of follow up on these, erm, these business ventures
It was probably the farthest thing from
the minds of the producers but there was a morality tale contained
within all this consumerist horseshit.
Stupid Totty had tendered her
grandfather's WW1 medals, hoping for ten grand, silly cow. In ordinary
circumstamces the pawnbrokers would've just laughed at her and sent her
packing but since this was TeeVee the Cockney, in-house handbag expert
said he would do some ree-surch, I shouldn't think he could research his
name and address but somebody, anyway, on the production team,
established that these were relativey unexceptional service medals,
given to any members of the then Royal Flying Corp who had been anywhere
near the Front. Stupid Totty's granddad had been a sergeant mechanic
and someone on the production team had obtained a copy of his service
record for her and a scene was constructed in which Mr Handbag strolled
up the path, into the gaff and revealed the truth about her ancestor
to the greedy bint. She had never looked around the edge of one medal
which was engraved with graddad's name and rank and she feigned being
thrilled at now discovering it. The valuation, said Diamond Geezer,
Head of Handbags, on the one medal, was four. Thousand, she gasped.
Pounds. And the other one? Ten. Ten Pounds. Lady Avarice put on a
brave show, insisting that had she known what the medals meant she never
wouldof thought of selling them, they'd just have to pull their belts
in, her and hubby, to pay for Mum's funeral bill, praps not go on
holiday so much. Cockney git actually had the cheek to say that it was
all part of the service, connecting customers wiv their families, even
if what they wanted to pawn was shite and a waste of everyone's fucking
time. Family, innit, 'swots important.
In a world less ruinously skewed the
medals would have been far and away more valuable than a few handbags, a
vulgar, gaudy pimp's watch and a more or less useless flashy
automobile.
Militaria, that's what they call it on Flog It and Bargain Hunt
with this insufferable arse
but that's just consumerspeak; they are
actually part of a sombre, national treasure. When those medals were
awarded the recipients were told all sorts of stuff about courage and
duty and sacrifice and patriotism, all of it now, quite literally, as
far as Money is concerned, worthless.
6 comments:
Oddly enough, my dog likes watching one of those daytime TV advertising shows we get down here. Takes it very seriously and sometimes barks approval - he particularly likes ladies underwear.
Harris doesn't care for the telly, he is more of a foodie. We just had some Evesham asparagus which he enjoyed. But not as much as he likes smoked haddock, mashed potatoes and cabbage. He does eat dog food but he prefers a well balanced proper human diet.
The arse in the last picture we see down here - I'd assumed he was a caricature of what the English think the Aussies think an Englishman is. No doubt we will get those other progs when they drop the price sufficiently for our public broadcaster to be tempted. TV down here must be the worst on the planet.
He is a caricature, that arsebloke, but he's making a fortune. I don't know if he is an expert or if it's all the work of researchers; he is certainly very nasty and it slips out now and again, he might, therefore, have slithered from the antiques trade which has more than it's share of the unGodly, Christies and Sothebys, to name but most of them.
When even Google are starting to buy London property as a means of fleecing the tax payer, well, it seems that the humble Landanner can go fuck himself should the prospect of home ownership be on his agenda - they're only voters anyway and fuck me, can't have them getting in the way of international money laundering - fuck, they'll be wanting other stuff too, i'd wager - some kind of human rights next, the cheeky cunts.
There need only be a few cunts like Fletcher and McKnight in education and health, which there are, and the whole shebang'll be sold off. Come the revolution there should be more than a few union leaders dangling from the People's lamp posts.
I remember reading Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian, years ago, saying that the probation service offered the only decent, human face to be found in the grinding behemoth of the criminal justice system. That was at the tail end period of the service's role being to advise, assist and befriend the outlaw, bring him back inside. Fuck me, Jack Torture couldn't be doing with that shit and now it's all gone; politicians and union leaders shitting on members and public alike. As you say, mr dtp, nothing must get in the way of GlobaCrime.