Walkers Customer Crisp Flavours Ideas that Didn't Make the Final Cut

I was intrigued by Walkers recent campaign for a customer-led crisp flavour competition, and subsequently entered some of my own ideas. Imagine my horror, my extreme mourning, the wails of agonised grief when none of my flavours made the final cut. Pain Hubris and vinegar Chaffing Ready Gritted The Broken Dreams of a Thousand Orphans and Mature Cheddar Arse and Elbow Cajun Fungus Thai Sweet Chilli and Sex Tourism Cock McFly Potato Shapes The Tears from Gordon Brown's Eye BBQ Burnt Hair Civilisation's Nadir Porn Cocktail Smokey Flesh Gout Incessant Unbearable Whining Yesterday's Kebab Morning Beer Mouth Shaved Pubic Region Pickled Mercury Tramp's Coat All I can summise is that Walkers are afraid to try anything new. Unless it involves Gary Lineker.

The Ugliness of Modern Culture

Susan Boyle. An unremarkable name for a woman with a powerful and melodic voice.

If you saw the first episode of the new series of 'Britain's Got Talent', you'd have witnessed the unedifying sight of a middle-aged Scottish woman amble modestly out onto a stage, in front of a crowd who were eagerly prepared to rip the stinking piss out of her, as soon as they'd appraised her appearance. Once she got her lungs into gear however, they were stunned into silence, presumably thinking, "Holy Ghosts of Mars, this lady can sing." They were as surprised as a cinemagoer would be to see Val Kilmer's facial expression of the last twenty years suddenly change.

Amanda Holden, the lady filling the role of 'the compassionate judge' turned on the tears, driven to them by the overwhelming sight and sound of a fairly plain looking woman singing well. The crowd and judges gave her a standing ovation for her performance, while secretly feeling like complete cunts for equating her looks with the expected inversely proportional quantity of talent.

A question - why would this sight drive someone to tears? Is being ugly the new autism? Is Susan Boyle an 'ugly savant'?

Somewhere along the line, and I'm not saying it's a new phenomenon, one of those strange unwritten rules was erm, unwritten, which states that 'ugly people can have no talent'. To be of less than supermodel looks and make it in today's showbusiness, you have to have an inordinate amount of talent, or appear on a reality TV show, or be a loud and vacuous polemicist.

And even if people of unglamourous appearance do somehow make it into the public eye, they run the risk of being patronised to death. 'Aw, the blind woman can sing', 'Aw, there goes the ugly bastard who can play a piano', 'Awww....Awwww...AWWWW.'

Still, I suppose it's better than being an attractive celebrity being harried at all hours of every day to satisfy the morbid curiosity of people for who's looking fat, who's looking thin, who hasn't got make-up on, who has cellulite, who has a spot, who was caught mid-blink and looks like they've had a massive stroke, and who is suffering from debilitating diseases. The obvious next step for these abysmal weeklies, is poublications devoted to highlighting particular 'flaws'.

When I see 'Celebrity Acnewatch' and 'Anorexic Rib Revealing Death-Verging Star Shots', I'll know it's time to do a Bill Bixby and hitch-hike to sad music up and down A-roads and motorways for the short amount of time before the planet finally gets bored of us and eliminates us.

And it'll be richly deserved, because let's face it, the human race and the noxious stench of modern mass Western culture have no place in a universe where we can view the ethereal beauty of a stellar nursery, of the divergent range of natural phenomona that the Earth has provided, but choose to watch '50 Celebrity Meltdowns' again instead. Hosted by Paul Fucking Ross. FFS.

Eggheads

Is there a more consistently annoying programme on television than BBC 2's 'Eggheads'?

It's hard to think of one.

The basic premise of the show is that a pub team of five friends challenges a team of 'Eggheads' who are former winners of other quiz shows, such as 'Millionaire', 'Mastermind' and the like. There are five rounds altogether, the first four of which are head-to-head battles between one of the challenging team and a nominated 'Egghead'.

The loser of each head-to-head battle is eliminated from the final group head-to-head, where the two teams go against each other for three questions each, followed by sudden death. A fairly bland, generic quiz format, if ever there was one.

The presenter is either Dermot Murnaghan, a fairly capable and affable chap, or Jeremy Vine, the Radio 2 lunchtime show idiot-baiting host, with a voice that can only be described as someone who sounds like they're permanently in the middle of having a particularly difficult butternut squash-sized shit.

The Eggheads look as you'd expect human encyclopaedias to look, and far be it from me to decry others' physical characteristics, but a couple of them wouldn't look out of place with pewter tankards full of home brewed mead in their hands, one of them looks a bit like Mackenzie Crook's tanned foreign cousin, another looks like a cards-in Women's Institute member and the last was the uber-posh winner of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'.

She was the lady who invoked ire from the angry uneducated masses because she didn't really need to win a million quid, but thought that she might as well, seeing as she knew a planetload of useless information. Fair play to her really.

On to the quiz then. During the one-on-one rounds between an Egghead and challenger, either Dermot or Jeremy will ask a multiple choice poser, and here is where the problems begin. Rather than simply answer the question, I can only presume that the Eggheads are encouraged (I resisted the urge to say 'egged on') to elaborate on their answer and make themselves look like massive cunts by elucidating at great length about why the capital of Peru is not Cerro de Pasco because that's a city in the Pasco region of the country and was formerly a great exporter of silver, and at over 4,000 metres up is one of the highest cities in the world.

The challengers then carry out the same trick, but, by dint of not spending their childhood reading Encylcopaedia Britannica and Schott's Miscellany every night, generally fumble their way through by excluding Chris de Burgh on the basis that he doesn't really ring any bells and Curtis Stigers is far more likely because the random firing of a few neurons in their tattered brainbox says so.

If you took out the stultifying banality of the contestants giving their answers in this way, the show would probably only last ten minutes. Which would be good all round, as that would be exactly twenty minutes less Jeremy Vine, and a short snappy quiz where the viewers wouldn't want to hammer nails through the eyes of each and every participant.

A severely strange aspect of the show is the giant screen behind each team. During the final round, the giant disembodied heads of the eliminated appear on the screen, leading to a surrealistic scene reminiscent of having really clever BFGs sitting behind the remaining contestants. See here - http://tinyurl.com/ck2fbp

I guess this blog is a really really long-winded way of saying that nobody likes a smart-arse.