Breaking news
I get annoyed by lots of things. Some things shouldn't annoy you. Yes, I know, a footballer, with a dick, has split up from a singer, who doesn't have a dick; this is all tremendously exciting and intriguing for everyone, ever, because, as I've said before, news about dicks beats all other news. Would you believe it? People have sex with each other, and have relationships, and sometimes those relationships don't quite work out. Fancy that. If only popular culture could reflect these astonishing events, we might understand them a little better, these miraculous and bizarre things that take place.
It's annoying, of course, that it's all over the TV news stations now, and will be smeared all over the front pages tomorrow morning, and will be discussed ad nauseum by all kinds of awful bloggers, including me. It's annoying that it's a story at all, and that by saying you're annoyed by the fact that it's a story at all, you're adding to the noise and perpetuating the storyness of the non-story. All this is annoying, and yet I still continue to type.
And yet there's something specifically annoying about Sky's decision, above, to use the phrase BREAKING NEWS - in scary black-and-yellow, like it's a wasp about to buzz into your can of lager, or a strip of tape across a low-hanging beam that you might bump your head against while you're walking upstairs, or something like that - about the story. Because breaking is pretty surely what it isn't.
I am no English teacher, and I'm not entirely sure about the grammar of this whole situation, but there's something particularly piquing about the use of the present continuous - I think I'm correct with this, but no doubt I'll be set straight if I'm not - to describe this. Is the story really 'breaking'? Is this news 'breaking'? Surely it has broken? Cheryl and Ashley have called it a day, haven't they? She's not still in the process of telling him, is she? It's not as if this took a lot of time to happen. They were together; now it's confirmed they're not. It's not breaking. It's done, finished, behind us.
Oh you can try and pretend, as TV news and so on do, that there's still something to eke out of this, like a ketchup bottle turned on its lid in a student kitchen, but there really patently isn't. They were together; now they're not. Something has happened. I thought that was what news was? Apparently not. We have to pretend that there are things still going on, stuff still to be learned, so this can be spread out over hours and hours of pointless bastards gassing away on news programmes talking about what might happen, who might do what, how people might reflect on all this, who's going to take sides, who's going to be on Team Ashley or Team Cheryl - maybe they'll drag one of them in to be made to cry by Kay Burley. Who knows? More to the point, who gives a shit? I don't. It's done now, can't we talk about these things as if they've happened, rather than they're still happening. They're not.
The present continuous* just lets you know you're heading into a world of giddyingly vomitous crap in which this bloody story will never be left alone; in which this event, insignificant in all our lives though it really is, is stretched out into some never-ending poxy saga in which we learn nothing new about anything ever and discover that, yes, the thing that has happened has happened, and now we're left gazing at a bunch of flowers by the side of the road, pretending that a car crash is still actually going on, right in front of us.
Please, can it end? Will it end? When can we start talking about this as if it took place in the past, which it did? When can we start getting on with our lives without these two fuckwits looking a bit glum in photographs on our front pages. Ooh, I wonder why they're glum - couldn't be anything to do with the fact they've got half a hundredweight of sweaty photographers pointing massive fucking cameras in their faces as they clamber all over their front gardens and bellow at them like they're performing fucking seals? Surely not, surely not.
No. We're stuck with this. Stuck with this, in the never-ending present tense that stretches out to the horizon and never diminishes. This endless bloody story, dragged out until we're sick of it, until it's rammed down our throats and we choke on it - except I'm sick of it already. Make it stop. Make it be in the past. Please. Someone. Make it end now.
* I think I dislike this tense for another reason. It's the one in which computers talk to you. "Loading..." they smarm at you, when they're quite obviously not loading anything and are just pottering around, making whirring sounds and blinking a bit, like the lazy bastards they so clearly are and always will be.
News about dicks
Dicks sell papers. News about dicks might not be as important as, say, news about real things happening somewhere, but dicks sell papers. You have to bear this in mind.
Take Tiger Woods. Yeah, fine. Second most successful golfer in history. Talented sportsman. But... when he stopped swinging his golf club and started swinging his dick, it all become much more important. All of a sudden it was a real story. Who wants to read about some dull guy plodding up and down a bit of mown grass in a brightly coloured jumper? I mean, hello! But using his dick, to do the things with his dick that dicks are designed to do...? Ah. Now that's public-interest news at its finest. Yes, he has a dick. Yes, he does dick-things with his dick. He uses his dick to have sex with. He probably uses it to have a piss with as well, though we don't have any independent clarification of that. But that's not the interesting thing to do with a dick, is it?
Not a massive revelation, you might imagine, given that the continued existence of the human race proves that quite a lot of men know how to use their dicks - ah, but, you see, it's all about money. Money and dicks. He has a lot of money, and he has a dick, therefore his dick is more important to know about than, say, my dick or your dick, or, if you don't have a dick - and you're probably better off in so many ways if you don't - someone else's dick. His dick and his sponsorship deals are inextricably linked. If his dick doesn't do what it's supposed to do, that money doesn't go to him. Money and dicks. That's the real story here. How doing the wrong thing with your dick can lead to you losing millions of dollars. It's a dick lottery. It's a big one-dicked bandit. Pull the dick and see if you're a winner.
Tiger started this latest wave of dickmania off in the papers. Dicks have existed sime time immemorial, but there was so much interest in his dick and what he'd done with it, that it began to create a big Tiger/dick monster that sold a hell of a lot of papers and got a lot of clicks on the web. There were, it turned out, only a finite number of women who had experienced Tiger's dick, but no matter: thankfully there are a lot of other dicks in the world, and quite a lot of them belong to men with money.
Money and dicks. Bear that in mind, because that's the justification: this man, with a dick, doesn't want you to know about what he does with his dick, and he's got money, and it's probably because he's worried about his sponsorship deals, really. I mean who doesn't want everyone to know what they and their dick get up to? None of the rest of us mind, do we? It must be all about the money. And therefore, by revealing John Terry, or Ashley Cole, or Tiger Woods, or whoever, as someone who does stuff with his dick, the papers are actually exposing them as a hypocrite, and the public have a right to know because imagine if you bought a fucking razor but you hadn't realised that the man advertising it had done something with his dick you might not approve of, what then? How can we possibly make informed brand choices without knowing the status of the dick of all the men involved in recommending these products to us? What if their dicks have done stuff we don't think they should have done, but we didn't know because the press weren't there to tell us? We could be buying all sorts of replica sporting equipment or bottles of brown sauce and using all kinds of consultancy firms and stuff... and there where would our lives be?
Dicks sell papers. Not just crappy papers, the ones we laughably dismiss as tabloids. Dicks sell the big boys' papers too, although they pretend that they're merely reporting on the media storm which already exists, and which was nothing to do with them. How can they ignore it, they ask, and shrug. I don't know. Maybe nothing else is going on in the world. I mean it's not as if there's a war or anything, with dozens of innocents being scooped off the roadside with shovels all the time, is it? It's not as if soldiers from this country are coming home in zip-up bags every week, is it? No, the activities of dicks are the only important things out there.
It may only be me. I know a lot of people really do see these things as being important. And I feel I must at this point explain that I don't want stories about dicks banned. You say that you disagree with anything nowadays and someone will tell you you've tried to ban it. No, not banned. I just wish that newspapers were grown-up enough to not give a shit about dicks. I wish we were grown-up enough not to give a shit about dicks. I wish we were more interested in things other than dicks. But what do I know? It would appear that we are obsessed with the bloody things. We're a nation of people giggling in the shower.
You could say it's news about dicks, written by dicks, and read by dicks.
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Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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