Get Off Our Backs!
Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY
It’s not just you. People everywhere are feeling the infuriating crush of heavily regulated society, of ten speed limit signs every block you drive, of warnings to never smoke, don’t drink too much, watch what you eat, don’t put your rubbish out wrong, don’t drive so fast, don’t walk so slow, don’t buy this because some poor people somewhere may suffer as a result, turn off the lights, turn down the heat, empty your pockets, take off your shoes, sit down and shut up.
Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson wonders what has happened to all the mavericks and rule breakers in his homeland :
We like people who like to laugh, to have fun, to break the rules once in a while.
Trouble is, it’s hard to find people like that any more . . .
Imagine if we had someone like Winston Churchill in power today. A smoker. A drinker. A man given to Herculean bouts of depression. Under a hailstorm of criticism he wouldn’t last a week.
There’s a constant bombardment for me to sit up straight, eat my greens, comb my hair. It drives me mad. Honestly.
I fear for our future. I worry that bad behaviour is being erased from society, and that unless the trend can be reversed somehow we’ll all have to go through life on the Planet Stepford, a rictus grin masking the boiling turmoil of desperation inside. I yearn sometimes when I encounter a neatly stacked pyramid of tins of beans to push it over. Don’t you? Wouldn’t it break the monotony of having to drive at 30mph and eating a wholefood fair-trade sandwich at your desk.
And comes up with a solution in his pitch for the most shocking, confrontational and outrageous show on TV. Which will, of course, never be made :
Recently Annie Robinson and I dreamt up a TV show that would serve as an antidote to the endless parade of hectoring and finger-wagging programmes we get today. Instead of running down the street after a cowboy builder who’d charged an old lady a million quid to build a fireplace, we would go after the victims.
It was to be called Sucker and it would celebrate the ingenious while pointing the finger and howling with laughter at the stupid, the gullible and the fat. Never has the nation needed such a show more.
A TV show where you are encouraged to laugh your face off at those who have been screwed over, a triumph of the cunning over the not-so-bright.
Now what would that do to modern society? Something very interesting, no doubt.
