Tuesday 16th September – Bad Song Lyrics. Irony. Angus Deayton is a Prick

As a follow-up to yesterday’s sort-of poll, I would like to suggest the theme of worst song lyrics of all time. My first suggestion is an obvious but a worthy one. It is Des’ree, with the song ‘Life’:

‘I’m afraid of the dark
Especially when I’m in the park
And I’m all alone
Oooh, I get the shivers
I don’t want to see a ghost –
That’s the sight I fear most
I’d rather have a piece of toast
And watch the evening news’

That is pretty bad.

I would also like to nominate a song by little known R n’ B blandy Christina Milian. Here she instructs us in the folly of judging by appearances:

‘You look at your neighbour, thinking ‘what a guy’
Because he’s got a 9 to 5….
But you’re scared of that homeless guy
Think he’s gonna wanna start a fight
Never judge a book by its cover’

And I can’t let a topic like this go without putting the boot into constipated retro-fools The Stereophonics, whose ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ contains the line:

‘4 and 20 blackbirds in a cake
And bake them all in a pie’

I know they didn’t actually write this song, but by covering it, it is clear that they wish they had, which makes them even more ridiculous.

Tonight, after the Man Utd. Champions League match, ITV is screening a programme called ‘Posh and Becks: Reign in Spain’, which is to be presented by Television’s Disgraced Angus Deayton. I don’t like Angus Deayton. Not because he cheated on his wife, or because he snorts cocaine out of prostitutes’ bumholes (or because he apparently has some kind of horrible posho nickname for cocaine like ‘Colombian Happy Powder’ or something, according to Popbitch), but because he is desperately unfunny in the most English of ways.

On ‘Have I Got News For You’, he was alright, because he had an enormous team of scriptwriters grafting away in darkened rooms to come up with the most razor-sharp, topical gags for him to read from his autocue. However, on his ‘Auntie’s Bloomers’ shows and so on, he clearly has a far less reliable team of writers behind him, and has to fall back onto the negligible cushion of his own talent. A talent that amounts to little more than reading out bad jokes in a snooty, deadpan voice and the ability to raise one eyebrow slightly higher than the other.

Surely in any other country this man would be languishing in well-deserved obscurity. But we seem to have internalised as fact, in this country, the idea that we and we alone have the monopoly on the concept of ‘irony’. How we laugh at Canadian flailer Alanis Morissette’s flagrant misuse of the term in her bad-lyric contender ‘Ironic’. How we congratulate ourselves on the fact that, though we may be America’s embarrassingly servile lapdogs in almost every conceivable sphere, the Yanks ‘have no sense of irony’. Ha! Suck on that, you most powerful nation on earth, you.

Except - as with all generalisations about America - it is rubbish. George W. Bush might think that ‘irony’ is a quality associated with his freshly-laundered shirts (Ha ha! They have a stupid president! Kiss that, wealthy captains of global industry!), but you only have to watch programmes like The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle to realise that they (some of them) not only appreciate the concept, but are able to take it to comedic heights apparently beyond the reach of British writers.

Somewhere along the line, we have mistaken irony with sarcasm, and then mistaken sarcasm with sneering. Now any witless no-mark can compensate for a complete absence of a sense of humour by simply saying something neutral in a haughty Deayton-esque voice. Maybe this is why it suits the English psyche so much – this mode of humour allows you to put yourself above the subject of your sarcasm; to imply that you know something they don’t without ever having to reveal what it is. It fits nicely with the English sense of thwarted ambition – we SHOULD be the most powerful nation on Earth dammit! But it is too late – the world has moved on and left us bobbing impotently in its wake. So if we can no longer be the best or the brightest, at least we can sit carping on the sidelines, raising a stupid eyebrow and pretending we’re to cool to get involved, even though we could if we wanted to.

Thus, Angus Deayton becomes a popular figure, one that no amount of scandal can ever fully dislodge. Because he is the archetypal sneering Brit, who has appropriated irony and turned it into a horrible, witless parody of itself. Tonight, he will be shown walking around Madrid in a sunhat, and sitting in tapas bars while making crap, low-rent jokes about how common the Beckhams are. I am willing to bet that there will be a sequence in which Deayton offers Spanish translations for phrases his writers think are relevant to Beckham. Things like ‘On my head son’, ‘Over the moon’, ‘Where is my sarong?’, and ‘Do you served jellied eels?’ Prepare your sides.