BEST BEFORE: DECADE

What a decade. The bad news is that it will descend further and we’ll all be ageing while it does.

It’s been a crap decade partly because of the following;

RISE OF THE CHAVS

Imagine the film  'Terminator 3-Rise of the Machines' and substitute it for chavs. It’s a terrible vision of the future isn’t it? And it’s been here for a while already. Chavs aren’t distasteful label whores like Daily Express/Mail believe. They can’t afford labels, often getting knock off’s from the market. They don’t work, are largely unemployable, are often off their faces on any number of drugs or cheap cider, have bad teeth, skanky and manky, wear baseball hats (still), are fond of striped tops and tracksuit bottoms, can often be seen in council estates with their council faced girlfriends, love what they call hardcore music, although they’d as would we, be hard pressed to recognise and identify track names or writing credits. They might occasionally splash out hiring a stretch limo (you know the type, with the phone numbers advertised all over them. Like anyone IMPORTANT ever uses a stretch limo!?) ASBO’s are a badge of honour as is the signing on book. A chav is not so much a lifestyle choice as a way of life but some of them can choose to try and leave it behind.

THE AGE OF SELF ENTITLEMENT

Sex and The City. Meism. Parent’s with 4X4’s who want there best for their kids not because private schools are necessarily better serviced but because they don’t want their kids to mix with chavs (because they might enjoy mixing with chavs), just in case they get chav diseases such as swine flu and sars and aids and them kind of things. I don't Julie Burchill was the first hack who wrote stuff as if she expected us to actually care about her life but you can't move for bloody coloumists in the weekend mags that come with the newspapers. I don't give a shit what Zoe Williams thinks about cyclists in London or what that Mary, Queen of Queens (or whatever she's bloody called) woman thinks about David Cameron no more than you give a shit what my views are on self-entitlement or meism. So because of wank TV shows, every knob and her one armed mother has a right to be famous. You don't have to be a generic singer, shag John Leslie or be a middling dancer anymore. Fame is a right. And everyone deserves what they get.

THE CELEBRATION OF THE STUPID

Jade Goody became in some respects a poster girl for the stupid and ignorant and the media loved her for it…actually they hated her for a while and took the piss but when enough arseholes hung around the Big Brother house in support of her, the media couldn’t help but fall for the minger. It was amusing to view the spineless arseholes who slagged her off practically forming a line around the block to eat her shit. But the stupid are all right. If you’re stupid you can have a career in radio and television, you can have your own youtube chanel where you can dance like an arse in your bedroom and unconvincingly lip sync to bad songs. You can even write a bitter blog, you can join a forum for people who like generic emo music, where you can encourage each other to self harm, you can create a show called Loose Women, where the only thing actually loose about it is what remains inside their skulls. You don’t need an education. You don’t have to be able to write to put out tediously forumulaic novels, you just have to have been in a soap or got you sex video online, shagging someone, or be the poor offspring of some daft Irish prick with a mediorce music or a wasted football career. You can even be the president of the United States because your fellow stoopid yanks will endorse you. If you’re stupid you will be trusted to run organisations that love bombing innocent people because you’re dumb enough to believe in something with no basis in fact or because your followers are too daft and backward looking to interpret ancient books and beliefs that profess to be about love. If you're  too stupid out of laziness then get outta my face. If you've squandered your opps like fuckhead Doherty, then stay outta my way. I've no respect for you. Euthanasia is the best thing for you.

COMEDY BECAME UNFUNNY

I used to enjoy Little Britain. But after about three weeks I realised that I was getting the same jokes, the same punchlines and it wasn’t as funny. Then they made another series…and another one…all with the same forumula. And it became fairly hateful. That kind of sums up BBC/E4/ITV’s sense of humour this decade. It became less about quality control and more about milking it…and of course the dullards at home who had forgotten how it could be, didn’t know any different. That’s why Peter Kay is a success, it’s why people think Frankie Boyle has an acid like wit, why inoffensive Russell Howard gets his own show, why Michael McIntrye can sell out arenas. Britain’s brains haven’t had much excericise in the world of comedy. Like pretty much everything else in this decade it’s easier to get the quick watered down fix. Pointless watching Izzard, it’s too much to take in. And he's gone off the boil as well.

REALITY TV/BAD TV

Big Brother, The X-Factor, Doctor Who…I can’t go on…I’m tired. Just look at the parts I've written above. It's all related.BBC 3/ITV1 and 2. OK?

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Good or bad? As with everything once it's abused or infected with stupidity and dumb ass people using it to say how pissed they love getting, how great their lives are, when they're getting pissed up again, the best time they got pissed up, the evidence to prove that they got pissed up, then you kind of want to put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.

BLAND MUSIC

2000 was really the birth of the likes of Jo Whiley championing mediocre music such as Coldplay and David Gray although I’d been initially suspicious when a year or so earlier she was acting like fucking Gomez were the saviour of British music. This continued with The fucking Hoosiers and Scouting For Girls or what we call 'comical indie'. 'Landfill indie' is soo 2007 and the kind of crap John Harris would come up with in his fashioned moody pose. How could popular British music really get better when the whole Britpop toss a few years earlier had been set as a laughable benchmark for quality. In 2010 things are still disappointing. Oasis are still inexplicably seen as relevant and the NME are still hyping anything slightly lo-fi, mock punk based and pretend angst ridden from the US. (Most of their recommendations don’t amount to much and yet they present themselves up as tastemakers) Mika's rubbish. Florence and the Machine has replaced the space left by Dido, surely. Even 'urban' music, which in the distant past (I'm talking the 1980s) which could be pioneering was rather dull. Sure you had some good moments from Dre, Eminem and Jay Z but this only spawned Timbaland-lite shit like the Black Eyed Fucking Peas! No hope there as well. Pop music? The demise of the charts, singles? Oh it all happened...not I think because of people's access to free music on the internet but because there was nothing worth buying in the charts! Anything decent either wasn't actually getting played on the radio or was shoved into niche programmes. We lost John Peel as well which is a big loss to anyone who actually cares about music.

LONDON/ NATHAN BARLEYS

The only people who actually love London are those with disposable incomes, who live in a stylish, secure area, hermetically sealed, go to daft parties, bars, restaurants and gallery’s without actually doing a real day to day job…but in the ‘noughties’ a term I still hate, London is still the centre of the universe. The dubious capitals of this London are Hoxton/Shoreditch and Primrose Hill. Now despite the TV show 'Nathan Barley' being a poor and disappointing effort, you do see Barly types bloody everywhere because they look ridiculous. In Manchester we have the morons in the 'Northern Quarter'. Far from the being the height of fashion, culture, music and urbanism, they look like transexual gypos, a parody of themselves. Everyone in this world has a haircut that would make Russell Brand blush. Presumably Russel Brand and Nick Grimshaw are worshipped as some kind of Barleyesque gods. They're harmless enough even if they look like clowns.

THE POLICE STATE

Are we there? I tried to change my bank account in 2002 and all I got, because I didn't have the exact information to the letter was  'ooh since 2001 everything's changed' as if I was supposed to react 'well that's understandable'. So what legacy has 2001 attacks on the US, the illegal War in Iraq left us with? I could be petty but the truth is actually petty. There's more redtape when you want to travel...all this ridiculous bollocks about what you can or you can't take. Even local councils abuse the anti-terrorism laws to penalised its tax payers for all kinds of stuff they never used to give a shit about...and I don't know if it's true, but I read about it the other day, some idiot has even had his tweet reported because he made a joke about bombing an airport because of the bad weather and he was collared and held by the cops (who knew full well he wasn't a terrorised and hadn't actually comitted a crime). So the web is being watched, keywords being flagged and we're being held accountable for semantics. The next ten years won't fare better, I fear.

 POOR JOURNALISM AND ESSAYISTS

This decade, largely because it’s sense of ambition, execution and acceptance of things of any value were of such a low standard, also mirrored but continued a decline in journalism in so called ‘serious’ media. See Zoe Williams, Deborah Orr, Jan Moir, Quentin Letts. Peter Hitchens, Deborah Ross, Johann Hari, Peter Robinson, Conno McNichols, Tania Brannigan, Rod Liddel, Jess Cartner Morley, Aerial Leve. I know that they’ve had much of my bile this year but they can at least take comfort in that they are more well known than many, many other coloumists that deserve this accolade.

METROSEXUALITY

This was the decade where for about two minutes another pointless lifestyle trend was promoted. Basically men decided to have a wash (and stay closet crossdressers) So what? There was also a shit Channel 4 series with the same name as well. Really shit.

RECEIVED OPINIONS

Everyone was a national treasure in this decade. Big Brother and Eastenders is like Chekhov. Or so says received opinion. No.

In short Orwell was right.