The Hell of It All Read Online Free Page A

tabloids bang on about it, you’d have thought they were fearless campaigners for truth who’d never, say, take 25 photos of a celebrity emerging from a nightclub, select one in which their eyes are in mid-blink and their gob’s half-open (probably because they’re telling the photographer to piss off), then run it to illustrate a story about how drunk they are, because look, look, you can see it – those drooping eyelids, that dangling jaw.
    ‘We’re all worried sick about him – he’s on the fast track to an early grave,’ said a source close to the star (who can’t be named for reality-based reasons). Massaged reality is all around us. Although of course, since I work in both newspapers and television, you shouldn’t believe anything I say anyway. These aren’t even realwords. I filmed the individual letters two years ago, then edited them out of sequence to give the impression of an article.
    Right now, for example, I’m pretending to write about Heroes , which starts this week on vanilla terrestrial television following a wildly successful run on the Sci Fi channel earlier this year, and which I’d somehow managed to miss until now. In fact I know so many people who’ve already seen it – downloading it here, burning it onto a DVD there – I’ve sometimes felt like a Victorian gentleman who’s somehow beamed himself into the future and discovered himself to be a walking anachronism.
    And now, finally, I understand what the fuss was all about. Heroes is great: a sassy modern take on comic-book superheroes, clearly influenced by Alan Moore’s Watchmen . Nonsense, maybe, but hugely entertaining nonsense. Surprisingly grisly too.
    If you’re one of the three people who hasn’t already watched the entire first season on an iPhone or something, I won’t spoil any of it for you. But for pity’s sake do tune in, because it’s a beautifully assembled piece of popcorn fun – even though none of the actors have real superpowers, and apparently the words they’re saying are all scripted in advance, and they just turn up on set (yes ‘on set’ – those aren’t their real homes) and read the scripts out and pull faces that make it look like they’re experiencing real emotions and then it all gets edited together into a ‘story’, which the public buy hook, line and sinker. Man, it’s a devious world.
     
    – Despite my kind words here, the dumb- but- fun Heroes went all to shit in its second season. That’s life .
Charley Hoarse [28 July 2007]
    And on the 55th day, God sent a flood to destroy all of Britainkind. And Oxfordshire sank. And Gloucestershire sank. And the Vale of Evesham became a stagnant puddle with a few bits of roof poking out of it. And Sky News did sadly gaze upon the scene, running a Breaking News caption each time a lilypad floateth past, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, for even though this wasthe most boring natural disaster of all time, there was much ruining of carpet and wine cellar, and the people were greatly upset. And eventually God appearethed at a hastily-arranged press conferenceth and said, ‘lo, I missed.’ And God wenteth on to admitteth he’d been aiming for Borehamwood in a desperate bid to silence Charley off Big Brother 8 who, God explaineth, gets right on God’s tits with her constant bloody jawing, like.
    Deities aside, it’s hard to imagine anything that could shut Charley up. She’s the most boring housemate in the programme’s history – far more boring than the ones who spend their time moping silently in the background, like Thingytits from year two and Whatsisarse from year four, because she’s pro-actively boring. Unstoppably so. She’d cross a lake of fire to babble into your ear about herself for 17 solid hours.
    Charley’s name is fitting, because listening to her ceaseless self-centred rambling is PRECISELY like listening to a dreary cokehead chewing your ear off at 3 a.m. with a punishing soliloquy about what they’re