International hugeness (a sort of 2012 review)

“Well, everyone, prepare to get your guts kicked out by folk singers…” (Hello!)

Green! Wow! Cool! So, you’re probably right busy just now, giftwrapping the turkey and removing the giblets from the tree and all that, but I’m sure you’ve got a spare five minutes/hours/days in your holiday period to let me belch out one more package of text-based ineptitude. This being thankfully my last big noise of the year of the year 2012, I’ll take the opportunity to get even more reflexive than usual by doing what appears to be a review of the past months gone by, picking back over my previous blandish radiocasts to upend my thoughtbox and see if anything relevant to history falls out, and if so in what order. And remember, if you’re turned off, turn off!

I do appear to have been stuck in some sort of juddering loop this year. I’m in much the same position, if not worse off, now than I was at the end of last year. And I’ve been whining about my lack of forward motion quite a lot – though the amount of time and effort I’ve put into jobhunting has thankfully meant these starchy bleats have only appeared about once a month, and my use of Twitter has declined to almost nil thanks to the ropey browser on my second-rate stand-in of a phone. I’ve genuinely tried to better myself and move forward, and my continued rut-sludge has become increasingly frustrating and fractious: I’ve had to build in breaks to my jobsearch to allow me time to recover from the shakes, setbacks and struggles which have become increasingly likely in the way I live. I haven’t really been able to move on and frustratingly it’s not entirely my fault – I’m doing the forms and interviews as set out by the employers, but when it comes to time to make their choice, the employer is often passing me over in favour of taking other action – which in one memorable case this year was to go into administration days after I applied to work there! Aside from the work worry, I’ve also been taking on more duties at home, and have as a result had to spend practically every other day rushing around a large supermarket, a requirement which, when combined with my jobhunt requirements, has meant that I haven’t had any time for relaxation or fun this year: the fact that my sole holiday trip of the year was a couple hours in a Stratford shopping mall suggests I need to treat myself more nicely in 2013. I have been rushing around in a stressed panic to such an extent that I barely know which way is up; I haven’t had time to stop and smell the flowers – literally; one of my many regrets this year was my wrongheaded response to a friend’s kind and polite gesture on my birthday, way back in March, to send me a bunch (if that is the word) of beautiful cut flowers. I became so obsessed with caring for the bouquet that I spent large swathes of their glory days rushing around various local homeware stores buying plant-related gubbins in order to try and nurture them, not realising that I was missing their brightness and beauty by being out of the room. During the period of silly panic I did look up Wikipedia information on cut flowers in a rushed attempt to find out how to look after the poor blooms, and realised with tears in my eyes what sort of limited shelf life flowers enjoy after being separated from the main plant. I did, once I knew how to, try to tend to my beloved gift, and they ultimately had, for cut flowers at least, a fairly good innings; I wish I could manage my own decline in such a caring way!

Elsewhere, many of my posts here in 2012 featured repeated and recurring worries, fears, obsessions and triggers, that kept bouncing up onto these pages – though sometimes my treatment of these individuals or concepts would pendulum from positive to negative, or vice versa, or even back and forth, based on my thoughts, feelings and opinions at the time, and often abetted by media coverage. Shouting at (or, more accurately, about) the telly has long been an obsession here, and maybe if there’d been more good stuff to watch, in what was a pretty shoddy TV year outside of sports events, I would’ve had more opportunity to be entertained rather than annoyed. Aside from that, for some reason I suddenly got stuck into a loop of waffling on about Woolwich for no apparent reason, having plucked the town from my memory, seemingly at random, having at the time not been there for a long while (I have since returned, though the new Tesco is big enough to give me the supermarket shakes!) I’ve also had to dodge the media nonsense flung at me by the ever-grabby and grubby media. I have realised one potential reason why I’ve allowed showbizzy nonsense to intrude too far into my life, and the penny dropped when Ceefax bit the worm recently with digital switchover. Back in the day, or in the late 90s and 00s period between getting a teletext telly at home and the services stopping, in any case, I used to start my day, whilst getting ready for school/college/convincing myself life is worth living, by reading the intelligent music and games journalism delivered into my home at the touch of a few buttons by the likes of Planet Sound and Digitiser. However, I no longer have this available to me, and whilst having the mobile web essentially brings Ceefax-style push-button access to a cut-down version of the news, my clanky current phone can’t work many sites, and one of the few which does function is hateful showbiz tripesite Digital Spy. There isn’t a WAP equivalent of Planet Sound, unless Drowned In Sound or NME or someone starts doing some kind of quick-access, stripped-down, daily-digest news-site, and the mix of news, analysis, opinion, criticism, pig-based insults, snake raps, Inspector Morse jokes and references to Mr T’s bins that the now-a-decade-gone Digitiser once provided isn’t, as far as I can see, replicated anywhere. I did enjoy Digi’s mix of information and entertainment in my youth, much as I enjoyed the similar mix of proper pop DJ links and comedy skits proffered by Mark and Lard on Radio 1 around the same time; now, instead of being informed and entertained by my media choice, I have to put up with what I’m fed, which is increasingly a breathless bellowing of massmedia nonsense about celebby transients who matter little in the grand scheme of things when you really think about it. Still, at least Paul “Mr Biffo” Rose is still, much like I am now, sat around writing, now penning the actually-good CBBC sitcom Dani’s House, something else which has had more mentions than merited on this mauve page, and which stars the genuinely-gorgeous Strictly finalist and former Tracy Beaker star Dani Harmer. And I’d much rather read about Harmer’s exploits than some of the stars who’ve been foisted down our throat this year.

Rihanna, for instance, has barely been out of the media spotlight all year, as her continuous heavy-rotation presence in the spotlight really began to grate – it got to the point where you couldn’t open your eyes and/or ears without having that still-very-young Barbadian barraged towards you, either through one of her overplayed music videos (Chart Show TV’s three-hour all-RiRi marathon being the thud at the bottom of that particular barrel, a slot scheduled to please advertisers, onanists and chavvy teens – in that order – but with no recourse to the feelings of actual music fans) or through her constant hovering around the gossip pages thanks to her much-gabbed-about (even on here) on-or-off love connection with Chris ‘Punchy’ Brown or her increasingly-racy photoshoots and self-shots which always get the grubby media salivating, and contribute to the overall air of tackiness and tawdriness that surrounds it all. You didn’t see the pop stars of the 90s behaving this sleazily, at least not in public (though as we discovered this year, the celebs of the 70s were into acting the dirty way, they just chose to do it behind the studio doors.) Maybe this is just a sign of how desensitized and sexualised we’ve become in the internet age; see also the inescapable Kardashians, whose dominance of TV and, oddly, the Daily Mail website (despite barely meriting a mention in the printed paper) is driven by the sisters’ presence in the world of fashion and pop culture, despite (or perhaps because of) Kim’s rise to internet fame when a raunchy video of her bedroom activities with R&B swordsman Ray-J (brother, should it matter, of fellow singer Brandy) appeared on t’web. I’m not certain that sort of behaviour should be celebrated, but then I grew up in an age when the likes of Ceefax wouldn’t have had the bitrate for that sort of nonsense. That said, my comforting-women siren was set off briefly when curvy Kim revealed to the press, during one of her many appearances in the public media, that her partner Kanye West (she loves her music men, does Kim) wanted her to slim down and starve herself such that she would be skinnier. And that’s despite his famous interruption of the waiflike and beautiful Taylor Swift at an awards show several years back to effuse about the videowork of Beyonce Knowles, a lady, like Kim, famed for her badonkadonk, apparently! Anyway, I decided on this occasion to pause my bellows that 4Music should replace her shows with Vic & Bob/Adam & Joe reruns solely for my benefit, and instead took a moment to advise Kim not to let a man bully her and instead to be comfortable in her own body. Speaking of 4Music, there’s thankfully still no sign of Friday Night Project reruns on that gunky pink channel this festive season, perhaps wise given what Justin Lee Collins was convicted of this year, though shamefully at the time listings mags were printed Pick TV was still planning to fling on some Oops TV as a timefiller over the holidays. After widespread condemnation of his rumoured involvement, JLC was forced to issue a statement denying he would be taking part in the sadly-soon-to-return Celeb Big Brother, but those rumours were perhaps started by a Channel 5 desperate to find something for their golden-handcuffed Bristolian to do given all his past shows for the network have flopped horribly, and all his future shows hopefully will too. Nobody has a right to treat a lady the way Justin did.

Yes, I always say nice things about women, even the Kardashians when necessary, and this desire to protect a lady’s honour is perhaps why I’ve taken more interest than I should in the romantic machinations of the aforementioned Rihanna, perhaps in concern that not-entirely-a-mastermind Brown may again revert to his aggressive ways should they shack up again. Maybe it’s not my place to get involved: Ms. Fenty herself seems willing to let the past be the past and made reference to Biblical verse on forgiveness when challenged on the matter by those who can still send messages on Twitter. I also continued to show love this year for a certain Unnamed Woman I have been fond of for several years now, but whom in a self-imposed ban I have decided shall no longer be named by name on here simply in an attempt to avoid sounding obsessed and vulgar. This lady has been quite influential on my life this year – she has released two helpful, uplifting books, for instance – and is returning to Channel 4 with a new programme next year (though sadly there is no sign of any rerun of her prior shows over Christmas on TV, so it’s off to 4oD I must send you); however, it’s clear that this lady no longer needs me in her life – she has a boyfriend, a charity to run, and is planning to move on with her life and activities, regardless of whether I’m still clinging to her hull or not – when asked during a publisher-sponsored Q&A session on Twitter recently what her next big goal was, an apparently-broody Unnamed suggested it was to become a mother (though one feels maybe this is one of those things she should run past her boyfriend first, before declaring to the world online…) Indeed, the fact her Twitter page has switched from a personal conversation to the commercial property of her publisher suggests this lass is trying to move away from one-on-one communication and hide behind the corporate protection afforded to those who find themselves famous. No wonder I cannot talk to, or even mention, her anymore – we’re on different levels now, she heading for the bright lights and chandeliers, me still stuck in the same muddy gutter I’ve always been. I’ll never be a father – I don’t have the health, energy, wealth, responsibility, tolerance, patience, balance or girlfriend necessary to spawn progeny – and now I’ll probably also have to change the name I’d planned to give my never-to-be-born daughter, having previously planned to use Unnamed Woman’s surname as a first name (which, like in some other names such as that of actress Ms. Perabo, it can also be used as) for any girl propelled from my potential partner’s loins. But this year I also noted how even those stars younger than me were moving on with life at a faster pace than I: I noted that two of the five beautiful ladies who form The Saturdays were now married, with one now a mother and the second this year announcing a bun, only to have her thunder blown out the water soon after by another expectant mum (of whom more later).

I’ve devoted a with-hindsight-unlikely volume of this violet gabble to girl bands this year as it goes, and one notable example of a pop outfit over whom I’ve changed my own tune during the course of 2012 is the X Factor-generated all-girl combo Little Mix. Twelve months ago, whilst not myself a viewer of that music-crushing behemoth of a TV series, I had been burned quite badly mentally by the humungous volume of media hype and counterargument that had meant the show and the behaviour of its performers – and judges – had never been far from the top of the media agenda, and quite frankly I was almost literally ill because of it. Little Mix were one of the victims of my tiredness and sickness – amid all the hooha about their original name, Rhythmix if you don’t recall, being ‘stolen’ from a charity, I decided I despised these girls, seeing them as all that was wrong with the Cowell-dominated, money-first-society-second nature of media today, and deciding that their name woes – and their apparent demolition of Cannonball, a Damien Rice song I’d previously liked – meant I couldn’t like or support them. I started to lash out at them, and as a non-viewer this was before I’d even heard them sing a note! And I cheered the Christmas chart which saw the ‘Ball deposed by the astounding Military Wives. But over the subsequent months, somehow the foursome won me over. Maybe it was because, once Cannonball was out of the way and they started to do songs that had actually been written for them, they started to look and sound more like an actual pop group – never one that would challenge, say, British Sea Power or the Cooper Temple Clause for my affections, but a perfectly acceptable substitute for the now-long-in-the-tooth likes of Girls Aloud, the previous watermark for ladybands emergent from these kinds of telly show. Maybe my ice-heart towards LM was also melted by the fact that the girls have been open about their body worries – as I mentioned in the Kardashian-led paragraph above, I want to be the knight that explains to a lady she’s beautiful the way she is, and doesn’t need to change anything about herself. Jesy has become something of a hatred magnet online, with many foul endusers making unnecessary cruel taunts about her figure and appearance despite the fact that the lady herself actually has a perfectly acceptable and natural body; Jade also voiced concerns about herself, this time claiming that, compared to other girls – including Jesy, as it goes – her figure wasn’t curvy enough – again wrong, Jade’s in lovely shape, and the fact she’s often seen with purple hair elevated her quickly to the rank of my favourite Mixer. As it happens, since last I posted on the subject of Jade another member of the Mix has experimented with violet locks, and so if you thought the previously-blonde Perrie couldn’t become any more attractive (to me at least), it seems you were wrong – with lilac hair she’s more stunning than an entire busload of Pixie Lotts. With Jesy having also been spotted sporting a touch of mauve amid her hairs on occasion, only the also-gorgeous Leigh-Anne needs to pick up the dye (if she hasn’t already done so) and we could well have my ultimate pop dream – the first all-purple pop band! OK, so from above they’d look like a pile of Quality Street, but given that a year ago I wouldn’t have used Little Mix and the word ‘quality’ in the same sentence I think we can say for once I’ve moved on and improved.

Conversely, over the years my opinion of Little Mix’s XF mentor Tulisa has worsened. I mentioned recently how I’d been looking back over some of my 2006-10 posts from my old blog in an attempt to potentially make them available on here somehow, and something which appeared among the noise thereon was a kind of radar-tracking of the rise of urban-grime trio N-Dubz, who during my earlier period of bloggage rose from a tinny little local concern to proper big actual stars, and I commented on how good it was to see an original British act pulling themselves up from street level rather than being dumped into sudden fame by some kind of telly show. But fame changed the three: Dappy’s litany of vile behaviour is well-documented, and the grotty Tulisa – a woman I once, perhaps wrongly, described as ‘talented and attractive’ on the old blog – has devoured the trappings of fame (among other things), appearing as judge on that hellish pop-reality chod The X Factor (seemingly in a bid to pull in young, urban viewers and ensure the output of the contestants matches the moronic noise that’s in the charts), popping up online alongside her then-partner (or part of) in a filmed-some-years-prior video giving headline-writers something to crow about, and getting involved in all manner of media spats – even with her now-former fellow N-Dubbers – all of which has meant that Miss T has never been more than a moment away from the media circus, and has, rather ironically, somewhat been rammed down our national throat this year. And to cap it all her sextape costar has, like JLC, been approached by the too-scummy-for-words Channel 5 to appear in Celeb Big Brother (though in this case Tulisa’s lawyers pointed out he’d been banned from going on reality telly under the terms of his legal settlement with the singer.) It’s been really gruelling to see someone I used to admire riding roughshod over my previously-positive image of her, but them’s the breaks – and as a self-confessed indieboy, I gambled on a brief flirtation with the urban scene and lost bad, so perhaps it’s partly my fault for ever liking her in the first place. Maybe I should stop feeling so sorry for myself and instead look for new heroes, but they’re in pretty short supply in a music and media world dominated by the Drake/Rihanna/Chris Brown triangle and the X Factor mediachoke. As I’ve said frequently I don’t watch X Factor, but feel pressured to keep up with what’s going on because of the dominance these folks have in the muso-media spectrum. I don’t particularly like banging on about XF here, as it goes, but at this end of the year Cowell and his footsoldiers make it their business to ensure the public have little else on their mind. X Factor people have wormed their way into my life with increasing and potentially alarming intensity – the moment that spooked me the most and had me asking myself all sorts of questions was the day when, on scanning through the magazine section of a shop, I spotted a blonde singer on the front of some teen mag and, unthinkingly, thought to myself, as I addressed each mag cover in turn ‘…and that’s Amelia Lily…’, before halting myself to question (a) whether I’d actually got that right in the first place – a closer inspection of the mag’s coverlines confirmed this – and (b) how I’d managed, as a non-X Factor viewer, to spot the lass so effortlessly without prior prompting. Amelia – who, along with Karen Gillan’s now-former Doctor Who partner Ms. Pond, has been credited with a revival of interest in the name – has this year begun to release her own pop records, in her case with a dance twist, and looks like giving Pixie Lott and the like a run for their (well, technically our) money.

It’s been a fairly strong year for X Factor people, as it goes – JLS have continued their strong run of success in the crowded boyband market, and one of them is, as mentioned above, now hitched to one of the Saturdays in what must have been the teen-pop wedding of the year. Misha B – slammed during her series as a bully in tabloid hate-stories I’m ashamed to say I swallowed wholesale – has unleashed her own tunes, and they’ve shown quite a range, from the dubby, clubby ‘Homerun’ to the soaring, soulful ‘Do You Think of Me?’, suggesting she may over her career proffer a similar musical spread to the late Whitney Houston, one of the notable stars we lost in 2012, and whose credits also ran from the funky (‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’) to the ballad (‘I Will Always Love You’). Olly Murs has absolutely nailed the cheeky-chappy persona down to a T, and has been the star of several of the more entertaining music videos of recent times (my personal favourite of those available being the pelting-through-a-shopping-mall-in-pursuit-of-random-babe film for ‘Oh My Goodness’ – tip: videos with a Segway in will always score extra points), clips which hark back to the days of the Chart Show when pop acts put a bit of effort into their films rather than just going the route of most artists today, simply shouting in a modified car while girls in bikinis prance about aimlessly. Speaking of videos, Jedward, previously dismissed as a joke act, pulled out an unlikely ace with ‘Luminous’, a proper actual club banger (which the twins described themselves as an attempt to be a bit David Guetta, perhaps wise when the French DJ has lodged himself a near-permanent residence at the upper end of the chart) accompanied by an arty, hi-tech video the likes of Empire of the Sun or Friendly Fires wouldn’t be too ashamed of. (I should point out I was into Guetta’s sound decades before it became cool to be – I bought, on CD which tells you how long ago this was, the original, pre-The Egg version of ‘Love Don’t Let Me Go’, which means I am actually cooler than today’s teenagers!) Elsewhere, Marcus Collins brought out a cover of the White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ which has actually been mentioned on here before – I mentioned how the completely-different-to-the-original production, with Ronson-style synth horns, gave a totally different take on the tune from what had gone before, and mentioned that I actually like covers which put a different spin on a song, be it A Day To Remember’s punked-up resing of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since U Been Gone’ or Scala and Kolacny Bros.’ choral workovers of, amongst others, Foo Fighters’ ‘Everlong’. I even recalled buying Eliza Lumley’s album of Radiohead covers back when a dying Zavvi was flogging off whatever it had left. And right at the end of the year, sometime Gorillaz sparring-partner Daley (from off of ‘Doncamatic’, if you’re struggling) teamed up with Jessie J for a rather unique take on The Blueboy’s rave classic ‘Remember Me’. Yes, ‘geng-geng-g-geng’ bits and all. And yes, as male viewers will note, the non-Buxton-partnering J. Cornish (as was) looks ruddy mint in the video, if we must dwell on looks (and the media insists we must, even though I’m certainly not one of those fools who’s all about the b-bling-b-bling), to the shameful extent that, on first viewing of the clip, I didn’t actually recognise her until her name popped onto the infobar at the end of the vid.

And then there’s the seemingly-unstoppable One Direction, storming the charts not only here but also in the US, soaring like a knife through butter in a market where many British artists, including much more ‘serious’ acts, have failed to take flight, and securing themselves star-name girlfriends much to their teen fanbase’s consternation, one lucky 1D sod dating the now-lilac-barnetted Perrie of Little Mix, and supposed swordsman Harry siring seemingly an array of ladies, apparently including Xtra Factor host Caroline Flack, before setting his sights on young and rather pretty US country-pop belle Taylor Swift. Jammy git. Anyhow, it’s too early really to tell whether any of this year’s crop will go on to international hugeness, though apparently-oily Katie Price-inspired Rylan Clark seems keen to cling on to fame and become a ‘brand’ in his own right, which means he should be particularly tough to avoid in the coming months; after surviving the vote by the skin of his teeth in controversial circumstances during the show’s first week, Rylan subsequently secured enough support from the public to keep him buoyant for several more weeks, causing much consternation when apparently-more-polished performers were being scooped out of the contest whilst Clark survived. Meanwhile, the apparently Cowell-despised Christopher Maloney stormed the public vote for seven consecutive weeks, before ultimately being unseated by eventual victor James Arthur (who for some reason has been coerced into singing an R&B track by a non-Rihanna Barbadian chanteuse as his first single, though admittedly that’s no odder than Little Mix doing ‘Cannonball’…) However, Maloney’s apparently been given the chop from the XF tour after supposedly disgraceful behaviour toward Rylan’s first-week victim Carolynne Poole. How much of what was reported was fact and how much was bad blood it’s impossible to tell, but crooner Maloney’s successful run is apparently a sign that XF, having earlier focused on the young pop audience, has recently been viewed mainly by older viewers, a move assisted both by young people moving on to other media and X Factor itself shifting to a later slot to avoid clashing with Strictly Come Dancing. The move away from clashes has benefitted Strictly more than it has XF – now people can watch both, Strictly’s figures have improved, whilst X Factor’s have fallen over the years, a major embarrasment for the once-swaggering Cowell machine; this has perhaps spurred Cowell on to plan a back-to-basics relaunch for the show, which could include changes to the judging panel or to the format of the show. One thing that’s definite is that in the run-up to the relaunch, the tabloids and gossip websites will be packed almost daily with a ‘will (name) leave?/will (name) be back?’ conjecture that’s likely to become very tiresome. But the noise won’t stop – Cowell loves it when his shows are in the papers, even when it’s bad news – as it keeps the X Factor brand’s media dominance alive. Maybe I need to accept that the sort of entertaining media I like is never coming back – urban grime, showbizzy slime and the Cowell mafia have the mass-media sewn up almost to the total exclusion of any other voices, and I have to accept this is the way things are now. 4Music isn’t for the Adam & Joe/Mark Radcliffe/Digitiser-idolising likes of me, it’s for the modern teens whose tastes stretch from One Direction to the Kardashians, and if I don’t approve of that angle there’s little to nothing I can do. I could, of course, continue to support the few alternative options which remain available *cough*6 Music*cough* but I guess I’ll just have to get used to being on the cultural backfoot.

One thing this year that may well change what’s printed in the papers and mags in future was the Leveson Inquiry. Set up in the wake of the 2011 fallout from the News of the World hacking scandal, this year saw the first stage of the probe concluding with the publication of Lord Justice Leveson’s leviathan of a report into the culture and ethics (or, increasingly, lack of ethics) of the press. I won’t reprint the entire wodge here – most of the news sites have done fairly concise summaries of what emerged – but it was corroboration that the press, or elements thereof at very least, have engaged in avaricious pursuit of scandalous and salacious stories, often at the expense of decency, dignity and occasionally the law, in an attempt to keep pace with online rivals who have eaten away much of the traditional straight-ahead news market. The reckless behaviour of those in the media is no real surprise – anyone with more than an ounce of nous would have been able to figure out themselves that what the press-pack were up to didn’t always sit right – but the question now is how do we fix this? There’s ongoing debate in politics and the press over the future of media regulation, a discussion which will spill over into the other side of the Christmas recess, and there is still contention over whether, as posited by Leveson, new legislation is wanted or needed to provide a statutory spine to the will-be-protected-either-way freedom of the press (paper barons and PM Cameron don’t want legal underpinning for the new regulator, whilst other MP’s call for Leveson’s request to be implemented in full.) The fact is: the press have failed in their duty and misused their existing freedom. Whilst the media should never be under the thumb of those in power, and should be able to hold public and political figures to account, the media as currently constituted has played fast and loose and the chain needs to be yanked back. We need to protect the freedom of genuine, quality journalism, but what if that also means allowing freedom for the gutter tripe who base their presses on the showbiz trash and often resort to dirty snoopery? It’s a really tough call to make – we need to stamp out the slimy, scummy behaviour which has soiled the name of the British press, but how do we do that without curbing proper journalistic investigation at the same time? One organisation which was little tainted by Leveson but which has had its own scandal to cope with was, of course, the venerable and yet also vulnerable BBC. Whilst their Olympic coverage was more well-recieved than much of the pre-transmission mithering would have had you believe, there were several more bulletholes made in the increasingly-fragile body of what was once our national broadcaster. The weather-hampered, error-strewn, Fearne Cotton-assisted coverage of the Jubilee undid much of the good work the Beeb had done in its coverage of 2011’s Royal Wedding – the disjointed attempt to appeal to the very young and old alike by hybrid inclusion of everything from boat pageant to Horrible Histories skits (well, skit – the Beeb was slammed for dumping several sketches by the well-regarded stars when the running order went to pot) and sick-bag reviews didn’t come off well, with viewers furious at the tone and manner of the coverage, which was given an unexpectedly grim pall by the grey rainclouds which, whilst not physically the Beeb’s fault or something they could fix, dominated the coverage.

But worse was to come at the end of the year when it emerged that some of the Beeb’s stars back in the 60s, 70s and 80s may not have had the noblest of intentions, and may well have been abusing their position to feather their own grimy nest with the crushed dreams of the young people they apparently molested during the course of their career. I was not involved in any of this – indeed much of it occurred before I was born – and I don’t condone this, but, unaware of what was happening behind the scenes, I supported these monsters’ careers, blithely watching Top of the Pops, Jim’ll Fix It and the like and just assuming at the time that these were simple light entertainment shows, not knowing what was going on once the closing credits had clattered down and the cameras been powered off. And the BBC’s news department was quite non-John craven about the whole situation throughout its history, refusing to blow the whistle on one of their own, and whilst those who worked with Savile during his Beeb tenure had inklings as to his dark majesty – Radio 1 then-head Derek Chinnery probing briefly the gossip around Savile back in the 70s, and taking as gospel the DJ’s denials given the lack of hard proof – the true extent of Jim’s urges didn’t start emerging from the woodpile until an ITV documentary in autumn 2012 finally gave voice to those whose whistleblowing was silenced by Newsnight. The recently-completed review into the whole mess found that, whilst there was no truth to the oft-held suspicion that entertainment heads got News to quash the story to protect warm tributes to Savile aired last Christmas (and which, shamefully, I watched), a lack of effective communication within the BBC and a degree of animosity and silo mentality between departments and individuals, coupled with the complex reporting-up and management structure of the unwieldy Beeb, led to a large-scale confusion among staff, confusion which only got worse when, with many senior people stood aside or in acting or dual positions amid the Savile fallout, a Newsnight keen to rebuild its own reputation broadcast a report which, whilst not directly naming the individual, implicated a senior political figure in historic abuse, only to subsequently find that the report was built on a years-old error – the victim had been mistakenly told by police that this peer was the abuser, and had then given this information to the reporter, with the identity of the attacker not double-checked before the allegations were broadcast. The already back-pedalling Beeb, whose new boss George Entwistle had barely got his feet under the Director-General’s desk, was forced into further convulsions and Entwistle was self-elbowed, with a controversially-high payoff, less than two months after arrival in the big chair. This mess did lead to questions about the future of the BBC and whilst my fearful, height-of-the-crisis suggestion a couple months ago that the whole edifice could collapse and be broken down appears, for now, to be unfounded, there will certainly be further timidity at the already-weakened Beeb which still has skeletons in its closet – a report into the culture of the Beeb in the Savile years is set to ‘drop’ in the new year, and may well unearth further political landmines in the floor of the soon-to-be-vacated TV Centre.

Whilst the BBC itself is, at time of writing at least, still going, some parts of the corporation have been sent to Coventry – something innovative and rarely harmful that came out of the 70s, the blocky-but-beautiful Ceefax, left us this year, departing with the digital switchover (leaving my London-area transmitter in April and killed off altogether when Northern Ireland completed the switch-off map in October) and BBC One will no longer be going after kids – no, that’s not a Savile gag, I mean programmes made for children will no longer be part of the main channels and will instead be exiled to the digital CBBC and CBeebies channels now that, with digital platforms live, anyone who can get BBC One can also get the kids’ channels, which allow more flexibility as to scheduling than a block wedged into a general-audience channel can, and broadcast in dedicated, identified kid-friendly walled-gardens of the onscreen channel guide, where the shows for young’uns don’t need to butt against shows which may be less suitable. BBC One will still air shows aimed at families, but the death of CBBC on BBC One – six years after ITV1 killed off weekday CITV in favour of their own cheap digital channel – ends something that TV had been providing since back when I was a lad; I grew up in the 80s and 90s and this was a boom era for kids’ TV – prior to this, according to websites I’ve seen, kids’ shows existed (Blue Peter, Newsround, Magpie, Rainbow, Play School et al) but were often just wedged into regular schedules with no real thought to any dedicated presentation. That changed in the mid-80s when ITV decided to introduce networked specialised presentation links as Children’s ITV, followed in short order by the Beeb shipping Phillip Schofield into a continuity studio to marshall the similarly-skewed Children’s BBC service. Over the years, the studio facilities and presenters accorded to each service changed and evolved – sometimes reducing (in CITV’s case cutting back to voice-links only for a time in the 90s), sometimes expanding (CBBC gaining its own fiefdom in the hallowed Studio 9 on the roof of TVC around 1997, and also gaining a BBC Two breakfast berth) – but the core idea of providing a range of material for kids, from drama and comedy to fun and games, and from animation to factual features – continued to thrive as generations of kids came home from school to enjoy a couple hours of made-for-them entertainment ahead of homework, dinnertime, primetime family telly, and then bed. The fact that the vast majority of schooldays were just that is the reason I can’t write an autobiography, there just wasn’t enough variation in my activity! But that was the media world we lived in in the years before the internet and digital media meant we could watch, within reason, whatever we want whenever we want to – now, if you want to watch kids’ TV at midnight or intense sexually-explicit drama at 3pm, you can, you slimeball, thanks to iPlayer, YouTube and digital channels. People just don’t have the same experience growing up today as we did when I was young, which is why in 20 years’ time there won’t be sites like TV Cream – there won’t be enough people with shared collective memories, as we today live in an age where we can have whatever our heart desires on tap, and fie to the schedulers. That said, the TV companies love slapping themselves on the back, and ITV is celebrating 30 years since CITV in its block-on-ITV1 form was introduced with a special documentary over the New Year and a weekend of retro shows, many of which I remember from my CITV-watching years, in early January. Puddle Lane, based on the books I loved in my tothood! The Raggy Dolls, which taught us about acceptance and tolerance decades before Unnamed Woman embarked on her …Beautiful Friends series! Spatz, for burger-flippers’ sake! This is gonna get CITV Channel its best ratings in years! Even I’m gonna watch the bugger! It’s just a shame that outside of anniversary time ITV seems content to sit on its archive and just roll out Horrid Henry on a loop – some kind of ‘CITV Classics’ strand on the regular schedule could get kids watching with their parents as both enjoy the shows – parent from their own youth, kid being introduced to the show anew – and that kind of shared experience is gold-dust in our ghettoized, suit-the-individual culture.

Away from the TV screen, as I have been since my bedroom telly blew out after 16 years, there has been little good cheer in 2012, as you’ll know if you’ve bothered to read my halting treaties on news events, heavily weighted towards death and disaster, within my wider whine-posts. If some poor soul’s life is devastated enough for their calamity to feature in the newsmedia, there’s a chance that it’ll fetch up in my field of vision and contribute to my unbearable heartache. This year, one common theme which has recurred and devastated many parts of Britain is the destruction wreaked by the weather. It’s been a wet year, as anyone who bothered to watch the Jubilee coverage will not need reminding, and in both summer and winter we’ve had reports from right across the country of homes and businesses being washed away (sometimes quite literally) by rushing water as sodden rivers burst their banks. Mere weeks after Thames Water launched a marketing campaign urging London scum to watch how much water they used, some higher power decided to foist upon Britain more of the wet stuff than we’d ever need. Crops were reduced to slush, leaving less-than-perfect pickings for the supermarkets that have driven so many stores out of business, families were left wringing out the remains as a lifetime of memories sank into the sludge, and the gush seemingly didn’t stop, Cornwall basically being washed away this very week, meaning many people’s Christmas celebrations have, perhaps literally, been washed out of the window. I’m always uncertain what to do in these sort of situations – I don’t have the power or money to be of any practical help to the disadvantaged, a claim I have made repeatedly on this and the earlier blog since 2006. So instead I sit helplessly by and weep as I watch Britain drown, crippled both by worry for those afflicted and rage at my own inadequacy. Mind you, those who do have money and power haven’t always got a blemish-free record: this year the likes of Starbucks, Google, Vodafone and Amazon among others were slammed for their tax payments (or lack of), amid suggestions that if these firms paid up properly, the Tories’ scything cuts to public budgets could have been lower. Starbucks in particular were being crafty, slipping UK income to international subsidiaries such that its Brit operations were technically lossmaking and therefore subject to a lesser tax burden. Indeed, many of the firms implicated in the scandal have the benefit of international operation – the mostly US-owned (Vodafone is European) companies can pool incomes and shuttle balances around the globe to land in whichever domicile gives them the best chance of keeping profits in their back pocket and away from the grab of the taxman. This is perhaps how Amazon has been able to offer such low prices on CDs and drive the likes of Zavvi, MVC, Music Zone, Fopp and nearly HMV out of business, pulling CDs and to an extent DVDs off the high street pretty much altogether. I must again admit some TOTP-like guilt in this program: I have bought from Amazon before, again mostly on cost ground – my copies of all three of Unnamed Woman’s books came through the post from the ‘Zon rather than book-in-hand from a Waterstones pretty much purely for the discount I could get on an early preorder. I won’t be spending much time in Starbucks, though – I’m not the biggest fan of coffee, and for the price of one of their probably-needed-in-this-weather hot drinks, I can get an entire lunch from Boots! Some individuals’ tax arrangements also made the headlines this year, perhaps most prominently comic Jimmy Carr, though here at least he took the upbraiding in a classy way, taking his medicine on 8 out of 10 Cats and adding gags on the subject to his act. This ability to roll with the punches means Carr hasn’t been harmed too badly overall by the situation, and as he himself pointed out in Cats’ own end-of-year review, there’s a Jimmy off the telly who’s been found to have done much worse in his offscreen time…

With this being a jubilee year, you’d expect the Royal Family to have been in the headlines, but their coverage (or in some cases uncoverage) this year was even more deranged than could have been expected. Of course there was the furore over Harry’s naked antics in Vegas (Las, that is), and this perhaps illustrated how frustrated the mainstream media is by the explosion of unregulated online content, the Sun eventually breaking the unspoken embargo and printing the shots. No British papers printed the grubbily-grabbed long-lens shots of the Duchess of Cambridge sunbathing on holiday, but again the shots were widely circulated internationally and online, leading to much consternation around intrusion into the couple’s privacy and debate around how much of it people in the public eye can or should have. There was better news for William and the former Kate at the end of the year, when it was confirmed – earlier than it usually would have been, due to Catherine’s hospitalisation – that the Duchess was up the duff. There had been masses of wild speculation in the months since their wedding, of course, and the baby news was set to give the midmarket papers something to coo over, until the story took a much darker turn. The news that a lady who had, up ’til a couple years ago, been working for Jigsaw, and who in her childhood presumably assumed as pure Disney fantasy any suggestion she’d one day be birthing the third-in-line to the throne (in the process shunting her hubby’s brother down the queue), made headlines around the globe, and when the gen reached Australia a then-little-known-outside-Oz DJ duo (‘MC and Mel’, if it matters) decided to set up a classic radio crank call. Now, this was slightly off-colour to begin with – if someone high-up in Aussie culture was seriously sick in hospital, would, say, JK and Lucy ring up the hospital? It’s unlikely – but the prank phonecall is an established part of radio output so the Aussie hosts pressed on. Ringing through at 5.30am UK time to the hospital treating Kate for severe morning sickness, and posing as the Queen and Prince Charles, the presenters were put through to the relevant ward and pretended to ask after the Duchess’ condition; the call was then given the green light for broadcast by 2Day FM’s legal high-ups, and once word got out the call went viral, causing a media circus which dragged the DJs into the spotlight and, tragically, led to the duty nurse who’d answered the phone and passed the call onto Kate’s ward being found dead, leaving suicide notes, perhaps ashamed she’d let the scam call slip through the net on her watch rather than protecting the patient under her care. The nurse’s teenage son and daughter will be left living without their mother, whilst MC and Mel – in interviews seemingly shellshocked their simple gag had led so far – have been tainted to the extent their careers may never recover. Amid the sorrow and bad feeling, many stations over here stripped crank call-ups from their line-ups, until the dust has settled at least. But this case was certainly a reminder that sometimes things can spiral out of control and have effects far beyond what was intended. I’m quite timid when it comes to doing anything risky, for fear that I may cause unintended effects, and this timidity is perhaps holding me back in life. But I won’t be making unnecessary phonecalls to hospitals, even if I do somehow end up as a radio DJ, a career I sometimes wanted thanks to my former love of music. There have been other bad tidings emanating from hospitals over recent times – you’ll have seen my rants here this year about abusive staff as exposed by Panorama, and my continued hatred and animosity towards the bilepit that is Stepping Hill Hospital, which always gets a kicking on this purple page despite (or perhaps because of) the fact I’ve never required medical treatment in the northwest. Recently we’ve seen the case of a young cystic fibrosis sufferer being given lungs taken from a heavy smoker, with her subsequent death leading to criticism of the use of ‘dirty’ lungs in the transplant process; and there’s been slimy crime in hospitals themselves, with light-fingered yobs helping themselves to presents intended for kids at both Great Ormond Street hospital in London and the University Hospital of North Staffordshire – though in both cases, donors have replaced the lost toys. How deep in the gutter must someone be to steal kids’ gifts from a hospital? There’s some real scum still sloshing around the streets, and there simply aren’t enough prisons in Britain to hold them all. I did once suggest turning Bluewater from a shopping mall to a prison, ripping out the shop units and replacing them with cells, and now I’ve applied, mostly without success, to work at most of the shops currently there, it’s no longer of use to me as a mall, so perhaps this conversion is the way to go. Maybe I’ll fire up the JCB once it’s back from flattening Stepping Hill… Speaking of vehichles, there has been a seemingly endless parade of death and chaos on Britain’s roads this year: thankfully incidents were on a much smaller scale than the mass pile-up which tainted the M4 forever late in 2011 (to date the organiser of a nearby firework display, who like MC and Mel was presumably unaware of the devastation he was about to cause, is the only person to have been charged with any offence in connection with the chaos), but there’s still far too much death and injury on the roads, the sheer number and frequency of incidents meaning I can no longer write about cases individually on this blog (though one nasty case just days ago was a death when a car collided with a bus stop in South London’s very own – because nowhere else would want it, presumably – Streatham.)

Looking internationally, however, there have been cases which have grabbed global attention because of the needless loss of innocent young lives. In contractually-obliged-to-be-descibed-as-war-torn Afghanistan, nine young girls out collecting firewood for their families were wiped out by a landmine, the latest casualties of a seemingly-endless procession of conflict in the middle east (though David Cameron has at least agreed a timetable for the withdrawal after a decade of Brit troops from the country.) These girls’ deaths were little more than a footnote in most newscasts, however, due to events in Newtown, Connecticut, USA. A man so deranged and vile he doesn’t really deserve to be called a man killed his own mother at her home then descended upon the school where she worked (and where he himself had once been a pupil). Recognised by staff, he was let into the school and there the carnage really kicked into terrifying gear, this monster unloading his rifle into twenty innocent kids, all aged just six or seven, and six adults in the school before turning the weapon on himself. One true hero of a teacher, according to the sombre front page of the following day’s Independent, laid down her life to save her class of 16 tots, hiding the kids in a cupboard and taking Lanza’s bullet after telling him the kids were in the gym. Only the quick thinking of other staff – shepherding their young charges to safety when they heard the gunman’s rampage over the school PA system – stopped there being much more widespread bloodshed. This truly terrible act set the tone for the closing stages of 2012: how can we be truly happy this season when dozens of families who had seen their loved ones head off to school will never see them return? It’s certainly one of the most shocking and wanton acts ever to have taken place in a school, and perhaps inevitably invited comparisons to the similarly shocking attack on UK soil which forever tainted the tiny Scottish area of Dunblane back in 1996. It’s worth pointing out that even now Dunblane is spoken of in hushed tones, though the Daily Mail was perhaps rightly slammed for its needless whinges about the supposedly-wrong behaviour of the now-in-their-late-teens survivors of the Scottish atrocity posting updates about their drunken party antics on Facebook. Y’know, like almost all people in their late teens do. Regardless of that, one thing the Connecticut case did raise in the news was discussion of the mental condition of the gunman, and it can’t have been normal given what he did. I’m aware that those who have mental health issues need help before they overwhelm the sufferer – as someone who’s not in the best of nick myself, and who spends a lot of time around the fellow afflicted (on buses, at the library, at the TC) I know there’s a danger that mental unwellness can lead to societal damage, and I’m shocked by how violent and frustrated I have been – thankfully usually towards myself and the underpowered, trashy computers rather than any of my fellow unemployables – during my often-grim Wednesday visits to the TC. Indeed, one horrible dream which has thankfully yet to become reality saw me flinging myself around the TC building and bellowing, like a wheezy, bearded Mitchell brother. One problem is I really don’t communicate enough – I don’t talk to my family or the jobcentre about how truly ill I am, and aside from these spurts of lilac gibberish mainly suffer in silence. I badly need a rest, but am not in a position to have one – as mentioned above, a couple hours’ wander round the too-far-to-get-to-daily Westfield Stratford is what counted as my holiday this year. I haven’t watched any movies this year, the only time I stepped into a cinema being for a failed job interview as I attempted to broaden my horizons beyond the defunct retail industry. I haven’t made enough time to sit and listen to the radio, and as a result good tunes and quality commentary, should any have existed, may well have passed me by. I’ve virtually stopped listening to whole albums, instead having to squeeze a few tracks here-and-there into the short gaps in life in which I have a few minutes to sit down. I haven’t read any proper books in a good while, which stood me in poor stead when I applied for work in one of the few remaining book stores, and Unnamed Woman’s selfhelp and affirmation tomes aside, the only books I’ve read lately have basically been printouts of the sort of ponk that floods the internet – silly signs, daft misprints and the like – which again I squeeze into available moments whilst not doing other stuff. I did try to expand my literary horizons this year by buying cheaply a preowned copy of not-actually-a-book DS cartridge ‘100 Classic Book Collection’, only to accidentally smash my DS – in unthinking conjunction with my brother – before I’d had a chance to get my teeth into any of the ton of tomes. I really am at rock bottom and, whilst I have social sense enough not to actually pull trigger on another being – after all, perfectly symmetrical violence never solves anything – I don’t know how much lower my mojo can go.

Maybe I should stop taking things so badly. Every knockback I get is like a bodyblow, no matter how used I am to recieving them, and I’ve become resigned to the fact that it’s probably too late in life for me to be successful. I somehow waddled past the 30 mark this year despite my decaying health (some people wake up thankful to a higher being that they’ve survived the night; I often awake quite frankly surprised that I have done so). In the kitchen, the stress of cookery pressure means I get quite giddy at times, and am never sure whether to take the microwave’s vibrant beep as an insulting, arrogant dig (along the lines of “Get your ugly butt over here, you slag”), or a cheery warning from a helpful friend (“The food I’ve carefully and lovingly cooked for you is ready and prepared, my hungry chum!”) I’m alone and unable to even recieve help with my shopping, leading to gibbering and shaking at the checkout; as the years whizz by I become increasingly mottled and unattractive, to the extent that no woman intelligent enough to appear beautiful to me would actually agree to serve as my partner; and I have no real plans for the future, given I’m not entirely sure, given my present predicament, that I have one. I’m too timid and risk-averse – I avoided Woolwich for over a year following the devastating riots, only returning when circumstances (and the job centre’s desire to piss me about over my bus pass) required me to hoik myself off there, and I often stick rigidly to the regular stuff when out shopping. I have now calmed towards Woolwich enough to return there when necessary, and I am looking to become more adventurous in my food choices – I recently took up the offer to buy lemon, and later strawberry, mousse to serve as my dessert in place of the more-usually-purchased chocolate flavour (though I accept that having a dessert at all marks me out as some unthinking, uncaring capitalist pig.) I’ve also tried to experiment with cheeses – not in a filthy way, get your mind out of the gutter, I mean trying something other than the cheddar I’d usually pick up: at Christmas I often have Applewood, after seeing it positively mentioned in passing a magazine somewhere, but that’s basically smoked, flavoured cheddar. But one day, on seeing the various forms of cheese lined up alongside the cheddar whilst on a supermarket giddy-run, I decided I’d experiment with other forms of cheese to see if I could find one to mix up my cheeseboard a little. Wensleydale I found a little too clunky and moist for my needs, though my brother likes it (and will often bring home a block for his own consumption completely unprompted). The next one I tried was Double Gloucester, and I loved the creamy taste – though as my first DG experience was with an onion-and-chive assisted truckle – and there’s a first, I’ve never bought myself a truckle of anything before – I’ll have to see if my response is the same when confronted with a regular workaday slab of the stuff. And then there’s other cheeses yet for me to endeavour upon: whither Cheshire? I do spend a lot of time in the supermarkets, as I have a ‘mail must get through’ mentality when it comes to serving my family – they are reliant on me to safely and successfully get food home to keep them going through the day, and if the scran is lost or damaged in transit (or indeed I am) I will have failed as a son and supplier. It’s not easy when I’m having to contest with frequently mucked-about bus travels – it does appear that in around October/November time, TfL were carrying out some kind of unpublicised experiment to reduce the frequency of buses in my area – and having to dodge my fellow customers to get the items required. Christmas shopping wasn’t much fun either. There have been an increasingly-high number of instances where I’m flailing around a store muttering to myself “It’s just [name of shop or town], it won’t kill me, it’s fine, remain calm…”, though that in itself probably doesn’t leave shop staff and fellow customers with a good impression of me. I even had a breakdown when I arrived for a job interview and couldn’t rouse any of the overworked staff to alert them to the fact I was within their store! Didn’t stop the same firm somehow inviting me back for exactly the same interview a week later, though. And me being mental in supermarkets when required to deliver on my promises is nothing new – remember last Christmas (“Where are the cubes?”) Maybe cube-gate came back to bite me this summer when a yogurt I was buying from the same store burst in my basket, slurrying-up my new jacket in the process and making me look like I sexually molest zoo animals – or perhaps that was a revenge act for having bought the jacket from a rival superstore whilst in a different location a couple weeks previously. But I have, when not scraping spilled yogurt off myself, been thinking a lot about trust, loyalty, responsibility and care. It goes back to those flowers I mentioned earlier – I became so obsessed with caring about them that I forgot to simply sit and admire their beauty. I feel a failure for the occasional mistake – when my weak new phone failed to correctly identify a Thursday and set the alarms off on the wrong day, I missed a bin day, thus causing all sort of waste-based panic, and feeling I had derelicted my duty (though ruining the previous phone I’d entrusted myself with by allowing it to be rained on during Bexleyheath’s unlikely monsoon season and not packing the thing deep into my pocket at the first sign of drizzle was probably in itself a dick move.) Everything comes with ‘care instructions’ these days, even a can opener; maybe I should be more friendly to these devices and less furious with them when they fail to do their duties (I’ve bought three tin openers this year, ranging from a cheapjack £1 bodgejob with a too-weak hinge to a massive weighty purple-handled old beast: between the three of them they can almost open one can.) Sometimes I can be too caring – in attempting to handle my DS gently to avoid adding to the damage my brother had already done, I held the device too loosely and ended up accidentally killing my innocent game-playing friend. Or maybe I attach too much personality to these things. How do I walk the fine line between ‘uncaring’ and ‘oversensitive’ without looking like a bland dweeb? That’s one question it seems I’ll never answer satisfactorily.

I am aware I am very up myself. Despite not having done anything worthy of the channel myself, I still aspire to have a ‘BBC Four girlfriend’ – that is, one who’s talented, peaceful and intelligent, rather than the orange-skinned, silicone-filled slime you see on a depressingly high number of channels these days (ITV2, you created a monster…) But maybe I’ve been too dismissive of the lower classes. After all, the often-mocked-on-here-for-filling-up-4Music-with-their-reality-shows Kardashian sisters are miles more popular and successful than I’ll ever be – I struggle to get work as a shop assistant and I’m supposed to be one of that! – which suggests the K-named crew are in the right and I’m wrong, very wrong. I’ve also been behaving shamefully this year, spending so much time wobbling around in a panic and dragging myself through the motions that I’ve had very little chance to move forward. I’ve also abandoned the lovely people who’ve been helping me out over the last few years on Twitter, though in that case it’s for technical reasons – my sludgy new phone can’t do Twitter properly, so I’ve had to largely stay away. I’ve lost some good friends because of my mobile-based incompetence in the last quarter of 2012, and if you’ve come over here from my Twitter page I’d like to apologise to you. I’ve even been wrong about someone I like, assuming Unnamed Woman had given up on me when in fact she’d simply moved on with her life, getting a boyfriend and focusing on the future and cutting out of her life the unneeded slime that keep eddying around in their own rut (hi) and are thus of little use. I’ve spent too much of the year living in the past – listening to 80s and 90s music for much of the start of the year, perhaps in retaliation to the N-Dubz/Rihanna/Drake et al dominance of the modern scene, and latterly watching the likes of Bob’s Full House, Fawlty Towers and 3-2-1 in preference to more modern entertainments as conveyed by the Strictly/X Factor/Voice/BGT axis. And in what must be a misguided attempt to reconnect with youth, there’s no other explanation for it, I’ve loved CBBC’s retro-tastic series 12 Again, which tries to put vintage concepts – everything from communism and famine to Abba and Ghostwatch – into a modern context. Although presumably the recent episode featuring Lostprophets’ Ian Watkins has been ripped from iPlayer never to be seen again, given recent news. And let’s hope none of those invited to relive their youth on the series had ever said “The show I remember from the year I was 12 was a thing called Jim’ll Fix It…”  Anyway, I’ve spent too long trying to regain the past. It’s not coming back, the heroes we once had are either deceased (poor Sir Patrick Moore, one of the heroes, and not just for his turn as the GamesMaster back when Channel 4 used to show programmes that weren’t The Simpsons…) or discredited. Sometimes heroes are reborn – ITV brought back less-tainted-than-the-other-side dream-maker show Surprise Surprise, though a modern equivalent featuring Holly’s sparring partner Keith Lemon, Saturday night series LemonAid, mainly got slated for giving away a puppy and is thought unlikely to return. But perhaps I should live more in the present or even the future – if I keep looking backwards, either at our cultural history or my own life, it’s only going to be ever more different to move forward. I’m still not fully versed in new media – my YouTube page is only used to watch what Cassetteboy or Unnamed Woman have uploaded recently, I’ve not managed to fart out any videopodcasts yet, and as mentioned my current mobile is more smartass than smartphone. But perhaps there are changes I could make. I’ve been listening to Adam Buxton and Edith Bowman’s recent run on 6 Music – they introduced me to Haim, for one – and if time allows I’d like to spend more time sat soaking in that salvaged and surviving station’s mixpot of musical genius. Also, whilst flipping around the FM dial one night, I randomly stumbled into Mark Radcliffe’s Tuesday night show on Radio 2; whilst I’m loath to judge an entire strand on one sole edition, the usual Scrawn seal of quality was present, if somewhat compressed to fit the tight slot allocated, and it would certainly be worth my while to dip in again. I’ll also start reading more in the new year – if I get my DS and its 100 books back, or get my arse to The Works, or even log on to tax-pisstaker Amazon and have a digital browse, I could pick myself up some proper classics, and maybe even something modern and progressive. (I did go through a phase in my late teens/early 20s of reading modern books – for instance, I’d read James Hawes’ Rancid Aluminium years before it got turned into a film which most reviews seem keen to slag off – but haven’t dipped a toe into that particular fiction pool in a little too long, in all honesty.) I need to believe that things will get better – and this is where battering myself (figuratively, at very least) with the two books of positivity Unnamed Woman released this year may, one hopes, have lasting effect. But as it’s taken me thirty years to discover Double Gloucester, don’t expect change overnight.

Things can, though, as in the title of Unnamed Woman’s February 2012 book (reissued in piperback *cough* sorry, paperback, in January 2013), get better. Woolwich has for the most part been rebuilt – roast to a shell in 2011, the Great Harry pub reopened this year, though I haven’t been in for a pint yet (I was too busy rushing about trying to sort out my bus pass, thanks…) And sometimes stories I fret about have a positive outcome – one of the real-world guttings I worried myself over this year was the wedding-barn blaze that threatened to destroy two busy firefighters’ wedding plans; it’s recently been announced that two vile firebugs have been sentenced to (or of, I forget how this works) arson over the incident, with sentencing to come in February. And of course, there was the happy event which I not only enjoyed, but did to a degree which surprised me. This year we saw some true heroes – those of our own, and those from around the world – descend upon my apparent holiday venue of choice, Stratford, for a festival of pure sportive excellence. Not being much of a sportshead myself, I expected to take little more than a passing interest in the matches, but once the Beeb’s 24 extra channels had got flung up onto my screen I started lapping up the provision, to the extent that my rush-around-worrying schedule would allow at any rate. And I basked in the glow of genuine achievement and endeavour. After months, nay years, of becoming upset at the prevalence of famous-for-nothing slackers and slags dominating the media mix, it was good to see genuine effort and hard work go rewarded. After getting an ‘Ibiza Uncovered’-style reputation for slovenly selfishness, it was good to see the best of Britain being honoured: aside from the tranche of non-Brit badmintoners who contrived to rig the table standings, the majority of the sportspeople behaved and performed impeccably, and those who got their stance on the medal podium by and large deserved and earned their place there. Yes, there were disappointments – I made some unwise, tongue-in-cheek comments about Canadians on my I-could-access-it-then Twitter page after the talented Canuck ladies booted our girls out of the soccer tourney at quarter-final stage when, as an England fan of sorts, I should know that’s usually our limit (as proven when the male squad left the contest at the same level the next day.) And yes, after all the hype heaped on their heads beforehand it was at the time sad to see Victoria Pendleton and Rebecca Adlington end their Olympics in the way they did, but they still put in masses of effort and were recognised for this – indeed Becky’s times for bronze in 2012 were, I hear, better than the times the blonde posted to get gold in 2008! And whilst local hero Zoe Smith didn’t make it into the medal rounds, she certainly proved to all the haters that it was indeed possible to combine strength and beauty, simply by being both (a) strong (she’s a weightlifter, that’s more than I’ll ever be) and (b) beautiful (seriously – she’s properly genuinely hot, and at the lift proved sportswomen could be glamorous by accessorising her weightlifting suit with lush sparkly triangular earrings). And not long after the Olympians had departed the pitch (that’s what it’s called, right? A pitch?) a fresh set of heroes entered the field of vision: the Paralympics proved the doubters wrong by showing that a physical or mental disadvantage is no barrier to representing your people strongly in a sportive endeavour. Some fine performances showed the true strength and depth of the world’s sportspeople, and introduced Britain to sports it had perhaps little knowledge of or interest before (all hail Murderball!) The Paralympic athletes were an oasis of quality in a summer landscape too frequently dominated by slimy wannabes and slutty reality no-marks (and, again, the female athletes were stunningly beautiful – if hotter-than-a-million-popstars wheelchair-basketball player Amy Conroy is looking in, the offer of a date with a decaying, hairy Londoner who can’t really stand up in a straight line even though he’s supposed to is still very much on the table). And of course, there was another of my heroes of 2012, Martine Wright: left without legs in the 7/7 terror blasts the day after London won the frigging Olympic bid, Wright turned her traumatic experience around and ended up on our sitting-volleyball team. Now there’s dignity in action. You listening, Tulisa? The Olympic and Paralympic athletes were honoured not only with Team of the Year – and 11 of the 12 individual nods – at Sports Personality of the Year but also with a collective gong at the Pride of Britain Awards, where other winners included Unnamed Woman for her work championing the disfigured and disadvantaged, and the also-previously-mentioned-here Alice Pyne, the sweet Cumbrian teen who, like Unnamed, now runs a charity to help those in a similar bind to her own. In all then, 2012’s been a jammie dodger of a year – crumbly, dusty and dry at the start and end, but with a brief sliver of delicious jammy goodness wedged around the middle.

The festive season is, of course, a time for celebration and commemmoration. It’s not meant to be a time for misery, even though statistically it sometimes strikes – remember the 2004 tsunami, which still sends chills down Boxing Day eight years on. But I need to accept that, whilst some are able to spend the season with loved ones, others may not have the luxury of family, either because some tragedy has taken its toll or because the natural progress of life has left a sole survivor without relatives. So whilst I’m loath to end my final big-post of the year on a sour note, I would advise you to raise a glass of whatever the heck that is you’re drinking to those who will be glumly left with an empty chair at their Christmas table this year – such as the families in Newtown whose younger members won’t be alive to excitedly celebrate Santa’s visit; the families of murder or suicide victims, be it those of hoax-call nurse Jacintha Saldana or previously-mentioned-on-here teen Amanda Todd, who took her own life after victimisation from her peers; and the families of those lost to illness – this year, the often-mocked Peter Andre is in mourning following the passing of his brother Andrew from cancer, so how about this year you leave aside the taunts directed at Katie Price’s ex-husband, OK? And also raise any subsequent toast to those who, despite difficulties they’ve been through, will be able to celebrate some form of kinship with their loved ones, such as Tina Nash – blinded by her abusive partner but remaining strong for her sons; Gaby Scanlon – a young woman whose stomach was removed after a liquid-nitrogen-addled drink perforated the organ; and Louise Wedderburn, Channel 4’s ‘Human Mannequin’, who isn’t letting a damaging medical condition (FOP, since you ask) stop her living her dream of working in the world of fashion and beauty. She also posts recipes as well as fashion tips on her blog: once I’ve stopped arguing with the microwave and having heart attacks in the supermarket, I may even try some. And of course, my hero-of-the-hour every year, Unnamed Woman, who will continue to soar and fly; maybe one day I will be up among the treetops myself. Albeit keeping a respectful distance from Unnamed, of course, I don’t want to be accused of interfering. And hey, maybe I’ll stumble on good fortune – sometimes good things happen completely by mistake, as the Dutch wing of discount superstore Lidl found out when they launched a Twitter campaign with the aim of boosting publicity, and announced a plan to hand out 1,000 foodpacks to the homeless. The campaign went viral and eventually Lidl had enough messages to equate to 10,000 of the free dinners. Did they do what other firms bowled over by social media have done and rescind the offer? Hell no – they doled out the ten thousand meals with no fuss. OK, it was Lidl food rather than Dutch Waitrose, but those in most need of food aren’t going to make that distinction – sometimes those of us who are free to eat as we choose forget that! So remember, don’t be an idiot like what I am: you don’t need to get too stressed by the value of what you’re doing – it’s the worth of it that matters: a well-meaning gift is more well-recieved than an expensive one, and as the booze ads say, it’s not what’s under the tree that matters, it’s who’s around it. So do feel confident to tip the hat not just to those apparently less fortunate than yourself, but also to your peers and relatives: they will, for the most part, be there for you, ‘cos you’re there for them too. So, from all the OriginalPurple ‘team’ (i.e. me), have a generic, effective Christmas and a servile, dutiful New Year. I’ll see you on or after 2013. Dougal, leave the calendar until tomorrow!

“I’m just a blonde monkey to you, aren’t I?” (Goodbye!)