There’s a new Ian Bowler video out.
These children will be this unhappy if you don't come
You may know that next Tuesday, April 17th, is the beginning of something *very* exciting. And by ‘very’ I mean ‘very, very’.
Next Tuesday sees the launch of the new, topical, character comedy night at The Vandella: Topical Cream.
Wait? What? Topical character comedy? Can such a thing even be done?
Oh, it can. This month and every month I shall be gathering the most intriguing, hilarious and bizarre weirdoes into one place to create an entirely new kind of comedy.
Yes, it’s topical comedy. No, it won’t simply be songs about how George Osborne has a stupid nose and drinks the blood of children. Although there will be songs.
It’s unlike anything you’ll have seen before, and it will leave you weeping hysterically, unable to move without medical assistance. You’ll laugh yourself in half.
And if that doesn’t convince you, here are ten more reasons.
- Time Out recommends that you come. It’s recommended by Time Out. Look, over on this page. The bit that says ‘recommended’? That means they recommend it.
- It’s a Tuesday. What else are you really going to do with a Tuesday? Really? No. Thought not.
- The line-up. We’ve got Ruth Bratt, Darren Strange, Sara Pascoe, Robin & Partridge, Hils Barker, John Voce & Michael Legge, Jake Yapp, David Trent, and Nadia Kamil.
- Oh, and ME!
- In future we’ve got Bridget Christie, Pippa Evans, Dan & Dan, Marcel Lucont, David Bussell, and many, many, many more.
- We are employing Professional Hecklers to make sure that any heckling that happens is of the highest possible quality. We are the only club in London to do this.
- The Vandella is lovely. It’s a brilliant venue, run by some lovely people. It’s comfy, quirky, and is definitely the place to be seen this summer.
- It’s musical, it’s odd, it’s got acts the like of which you won’t have seen before, all doing brand new material. It’s bleeding edge political comedy, and it’s where the new satire boom is going to happen.
- People will think you are cool when you can say that you saw all those people on the telly before they were famous.
- I love you and I miss you.
Book your tickets here.
The Lesser Of Three Evils - picture (c) Monica Sablone
The eagle-eared among you may have noticed that I was not invited to the LBC Mayoral debate that turned into a triple-fuckathon in the lift. Despite that fact that this would clearly have been the best place to showcase my own, quite spectacular, personal lexicon of vulgarity together with half-baked theories about what London does or doesn’t need, I wasn’t invited.
LBC didn’t see their way clear to extending me an invitation. Neither did the BBC ask me on their Newsnight special last week. All in all, I can only conclude that there has been a wide-ranging media conspiracy to conceal me from the general public.
Perhaps partly because I am no longer an official candidate for London Mayor.
As March reached its end it became clear that I wasn’t going to have raised the £10,000 deposit needed to stand for Mayor of London. We raised some, but nowhere near enough. It was a little galling to realise that we had more than enough support in the boroughs to get the 330 signatures we would have needed, but that simple lack of funds was going to prevent us doing it for real.
Not to mention that the whole process was a massive pain in the arse. Who would have thought that standing for Mayor on an ill-thought-through platform, pretty much as a laugh would be hideously expensive, involve soul-crushing amounts of admin, and could possibly mean that you go to jail for electoral fraud? Really, who?
So, I’ve put off blogging about this out of embarrassment more than anything else. I feel like I’ve let a lot of people down. People who made posters life this:
Hell, yeah!
I’ve let down the hundreds of people who offered their signatures, and offered to collect others. And I’ve let down the people who pledged money.
Never will London see itself protected by an army of highly-trained chinchillas. And that’s on me.
However, Sir Ian’s campaign continues. There will be more blog posts, more videos, more revelations, and some very special guests. However, my name (and his face) won’t be on the ballot.
Not that they won’t be on one soon.
After all, we did raise enough to stand as an MP. Twice over.
And Sir Ian has given a solemn pledge not to stand against Nick Clegg in Sheffield Hallam in 2015…
Image via Wikipedia
It’s weird that the government don’t have any, you know, facts and figures about the kinds of reforms it’s trying to introduce now. You know, the sorts there must be loads of, to show how much better it would be. The sort you’d want before undertaking a thorough restructuring of the whole system.
Surely there must be some sort of evidence from the last time an internal market was introduced (in an limited form) in 1991. Surely…
Oh wait! There is! Popper, Burgess & Gossage’s 2003 paper: Competition and Quality: Evidence from the NHS Internal Market 1991-1999.
Brilliant! This should put my mind at ease…
“We find the impact of competition is to reduce quality. Hospitals… in more competitive areas have higher death rates.”
…. Oh. Never mind, sure there’s some good news later…
“Death rates were higher in competitive areas in most years between 1992 and 1999.”
Really? But still, everyone’s living longer anyway, right?
“[T]he negative impact of competition in the more competitive areas more than offsets the positive impact of technological change.”
Oh poo. Please, please, please #savethenhs…
Here is the latest behind-the scenes video from the campaign.
And here’s the campaign video for those who may have missed that last week…
For more, go to EBowler or Like the Facebook page. Or follow him on Twitter. Or whatever.
Image via Wikipedia
The spice jars rattled when he slammed the door. Marjorie kept her head down. He hated it when she waited for him. She heard him dump his briefcase on the table. She shouldn’t turn around.
She turned around.
He just stared at her. He stared a decade of disappointment at her before sniffing loudly.
“What’s for dinner?”
She smiled. She should definitely smile. Pretend she didn’t know what was wrong.
“I thought we could go out.”
He yanked open the fridge door.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He took out a beer. “I’ve had a long day. I’m working the weekends inspecting booty. Is it too much to ask to have dinner ready when I get home?” He took out another three beers, shoving them under his arms, and he made for the den. “Call me when it’s ready.”
The spice jars rattled as he slammed the fridge door.
***
He’d been lying, of course. He hadn’t done any actual booty inspection in years. He had loved inspecting booty, but now he was lucky if he saw any booty in a month. It was mainly paperwork. And what was worse, he was a little behind.
He cracked a beer, and flipped the television on. Red carpet. Look at those fuckers. He balanced his beer on the arm of the chair, as he got out his latest booty assessments.
He didn’t regret it. He didn’t regret a single thing.
Yes, it had been hard splitting up the Funky Bunch, but the promotion was something he just couldn’t turn down. Most people had to wait years before they got made a Booty Administrator, Hector had been just 27. Most of the Bunch had understood. Marky had taken it the hardest.
“What the fuck, Hector? That doesn’t even rhyme!” Those were the last words Marky had said to him.
Not that he had cared. Those had been good years, fat years. Hector and Marjorie had lived high on the hog. Booty assessment had been a growing field in the 90s, and they had ridden the crest of the wave. But somewhere along the line, he had fallen down the crack.
He was still Funky.
“Shit!” Hector flapped at his trousers, as the beer glugged lazily into a pool on his lap. He rescued the papers and stood, dripping, brushing himself down.
Still red carpet. Who was wearing what. Or whom. Or some shit. Same every year.
The chair was only a little damp. He’d live.
He shouldn’t have shouted at Marjorie. It wasn’t her fault. The Booty Inspectors had never unionised. It had never seemed like they had to.
So when Hector had had that accident…
He was bumped upstairs to a desk job. Booty Supervisor. A room full of dead-eyed men who had once been something. Lords of all the surveyed. M-ass-ters of the Universe. Now all they did was shuffle booty between different filing cabinets. And not in a good way.
He looked up.
It was starting. He wouldn’t get too drunk this year. It wasn’t Marjorie’s fault.
The 84th Annual Academy Awards. There he was, grinning away in the fifth row. Marky fucking Mark. It was going to be a long night.
Sighing, he flipped his bifocals down off his forehead and opened the folder. Booty didn’t supervise itself, you know.
Image via Wikipedia
This whole article is a parody of this. If you haven’t read the horrible Rod Liddle piece, you probably won’t get this.
My New Year’s resolution for 2012 was to become a bigot.
Nothing too bigotty: a light moment of racism posing as ‘political incorrectness’ on national TV; working myself into a really frothing high dudgeon at the idea of the poor once a week; or that newly-invented bigotry: hatred of the disabled.
There’s lots of money to be made from being a bigot. If you can reliably work the readers of a tabloid into a lather with a mixture of baseless opinion and made-up statistics, the editors will literally chuck money at you until you can afford to go and live in Florida like Littlejohn.
And it is far easier to be a bigot than it ever was. It used to be thought of as bad form to cultivate outright hatred of the disabled. It was felt that you had an unfair advantage because they were, well, disabled. Nowadays, however, with the imprimatur of the government you no longer have to be ashamed about kicking people’s crutches away. After all, what are their crutches but a crutch? Thanks, Lib Dems!
And being a bigot is incredibly fashionable: from Clarkson to Littlejohn, from Jeremies Kyle through Vine, the airwaves are dominated by men in middle age who are desperate to find someone to blame for their thinning hair and thickening waistlines. Impotent? That will the fault of the gyppoes at Dale Farm! Sense of malaise at having done nothing with your life? It’s probably the fault of the spendthrift Labour government. With every follicle that closes our moral certainty increases.
The world is shit. And it’s everyone else’s fault.
And who can blame us? Not you lot. Every time we find a new scapegoat, you all get to put the boot in, too. As long as we cultivate an air of national nastiness, in which there’s no problem that can’t be solved by puking hot bile at it, you can all vent your frustrations, too. Just realised that the mortgage payment will bounce? That’s the fault of a feral youth.
The latest figures about bigotry came out this week. They suggest that 50% of those writing deliberately provocative, ill-informed, poorly-constructed opinion pieces in the tabloids are actually fit for proper work. Some of us don’t believe a word of what we’ve been paid to say, and yet we churn it out, day after tedious day. Some have been doing it for more than a decade.
But when you suggest that these people are nothing more than loathsome pondslime you get accused of victimising the mentally infirm.
Well, I’m not. I’m victimising the morally infirm.
Or at least, I’m trying to. But it will probably go in one ear and out of the other. Like the imaginary bullets Melanie Phillips dreams of firing into the heads of gay Islamicists from the BBC.
The Right-wingers will say, hey you fat old fag-enabler, more money is spent on Jobseekers’ Allowance than is spent on maintaining out eight or nine top bigoted columnists. To which I say: not by much.
But that doesn’t make being an awful, twisted bigot; a festering, crapulent, pustule of a person, who has a picture in the attic of someone who gave up long ago and hanged themselves in despair; a monstrous toad who fell into a bucket full of wet lips okay, does it?
That’s like saying we shouldn’t get worked up about people being cautioned by the police for the common assault of a pregnant woman because murder is much worse.
It’s a silly argument.
More than anything, though, those posing as bigots just to get their tabloid-assured moment in the sun, and the odd appearance on Celebrity Come Dine With Me are doing a disservice to those who really need our help: the actual bigots. Rather than directing our expressions of concern, and warmth, and facts to those who could really use them, we end up shouting at Rod Liddle. So nobody wins. Except Rod Liddle.
It has been easier to pose as a bigot ever since tabloids started espousing positions through their own self-interest that would previously only have been held by unspeakable turds: in favour of torture, against human rights, in favour of turning our backs on refugees, the idea that disabled people are disabled through some fault of their own, demonisation of the poor.
I think we should all pretend to be bigots for a month, and… No, hang on. That’s a horrible idea. A stupid idea.
Let’s not, eh? Let’s really not. Instead, let’s not be bigots at all for a while. The next time you hear the news, or the government, or a neighbour saying something that is clearly intended just to get you blaming someone else for your problems, why don’t we all have a cup of tea? Or a sit down? Or a ponder of the ways in which we’re culpable for making other people’s lives miserable.
Tell you what, let’s all pretend not to be bigots for a month. Or a year? Who knows, we might discover we’re not actually bigots after all…
The Lesser Of Three Evils - picture (c) Monica Sablone
This morning I found a hastily-scrawled note wedged through my letterbox, smeared with pate and Montrachet.
People of London,
I think it’s appalling that you, as voters, should have to choose between a drink-sodden, priapic, bumptious right-wing simpleton and a wily appeaser-of-unpleasant-extremists with an unhealthy fixation on handling pond life. Why should you have to choose between those two? Especially when there’s a candidate who offers all of that, and more.
Me.
Now, I’m more well-known for my association with my countryside constituency of Buckland and Ruttington. My campaign to bring back village idiots, and to stop them being replaced with one, large, out-of-town superdunce near Aylesbury was notable for its enthusiasm, if not its success.
However, as an MP I have spent a lot of time in London. As much time as you could afford. I have dined in your many fantastic restaurants, been thrown out of your many inviting zoos, and, on one occasion, been held in remand at your beautiful HMP Wormwood Scrubses.
I have reason to believe that my candidacy would be supported by a huge range of people: from the very rich to the very prosperous. Some have suggested that I might be unduly influenced by my connections to United Beef. I admit that I do sit on the board of United Beef, but I strenuously reject that that has had any influence on my support for compulsory Bovril in maths lessons; the building of the 620-foot long Wall Of Cowmeat to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee; or the opening of St. Ermintrudes Beef-cademy School. I reject the insinuation that I have been injecting subliminal messages in my statements to promote the eating of the finest of meats because of my steak in the company.
So, in short, I am looking for the names of 330 London voters willing to support my candidacy. If I can find them, I can moo-ve on to fundraising (asking United Beef for a cheque).
So, if you want to see a change in London, pop your name below. Or subscribe to my You Tubes (Our Tubes?). Or my Twits (@sirianbowlermp).
After all, isn’t it time that London had someone who wasn’t a joke candidate?
Yours,
Sir Ian Bowler, MP for Buckland & Ruttington, The Lesser Of Three Evils
So there you have it. I am reliably informed that if he can get the 330 names, Sir Ian will make a serious attempt to “clean up my utility room. And then London.”
What do you think, London?
Sir Ian Bowler tell you how it is. And where it is. And what it is.
Nathaniel Tapley 