It would be very easy this week for me to write an article condemning and mocking last week’s London rioters. So here we go.
Yes, London caught fire last week when thousands of morons decided that Carpet Right would look better drowning in smoke and with no carpets in it. The scale of the uprising was relatively huge, and, to me, the whole thing looked a bit like a sci-fi film where the robots suddenly fight back against society when a chip inside them instructs them to on a specific day. Except instead of robots, the uprising consisted of a group of people whose main aspiration is to learn how to write so that they can one day fill in a benefits claim form; a group who look mainly to the Jeremy Kyle show for some moral guidance (although usually only through the window of Dixons).
Some have spoken out over how many, if not the majority of rioters will go without prosecution. But I’ve cleverly come up with a plan to solve this issue: send out a form asking respondents about the extent to which they were involved in the riot. Those that tick the option ‘i didn’t do nuffing you cant proof it’ are put on trial.
Perhaps though rather than looking at the actions of the rioters we should be looking at the lack of action by the police (or the influence of society as a whole but that’s too much effort). Many of the officers involved practically let the looting take place, almost as if they were within a nightmare where they’d been demoted to the rank of community support officer and were restricted to the authority of shouting “stop that please!” and “I’m concerned that you may be causing disruption!”. Hitler’s other testicle, Nick Griffin, stated that ‘we need these people to be charged and in prison in hours’. But that’s really a case of easier said than done. I mean, he could say we need a system where everyone’s happy all of the time and no-one ever dies, but throwing union flags at mosques probably isn’t going to help, is it Nick?
Coincidentally, on the day the riots started comedy acid trip ‘Shooting Stars’ also returned for a new series. Watching it last Monday evening proved even weirder than ever, in knowing that while James Martin cooed down the dove from above, that multiple JD Sports were under severe threat from being ransacked. This eerie juxtaposition between the delightfully absurd musings of Vic and Bob and the devastating nature of the riots was carried over to Twitter, where ‘Angelos Epithemiou’ contested ‘#londonriots’ for the top trending spot.
Shooting stars really is excellent though. It’s easy to accuse it of just trying too hard to be ‘random’ and ‘weird’, but where this description could apply fittingly to Noel Fielding stating that an outfit looks like a platypus crossed with an embarrassed inhaler, I’m not convinced it applies to Shooting Stars. The jokes are weird, but the scripting is good: references to ‘trouser cress’ and Angelos’ abstract sketches are more than just funny sounding words strung together and contain a level of intelligence below their absurd nature. It’s great that the BBC isn’t too embarrassed or conservative to commission such a programme and doesn’t just falter and go with another antiques based celebrity cook-off presented by Richard Hammond.
It would be nice to be able to close by saying that Shooting Stars is good enough to keep some of the population in and away from rioting for at least one night a week. But sadly not only is the humour far too complicated for any of the rioters, none of them had TVs until after the main riots took place.
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