Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Frankie Boyle Page B

someone saying something relevant. In a world where we fly remote-control bombs into civilians and rip out our planet’s lungs to fund our appetite for shiny gee-gaws, I find the idea of being offended at a joke vaguely decadent. I don’t wish any harm on such people, except perhaps that they suddenly develop a sense of irony as they tweet their moral outrage on a phone made by a suicidal slave.
    I think if someone announced that the whole of the last couple of decades of telly had actually been a huge overarching art project about banality and worthlessness, a deliberately clumsy shadow play of exhausted memes, I would stand up and applaud. Perhaps you can just view it that way, anyway. I mean, the only interpretation that really matters for you is your own. I always enjoy The Matrix a lot more by pretending that Morpheus is the spiritually enlightened version of Laurence Fishburne’s character in King of New York . *
    Perhaps our media output is an enormous subconscious defence mechanism. You know how radio waves and TV signals travel off through space? Perhaps we know that we’re not ready for first contact and fear the malevolence of a race advanced enough to travel easily among the stars. So that’s what our culture is for. No technocratic alien race will willingly visit the world that produces Take Me Out .
    Look at the sheer creative morbidity of our top-rating shows. Strictly gets 11.5 million viewers – I never even realised there were so many people in the country going through the menopause. The show lost viewers with Bruce’s return – which shocked me. I thought the only point in watching was the grim anticipation of seeing him collapse, develop a cocoon, then fly off like a giant moth.
    Alan Sugar says that The Apprentice has not been sexed-up for ratings. It must be for more sinister reasons, then. It was the sexiest series so far, yet still presented by a man who looks like he’s been cleaned out of someone’s belly button.
    I have to accept some responsibility for The X Factor ’s reappearance this year. The sloppy calibration of my flux capacitor meant I failed to go back to 1924 as planned, and beat John Logie Baird to death with a replica TV Quick Best Entertainment Show Award. I overshot by a full decade, the one consolation being that, thanks to my efforts, we’ve at least been spared the empty hypnotic indulgence of Professor Hugo Moffat’s clockwork mesmetron.
    I confess I lost a big X Factor bet at the bookies this time round. I’d got 4 to 1 on me taking my own life before the end of the series. Every week we’ve heard who was the bookies’ favourite. Is that much of a guide? Can the best judge of the nation’s mainstream musical tastes really be someone whose perfect sound is a chorus of divorced men coughing and sobbing as they try to light tear-stained roll-ups?
    In 2012 The X Factor lost two million viewers. Perhaps it’s simply becoming harder to operate a remote control when you’ve got cloven hooves and a twitch. I think ‘viewers’ is the wrong word. It’s too active. Still, I suppose there’s just not the space to write ‘This Saturday two million fewer people had the deluded shuffling of sterile karaoke puppets reflected in the glaze that coats their lifeless eyes.’ I’ve started to wonder whether ratings are down because people have absorbed all the crap they can take. Maybe it’s literally brimming up to their eyeballs and when they next chop an onion their face will shit itself. Are there too many ad breaks on it now? I’m glad of them. At least it’s a relative break from the relentless commercialism.
    But these declining viewing figures are a concern. Experts estimate if they don’t stop falling, by 2032 the show will be forced to travel door-to-door, contestants trying to win viewers over by singing through their letterboxes. It will constitute a sorry procession, forced to trundle its way from town to town in cages set upon little wooden carts, Simon’s