Questiontime

[Jairzinho]

What were they talking about at the time?

 

And who was Shylock?

[Jairzinho]

Galloway on tonight.

[Jairzinho]

Who the fuck is this cretin?

[Jairzinho]

Jesus christ, a normal human being.

[Carvalho Diablo]

Cheap shot from Dimbleby there.

[Jairzinho]

Fucking hell. Three people on the panel that I wouldn't happily drown, and people in the audience that don't count to potato.

[Carvalho Diablo]

Crazy old tory bastard in the front row has been down the pub.

[Faustus]

Dimbleby really is ready for the knackers' yard. He really is a piss poor moderator. A point put to Hunt, who attempts to answer, and he lets Morgan and that horrible Tory queg in the audience talk over him to create a load of white noise.

[Jairzinho]

What a shame he has to remain fiercely loyal to New Labour cuntery there. They just have no fucking idea who to represent.

[Jairzinho]

Going to send some appallingly offensive abuse about Dimbleby to the BBC. It'll be cathartic.

[Carvalho Diablo]

Galloway talking sense.

[Jairzinho]

No, that is not what I believe, you hateful fucking cunt.

[Jairzinho]

 

To whom it may concern,

 

When will you be turning that hateful, snide, snivelling, haughty, bad shithouse dog aids riddled, Tory queg, Dimbleby into glue?

 

I look forward to your correspondence.

 

Yours, license fee payer.

[Carvalho Diablo]

Tristram Hunt, uncanny rhyming slang.

[Jairzinho]

Does he have actual left wing views and is too much of a coward to air them? Or is he just a Tory?

[Jairzinho]

Looking forward to Galloway's response here.

[Carvalho Diablo]

Galloway tick tick ticking...

[Jairzinho]

I fucking love listening to Galloway speak.

[Jairzinho]

That cunt in the white shirt will appearing in court fairly soon. 

[Jairzinho]

Oh, for fuck sake, none of these other people on panel will have anything interesting to say.

[Carvalho Diablo]

Galloway speaking sense again.

[Jairzinho]

Those two/three bellends shouting throughout the last 15 minutes should have been thrown out.

[Carvalho Diablo]

[RoboRiise]

I just can't warm to Galloway at all.  I think it was NV who called me on that years back on here and I said I'd get back to him with an explanation of why but from what I recall, I never actually did.  I still can't if I'm honest.  It's not what he says, it's not the fact he made a cunt of himself on CBB, nothing that precise, or that superficial, it's just him.  For reasons I can't explain, or at least articulate, I don't just dislike him; he actually chills me.

 

Best analogy I can give for it is one that depends on familiarity with the Stephen King book The Dead Zone.  The film will do in a pinch, but it's nothing like as well-executed as the book which is a great novel by a genuinely brilliant author who deserves much more than the 'fright book' reputation he enjoys amongst people who haven't read his books because they're pretentious enough to imagine that 'popular' and 'gifted' are mutually exclusive terms.

 

In short, the book concerns a young man, Johnny, who is knocked out during an ice-skating accident as a boy and has a vision of a person's future when they touch him in an attempt to revive him.  After a similar precognitive episode in his twenties, he is in a car crash on the way home and enters a coma for five years.  Upon recovering he discovers that he can regularly gain insights into people's character and (to a limited extent) their future by touching them.

 

The main story arc of the second half of the book is prompted by Johnny becoming obsessed with and then meeting and shaking hands with a politician, Gregg Stillson, who has already been introduced to the reader as a full-on psychopath and yet is steadily climbing the political ladder from local to national level.  Johnny sees a vision of him as president of the USA launching a nuclear attack on Russia and decides he has to take some kind of action to prevent this.

 

(Incidentally, one of the indicators that King is genuinely a fantastic author whom I would recommend to anybody is that the quality of his writing manages to make what sounds like a B-movie set-up into a story with both tremendous warmth of feeling and genuine emotional depth; his two greatest attributes as a writer are that he can construct wholly believable and sympathetic characters and then make the reader care about them.)

 

Anyway, something that freaks me out a little is that I had my own Dead Zone moment years ago, not even prompted by touching someone but merely by seeing them.  The person in question is Vladimir Putin and it happened when I saw him on TV for the first time when he took over from Yeltsin.  Bear in mind I had no idea who he was at the time, didn't know that he was ex-KGB or any of that, he was just the bloke taking over from Yeltsin.  I can't even pin it on the sense of distrust of Russia that is intrinsic to many people my age brought up in the Cold War years because he took over from the most reforming Russian leader of the modern age, at a time when the country was perceived as having stepped out of the darkness of the Politburo years and into the (supposed) light of Western democracy.

 

Despite all that, the very first time I saw his grid on TV, the only way I can describe it is that O Fortuna started playing in my head:

 

 

and I became gripped by the sensation that I was looking at a man who, if he had his way, would see the end of the world and likely be its chief architect.  In fact, when some nine years later I watched The Dark Knight and Michael Caine gave his 'some men just want to watch the world burn' speech, I realised that it was exactly the phrase to describe what I'd felt about Putin that day.  In fact if Stephen King was reading this post, I'm sure he's say it was also exactly the vibe he was trying to express about Stillson in the novel.

 

Galloway is the only other person I can think of who has ever given me the same vibe.  Even George Bush (either of them) didn't do it.  I can't and won't try to justify it because I can't cite document X and interview Y to back it up.  It's not evidence-based, it's not what he says, or how he says it, nothing that precise unfortunately, nor is it informed by anything as banal as a hostile press, New Labour or Celebrity Big Brother.  I almost wish it was because at least that way I'd just be into a straightforward difference of opinion, rather than sounding like a lunatic crank who nails horseshoes over the door and carries a rabbit's foot around in the belief that despite being manifestly unlucky for the rabbit, it's somehow lucky for me.

 

Instinct is a powerful thing though and although it's also something of a lottery, I do know that on balance throughout my life mine has been right more often than it's been wrong, so I have to trust it.  I therefore declare him a wrong 'un.  Sorry and all that.

[Stickman]

Does he have actual left wing views and is too much of a coward to air them? Or is he just a Tory?

This is why I can't take the likes of Hunt seriously and why most Labour MP's are just faceless nobodies who you wouldn't know if they are actually Tory after all....they're just career politicians who have no ingrained beliefs or passions of their own.

 

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-8b5c-Tristram-Hunt-crosses-picket-line-to-lecture-on-Marx#.VNQfGOH46rU