Nietzsche for kids

We shouldn't be sentimental. Life is a struggle for power and gratification, fuelled by the illusion of immortality. But time laps against us, eroding our existence until our consciousness is rubbed out of space. We are both the hounds and the hounded, chasing after the future as we are thrown into the past. Our slavery to futile endeavours, to whims and dreams, is merely the sight of a prisoner chalking up his years on the wall of his cell. But cheer up. If you look closer, you'll see the prisoner is actually Timmy Mallett and if he makes another sound, his cellmates will scoop out his face with a ladle. We all know David Van Day supports the death penalty. Kilroy, clearly excited by being sweaty and half-naked, came close the other day, but stopped at an air-stabbing, slightly desperate talking down, in the mode of an exasperated teacher. Sadly, Kilroy's left, because the main reason for watching this programme was to see how much of a tit he would make of himself. All that's left now is the simmering tension between Joe 'Swish' Swash and Esther Rantzen, and the general feelings of antipathy and annoyance rustling around the prison camp. I've always thought this show was about tempting fate. The Big Brother house isn't extreme or trying enough to drive their inmates truly insane. The Australian jungle, and the combination of heat, strange and inhospitable terrain, clashing egos and sadistic ritual abuse, is the perfect place to play with madness. It's like an indoor rainforest at the Ministry of Love, with two Geordie O'Briens dishing out the pain with implacable purpose.
The celebrities this year are the usual faces from semi-obscurity - the types who turn up in the Picture Round of a pub quiz. I'm not sure whether the presence of George 'Sulu' Takei or Esther Rantzen surprises me more - or weirds me out more, really. Martina Navratilova's an odd choice too - and there are two WAGs, seemingly only there to needle the older men. And what's Brian Paddick doing there? He was running for Mayoral office only recently. Thank God then for Van Day, who's like a crooning version of Simon Heffer. He and Mallet will hopefully ensure that the show will finally fulfill its potential and cement this series in glory, which is surely what the contestants all want. This first live-broadcast snuff film will be the televisual treat of the year, especially if it is set to the soundtrack of Last House on the Left, which I also recommend be blasted out over the camp day and night. Psychosis and rebellion would not be far away. If they want to revive their flagging and putrefying careers, and attempt to carve their names onto the tombstone of history, they must try a little harder to break new ground and produce more extreme forms of entertainment. Little Dorrit has been a major disappointment in these terms, and with Ross and Brand in TV Purgatory and Channel 4 becoming increasingly pompous, I'm sure ITV will be only too glad to push the boundaries.

Look, just say 'NO', you twat, so we can all live in peace, with or without our chemical compadres, and be spared the excruciating process of reading yet another Drugs survey. Newspapers love surveys, because they smell vaguely democratic and informative, as opposed to bias and reactionary, which they're usually accused of being. They also love drugs because it gives them a license to do their two favourite things: scare the living shit out of everyone and then tell us what the people and our politicians should do to make things better (which will definitely work because these are objective journalists, not paid-up experts with their vested interests). The Observer last Sunday published its Drugs Uncovered - and so soon after their Sex Special? - which went through the motions of describing in friendly words what exactly each drug does; why the black market is bad; what happens when you're addicted to smack; why drugs are bad for the body; why drugs should be legalised; famous people from the past who have taken drugs; and famous people from the present who have taken drugs. And a survey, which revealed that 27% of people over 16 have taken an illegal drug and 68% of people want teachers to be routinely drugs-tested. Harsh, I think, for teachers have an terrible but important job, and should be given a little more slack in these matters. A teacher who took cannabis, LSD or even crystal meth before each class could bring alive the magic of Shakespeare, the bloody horror of the Trenches, or the awesome shininess of Milton, with so much more vigour and tenacity than one who was merely reading from a dog-eared old text book. Their low tolerance of boredom and desire for frivolity and sensation would make lessons fly by, and as long as they kept on the tip of the crest, they wouldn't feel the need for trivial punishments and forcing the fat and lazy pupils to play sport. Schools need less teachers who want to off-load their insecurities and dominance fetishes onto their students; who don't see education as a way of bullying those less mature than themselves. Some parents would disagree of course, but parents usually do because although they want to see their off-spring well educated and mannered, they have no actual idea of how this should take place. Illegal drugs may not be the answer, but narcotics of some sort will become necessary in schools in the near future, with both sides packing heavy weaponry and the threat of writs. However, the mysterious wonder of private education, in which the child is abducted for a period not normally more than eleven years, is also highly questionable. Most of its products roll off the assembly line with all the empathy of a psychopath, artistic sensibility of a property developer, and the weakly concealed greed and ambition of a reality TV contestant. These factories have produced many of our highest-ranking politicians, industry leaders, soldiers and artists, and are over-flowing with drugs. The son of a famous rich man also served as the resident cocaine dealer at his public school (Fancy a chance of winning £5? Then send me who YOU think it is, and a crumpled note will be winging itself your way by the year 2032). The answer is clear: school pupils must be banned from taking drugs of any sort, unless it is to sedate them in a conflict-resolution. Teachers must be prescribed whatever they want to get them through their terrible burden of educating tomorrow's leaders, musicians, novelists, business men and criminals.

Anyway, I was actually going to write about Maidstone and how soul-dissolvingly depressing it is. I went there this week for a job interview with the kind of company that appears on Watchdog. The one-horse office was situated above a shop which was in the process of being gutted. The highlight of my day was sitting in the glaringly sparse waiting room, the kind of place which hands out migraines like tickets for Jesus, and realising that the little CD player in the corner was gently wafting out Radiohead. Because existential gloom-rock really gets you in the mood for an interview. The place felt like a loan shark's; all chipboard panels in cloudy white paint, strip-lighting, and that smell of brick dust and musty carpets. I expected two burly men to pin me to a table, whilst a third produces a cricket bat from the sideboard, gives me a short speech about the value of prompt debt-repayment, before treating my legs like Twiglets.

The guy who interviewed me vehemently denied that it could have taken me two hours to drive down (though it had, and I wasn't trying to con him for petrol money, but his grasp of British geography was shitty was to say the least), and then clumsily evaded my queries about salary and what exactly I'd be doing. Turns out, it's direct marketing, but that's not quite what the job ad said. I was inside a more convincing cowboy outfit for my fifth birthday. And then there's the town, which is like a glass dump built on a concrete dump that's been pissed on from a very great height. Maybe it wasn't all that bad; it was over-cast and I was irritable, partly from getting lost in the shopping mall. And I kept seeing the same chugger again and again, as if he was following me or I was sub-consciously following him.

On the way back, my MP3 player managed to play the same song four times, which in theory, should be somehow impossible. The song is Duality, by Slipknot. I should explain, though I can't convincingly. I'm not a fan of Ol'Slip, but I thought Duality was hilarious the first time I heard it - it's that chokingly over-wrought chorus, viscous guitars and flatulent bassline. Then, I started to like it in a pathetic 'it's funny, it's tragic, it's awful, but I kinda like it' way. And then it turned up on my MP3 player and I was singing along to it in my car, almost causing several pile-ups due to some zealous head-banging. I told you it wasn't convincing.

Interesting people - exciting, laughing, perfectly-formed, their hypnotic sun-tans shimmering in the crisp surf as they jet-ski from one velveted champagne party to the next - are far too busy to watch television. Of course they are, they're interesting and outgoing and have friends who call on them and have a million half-interesting things to do before they get down to the really interesting stuff. Saturday night telly seems the antithesis to all this. If you're still only just climbing out of the Paleolithic age of freeview (as I am), then the choices are pretty limited. There's the televised gambling event of the National Lottery, which makes you feel less like a gambling junky by turning your own living room into a casino. Betting doesn't feel half as seedy when you're not surrounded by neon lights and mummified slot-fiends. In the interest of balance, the BBC should dump some poor sod from the local booky's in the corner of the studio, amidst a pile of used betting slips and gin bottles as a memento mori that this isn't just harmless fun. It's not that gambling isn't fun, but the BBC can't expect to be taken seriously when they bang on about standards and quality broadcasting when they're the sole vehicle of the Idiot Tax. That said, ITV has its share of blindingly tacky gambling shows (the insomniac's nightmare of Quizcall), and the cable channels offer even more opportunities to pour your bank account down the telephone. Perhaps the best of all is The Chat on smileTV, in which a girl sits in front of a computer and a curtain and, well, chats - either to the viewer or to callers. About almost nothing, but occasionally something, which if interpreted in a certain way, might give you the beginnings of a semi-on. Annoyingly, the sound is immediately muted when she picks up the phone, but you can always read the text messages displayed below her viewing box. The texts alone are worth watching this. They range from the fairly innocuous and jokily coy to the spine-chillingly demented. But like most British television, while it's clearly a wanking show, it's coldly non-sexual and radiates a grim shabbiness which is quite hypnotic. Like watching Christiane F or a particularly downbeat episode of Jeremy Kyle, it's a mesmeric glimpse into the abyss. Abyss Porn is huge nowadays, and like its cousin, Justice TV, it always pretends to have a vaguely social mandate. In The Chat's case, it's probably that it's better weirdos are phoning into their U-rated peepshow than torturing small dogs or re-enacting Wolf Creek in their garage. But it seems like a solution to a problem that never was. In his book Big Babies, Michael Bywater points out that the idea of 'feminine hygiene' was effectively created by Femfresh in order to sell their product. If women think they have a hygiene malfunction in those areas nobody's allowed to name directly in adverts (though it's where we all came from, children; and if you see naked dog running about, there's a 50% chance it has one too), then they will buy the product. If you buy Femfresh, you're taking part in a shared experience, mediated through television and enacted upon by the people. If you call into The Chat, you probably exist more in those few moments and in the eternity of their records, than you do in your everyday reality. Like the National Lottery, it's a half-measure to keep us constantly consuming and desiring without ever attaining. The smug ringleaders of the Lottery and the prick-teases on The Chat draw us into this dream-world with the desperate promises of a weak parent to the relentless demands of a petulant child. Smack the child and kill the parent, or better yet, send them to Dog Borstal.

It's taken a whole week, but I've finally done it. It's been an upill struggle, a task of immense proportions utilising all my where-with-all against the tide of doubt and cynicism which has distorted modern debate. I've convinced someone that Barack Obama's stepmother does indeed live in Bracknell. To anyone who lives there, or anyone who isn't afflicted with a Permascowl, this is probably very old news indeed, but some people just don't want to know the truth. Written evidence on BBC news and Wikipedia is all very well, but in these world-weary times when even Stephen Fry has to declare on his show that he hired a London cab in America rather than shipping his own one over (just in case Morons Incorporated feel cheated out of seeing true British cabbiness of a Sunday evening), the amount of proof you need to verfiy a fact seems almost insurmountable. After all, Jean Baudrillard claims that Gulf War #1 didn't really happen and that the idea of a conflict between two sides was conjured up by a war-mongering media. Can we be sure that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross didn't pre-plan those calls to Andrew Sachs, in a complex three-way bid for publicity? It's not as if their careers will be significantly harmed by the Daily Mail swinging its sore old legs over that mangy moral high-horse once again. I think they're on it too; Paul Dacre probably supplied the 'He fucked her' line, and everybody knows Rebekah Wade and Chris Morris are the same person, just played on TV by two different actors.

But anyway, his stepmum does live in Bracknell (which is knowledge freely available on the web without having to type 'fertiliser' and 'jihad' into Google, so hopefully this won't end up being used at my trial). Indeed, after the arrest of two, slightly crap, would-be assassins in Tennessee, I would advise our Customs officers to look out for any discontented, shaven-headed men marching through Terminal 5 with a well-thumbed Mein Kampf or a large box of roses under their arm. There are plenty of people, both here and abroad, who wish harm upon Obama and his family, and who would use force indiscriminately to get their ends. Both his stepmother and the inhabitants of Bracknell - most of whom, I hear, are not criminal - deserve protection against the potentially vicious backlash against this historic election. The law and security services might do well to invest their time in defending vulnerable individuals and targets of terrorism, rather than pursuing smokers, harmless amateur hackers, and fetishists (cf. Section 63, Criminal Justice & Immigration Act, 2008).