In the UK: Thursdays, E4, 10pm. Probably other times, too.
Extract from Tarquin Forquay-Fothering-Smythe and the Masculinity Hang-Ups of Doom.
112
You arrive in a small, squalid bedsit. Cockroaches scurry over days old pizza boxes. Cigarette ends line the floor, wall to wall. A small television set is in the corner, its picture flickering.
It is clearly not an actual bedsit that someone lives in. It is actually a bedsit furnished and decorated by some extremely posh people who have never had to live in anything less than 4* accommodation, but imagine that is how all working class men everywhere live.
Stepping over the cigarettes, you reach the faded, tatty armchair in the middle of the room and sit down on a stack of Daily Sports. Idly, you flick through the channels on the television, using the stain-caked remote control.
As you watch, you realise that the television has also been provided with programming exclusively from posh boys’ imaginations: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Snatch; and Dogface, a new comedy show from E4.
You stick with Dogface. On it, you see various people swearing. There are jokes about bodily functions. There are animations where dogs are voiced by men progressively trying to show how hard and working class they are by having pub conversations straight out of the left hemisphere of Guy Ritchie’s brain. You idly notice how just about everything reminds you of something you’ve seen done better on another TV show.
Do you:
- Decide to leave because you have some emotional maturity and realise that even though it’s from the “writers of Peep Show”, Dogface is just not for you and you haven’t laughed once because it’s all complete arse? Then turn to 127.
- Decide to stay and watch Dogface because you are a 14-year-old Nuts reader without much experience of life and who gets beaten up at school a lot? Then turn to 167.
- Decide to stay and watch Dogface because you are a middle-class Tarquin who thinks that by watching shows in which you see working class characters talk hard, that by some form of osmosis, you’ll end up hard and be able to join in with pub conversations you’d never normally be invited to join in with, even though you’d get your f*cking head kicked in if you actually did try? Then turn to 173.
127
Well done you! You’ve avoided wasting half an hour of your life. Now turn to 234 and be free, free I tell you!
…
167
You end up committing yourself to a life of staying in in front of the television, getting more and more obese because you couldn’t tell the difference between life and fantasy. You will never have a girlfriend ever, apart from the pin-ups you clip out of Nuts and stick on your fridge door. Eventually, you will be used as ‘Gluttony’ in a snuff video recreation of Se7en.
You idiot. You could have avoided all of that by not watching Dogface. Now start again.
…
173
After cackling like a drain, even at the really condescending bits – albeit slightly nervously because you don’t get half the jokes and are worried that you really will get your head kicked in if you actually have to speak to another working class person again, like you had to last week – you stand up to turn off the television. Unfortunately, because your IQ is slightly smaller than the average amoeba’s, you trip up on the way to the television set, impaling your brain on one of the TV’s razor-sharp corners. You end up dying horribly inside the imagination of someone who has even less of an idea of how regular people live and has more hang-ups about his masculinity then you do.
You idiot. You could have avoided all of that by not watching Dogface. Now start again.
