AKA47

(Sic throughout, including that title)

Interesting article about British Comedy in the Guardian today - WARNING - Pretentiousness alert - Bad Language and Nudity - well maybe not the last one. The last line of the piece is very good. And this in the same paper is fun but again as pompous as Colonel Blimp's first exhibition at Tate modern.

The drive here today was strange. Once I was off the motorway, everything seemed worthy of mentioning here - the strange statue made of metal pipes, the huge, new Barratts estate with its fake warehouse style, the half-timbered house under a tarpaulin. They still seem worthy of a mention but it is all so unstructured as Graham Norton might have said when he was good. (i.e. On Channel 4 rather than the BBC). The one that seems most interesting is the new estate. There are many two-storey house - semi and detached - but there are also blocks of confused warehouse style apartments with fake doors on the gable ends - one even completed by a derrick extending out into space just in case one of the new tenants wants to install a piano or more likely a juke-box. I bet there isn't even a hole in the bricks behind the door. Lower the price a bit and stop sticking all the junk on the outside. I know of course that £50 spent on a fake door which makes something look old probably adds a couple of hundred to the price but all this fake heritage is just depressing. I am sure there are better places on the web to get a rant about the authenticity of the world and I suppose that really we shouldn't be bothered about this - we all have houses that don't leak and keep out the wind and even in poverty we have enough food. What happens when everyone in the world lives happily with enough food and freedom? I know that's a long way off (we must not believe that it will never happen). Everyone will want Ronco Olive pitters to attach to their breakfast bars and the means of production will be fully occupied. Will they start putting fake mud-walls on the huts in the Kalahari in order to suggest the old days? I am horrified that I have thought of many examples of how this happens in cultures far removed from this one. I hadn't actually realised but it goes on all over the world already.