The Next Step For Wilftonville

With the World yet again poised on the bring of destruction, economy broken and all semblance of humanity crumbling right before our eyes as we suddenly see all the other countries of the world evolve into something threatening and alien, it appears that Wilftonville has a problem to solve. Not for the first time, we find ourselves right smack in the middle of all the problems in the World. To our left is the lovely Queen Rania, batting her eyes softly as she tries to seduce some more pro-Jordon articles out of the Wilftonville keyboard. To our right sits that mad bloke who’s in charge of Italy, eating some spaghetti and muttering darkly about London fashion week. And on top of us is Cliff Richards – which is a little disconcerting.

Whichever way we look, there is some high-profile leader or political figure advancing on us with an intent to assert control over the sought-after gold that are our pool of crack-writers. Did we mean to say crack? It was something that rhymed with it, anyway.

Everyone wants a bit of Wilftonville. Somehow, crazily, we’ve become the go-to website for absolutely all people in existence and we’re taking this fame quite seriously. With the New Year (2009, fact-fans) kicking in, it feels like the time is right for us to change the site into an uber-liberal political protest blog, which fights hard to save the World from itself. Gone will be the constant references to Claudia Winkleman’s feminine beauty and the shameless racism in favour of considered debate – such as one about the actions taken against the Hamas terrorist organisation, and whether the course of action planned in Egypt and France’s peacefire are negotiable or not in the current climate.

It turns out that blogs can actually influence people on political and ethical levels, with just one well-written article - against the death penalty, let’s say – is all that is needed to persuade the important members of Government to drop the law altogether and amend it so a more ethical course can be taken. Wilftonville feels very strongly that we should use our overwhelming fame to stop scientists from doing experiments on zebras. Every Friday we will send a new blog entry to the site, which will feature some hard-hitting facts and statistics which are relevant. But mostly, there will be poorly justified threats and some AREAS OF SHOUTING which will criticise people we don’t really like. Through doing this, we will change the World.

Not really. We’re going to talk about the same silly pop-culture stuff we always did. But did you fall for what we were saying, if only for a minute? Probably not, but it was fun anyway. Every Friday a new topically-relevant article will appear on Wilftonville!

The Top Of The Charts

There are those of you who believe that the music charts mean nothing anymore. That because everyone steals their music online anyway; nobody buys records or singles anymore, so the chart is based on radio airplay more than anything else. And those people would be right. Nobody cares about which song is number #1 anymore, because it’ll inevitably be whichever musician has been given the biggest push from their record company. There’s no fun in it anymore.

But there is one exception, which happens to be Christmas. The Christmas #1 is still incredibly important, because it’s the one week of the year when almost anything could win. Sure, the X-Factor and countless other reality shows all release their singles for Christmas, so usually one of those wins. But at the same time, there are so many different wild cards in play during Christmas that nothing can be guaranteed. The winning song could be performed by a credible rock band, or a children’s TV show (Tellytubbies, anyone?) And because there is such variety, and so little stability for this week, the BBC have relented.

They’ve given in. Finally, the public have won. Because Top Of The Pops is coming back! At Christmas! It’s only coming back for a special, but this is still rather big news. Top Of The Pops, for our international reader (you know who you are), is a TV institution which was cancelled a while back. It ran down the chart, and featured performances from six or seven of the bands who had done well that week. Although these performances were generally mimed, the show was entertaining Friday-night viewing (wait... when was it on, again?) and the public loved it. And then... they didn’t love it anymore, and it lost viewing figures and got cancelled. The reason? Well, Wilftonville thinks it knows the answer to that one:

Yeah, the presenters. You’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually likes Fearne Cotton as a TV presenter, and her overeager sidekick Reggie Yates isn’t much fun either. Yet they were put in charge of the show during the last few months of its existence, and ran it into the ground. And hey – guess who are back to present this year? Yeah, those two. It’s not on.

What TOTP needs is a guest presenter format, like ‘Have I Got News For You’, so that each week a different celebrity hosts the show, thus making each week’s show different from the week before. Guests hosts can include: Jeremy Clarkson, Michael Palin (yes!), Jimmy Saville, Claudia Winkleman (hey Claudia!) and Terry Wogan. This is what is needed, BBC, if you want to make a success of this franchise again. And make sure that you dump Fearne and Reggie, and put Noddy Holder on the Christmas show instead, because he’s really excellent.

You’ll thank us for this later.

Getting Into A Soul War With John Legend

Aside from my traditional blogging duties, I enjoy a number of other activities during my free time. And nothing, I mean nothing, has more of a thrill for me than going into a jazz café and freestyling up some hefty middleweight jams for the good patrons around. Typically, I walk up onto the stage and ask the crowd to shout out a topic for choral discussion, and on occasion this has meant working some devious rhymes about the Cheryl Tweedy, gardening, Harrogate, and the ongoing unease in Britain regarding the credit crunch:

“Britain’s feeling the financial drag/But man, that ain’t my bag/I don’t think about the crunch/I go out and get some lunch/so serve it up barbeque-style/make it worth my while”

It’s a way of giving back to the community without having to touch members of the community or even speak directly at them. Instead I can concentrate on tightly focusing my melodies so that the full impact burns the crowd away. Burning a crowd away, incidentally, is a more politically correct way of blowing a crowd away, unless you are talking to the Vietnamese of anyone from Hiroshima. In which case, you wash them away. In turn, you must never talk of washing away to anyone from New Orleans. These are the rules of euphemism. I never fail to feel a tinge of happiness when I burn a crowd, and I hope they feel the same way about me burning them up bigtime.

But imagine my surprise when I went up to Batley last week to thrill the crowd with some long-term ideas about Northern Ireland, only to be met with a terrible sight. John Legend, the Grammy-winning American singer who possesses both dreamy eyes and bizarre facial hair was onstage, dancing around to a small-scale funk display. He cavorted with the local residents, and smiled seductively at a row of septuagenarian women who were on an outing organised by Gala Bingo. He was on my turf. I made a hasty line of retreat towards the bar, where I ordered a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and turned back to get a better look at Legend’s show. He was singing one of his soul-tinged pop hits now, with all the charm of a mountain goat stealthily sidling up on a patch of delicious bracken.

“Claudia, what’s going on?” I asked Claudia Winkleman, who never misses a show.
“I don’t know how to stop him,” she replied. “He jumped up on stage half an hour ago and nobody’s been able to topple his marriage of harmonious voice and smooth lyricism. It’s been a wild evening.”
“Here, take my crisps,” I told her, and stood up. In doing so, I caught the eye of Legend, and his mouth slowly formed a treacherous smile as he realised what was about to go down. I marched on over to the stage and jumped up, landing with both feet at the same time and stamping so hard the musical conductor snapped out of his jazz trance and stopped the music.

“We meet at last, Legend.”
“So we do, Serese…Sereseros?”
“Close. Seresecros.”
“A hard name to spell,” he admitted.
“Yes. A lot of people have trouble with it. It’s a difficult name to spell and pronounce because it has three letter E in close succession, you see.”
He nodded, tilting his head to show all the teeth in his face. There were a lot of teeth in his face. “And a whole buttload of S, too.”
“You bet your ass it does,” I hissed.

While we were trading off whiplash dialogue with each other we circled, hands in clawlike positions in case the other pounced. The air with thicker than an electric eel who had been fed much krill in a short space of time. And like that stuffed eel, the air crackled with electricity. This was going to be one for the generations.

“Seresecros/You think you’re the boss/But when you mess with John/You’d better go go gone”

Gah! He had drawn first blood. Not only were his lyrics outstanding, but he’d managed to throw out a reference to a song by Estelle. I had to retaliate quickly, before the pensioners defected to Legend’s camp.

“Oh, you’re using Estelle/To ring my bell/Well I can tell/You’d better listen well/I’m taking you to…”
“Musical hell?” he interrupted.

Oh noes. This was looking bad for me. Not only was John Legend now 2-0 up on me, but he had all the momentum on his side. I had shot for the stars by putting two rhymes into one section of my rhyme, but he’d erected a study iron-mesh net in front of my aspirational cannon and caught me mid-flight. I was sent reeling backwards into the brass section, who made assorted squeals as I landed.

A pumping beat suddenly erupted from the back of the room, and Kanye West walked in, flanked on all sides by a tasty entourage. Without a word he sat down in one of the prime seats next to the stage and watched on. I crawled out of the trombones just in time to hear John Legend’s next freestyle.

“Well I’m here in Batley/I’m on a song-spree/Makin’ the people happ-ee/Like I’s in ‘Born Free’.” He sang whilst sat at the piano. It was at this moment that I knew this was a battle I could never win, and I turned to Plan B. The heaviness of his film knowledge broke one of my ribs, but I threw myself across the stage and slammed down the lid of the piano, smashing all of his fingers. He screamed in pain as I dove into my pocket and pulled out a vibraphone.

“Oh Johnnie Boy you got it wrong/Cos I don’t need to fight in song/Sure, I can drop a beat and I can rock it/But twenty second ago I put a grenade in your blazer pocket.”

I jumped to one side just as the grenade exploded, and the force threw me into a flautist. Getting up, though, I saw that there was no sign of Legend apart from a tuft of curly black hair and a ringing noise not dissimilar to the breakdown in ‘Ordinary People’. All around me, everyone else was fine, and they got back up and arranged the chairs back in order. Back at the bar, Claudia took a thoughtful bite out of a crisp.

“Can you sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ for me, Seresecros?” asked Frank, one of my biggest supporters.
“Sure, Frank,” I told him, as I picked up the mike. “Anything for a fan.”

Clinton Cards Are Hate

There have been , at one point or another, approximately five different outlets of ‘Clinton Cards’ spring up somewhere in my hometown during the past year. I’ve watched as the store moves from area to area, outlet to outlet, section of hell to… no, wait, Clinton is in the same section of Hell that it’s always been in. And that section, according to Dante (ever read a blog that quotes Dante before? Marry me!), is the eighth. Go look it up sometime.

Clinton Cards have done so much to deserve the Universal hatred of humankind. So, so much. For a start, allow us to tell you all about Mr Clinton. THERE IS NO MR CLINTON. It’s a lie. Clinton Cards were not set up by anyone called Clinton, or in a place called Clinton; the word Clinton is completely haphazard and chosen possibly so that the chain could cash in on the recurrent popularity of noted secretary-worrier Bill Clinton. He doesn’t own the chain, though, and neither does his ‘wife’ Hillary. George Clinton is another man who doesn’t own the shop. In actuality, the place was founded by Don Lewin in 1968. That’s right – they attempted to cash in on the popularity of a man who wasn’t due to become President for another thirtyish years. Witchcraft.

Clinton Cards is marketed to the general public as a card shop. It is where you buy cards for people, like your mother, father, sister, brother, or dog. Hey, wait – dog? That’s absolutely correct, Wilftonville – dog. You can buy cards for or from your dog to send to members of your family (but not, conveniently, other dogs) with a footprint on the front and some computer-type inside saying something with a dog-related pun involved. This is the first point that we can’t stand for. You can write this point down, people – dogs are unable to write, produce, or sell cards. They can’t even tell a card apart from a different piece of paper. we’ll tell you why, too. Dogs do not speak English.

They don’t speak any language apart from ‘dog’. That’s their native tongue, so when you get a card from your dog (cat, canary, slave) to send out, be aware that at the same time you are buying this piece of paper, you are also establishing an English supremacy on the planet. Do you want that? If you buy a card, we’ll say simply, you are saying that dogs are inferior to people. Try telling that to PETA! Your dog, at the same time, probably hates you for doing this, and there is nobody on Earth who should like a card sent by a dog. It’s not cute, it is highly disturbing and the first sign of bestiality tendencies. Another one of the great cards offered by Clinton are those of bereavement. This is yet another card that has not been thought through by the company. Picture the following scene.

Scene: A HOUSE (int.)
Enter YOU, dressed in black and holding a piece of paper. You approach an old woman, AUNT TABITHA, and stand awkwardly next to her until she notices you. There is a coffin behind her.

You: Aunt Tabitha, I got you a card.

Aunt Tabitha: Why?

You: You’ll have to read the card to find out.

Aunt Tabitha: Why?

You: BECAUSE I HAVE MY OWN PROBLEMS, ALRIGHT??

YOU exits scene, leaving Aunt Tabitha with card.


There may have been some exaggeration there, but you get the point. The card goes off to a family member, leaving you free to ignore the funeral and instead get in some extra time on Wii Fit. But do you realise that by sending a card, you are not furthering the emotional bond with Aunt Tabitha that will eventually prove crucial when she croaks it and leaves you nothing in her will? Instead, you are only making it less likely that she will give you her summer house, because you Aren’t There. The whole point of cards is to help people grow closer, but more often than not they only help people grow further apart.

Have you ever wondered why there are not ‘Happy Divorce’ cards out there yet? It’s because these cards already exist, in the form of ‘anniversary cards’. Some people are so insecure in their own relationships that unless they buy each other cards then they will feel like their marriage is crumbling before their very eyes. Cards are thus highly important in keeping together couples who should really get divorced.

I was having a talk the other day with my good friend Claudia Winkleman, who was telling me all about her particular grievance with Clinton. “Seresecros,” she said (for this is my name), “why is it that Clinton Cards sell things in their shops that are not cards?”
“Claudia,” sayeth I, whilst rewriting out tracts from a peace proposal for Ireland, “I believe the answer you are looking for can only be founds deep in your own soul.” Sometimes I like to say this to people, in order to mess with their minds. “What does your heart tell you?”
“Well… I don’t know. That’s why I asked you.”
“Oh Claudia Winkleman, you are so witty! I’ll tell you the answer, then. Clinton sell things other than cards because they hate white people!”
“Oh my! Explains this!” She exclaimed, which I then did, thoughtfully, analytically. Everyone who was around us on that day say it was the single greatest revelation they have ever heard. It was a stunning monologue. But I digress.

Y’know what we really hate about Clinton Cards? The payment system. Some cards have a number on them; some have a letter on the back. They’re all meant to tally with a system they print up in the shop, but the reality is that most of these symbols are completely made up by whoever prints them. They pick a letter at random, put it on the back of the cards, and then foist these erratic papers to an unsuspecting public. Thus, when you go to Clinton and try to buy a nice birthday card, you find that your ‘32H’ card does not correspond to anything that can be seen elsewhere. Just to mess with you.

Our last complaint with Clinton Cards is that we can’t understand why it is called Clinton Cards when it would make so much more sense to call them ‘Clinton’s Cards’. If the place is Clinton Cards, that suggest there is no ownership involved. There’s no apostrophe that claims the cards in the name of Clinton, so how come when I walk in there and take some cards home with me, I get arrested? What’s up with THAT?

Who Will Replace Terry?

Terry Wogan has had enough of Eurovision, and you can’t blame the guy. For the past ten years or so he’s sat by and watched as the British entry has failed miserably (with the exception of HAWTNESS Jessica Garlick, who came third), and has had countless attacks aimed at him because he realises, as does most of Britain, that Eurovision is a popularity contest and not based on the music. Actually, it’s probably because he has noticed this that Britain has. And he’s not just a passive bystander, remember. Terry picks and befriends and promotes the entrant each year, appearing on TV shows and doing interviews and doing his best to boost the profile of these bands and singers, only to see them fail. It must be a little heartbreaking, and you could hear at the end of Eurovision this year the despair and aggravation in his voice as he debated whether we should bother with it anymore.

Terry’s better than Eurovision now, and he deserves his break from it, should he choose to pass on the baton. But the Eurovision will remain, and the only question is: who will take over? A lot of people have been pushing Jonathan Ross to do it, because he does everything else so nobody will notice, but that’d be a mistake, as would Jimmy Carr, that other guy who presents TV in Britain. You need someone who isn’t a one-trick pony, who can do more than that. So I’ve compiled a list of people who I think would be great for Eurovision, and I urge you, should you agree with any of them, to form petitions and start chaining yourself to BBC headquarters in order to get your person into the job.

Graham Norton: The cheeky Irishman would be just the ticket for guiding us through the camp joys of Eurovision, and could poke joyous offensive fun at proceedings. He could also, though – and this is the key thing – do so whilst still being in awe of the whole event. It’s tailor-made for his personality.

Mark Radcliffe: The Radio 2 DJ has a wry eye for details, and if anyone would be able to tell us that the Romanian entrant looks like a broken TV set with green mouse ears, it would be him. At the very least, he should take over if Ken Bruce moves over from the Radio 2 programme to the TV broadcast, which is possible.

Rob Brydon: My personal favourite choice. Brydon can do pretty much anything, having an astonishingly wide repertoire. He also has a superb voice for the event, and a wicked sense of humour. He could make fun of something and then pull himself back and tell us off for agreeing with him.

Jools Holland: Imagine the awkwardness of any interview Jools has ever done on his show, but stretched out for three hours or so. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Claudia Winkleman: Three hours of listening to the delightful Claudia Winkleman would be fine by me! I love you, Claudia Winkleman.

Ronnie Corbett: The great thing about Ronnie is that he would be reminded of a story by seeing someone from Armenia or something, and would go off on a long-winded joke about things, paying no attention to what is happening on screen, making for a superb night of calming television.

Brian Blessed: Admittedly, I’m pushing it a little here.


Who would you like to see?

The Five Best Moments From Sports Relief 2008

Every two years now we have Sports Relief, a charity that raises countless amounts of money for people who are suffering around the World, from aid agencies in Africa to more local causes which help kids deal with bullying, diseases, other injustices they suffer in their lives. And it manages to do this despite having a godwaful entertainment line-up and highly questionable central concept.
With Sports Relief, the PTB decided that what the general public would really respond to is being lectured for hours on end by millionaire footballers about how “every penny counts” when children are suffering, and hearing repeated implications that because we have yet to give a tenner to charity we are somehow inferior human beings and will in all likelihood be sent to hell for our sins. The producers make up for this irritating idea (seriously, if all footballers cut their wages in half, we could fund so much more stuff for the needy, etc…) by giving us slightly entertaining TV for one night. I say slightly, but we hear at IEF in honesty found the whole night, except for the inspired Top Gear section, to be enervating and depressingly uninspired. Strictly Come Dancing, The Apprentice (how downbeat was that!), that bit where Chris Moyles was on a treadmill – that’s not entertainment, it’s just dull. But despite all of this blandness, there were five moment that stood out from everything else and made the whole thing almost worthwhile.
Although £19 mil in the bank does sound like a reasonable excuse as well.


1: Darren Gough’s Face
For the past few years, perennial goon Darren Gough has been untouchable on Strictly Come Dancing, winning whenever he’s in the competition and proving to be untouchable even by the talents of such acts as Mark Rampracash and that rugby bloke (you know the one – he’s the only one who doesn’t take it too seriously). This fact, combined with the smug smile Goughy had on his face all evening, made it all the sweeter when he actually lost. His face turned to hatred, fury, and grief for one brief, wonderful second, before his forced smile began, a smile which lasted for a good five minutes while he stood in the background and pretended not to want to burn down the BBC Centre. Tremendous.

2: Top Gear’s Newspapers
This is just a little moment from what was undoubtedly the most glorious part of the evening, when the Top Gear presenters systematically destroyed Steve Redgrave’s garden while he was out. Did you notice, when James May and Jeremy Clarkson drove in to the lot, the newspapers both had folded against the dashboard? Clarkson obviously had the splashy and sensationalistic Sun, whilst the quiet, reserved, and possibly very bitter about the immigrants May had a Telegraph up there. A small moment, but a classy one.

3: Annie Lennox Goes Off On One
After giving a short but clever and thought-provoking speech to the nation after we watched her heartbreaking documentary about children in Africa, Lennox then performed a song for all. Claudia Winkleman came over to thank her, only to be caught out by another long, incoherent and patronising lecture from Lennox, which blamed the entirety of Britain for not saving Africa single-handedly. Her eyes grew wide and smoke began to build up as the Lennox got mental on live TV, and nobody could stop her.

4: Lemar Starts Making Sense
Lemar fought a boxing match against the wee young nipper from GMTV, and got punched several times in the face, itself a joy to behold. The best thing was though, that afterwards when being interviewed, he actually made sense. Everyone knows that Lemar is the worst interviewee ever, being as he is completely indecipherable as a person, but it appears the frequent blows to the head may well have damaged his brain and turned him into an avid linguist. I look forward to hearing him expound some theories on Freud’s dream theory in one of his next songs, dropping some unilateral ego analysis in yo’ face.

5: Claudia Winkleman
When all around you are Patrick Kielty, you need to be likeable or the show’s going to go down the pan. And luckily for us all, Claudia Winkleman was on hand to distract us from Kielty’s mugging with some actual presenting. She’s funny and kooky yes, but she was the only presenter the whole night who didn’t feel like she was forcing it when she asked for money. For that, we salute ye, Winkleman. She’s one of the best presenters there is, and hopefully people are starting to notice this – she’s funny, clever, quick-witted and pretty darned hot too, wethinks. And she pretended to punch Paddy Kielty not once but twice! Oh Winks, if only ye were single…

One Bonus One: The Humpty Dance
Towards the end of the night, when they are desperate for things to put on, a dance act came and did some very well choreographed routines. I don’t have time for these sort of things though, so I put on Digital Underground’s hip-hop classic ‘The Humpty Dance’ on full-blast, and watched in delight as the troupe danced along in time to it. Highlights from the dance included when the lead dancer sang “in a 69 my nose will tickle your rear” whilst we saw an image of a woman trying to do the splits, and the way the line “I once got busy in a burger king bathroom” coincided with all the men simultaneously doing the splits. They... did the splits a lot during that routine.

Peace and humptiness forever, y’all.