It’s hard to believe that 2017 is already over. But we must believe it. Or, if not quite believe it, at least entertain the notion for the next few minutes.
2017 certainly hasn’t been as bad as 2016’s worst doom-mongers would have had us believe. After all, a human still lives to write this, and several others to read it. So it’s been much better than many expected. And even a real glass-half-empty type would have to admit that, regrettable though events on the international stage have been, what we’ve just undergone was really quite a small nuclear war.
I’m joking of course, because, as we know from our recent attempts to have a nuclear war, nuclear weapons turn out never to have existed – or only briefly. It seems the original plans for the atom bomb were destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the Area 51 alien, who didn’t actually have any hands, just sort of suckers, and was subsequently discovered not to be an alien but an incredibly inaccurate model of the Michelin man constructed out of cork by a midwestern garage owner based on instructions he’d been given on a crackly phone line in French.
So, for most of the nuclear age, the notion of the weapons themselves was just a conspiracy by the rulers of the world’s leading nations to siphon off large sections of their respective defence budgets to spend on canapés. As a rogue CIA agent confessed on a YouTube video he released just before disappearing into the Cloud via a bizarre human-body-uploader he’d made out of a Portaloo, a liquidiser and a modem: “There are only two secrets you need to know: nuclear weapons don’t exist and unicorns do. Their livers can be made into stratospherically expensive pate.”
Needless to say, this has made 2017 nearly as embarrassing for conspiracy theorists as 2016 was for opinion pollsters. “Heaven forbid that you’d suspect anything nice!” remarked Ian Hislop on Have I Got News for You in October. “Oh no! It’s all got to be ‘No one’s really landed on the moon!’ or ‘Princess Diana was murdered’ or ‘The world’s run by a secret cabal of lizards’ by which you basically mean Jews but it goes down better if you say lizards. But when it turns out nuclear weapons don’t exist and unicorns do, you missed it because you were too busy looking for evidence that 9/11 was actually a Top Gear stunt that got out of hand!”
It’s unclear how many times President Trump had pressed the nuclear button before admitting that nothing seemed to be happening, but he gave several speeches throughout the spring with a noticeably reddened thumb. Military historians will be debating the consequences of the anticlimactic third world war for decades, and its impact on the dystopian fiction genre is incalculable, but here are some of the lighter news events of the year that may have escaped your attention.
Truth comes at a price on Google
From September onwards, the first search result that came up for anyone Googling the word “truth” was a paid-for ad defining it as an “outmoded and discredited concept”. The cybergiant refused to disclose who was financing the ad on the basis of “professional ethics”, a phrase that, if itself Googled, gives the result: “lucrative non-disclosure agreement”. Julian Assange was initially suspected but he said that it couldn’t be him because “the embassy has changed the Wi-Fi code again. I’ve been trying to guess it for weeks.” Michael Gove also denied that he had anything to do with the ad, claiming: “I’m desperately trying to dissociate myself from all that and get some TV formats away.”
Sir Richard Branson launches new item of cutlery
“It’s been an awkward threesome for centuries,” said Branson at the launch of the Any-Tine. “Knife, fork, spoon. It’s as wobbly as a three-legged stool. Let’s bring some balance.” Described as “a breakthrough in the field of scooping prongs”, the Any-Tine looks like a double-corkscrew, with strange wide sections ending in three vicious sharp points. “I wanted to get inside cutlery’s DNA – and how better to do that than with a piece of cutlery that looks like the structure of DNA?” the billionaire asked. Lawyers for the Any-Tine effusively denied they’d had any initial discussions with the owners of the patent for the spork.
Channel 4 buys the Queen’s speech
The BBC and ITV were left with egg on their faces when Channel 4 signed a £60m 100-year deal with the newly formed Royal Palaces plc to make and broadcast the sovereign’s Christmas message. Confusion arose, however, when Her Majesty announced her intention to remain with the BBC. “I wish the show well, but my loyalties lie with non-commercial broadcasting,” said the Queen, who was believed to be in the running for a new reality format featuring Michael Gove and being developed by Endemol. “Working title: Gove Fucks It Up,” said the company’s head of development. “Each week, the Queen sends Gove on an important mission and he does what he does best: ruins everything.”
Hollywood to release remakes first
“It is a work of accounting genius,” explained a Hollywood insider. “Statistically, remakes do the business. They make much more money, on average, than films that aren’t remakes. Perhaps not quite as much as the films that warrant being remade but that’s a detail. The irrefutable fact is that the remake is the most profitable form of film. So they’ve got to be released first. We make a film, bury it, remake it, release the remake – then we can stick the original on YouTube or as a DVD extra, who cares? It is literally innumerate to claim this will not work.”
Britain becomes last member state of the European Union
Our former European partners stole a march on us in February by all simultaneously triggering article 50 and leaving the EU a fortnight later, leaving Britain the only remaining member of an organisation it long ago resolved to leave. “Brexit means Brexit,” said Theresa May as usual. “We will leave. We’re determined to leave. But obviously it now falls to us to wind down its various institutions first. Needless to say, this will all be very expensive. I would cancel Trident but, as you know, we rather blew all that on unicorn liver pate for President Trump’s state visit.”
