POLDARK
Steven Toast This TV blockbuster raised once again the thorny issue of nudity on screen; a topic I’ve always been keenly interested in. (OK, we only saw his top half naked, but it was filmed in such a way as to give a clear indication as to what the rest of him was like.) While the prospect of a nude woman on TV is instantly appealing, I find male nudity on screen abhorrent. Why is this? Is it the jaded and outmoded opinion of a sexist misogynist who hasn’t changed his views since the 1970s? Far from it. I just happen to think that while female nudity is almost always justified on film or on TV, male nudity rarely is. Call me old-fashioned, but I invariably find a nude woman on screen erotic; a naked man, by contrast, always appears to me either comical or just tasteless. The sight of female genitalia in a cinema is usually greeted with a respectful silence, while its male equivalent invariably provokes gales of laughter. Why is this? I don’t know; it would take a team of psychologists years of research and they might still never reach a conclusion.
Jessica Knappett It’s about time the tables were turned and the ladies got some eye candy to perv on in dramas. Having said that, I’m not going to watch it because it’s now one of those shows I feel is being forced upon me – and call me obstinate but I will not be told what to do with my spare time, however sexually arousing it might be.
Lauren Mayberry I didn’t know it was a TV show. I thought it might be a woodland creature? You know a beast? There’s little Poldark! Outside in the garden!
UK GENERAL ELECTION
ST This now seems like literally ages ago. So much has changed since: the PM has been dragged into the murky world of pig sex (see below) while Ed Miliband has been replaced by the more vigorous and youthful-looking Jeremy Cordon. Surely Miliband, an educated man with a keen knowledge of American and European history, should have known that not being completely upfront about the amount of kitchens in his house could be the crucial factor in deciding who ruled Britain? There were precedents: Abraham Lincoln and Haile Selassie immediately spring to mind. The voters immediately knew how many kitchens these inspirational leaders had in their homes and, as a result, both statesmen reaped the electoral whirlwind.
LM I feel like if it wasn’t real and actually happening to people it would be this incredible farce novel. You want to laugh at the ridiculous way in which this is working, the choices the Conservative government have made but you can’t because it’s serious and it affects so many people. It was a very depressing experience, to be honest.
Stormzy I didn’t vote. People might see this as being naive or ignorant but I just feel like it’s a recurring pattern. Every time there’s an election, these guys promise something and it never happens. But to be honest, though, this new Corbyn guy, I feel like there’s a ray of light with him. I saw a very old picture of him where he was holding up a protest sign, calling for equality and he was getting lit by the police. He was out there and angry about it. So I was like, “Wow, you’re not just one of those politicians who’s thinking: put on the blue light and just cruise. You’ve really been out there grafting.”
JK Yeah, it’s not complicated is it? The Tories got back in because there was nobody better to choose from, unless you lived in Scotland. It’s sort of like when you’re choosing teams in PE and you get down to the kid with mumps or the kid whose catching skills resemble the arms of a digger. On a personal level, it was depressing because I tweeted a bit about Labour and lost so many followers I thought I had the unfollow bug and contacted the Twitter helpdesk about it. I did not have the unfollow bug.
Limmy I’m not like the SNP are wonderful and perfect and I’ll vote for them for ever and ever and ever or anything but it was just fucking magic seeing Labour getting wiped out, Tories getting wiped out as usual. One Labour MP, one Lib Dem MP, one Tory. It was magic. I was gonna vote Green but then I realised it was going to be a wasted vote and so I decided to vote for them next time and I probably will. I probably will. I’ll say I’ll vote Green anyway even if I fucking don’t.
THE DRESS
Limmy There’s people who don’t get it, there’s people to this day who don’t fucking get it. They don’t get what that is. Because I’ve seen both. I’ve seen both. The first thing I knew aboot it, people were talking about this dress: “Look at this dress. What colour is this dress? What colour is this dress?” and I looked at it and it was obviously this gold and white dress. It was at night and I was in my bed looking at it on the phone, it was a gold and white dress and I’m telling you I saw white and fucking gold. White and gold. Then the next day, everybody’s still talking about it and I looked at the picture again and it was blue and dark grey, and I thought: “What the fuck’s this? Where’s the picture with the gold and white?” And I started looking aboot. I searched Google images, I searched everywhere, and every single one was blue and grey. I thought it was amazing but some people were saying: “I don’t know what the big deal is.” And I thought: “It’s cos ye don’t fucking know because ye’re no one of us!” I felt like some kind of mad person in a film like they saw something like a ghost: “I’m telling you what I saw!” But it never went back. It’s never went back for me. I looked at it in the same environment, lights aff, in bed, same picture, same link; I shut my eyes for a while then looked at it, all sorts of things and it never went back to gold and white for me. It was amazing.
JK 2015 was definitely the year of: “This will blow your mind” clickbait time-wasting, and this mind is pretty difficult to blow thanks very much. Then people I actually respected were tweeting about it and I had to see for myself. Why was everyone reacting so hysterically to this white and gold dress? It was quite a disgusting dress, sure. Then it turned out that the person sitting next to me thought it was not a white and gold dress but a blue and black dress and as promised this actually DID BLOW MY MIND. 2015, the year we all finally learned the valuable lesson the internet has been trying to teach us for years: people see things differently, and there is no accounting for taste.
CAITLYN JENNER
JK I suppose it’s good that the existence of a trans population is starting to be acknowledged by the media but unfortunately it feels like all best intentions are overshadowed when what we are really looking at here is a vulgar and fame-starved consumerist Kardashianisation of what is actually a very complex identity issue requiring intelligent thought and analysis. It has quickly been reduced to an attractive woman in expensive clothes being objectified yet again.
Limmy It’s strange. It’s good. I’m happy with myself and my attitude because I think if I was younger, if I was 15 or something, I mean back then in the 80s, and I heard about that I’d be like: “What, what? What the fuck’s that? What’s going on there?” But times have changed, for me anyway, and when that happened I didn’t even bat an eye. I just didnae think anything about it at all. Going into the shops and the guy that was serving me yesterday is noo she. It’s: oh, right, and then a few seconds later, it’s nothing. I thought nothing about it. And I mean that in a good way.
LM I think it’s really positive that there was such a constructive conversation and I think Caitlyn Jenner is an incredibly brave woman to have done what she did and been so vocal about it. The fact that trans issues are being discussed in the same bracket as feminism now is really important because for years they weren’t a part of the conversation. There were a lot of old old-school, previous-wave feminists who are very cruel and thoughtless about trans issues; just Germaine Greer… Why?
Stormzy Social media lets people talk about issues of identity. For me the big one was in London, a club called DSTRKT where a group of girls couldn’t get in because apparently the bouncer said they were too dark. I don’t even understand how this stuff can still go on. I don’t actually rave, but if I had a show and I said: “Everyone’s welcome but no white people can come in,” I feel like I would get slandered for that. So how can a flippin’ club be able to do that and get away with it?
WATER ON MARS
ST This was a genuine scientific breakthrough. So, those grainy little lines on the Red Planet were canals after all. Super-magnification of photographs taken from Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter not only showed evidence of waterways, but also primitive lock gates and small craft which some experts claim could be barges. A new series of Timothy West and Prunella Scales’s Great Canal Journeys beckons! (Don’t forget the oxygen masks!)
JK I get excited about water on Mars because of the implication of life on Mars but then you realise it’s all just microbes, and not even actual microbes just potentially microbes. Call me a millennial but I cannot get excited about microbes potential or real. Show me clear video footage of a proper living, breathing green alien marching around, having its lunch, doing alien Sudoku in its alien house and then we’ll talk.
Limmy I remember people talking saying: maybe there’s water on Mars, maybe this, maybe that, talking about colonising Mars and things like that and I remember going out to my green bin. I was cutting the grass and I went oot the green bin that hadn’t been emptied for about a month and in there were fucking snails, woodlice, insects, the wee type ant types of things and fucking everything. There’s some flies as well. I thought: “There’s mair fucking life in this bin, there’s mair life that I’ve just scooped up in one finger, there’s mair life on that than there is in that fucking planet.”
LM My first thought was: “We’ve just fucked up one planet, I don’t think we should get another one.”
TRUMP
ST This clownish buffoon’s attempt to buy Scotland and turn it into a private golf course not long after the Scots had narrowly decided to break away from the rest of the UK (see “Highlights of 2014”) says a lot about his ambition. He’s a true “ass” in every sense of the word. The possibility that Jeremy Cordon (as UK PM) will be sharing tea and fancies at Chequers with Trump (as US chief) within five years is the stuff of a Frederick Forsyth novel. (A novel that I’ll be filing in the “unread” section of my library along with Germaine Greer’s Female Enoch).
LM We’ve been in the US a lot and people always say: can you believe what he’s said? Can you believe it? I’m like: “Yeah, I can believe it because he’s an ignorant hateful man with an endless supply of money to do what he wants.”
Limmy If Donald Trump is president he’s going to wake up one day and say: “My dream told me to press the nuclear button.” He’s going to get up one day and say, “That is my destiny.” He’s going to press the red button and he’s going to love it. And when he presses it he’ll say, “You’re fired!” He won’t be able to help himself.
ASHCROFT/CAMERON/A PIG
ST It happened, people have admitted as much, and now it’s time to move on.
LM Am I more disturbed by allegations that the prime minister stuck his dick in a pig or the decision to bomb Syria? I don’t know. JK As revealed in Ashcroft’s biography, even Margaret Thatcher thought Cameron was a knob for not believing in anything. Who’d have thought a Tory prime minister could come along and make me want to side with Thatcher? That happened.
Limmy It’s like roulette. If you put enough chips on enough numbers, it will come up. If you accuse enough Tories of putting their cock or for female ones, maybe a nipple, in a pig’s mouth then one of them will eventually go: “How did you know?”
Chvrches’ Every Open Eye is out now; follow Stormzy’s campaign to be Xmas No 1 at #ShutUpForXMasNo1; the final Toast Of London is on Channel 4, Wed, 10.30pm; Limmy’s Daft Wee Stories is out now; the first two series of Drifters are on All4
