Vic & Bob
The biggest fools at their imaginary celeb Christmas party
1. Ed Miliband
Vic Ed would be good at the door, welcoming people in. If you didn’t want anyone to come in.
Bob He could welcome people to the tree. Come to think of it, he could be the tree.
V Put a green lampshade on his head. Has he made the name Miliband up? It sounds like cleaning fluid or gastric tape.
2. Cristiano Ronaldo
B His aggressive post-scoring stance should be what announces the commencement of the meal, or the next stage of Christmas. He starts hidden, then walks into the front room and goes: “NNNGGGURGH!” And that means, “It’s turkey time”. Or, “Let’s have crackers and arguments.” We’ll use him like a gong, and call him Gongaldo.
V I don’t know who he is.
3. Kim Kardashian
V I’d like to practise carving a turkey on her. Or she could be the turkey. You’d get some good slices, though you’d need a big oven.
B My wife’s aggressively anti-her, though their lives don’t really cross over.
V She’s all pumped-up.
B Is it meat though, or is it packages of silicone? The only way to know is to eat it.
V We’ll eat her arse.
4. One Direction
V If I opened a hairdressing salon for lads, I’d call it Hairy Styles and I’d only comb hair in one direction.
B One for the kids. Let the girls comb their hair like dolls, let the boys have a kickabout in the garden with them. They could keep kicking the ball over, and make Liam go and get it every time, until the neighbour shoots him.
5. Lady Gaga
V She’s a big fake. Pretending to do things first, she’s just nicked it all out of a glossy book. Lady Gargoyle’s doing swing songs now, hanging about with Harold… Bennett? Pinter? Tony Bennett.
B She’ll be our standby carpenter: if Turkey Kim’s on the table we may need a new table knocking up.
6. Prince Harry
V Why do these princes all have to prove themselves in the military? Why don’t they put them in a tobacconist?
B Or a Timpsons.
V Forget your helicopters, take charge of this Spar.
B Get him drunk quick. Good to get the party started.
V He’ll take his clothes off and chase One Direction into the street, while we take pictures.
B And then lock them out.
Jackmaster
The DJ reveals his tried-and-tested 2014 dancefloor bombs
1. Artwork – Let Go Of my Acid
Out of everything I’ve been playing this year, this is the one that gets a reaction every single time. Should be out on Numbers as soon as Arthur finishes the B-side! I know he’s reading. Hurry up, Art.
This just came out a few weeks ago on Tasker’s Whities label. The xylophone melody really reminds me of the more melodic stuff Jeff Mills used to do, and the bass just cuts through everything.
3. Unspecified Enemies – Everything You Did Has Already Been Done
The perfect Numbers record. It encapsulates (almost) everything we’re about over two sides of vinyl.
4. JBs – Tell Me (Blue Boy edit)
Krysko from The Warehouse Project ripped this for me. People are always asking me about it. The truth is I have no idea where to find it! All I know is it was done by Blue Boy, who of course made the 90s classic Remember Me.
I think Barnt is incredible. He seems to be able to please everyone’s palates, from the slightly more commercial to the most hardcore underground DJs. Everything he does sounds original and has its own identity.
Sara Pascoe
An alternative Christmas tale in three chapters
All through 2014 people been wagging their mouths off, saying things like: “You got to choose a side, man” and, “You can’t enjoy Bible stories if you don’t believe”. I cried through all of April, thinking that my fellow human’s adherence to either religious or scientific explanation would create tension at my Wintertime Let’s All Agree Party once again. And then in October, I was bitten by a radioactive compromise and so I spent November in the sewers creating a Christmas story we can all enjoy, atheists and nuns alike!
Chapter one It was the 25th of March of the year zero AD. The Virgin Mary was in bed with her husband, Charles Darwin. They had never made love due to plot points and also because she was roughly 1,900 years older than him (and we all know how unattractive a woman over 29 is). Suddenly they are awoken by a bright Angle, sent by triGODnometry, who stuck a hypotenuse in her ear and got her pregnant. “You are having a baby,” the Angle sang. “He is an early hominid closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos”.
Chapter two And so nine months later Mary gave birth and called the baby GENESus. GENESus was visited by three wise Million Years, and they gifted him with a large brain with advanced communication faculties and ever-increasing abilities in motor function and tool-making. Then a shepherd visited with lambs, which GENESus ate. Then he ate the donkey his mum had ridden, some chickens, and any other herbivore he could lay his hands on; this protein made his brain even bigger and smarter and enabled him to hunt all animals until he was the most skilled killer the world had ever seen.
Chapter three Now GENESus lives inside every one of us and he tells us what to do and every year we stuff our faces full of innocent animals to remember him. Happy Christm-olution everyone!
Jason Williamson
The Sleaford Mods man on the five worst things about touring in 2014
1. Travelodges A timely reminder that underneath the nicely positioned toilet roll is a reservoir of human waste that doesn’t care about your hard work come good. It slaps you down into the hard moulded-plastic chair and grins at you with its beige walls, chocolate machines and strange marks on the carpets. And you leave smelling of bird’s eggs and papier mache.
2. Food It’s all shit, even the fruit and water. Everything is tinged with the smell of arse.
3. Merch Selling T-shirts, re-stocking T-shirts, finding sizes for very drunk people while they scream your lyrics down your lughole… Worse than smelling of bird’s eggs.
4. Crazy promoters We ain’t the Doors and you ain’t Andrew Loog Oldham, shut up.
5. Support acts We’ve all been there but if you believe you should be headlining tonight, then help yourself – you’re clearly much better than us and I’m sure the punters won’t mind at all.
James Acaster
The comedian’s biggest schmoozes of 2014
I make schmoozing look easy, but it ain’t. Buttering up people you want something out of is an artform. Most of the time they’re awful human beings and you have to pretend you like them so they’ll give you the goods. Here are my big fish of 2014.
1. Huck Timmersmitt Timmersmitt works security at comic-book conventions. As you would imagine, he is of average build. Physical confrontations simply aren’t going to happen in a gathering of dweebs; psychological confrontations however, are aplenty. Huck Timmersmitt is a brainy scumbag often assigned to guard the door of some sci-fi big shot (your Nimoys, your Alex Macks, etc) and has to outsmart many superfans trying to disarm him with Derren Brown-style mind tricks. But I’m a schmoozer. I complimented his stance, made a joke about his side parting (the joke was at my expense) and gave him my card (he would later notice it read “Expert Schmoozer”). Within six minutes, I was playing dominoes with the large guy from Lost.
2. Fleur Du Chousze Hang around any high street long enough and you’ll be approached by some do-gooder with a clipboard trying to get you to donate money to a charity you don’t give a high hoot about. They try and schmooze you into helping people but their hit rate is pitiful. So naturally, when I’m up for a challenge, I grab a clipboard and take to the streets, convincing strangers to donate to charities that I made up, just so I can taste the sweet ego boost that only a good schmooze can give you. Fleur Du Chousze was strutting past Waterstones (I don’t target the dawdlers, I go straight for the big game). I didn’t waste time with the usual kids’ TV presenter garbage peddled by most of those drama students; I locked eyes and said: “It’s high time you thought about someone other than yourself, you selfish monster.” Within seconds she’d signed up and still gives regularly to Save The Schmoozers.
3. The Mayor Just a chump, plain and simple. Long story short, if you’re a human statue and you like not having local police arrest you for blinking any more, then you’re welcome.
Stacey Dooley
The investigative reporter’s hairiest moments of 2014
1. Mexican drug cartels We’ve been filming crystal meth trails in Mexico. Some really scary places. And there was one night where we were umming and ahhing whether we should follow a vigilante movement, who were trying to hunt the cartels. It was super hairy. The director was mad keen to do it. And I remember that night just going to bed and thinking: “I’m going to die. I am absolutely, 100% going to die.”
2. Food poisoning in Ghana I was filming the CBBC series Show Me What You’re Made Of. We’d been staying in these villages and I hadn’t washed for a couple of days. And then we checked into a reasonable hotel. Everyone was eating the buffet, and I gave myself really bad food posoning. Obviously, I self-diagnosed as having Ebola! So that wasn’t a great night.
3. Cambodian rats I filmed a show about MDMA, and we finished up in Cambodia, in the rainforest. We were super remote. We were staying in a rancid hostel that was just a man’s living room. It didn’t really have a roof and there were rats running about the place. And we’d been given these mozzie nets that were covered in holes.
4. Detroit’s red-light district We made a documentary in Detroit about homelessness and were outside the entire time. It was one of the coldest winters in 50 years. The temperature was minus 20, 25. And we were following some transgender prostitutes, so a lot of their work was well after midnight. So we’d be working midnight to 5am, out in the cold for five hours losing our minds. Then, at 5am, you’d try and shuffle off to bed in the loudest part of Detroit.
Peter Farrelly
The director’s dumb and dumbest things of the year
1. The Selfie The whole selfie thing I find unbelievably dumb. That is the most selfish, embarrassing, show-offy thing. It’s insane. It’s like people that say: “It’s not bragging if it’s true”. Well yeah, it is bragging if it’s true! That’s exactly what bragging is: if it’s true, it’s bragging. If it’s not, it’s just bullshit.
2. Luis Suarez’s bite We (America) already had that with Mike Tyson. But that Suárez guy really had some issues. He’s a loon.
3. The French crop hipster hairstyle That’s the Jersey Shore hairstyle [really short on the side, long on top – Ed]. They were doing that five years ago. How did they win? It’s such a goofy, guido, Jersey thing and it’s now worldwide.
4. Big beards In every city in the country now, men are walking around with beards that look like civil war reenactments. Every single guy in Brooklyn has that beard.
5. The reaction to Renee Zellweger Everybody was, like: “Look at her new face!” and she just looks like she’s ageing gracefully. It’s crazy.
6. The absence of Pee-Wee Herman
We’ve had to wait almost 20 years for a new Pee Wee Herman movie just because the guy got caught jerking off. He was in a theatre all by himself and he spanked it and that was the end, which I think is absurd. I’m pro jerking off.
Hayden Thorpe
The Wild Beasts man’s top three international fast-food innovations of the year
1. The Cronut (USA) The best treat is always one which makes a Glaswegian chippy look like a health spa. When first sampling the cronut, pleasure centres awoke within me that had previously lay dormant and out of reach. I see it as the natural evolution of classic French patisserie: the croissant has been dragged into the new age via the gung-ho cowboy cookery of the US. Not for the faint of heart, or any heart for that matter, but I will die happy.
2. The KFC Zinger Double Down King (South Korea) A beef burger with two fried-chicken fillets in place of the bun, seemingly exclusive to South Korea. My theory is that this burger acts as a deterrent to the hostile North. Only the fittest and hardiest of nations could sustain such indulgences. People not to be trifled with.
3. The Burger King Premium Kuro Burger (Japan) Black bun, black cheese and squid-ink ketchup. A kind of food with so many additives that it can only be eaten when on tour when I am lucid and disorientated enough to think it’s a good idea. The affection of the audience during the evening’s performance is the only tonic for my post-meal self-loathing.
Run The Jewels
The incendiary rap duo’s hopes for 2015
1. Hip-hop
Killer Mike I don’t really give a fuck about what’s going on in hip-hop!
El-P I think it would be best if it just acknowledged our dominance.
M Exactly!
E My hope for hip-hop in 2015 is that people stop talking about it like it’s a person who got injured. “How’s hip-hop doing?” “Oh, it’s in the hospital still but doing good”!
2. Politics
E I just want Obama to get out of here already because I want to elect another dumb guy. It’s so much easier to accept terrible policies from a stupid motherfucker than it is from a dude like Barack Obama.
3. Comebacks
M I’d like to see Eazy come back from the dead and NWA reunite. That would be a very big deal for me.
E I want Kid ‘N Play to come back out.
M You know Play’s a born-again Christian now?
E That’s fine, Christ likes rap.
M I hope that Jesus and Judas will get back together, discover their lost friendship.
4. Television
M I’d like a show where you take every politician found to be a hypocrite and have them swim with great white sharks. Like, the politician who wanted to enforce drug tests on welfare recipients who got caught with cocaine [Trey Radel]. He should have to swim with the sharks.
5. Great Britain
E I just hope for more cameras for you guys, because while the police may have almost every block surveilled and covered, I think there might be a few holes.
M I hope one of the royal sons marries a black chick. Or a Kardashian. Harry should marry the young Kardashian when she gets of age.
E Why wait? Royalty doesn’t have a problem with underage.
6. Inventions
E I would like to see a little dispenser of plastic bags above the door handle in every bathroom, so you can turn the door knob using the plastic. I don’t like the idea that I go to a public restroom and I wash my hands and then I have to turn the handle; it kind of defeats the whole purpose of washing your hands.
M You could use your sleeve.
E Well I do, because it’s all I have. But all I’m saying is that some people leave the bathroom without washing their hands, so sometimes shit gets on your hand. And if you had a little plastic bag you could tear off from above the door handle then you wouldn’t have to risk touching someone else’s shit. And I don’t know why the people won’t just get behind me on this so we can all march into a better tomorrow.
7. Animals
E I would like the animals to rise up and take over the earth.
M I hope that the deer my cousins are going to kill this weekend are gonna make great steaks.
E I personally would like the deer to arm themselves.
M They already have antlers, what the fuck else do you want?
E They don’t have guns. I’m just saying that hunting would be much cooler if motherfuckers were shooting back. I also think it would be cool if, finally, once and for all, we could communicate with whales. Because I just know that whales have a giant “fuck you” to say to us.
