2011 was a busy old year, so what did you enjoy most? The Royal Wedding? Nah, you’re right, apart from a day off and a chance to ogle an all-new Royalty related arse in the shapely shape of Pippa Middleton, it was all a bit naff. What about the killing of bin Laden? Yeah, that’s more like it – a 10 year game of hide and seek come to a brutal end in, what was described as, a ‘luxury villa’ in Pakistan. I personally would have liked to have seen more images of Barry Obama punching the air and Condoleezza Rice rubbing against the furniture in a orgasmic frenzy of savage vengeance, but you can’t have everything. I would also have preferred the video footage to have been soundtracked with AC/DC, but again…
Which bad-guy bashing naturally leads to the equally drawn-out demise of Libyan golf-buggy fancier, genocidal maniac, and all-round nutjob melty-face, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Defiant, mad as a box of retarded frogs, and as deeply in denial as previous holder of the It’s Not Happening World Championship, Comical Ali, there were rumours that Gaddafi Duck had fled Sirte disguised as a woman, which was well worth mocking until you remembered that he wore dresses every day anyway. In the end he died the way he lived: in a pipe. Or something.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Greece owned up to having fucked up its finances on a whole new level of fuck-uppery, leading to Germany umming and ahhing about helping out before eventually deciding that some kind of hostile takeover of the Greek banking system was called for. Followed by a hostile takeover of Greece, no doubt. They can’t help themselves.
Back in Britain, some criminal who owned a gun but wasn’t holding it at the time got himself shot by the police, consequently the nation went looting. Never before have so many stole so much in the name of so few, well one, one person they didn’t know… or know anything about. Alright far from a political movement over dissatifaction with life in coalition Britain it was all about pinching trainers from Foot Locker and as much tech as their cheap gold jewellery covered pikey hands could half-inch from Currys. Fortunately before long even nicking stuff began to feel too much like ‘work’ and the chaos stopped.
It was also the year of demise for another terror of the people, the News of The World – a newspaper that was simultaneously not about the world or news. Hacking coughs spread and took down journalism’s last bastions of illegal practice in a whirlwind of finger-pointing, back-stabbing, implausible deniability and out-and-out lying as the Murdoch family pleaded laughable innocence and the red-topped, Ross Kemp battering banshee of the red-tops, Rebecca Brooks, was toppled and the 168 year old creaking organ that was easily Britain’s Worst Newspaper was shut down forever, the final edition’s front page emblazoned with ‘Thank You & Goodbye’ which, presumably, came from the end of a phone call they’d hacked.
There was also plenty of natural and unnatural disasters scattered throughout 2011 to keep the remaining newspapers in business until the Leveson Inquiry (not named after Brian Leveson, the writer behind the hilarious My Family) inevitably shuts them all down: Japan with its earthquake, tsunami and subsequent Fukushima nuclear near-Fuk, Thailand with the floods they didn’t love long-time, and America with its annual array of high school and postman-based shootings.
In entertainment – a term I use as loosely as a prolapsed rectum – X Factor history was made when the fixed competition was won by a group comprising three chavettes and a singing pig. Which, come to think of it, would be a better name than Little Mix. But, of course, they’re all winners, aren’t they? – the one who looked like a bloke in a dress, the fat Cocc kid with the stupid hair, the one who thought she was Grace Jones, that stunted, Autistic Irish homosexual, the fat one from Take That, the one that’s not Beyonce, the new Queen of the Chavs and…. wait, no they weren’t winners, were they? There’s only ever one winner – Simon Cowell.
2011 was also the year the terms Tiger Blood, Bi-Winning and Complete And Utter Public Mental Collapse were bandied about all across the papers as Charlie Sheen began his descent into shit-smearing insanity and a teenage American girl called Rebecca Black recorded the worse song ever, worse even than Little Mix’s reimagining of Damien Rice’s Cannonball (for which they will pay), but which finally settled which day came after Friday and overtook the Japanese disaster in the Twitter ratings; unbelievable. Following which, refusing to be outdone, Amy Winehouse poured herself a proper stiff one in a blaze of absolutely no surprise to anyone and now has another number one album. That’s how it works.
What else? Ah yes, the final flight of the Space Shuttle arrived when apathy set in at NASA and what was once all ‘space this and space that’ ended after overwhelming evidence across the globe proved that there’s no intelligent life anywhere and they’d be better off saving the money up in the hope that they can one day buy the country back from China.
Which I think just about covers it. Nothing more I can think of anyway. Feel free to add anything I missed.
PritchardMedia 