LUV & HAT

LUV - Right, pay attention. Celebrity Big Brother is back! BACK, I tell you. Barely had its tired, weakened bones been laid to rest in the Channel 4 mausoleum last year, before Channel 5 were feverishly digging it up, flicking off the maggots and drawing a massive knob on it. I’m EXCITED.

Clearly I hate myself for this, for I am a learned woman who reads The Guardian and knows how to use a semi-colon and listens to Radio 4 (Only the funny stuff, mind – none of that politics shit or the radio plays that sound like they’re being read by asylum escapees). Of COURSE I appreciate that CBB is a vacuous, puke-ridden swamp of washed up has-beens who your local panto wouldn’t touch, even wearing a full biological warfare suit and Kevlar oven mitts. And now it’s on CHANNEL 5, which means that any day that passes without a double figures nipple count will be considered a waste of valuable airtime; Richard Desmond will be conducting from the gallery, yelling “I want MORE TITS, goddammit! Hide their clothes! Send in Cheggers! LOOK, there’s an ARSE poking out from under that duvet! ZOOM IN! ZOOM IN!” 

But I don’t care. I love it. Where else can you see George Galloway tossing aside the last few dregs of his credibility by stuffing his knackers into a lycra body suit and purring “I’ll be the cat” to Rula Lenska, (other than a website dedicated to geriatric feline porn)? Where else can you see Verne Troyer getting hammered, perving at women with boobs bigger than his head and then crashing his motability scooter into a door? Or Stephen Baldwin helping Alex Reid to find Jesus, or Pete Burns calling Jodie Marsh an imbecile? WHERE ELSE will you find Dane Bowers, Stephanie Beacham and Ivana Trump in the same room as DJ Basshunter dressed as a pig? Seriously, people. This is CUTTING EDGE TELEVISION. 

And if this weren’t ENOUGH, rumour has it that the new series will feature NOT ONLY Kerry Katona, but also KERRY KATONA’S MUM. Who apparently gains celebrity status by proxy, having scraped the putrid foam off the surface of the gene pool, strained it through a velour tracksuit, implanted it in her womb with a turkey baster, then pushed it out through an Iceland prawn ring and called it Kerry. They will be accompanied by TOWIE’s Amy Childs (who I had to look up, having never watched) – the best description I can come up with is an inflatable doll with a voice akin to setting fire to the end of a knitting needle and slamming it into one of your ears with a meat hammer.  

Sorry? You’ve made it this far and STILL haven’t worked out the single most brilliant thing about Celebrity Big Brother? OK, here it is. You ready? At the end of every episode I do a little Tim Henman fist punch in celebration of being comparatively normal. I am not famous, I’ve never had two tuppences to rub together (another staple of Big Brother, as it happens – vajazzles ahoy), I don’t even own a DECENT HANDBAG. Yet I am sane, and these celebrities are more batshit crazy than a trio of rollerskating unicorns.   

Need a life coach?  Fuck that. Every ounce of therapy you will EVER NEED is right here. Watch it and bathe in the cheap, warm lager of your ordinariness. Marvel at your unremarkable, banal existence. Your future may be an uneven path full of unexpected twists and turns, but go about your business safe in the knowledge that you will NEVER, EVER be trapped in the Bungalow of The Unhinged with Kerry Katona.

No really, you’re welcome.
- Heidi Stephens 

HAT - Right, let’s all make a deal. Next time someone decides to kill Celebrity Big Brother, can we do it properly? Can we cut off its head with a spade and then encase it in a lead-lined concrete block and sail it out to sea and drop it down the conduit of a subaquatic volcano forever? Can we do that?

We must. Because every time we don’t kill Celebrity Big Brother properly, it’ll just keep reanimating with a smaller budget on a smaller channel. Which is fine when it means going from Channel 4 to Channel 5, but look to the future. What do you see? That’s right, the Price-Drop.tv Celebrity Big Brother, slung together for 50p, filmed on a Nokia that belongs to someone’s dad and featuring the corpse of one of the Chuckle brothers and a confused old man who was either on The Bill or just happens to be called Bill. This will happen. It WILL. I have SEEN IT.

But let’s deal with that nightmare when we get to it. For now, looming over us like a dribbling paedophile with an erection, is Celebrity Big Brother 2011.

We’ve been through this nightmare before, of course, so we know what to expect. The catastrophically dull glamour model. The hasbeen who’ll throw a tantrum and storm out. The angry American. The politician. The reality TV star who’ll say “It’s time that people saw the real me” and then act surprised when the real them turns out to be a massive cunt. The level-headed one, who will win. The racist one, who will not win.

And, for fuck’s sake, Jedward.

Jedward. Funny for ten minutes in 2009 Jedward. Jedward. Jedward who make your teeth itch. Jedward who make your balls retract. Jedward who make you cry animal vomit. Who are compelled to use the word ‘guys’ at least six times in every sentence. Who consist of one twin who loves being in Jedward and another twin who looks like being in Jedward causes him tremendous pain. Jedward. Jedward. Fucking Jedward.

So Celebrity Big Brother will be awful. Everything about it will be awful. The show itself will be awful. The newspaper coverage of it will be awful. The inevitable race war and ensuing parliamentary debate will be awful. But, most awful of all, it means that we’re in for another summer spent listening to all sorts of uppity arseholes droning on about how much they hate Celebrity Big Brother. People who do this are, without question, the worst people in the world.

Yeah, I know. Shut up.
- Stuart Heritage

LUV - Family legend has it that, on 6 April 1974, I shut my bawling infant mouth for the first waking moment since my birth nine months before. I was rendered utterly silent, to the extent that my mother had to stub her fag out and check I hadn’t crawled into the gas fire. The reason? Our recently-purchased colour television, where a group of beardy Swedes (and a blonde bird) were jigging about in a technicolour smorgasbord of polyester loonpants. Despite not entirely grasping the lyrical military analogy about a girl surrendering to love, that night was my Waterloo. It would be a lifetime of pain and heartbreak, but I was hopelessly and utterly devoted to The Eurovision Song Contest.

37 years on, it is a love that endures. I have dedicated countless hours to white-suited boy bands, Baltic power ballads, startling chest wigs, Finnish rock, demented flag-waving, baffling lyrics and artists of indeterminate gender. I have devised complex drinking games and managed sweepstakes, printed off nifty scoring sheets and skewered cheese and pineapple onto sticks topped with wanky little Euro-flags. I once made a disparaging comment about the winning entry and received drunken death threats from angry Norwegians, and yet still I love every Edam-stuffed, parmesan-topped minute.

And you know why? Because it’s shit. Unutterably, consummately, excrementally crap. In a world where coolness is a commodity that can only be found dangling off a three grand fucking handbag, it is a few hours of hilarious, escapist, camptastic nonsense that gives me license to laugh my tits off at Jonny Foreigner until life returns to normal and we all go back to being sensible, grown-up, modern Europeans.

And most of all, I love that the rest of Europe takes it all so seriously, like Brussels is watching and poised to decimate the EU fishing quotas of anyone who doesn’t look like they’re really trying. I love that they all shamelessly vote for their neighbours, so that even if the Cyprus entry came out in a halloumi dress and farted the Turkish national anthem into a megaphone, Greece would still give them 12 points. I love that there are still parts of our fine continent where doing a demented jig in Lederhosen with an accordion is still at the cutting edge of music.

How can that NOT make you proud to be European? It’s the best night of telly all year. Vive L’Eurovision!
- Heidi Stephens*

HAT - Face it, Britain isn’t very good at much. Our skies are mottled, our transport system is unreliable and our teeth look like the remnants of a mortar attack on a mint imperial factory. But music? Music we can do.

We invented The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and David Bowie and The Pet Shop Boys and Pulp and most of Girls Aloud and The Sex Pistols and Take That and The Kinks and The Clash and Dizzee Rascal and a meaningful percentage of Guns N’ Roses. We’re GOOD at music. We ARE.

Not that you’d even get the faintest sniff of that from watching any of our Eurovision output, though. If aliens came down to Earth today and judged the United Kingdom solely on the quality of its performance at any recent Eurovision Song Contest, they’d go home thinking that this was an island full of backwards, cross-eyed, gibbering titsplats who spend their days stumbling into windows and deliberately soiling themselves for kicks. Look who we’ve entered since we won last in 1997. Look, and then WEEP:

1998 - Toni Braxton’s Shit Auntie

1999 - Not Even Atomic Kitten

2000 - The Hormone Replacement Therapy Singers

2001 - An Awful Child And Her Awfuller Rapper

2002 - Jessica Garlick Who Is Lovely And YOU LEAVE HER ALONE

2003 - Nil Points

2004 - Darren Day’s Discarded Afterbirth

2005 - Not Even Alesha Dixon

2006 - The Creepiest Man Who Ever Lived

2007 - A Fat Bloke, A Gay Man, Two Readers’ Wives And A Blowjob Joke

2008 - That Crying Binman Off Of X Factor

2009 - Not Even Mutya (featuring The Genuinely Freakish Lizard-Man Ensemble)

2010 - Just Some Fucking Bloke

2011 - Blue

That’s right. It’s Blue this year. Blue. Fucking BLUE. A middle-aged boyband made up of an idiot, a musical theatre star, a man who aspires to be The Lighthouse Family and Antony Costa Who Wet Himself At A Cashpoint That Time. These are the people who we’ve chosen to represent us in front of all of Europe. ALL OF EUROPE, mind you.

Europe’s already cooler than us, friendlier than us, more efficient than us and has considerably better hair than us. The last thing we should do is show them three minutes of Lee Ryan shuffling around like a shaved baboon with a live fish wedged up its rectum while he makes a noise like a broken kettle. It’s literally the last thing we should do. Literally. Literally.

We’re crap at Eurovision. Everyone knows this. We don’t need to rub their faces in it. We’re an embarrassment. Even entering Blue into Eurovision at all is the most embarrassing thing I can think of right now. Except for them winning, of course. Obviously that’d be a disaster.
- Stuart Heritage

*This was a SPECIAL GUEST LUV from brilliant Guardian liveblogger extraordinaire Heidi Stephens. Stuart and Heidi are liveblogging Eurovision for The Guardian on Saturday TOGETHER! FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY! IT’LL BE AMAZING! TO SOME EXTENT!