Saturday 1 September 2007

Shaun Williamson and Pol Pot

Did anyone watch Shaun Williamson's tough gig, think it was on bbc2, where he had to explore the fashion industry, get to grips with the vibe, write a stand up gig and perform it to the fashionista's.....
Poor bastard. I have never felt such intense hatred for a group of people. I don't know whether it was deliberately cut so as to portray the fashion industry moguls, designers and models as a bunch of vacous, self serving, celery eating, coke snorting, narcissistic fuckwads but thats how they came across.
Oh how the mincing 6 foot 4 mens sales boutique expert laughed when Shaun told him he'll spend around £100 on a suit, when he himself was wearing a pencil thin electric blue number to make him look like a flourescent strip bulb. "Oh bring your suits in darling, we can have a laugh at them."
Like the British tommy in the first world war, Shaun took it all on the chin, with good humour and a generous warmth of spirit. He didn't understand these people, but he didn't want to offend them either. He was subservient, intimidated working class against these over the top caricatures of self indulgence.
"Want me to go over the top sir? I'm allowed to finish my tab first sir? Very generous sir. Thankyou sir. Run towards the barbed wire and german machine gun stronghold sir? Yes sir. I know I'm fat sir, but I promise to run fast, dodge the bullets sir"
Oh how they smirked at the podgy little man. They don't make clothes for him. They make clothes for men and women with no hips, no love handles, over 6 feet and faces like they've swallowed a stinging nettle covered in skunk juice. And apparantley these people are beautiful? Eat a pie!

For some reason, my mind drifted to my trip to Cambodia some years back. Here was a country recovering from the brink of extinction, one man's crazed vision, an agrarian ideal gone mad, where anyone with an education, government job or even for the crime of wearing glasses was considered an undesirable... and either executed, imprisoned or worked to death.

Perhaps Pol Pot, the once mild mannered Cambodian school teacher went to a fashion show, it drove him over the edge...

Come the revolution, I'm sure I'll be put up against the wall, but at least I'll have the pleasure of watching the fashion industry go first. Some of them may be too thin to shoot, so perhaps some sort of cake / chips execution would be appropriate.

And the finale. Was his stand up a hit... erm, No. it looked like Shaun's routine, based on dodgy carry on double entendres bombed in front of that audience... who disdainfully rolled their eyes at his attempts to make them laugh with his gentle observations and nob up the bum gags about the superflous qualities of the fashion industry. How dare this yokel tell us we aren't important!
But in his abject misery, as each jovial awful joke was met with a wall of silence, and his cheesy smile slowly dropped from his face till his body resembled a crushed big mac, sad, lonely and unloved, oozing special sauce, I knew that Shaun would still be a good person deep down, whearas his audience could drift around in their microcosm either telling each other how wonderful they are or bitching about how much weight (3 grammes) their mates have put on.

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