The Loneliness’ of the Long Distance Runner

Not only does it pay a pittance, make my blood boil and give me low self-esteem, but I find this job has ruined my love life. As a single man about town I thought getting into the TV industry - in whatever lowly position - would give me some real clout with the ladies. The killer punch came last (which hopefully will come again tonight ina good way for Rocky Hatton against Mayweather). So I’m quaffing a ridiculously expensive bottled bear in a Shoreditch hell hole and talking to a stick thin coked up blonde hanging on my every word, and she asks me “what do you do?” I could fix her with my twinkling eyes, raise one eyebrow and reply with all the time in the world “oh I just work in television”. Job done, surely it has to be better than saying I’m a DJ (Or I'm DJIN IN LDN THIS FRIDAY). But what actually comes out when talking to girls is “ I’m just a runner” before adding “ just a sad lonely runner really” - at which point the stick thin cokehead blonde normally looks as though she suddenly has a dog shit moustache and quickly moves in the direction of any other male in building.

In an industry more inbred than the Royal Family I have about as much chance of pulling as a member of the Taliban at a New York fire fighters conference. TV people often stick together hoping in the future to mate and give birth to a channel controller or at least a commissioner. Being at the bottom of the pile gives me no chance what so ever. The chances of me shagging my way up the career ladder are minimal. Apart from the time a menopausal divorcee director pinched my arse while I was bent over wiring up a deck in a edit suite. I can imagine I would be halfway through taking heR to heaven and back when she would tap me on the shoulder and ask me for a fucking latte.

Its pretty shit really. All I want to do is meet one of those nice trendy girls from the American Apparel adverts. I’d even wear skinny jeans and a neon t-shirt for any of those girls. Suddenly I would be infinitely cooler than all the other tryhards I come into contact with on a daily basis. That Lovefoxx girl from CSS would be the ultimate. I would then be very cool indeed (CSS are infinantly cool - and they're South American). After making my umpteenth lemon and ginger tea of the day, instead of losing the will to live I could just think “its ok I’m going out with Lovefoxx tonight to have monkfish and noodles at that Vietnamese place on Old Street,……… so fuck you.”

Nu-Cunts On The Block

I’m too young to remember old rave but this nu-rave stuff is bollocks. My research shows that rave didn’t happen that long ago anyway - I think it was somewhere way back in the midst of time - shit wait wasn't it was around the early nineties? So its not really old or anything is it. Not like skiffle. Or big band. As there is now nu-rave, does that mean we will now get nu-brit pop, nu-trip hop, nu-reggae? I don’t really see the point. Rave culture in the early nineties happened when the ecstasy culture was at its peak and it was never about fashion, just about the music and the quality drugs that could be scored, getting sweaty and having a good time was all that mattered back then. Now every club you go to is full of coked up assholes or dribbling k-heads. Where once people cracked open a warehouse and had it large, now its 30 quid a ticket in a car park smelling of piss.

The reason I mention I nu-rave is that many of my contemporaries seem to go on about this scene as though Jesus Christ himself has donned a 80’s Nike shell suit, some glow sticks and a neon bum bag, moved to Shoreditch and is playing keyboard for Shit Disco. Every other cunt I talk to is either suddenly a DJ playing ragga mixed with the accapella from Paul McCartneys Frog Song, or has started a band with a fisher price keyboard and an simon says electronic game. It’s all bollocks in my opinion.

In a long list of shit kids peddling this crap the worst offenders must be The Coconut Twins. They play something called ghetto tech, a name that sounds so futuristic to me, I don’t think I'll know what it means until some time around the year 2020. My eyes actually ache from looking at their neon glow and I have to ask where the fuck did it all go wrong? These two might be very nice girls for all I know but the shit they're coming out with must make their parents blush. Their myspace is so like a dispatch from right on the cutting edge of now, it's like staring into the end of the world. Apparently their DJING IN LDN THIS FRIDAY. Being DJ's as well as fashion designers, and ex-editors of nu-rave bible super super. So they have all of societies most useful occupations covered in one. The Coconut Twits dress themselves amidst a style that wouldn't go amiss in Spike Lee's 'Do The Right Thing'. Probably hoping that dressing like the hood will give them some sort of credibility that every other aspect of their existence lacks. To bring 90s American ghetto fashion into the equation, booty dancing, neon shit-patterned clothes and cheap gold surely takes a stylistic genius or far too many drugs. They say things like “Check the dates mang!” and generally go around acting like DJING in Shoreditch and “around the world” is a excuse for looking like the biggest tossers this side of a BBC commissioners Christmas party. At least we can rest easy in the knowlege that by next week, they'll probably be out of fashion.

The Ghost In Uniform

Walk past some of the major facilities houses around Soho and you see their runners wearing uniform; obviously not a police or fireman kind of affair - I mean a bloody uniform like they're waiters or something. This is an official uniform, as opposed to the unofficial runners uniform of American Apparel, garish early 90s neon shit, or whatever is the 'fierce' style that the denizen's of Shoreditch are deeming cool for this millisecond.

The runner’s t-shirts often have something hilarious on them like ‘run of the mill’ or ‘only a runner’. Basically this is so some other young jeans, trainers and t-shirt wearing scruffy trend addict (who actually happens to be a grand a minute promo director) doesn’t get asked by anyone to make them a cup of tea. This actually happened once - a knight of the realm British film director demanded a coffee from a young chap only for him to offer the excuse he was in the middle of cutting the latest advert for a famous alcoholic beverage. So uniforms make everything much simpler and regimented, that’s why the Nazis loved them.

Wear the uniform! You are shit and will be told what to do by everyone else for 90 hours a week. You are worthless! You are a runner! So its sort of like the clothing equivalent of the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket coming round to give you a nice little pep talk.

The North Face of The Moon

Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Fredrico Fellini, John Luc Goddard and Michael Winner - the director can be an artist responsible more than anyone else in filmmaking for the artistic creation of a film. Auteur theory has taught us to respect these artists and their creations, their beautiful lovingly crafted masterpieces of celluloid, and then there is the TV director. For every Adam Curtis, Molly Dineen or Nick Broomfield there are sadly countless cunts who make worthless reality TV but think their Stanley fucking Kubrick. Sadly I have to deal with directors all to often as they sit slouched in a leather chair in a edit suite on their MacBook (which has to be in black I may add), watching a editor try to save their mess of a television programme while they just sit there shitting it over the impending viewing with their exec. They will be sipping at a cup of cold coffee (they're just too busy to drink it while its hot) and dissapearing every 5 minutes to talk to someone on their Iphone and smoke a Marlborough light. Yet amongst all this mayhem they still find time to get me to wait on them hand and foot and wipe their arse with my own fair hands.

Dressed head to foot in north face and nhs style glasses( if North Face ever want to move into eyewear there is a killing to be made in the media sector) the modern tv director is always ready for action. But why travelling from their home to work they need to wear a jacket designed for trekking through Outer Mongolia I will never know. Or maybe their flash city apartment is located half way up the fucking eiger.

Up Dawsons Creek Without a Paddle

The story of the missing canoeist no doubt had production underlings frantically phoning round this afternoon to get that exclusive access for a fast turn around Channel five or Sky docomentary that will be made in a week and is about as informative as a chocolate wrapper.

The guy in question aparently has been missing for five years, and has no memory of said ordeal. If this doesn't make for the best interview, the lack of action will no doubt be made up for by some fabulous shaky cam re-enactment footage featuring a runner in a canoe.

Selective memory loss is a terrible thing and sadly something that effects the TV industry particularly badly, especially production managers and the like who often need someone to blame for the daily production fuck up rather than themselves. The standard question asked when said daily fuck up happens, such as an visa less crew stranded in some African hell hole border crossing, with only a teddy bear called Mohamed to keep them company, is “why wasn’t I told about this sooner” to which the response should often be ‘you were but just chose not to listen as you were too busy whitering on about fresh and fucking wild and spending Christmas in Chamonix”. Always save your emails to back your ass up, always!

Grimshaw

BBC Radio 1 appears to have a unique talent for uncovering annoying presenters. First we have Jo Wiley, who while thinking shes gods gift to man also likes to lay claim to discovering every artist on the planet. I noticed her drop this trick in while having the displeasure to watch the BBCs new attempt at being down with the kids, Sound (BBC2 Saturday at 17.15). While discussing the artist Robyn ,Wiley laid claim to 'having always liked her' and some other cantankerous lies to make herself her look good - I think when she was born her asshole and her mouth got mixed up and all the shit comes out the wrong end.

So Sound is the programme that is here to fill the saturday night void of Top of The Pops 2. But top of the pops was dated yeah, kids nowadays are like so cool. Well, Sound tries hard to be cool. So so hard. Its edited at such a frenetic pace that watching it makes you feel like someones taken your eyeballs out and put them in a washing machine full of spanners. It fucking hurts. So you've got the cool camera work, so you need some cool presenters yeah. Step forth Grimshaw, cool personified and proud victim of east londons tsunami of fashion.

So whats Grimshaws look? Lumberjack crossed with a shitter version of Morrisey's haircut from his time in the Smiths. Very dissapointing I'm sure you'll agree but no doubt all the little brats in Universitys across the country will start immitating him. Also being northern, he will no doubt end up being the 'new' Vernon Kay, now that hes settled into middle age entertaining the Pikeys on ITV1 of a Saturday night and saying how 'stonking' everything is all the time. I bet all the execs across the country are dripping at the prospect of this man and who can be the first to tie him up on a golden handjob. Prepare yourself for complete saturation; I point to the trends we've already been through - Kay Hole, Dermot O'Leary, that Bristolian Yeti, Russell Brand, Jimmy Carr, Tony fucking Slattery............................................................

So if you get the chance to switch off sound please do, and save us from a terminator style apocolaypse of a future.

Commissioner Boredom

Also tonight, been out for a few drinks down a trendy new bar which has been made to look exactly like the old mans pub it used too be but without the drunken cockney regulars. The captains jackets and no doubt Winehouse and Doherty will soon be a fixture here, and I just wanted to let everyone know that I was a pioneer before old crackhive whitened the shelves in the ladies. I was having a conversation with a friend who works as a runner at the offices of a production company, when this story arrived in the conversation. I really have to give her credit for the use of the phrase 'cuntwash'.

"The commissioner. The walking living god of the TV industry. The person who can make or break a production company. People go on as though these tossers are saving lives, instead of just dolling out slabs of their production budget to their old Oxford chums.

When a commissioner deems your company worthy of a personal visit, all the stops are pulled out. The best organic produce will have been collected. Choco Leibniz spread out, the freshly squeezed pomegranate juice prepared. All waiting for the arrival of the black clad, NHS glasses wearing commissioning cuntwash. If you fuck one of these cunts over, your well and truly screwed; no commissions from their channel until their sacked - and they will be - that’s the only nice thing about those commissioner cunts. Their all sacked at some point. I mean you only have to spunk a few hundred grand away on worthless cutting edges that sit on the shelf for years before your surely kicked out the door.

When they very rarely visit the office, as a runner as you might catch some of the meeting as your bringing the food, pouring the coffee or fellating where applicable around the meeting table. You will hear your boss, the exec who normally strides around the office like he is the fucking son of god, suddenly turn into Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross - the washed up old salesman desperately trying to close the deal. As you hear him twitter on about the 'Landmark series that will reinvent the way reality television is interpreted' you look over at the commissioner in all his smug glory. Stroking his chin and drinking black coffee (some have soya milk I may add), looking like a Roman Emperor about to raise or lower his thumb at the end of a blood thirsty gladiatorial clash. With all this power I cant help thinking it must be really easy for them to get laid, but they probably spend most of their spare time wanking off over their own reflection in a full length mirror instead."

How true this is. These fuckers are largely responsible for the state of television today and should take note of when TV was great, when ideas didn't involve repackaging all the inept programmes they've already had into new, even more boring wrappers. Arrange me a marriage? I'll arrange you a cab. And no we won't fucking put it on the bill you cheeky cunt.