TFTD 8/2/10: Gok Wan, as every Welsh-speaker knows, means ‘weak penis’ in Welsh.
This week’s castaway was that berk Gok Wan. He described how
the worst moment of his life was … having to style a fashion shoot for Bryan
Ferry. His luxury item was lip-balm. He is, truly, a gigantic berk.
TFTD 4/2/10: I'm seriously thinking about buying this motorcycle.
Oh, hang on. That's it. It looks like a fucking banana
It doesn’t actually eat cow shit, though. That would be dirty. No, it catches
smaller flies and sucks their insides out. It likes to eat blow-flies,
so this is a good thing. Hurrah for the Common Yellow Dung Fly! We salute you.
But in late autumn, when the grass stops growing, cows move inside to
their winter sheds. Instead of fresh grass, they eat silage, which is a lot
drier, so they get all constipated, and strain to force out nuggets of hard,
fibrous dung.
On the upside, their milk tastes great for a couple of weeks, because
it becomes creamier and more concentrated.
Then in the spring, the cows go back out onto fresh grass. It’s a joyful
sight, seeing cows go back into pasture after a long winter inside, paddling around
in their own shit.
The downside is that with the diet of fresh grass, the milk tastes a bit
watery for a while. And the cows get terrible diarrhoea, so when a cow lifts
its tail in the milking parlour, you have to watch out for great jets of liquid
shit flying across at you. Ahh, happy days.
And on this week's Springwatch, Bill Oddie gets what's fucking coming to him.
TFTD 29/1/10: Television
famously adds 5lb, but it also deducts 25 IQ points. I’ve met a
few TV presenters, and as a rule they’re very clever people
who appear slightly denser on-screen because of the demands of
working in a mass medium.
The exception is, of course, horse-faced shoutypants Davina McCall, who is an idiot in
real life, but looks okay on telly thanks to autocues and a boundless
store of terrifying ambition.
Davina once appeared on Room 101, where she was superbly vulgar and tiny-minded. I can’t remember the exact details, but her list of pet hates went something like this: Frank Sinatra, books, nature, education, puppies, sunshine, water, the countryside, art, dolphins, science, progress, the Renaissance, good manners, civilisation. etc etc.
Really? The truth is, local newspapers have bled councils for years.
Papers make very little money from the cover price – the vast majority comes
from advertising. The most lucrative ads were always for jobs, known in the trade
as ‘sits vac’. Around 60% of a newspaper’s entire revenue might come from sits
vac. Not a bad earner.
And the creamiest profits came from local authorities, who had no choice but to advertise their jobs in local newspapers - bilingually in
Then two things happened. The internet, obviously - sits vac quickly moved online. And councils realised
that rather than spend a fortune on local advertising, it was cheaper to start
their own newspapers – ones that didn’t take their advertising revenue, shaft them and
then slag them off in the news pages.
Despite calling for them to be banned, Sly Bailey is still happy to
print council newspapers, mind – Trinity Mirror is contracted to print seven of
them in
Talking of hypocrisy, Sly has also attacked the BBC for its hyperlocal
web strategy, saying it’s unfair competition to local papers. At the same time,
she’s closing down her own local newspapers, and axing branch offices. Most local
papers simply don’t have a local presence any more – they’re run remotely from head
office.
So who is going to give local people a voice? Not Trinity Mirror, that’s
for sure. Personally, I’d feel much safer if the whole thing was in the hands
of the BBC, rather than Dee Snider.
Sorry, I should explain: Dee Snider. That’s Trinity Mirror employees’
nickname for Sly Bailey.
Dee Snider: delivering profits to shareholders. And fuck the rest.
TFTD 27/1/10: One
Friday night in college, when everyone else was getting merrily
rat-arsed down the Rosemary Branch, I had to stay in because I was
absolutely skint. To cheer myself up, I made an event of it -
admittedly, a poignant and shitsomely lonely event - by
listening to Radio
1’s Friday Rock Show. And just to make it even more special, I marked all the
songs out of 10. I’ve still got the piece of paper somewhere.
Anyway, the Friday Rock show was presented by heavy metal prophet
Tommy Vance, who used to refer to himself as ‘Thomas the Vance’, because he was
like that.
More than 20 years later, I still remember that the two worst songs were
something by Neil Young – naturally - and Never
Satisfied by the Tygers of Pan Tang.
I just listened to Never Satisfied again on YouTube. It’s still marvellously shit after all these years. The narrative arc goes like this: our hero meets a lady in a nightclub. Despite his very best efforts, she proves to be sexually insatiable. The encounter leaves him exhausted.
It was a surprisingly common
complaint of heavy metal singers from the NWOBHM period.
Oh, and I just checked and Tommy Vance’s real name was Richard Anthony
Crispian Francis Prew Hope-Weston. Absolutely true. Fucking marvellous.
TFTD 26/1/10: So I went to a seminar last night. It was called “Keeping your
children safe from harm on the internet.” All seminars contain five minutes of genuine
interest, buried in two hours of bullshit. Last night was no exception. It was
conducted by a woman called Pam who specialises in prim moral outrage. (Ha! She
should see this website). Whenever Pam walks into her living room, she probably
checks under the cushions for paedophiles.
What Pam definitely does, because she bragged about it, is spend a lot
of time stalking her 13-year-old daughter and her friends on Facebook, and
ringing their parents to report what she sees as the Deadly Dangers of the Internet.
“One girl put up a picture of herself sucking a lollipop,” she said,
purple-faced with outrage. She paused to let the horror sink in. “Ladies and
gentlemen. She was sucking. A. Lollipop.” She sucked in her own cheeks
triumphantly. Quite possibly she had a small orgasm.
See, I’ve never understood this. If you’re a pervert, you’ve got the
whole garish majesty of the internet to go looking for porn. Why on earth
would you bother trawling through Facebook for pics that are only faintly titillating?
It’s like going on a shopping trip to
Incidentally, if teenage lollipop action is your thing, Pam, here’s a picture from a recent advert for Converse trainers:
TFTD 25/1/10: Women are
prettier than men. Even the prettiest man is, generally speaking, only as pretty as a fairly ugly
woman. Here’s a rare example of the reverse, where an unusually ugly man looks an
awful lot like a very attractive woman:
Left to right: Pretty Woman starJulia Roberts; big-nosed prog rock icon Geddy Lee from Rush
TFTD 24/1/10: Club DJs: instead of exhorting the crowd to, “Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care”, it’s more economical to say, “Put your hands in the air insouciantly.” And far more elegant.
TFTD 23/1/10: The Three Worst
Noises In The World, in reverse order:
2. Foxes
shagging outside your bedroom window, at three in the morning.
1. Neil Young singing After The Gold Rush.
Sweet Jesus - what's that unbelievably fucking awful noise? Oh, it's...
TFTD 22/1/10: I can’t tell who is looking at this site, but thanks to Google Analytics I know which Google searches they’re using to find me. If you type any of the following into Google, it directs you straight to this website. How marvellous, and yet slightly shameful. These are my ten favourites:
* dirty very young naked schoolgirls slag like fucking after
school
* gloryhole
* nurses enimas
* sally james tits
* she is wearing a pudding bowl crash helment show pictures
* tesco culverhouse cross butchery complaint
* would you shag amanda holden
TFTD 21/1/10: Bafta nominee Carey Mulligan has a tenuous Llandeilo connection: her grandfather taught at the local school (in fact, he taught my father at the start of his teaching career, and me at the end). He was called Denzil. Great name. More people should be called Denzil.
Another Hollywood star you often see knocking around Llandeilo is flame-haired (ie, ginger) heart-throb Damian Lewis, whose father owns a farm in nearby Trapp. Another great name, Trapp. Anyway, Damian Lewis usually turns up for the Boxing Day hunt - which is a bit daring, for a ginge.
Tragedy at the Llandeilo hunt as Damien Lewis's vividly ginger head is mistaken for a fox
TFTD 20/1/10: So farewell
then, the great Bill McLaren. He never learnt to pronounce ‘Gwendraeth’, as in
1. Being
kicked in the face by my own team captain, and being given four unanaesthetised
stiches in the changing room by Dr Terry.
2.
Being
knocked briefly unconscious against King’s College, and not
remembering where I was supposed to stand in the line-out, or any
of my team-mates’ names. They thought it was really funny; the
referee called an ambulance.
3.
The horrendous
fighting during a tour match to the dismal industrial French shithole
of Longwy. We had to leave two of our players behind
in hospital.
TFTD 19/1/10: Here's another thing I hate: the food reviews in local press. They're always written by some junior reporter on a freebie, or some witless advertising executive who writes things like: "My wife said her soup was very tasty."
TFTD 18/1/10: I've got nothing against him, but Prince William always looks like such a gigantic tit in photographs. Look:TFTD (21/6/9): Hey ho.
Another weekend ruined by heroin.
I wanted to
make elderflower cordial. Dissolve some caster sugar and citric acid in hot water,
then add a couple of lemons and your elderflowers, collected from the riverbank
by you and your winsome children, possibly while singing in three-part harmony,
like the fucking Von Trapps. What could be more wholesome?
Ah, but I
can’t get hold of citric acid in any chemist in
It’s
illegal to supply citric acid for drug-taking purposes. Excuse me, Mr Chemist.
Do I look like a fucking junkie? Apparently I do. Sigh.
And then
when you protest, “But I only want to make some deliciously refreshing
elderflower cordial from the frothy blossoms that nature has so generously
bestowed,” they look at you like you’re just some shrill middle-class ponce.
Which I am, but still.
Heroin. Just say no.
The
syringe falls from the cold, dead hand of Pete Doherty, after I swap
his citric acid for fucking battery acid. That'll learn him.
TFTD (20/6/9): I fail to see the point of magpies. I hate that football-rattle noise they make, at six in the fucking morning, every morning. When I am king, they shall be wiped from the face of the earth. And assorted other birds I don't like.
When swans breed with seagulls: a bird that breaks your arm, then nicks your chips.
________________________________________________________________
TFTD (19/6/9): Piers Morgan, the new face of Burger King? Jesus. It’s put me off burgers for
life. Piers Morgan, naked except for a tiny little loincloth? Whopper with
Cheese, sir? No thanks, I’d rather not.
In the picture, Piers Morgan’s face is grafted onto the body of a much younger man. It’s the opposite of Amanda Holden, who has the face of a much younger woman stuck onto the wattled neck of, well, Amanda Holden.
Talking of which (ie, botoxed judges), whom would you rather shag: Danni or Kylie? Scientific research conducted in a pub recently reveals that 68% of men would rather bend one up Kylie, but only because it bestows greater bragging rights. Most men, however, believe that Danni would actually be the better shag.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (18/6/9): I’ve been to the degree show at the Cardiff School of Art. Lots of excellent work, plus the usual hefty dose of posturing student wank. Oh, and some blocks of lard, pretending to be a sculpture:
A cow died
to make this. Perhaps that's the whole point. I don't know. Or how about my own personal favourite – a small white empty room,
with this label:
TFTD (17/6/9): And the
award for Greatest Living Englishman goes to… Gary Barlow. The fat one nobody
fancied. The talented one who wrote all the songs, and yet we still picked on
him. Gary Barlow, who went to work diligently every day, and every day had a
bucket of shit poured on his head. And he’d come back into work the next day, and it
happened again, every day, for ten years.
So he went away, had a family, reformed the band, and made the two best albums they’ve ever done. Gary Barlow. Stoical role-model. National treasure. On behalf of all smart-arsed columnists, I apologise. Still needs to shoot his fucking stylist, mind.
The obvious choice for that vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square: Gary Barlow with a bucket of shit on his head. Yet still somehow dignified.
_______________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (15/6/9): I love
Instead of hiring ex-special forces soldiers, I reckon world leaders should employ crack teams of Glaswegians porters. Anyone who came within 50 feet would have their shins hacked off by wheelie trolleys. Honestly, it really hurts.
Barack
Obama walks the streets of Baghdad unhindered, under the watchful eye
of a malevolent little ginger fucker from Glasgow Airport
TFTD (14/6/9): There were
hundreds of walkers on the main path up
All our
fellow walkers were in full-on hiking gear, with compasses and maps and lashings
of Goretex – apart from one bloke who was just wearing trainers and a 
On Ben Nevis, a Newcastle supporter out-stares a rain cloud until it fucks off back to where it came from, Sunderland probably
TFTD (13/6/9): I’d read
about Scottish midges, usually in a glossy travel feature by some hysterical Islingtonsite,
who makes you mutter, “Keep your knickers on, luv, it’s only a tiny little insect.”
But fair
play. They’re horrendous. It’s like being taunted simultaneously by three million
pre-school children. I’d bought some fancy insect repellent in Millets, which Highland
Midges clearly find delicious.
I ended up using
the military stuff, nicked from the Quartermasters Stores by our ex-army friend. It
works really well, but apparently the chemicals are so strong, it melts
the plastic of the SA80 rifles. God knows what it did to our children’s
faces. Kept the midges off, though.
TFTD (12/6/9): I once
wrote in a guide book that Snowdonia “… has all the drama of the Scottish
Highlands compressed into one small corner of
Snowdonia is fantastic, but the Scottish Highlands are truly, jaw-droppingly fucking amazing. So there.
Me, writing bollocks, again. It's a kind of pictorial metaphor, if you will.
____________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (11/6/9): Shame about
Ryan Jones missing the Lions tour, again. He’s a nice guy, and deserves a break.
I
interviewed him shortly after the last Lions tour, when he came back from
He’s a big
bloke, and his legs stretched almost the entire length of the room, with these
huge bare feet pointing up at the ceiling.
My abiding
memory of the interview is that I sat there thinking, if his feet are that big,
then his cock must be absolutely
enormous.
I did think
of asking, but it would have been a bit weird, just the two of us, sat in his
living room, on the floor. So I didn’t.
I’m still curious, mind. Do you know how big Ryan Jones’s cock is? cock@charleswilliams.co.uk
The whistle blows as Ryan Jones is illegally supported by his Wales and Ospreys team-mates
TFTD (10/6/9): I've been neglecting my daily updates. It's partly because I've been doing proper work, and partly because I've been up Ben Nevis. That's the mountain, not someone I met on Gaydar. Still, I'll just cheat and fill it all in retrospectively. Nobody will notice.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (9/6/9): Terrible
news for
Yes, but
it’s a risk worth taking, surely? What with the desperate shortage of
transplant organs and everything.
An
alternative would be for the 48,000 tattooed morons to go to somewhere safe and
spacious, like
TFTD (8/6/9): The great
thing about Google Analytics is that I now know what kind of Google searches
people are doing to find this website. (Don’t worry, it’s all anonymous. I don’t
know who you are. More's the pity.)
I had a visit a couple of days ago from someone who’d Googled the phrase
‘Penrhiwceiber gurning champion’. And this leads directly to my website. No
other options. I’m not sure why.
But I’m
very pleased to learn that there is a Penrhiweciber gurning champion, and that
someone is Googling him/her. Although having been through Penrhiwceiber on the
train recently, I spotted at least eight contendors, and that was just on the
railway platform. Faces like fucking Picassos, every one of them.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (7/6/9): "Tell me," people often ask, ""What is the secret of a really good cottage pie?"
"Well," I reply, carefully marking the page in my well-thumbed copy of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, desperately pleased that anyone cares about my opinion on anything these days, "The secret is to put a layer of baked beans between the meat and the potato."
"But isn't that a bit, well, common for a man as urbane as yourself?" they ask, clearly taken aback.
"No indeed," I reply, removing my pince-nez and polishing the lenses with a large handkerchief taken from the pocket of my smoking-jacket. "I also find that a cheesy crust is a pleasing addition," I say with an avuncular twinkle, while stroking my long white beard.
"But..." they begin to interject as I raise a forestalling hand. "Please, no further questions," I say. "You must now fuck off, for it is time for Trisha."
_____________________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (6/6/9): Well, Graham Norton's new Saturday night show was breath-takingly rubbish.
TFTD (5/6/9): Never intervene in a playground squabble between three-year-olds. It's more trouble than it's worth.
______________________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (4/6/9): After David
Carradine wanked himself to death, I wonder how many men found themselves idly
fiddling with the dressing gown cord, musing about whether it’s worth a crack.
It must be
pretty good fun, if celebs like Kung Fu man and Michael Hutchence think
it’s worth a pop. Hmm... shall I shag Kylie or go for a spot of autoerotic
asphyxiation? If the choice is that tricky, then it must be fantastic. And it’s
only a wardrobe away.
I bet there’s a statistical spike of accidental deaths every time a celebrity dies while having a wank. Copycat wanks. Apparently this whole asphyxiation thing is more common than you'd think. But it's rarely reported because the relatives who find the body usually tidy away the shameful evidence before calling the police. And that's the bit that puts me off, frankly.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (3/6/9): Just after
the Kosovo war ended, I went on a press trip to the capital city, Pristina. The
place was utterly shafted. Nato cruise missiles had punched huge ragged holes
in all the government buildings. Welsh squaddies were trying to stop the ethnic
Albanians murdering the few remaining ethnic Serb peasantry. Everyone had
AK47s. The national drink, slivovitz, tasted fucking disgusting.
All in all,
it was a pretty screwed-up country, but there were the first fragile signs of
hope. Outside the library in Pristina was a bold new piece of public art – a
giant concrete ovoid. I don’t know what it was meant to represent – new life,
rebirth, regeneration, etc. But someone had taken a black marker pen and
scrawled on its side these immortal words: Fuck your egg.
Fantastic. This has
become a personal mantra of mine. It can be used in all sorts of situations.
For example:
Melvyn
Bragg: In this week’s In Our Time, we look at how Wittgenstein’s philosophy of
linguistics has changed 20th-century thinking.
Me: Fuck
your egg
Manager:
You can’t take your glasses outside.
Me: Fuck your
egg.
Hairdresser
in Llandaff North, just now: We don’t cut children’s hair.
Me: Fuck
your egg.
Me: Fuck.
Your. Egg.
Look, it's all very impressive and you're very clever and I don't wish to appear rude, but...
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
TFTD (2/6/9): I’ve
just been reviewing the papers on BBC Radio Wales’s breakfast show. Here’s how
it works: you turn up at 6am, spend 20 minutes frantically skimming a huge pile
of today’s newspapers, and go on air to talk about the day’s burning issues.
Like
MPs’ expenses, for
example. This isn’t something I care deeply about. I’m bored of it all,
and say
so. The presenters, though, are serious political journalists to whom
it
matters a great deal. And they’re a lot cleverer than I am. So they
tear me to
shreds. Fuck. Same thing with the Susan Boyle story. It’s the
inalienable right of people with learning difficulties to go on
freak shows and have their lives
ruined, apparently. Fuck again. Not my finest radio moment. Still,
there’s another
look at the papers in an hour. Perhaps that one will be better.
Now I have 35 minutes
to go through the papers again. This time I pick
some fluffy bollocks about children’s books, a story about email, and some absurd
research on the virtues of chocolate milkshake. I’m on home territory here. At
least I can make jokes.
As I
listen to my
own wittering, and watch the presenters nod politely as they listen in
their headphones as they plan the forthcoming interviews with cabinet
ministers and
ambassadors, I have a horrible self-revelation. I’m turning into that
fucking
idiot Simon Fanshawe, who reviews the papers on BBC Breakfast. Simon Fucking
Fanshawe. Ye Gods. Has it come to this?
Just when my radio appearance seems doomed to failure, I remember the trusty old adage: if in doubt, get it out.
TFTD (1/6/9): I just spent an hour in Primark, a shop I seldom visit because I am
middle-class. I like being middle-class. I like the food, and the skiing, and
the not having to shop at Primark.
But I need
several key pieces for my daughter’s school play costume, and Primark is the
cheapest place in town, thanks to the nimble fingers of all those children
sewing away in sweatshops in the third world, just so my daughter can be a
Robin Hood villager for the afternoon, before the clothes are tucked into the
dressing-up box until they are eventually thrown away.
My three
items cost me £8.88. The personal cost is that the queues are fucking enormous,
even on a Monday morning. So I join the line, standing morosely in a 40-strong
queue of the chip-eating classes whom we laughingly used to call Chavs, until
we felt guilty about dehumanising people who don’t happen to ski at the same
resorts as we do. We're big on guilt, we middle-classes.
If this was
John Lewis or M&S, everyone would be loudly harrumphing and demanding to
see the manager. But the queue at Primark was polite, patient and cheerful. There
was almost a party atmosphere. The girl in front was telling her family how she
couldn’t wait to get into her new outfit for the party tonight. There was none
of that dreadful sense of entitlement you get in, well, middle-class shops.
Oh, and that’s
the other thing about the middle-classes. We’re unbelievably fucking
patronising.
Stand aside everyone, and let the fine young gentleman through. He's middle-class, you know.
ARCHIVE
But wait - where has all the other shit gone? I'm sure there was a cartoon from mid-May that was almost funny.
Fear not, gentle reader - it's all in the archive. Simply click on the link below - or this one here, which does the same thing, which seems like unnecessary duplication - and you will be directed into the loving arms of Marion, the friendly archivist.