First Editorial: Who Breaks Mosquitoes Upon A Wheel? Or, Ross, Brand & An Answerphone

For the past week the British press has been dominated by the story of two comics, a grandfather and an answerphone. Blandrossgate has proven to be the scandal of 2008, a full scale media storm still raging, embarrassing Brand and threatening Ross’s BBC career. Although UK readers will be familiar with, and indeed most likely sick of, the story by now, The QuFF shall elaborate for our international readers, most of whom would have wasted their week reading about events in the Congo and Syria.

Two comedians, Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, left a series of increasingly controversial messages on the answerphone of the popular comic actor Andrew Sachs, 70, during Brand’s BBC radio show. Mr Sachs is most famous for his role as ‘Manuel’, the Spanish waiter in John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers. The messages related to Brand’s having slept with Sach’s granddaughter, each successive telephone call becoming more vulgar and explicit, with Ross occasionally interjecting “He’s f***ed your granddaughter!”. The telephone calls were later broadcast despite Mr Sach’s insistence that they should not be.

Brand has subsequently quit the show and Ross has been suspended without pay for three months as the media frenzy builds. The BBC licence fee is under government review, the Conservative Party are proposing a streamlined corporation; it is perhaps the most damaging event in Auntie’s recent history. The people are questioning whether the BBC is providing value for money and fulfilling its public remit. Elements of Murdoch’s press are calling for the abolition of the state broadcaster and the heads of Ross and Brand. The QuFF, however, marches to the beat of a different drum.

It is the opinion of this newspaper that Messrs Brand and Ross are the victims of a campaign so vitriolic and illiberal in nature as to shame any free society. After all, all they did was to publically humiliate a young woman, bait her grandfather on national radio and attempt to extract humour from their pain. Schadenfreude is perhaps the greatest comic tool of the modern era and this episode is merely another step towards furthering the boundaries of comic endeavour. The two most popular British comedies of recent times- The Catherine Tate Show and Little Britain- are expert in identifying members of society unable to command a riposte and picking them apart mercilessly.

It is common knowledge that all jokes that can be written have been written. The Duke of Kent is said to have mumbled the last new joke in 2002* and since then comedians, in order to survive, have had to siphon diesel from the metaphorical petrol tank of ‘edginess’. When seen in this light what Brand and Ross did was not in fact a mean spirited prank by two ageing men finally exposed as talentless shock-prostitutes without an ounce of wit between them, but in actual fact a trail-blazing, valiant attempt to save British comedy from extinction. It is pertinent to remember that humour is down thirteen percent in the last year alone causing some scientists to link the chief cause of laughter with bumble bees. They are rather funny.

Some people have drawn a parallel between this episode and the public outcry against Chris Morris and Channel 4 for the infamous broadcast of the bitingly satirical Brass-Eye Special in 2001. That comparison is not very good.

This former hyper-quadro-broadsheet also considers the calls for trimming the BBC farfetched and extreme. After all, who can truly argue that shows such as ‘Dog Borstal’ and ‘Snog Marry Avoid’ do not meet the BBC pledge to ‘inform, educate & entertain’? It is also important to consider the BBC’s commitment to catering for audiences of all ages, young and old. They have gone to great lengths to target the youth audience and should be applauded for doing so. Indeed, these middle-aged men running the corporation have proved themselves time and again to have had their finger on the pulse of youth culture, and their conclusion that all those under the age of twenty-five in Britain are mentally deficient glue sniffers who want to watch programs called “Can Fat Teens Hunt?” is both accurate and fair. Furthermore they are correct in deducing that the current generation of young adults are just too stupid to be in any way interested in or informed about the world, as “knowingness of things is unhip, boyakasha, brap and kiss my chuddies…” as the fifty-one year old presenters of Radio One, in no way like the creepy, strangely old people at teenage parties, often say. After all, the only teenagers lying in the gutters and looking up at the stars in Britain today are binge drinkers and drug peoples. The Daily Express said so, so there.

There are some who feel that what Brand and Ross did just isn’t funny. Indeed, there are those who see Brand and Ross themselves as painfully unfunny. To utter such mouth-incorrectnesses though is, although forgivable, to miss the point. They are not funny in a conventional sense. The BBC has branded their humour as ‘edgy’ and catering to ‘different’ tastes. Quite evidently, then, nobody got Brand’s infamous ‘dressing up as Osama Bin Laden less than twenty-four hours after 9/11’ jape. Therein lay the lapse- not in Brand’s judgement, but in people’s tastes. Just because nobody saw these telephone calls as funny does not mean that they weren’t. It just means that the youth of today just aren’t in touch with themselves, that is all.

The consequence of this lapse in public taste is that two pioneers of wit are left with their careers temporarily besmirched. It is all well and good that people have taken time to spare a thought for Andrew Sachs and his family, but has anybody considered Mr Brand and Mr Ross in all of this? Brand has had to surrender his radio show, leaving him with only television, publishing and stand-up engagements to occupy his time. He must be wondering where it all went wrong as he reluctantly fields bothersome telephone calls from tabloid editors offering him annoyingly heavy piles of cash for the exclusive rights to his side of such a long and boring story. Why, he must be wondering, does nobody find hoax calls to the emergency services funny? Russell, a prophet is never welcome in his own kingdom, remember that. You are ahead of your time. And as for Ross, labelled cruelly by some as “…a parasite sucking upon the public purse”, his fine of £1.4m pounds will leave him with a mere £16.6m on his contract. And during the credit crunch too.

Whilst people watch and jeer as all that is contemporary British comedy is torn to pieces and unravelled before their eyes, as the BBC flounders and struggles to maintain the public licence fee and the political vultures circle, The QuFF is moved to ask; who breaks mosquitoes on a wheel?

“Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,

This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;

Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,

Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’r enjoys”

Alexander Pope, 1735

*”Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Doorbell Salesman

Doorbell salesman who?

No, you’re not supposed to say that bit, that was the joke…”

Wordifying: Fluffer, The QuFFer-In-Chief

©The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman 2008

Run On Iceland As Global Markets Act Very Silly Indeed

Iceland was plunged into further chaos last night when Prime Minister Geir Haarde told gathered journalists and foreign diplomats the news that all who had gathered had feared. Ominous, portentous of doom, his voice reminiscent of Satchmo at his peak, Haarde held the media throng agog as he confirmed the fearsome rumours. There had indeed been a run on Iceland.

It is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the financial tumult engulfing this small island nation -with the banking crisis fuelling national debts of over 150% of GDP- that such a scenario, so unlikely 12 months ago, should come to pass. However, in the cold light of day, as yesterdays bankers and fishermen stare grey faced at their raw herrings, last week so appetising and this week so un, they will demand to know what is to be done. That is the question that Haarde and his associates must answer.

It could all have been so different. In 2004 Iceland was booming, the benefits of free market capitalism and membership of the EEA leading the UN to declare it “…the best place to live and that”. The population, although small, was certainly secure and indeed had seen an element of growth due to many European and Asian expatriates taking up residence there, lured by the musky smell of cold hard cash. This is, however, where Iceland overreached itself. So confident were they in their newly mustered national strength that they began to export large numbers of their own citizens for little financial return. The most notable ‘exportees’ are sportsmen such as Eidur Gudjohnsen, actors such as Anna Briem, musicians such as Sigur Ros and Björk*, and even the entire cast of television programs such as ‘Lazy Town’. Although in the short term it brought about the era described by Henry Kissinger as “The Age of Icelandic Global Cultural Hegemony”, the longer term legacy has been to wipe up to 90% off of the value of Icelanders, a critical drop.

Realising too late the precarious position they were in the government of Iceland attempted to redress the balance, importing 8,488 Poles. However the move proved to have little effect as the vast majority of migrant workers are not professional musicians, footballers, actors or production companies. In 2006 Alan Greenspan sought to sooth growing international fears about Iceland by saying:

“Man, you don’t even need people to have a prosperous nation. You just need a bucket full of optimism and an awareness of when to pretend things aren’t there. I remember in 1943 when one man in my home town by the name of Jones accidentally cloned himself 13,243 times. The government was afraid of there being rampant Jones inflation and set about drafting even elderly Jones’ across the state, but at the end of the day we got through the crisis by pretending that his name was “”, and that kinda solved the problem. Of far greater moment to me right now is where those damned ‘Reeses Pieces’ have got to…”

However, despite this noble attempt at intervention the moment the markets got jumpy, so did Icelanders. Get jumpy I mean. Not noble.

By the 17^th of the month some econosociolosophers predict that as many as 48,000 Icelanders will have tried to withdraw themselves nationwide in a bid to protect their own physical integrity. The problems arise, however, when there are quite simply not enough people, and parts, to go around.

In 1998 the government of Iceland came up with a revolutionary new idea; organ-time-sharing. The idea was to make more efficient use of the organic resources integral to the human experience. Some saw it as a liberating idea almost on a par with the Thatcherite sale of council houses, and it did indeed generate a great deal of wealth, at least initially. Poorer manual employees working in the fish packing factories, for example, would rent out their olfactory organs for much of the day, firstly because the smell of decaying cod was unedifying and secondly because there was a considerable market for it. Cat-smellers, gastro-obsessives and taxmen would pay very high rates to rent or partially own an additional nose. As demand grew supply stagnated causing rampant nose, foot and elbow inflation. Indeed, by 2005 ankles and bottom cheeks were being sold outright on ebay for as much as $230,000(US). These levels, fuelled by debt, proved to be unsustainable. In the final quarter of last year as much as $2.4m of finger loans went unpaid, the assets being seized by banks, occasionally even by force. One man from Arborg had a third wrist removed by none other than Björgólfur Guðmundsson, head of Landsbanki, the billionaire using only a written description of anaesthetic and a butter knife “..to show the bum some learning.”

As body parts and later the people themselves began to pile up within Iceland’s banks as toxic debt, it was only a matter of time before disaster struck, and the advent of the credit crunch seems only to have exacerbated the crisis.

There was carnage this evening outside many branches of Glitnir, the (now) state owned bank. Hundreds of worried citizens queued outside planning to withdraw themselves, or at least as much of themselves as possible. However, as the crisis deepened the shutters were pulled down and panic ensued. The police sent politically sensitive mime artists to calm the situation but the crowd merely shrieked in horror fearing the return of “Bjork the Very Insane”. One mime artist was even stolen, the thief leaving a travellers cheque and a signed picture of Walter Matthau as compensation.

The population of Iceland last week was, according to the United Nations, just over 313,004.32. However, with the recent slide in value some sources, including the World Bank, estimate the population at well under 200,000. Give or take an Eidur. In fact Henry Paulson, the United States Treasury Secretary, is believed to have told George Bush that “The Icelandic people to all intents and purposes now appear to run into negative integers.”

So back to the Haarde question- what is to be done?

The government has firstly promised to back the physical integrity of all of its citizens. How they feel they can manage this, however, is a mystery. At the last audit it was discovered that the organ-banking system was deficient to the tune of over 12,400 body parts, 62% of them vital. Conspiracy theories abound that Russia has promised, along with a £4bn dollar loan, to provide enough vital organs from dissenting journalists to plug the gap. China is also thought to be involved, President Grimmson doing little to stifle this rumour when declaring:

“Well, they do have a bloody lot of people, don’t they?”

The Duke of Edinburgh was moved to declare that comment in poor taste.

As the world looks on Iceland knows that this gamble must work or face the confusing prospect of there being less people than there are, with more organs than there are supposed to be, embedded in bodies and attached to faces that ought to not be, or really do be but slightly less, perhaps not at all, unless they happen to be more, in so being, in which case it’s alright. Eh?

Report By: Björÿgÿólÿfuÿr Guðÿmuÿndsnÿjkoÿÿÿorksÿssÿÿÿonÿÿÿlmnf

Icelandic correspondent and regular contributor to “The Monthly Cod War Games & Split-Mary Handball Monthly”

*It must be noted that Björk, rather than exported for profit, was in fact banished from Iceland for being “Mjög Geðveikur” (“Very Insane”).

QuFF Nominates Self For Blog Award

The Quindley Fluff Frontiersman this evening nominated itself for the ‘Bloggers Choice Awards’ award in four categories:

The Blogitzer

Best Blog

Best Political Blog

Most Modest Blog

When quizzed by himself as to whether such an act were incompatible with the final nomination, Zeb. Zeb. ZebZeb, QuFF spokesman for self-referentialism and associate of Newcastle interim manager Joe Kinnear, responded in a heated manner*:

“If you Ker’plunks want to act like a bunch of Connect 4’s and stick your Twisters into other people’s affairs, questioning every Cindy thing that anybody does in order to achieve in life, then stay out of my Panini stickerbook’s way. And mark you, you My Little Pony’s, you My Baby All Gone’s, Stretch Armstrongs and Polly Pockets, if I do see any of you again I’m going to jam a load of Pogs up your Cluedo!”

With eloquence such as that amidst the charlies of our reportage, can failure even be considered an option? Alas, yes. But only if you, the chaps at home reading this compound inanity, decide thusly. For you see the power to bring to The QuFF the plaudits that such a fine publication deserves is yours alone. Remember as you place your votes The QuFF, a blog written as if delicately hewn out of silken marble, informing like the dazzling light that illuminated Plato’s shadow world, blinding with brilliance those who seek to live in the realm of the forms. Or failing that in Catford. What other online read promises so much that it cannot deliver?! Party conference season is over, and our competition with it! What other publication offers you racing tips for free?! For races that don’t even exist?! Exactly?!

Also note this. Those who don’t vote for this blog are a right bunch of Guess Who’s. So vote for The QuFF at The Bloggers Choice Awards.

Subbuteo!

Report By: Zeb. Zeb. ZebZeb, QuFF spokesman for self-referentialism

*As part of The QuFF’s ‘Making Family Friendly’ campaign, all language of a vibrant hue has been substituted with popular childrens toys of the 1990’s.

Following the recent success of the Number 10 film mocking Jeremy Clarkson, the Foreign Office has announced the department's intention to produce a number of it's own productions...

History of "The QuFF".

The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman is a publication with centuries of history behind it. Founded in 1624 as a means for the two estranged inhabitants of Quindley & Fluff to communicate without risk of sodomy, it grew in tandem with the respective populations of the two villages until by 1832 it had a total readership of over 14,000 people. However, after the great sodomy epidemic of 1833 the readership was again rendered to two, threatening the very existence of the by now iconic publication. Fortunately Horatio Wellington, the Archbishop of Trafalgar, took the paper under his wing, and so saving it from total oblivion.

By 1880 the paper, for the second time in it’s history, sold over ten thousand copies and drew the attention of the then Prime Minister and Papist ‘Benjamin the Israeli’, thusly named due to the international fame of his anti-semitic rants and acts. He bought ‘The QuFF’, as it had then become known, and changed the paper size and typeset to the hyper-quadro-broadsheet format as a solution to the housing problem. However, printing of the paper had to be stopped for a fortnight after it was discovered that Gladstone had eaten much of the printing machinery. The precedent set rocked the world as the luddites set about trying to ease their own unemployment problems by eating the machinery that had usurped their positions in the labour market. Thousands died of Chronic Bottom Evacuation Syndrome, yet again leaving the Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman with an available readership of only two. This act of mass sabotage and chronic indigestion brought Gladstone’s Liberals to their knees as D’Israeli (as he had become known on a recent trip to the Dodogne) described it as “G.O.M”, or “Gladstones’ Over-enthusiastic Mouth-eatings.”

By 1918 The QuFF was in jeopardy. Some historians claim that the readership at this time had shrunk to just the editor himself, although this fact is disputed due to his having been fatally wounded at the Somme. However, none other than Winston Churchill revived it in 1919 as an alternative to “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash”, although he stated his personal preference was for the latter. The shot in the arm he provided led the paper to become an essential depression-era read for many families, partially due to the fact that the paper it was printed on contained an average of 1800 calories and the ink 42, although the then editor, Fred Astaire, did insist upon covering one in every thousand copies with arsenic “for a laugh”.

In 1945 the front page of The QuFF was said to have won the war in the Far East with the famous headline:

“Emperor Hirohito Princess Margaret?”

Indeed, the role that The QuFF played in World War Two was acknowledged by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who recently played a commemorative four hour concert in the paper’s honour using only the note of E. This was due to it being the letter most often used in the paper’s reportage during the global conflict.
In modern times the paper consolidated it’s position as a niche publication by carrying eyewitness accounts of less famous historical events, such as all the days that Jack Ruby didn’t shoot Lee Harvey Oswald and Ted Heath’s birthday.

However, controversy was just around the corner. Some blamed The QuFF’s conversion to a normal broadsheet format as the primary cause of the LA riots, although generally this point is considered:

A) In Bad Taste and

B) Mad, due to the change happening in 2002.

In 2008, due to reasons divulged elsewhere, the Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman made the leap into the world of the internet. If there is hope for it’s future, it can be found in it’s past. Salvation is always around the corner.

Blither By: KPD, QuFF Society Historian.

Introducing The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman on Blogger

The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman launched today as an online publication to very little fanfare. After 384 years of being a print-only publication with a consistent circulation of 4 the paper has moved into the technological age. The editor, known to the world only as ‘Fluff, The QuFFer-In-Chief’, made the following brief statement at 1am:

“After 384 years of being a print-only publication with a consistent circulation of 4, the paper has moved into the technological age. As chief charlies I and my associates have voted unanimously, by a majority of 1, that now was the time to make the move. We understand that some of our readers may be put off by this. Indeed, I still remember the violence that marred our move from a hyper-quadro-broadsheet into the more recent regular broadsheet format. The -admittedly catchy- chant “72 square feet of paper is better suited to one 6 foot by 6 foot double sided sheet than to 24 24 by 18 inch pages!” still haunts me to this day. But we shall not be held to ransom by the extreme fringe of our readership. We are prepared to accept the worst if needs be to make this essential move. We live in an age where literacy is being outsourced to Asia and people cannot readily identify the obvious aesthetic differences between the carrot and the radish and we have to change with the times. It is with this in mind that we have taken this step, this leap into the unknown, and we now throw ourselves at the callous feet of the Free Market God.”

However consumer reaction was instantaneous and laced with menace. One reader wrote on the online forum www.howtoreadilyidentifythedifferencebetweencarrotsandradishesparticularlyinstressfulcircumstances.tk:
“I will not take this lying down. Therefore I have righted myself and have adopted a more vertical posture”.

A later, less grounded person wrote:

“The main problem that I have with this decision is that I cannot read my computer in the shower!!!! I mean!”

Facebook groups were also alive with INTRIGUE. Indeed, a recently formed Facebook group called itself: “If one billion people join this group, The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman will catch fire and everything and that and then we can all sweep the ashes into jam jars and use them for cat litter and then watch as our cats defecate on the remains of The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman BAXTARDS!!!!! I mean!”

However there is a more positive spin to these developments. For example Lord Tebbit described the move as “Good for The Co-op and Good for Britain”. Foreign Secretary David Miliband praised the entrepreneurial spirit of the decision in a speech to the House of Commons, describing it as “…balls out furniture action”. He later used hyperbolic adverbs such as “Pluckley’s Comb”, “Shed-banger” and “Knee-Skiddy” to describe his expectations for the project- rousing language that, in the words of Tory front bencher Grant Shapps MP, left the opposition “…completely and utterly beefed”.

Despite the controversy the future looks bright for ‘The QuFF’. It is by no means the first paper to make the move from hard to digital copy as it follows in the well trodden footsteps of other notable projects such as “Pens as Darts?”, “Italian Mannerisms and how to adopt them” and “Stewart Granger- Actor or Fanzine?.” Indeed, “Pens as Darts” has seen a five-fold increase in its readership since the move in 2006. However, some attribute this exponential growth more to the increasingly pornographic nature of the magazine rather than to the change in format.

Only time will tell as to whether the move will prove to be a success or a failure. “Fluff, The QuFFer-In-Chief” is confident that the gamble will pay off: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams … glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those … moments will be lost … in time, like tears … in the rain*……… But one thousand years from now I am confident that The QuFF will still be there, plugging away for an audience long since dead because we would all have been killed by space rats or something.” This reporter for one is convinced of the fundamental truth of those words.

Report By: “Fluff, The QuFFer-In-Chief

Additional Copyrighted Words By: Rutger Hauer

*With apologies to Warner Brothers Inc., and Rutger Hauer in particular, for the rampant plagiarism.