The Possibly Phoney Profundity of Puerility

A strong candidate for the most infuriating show ever broadcast on British television must surely be The Late Review which appeared regularly on BBC 2 in the mid 1990s. It featured a panel of pseudo-intellectuals who sat on easy chairs and discussed new books, films, artworks, etc, while the host, an extremist moderate by the name of Mark Lawson, pretended to see both sides of the argument simultaneously while somehow silently insisting that fence-sitting was the only true position. The occasional guest reviewer of intelligence, such as Ian Hislop, served only to further highlight the greasy charlatanry of the regulars, a crew of vermin that included the failed poet Tom Paulin, simpering weakling and thickie Eko Eshun, quasi-academic hag Germaine Greer, textbook racial minority victim Bonnie Greer and useless rubber gargoyle Tony Parsons.

Tony Parsons in particular had already contributed heavily to a significant decline in culture when in the late 1970s he worked for the NME (New Musical Express) as a critic and opinionated moron. Together with his bloated girlfriend, the helium-voiced designer-lesbian Julie Burchill, the Parsons freak crusaded against beautiful prog rock, slandering its complexities, mocking its honourable ambitions, advocating punk as a replacement. So successful was he in this fascistic campaign that ‘prog’ soon became a term of abuse and its fans worse than pariahs. The fact that Johnny Rotten himself cited Van der Graaf Generator as a major influence made not the blindest bit of difference to the bigoted Parsons. I still resent Parsons for the way I had to keep my King Crimson and Gentle Giant albums hidden while listening to them in secret on headphones at night.

The great obsession of Parsons, Lawson, Paulin, Greer, etc, was ‘maturity’. None of them ever seemed exactly sure what maturity consisted of but they knew one thing for certain: it was the diametric opposite of puerility. Anything that celebrated puerility was automatically bad. Bodily secretions, even though we all ooze them, are puerile; and so is laughing at the misfortunes of others, even though we all do it; treating genitals as objects of humour is puerile; so is obeying the overriding male urge to gawp at women. In fact white straight males are fundamentally puerile. Maturity on the other hand involves accepting a special set of hypocrisies. Promiscuity is permitted provided a tally isn’t kept (I know I’ve slept with 18 women so I must be puerile: if I hadn’t kept count I would be mature) and backing down from a fight is a mandatory mature reflex, though how this differs from plain ‘cowardice’ is something I still don’t understand.

The very lowest level of puerility is the dreaded ‘sixth form’. This number refers not to states of matter but a particular stage of British school education. A story about breasts or testicles, no matter how clever, wise or insightful, is instantly given this label. It’s the insult that annoys me the most. I remember once writing an anti-authority satire in which defecation played a role. I tried to make the piece witty, politically aware, righteously savage: I was pleased with the result, believing that it struck a (very minor) blow for the common citizen against the ruthless machinery of local government. I proudly showed it to my girlfriend of the time and she glanced at it before pronouncing two words only: sixth form. I was both deflated and enraged by her response. I was 25 years old with an IQ of 148 but not yet published. Sixth form! What kind of sixth form existed that could boast such superb and affecting talents as myself? Years later I watched a documentary in which Roger Waters of Pink Floyd denounced his own Dark Side of the Moon album as ‘sixth form’. I dearly wish I had attended a school whose sixth form pupils were capable of producing such mesmerising gems of modern culture! As it happened I wasn’t entirely discouraged by my girlfriend and my first acceptances for publication followed within a few months of her comment, but it was many years before tits and bums resurfaced in my stories.

Tits and bums are important. We aren’t just rational civilised creatures: far from it! We are essentially puerile, all of us. People like Parsons, Lawson, Greer, are merely smoke and mirror merchants, pretending to be mature, which in itself is a form of puerility. As it happened I never entered the sixth form of my own school. I dropped out and went instead to a college where the tutors set off small bombs in the classroom and gave tacit approval to our own improvised explosive devices. They knew that blowing things up and farting are honest pursuits. I listened to prog in my room, took LSD and made bombs. I never had the chance to be sixth form. Incidentally, actually knowing your IQ is a puerile act: mature people shop at IKEA and pretend not to care. And yet, puerility may well be our most profound asset. It is everywhere so it must be vital to the human condition. The girl who says “Don’t talk to my breasts” is disparaging billions of years of evolution, the structure of DNA, biochemistry, physics, cosmology, the Big Bang, everything!

On the other hand this might not be so. No matter! The point is that at least I have dealt with a sticky subject (male ejaculate) in this book and I’ve done so not in a thoughtful or sensitive manner. Somebody had to. I knew it would be difficult not to stray into niceness and reasonableness but I kept a tight reign on my conscience. Instead of doing what is good I did what was right. To keep my mind focussed on the task before me, on the ineffable joy of tittiness and buminess, I imagined that I was writing the book especially for The Late Review. I fantasised that it would be discussed by Parsons, Greer, Paulin, etc, and that it would make them extremely unhappy, indeed that it would even encourage Mark Lawson to have his very first violent opinion. That will never happen but a healthy dose of self-delusion can work wonders. Bum titty bum titty bum bum bum.