c-c-c-c-credit crunch

Is it me, or is there a media conspiracy to make me throw myself under a train?

Every single time I do anything – and I mean anything – I seem to end up being involuntarily updated on the current appauling state of the FTSE 100, or reminded that we’re already in a recession and that no-one has a hope in hell of ever buying or selling anything ever again, or that some snivelling, pin-striped, cockney tosser from canary wharf has just dispatched his wife and kids with an axe because he’s lost £15million on the stock market. No doubt we should all follow the example of Jean from Tyneside, who has recently taken up prostitution and pawned her children in order to stay on top of her gas bills. Otherwise, well… we’re fucked. In this way it seems that every single news story these days is cunningly interwoven with not-so-subtle prophecies of impending monetary ruin and despair with an apparent intention to make the situation even worse by turning everyone into a financial spastic, lying prone and dribbling without two pennies to rub together.

Did people have to put up with this incessant forecasting of doom during the Great Depression? I very much doubt it. When you’ve burned your last dining chair and have started greedily eyeing up the succulent limbs of your youngest child, the last thing you want is some dreary wanker with a semi in a suit gobbling nonsense about how financially fucked we all are and how things can only get worse.  During the Great Depression there may have been widespread unemployment and destitution, but at least 1930s paupers didn’t have to contend with the BBC’s pack of half-wit, bug-eyed financial commentators who seem to spend 24 hours a day broadcasting fatalistic alliterative drivel about how everyone in the entire world is skint and could possibly die of starvation in the next 18 months. What makes it worse is that the BBC has harnessed all manner of technology to ensure that their message of misery gets transmitted straight into my aching earholes whenever I gain consciousness in the morning.  Would I like to be given the bad news by podcast, radio or just plain old television? Perhaps it would be easier to inject it into my temple and allow its icy message to slowly obliterate my brain cells intravenously…?

I shouldn’t focus all of my anger on the BBC – they’re not alone in this. What about GMTV? Officially the UK Broadcaster for Dullards and Pikeys, and spearheaded by that useless, balding twat, “money man” Martin Lewis, GMTV is going for the monumentally irritating approach by ensuring one of its mindless, floppy-eared gonk presenters mentions the words ‘credit crunch’ through a loud speaker at least once every thirty seconds, and that Martin Lewis himself gets my home number so that he can badger me to sort out my finances with the help of his ‘credit crunch-busting tips’. No doubt the aforementioned Jean from Tyneside has received similar guidance.

This morning, I was heartened to hear on the news that the Beeb are apparently making a concerted effort to perk up their negative news reporting before people start to set light to themselves. That posh-arsed 50 year-old schoolboy presenter and his pregnant fag-hag co-host barked in earnest that they had spent ages on a story which was intended to ‘lighten the mood’.  Personally, watching a toothless factory worker from Wigan (which, you’ll be delighted to hear, has a superb history of unemployment), holding a pitchfork and mumbling that he found 50p down the back of the sofa (which is currently being repossessed), is not my idea of ‘light hearted’. May I suggest directly to the BBC that you broadcast some shaky footage of me inserting a substantial hollow tube up Robert Peston’s rectum whilst attaching it to an industrial hoover, then scooping out his eyes and feeding them to a blind-folded, castrated Martin Lewis, begging for his life.

 Perhaps then you might lift the national mood a little.

Tags: BBC, Credit Crunch, GMTV, Martin Lewis, media, wanky news