alexsarll | Inspiration deserted me when it came to the title

In spite of having attended every Black Plastic to date, and having one of the promoters for a flatmate, I somehow managed to get the start time wrong and turn up half an hour early on Friday, which is quite special. In spite of that, and being fairly tired to begin with, I made it to the end - and beyond, even when the afterparty relocated. Admittedly I didn't last too long beyond that, but I still think this is a win for my new club strategy of having a banana in my pocket for midnight. And I'm glad I was around for it all, because it was a great night - perhaps in part because, as the usual postmortem conversations about who was incredibly drunk soon had us realising, pretty much everyone was incredibly drunk.
I wasn't about for most of Saturday, and even when I made it along in body, I was half-absent in spirit. Not that this was any impediment to continued boozing, of course, but once I hit Sunday and the Hangover Swish (a clothes-swapping event, incidentally, rather than some peculiar toxicological complication), one pint almost did for me so I bowed out early, and even then needed to take a break in Highbury Fields on my way home, and ended up having deeply peculiar fever dreams in which I was the one constant point in a universe which had been destroyed and recreated around me. Twice.

I don't normally link to Charlie Brooker's column, because by now I assume that everyone is aware of him and those who want to read it know to do so without my help. Furthermore, this Saturday's piece wasn't even one of his best. But I'm linking to it because, if you read it online, you got a censored version, and indeed one censored in such a way as to ruin the pacing. The penultimate paragraph carries on after 'incendiary':
"Take Jews. Step one: identify the stereotype (neurotic, big-nosed skinflints). Step two: collect the most neurotic, biggest-nosed, skinflintiest Jews you can find. Step three: film them calling each other "Yids". Step four: put them in a house with a huge Star of David on one wall and a framed picture of a circumcised penis on the other. Step five: dub the Fiddler On The Roof soundtrack over the top. Step six: before you can go home and count the proceeds, you've got to think of a title. How about Oy, Vey?"
Properly placed in the piece, this thought experiment is clearly intended to demonstrate just what a grubby little exercise Jersey Shore is. Anyone reading it in that context and failing to understand that it is satire rather than anti-Semitism is too stupid for their opinion to be worthy of consideration. But the 'Corrections and Clarifications' column says that while the piece was "intended to be satirical", it "should not hae appeared in the Guardian, before dragging Brooker himself on for a little Maoist self-criticism session. The Guardian: officially the paper for people too retarded or permanently offended to recognise satire.

Initially I had the same problem with Lizzie and Sarah that I have with a lot of Julia Davis projects; while I like dark comedy, she has the balance slightly skewed, and just having horrible things happen to your characters is not in and of itself funny. But because Jessica Hynes was also involved (and in spite of her last effort being that godawful drivel with David Tennant as her driving instructor), I persevered. And yes, come the twist it became rather entertaining, but given the nature of that twist, I now don't quite know how they'd get a whole series out of this pilot.