Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest television progamme
ever made*, and when it came to a close in 2003, I was rather lost, although I
felt it had not only Jumped the Shark, but rode the back of, spat at and
defecated in the eye of the same sea beastie.
The show ended not because the producers realised they were
developing a walking corpse that wouldn’t play dead, but because Sarah Michelle
Gellar decided she wanted to move onto bigger and better things. By which she meant become a film star and
make a shitload of cash.
I discovered last week that Gellar is a Republican, and it
left a bitter nastiness in my metaphorical mouth. I love Buffy because, behind the mask of
inanity, there was a programme which was quite progressive for a mainstream
American show. I considered it be an Ideas
Smuggler – surreptitiously provoking Americans into thinking while they thought
they were watching a programme about a blonde cheerleader killing
vampires. Obviously, they were watching a
programme about a blonde cheerleader killing vampires, but it was oh-so-much
more.
To discover that the hero of this modern masterpiece is
playing, politically speaking, for the other side meant that my sturdy walls of
perception came tumbling down, as if a fog had been lifted from my eyes, like a
cubic zirconia bullet right through my forehead. It was up there with the time I realised that
God didn’t exist, and the realisation at the age of ten that, despite my claims
to the contrary, Manchester City were not better than Manchester United, and
weren’t the greatest team in the world***.
Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there
is a Buffy comic which takes up the story from the end of the final season and
it’s actually quite good. More importantly,
because it’s a comic, SMG isn’t actually required, and doesn’t profit, and I am
not forced to deal with the dichotomy of reality vs.fiction.
The moral of this tale is that sometimes it can be a good
thing to dig up the rotting corpses of popular media and re-animate the
cadaver, slap on a bit of lippy and give it a new haircut, and send it back
into the world.
However, some corpses should remain buried. Buried forever.
This forthcoming Sunday the Crown Prince of Corporeal Evil,
Rupert Murdoch, will attempt to insult an entire nation with the relaunch of
his cesspit of a rag, The News of the
World, under the guise of The Sun of
Sunday. After his performance at the
select committee hearing in which he claimed to be living the humblest day of
his life in a manner which was, tellingly, very fucking far from humble, I
hoped that he would least have the sense to accept that the hacking of a
murdered child’s phone was so far below any kind of accepted civilisation as to
understand that he might as well dance
up and down on Milly Downer’s grave as try to bring back a Sunday paper. I underestimated him.
To my mind, this is a little like Hitler claiming he’d seen the
error of his ways in trying to wipe an entire group of people of the face of
the earth, and he felt humble because he’d had an epiphany, rather than because
he’d been busted. And while he was at it, would anyone be interested in reading
the new edition of his book, which would no longer be known as Mein Kampf, but would now bear the
moniker How to Kill Friends and Liquidate
people. A little like this.
The comparisons might be a bit extreme, I admit, but the
principle’s the same.
I am hopeful, however, that the target demograph for The
Sun, the kind of people who attacked a paediatrician believing she was a
paedophile****, aren’t quite so forgiving or forgetful as Rupert the Human
Cancer would believe. In fact, given The
Sun’s history of moral outrage, I fully expected the weekday Sun to run a
campaign against The Sun on Sunday. I’ll even give them their headline for
free.
Humble hacker in Pseudo Sorry Sunday Sun shocker.
Or, preferably, Murdoch Falls in Mincer: Nation Rejoices.
Please don’t buy this piece of shit. You can make a difference.
*I’m serious**
**No, really, I am.
Closely followed by Battlestar Galactica (The new one, obviously), and
Duckula.
***Both these problems have now been addressed
****I shit you not
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