Anyway, the Tories more or less admit that they’re going to fuck over everybody at the bottom of the payscales, the people whose votes they need in order to do anything, and still manage to find themselves in power. What’s going on?

Crafty is what it is. Nobody THINKS they’re at the bottom of the heap, or wants to think it. When Cameron talks tough about benefits and unproductive citizens, the middle class think of the working class, the working class of the unemployed, the unemployed of the immigrants, and the immigrants of the guests on The Jeremy Kyle Show, who seem to exist in a social heirarchy which exists not beneath but alternately to ours, in another dimension. These are the sponges from which the Tories are going to wring the deficit; Kev and Bev from Maidenhead will be shaken by their upside-down ankles until the economy’s awash with Nokias and Rizla papers. In this reality, the council estates of Lanarkshire are basically the Mysterious Cities of Gold, a troglodyte nation of swine and pearls; and those pearls belong to US now!

Sorry, Mario, but those pearls are in another castle. The dolescum get their £45.12 a week for not doing anything, yes; the executive directors get paid so much more for doing so much less that maybe it would be an IDEA to pay them for doing nothing, just to stop them wrecking up the place for a bit.

Anyway, that’s what shows like Jeremy Kyle are there for. They convince us that not only are we NOT on the bottom rung, but those who are are so contemptible as to deserve everything they get. Pull the ladder up, boys, we’re safe from the rising tide, and leave the poor bastards to drown in their DNA tests and paternity suits.

It’s all a lie, and a fairly transparent one at that, but what’s worst about it is that it’s such a nasty lie. Fifty years ago you could have shown an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show at the Odeon and it would have been hailed as a masterpiece of satirical fantasy; no-one would ever treat ANYONE like that on national TV, and no-one would ever put up with it! Still and all, the pessimists would mutter, you could just about see it happening, although maybe only in America. Whatever else we might feel about Sachsgate, I think we can all agree that it’s a sorry joke that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross should be pilloried for a couple of silly phone calls whilst on national daytime TV the most vulnerable secrets of our society’s most vulnerable members are revealed by a madman shouting and screaming at them like a demented audition reel for American Psycho.

So good for Kev for chucking an envelope at him. He might not have been able to explain it, but the sudden realisation that what was happening was an affront to his self-respect was probably the most positive thing ever to happen on Jeremy Kyle. How funny and how shameful it all is, and not for any of the reasons that the audience might think.

Not true. I am like the Evil Coach in one of those kids’ sports movies. An emotionally honest highlights reel of our games would cut to me after every goal, roaring with incrementally more obnoxious laughter whilst exchanging high-fives with my subs bench, and conclude with me in the centre circle leading the entire squad in ecstatically dancing around to “99 Luftballons” whilst pointing at myself with my own thumbs.

I want to say that I am ashamed of my own vulgar grandstanding, the orgasmic air-pounding which follows every goal. I want to say that, but I can’t, and here’s why. Every time I switch on Match of the Day to watch the best footballers and coaches in the world mystifyingly mutate into po-faced, tautology-talking potato heads the minute a microphone is thrust under their nostrils, well, my stomach starts to hurt.

I mean, it’s, it’s just that, if I could play like Steven Gerrard can, why, I’d never shut the fuck up about it, all my life would be spent spouting ever more effervescent love letters to the Beautiful Game. But stick Stevie G in front of a TV camera and it’s like some Scouse reworking of Hamlet, a melancholy bundle of joyless cliché, the oratorial equivalent of a half-hit passback.

But I suppose it’s everywhere, right back to the baleful, half-bored stare of the man in the stands. I sit down amongst them at New Douglas Park or the Warwick Road End and silently pray that in amongst all the noise and shouting, the hateful, hate-filled songs and chanting, spilt beer, spilt Bovril and all the rest, that no-one will realise that I alone am happy, I’m content, I love football.

I was in my late teens when it started. Football first, any ball slotted between my legs inviting cries of “Choo choo, Thomas!” Then, suddenly, the whole world was in conspiracy to call any person of somewhat corpulent build whom I was seen with “The Fat Controller”. Fortunately, just as I was starting to get fed up with it, the whole thing was derailed (“Ho ho! Bet you used to get that all the time!”) by the infinitely more fruitful circumstance of my having been thrown out of a Glasgow bar for throwing up in their sink, something which I didn’t actually do but fully intend to make good on once my appearance has changed enough for them to let me back in.

(In real-life conversation what would follow here would be a long, thoughtful pause, as it occurred to me for the first time that someone actually did throw up in that sink, and got away with it too. Probably even blamed me for it. Took my good seat in the corner and casually drank the rest of my pint. Is currently reading this aloud to friends whilst giggling at my clumsy use of cadence. I bite my bottom lip and frown, silently internalising yet another source of vague, unfocused grievance, before going on: )

Anyway! I always liked Thomas the Tank Engine, to the extent that its theme tune is what I shall probably choose to enter the ring to should I ever become a professional wrestler, or come down the aisle to if I ever get married, right down to the rotating wrist movements mimicking the wheels of a train. I think I liked it (the show, not the tune) because it was so demonstrably unreal, model, idealised. And because of its falseness you took it at face value, not as a representation of the world as it actually is but as someone hopes it is, would like it to be. Animation used to be someone’s imagination meetings ours up there on the screen. Now instead I watch cartoons that look like real life and, right outside my window, the Lego bricks and Fisher Price construction of local government ‘regeneration’. Neat. Neat-o.

Yeah, Buffy. Within 12 hours of seeing an episode of it I cannot remember a single thing that happened in it, except through application of the most melodramatic brow-creasing and bottom-lip-biting. There are no after-effects whatsoever; no intellectual revulsion, no melancholy reflection, and, most importantly of all, no disappointment. Ever! Sometimes The West Wing is weak, Futurama fails it, Homer nods. Buffy, on the other hand, is only ever as good as it is. It is rarely boring, and almost never a waste of time, if only because you’re not aware, when you’re watching it, of time having passed. How could it have? Nothing has happened! You were sitting exactly here the last time you checked, and maybe the clock has turned another hour and the pizza box is empty now but, hey, you sure don’t feel any different.

Because the problem with having interests -in short, with caring- is that you could always be doing something better with your time; reading, writing, listening maybe. But you can’t always be doing something better with your time, not always, and the thing about mindless activities is exactly that, that they leave your mind free to reflect on what a stupid abnegation of intellectual responsibility it is, this is, to be wasting that wonderful brain of yours on hours and hours of Super Mario Kart. Buffy strikes exactly that right note, the one that alchemists throught would turn lead into gold, reliably engaging you juuuust enough to stop you from mental self-flagellation over unfulfilled potential. I suppose this means it’s all just a matter of degree, doesn’t it, with gradation but no distinction between Thunder in Paradise and Twin Peaks, and that all that separates us from each other is the minimum level of stimulation we need to keep our little minds a-ticking on and on. Mine is teenage vampire slayers. What’s yours?