Cloudbusting – I thought it was a great No.20 hit for Kate Bush that featured Donald Sutherland in the video. Well it is actually, but now it’s something else entirely…it’s what I’m doing here.

I can’t feel comfortable with parking my private stuff in the ionosphere. I have a feeling that it is absolutely the future, but as an almost official grumpy old man, I’m not happy. People are just too damn clever with their keyboards these days and something tells me that if I float my private information off on a cloud, then someone is going to be able to cloudbust and get access to it. Now who the hell would be interested in my stuff? Boring as I may be, that info could help someone to re-create my identity and virtually talk to virtually anyone in my name!

The Googles and Apples will say their clouds are locked up like Fort Knox (remember ‘Goldfinger’?), but they would say that wouldn’t they? Anyway it’s not so often the bank that gets done so often as the security van taking the gold to the bank. That’s where the weakness is in cloud computing – it’s the stairway from you to Heaven. I have seen tests that demonstrate  with the right bit of readily available software you can sit in a wireless zone / internet cafe / hotel reception and log into the computers and iPads of those around you! Nightmare…but quite interesting if you log into that woman on the 2nd floor…

RJ

Was it a fix?

Frankly who cares? The Britain’s Got Talent viewers definitely picked the wrong winner on Saturday night, but with a nice piece of ‘fix’ hype, ITV got a bumper audience for the final after a lacklustre ratings display earlier in the series. Jai (who won) seemed like a really nice guy, but the kid Ronan is definitely a Su-Bo in the making – quirky, great voice and clearly someone Simon Cowell can and will do business with.

I must be the only person in Britain who hadn’t watched BGT until this week and now I know what all the fuss is about. Hilarious isn’t it? However, I have a sneaking suspicion that a large number of the audience don’t realise they’re having the piss taken out of them. This show is not about the best of British talent, it’s a freak show isn’t it? Forever and a day we Brits have loved circus sideshows, bearded ladies, men with two heads – you know the kind of stuff. I actually missed those two acts on BGT, but I did see Angela and Teddy. Sadly they didn’t make the final because the old poodle didn’t quite do what Angela’s ‘Mummy’ wanted him to do with her shopping trolley!

The really clever thing about BGT is Simon Cowell’s deadpan approach. He makes you believe that this really is the stuff of dreams. Bill Kenwright, the musical theatre empresario (and Everton Chairman), once told me that he saw at least 8 singers a week who were better than any Pop Idol or X-Factor winner. So this isn’t really about great talent. It’s the rubbish that rates and good on Cowell for realising that and turning it into ratings points for ITV.

RJ

Scene One: Bullshit Awards at the Furcoat & No Knickers Hotel… I’m. On. The. List. And. I’m. Getting. In through the out-door, I’m studio-tanned, off my tits and immediately swimming in a supermodel social-lite shagpile of dumbed down media whores, drowning in a sea of B-list Bitches’ and Diamond Dogs’ dilated pupils gazing Kerching! dollar sign sales pitches. “Don’t be coy, dah-ling, buy me get one free”. Money talks when fame walks and the Wannabe bore-shwazee come on with their Upwest Cockney-translator come ons. It’s wicked, guy. Tools with tools and chicks with attitude trainspot sexual conquests adding scalps to their tabloid fuelled CVs, the see through fashion posturing seen through. We are all common, common people; vulgar throbbing dog’s dinners, mutton undressed as slaughtered-lambs backstabbing shock-of-the-nothing-new longpigs basted in fake tan and chargrilled under a packaged sun.

Across the stagnant sick-scented mess of tonight’s swanking cocksure 15-minute-Ratner-royalty I spot a celebrity slapper as desperate to score as I am; it’s not love, it’s not even sex… it’s Tactics. It’s a Fucking War.

We connect and dispense with the pleasantries while Jude Ass, her PA with ambition, books our room. The corset-crucified pushed up’n'thrust-out kid’s TV babe and the Pavlov’s dogging northern cultural pop-prozzie dribbling and dressed for safe sex and opiates, and stinking of “Love me I need to be loved” and Fuck Me #5, exit stage front, with plenty of it.

Bug-eyed and fist-twitching, bumfluff lager’n'lard lad tugs nicotine from a fag and chokes “Go on, my son. Give her some Action Spectacular”. Yeah. Funny like Garfield in a car window. Get. Some Fucking. Self. Respect. Shandy. Boy.

Scene Two: Rattling my crown jewels in the cheap suite…

Nose to the mirror, sweat-dripped and snorting I watch my working class revolution end right here right now. The Presenter zooms closer. Closer. Closer she fag-stain whispers “Give me what you got” not bargaining for exactly what I have. The lines are drawn and we’re fucked and ready to fuck now stripping and bright-white strip-lit she’s more Razzle than Penthouse; me much less Playboy more easy-target Toyboy. Our shot rolling eyes the colour of money on heat, her fixed smile is electric blue. I should leave.

I’m tired and pissed up and tired of being pissed on. I want to do the right thing and it’s not her, not now. She looked good through a Smirnoff bottle; her glass half empty, my empty head half full spinning purple. I’m the token rough, the dirty-fly-by-night-northern-cowboy hitting the jackpot and riding the regional TV rodeo girl drenched in the schmooze and booze of desperate prime-time networking. Her scoop complete she urges me to hurry. She has dead lines for me to meat…

Shooting my load I open my eyes sniffing my disc-scarred dead fingers in the First Prize-twat crush and reality floods in. “They made it to the third single, then”. I nod trying to focus on the buy me get one free chart-first-week-or-die instore propaganda. “Album’s out soon” I add “It’s wicked… er, guy. Or was that ‘sorted’?”.

Out into a barrage of sun and lobster-scorched northern flesh and into the waiting van. This is the life, Croydon here we come, From Here On In It’s A Riot… those rich cunts down South won’t know what’s hit ‘em.