Mamma, I Want To Sing!

Liza Minelli, busy pissing me off.

There are a lot of things wrong with local radio but the worst, most annoying, most generally vexing thing is the bloody adverts and their stupid fucking jingles. There's one on Beacon radio for an establishment called Hollybush which is, as far as I can tell, a massive out of town garden centre cum DIY store cum shite pit. Currently they're very keen that the good people of the Midlands choose them for all their Christmas decoration needs; in order to lure us in they've decided to go with an advert of such face-melting annoyingness that if for some unfathomable reason I actually set foot in the place I'll probably be naked, screaming, pissing myself uncontrollably and carrying a live hand grenade. It's that bad. But after I'd heard this ad twenty or thirty times I started to think about the women who were actually singing the jingle.

I mean, it probably wasn't what they wanted, was it? No singing person starts out with big dreams about doing the radio jingle for Hollybush megastore, Great Bridge, Birmingham. They want to win X Factor and appear on Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. The broken aspirations of another human being aren't really a source of amusement for me - honest - but I make an exception for singers because they really get on my tits. It was the drama students that did it. I once took a minibus ride from Aberystwyth to London. Six hours, with a 7:00AM start. The minibus was packed full of drama students. Who sang show tunes. All the way there. By the end I was sat there, gnawing on my own lips and straining as hard as I could in the vain hope that I might burst something internal and bring on a self-inflicted stroke. An embolism. Anything.

People who are really good at crochet don't feel the need to get their crochet hooks out in public and start whipping up a nice bobble hat for the sheer joy of it. There are people out there who are amazingly gifted at carpentry but they don't get up in everyone's face about how now neatly they can bevel a hole in a plank. But apparently if you sing you're compelled to do it loudly, often and as publicly as possible. Why? Because, as a singer, you crave attention in the same way that a normal person craves chocolate covered hobnobs or oral sex, i.e a lot. And that kind of 'Look at me! Look at me!' attention seeking is just very, very unseemly, and a little bit sad. So when I think of the jingle women, or the endless thousands of talentless gimboids that queue for hours just so that Simon Cowell can tell them to get to fuck, every one convinced that they're, like, totally fabulous and the whole world will love them, I can't help but let out a devious little chuckle. Moo Hoo Ha Ha!