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The BoF Awards 2007
Woman of the Year
Girls, girls, girls. Lookin’ so pretty it’s a dawg-gone pity
that they couldn’t all be…winners of the BoF woman of the year 2007 Award. Here
at the BoF we’re not into patronising the fairer sex with awards about
achievement. We know women are equal (and in most cases superior) to their male
counterparts and highlighting further examples of this would be condescending
and nothing short of an insult to ladies everywhere. We are looking for a woman
of notoriety, but one who has gained it for all the wrong reasons. We are
looking for a woman who would have famous suffragettes like, erm, the Mother
from Mary Poppins (ho-ho, who needs research?) spinning in their
graves/deathbeds; a woman who seems to be addicted to the limelight, regardless
of the cost; a woman who has taken talent, dignity and achievement and thrown
them out of the window of a moving vehicle.
So, before we get to the winner, let’s have a look at the
also-rans. First up, its everyone’s favourite monopod: Heather Mill-McCartney. That’s right, her continual tabloid
roastings and TV bleatings almost bagged her and unprecedented double haul at
the BoF awards. But, truth be told, she’s actually done very little to deserve
the award. The Sun and their partners
in shite tend to drag out old news and hearsay to give her a good slating on a
slow news day: there’s very little evidence of newly created furore. Apart from
the GMTV thing – which, on its own, is not enough to bag her this particular
award.
Next up, everyone’s favourite talentless socialite: Paris Hilton. Not content with mildly
irritating three quarters of the worlds population by appearing idle, spoilt
and stupid she took it a whole step further in 2007 by seemingly assuming that
petty things like ‘the law’ didn’t apply to her. After getting caught drinking
and driving and then driving again with a suspended license she was hauled off
to jail for 40 days. Or 5 days as it’s more commonly known in celebrity
circles. Citing “medical considerations”, the authorities took the decision to
send her home whilst only one-eighth of the way into her jail term. There is
not truth to the rumour that these medical considerations were ‘being stupid
and not wanting to poo in front of butch shemales’.
But Paris simply hasn’t done enough. Neither has Amy
Winehouse, who’s reported drug related misdemeanours have simply turned her
into a crashing tabloid bore. Anna Nicole Smith couldn’t bag the
award, despite overdosing herself to death in a shameless last-ditch
attempt. Even Lindsay Lohan couldn’t bag the prize, despite spending vast amounts
of time in the trendiest rehabs/courtrooms.
There could only be one winner. Yes, it’s the woman who
turned Hit Me Baby One More Time from
a pop song to a casual request for more drugs: Britney Spears. Not just exploding onto the front pages with the
occasional ill-advised move, Britney seems to have done her level best to stay
in that spotlight with a series of sad, bizarre and outrageous acts. Keeping a
very long list as short as possible, Britney’s alleged adventures this calendar
year include: popping in and out of rehab like a whack-a-mole, ‘partying’ hard
and losing clothes, shaving her head a la Alien3, failing to participate in
court-ordered dugs tests, losing custody of her children and having the most
laughable comeback since ponchos returned to the high street. That’s some good
going there Ms. Spears: have and award on us.
Man of the
Year
The 19th century commentator and historian Thomas Carlyle
wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great
men." And what does it take to be a
great man? Balls, that’s what, as
Carlyle himself concluded, in an uncensored version of Heroes and Hero Worship. In
searching for the BoF Man of the Year 2007, the judging panel looked for wit,
passion, defiance in the face of idiocy and a cheeky little smile that makes up
for a mountain of incompetence. In
short, we want balls on display, not pricks.
And our first nominee certainly showed some top quality
balls, silver ones too. A former
Detective Superintendent, Robocop Mayor of Middlesbrough,
the silver fox Ray Mallon leapt to national prominence following Channel Four’s
broadcast of Location, Location,
Location: Best & Worst. After
the show declared that the jewel in the Teesside crown is the worst place in Britain to
live, Mallon wasted no time on his counter attack. Promising presenters Kirstie Allsopp and
Phil Spencer a good kicking in the cells off me and the boys, Mallon went on to
give an official statement:
“What we have witnessed is nothing short of a brutal,
unjustifiable and unacceptable assault on this town by Channel 4. This is not a case of Location, Location,
Location but a clear case of fabrication, fabrication, fabrication. I will be personally boycotting Channel 4. I
will not be watching any of their programmes.”
Oh yeah, take that Channel Four, Hollyoaks is now one viewer down.
But well done to Mallon for taking on the southern property pimping
elite. With regard to the worst placed
accolade Allsopp said: “What I want more than anything is to champion, not
condemn, the places on the worst list as there are some real diamonds in the
rough.” Thanks Kirstie, maybe next you could come up with an even more
patronizing phrase with a little extra unconscious condescension. According to Wikipedia, Allsopp is: “…the daughter of Charles Henry Allsopp, 6th Baron Hindlip
and former chairman of Christie's, and the interior designer Fiona Victoria
Jean Atherley McGowan. She is entitled to be referred to as The Honourable
Kirstie Allsopp, but this is rarely used.” Presumably because “twat” is preferred. Mainly by Ray Mallon. So for declaring “your move, creep” to the
smug house price inflationist parasites, Raybocop earns his nomination. And also for managing to keep a straight face
while saying Middlesbrough is a nice place to
live.
Our second nominee enhanced his longstanding reputation for
maintaining furious, decade long grudges and repeatedly scuppering comeback
success with ill judged comments.
Demented Wildean crooner Morrissey claimed the NME took his comments
about immigration out of context. That
context being “Arrrg! Immigrants!” Nevertheless, in the best rock n’ roll
tradition Morrissey decided to sue the NME.
Interviewer Tim Jonze stated that “I found comments such as "England's been
thrown away" and "These days you won't hear a British accent in
Knightsbridge" woefully ignorant. If Morrissey holds these opinions he
should either be sticking to his guns and standing by them or - more honourably
- educating himself on race issues, realising why his comments were both
offensive and inflammatory, and apologising for them as quickly as is humanly
possible.” Because questioning
immigration is of course racist. At
least to middle aged people trying to fit into the clothes, minds and haircuts
of 15 year olds, or NME journalists as they are otherwise known. But what really wins Morrissey his BoF
nomination is his opinion that Jonze “accepted every answer I gave him with a
schoolgirl giggle”, that the NME was playing "the editorial naughtiness
game" and branding the magazine "devious, truculent and
unreliable", three adjectives used by a high court judge in 1996. About Morrissey. Who can resist such a camp hissy fit? Lots of people, but in a year when music
reportage appeared to consist of Pete Doherty droning on about his heroin
breakfasts and Amy Winehouse wandering about in public with a syringe hanging
out of her foot, it’s good to see Morrissey once again trying to destroy his
own career with wit and style. Just don’t listen to Bengali in Platforms.
It’s a lonely road to travel being a likeable politician,
but Yorkshire’s finest, William Hague,
continued his solitary progress, occasionally given a wave from Boris Johnson
sitting on a style chewing hay. Hague
maintained his amicable persona alongside David Cameron’s impersonation of Tony
Blair circa 1996, revitalizing Tory prospects for 2008. Whether this is good thing or not depends on
your politics. The BoF doesn’t
care. Because we wrote to Hague asking
for an interview. He replied. No one else did. You’re the man Billy!
Best Local Oddity
While the angry celebrity crowd get the lion’s share of rage
reporting, it’s the humble local newspaper that can sometimes express fury in
its purest form and, in some cases, actively cause it. To succeed as a BoF award winner, a local
oddity must contain an element of rage, stupidly or simply the bizarre. It gives us great pleasure to present to you
the nominees for Best Local Oddity 2007.
Warning to beware
doorstep fish salesmen
A fine example of local absurity. Who on earth would a) buy fish from a strange
man who knocks at your door or b) sell fish door to door. And why fish?
Why not venison or curry? “The
rip offs include traders offering expensive varieties of fish at seemingly
attractive prices only for consumers to later discover the fish has been
mis-described and that they have been given cheaper varieties.” What the
hell? cried one victim, this isn't a salmon, it's a goldfish! “Others
reported being pressured in to buying more fish than they could consume, afford
or store adequately.” Ah the old hard sell.
Buy 17 trout, motherf*!ker, or the grandkids get it.
Escaping cow
highlights the need for mart move
Furious animal behaviour is always a highlight. Especially when a rampaging cow is
involved. “Chris Neesam was working in a
garage when the cow broke through the doors. He said "I was busy
working when it came to the doors, but it barged through so I hid behind the
van until it ran out the other side.” What
a hero. Surely the headline should have been ‘Man hides in garage until cow
goes away.’ Adding extra value to this
oddity is the fact that “the animal was later sold at auction and will be slaughtered
over the next few days.” How long does it take to slaughter a cow? Several
days of slaughtering for one cow seems a bit harsh. ‘Cow slowly slaughtered for intruding on busy
man in garage.’
Buggy woman crashes
through train.
“An elderly woman on a mobility scooter crashed through
train doors and onto the track after boarding a Metro service on South Tyneside. She drove onto the train at Brockley
Whins station with enough force to break open the opposite door's lock, according
to Metro operator Nexus.” Quality speaks
for itself.
Parking fines
cancelled after anger
Dr. Bruce Banner's fine was quietly removed after he turned
into an 8 foot raging green beast and threw a traffic warden through a window.
The Courts Section:
For
decades The Courts Roundup has guaranteed excellence in local idiocy reportage,
and this year is no exception:
Ex-Drug addict stole
socks from shop to raise money to buy alcohol
Provoked driver hit
boy with plastic bat
Estranged partners'
row over dog ended in theft of hoover
Man threw drink at
estate agency door
Pagan rumpus ends in
court
Man crashed into five
cars after airbag opened
Stalwarts of any community, the Local Councillors, make
their expected misogynistic appearance with Chairman's comments about women cause upset and Councillor's
remarks on women 'objectionable'.
Temporary lights at
junction are fudge deserves an honourable mention for its confectionary
based confusion, as does Colonel fumes
at parade bureaucracy. Because
nothing fumes like a Colonel. Famous vet's son opens art exhibition illustrates
the sheer crapness of small town life; It’s not even a famous vet, just his
son, who isn't famous. Similarly, Dog pulls over woman suggests a
spectacularly slow news day and as competitions go, Create poster, win a bin is hard to beat.
All our nominees have given some great local bollocks this
year, I’m sure you’ll agree. But there
can only be one winner. And for sheer absurdity with a hint of small town
fraud, it gives the BoF great pleasure to announce that the winner of Best
Local Oddity 2007 is:
Photo of man with
hair led to bald bouncer's downfall
Anyone who can work out what the hell that refers to wins a
badge.
Biggest Batch of Sporting Crumble 2007
What a year it’s been for people who are both athletic and
pathetic. While it’s fair to say that you could pick any year at random, grab
the nearest historical sporting tome and be overcome with British sporting
failure, this year has been particularly generous with the dramatic
capitulation. It’s important to understand that to be considered for this award
you need to be more than just a loser. The worlds full of losers, sporting and
non-sporting; if we just wanted to honour losers we’d head off down to the
cobblers, have a couple of hundred crappy trophies made and start hurling them
at everyone leaving JJB Sports whilst shouting ‘Wooo! Yeah!’ But we don’t want
to do that (on this occasion). We’re looking for sports men, women and teams
who have overcome the odds and managed to put one hand on the Holy Grail, only
then to go on and drop that Grail into a vat of radioactive sulphuric acid (or
the hand of an Australian).
Before we discuss the winner of the Crumble Award, let’s
have a brief look at some losers of note. First up, capitulating quicker than a
balsawood bomb-shelter was the England
Cricket Team. If they weren’t binge drinking and fannying about on water
based leisure equipment they were, erm, being totally shite at cricket,
culminating in a drab exit in the Super 8 stage. Also deserving of an
honourable mention is the Welsh
International Football Team. In a year when even Northern
Ireland made a fist of qualification, Welsh flew the flag
for camp dire; the particular lowlight being a 3-1 thrashing by that renowned
international force: Cyprus.
Next we come to a group of nominees that can be grouped
together as ‘punching above their weight’. The
England Rugby Team, The Scottish
Football Team and Lewis Hamilton
all promised little before the start of their respective sporting campaigns and
all defied the odds: battling their way to the bitter end only to taste the
bitter defeat of Granny’s crab-apple crumble. A combination of naivety, bad
luck and just being crapper than the opponents led to the inevitable last
minute heartbreak, but all three deserve credit. Here at the BoF we have a
heart. It may be small, black and filled with bile, but it still allows us to
appreciate genuine effort and that’s what keeps this group out of the running
for the non-coveted Crumble Award.
The same can be said of one Ricky Hatton. He gave as good as he got until the odds finally
overcame him and The Best Pound-For-Pound Boxer In The World® caught him with a
lucky punch. When Hatton told viewers of BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year
Award that ‘he felt like he’d let everyone down’, it must have been tempting
for Gary Lineker to reply ‘You haven’t Ricky…well, with the exception of the
thousands of people who spent all that money flying out to Vegas to see you get
dropped on you arse’, but he didn’t. And he didn’t because he’d seen a man
giving his all.
Having scoured the list of potential candidates for this
award for literally minutes, the choice was fairly simple. When you strip down
‘The BoF Award for the Biggest Batch of Sporting Crumble’ to its bare bones,
you need to find an able, quality sportsperson/sporting team that has fallen
foul of the 3 Is:
·
Ineptitude
· Incompetence
· Intolerable Shitness
Yes, you must have guessed it by now, the winner is Steve McClaren and his England Football
Team. With the all organisational skills of an Anarchist disco, all the
panache of Mr Blobby on crack and all the tactical know-how of Sgt Bilko,
McClaren did little to endear himself to the nation, culminating in an
agonising yet strangely inevitable heartbreaker against Croatia. Remember, any loser can just lose. It couldn’t
have just been 3-0 to Croatia and over and done with. That’s not the England way: somehow getting back into it at 2-2, raising
spirits…and then dashing them like an egg in a blender - that’s the Three Lions
way. And what legacy does poor Steve leave: shortest reigning England manager
ever. But boy, can he hold an umbrella. And let’s be fair, this is a joint
award and there were usually 11 buffoons on the pitch doing there upmost to
make England look like escapees from the House Of Inability. And deary me, how much loser
talk can we take: ‘we’re tired…too many fixtures…I’ve hurt my leg…the crowd are
booing us…the papers are being nasty…I’m not playing regularly…we do care,
we’re just shite…’ It’s enough to make you want to let the upper middle class
keep that game, and we’ll invent a new one.
The Kevin Keegan
Award for Outstanding Display of Public Anger 2007
I’d love it, I’D LOVE IT, if 2007 proved to be a classic
year for the celebrity tirade. And
looking at the nominees there’s every chance that this year will indeed live
long in the memory. Our first contender
has a fine track record in acrimonious public disputes with family members, but
Alec Baldwin excelled in 2007 by haranguing an 11 year old child. His 11 year old child. “You have insulted me for the last time”
riled the SpongeBob SquarePants The Movie
and Thomas and The Magic Railroad
star. “I don't give a damn that you're
12-years-old or 11-years-old (not quite
sure there), or a child (not quite
sure there), or that your mother is a thoughtless pain in the ass who
doesn't care about what you do. (more sure
there) You've made me feel like s**t.” Baldwin did
pull himself together to finalise arrangements for his next father and daughter
bonding session, though. “You better be ready Friday the 20th to meet with
me." Or else, presumably.
And 2007 clearly shapes up as a classic year for aficionados
of the celebrity family breakdown with a fine showing from Duane "Dog" Chapman. The Dog
the Bounty Hunter star took a break from macing bail violators for the
viewing pleasure of aggressive simpletons and launched a finely judged diatribe
with just a hint of ambiguous racial opinion.
Discussing his son’s choice of partner, Chapman ventured that: “I don't
care if she's a Mexican, a whore or whatever. It's not because she's black,
it's because we use the word nigger
sometimes here. We don't mean you fucking scum nigger without a soul.
(Ah, that’s all right then) We don't
mean that shit. (No, not at all) But America would think we mean that. And we're not taking a chance on losing everything we
got over a racial slur.” Following this
conversation becoming public Dog the
Bounty Hunter was pulled from the TV schedules. Mission accomplished Dog!
The ever likeable Heather Mills McCartney completes our 2007
line up. Appearing on GMTV to suggest that
the tabloid press be a little more restrained and accurate in their merciless hounding
of the rich and famous, Mills McCartney guaranteed herself another 300 miles
worth of column space in the tabloids by loosing it completely. "I've had worse press than a paedophile
or a murderer and I've done nothing but charity for the 20 years” she said,
looking around, wild eyed, for the violin player she had hired to appear at
this point. “They've called me a whore, a gold digger, a fantasist, a liar,
I’ve had eighteen months of abuse and 4,400 abusive articles… everyone jumps on
the bandwagon, makes money out of my misery." (The Bat o’ Fury, yours for only £2)
My sister was crying her eyes out because that awful Jordan and Peter
Andre did a joke on Sunday.” Don’t worry
Heather, it wasn’t the joke, we all cry our eyes when Jordan and Peter Andre appear.
With a fine ear for translating events into angry gibberish,
Mills McCartney added that: "They
always say 'publicity-seeker'. Look at me going to court. My pelvis is bust.
You've seen the X-ray, right, which I had to produce because they put in here,
'Heather pulls her leg off', and, you know, talks about her pelvis.” Yes, those tabloids are always after the latest
scoop on celebrity pelvises. "I
even got an apology… when they said that my petition was a lie. And the size of
the apology? 'We're sorry. We now accept that the judge did not throw out any
of her claims. She was not portrayed as a liar in court and did not erupt with
rage,” she said, erupting with rage.
While Duane
"Dog" Chapman’s and Alec Baldwin’s familial fury is indeed
impressive, it’s the private aspect of their performances that prevents them
from taking the ultimate rage based prize.
The telephone outbursts were taped and then sold to the press. After much debate amongst the BoF judging
panel it was decided that both had to be disqualified for not being true
Keegan-esque public freakouts. In the classic Keegan style of a televised, over
emotional interview that sheds a little too much light on a fragile state of
mind, Mills McCartney is therefore the worthy recipient for 2007. In a tired and emotional acceptance speech
Heather said “they will go for me tomorrow and they'll go she's crazy and she's
this and she's that... Go for it, because I will do even more.” Clearly Heather
has an eye on defending her title in 2008.
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