Due to low ratings, poor action figure sales, and one heavily edited ‘documentary’, the BBC has been forced to regenerate director-general Tim Davie, so they can usher in a new season of confusing newstertainment mascotted1 by tech billionaire and Martian toucher, Elon Musk.
Read this post to find out how it happened (it didn’t, I made it up).
Speaking about the BBC’s heavily edited 2024 Trump ‘documentary’, Elon Musk’s robotic clone chirped, whistled, and burrowed several thousand tunnels under California. We’ve no idea what this means, but we mapped the tunnels and they look like the neuron structures found in that dead alien we have in the office fridge. More news on that whenever.
What’s more important than aliens turning up right now, is the news, obviously. And also what random children’s authors think about the news, and what the news thinks about random children’s authors thinking about the news, and what those authors, in turn, think about what the news thinks about what they thought about what the news was thinking when the news thought things about what they were thinking about the news.
It’s an infinite regression, sort of like the endless rewrites of Doctor Who lore. I imagine by now Doctor Who was secretly a lasagne the whole time, and was given sentience by Davros due to his unreasonably overcomplicated microwave oven. That’s the lore now, right?
“Donald Trump is basically a Dalek because he’s literally killed entire planets of people,” said Intern2384783, who we didn’t actually interview. They just turned up and started having these outbursts when the Wi-Fi went down and they couldn’t get their regular fix.
“Which planets has he killed?” asked our interviewer.
Intern 2384783 then called our interviewer lots of catchy, popular insults, some of which would lead to social ostracization or even a loss of job if believed, so we’ve not copied them here, but you can be sure it’s viral on twitter already and our interviewer will make a crying apology in the bath on Youtube within the hour.
BBC accused of ‘Realityphobia’
If you’re not clued up, here’s a quick summary of this week’s nonsense.
The BBC has faced serious criticism after it was revealed two quotes from a speech made by US President Donald Trump were stitched together to make it appear he had told supporters ahead of the Capitol riot he was going to walk with them to “fight like hell”.
An hour-long Panorama special called Trump: A Second Chance? had been broadcast a week before the last US Presidential election and spliced together two quotes from a speech Trump made before the January 6 uprising despite him making the comments nearly an hour apart and about different topics.
- https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/bbc-donald-trump-speech-us-election-panorama-b1257366.html
Trump has since levied a 1bn dollar threat to the BBC, threatening to sue if the company doesn’t retract the documentary.
“That’s about the cost of one Disney Doctor Who episode,” said a showrunner. “How are we going to film Space Babies Two, now? That farting spaceship was real you know. We used 2% of our weekly budget on it.”
“We need more money for the pooing spaceship. It turns out, Galifrey is a big turd, that’s the new story. How will we afford the polygons to properly show the poo?”
“Is it a metaphor?” our interviewer asked.
The showrunner then broke down crying.
“On top of hiring those people who make office job training videos to write the patronising dialogue about every single subgenre of human the Doctor might have historically been a bit dismissive of, we now have to fork out for CGI because we have a new policy to replace good stories with pointlessly huge CGI monsters by 2030.”
“It’s called our storytelling reversal initiative. By 2030, we hope to put the morals of the story on the outside, and the actual fun bits on the inside, but then remove the fun bits and replace them with corporate sponsorship.”2
“We simply cannot afford to absorb a 1 billion dollar court case from Trump. And if he finds out the bad guy in the evil space spiders episode was based on him, we might be doomed.”
“We have looked into cutting down on the BBC’s CGI budget to make room for this 1bn court case. I’m in talks with Zack Polanski to see if he can use hypnotism for the gigantism scenes, but he says he can only make boobs bigger, not whole people.” said the showrunner, whilst crying into a Starbucks which cost precisely half a billion dollars.
“The caramel syrup was milked from an authentic Mars caramel goblin,” he said, explaining the necessity of the purchase.
“I have another mid afternoon, to help me write new episodes.”
“Another coffee?” our interviewer asked.
“More like covfefe, am I right. But no, another goblin. I use them for inspiration.”
Before we could ask what this could possibly mean, the real Elon Musk manifested from loose electrons and bits of gristle in a nearby vending machine, 3D printing himself from materials his roving drones identified as spare parts; non-living, but organic compounds for which to absorb and print out a new Musk right here in the UK, whilst the original is off giving moss the ability to fire lasers, to combat crime, of course.
The result of this collecting and organising of “non-living parts” meant of course that Intern 2384783’s brain was consumed for the new Musk, but that doesn’t matter. We’re not doing clever, ship of Theseus comedy today, that’s for my next book. The intern’s brain was inert matter. Their consciousness lives on in TwatGPT, a new chatbot designed to back up the memories and personalities of people whose outbursts would overload conventional cloud-based storage facilities.
Elon Musk’s air-printed meat clone took one look around the empty head offices at the BBC, and sat down. “I’ll sort this,” he said, regenerative energy still streaming from his eyebrows and fingertips.
“I will take over, I will be the next Doctor.”
“Chief,” another nameless intern corrected.
“Whatever. But first, I need to invent daleks. They seem fun.”
Endnote:
So, as reality crumbles around us and news becomes entertainment becomes news becomes entertainment becomes news becomes entertainment, one must wonder, is the magic anxiety attack rectangle worth listening to? What about the smaller anxiety rectangle you keep in your trousers, beside your favourite testicle? (women, you can have a favourite too, just buy one from a butcher’s or something).
Well, some people are rushing to defend the BBC in weird ways.
I quite like the BBC. It is why I felt comfortable writing this article taking the piss out of it.
If you love something, you surely must wish for it to remain as good as you imagine it is, and perhaps want for it to improve over time; for its goodness to continue, so that you might enjoy more of it in the future.
So I don’t believe the people wanting to defend the BBC from criticism really love it at all. I think they just hate Trump more, and that’s what motivates their syrupy outbursts. They are siding with the BBC only because they want to not be on the side of Trump. To them this is not about editorial standards, it is about a cartoonish battle between good and evil.
I grew up watching a lot of BBC. Its panel shows, now ancient and demented, inspired me to write more of my own comedy, like this article. And maybe one day if I dye my hair purple and start writing depressing poetry again, I will turn up on one of their radio shows. But my enjoyment of the BBC does not preclude me from being annoyed when it turns out footage people shared was edited to be misleading. That those marching protestors on the documentary were filmed before the edited speech, yet shown after, is proof to me that editorial decisions were made to push an idea in front of reality. The ‘documentary’ therefore is little more than entertainment, a twisting of the order and nature of events, a destruction of reality.
I want the BBC to be honest.
I want news to be news.
And fiction to be fiction.
I think that’s a fair and simple thing to expect.
Resignations won’t fix the problem. They are a distraction.
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I just coined the word mascotted. It’s mine now.
I’m actually writing a writing class about this modern reversal of literature. Coming soon