Day 5: I Am Afraid Of Rolf Harris and Richard and Judy

Because they hate their jobs so much and are jealous, the Working make jokes about the Not Working watching daytime television. They imagine we sit around all day watching 5 consecutive episodes of Judge Judy and eating family packs of Yum-Yums from Tesco. They are wrong. Daytime television can be terrifying, and they should be grateful that they're not exposed to it.

Rolf Harris can appear when you don't expect it. You know, him. Likes animals. Beard (like Satan - see left). Glasses. Australian. Didgeridoo. Hums and paints at the same time. Portrait of the Queen. National art events in Trafalgar Square. Debunking the Old Masters for the barely literate on BBC1. That kind of thing. "Two little boys/Had two little toys/One had a wood-en HORSE". "Tie me kangaroo down, sport."

Anyroad up, R. Harris was on a flight to Canada or something and heard about the plight of the baby seals. Now look, I'm not going to take sides on this. I don't know enough. The Canadian government say they have to be culled otherwise the world would be over-run with seals with pleading eyes, and none of us would get any work done. The other people say that they're skinned alive, with their furs (still twitching) shipped across the world to adorn Naomi Campbell's stupid head. That aside, Harris was horrified enough by this to write a poem. It goes like this (at the beginning):

Shall we do it?
Shall we do it, you and I?
Shall we do it?
Shall we do it, you and I?

Some ordinary man with a baseball bat
Stands over them and bashes in their heads
They're babies!
Helpless babies.

Oh he's very very careful as he slits
From infant navel up to chinline
At least I imagine that's the method
I've never really watched, like a mother would.

Then he set it to a full-on Jah-Wobble-after-too-much-marmalade late-80s dance track, complete with keening seal sound effects and didgeridoo ("that haunting instrument").

And then Richard and Judy's production team make a video. The Rolf talking to camera, intercut with pictures of pleading baby seals and stacks of corpses (and back to The Rolf. I'm not sure which is better.) And Richard vows then and there that he will make a DVD of this masterpiece and 'send it to all the major record labels in the country'. Judy cried a bit. Richard looked earnest.

Look, a 2:2 in English and Related Literatures from York doesn't make me the F.R. Leavis du jour. I know the difference between Milton and Donne (one was blind, the other wasn't), and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (one was Irish and wore glasses, the other didn't), and Jane Austen and Jilly Cooper (one wrote novels about 13 year olds shagging at boarding school, the other didn't), but that's about it. But I will tell you this: that is a piss-poor bit of poetry. The Rolf is good at drawing pictures of himself as a kangaroo whilst humming and playing the didgeridoo. Shall we do it?/Shall we do it, you and I? What, Rolf? Buy your record? Certainly not.

It may be that you care deeply about the fate of the baby seals and want to support Rolf. If so, you can do so here. If you don't care but fancy a bit of a fright, click on the same link, or enjoy a selection of Rolf's album covers here. All I know is that it's things like this that make me think working isn't so bad after all.