offcom!

Public dissatisfaction with the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom came to a head yesterday when over a million members of the British populace phoned the authority’s complaints-line to complain about it.

Numerous controversies ranging from the regulator’s funding structure to the ‘com’ part of its name sounding a bit rude, led to the UK’s largest bitch since records began, with 1.4 million consumers contacting the authority in what the tabloid media have dubbed ‘Moronic Blind Outrage-gate’.

Mother of nine, Mona Lot, was shocked to hear from her neighbour’s boyfriend’s cat that, in the previous financial year, Ofcom cost the individual British tax-payer over £35,000.

‘Well it’s outrageous, ‘aint it?’ she grumbled. ‘And what’s worse is I only pay £8,000 a year in tax! I had to give ‘em a piece of my mind, didn’t I?’

‘Luckily I’ve got their number on speed dial.’

Ivor Nolyfe, an unemployed cement-mixer from Deptford, lodged his complaint to the watchdog after seeing a documentary on Channel 5 that purportedly claimed that Ofcom employees spent their lunch breaks burning postage stamps and defecating over photos of Baby P.

‘Well it’s outrageous, ‘aint it?’ he grumbled. ‘There weren’t any footage of them doing it or nuffin’ but the reporter bloke said they’d done it and he looked like a really clever bloke.’

‘He was wearing a tie and that.’

In keeping with other public outcries, the vast majority of the yesterday's complainants were over 65 years-old and didn’t actually know what Ofcom was.

One such old-timer, when asked by the complaints-line operator what it was he was complaining about, screamed ‘the Blacks!’, before snoring loudly down the phone for the next twenty minutes and then informing the operator that he'd soiled himself.

In response to the various indictments, Ofcom CEO Jimmy Luffman this morning issued this statement: ‘We’re not entirely sure where these allegations have come from. Our best guess so far is that they are the result of escalating negative press about the authority, possibly stemming from last Wednesday, when my secretary told the person using the self-service check out in front of her if she wouldn’t mind hurrying it along a bit.’

However, the public outcry to ban the regulator has presented Mr. Luffman with an unprecedented dilemma. ‘Do we follow our mandate and act on the British consumers’ request and take away our authority? Because if we do that, we won’t have the authority to take away our authority. What a head fuck!’

‘It’s like that bit in the Back to the Future when all his relatives start disappearing from that photo! Sort of.’

extraordinary attrition

What with the intelligence agencies coming under fire again this week for employing ‘questionable’ tactics in eliciting information from suspected terrorists, I thought I might contribute to the debate by suggesting a few alternative interrogation techniques that do not contravene basic human rights laws.

• Put the suspect in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere with a bunch of intelligence agency employees, and ensure that every time he tells a joke or amusing anecdote, one of the agents loudly informs everyone else in the group that he nicked it from a stand-up act. [This will damage his ego far more than any form of sexual humiliation currently employed by the CIA.]
  

• Invite the suspect to attend a dinner party, then sit him between a teetotal, vegan sap, whose only frames of reference involve her job at Amnesty International and the shop where she buys her organic jumpers, and a pretentious, over-bearing fuckwit, who has decided prior to the party that he only wants to talk about how awful he found the last Bond movie. [This one is based on personal experience. Trust me; it’ll have him screaming the bomb location in no time.]
  

• In the, albeit unlikely, event that the prisoner is Muslim, get Ellen DeGeneres to lecture him on the rise of Israel and how much she hates Cat Stevens, whilst drunkenly attempting to draw a picture of Mohammed eating a hotdog. [Should sufficiently piss him off enough to reveal the codes in return for permission to chop her hands off.]
  

• And if he’s Christian, bring in a chimpanzee to demonstrate the use of its opposable thumbs by juggling fossils, whilst a stem cell scientist and an abortion clinic doctor take it in turns to recite all the passages from the Bible that make absolutely no sense. [Again, would almost certainly nark him off to such an extent that he would gladly offer up information in exchange for the opportunity to practice some of that famous Christian tolerance.]
  

• Strap the prisoner to a chair in front of a television screen and put on The Usual Suspects, Se7en and Planet of the Apes, turning all of them off before the last five minutes.
  

• Similarly, after this ordeal, put on Scream, Saving Private Ryan and Swordfish, without playing the first five minutes.
  

• Then just make him watch Battlefield Earth, The Postman and Revolver. Over and over and over again. [WARNING: if all three of these are employed, a bucket will be required to hold the subject's brain in, after it leaks out of his ears.]
  

• Force the prisoner to co-present a radio show with Zane Lowe. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. Continue this until he a) talks, or b) kills himself (more likely).
  

• Place the potential terrorist in a silent, eye-gaugingly boring office environment with absolutely no work to do, so that he is forced to bear witness to the inevitably hopeless attempts of a sleazy, 50 year-old loser trying to pull a pert 20-something admin temp on an almost hourly basis. [Again, based on personal experience. It is the true definition of the word torture.]