Mr Dystopia

Welcome to the Dystopian future. We’ve been expecting you.

Slight aside: Barry Norman wrote a weird dystopian apartheid novel! WTF?

We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Cinema has been pimping global disasters for over half a century. We’re bored of watching Big Ben devoured by tidal waves, or screaming radioactive lizards sending the house prices of Japanese water-front properties through the floor.

And we thought we’d get a bit of me-time: wandering around in rags, looting in a leisurely manner and hiding from reanimated corpses who like to eat human brains, meaning once again Whitehall is the safest place in the country: so clever, so stupid.

And I wanted that feeling of being the last, lonely man. I wanted to be touring the abandoned streets full of shredded newspaper and burnt-out cars with human shaped shadows etched into the walls. I was raised on cracked, depopulated visions of the future: it feels like my birthright to drive around in a stolen car, shooting at the "new people" and then swinging back to the flat which looks like Swiss bank vault after the Second World War. My future pad should resemble a Yates' Wine Lodge decorated by Liberace. We were promised we could blow up people in cowls and pour Chateau Lafite on our cornflakes. That's not what we got. 

But we didn't think it would be queuing to be let into a Lidl and clapping useful people from a safe distance and walking into traffic to avoid somebody blowing their nose on the pavement*. We didn't think the apocalypse would be about middle-aged men hanging around outside with the bins in preference to spending time with their families, or your social media being an endless stream of people’s favourite films and an equally endless stream of people complaining about people’s favourite films. I never anticipated receiving a letter from the Prime Minister telling me it’s "going to get worse" and then making it worse, or the veiled threats of martial law if we don't all behave. Barely veiled threats at that - there's no way Johnson would mistake one for a post-box.

Our apocalypse sees the press angrily requesting an end to the lockdown on the day that deaths from an illness no one had heard of three months ago reached the 30, 000 mark. What movie was this in? I’m flicking through the pages of a John Wyndham novel but I can’t find anything about people chuntering on and on about “Normal People” during Triffid attacks. 

But here we are: looking at adverts for MacDonald’s Drive-Through as strange news from a distant star. We are laughing at the perverse abstraction of being told what the weather is going to be like because if we don’t we’ll start raking our cheeks with our fingernails. We stare through the blinds at the street outside like cats in a cat-flapless world, miaowing at strangers. We are becoming judgemental of people daring to go outside: “That’s her second walk today: I hope she gets the virus and dies now”. “A six pack of Mini Cheddars and a bottle of gin are hardly essential shopping! Why aren’t there police in vans shooting these people? It’s time!”

The real threat to the lock-down and social distancing is going to be the VE Day celebrations. The potent combo of good weather, Christopher Eccleston reading a poem on the One Show that contained so much war imagery that I can now only see the Covid virus with Jack boots and a duelling scar, commemorative Winston Churchill coins from the Balmoral Mint, the extraordinary availability of Union Jack bunting and the fact that from where we are looking at it a no longer recent past where we were definitely the goodies, and not a shitty bonsai version of America with bad weather and worse teeth, seems really, really comforting right now. So people are going to hit the streets and the parks and beaches and have a proper knees-up and a fight and get arrested by police in Hazchem gear. Expect a patriotic death spike in two weeks. England expects a futile gesture at this point – it’s good for morale. But you won’t see it in a film.   

What’s common to practically all cinematic prophesies of the end of days is that you need a tough, stand-alone man to get you through them: a take-charge, rip-up-the-rule-book kind of guy, not afraid to get his hands dirty or smash the glasses and smear the lab-coats of so-called experts. Luckily we have one: Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Unluckily it hasn’t worked out too well for him. He fucked about, he did nothing, he hi-fived the sick and nearly died, he came back, none of his promises materialised, he missed a load of meetings, he didn't meet his testing targets and without his mates backing him up he massively shit-legged it in Prime Minister’s Question Time.

But he had another one of his babies. So well done him.   

Perhaps we need another approach, one where we listen to the experts, cooperate, don’t act like selfish pricks and stay safe. It’s time to turn our back on Hollywood, otherwise…well, that’s all folks.     

*should've used a hankie.