BANJO : open a door - with force. Often uttered on The Bill, Britain's 'real-life' cops drama. Suffice to say that it's closer to Friends than The Shield. The mighty Shield!
A couple of brief digressions: The Bill itself has only ever been good for one thing - ie one character - Tosh Lines.
Tosh Lines. A cartoon blimp of a police officer (short, fat, dishevelled, fond of a tipple, irascible, with the requisite 'complicated' love life), in real real life the actor playing him was an alcoholic; notoriously he went on a week-long bender - luridly pursued by the British 'gutter' press - that killed him.
I confess that I - and many others - found the whole thing hysterical back then (late 90s): we were warped young minds seeking warped living legends; but now it's sad. Very sad.
Of course, in the annals of British TV there is a cop drama that sits above all others: The Sweeney.
(Inspector Morse, I hear? No. Not having that. Here's why. Morse is closer to Agatha Christie's Poirot et al than a street-legal police procedural. He was an interior detective, solving a whodunnit - whereas the Sweeney operated as the exact opposite. Regan & Carter pretty much knew who had done it each time - it was all about the chase: finding the fence and the slag and the ponce and the nonce with a "Put 'em away, darlin'" and "Get yer trousers on, you're nicked, sunshine" - and more often than not, a bollocking from 'upstairs' for bending the rules.)
A brief bio of the show is here, and a site with more features is here.
As a clincher, I insist that the melancholic exit music to The Sweeney remains the best there has been on TV. And the opening theme tune itself is right up there in that department as well, though there the competition is really stiff: Van Der Valk, The Persuaders, The Simpsons, The Sopranos . . .
BEARD : my oh my, how the world of show is littered with beards. Even now, so late in the goddamned day. All these people pretending to be in 'conventional' heterosexual relationships, when every chance they get they're off sating their real desires - comparing and nuzzling cocks or conjoining clit rings. An odd, inexplicable quirk is that beards seem to be the predilection of the vertically challenged.
No, I'm not falling into temptation and naming names here - for one thing, the list would go on and on. Hello! magazine and its bitchier sister rags are stuffed with beards: indeed, there are C-list celebs whose whole aison d'etre is to serve as a beard - anything, anything to be anywhere near the flashbulbs and spotlights.
To finish, here's Roger's Profanisaurus' tight definitions:
Ancient: Hairy Pie; mapatasi.
Recent: a woman married to a gay man in order to conceal his true sexuality. As in: "Do you reckon that Sophie is Edward's beard then, or what?"
BEER GOGGLES : a great contemporary institution; but being the mincing iconoclast that I am, nowadays I prefer to see them worn by others. That's pure yarbles, of course: I have them on about twice a week, same as just about everybody else I know in this town.
BINGO WINGS : the first of a fair few steals from Bo! Selecta (almost exclusively Series 2). Said wings are the arm flaps on the average middle-aged woman: the bite in Bo! is to assign this sadly pretty inevitable physical development to younger female celebs - who, as we all know, spend up to an hour each morning worshipping at the porcelain altar to cleanse themselves of the sins (read calories in alcohol) of the previous night's bender.
(the) BIN LINER TREATMENT : settle down, children. Pop an Adderall - or whatever it is you're using to ease yourself up, down or level off. Right: once upon a long ago - when donkeys wore high hats - suckers on the corporate vines would receive a pat on the back and a clock come their graceful retirement at 65 or 70; they bwere then free to sit by the old two bar fire and viddy down the tick-tock of their lives.
Then something happened. In London, the big bad Iron Lady cometh . . . and everything went strange. In actuality, things went American. And before we knew it, before tinkers had abandoned the search for Shergar, poor little city types found themselves on the receiving end of the Bin Liner Treatment - with its vocal companion, "Oi, you've got fifteen minutes to clear your desk and hop it."
And oh how we youngsters laughed at their misfortune. And now . . . now we tremble. Our snide, snarky digit salutes at the head honcho, when his back is turned and the humming lights tressed above anoint his pate, betray not the tremble of anger, scorn, or even our dearest friend - delirium tremens: no, the story they tell is that of fear.
BLANG BLANG : when a brother points to another brother bequeathed in tiresome bling bling, then points to his own head, meaning It's not what's outside, it's what's inside. (As spotted, and sported, oddly enough, by celebrity chav Tim Westwood.)
BLOOD PUDDING : what you get when your daily ablutions are afflicted with stools that struggle to make it to freedom. And, small comfort though this be to the denizens of the Third World, the richer your diet the greater the struggle - or so I've been told.
Because I want to, I'll digress slightly here to slip in a bit of Salvador Dali - as he was a man with a fixation about the quality of his stools and other bodily secretions. Try this:
The stool of today is of the purest ... I attribute it, without question, to my quasi absolute asceticism - and remember with repugnance ... my stools at the time of my debaucheries, when I was twenty years old and living in Madrid with Lorca and Bunuel. It was of unnameable ignominie, pestilential, discontinuous, spasmodic, splashing . . .
Any further questions?
BO : taking its meaning from rhyming slang: Bo Diddley = diddly squat. So bo can mean nothing, useless, empty - generally dismissive. "U2's new single is bo, and the album title is completely up its own arse."
BONGO-BONGO LAND : no, not Hackney - quite. What it is is a description of countries where tinpot dictatorships tend to flourish, and it was floated into the public realm by the late Alan Clark MP. A casual read of his Diaries would suggest that in his mind the term covered just about anywhere south or east of Gibraltar.
BOX-HILL BEHAVIOUR : as slyly referred to in The Streets' A Grand Don't Come for Free, whereby he doffs his beer-stained burberry cap to the Grand Dame of English Literature, Jane Austen. Essentially it refers to the sorry act of belittling your social inferiors, purely for sadistic pleasure.
I'm sure that I don't need to direct you to chapter 43 of Emma, wherein the original incident is delicately unfolded.
Need I add that in London the inability to complete correctly on demand the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice often begets insolent service at bars and restaurants - or no service whatsoever. Furthermore, as the Streets proclaims, "No sexual favours shall come your way for free either. Neither." I do my bit by passing on this information to every tourist I converse with. Please feel free to do likewise.
BREAK DOWN THE BACK DOOR : okay, bear with me a short while ... Early doors in Yellow Dog, Martin Amis riffs about the loss of pudeur in modern manners - you know the sort of thing: couples fulminating at each other right in front of you, or, somehow worse still, via their mobiles. The thing is: you become an eavesdropper against your will; and your only choice of escape is to move from where you are.
Now, early one evening, as I was travelling through south London by train in an almost empty carriage, there was this guy on the phone to some girl. He was highly miffed that she was planning to stay out on the piss, and the few of us in the carriage couldn't help but hear it. One of his lines in cajolling her home early was his stated desire to "break down her back door". He continued, "After all, you didn't mind last time."
BUKKAKE : friends with the time and inclination to do these things tell me that this is the most popular search nowadays, when you're looking for some late afternoon (the alone at work scenario) or late night (home alone, curtains drawn) entertainment.
I assume we all know what it is, so I'll just add my wish as to how it should be pronounced. I insist that for poetic effect it should rise and rise, before melismatically falling at the death (boo - car - key!) - rather like the act itself, if you see where I'm coming from, and I think all of you do.
BUMBACLOT : Motherfucker. As used by Caribbeans, particularly those who wish to "burn a sodomite raw".
See this - culled from the Guardian in January 2005:
"When I first came to Peckham we just wanted to be accepted by the West Indian community," says Posh - an acronym constructed from Paul Olufunbi Shokoya (his name) and Harrison (his mother's). He is remembering 1988, when a young Nigerian student of child psychology came to London on holiday, got a girl pregnant, and decided to stay to look after her.
"I used to have a lot of problems back then," he continues, leading the way down into the Big Choice basement. What kind of problems? "Very violent problems. If you go into one of their pubs and you check one of their girls, you are in trouble if they know you are African. They'd go bumbaclot and all that." (Bumbaclot, the acme of Jamaican swearing, translates literally as "arsewipe". Its real meaning is more like a slow, surprised "motherfucker".)
