Free My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle Page B

fox in your back garden. You’re upper class if you get on a horse and chase it with a pack of hounds. You’re middle class if you make your children draw a picture of it to send into Blue Peter . You’re working class if you beat it to death with a shovel and make soup out of it. Upper-class people go to Oxford or Cambridge, middle-class people go to any other university. Working-class people go the university of hard knocks: Dundee Abertay. If my grandfather had died working down the Strathblane coffee mines, if Strathblane even had a coffee mine, he would be turning in his grave, rather than exposing himself to care workers in an Alzheimer’s hospice, which I believe is what he’s doing right about now.
    The thing that really gets me about our upper classes is this: what’s wrong with using an attic to store old lampshades and games of KerPlunk? What’s this obsession with hiding inbred mutant children in the attic? That’s the reason why you never see a member of the upper class in an episode of Cash in the Attic .
    ‘This is a very unusual piece, do you know what it is?’
    ‘Oh, that’s Edward and Charles, the Siamese twins. I’d quite forgotten they were up here.’
    * * *
    There wasn’t just a class divide in Glasgow—when I was growing up it was also pretty racist. Asian shopkeepers would get abuse and black footballers had bananas thrown at them. I don’t know if the attitudes behind that have really gone away; maybe people are just better at hiding those feelings.
    I used to think of Scotland as particularly racist but when I went to England I found it much the same. The other night a cabbie in London recognised me and asked if I ever got censored on the grounds of political correctness. I mumbled something about occasionally having things toned down and he said:
    ‘I know. You can’t call a coon a coon or a poof a poof, can you?’
    It was amazing. This guy actually lives in a reality where everybody on Mock the Week is doing jokes about Obama’s fiscal-stimulus policy and what we’d really rather be doing is saying, ‘He is a coon.’ Of course, neither country has anything on Ireland, which has a set of cheerfully racist attitudes worthy of the Third Reich. Then of course, there’s Australia. It’s ironic that Australians are so racist. Kind of hard to defend the proposition that black people don’t belong in your country, when the white people keep dying from skin cancer.
    When I watched the infamous Celebrity Big Brother that featured the bullying of Shilpa Shetty I started to consider that I might be one of the few people who isn’t into racism and that I had totally underestimated its current level of coolness. One thing is certain, it doesn’t do ratings any harm so we’re going to try to build as much racism into the next series of Mock the Week aspossible. Naturally, Hugh Dennis has raised objections but that is just the behaviour of a typical Chinky. Racism really does open up new markets to the canny performer. Jade Goody went from being an unknown in India to effigies of her being waved in the streets.
    I’ve always been pretty broadminded about other cultures. For instance, I’m in favour of the full-length burqa as it allows me to masturbate in Tescos. The spectacle of British politicians playing to the assumption that we are all racists sickens me. I’ve come up with my own British Citizenship Test exam paper that would help make sure the applicant will fit in with the culture.

1. Spot the difference between these two cartoons of Mohammed.

2. Why has your country never voted for us in Eurovision?

3. Have you ever looked at the ingredients on Ready, Steady, Cook and thought ‘I could make a bomb out of that’?

4. You’ve just picked up a newspaper on your way to the Tube. Expecting to be shot?

5. Write down ten well-known British swearwords. On the house of your local paedophile.

6. A TV presenter has been involved in a sex offence. Do you find this (a)