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Doing them down.

During the day Jocky was a ‘normal’ bloke. He clocked in at the local gas works along with hundreds of others. In order to root out Burnley’s potential insurgents, the workforce was fingerprinted, iris scanned, inside leg measured and DNA tested. Jocky was a maintenance engineer.

But he harboured a deep secret.

The banter around the gas pipeline was typical:

‘Kate Moss is fit.’ ‘You what? She’s made up to the nines and is thick.’

‘Steve McClaren should be sacked.’ ‘Bring back Sven, all will never be forgiven’

‘You wouldn’t catch me in Iraq.’ ‘Why have you cancelled your holiday?’

And other such gems. Jocky and his mates tried to put the world to rights and failed every day. But it kept them going, along with over-sugared tea, Mars bars, black puddings and extra thick white bread.

Every so often, the brain-dead banter would run to talking about a new film release. Another engineer Clucky, was film [especially those about ‘superheroes’] obsessed.

His favourite was Spiderman, but he loved Superman, Batman, Robin Hood, Doctor Who and Captain Underpants. *

Clucky knew everything about the films, the actors, the comics, and trivial personal stuff. Going on about Tobey Maguire’s nasal hair was a cue for the maintenance crew to nearly lose the will to live.

For reasons few had noticed, Jocky was even more distressed than the others when Clucky rambled on about Spiderman 6 [Wind up time].

‘Are thee OK Jocky?’ said Clucky, showing amazing empathy after a 20 minute rant of pure, utterly pointless, coma-inducing garbage. ‘You could do with a good dose of Bat breath.’

‘Aye’ said Jocky, ‘Just like you could do with a shot of bird flu.’

‘Steady on lad’, countered Clucky, ‘Oo’s rattled your cage?’

Jocky checked himself just in time.

‘Yes, it must ‘ave bin that bad pint last night. Sorry Clucky you auld b*******, let’s have some more.’

Jocky had come so near to giving the game away on hundreds of occasions. Indeed the edges of ‘reality’ and his alter ego seemed no longer to exist. But it was in his contract that no-one, not even his terminally bored wife should discover who he really was:

MISERY MAN!

Orwell’s 1984 had crept up on Western society without many realising, but things were beginning to change. Getting the population to collectively soil itself was one strategy that had worked since the Blair-Bush double act began.

Far more insidious, less likely ever to create any backlash, and far, far cheaper was the tactic of spreading pure misery, like undiluted manure on the spotty, pre-facially-peeled, botox-injected face of the UK.

Misery Man [all superheroes are men, but Jocky was androgynous. It was his penchant for ‘chemically enhanced’ king prawns] appeared as Deidre in Coronation Street, Dot Cotton in Eastenders, and the whole cast in Emmerdale. He came into his own when the Queen Mother died, and has been cloned for the inevitable passing of her daughter, Big Bet.

We all know Misery Man. Indeed to some of us he is our unconscious role model. He does a turn at our local pub, visits wards at the hospital, stops us with a certain look in the supermarket. ‘How are you Jean, not seen you for years?’ ‘Well, I’m still here.’

Jocky Juttocks was in training for Misery Man as a small boy. Whenever any of his mates did well at anything, JJ would trot out his one-liners. They all had in them the message.

“Don’t raise your head above the pavement, don’t excel at anything. Be miserable and you won’t be disappointed. It’s good to be miserable. They are in charge.”

When by sheer chance JJ ended up becoming a skilled engineer, he regarded it as an aberration. Like the optimist who would dismiss the odd bout of ill-fortune and carry on smiling, Jocky saw the glass not as half-full, but as completely empty. Indeed he took it to the local bottle-bank.

The permanent scowl, the furrowed brow, and the sharp intake of breath were his stock-in-trade.

Misery Man was the face that looked like a thousand bricks. He could do clever misery or stupid misery. As a clever misery, he nearly lost it when as Angus Deayton, illegal substances intervened.

All at the gas works were fooled. Except that is, Dobber the Dog. Dogs had been trained to sniff out drugs, explosives, and now even mobile phones. Dobber had no such training, but he could sniff out miserable ******** in his sleep.

Dobber was genetically incapable of being miserable for long. He decided he had enough. On his web site was a picture of Jocky, a large gasometer the background, and underneath the punch line:

[Jocky] Juttocks is Misery Man, and he works here!

The trouble is, Dobber’s site was for dogs only, and no human ever discovered JJ’s secret.

But, after Dobber’s expose, Jocky stopped using the expression ‘It’s gone to the dogs’ without knowing why. He ‘retired’ a few years later when appointed to news reader at Gloom and Doom channel.

Clucky had become sick of superheroes, and started to look for one inside. He had to leave the gas works. Brain-dead banter was all that been keeping the workforce going.

And Jocky’s wife?

She ‘ran off’ with an incurable optimist, long escaped from the local asylum. They adopted Dobber after he had been found wandering lost in Earlestown.**

And what of the powers-that-be? They had used Uncle Cannabis, Al Borehole, Flew Bird, John Getsoff, Donald Duckfelt and the whole town of OB City.

Maybe superheroes have had their day…

JS, April 2007

* no not the caricature of John Major, ex-British Prime Minister, but a cartoon character by Dav Pilkey.

** Earlestown is a small Lancashire town between Liverpool and Manchester, the place of birth and former residence of a dear friend of mine. It has to be experienced.