Bitter Suite Symphony

I quite like Peep Show. In the same way that I quite like, say, having garishly painted nails raked up and down my naked torso whilst all manner of filthy suggestions are whispered in my ear... Or Mr Kipling Almond Slices.


Peep Show is so good that it renders the material written by its two main actors - David Mitchell and Robert Webb - for their own show That Mitchell and Webb Look as unfunny as a Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps special commemorating the human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay. Messrs Mitchell and Webb have, however, penned one exceptional sketch.


It's set in World War II during the German withdrawal from the collapsing eastern front. One immaculately uniformed Nazi SS Officer uncertainly sidles up to another, his face clearly betraying the torment of a question with which he has wrestled for some considerable time, and asks: "Are we the baddies?"


This question takes on a particular significance in the light of Our Tone's performance at the Chilcot Inquiry.


The epic ongoing adventure of 'My Left Foot' featured an MRI Scan on Friday afternoon. I made my way to the X-Ray department and was directed to a Portakabin around the back of the hospital which looked quite worryingly like an outside toilet. Now, I have nothing against outside toilets - I've done some of my best work in al fresco W.C.s - but it's not the first location which springs to mind when you're required to have subatomic particles zapped through an injured body part. I disrobed - removing my nipple bar so as to be entirely metal-free - slid into a flattering green cotton smock and climbed into the Siemens MAGNETOM Symphony Maestro Class MRI machine.


Just before the radiologists legged it out of the room they handed me a pair of headphones and a grey cable upon which sat a 'panic button'. I wish I could tell you that Nine Inch Nails was kicking off when I slipped on the cans, but I can't. Instead it was the iniquitously polite Jazz-Funk stylings of Level 42. Luckily the contraption started up, making a din not unlike an M60-2000 Main Battle Tank rolling over Susan Boyle giving a full-voiced rendition of 'Amazing Grace', and thankfully brought the sinister, easy-listening nightmare to rather an abrupt end.


I spent the next half an hour trying to stave off a cacophony induced mania as my left leg vibrated like a Platinum Rabbit Plus and the Symphony thump thump thumped like the bass drum intro to 'Blue Monday' by New Order. Afterwards, feeling a little sick, I limped back to my car to set off for home and was assaulted by a sound far more malevolent than Level 42 and considerably more disorienting and disturbing than the insistent clanging dissonance of the MRI machine.


Tony 'Charisma' Blair was in front of the panel of the Chilcot Inquiry and it was being broadcast on Radio 5 Live. Labour Chancellor Dennis Healey described being attacked by his Conservative shadow Geoffrey Howe "like being savaged by a dead sheep". The panel itself seems exclusively populated by a herd of cadaverous livestock. If they wanted someone entirely insipid they could at least have made an effort and tried to get Anthony Worrall Thompson on there. As the country he misled in the run-up to the slaughter (the term 'war' is kind of stretching it a bit) the least we deserve from Tone is public humiliation in the form of a poorly executed quiche.


He claims he'd do it all again and that he has no regrets, like some mid-eighties, big hair metal balladeer. I half expected him to warble:


"I'm a cowboy,
On a steel horse I ride"


"The world is a safer place," he says without fear of having his spleen removed via his left ankle for uttering such nonsense. Questions sidestepped in favour of a soliloquy cheerleading for similar action in Iran. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead. Hundreds. Of thousands. No reprisals. No retribution. And for the watching world the message is loud and clear: if we fancy it, we'll do it again...


Are we the baddies?