Bill Hicks RIP

The life of Bill Hicks, comic, provocateur, satirist, annoyer of rednecks, is coming to the screen in a terrific new documentary, American: The Bill Hicks Story. The movie is a mix of Chuck Jones-style animation, interviews with friends and family, and footage of Hicks from his days as a teenage stand-up to his last appearance before he died of cancer aged 32.


I first came across Bill Hicks thanks to a tape stuck to the front of Select magazine at the time of the (first) Gulf War. Now, you'd have to be 100 to remember either of those things but, trust me, it was a discovery. GW1 felt scary at the time: the first large scale post-Cold War conflict, complete with fears that other, more sinister forces could get involved (Israel, Russia, the Wolverines from Red Dawn) and then was Saddam and his radio-controlled Scuds which he'd fire indiscriminately at Tel Aviv. So indiscriminately, it turned out, most landed just outside Baghdad.

While everyone else bought the official line on the war, overlooking the fact that Bush, Rumsfeld etc had created the thing they now had to blow to smithereens, Hicks alone seemed prepared to question it. What made him maddest, though, was the compliant way the media parroted every line the Bush administration fed them. And he was funny when he was mad.

People said, "Uh-uh, Bill, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world." Yeah, maybe, but you know what? After the first three largest armies, there's a real big fucking drop-off, all right? The Hare Krishnas are the fifth largest army in the world, and they've already got our airports, okay, so I think that's the greater threat right now.

This was before comedy became the cosy domain of Michael McIntyre and skits about traffic jams. When comedy was a means of saying something about the state of the world, exposing hypocrisy and blowing up myths. All while smoking enough fags to fell the cast of a '30s film noir.

My favourite Hicks routine, though, is this very silly riff on the Gideons which don't really do any of those things.
I guess it was the product of too many nights spent in too many hotels, but it was his observational genius to a tee. And proof that no sentence can't be made 26% funnier simply by adding the word 'ninja'.

American: The Bill Hicks Story is out on Friday 14 May.

Bark-itecture

The 2010 Olympics seem to be coming along nicely. The stadium in Stratford looks lovely, the BT Tower proudly beams the countdown on London (842 days people!), and Boris Johnson hasn't been on the Today Program explaining a £9bn overspend for, literally, days. Even Crossrail is making progress. We know this because Tottenham Court Road now resembles Berlin in mid-1945, although still no one's quite sure what it's for (it's for getting from Middle Earth to Narnia, via Gatwick, if you're interested orc readers with Oyster cards).

But the Orbit Tower, really. WTF? I know it's designed by Anish Kapoor and he's a godlike genius and everything, but, really, it's terrible. It's improbably terrible. It's terrible squared. In fact, it's so bad it looks like something he came up with during one of those nights that involves king size Rizlas, industrial amounts of Haribo and an argument about who'd win in a fight between a killer whale and an aardvark on meow meow. When it seems like a eureka idea at the time but you wake up the next morning and wonder what you were thinking.


So just what was the brief? "Anish, we need you to design something that looks like what DNA would look like if it was made of giant strawberry laces and God got drunk halfway through designing it." "Sure guys. And how about a giant ashtray on the top?" "Perfect!"

I know one man's Chrysler Tower is another man's white elephant and don't want to come over all Prince Charles, but there should be a new rule in architecture. Namely: Don't design anything that you wouldn't want in your back garden. Somehow I can't picture the Kapoor family throwing back the curtains in the morning to rejoice in this hotchpotch of steel weirdness while birds tweet contentedly from its, er, tendrils.

Maybe I'm in a minority. People seem to have mixed feelings. According to the architecture correspondent in The Independent, "Its power lies in its ability to suggest an unfinished form in the process of becoming something else." Although that sounds suspiciously like an excuse I used when I handed in a crap essay at school.

One of the other contenders for the commission was Anthony Gormley. His Angel of the North was equally polarising in its day, but is much loved now. Somehow I can't see that happening with Orbit. Despite, or maybe because of its rhesus-red boldness, it lacks grace and optimism. It's a War-of-the-Worlds jumble of freakiness and, as my colleague Amar pointed out, it's got a fairground slide down the side. What we need is Gormley's Angel of the South. Or, better yet, a giant metal Kraken.