by Rufus Lodge
F is for F-Bomb (Live on TV)
A is for ANDRETTI: Marco Andretti, American racing driver, celebrated a spectacular shunt with Sebastian Bourdais in 2011 with an equally spectacular collection of expletives, broadcast live from his cockpit.
B is for BIDEN: That’s Joe Biden, the Vice-President of the United States, no less, who was overheard telling President Obama, ‘This is a big fucking deal’ as they signed the health care bill into law.
C is for CHRISTIAN: It’s Christian Bale, of course, who was taped letting rip on a movie set with a torrent of four-letter words. Which, unfortunately, BBC Breakfast’s team forgot to bleep out before they broadcast an extract, much to the embarrassment of the squeaky-clean hosts.
D is for DELAY: George Michael was chatting live to Chris Evans: ‘I’d be afraid of coming last on that fucking’ – at which point Evans interrupted with an anguished cry of ‘No, no, no!’ ‘You have got delay, haven’t you?’ Michael said. But they hadn’t.
E is for EXCITEMENT: As felt by Manchester City defender Micah Richards, in his first live TV interview with the BBC’s Garth Crooks: ‘Fuck it, I just can’t believe it!’ Crooks replied like a kindly schoolmaster: ‘You’re a young lad, I can understand your excitement, but this is going out to a national audience, so be careful what you say.’
F is for FRAUD: On the subway, specifically: the subject on which Arthur Chi’en of CBS News was reporting when he was interrupted by a bystander. ‘What the fuck is your problem, man?’ he shouted, losing his job in the process.
G is for GELDOF: Exhausted by months of preparing for the Live Aid shows, Bob Geldof didn’t actually tell viewers to ‘just give us the fucking money’. But he did interrupt one of the live broadcast presenters to say: ‘No, fuck the address, let’s get the numbers.’
H is for HOLLY: And it’s over to Holly Pietrzak, our anchorwoman at WDBJ: ‘More teens are having fuck – having luck, rather, finding summer jobs …’
I is for I BEG YOUR PARDON: That was the apology from Radio 1 DJ Vernon Kay, when he accidentally referred to a ‘forty-fuck artic truck’. That’s ‘foot’, Vernon, as in ‘foot in mouth’.
J is for JERSEY: The local television station, Channel TV, featured presenter Jess Dunsdon stumbling through the word ‘photographer’ before letting rip with an F-word, and attracting the most severe of disapproving looks from her co-host.
K is for KEATON: Veteran actor Diane Keaton was laughing at herself on US breakfast show Good Morning America, viewed by many millions: ‘Then I’d go to work on my fucking personality.’ She was much less embarrassed than her hosts.
L is for LEO: At the 2011 Oscars, Melissa Leo made a memorable acceptance speech: ‘When I watched Kate [Winslet] two years ago, it looked so fucking easy – oops!’
M is for MERTON: Paul Merton has had to endure many aggravating team-mates on the BBC’s ‘topical news quiz’, Have I Got News For You. But the one who appears to have made him most annoyed was Robert Kilroy-Silk, judging by the repeated cry of ‘Robert, shut the fuck up!’ that came from his lips. Kilroy-Silk’s response? An equally repeated bellow of ‘No!’
N is for NASCAR: You can always rely on American automobile racing for excitement when the action gets hot and the engines get hotter. ‘You have to be fucking kidding me!’ roared team chief Chad Knaus when his driver’s engine blew up, and viewers heard it all.
O is for OBAMA: Not that it was the President’s fault – blame Joan Rivers who, quizzed live by a CNSnews.com reporter about what she would like to tell Obama, said: ‘Take care of the fucking country.’
P is for PUPPET: Basil Brush, the lovable – OK, rather annoying – fox puppet who began his BBC TV career in 1962, has worked with many ‘friends’ over the last five decades, but only one of them has (maybe) uttered the F-word live on TV. Stand up Barney Harwood, who was heard (or so viewers thought) muttering ‘Oh fuck’ live on Basil’s Swap Shop when a kids’ contest didn’t go to plan. Nonsense, said his producers after the show: he actually said, ‘On t’floor’. Those Lancashire accents can be tricky.
Q is for QUIT: Maybe Tom Hanks should have considered doing just that, when he appeared on Good Morning America to sell the film Cloud Atlas, admitted that one of the accents he used in the film was mostly suited to swearing, and then still managed to shock even himself by uttering the F-word about two seconds later. Cue the most exaggerated ‘Oops’ expression in acting history.
R is for REFN: Nicholas Winding Refn appeared on BBC’s Breakfast show to promote his movie Drive. ‘Violence is very easy to work with, cos it’s a bit like fucking,’ he explained. ‘Oh no,’ said his interviewer, ‘you’re not allowed to say that.’ Well, he is Danish.
S is for SIMMONS: That’s Sue Simmons of Channel 4 News in New York City, who reprimanded her backroom staff when they inadvertently put up a picture of an ocean liner as she was recording a link: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Except that she wasn’t recording, she was live, prompting one of television’s most heartfelt apologies: ‘We need to acknowledge an unfortunate mistake that I made in one of the teasers we bring to you before this programme. While we were live just after ten o’clock, I said a word that many people find offensive. I’m truly sorry. It was a mistake on my part, and I sincerely apologise.’
T is for TEEN JEOPARDY: The title was apt when one contestant on the US game show failed to answer a question correctly, and instinctively groaned ‘fuck’, just like he would have done at home.
U is for UP: Or, as Maria Sharapova put it when a camera clicked as she was serving at a crucial point in a tennis match: ‘Up your fucking ass!’ But only after she’d won the point.
V is for the VIEW: While being interviewed live on TV, Susan Sarandon said: ‘I had a red dress on, and red fuck-me pumps – oh, I guess you can’t say that!’ But she already had.
W is for WHEELER: That’s half of what legendary football manager Harry Redknapp declared he wasn’t in a live press conference: ‘No, I’m not a wheeler and dealer. Fuck off.’
X is for X-RATED: And the most X-rated sport of all is … no, not football or wrestling, but the genteel middle-class pursuit of lawn tennis. Take your pick from John McEnroe telling an umpire at the Australian Open to ‘fuck off’, Venus Williams shooting her mouth off at Wimbledon, her sister Serena verbally assaulting a line judge in New York, or our very own Wimbledon champion Andy Murray, whose superlative skills with a racket are only matched by the vehemence with which he shouts, screams, or sometimes just mouths the F-word (and I don’t mean ‘foot-fault’).
Y is for YOU SERIOUS: It’s Sunrise – that’s live breakfast TV in Australia. There’s a phone-in contest and the hosts take a call from a woman called Jay. ‘Would you like ten thousand dollars on this Thursday morning?’ she is asked. ‘Are you fucking serious?’ she replies. And a line-up of highly embarrassed presenters hide their mouths behind hands, scripts and anything else they can find. ‘If anybody was wondering if we’re live or not,’ one of them finally says with a shrug: ‘we’re live …’
Z is for Z-LIST: That’s where football pundit Ron Atkinson ended up, when he told the audience watching ITV’s live coverage that Chelsea player Marcel Desailly was ‘what’s known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick nigger’. His excuse was that he thought the microphone was turned off, but that didn’t rescue his television career.
Showcases
A Class Apart
It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody swears like a toff. Long before James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence shocked society by publishing books that committed the four forbidden letters into print, princes and earls, baronesses and ladies could casually pepper their everyday conversations with language certain to redden the cheeks of the most self-assured docker. There was mild public outrage when The King’s Speech depicted George VI – father of our own dear Queen, let’s not forget – uttering the word ‘fuck’ on no fewer than forty-four occasions. (Strangely enough, his stutter seemed to vanish whenever a ‘fuck’ left his lips.
He must have been tempted to open his fateful broadcast to the British people with a hearty ‘Fuck orf’.) But these were hardly the first forty-four ‘fucks’ to have been heard within Palace walls – or, indeed, the last.
Although Her Majesty has never been heard to utter the nation’s favourite word in public (except when kidnapped by satirists or cartoonists), her devoted consort is no stranger to a good ‘fuck’. His most heartfelt expletive was unleashed over the Palace speakerphone in September 1997, directed at hapless Downing Street spin-doctors who were attempting to commandeer the arrangements for Princess Diana’s funeral, and dictate what part her young sons should play in the proceedings. ‘Fuck off,’ the Duke of Edinburgh shouted across London with such venom that the phone was scarcely required. ‘We are talking about two boys who have lost their mother!’
In less stressful times, many are the Royal engagements that have been enlivened by a sotto voce ‘Oh fuck’ from Philip when required to open yet another council office or endure one more display of ethnic dancing. His most famous outburst occurred in 1983, during a Royal visit to the United States. The limousine he was sharing with the Queen was delayed, again, by competitively anxious FBI agents guarding President Reagan and his wife. Overcome by boredom, frustration, and despair, the Duke finally cracked. ‘Move this fucking car!’ he screamed at the unfortunate driver in front of him, rolling up a magazine which he’d brought with him and striking the man several times over the back of his head. The driver was under orders to obey the FBI, and moved not a muscle. Neither did Her Majesty, for whom an incandescent husband was a familiar element of her right royal progress.
Rock star Ozzy Osbourne was stunned out of his usual stupor at the Queen’s 2002 Jubilee Concert at Buckingham Palace, when his wife Sharon accosted Camilla with the carefully considered: ‘I think you’re fucking great.’ While Ozzy imagined that he and his missus would be whisked straight to the Tower, Camilla took the unorthodox greeting in her stride. ‘Oh, it’s quite all right,’ she told Sharon. ‘We curse quite a lot around here.’ This was confirmed by those who remember Camilla in her hunting’n’shooting prime, cantering around the fields of Berkshire astride a fearsome steed, bellowing ‘Bloody hell, get out of the fucking way!’ at any mortal unfortunate enough to cross her horse’s path. Paparazzi beware.
This Be the Librarian
The posthumous publication of the lifetime’s collected correspondence of the poet Philip Larkin uncovered a passion for pornography, and for sexual innuendo of the most inventive and/or basic kinds, that was not immediately obvious to those who were only familiar with his tiny canon of work. Nor was it known to those respectable executives of Hull University who appointed the poet as their Head Librarian. So Larkin might have appreciated the irony that the two poems for which he seems destined to be remembered by future generations both have connotations with sex, or the language associated with it.
The first is ‘Annus Mirabilis’, the opening lines of which – ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three’ – can be quoted by thousands who have never knowingly read a complete Larkin poem. The second, from the same collection, High Windows (1974), is ‘This Be the Verse’. Again, the title is less familiar than the opening salvo: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ More than a decade after its initial appearance in print, in the journal New Humanist, Larkin told a friend that this was destined to be his equivalent of W.B. Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’, the piece most quoted by those who cared little for his work. ‘I fully expect to hear it recited by a thousand Girl Guides before I die.’ Less expected, perhaps, was its celebrated reading by an appeal court judge at the conclusion of a 2009 divorce case.
Larkin had originally posted a draft of the poem to his lover Ann Thwaite, suggesting that she might like to include it in one of the Allsorts selections of children’s verse that she edited every year. As he told an interviewer in 1981, the poem was more complex than its first line suggested: ‘“They fuck you up” is funny, because it’s ambiguous. Parents bring about your conception, and also bugger you up once you are born. Professional parents, in particular, don’t like that poem.’ He might have added that ‘This Be the Verse’ excused each generation of parents for their carnal and cardinal sins, because ‘they were fucked up in their turn’. His concluding line – ‘And don’t have any kids yourself’ – may have been intended as consolation or self-defence; Larkin died at the age of 63, without having fathered a child.
This was not the poet’s first fling with the F-word, however. The title poem of High Windows, written in 1965, revised two years later and first published in a 1968 issue of the Critical Quarterly, was written in the voice of a middle-aged man who could ‘see a couple of kids’ from his remote window on the world – ‘And guess he’s fucking her and she’s/Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm’. Here, Larkin isn’t intending to startle his readership (‘I don’t think I’ve ever shocked for the sake of shocking,’ he mused in 1981), but is using language with utter precision. ‘Fucking’ is there to express the freedom available to the modern generation which wasn’t to his; elsewhere in the poem, he uses the word ‘bloody’ as an example of what passed for liberation when he was a young man. And both ‘fucking’ and ‘bloody’ represent only limited freedom in the context of this poem, when compared with the boundless scope of ‘air’. No writer has ever used the F-word so poetically.
Fuck You, Please
A title can make a magazine, or break it before anyone has picked up its first issue. Modern publishers wouldn’t dream of tossing a new journal onto the streets and into the shops without running a selection of names past marketing consultants and focus groups. The most effective titles are those which are either wonderfully vague (Vogue, Esquire, Q) or perfectly specific (Railway Modeller, Homes & Gardens). Some mags have died when their title became an anachronistic embarrassment – like The Listener (when most people were watching) and Melody Maker (when 99 per cent of the bands they were covering were deliberately trying to avoid anything as obvious as a melody). It’s a rare beast that, like the Radio Times, can retain a name invented for a long bygone age and become such a familiar part of the language that its literal meaning has long since been irrelevant.
‘A familiar part of the language’ – yes, that description applies perfectly to the moniker of a journal that was launched in the spring of 1962, by an idealistic young American poet and bookstore owner in New York City. The previous year, the 22-year-old Ed Sanders had been jailed briefly for his part in a protest against the presence of nuclear missiles on American submarines. This experience sparked his poetry into life, and inspired Sanders to provide an unorthodox vehicle for maverick writers like himself, many of whom congregated at his Peace Eye Bookstore in Greenwich Village.
And so was born, on multi-coloured mimeographed paper, what was subtitled as A Magazine of the Arts – with the uncompromising title of Fuck You. That name was dubbed ‘cheerily obscene’ by Life magazine in 1967; and more than fifty years after its first appearance, it still cannot be printed in the otherwise forensically accurate pages of the New York Times (Time magazine bottled out by calling it Love You instead). ‘My vision was to reach out to the “best minds” of my generation,’ Sanders explained many years later, ‘with a message of Gandhian pacifism, great sharing, social change, the expansion of personal freedom (including the legalization of marijuana) and the then stirring messages of sexual liberation.’ Sanders omitted one crucial theme from his list: the playful desire to stretch poetry – and the language that could be legally carried in the pages of a magazine – way beyond its conventional limits.
The pages of Fuck You, which were originally filled with the writings of Sanders and a few friends, eventually grew to encompass such notable writers as Norman Mailer, Antonin Artaud, and Allen Ginsberg. It spawned a spin-off publishing house, the Fuck You Press, which ‘liberated’ previously unknown works by D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, printed W.H. Auden’s pornographic poem ‘The Platonic Blow’, add
ed Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘To Fuck is to Love Again’ to the poetic canon, and provided a home for Sanders’s own collection, Fuck God in the Ass. Sanders also issued a series of single-sheet offerings, under the generic title: ‘The Fuck You Quote of the Week’.
But it was Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts that made the most adventurous and creative use of the F-word and its associated activities. The first issue introduced a regular feature by Nelson Barr, ‘A Bouquet of Fuckyous’, a speed-written rant against anyone who had attracted his attention – often including his editor and fellow contributors. ‘Send me yr goddamn manuscripts,’ Sanders wrote, ‘I’ll print anything,’ and traditional forms of censorship were sidestepped entirely. The magazine rapidly progressed from work that dropped the F-bomb as casually as the romantic poets wrote about daffodils, to altogether more abrasive and confrontational material.
The semi-anonymous Margaret X contributed ‘Ronnie’, in which she proclaimed her desire to save her virginity for her brother. Someone named Penny came up with a visual poem which was ‘an exact replica of a vaginal smear’ (her own, of course: she didn’t give her surname, because ‘she doesn’t want her parents to know she’s been fucking like a mink’). Sanders himself composed the tongue-in-cheek (as against tongue-in-sheep) ‘Sheep-Fuck Poem’, thereby extending the parameters of American verse into fresh fields. ‘People keep informing us we’ve hit the absolute absolute depth of filth and corruption,’ Sanders crowed. ‘Balls!’
He demonstrated the point by printing a poem that momentarily caused him to doubt his own commitment to total liberation of word and thought, or at least to fear the possible consequences. ‘Stark paranoia gripped the editor as he typed this stencil. Fuck it,’ Sanders added to the bottom of a piece by one of his regular contributors. Al Fowler was already familiar to the hard-core readership of Fuck You for his unsparing chronicling of his own heroin addiction, and for Sanders’s description of his sexual tastes in his list of contributors: ‘Refuses to gobble or ball anything over twelve years of age.’ But Fowler’s ‘Caroline’ made his previous work seem like a Sunday School sermon. ‘I saw the hot eyes of my young daughter rolling in passion,’ it began, before detailing a paedophile encounter between father and child – imaginary, as Fowler had no daughter – in language that could not be repeated today unless one had a rampant desire to meet members of the Metropolitan Police’s sexual offences squad.
