Scarlett Says

by Scarlett Moffatt

  Big Brother

  The first few series of Big Brother were amazing. I can still remember those early people. There was Craig the builder. And that fellah that lied and said he was SAS and then he couldn’t get over the assault course. Nasty Nick. And Nicky Graham. I could relate to her because I went through a phase when I only drank bottled water. And she only drank bottled water, so I felt like I knew where she was coming from. See I’m not the only one. That blonde Kate who’s a DJ. Now it’s on Channel Five, I don’t even know when it’s on most of the time.

  Superheroes

  Superman looks exactly the same when he puts his glasses on and combs his hair and everyone acts like it’s someone else. I don’t buy it. Batman has a proper disguise. I can’t remember who said it, but it’s true, Superman isn’t brave. It’s not brave to fight people if you know they can’t hurt you.

  I don’t understand why female superheroes aren’t dressed a bit more practically. It’s all leather trousers and low-cut tops. It basically implies that the only reason Scarlett Johansson’s character is in Avengers is that she’s on the pull.

  Jeremy Clarkson

  He’s so overrated. He’s a posh knobhead. He thinks he’s so big he can do what he wants. Everyone’s always like, ‘He’s old school,’ and I’m like, ‘My granddad’s old school, but he never thumped an employee.’ How old is this school, like Vikings or something? He’s like Prince Philip: he just wanders in and insults whole countries. It’s not funny, man, it’s rude.

  And I bet he refers to himself at The Clarkson. ‘Hey, bar wench, The Clarkson needs another pint of beer.’ What does he spend his money on? Dad jeans and leather jackets and a gentle perm.

  I don’t get Top Gear. It’s like a fetish. How can you like cars that much? At least with property shows there’s a sense of real people in the houses and a bit of a story, like Susan is doing up her teenage daughter’s bedroom or something. But if they did property shows like Top Gear they’d be all ‘we test the ten biggest lounges in the UK’ and then there’d just be all these middle-aged men competitively sitting on the sofa, secretly hating each other and bullying each other and calling it banter. I hate the studio audience in Top Gear. They always put all the women up front. If someone got me tickets to go and watch Top Gear being filmed, I’d never talk to them again.

  The new Top Gear is with Chris Evans, isn’t it? They should actually show normal people using cars. Instead it’s always just been knobheads driving around. My dad doesn’t like it and I’m really glad. I’d hate it if he was one of those Clarkson dads.

  The Da Vinci Code

  I didn’t read the book but I watched the film and I don’t understand why Da Vinci didn’t just write what was going on on the back of the painting straight out. ‘Jesus = Daddy.’ Instead of having a statue pointing to a thing in Latin that’s an anagram. It was basically just all the famous people in art that normal people have heard of. Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, yep, all of them, it’s all the same.

  It’s like, why do aliens bother blowing up the Taj Mahal and the White House and the Eiffel Tower in films? If they’re powerful enough to destroy the planet, why would they bother with landmarks? They’d be blowing up the big cities in China where most people are, not Big Ben. It’d be like you going to pour water on an ants’ nest and working out which bit you think is the important bit.

  The ten most embarrassing things celebrities have ever said

  1) When Christina Aguilera was asking where the Cannes film festival was being held . . .

  Speechless.

  2) Kanye West: ‘I’m like a vessel, and God has chosen me to be the voice and the connector.’

  Somehow I don’t think God would have chosen an egotistical, miserable man who raps about money and bitches and whose right-hand woman leaked her own sex tape. He’s no Moses, is he?

  3) Justin Bieber on Anne Frank: ‘Hopefully she would have been a Belieber.’

  Personally I think that listening to auto-tuned pop music would have been the last thing on her mind.

  4) In 2007 Miss Teen South Carolina was asked, ‘Polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?’ Her reply? ‘They are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should help.’

  Sorry?

  5) Brooke Shields’ famous anti-smoking speech: ‘Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.’

  Thanks for clearing that up.

  6) Arnold Schwarzenegger’s insistence that ‘gay marriage should be between a man and a woman.’

  He’s clever, that one.

  7) The wisdom of Jaden Smith: ‘How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren’t real?’

  What are they? Pretend ones?

  8) David Beckham when his eldest son was born: ‘I want Brooklyn to be christened, but don’t know into what religion yet.’

  He may be beautiful, but he’s definitely missing some brains.

  9) Ivana Trump on writing novels: ‘Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.’

  Sigh.

  10) Joey Essex when asked if he knew why we celebrated Guy Fawkes Night: ‘No, not really. He died on the cross or something, on a bonfire, didn’t he?’

  No, Joey. He didn’t.

  Harry Potter

  I love Harry Potter. My theory is that you’re either a Harry Potter or a Lord of the Rings person. I read the books and I remember thinking Daniel Radcliffe looks exactly like I had imagined him in my head. I love Emma Watson too. I’m totally a Harry Potter fan. Hermione was better at magic than the boys and she made it OK to have frizzy hair. She was my role model.

  I used to love Roald Dahl too. The Witches was terrifying. You never got told how the nan lost her thumb, just that it was something to do with the head witch. And there was the girl that got trapped in the painting and she got older and older, and sometimes she’d be by the gate, and sometimes she’d be out feeding the chickens and that, until one day she died. I mean, people save up their entire lives to be able to retire to a house in the country with some chickens. And I used to think that maybe all the mice that you see are really kids who’ve been changed into mice.

  Doppelgängers

  I reckon we’ve all got one. A little while ago I met my actual doppelgänger. People kept calling me Catherine when I was out, and I was confused at first. And then we bumped into each other and I was all, ‘Is your name Catherine?’ and she knew I was Scarlett because people had kept calling us the wrong name when we’d gone out.

  Hoovers

  Me two-year-old cousin is obsessed with hoovers. There was this Dyson advert on the telly and whenever it came on he would just shout, ‘hoov, hoov, hoov!’ We had to rewind it and keep showing it to him or he’d get really upset. And round where my auntie lives, someone had left a hoover in the back alley for the council to take away and he kept going, ‘I wanna touch it.’ And she kept saying, ‘You can’t touch it.’ He was leaning right out of his pushchair as he went past. She had to do a detour every day on the way to nursery so he could look at it. He was stretching out of the pram to touch it. He’s literally obsessed. He’ll get me dad and be like, ‘Uncy Mark, Uncy Mark, hoove.’ And me dad has to get the hoover out and he’ll move it back and forth over the same bit of carpet. He’s interested in any vacuum cleaner but Dysons are his favourite.29 There’s a place on the corner that does them and sometimes me mam will take him there as a treat.

  Bradley Cooper

  He is a conventionally good-looking man, isn’t he?

  Calpol

  It’s just the most delicious thing. I reckon you could sell cocktails mixed with Calpol in bars and people would go mad for it. But the pink one, with the sugar in it, not that sugar-free nonsense.

  Guantanamo Bay

  We were talking about this
because the last British person that was there had just been released. But I remember when I was a kid everyone was talking about it when it was set up and I didn’t really understand what it was but I thought it sounded like a magical place, like a holiday camp or something, with free drinks and a swimming pool. It feels like the sort of name people would show off about going to: ‘Well, we’re off to Guantanamo Bay this summer.’ And then you find out what it is and it’s not at all fun, is it? I just think it’s a very misleading name. ‘What are you going to do in Guantanamo Bay?’ ‘Ah, we’ll probably do some waterboarding.’ It still sounds inappropriately fun!

  Differences between north and south

  It does piss me off that whenever there’s a news story about the north-east, they go and film some fat people in tracksuits kind of hobbling up and down. They have those people down south too. And what they never say is that we have a canny time up here. Yes, we may only live till we’re sixty-seven, but there’s plenty of booze and laughs in the meantime. And we don’t give a shit. Down south, all they do is walk past each other and moan about the Tube.

  Having said that, I saw a toaster down south the other day that had two dials on it. I’ve never seen a two-dial toaster up north. Travel definitely broadens the mind.

  Jennifer Lawrence

  I love her. When she fell over, she did it so sweetly. It’s amazing that she’s basically the biggest star in the world and she comes across so normal. There’s that amazing footage of her getting properly excited cos Jack Nicholson was chatting her up at the Oscars.

  Ellen

  I’m addicted to watching clips of her on the internet. She’s always talking about happy things. That’s what I like about America, they’re much more likely to have uplifting stuff on. And I think I maybe like her cos she looks like Justin Bieber.

  Ariana Grande

  She’s another one of those used-to-be Disney girls who went all sexy and grown-up. I swear, they want to look at that Disney TV thing. She does an amazing Celine Dion impression too. I saw her doing it on Jimmy Fallon and it was brilliant.

  Selena Gomez

  I know her mainly as Justin Bieber’s ex. I think it’s a bit weird that everyone’s obsessed with these people we’ve all seen as children and now they’re all writhing around in leather trousers and no top and that.

  We live in such a weird world that you can basically make a living from the size of your boobs. When it’s all Mad Max and people are digging back through the sand and trying to work out what happened, and there’s no electricity so they have to work out what it was like in the past just from newspapers and they’ll have the Daily Star and the Sun to go on, there’ll just be all these stories about what people were saying on Twitter and they’ll probably think Twitter was the name of a god or something.

  September 11th

  I remember getting in from school and my dad saying, ‘You need to watch this because it’s history,’ and I didn’t think it was real because it was so much like a film. And then the next day at school the teachers had the televisions on, and that’s all we were doing, just watching. It’s shaped everything, hasn’t it? It’s mad to think that, in fifty years, kids will be learning about it in history and we lived through it.

  Taylor Swift

  She appears to be mainly built of elbows. She’s all joints, man.

  Jeremy Kyle

  I saw an episode of Jeremy Kyle the other day and it blew my mind. The title was: ‘I’m both the step-grandfather and the father of a baby girl.’ He was this girl’s stepdad and then he got together with the daughter and they had a baby. Seventy-five million years and that’s what we’ve evolved into. Jesus, no wonder monkeys look sad when you see them in the zoo.

  Zoos

  While we’re on the subject of animals, I have to say that I do not like zoos. In a hundred years’ time I think we’ll look back and wonder why the hell we caged these majestic animals. I don’t even like going to aquariums. The first time I went to Blackpool Tower when I was about eight, I cried because they kept a giant turtle in a tank. It had sad eyes and it kept bouncing off the sides, and even thinking about it now upsets me. I don’t mind it when animals are in captivity because they may become extinct if we don’t help them, but anything else is wrong.

  It’s so horrible when you see monkeys pacing up and down because they’ve lost the plot. And if a monkey bit someone’s hand off, they’d put it down. I’m not being funny, but if I was a monkey I’d do the same.

  Ava keeps saying she wants to go to a zoo but I keep explaining why they’re not good. I’ve never been to one and I don’t want to. I’m not about to go and protest outside one with a giant placard, dressed as a gorilla, but equally I don’t embrace them.

  Criminals

  I hate crime, full stop. I hate people doing bad things to each other. Why would you? All crimes are crimes, but I feel like only people who commit petty crimes should have access to TVs and PlayStations in prison. People who commit much more serious crimes should have some actual punishment, not be allowed to watch Corrie of an evening. Why should people who have done bad things have privileges that some people who haven’t committed crimes can’t afford?

  I do love watching Crimewatch, though. Is that bad? I always hope I’m going to see someone I know on it.

  A friend of mine is an occupational therapist and she works with criminals, and she can’t read any of the cases because she’d rather not know what they’ve done unless they tell her. She said one of them had done something awful but he was really good-looking and it freaked her out that if he’d come up to her in a bar she probably would have fancied him.

  When I was at university I was in the hockey society and we had some mint nights out. There was a fancy dress party one evening and because we were in the first year we had to go dressed as robbers, while the girls in the years above went as cops. My mates and I were dressed up in striped jumpers with swag bags drinking cocktails and loving life.

  When Sarah and I got home drunk our front door was on the latch. We could hear people in the house and we thought it was just our flatmates Jess and Zoe. I peered into Jess’s room and it looked as messy as it always did but all of her drawers were pulled out and something didn’t seem right. All of a sudden Sarah and I clicked on to the fact we’d been burgled and I started screaming.

  When we eventually went into the house everything was everywhere. The robbers had thrown a paving slab through the double-glazing to get in and had stolen a load of stuff. They took tons of our expensive things, like laptops, but they also took more personal stuff, like photos, which freaked me out.

  I phoned the police and when they turned up Sarah and I were standing in the street still dressed as robbers. I was crying but the police thought we were taking the piss and told us that prank calls are an arrestable offence! How unlucky were we to get burgled when we were dressed as robbers?

  None of us wanted to stay in the house that night so Sarah’s mam drove in the middle of the night to pick us up. When she arrived she looked around the house and she was horrified by the mess the robbers had made in my room. The thing is, the only thing they’d taken from it was my computer. They hadn’t touched the rest; it looked exactly the same before they broke in. That floor-drobe was all my doing.

  Carrier bags

  The whole carrier-bag thing winds me up. I pay tax – give me a bag, man! I hate it when you go into a shop and they ask you if you want a bag when you’ve got twenty things. Of course I do. I’m not an octopus.

  I don’t want to have to carry a load of plastic bags around with me all the time. We live across the road from Asda and sometimes I’ll take the trolley home with me and unpack my shopping, and then wheel the trolley back because I refuse to pay 15 pence for three bags. It’s the principal. It did make me laugh the other day when there was a story in the paper about how you can get around the charge, and their tip was ‘bring your own plastic bags’, as if that was somehow cheating the system. That’s exactly the point of it!<
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  David Cameron

  No one ever really likes the prime minister, but he’s not to blame for everything.

  The whole pig thing was very unfortunate for him, wasn’t it? He’s never going to be able to eat a sausage sandwich in public again, is he? Everyone does crazy things at uni and even if he did put his bits in a pig’s mouth, so what? Although I did find it funny the next day when loads of people were putting up fake labels for pork pies and sausage rolls on Twitter with ‘David Cameron’s penis’ listed as one of the ingredients.

  I feel a bit sorry for him. He’s aged so much in the last five years. He looked quite young and buff and he had loads of hair back in the day, but he’s aged about thirty years in no time. It’s all those worries. Although, I mean, if we’re comparing him to Gordon Brown or Jeremy Corbyn, he’s quite fit really. Corbyn looks more like the next Dr Who than the next fucking prime minister to me. Cameron’s no Hugh Grant in Love Actually but he’s the best of a bad bunch.

  Actually, I hate Hugh Grant. He basically made a whole generation of men think they just had to blink and stutter and talk quietly and it was sexy. And have floppy hair. He basically invented the Made in Chelsea boys. For that he deserves to be punished.

  The NHS

  When I watch programmes like One Born Every Minute and 24 Hours in A&E I just think the NHS is amazing and we’re so lucky to have it in this country. Even people who don’t have money can get cared for and you can’t say that about many places in the world. In some countries people can’t actually afford to be well, which seems so crazy.

  Me dad had vertigo once when he and me mam were on holiday in Spain and when they went to the Spanish hospital people were piled up in corridors and the queues were crazy. I know the food’s a bit shit in our hospitals and they can smell a bit pissy, but they’re saving people’s lives, so you can’t really moan.