It’s Grim Down South

This wasn't ugly enough for Plymouth, so it's been replaced with something worse

Some craphole called Plymouth which is about as far south as you can get will be hit harder than most of the north, according to research commissioned by the BBC, but it doesn’t matter because nobody knows where it is, or cares.

“The really important thing is to pander to age-old stereotypes involving whippets and cloth caps,” said Tim Casio, an SQL manipulator at Experian who conducted the research. “Everybody knows it’s grim up north, it’s full of matchstick men and Manchester has so much to answer for. It’s a great excuse for the BBC’s news editors to rerun all that quaint old Pathé footage of back-to-back terraces and factory gates. But what scenes of grinding poverty can you pull up for Plymouth? They’ve got some pillock walking round in costume thinking he actually is Sir Francis Drake, for fuck’s sake.”

“I suppose they could rerun yesterday’s shot of that sodding great leylandii forest in an idiot’s front garden,” he added, “But I’m not sure that really proves anything, except that Plymouth is home to some truly exceptional fuckwits.”

BBC journalists were left scratching their heads for a while when Plymouth came up 319th in their rankings showing how well 325 areas of England were expected to weather the impending fiscal blitzkrieg, until somebody remembered that they have their regional TV studios there.

When asked about the effects of massive funding cuts on the impoverished backwater, Tory council leader Vivien Pengelly sucked on a plantain for a few minutes before declaring, “Oo bugger... oi doan rightly knooww, me ansum.”

A council PR spokesman later explained that what Mrs Pengelly actually said - when translated into English - was that Plymouth is the fairest place on God’s wide earth, according to the things that infest it, and if any late staycationers should feel the urge to spend their money wandering Britain’s foremost hope-crushing example of Stalinist architecture in the pouring rain of the city’s soul-destroying microclimate while polyester-clad ape creatures pester them for spare change, then Plymouth’s empty hotels still have plenty of vacancies.

Meanwhile, a Daily Mail hack dispatched to Portsmouth reported that the place didn’t seem as bad as it was painted at all.