Noel Gallagher Validates Nation’s Grandfathers

Music was better under Margaret Thatcher, according to Britpop granddad Noel Gallagher, and what’s more, everybody had proper haircuts.

Noel Gallagher - still banging out top tunes

“A’ tell thee this for nowt, there wor a proper woork ethic back in ‘em days,” observed the former Oasis guitarist, as he took a break from watching documentaries on Yesterday to light his favourite pipe. “’Ef tha wor oonemployed lak, ‘appen t’ obsession wor to find woork - man’s woork, y’know, lak down t’ coal mine she wor shuttin’ down, not poncin’ about sum fancy call centre lak a big girl’s blouse.”

“An’ t’lasses, ‘em knawed them’s place wor in t’ hoom, bringin’ oop t’ babby an’ scrubbin’ t’ khazi out back yard an’ all,” he reminisced fondly over a pint of foaming ale.

“Back when a’ wor a nipper, y’d see bloomin’ great steam locomotives go thunderin’ over t’ viaduct, driver on t’ footplate wi’ ‘is Hofner electrical guitar gizmo - as e’d purchased on t’ never-never from Kays catalogue - plugged int’ firebox for practicin’ riffs from ‘Smoke On t’ Water’ lak for t’ annual dinner an’ dance down t’ ASLEF Social Club,” explained the 90s legend, adjusting his flat cap. “Young ‘uns nowadays, tappin’ them’s jungle-drum loops into Ataris an’ Megadrives an’ what-‘ave-you – ‘appen ‘em en’t got a bloody clue as to what a proper middle eight is.”

Dads and granddads are now explaining to their sceptical children that Noel Gallagher is a national treasure, and Britain will be a poorer place when he dies.

80s Revival Begins With Interminable Kinnock Speech

Veteran party members remember Lord Kinnock's oratory well

Those bad old days which new Labour leader Ed Miliband faithfully promised would not return returned in full today, as an invigorated Neil Kinnock mounted the platform at a Tribune rally and launched into a speech which seasoned political observers say may not end until the next Labour government falls.

Lord Kinnock began by saying he could never praise Mr Miliband enough and then went on to prove it by droning his way through a thesaurus for four hours, before temporarily veering off at a tangent to tell dewy-eyed activists: “We’ve got our party back,” “The party which, at a particular point in time belonged to us, but then didn’t belong to us for a considerable period of time, is now hello, hello it’s good to be back, good to be back in our hands again,” “We, who had a party taken from us, are now finally at last back in total, utter and complete possession of the self-same aforesaid party once more for a second time now, isn’t it,” “What it is, you see, is those of us who think, feel and particularly those who think we feel that we lost the party which appertained to us - both collectively and on a personal basis - can now be said to be in full, frank and frankly full agreement that this present party which we now have is indeed the self-same party, to all practical intents and purposes, not to mention intense practical purposes – minor differences notwithstanding - that we previously had both heretofore and previously at that time which was then,” and many other horribly life-draining variations on the same tedious theme.

After three hours of this, Mr Kinnock returned to his effulgent praise of Ed Miliband’s two-day captaincy of the Labour movement, repeating his previous comments again but this time in Welsh.

While veteran left-wingers settled down in the sleeping bags for a long haul, some younger party members on the fringes of the meeting were seen furtively casting around for suitably heavy objects with good aerodynamic properties.

“Kill me,” begged a distraught Ed Balls to a rapt reporter from the Daily Mirror, as he clawed his bleeding ears. “Kill me now.”

Thatcher's Portrait Immortalised In Number Ten For Future Prime Ministers To Abuse

Margaret Thatcher was today back in Number 10 Downing Street, as PM Gordon Brown's guest of honour at the unveiling of a portrait of her smug, hated visage.

Whereas portraits of two previous prime ministers, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, hang on the walls of No.10, Baroness Thatcher's detestable face breaks with tradition by being painted on a Spacehopper.

"I am more than happy to be the first British Prime Minister to be able to sit at my desk, raise my head from my hands and look upon the sour, arrogant features of that awful harridan leering back at me," said Mr Brown. "And it will give me particular pleasure to go down in history as the first British Prime Minister to rise from my desk with a howl of rage and - on behalf of generations of British citizens who will be paying the price of her petty, vindictive evisceration of the nation's industrial profits base - kick her sneering face all around the room until I fall to the floor in a state of sated exhaustion."

Baroness Thatcher did not make a speech, as she has long since retreated behind impenetrable mental walls, which she uses to block out the increasingly-obvious results of her pig-headed policy of shutting down British industries - or, if they had been nationalised on the grounds that they were too essential to the sound running of the nation to be left in the hands of greedy profiteers, flogging them off for a song to her greedy, profiteering friends.

There have already been calls from Labour politicians staring down the throat of imminent unemployment for the spacehopper portrait to be made widely available to disgruntled voters.

"This could be the cheap, feelgood gimmick that wins us another term in the trough- whoops, I mean office," said disgraced Labour MP Andrew Dismore.

Hands Up If You Owned A BBC Computer - No, Didn't Think So

The Computer Conservation Society has reunited the twerps responsible for the goddamned BBC microcomputer, as part of goddamned ill-considered celebrations to mark the goddamned launch of the goddamned thing, which took place 26 goddamned years ago.

The goddamned BBC computer was the result of a search by the goddamned government and the goddamned BBC to find a computer that could be used by schools and families to teach the new science of computing to a generation of pupils and their parents.

Unfortunately, what they chose was a goddamned overpriced, beige doorstop from goddamned second-raters Acorn, who hastily cobbled together some sort of goddamned prototype in five days which used the wrong goddamned processor, the wrong goddamned programming language and the wrong goddamned operating system, resulting in a generation of schoolchildren who knew how to use a goddamned computer that didn’t exist anywhere outside their classrooms, then having to unlearn the goddamned BBC-specific rubbish they had been taught and find out how real computers actually worked.

“It’s a typically British success story,” said the organisers. “This goddamned thing cost schools a fortune to buy in the first place, and another fortune to replace when they eventually cottoned onto the fact that it was a goddamned blind alley that impeded computer literacy in the UK for years. They might as well have bought Spectrums at a quarter of the price - at least that used a recognisable version of BASIC, not goddmaned Pascal with line numbers, and had decent games. But with the BBC a small number of people made a lot of money in return for very little effort, and isn’t that the very essence of modern goddamned Britain in a goddamned nutshell?”