Homes under the Hammer Horror

If you've ever been unemployed and faced a day of dull nothingness. Where the only useful thing you've done is change a loo roll, and nearly messed that up. As you creep into the dark ether of hopelessness. You are probably familiar with Homes under the Hammer, an eerie programme where presenters that look like ex members of Buck Fizz and footballer, and Dube inventor, Dion Dublin,

http://www.thedube.com/ take you around creepy abandoned houses and show you harrowing scenes of pink baths and un-pointed roofs.

The fat medium one, then contacts poltergeist property developers on a plaster Ouji board, with the haunting chant of 'have you checked the legal pack' and 'it's got a lot of potential', as Dion bangs loudly on his percussive instrument.

This stirs the un-dead to rise from out of their crypts and transform characterful properties into generic, ghostly white hotel rooms in exchange for the fresh blood of housing tenants that grey skinned estate agents happily provide.

It's sadly missing Christopher Lee, but it is certainly one of the most frightening of the Hammer series. A real psychological, sleep wrecker. What's most disturbing is that the flesh eating poltergeists are never defeated or stopped in their incessant rampage of blood sucking terror.

Instead they are mawkishly paraded by the possessed presenters, cheered in their onslaught of knocking down walls and building large patio areas, that they will subsequently barbecue their unsuspecting victims on.

It is quite gruesome and completes a day time schedule from the BBC of horror flicks such as

'Escape to the country', where quiet country villages are seized upon by alien life forms that want to build out of period extensions, and holiday cottages for their retirement invasion.

To the graphic, sadistic, possession porn of programmes like Cash in the attic and Bargain hunt, where an evil, moustached devil, in a bright coloured waistcoat, forces people to sell materialist, misery manacles to unsuspecting victims, while competing against other unfortunate slaves, for the chance to free their souls.

By the end of a day watching these programmes I feel queasy, unsettled, physically shaken by what I've seen. I turn the TV off and stare at the walls of my one bedroom flat, with the extortionate rent that has no antiques in it, just a big flat screen telly. And I close my eyes, try to dream of a world that has beauty in it, that has hope, that has love, but I find I've run out of toilet roll.

Pop eat itself and got a dicky tummy

Loathe him or loathe him, part time lover and paint can power pop balladeer Phil Collins is a revelation. Yes, Phil Collins, the ferret faced uncle of pop, with his vocal sack of heartache from his Su Su studio of emotional longing is a living breathing revelation.

Before you start choking on your biscuit shaped prejudice. Yes, I understand that Phil Collins is probably an anathema to everything you believe music should be; soul blah integrity, blah blah, artistic vision blah, but we are talking about pop here, and pop music is a genre that will always be the giant turd on the dance floor of life because the general public are an inordinate bunch of yapping dogs, and you know that you are miles better than them simply by owning a Clash album that isn't London calling. You win, but in the genre of pop music Phil Collins is a revelation, worthy of our respect and admiration.

Why? Because there is something glorious and hopeful that at one point in musical history Phil Collins was the world's biggest pop star.

Phil Collins couldn't dance, couldn't talk, the only thing about him was the way he walked, Ellie Golding or Rhianna he ain't and yet it was probably his song your Auntie Margaret danced to at her wedding to Uncle Peter while wearing that big orange pom pom toilet roll cover dress.

Phil Collins, was hugely popular even though he looked more like a plumber than a pop star. He wasn't cool, he wasn't sexy, he didn't have elaborate dance routines with a harem of scantily clad women, but he did have no1 hits and that was a wonderful thing that seems sadly lost in our current pop climate.

There will never again be room in the pop sphere for another like him, or his ilk, Daryl Hall and John Oates, Midge Ure, Nick Heysaw, Feargul Sharkey, Michael Mcdonald, Billy Ocean and loads more that all looked like depressed Geography teachers. Pop is a too well oiled machine churning out ever younger repackaged models of the same sexually explicit, high tempo music of the beautiful, toned bodied, made up, glamour model kings and queens. I just can't see how the ordinary looking Phil Collins's of the world would ever compete against these Zeus like creatures?

If you think I'm talking nonsense, I have done the maths, poorly remembered GCSE maths, but nonetheless I have worked out that the average age of a singer with a no1 hit single in 1985 was 31, in 2015 it is 25. At least 5 artists were 21.

This is why whenever I look now into the shining bald head of Phil I'm filled with deep despair because a bald head in pop music now, is as likely as a Dodo for Christmas dinner.

It's a sad indictment of our culture that with the onset of the music video and the proliferation of the photograph that we are becoming more obsessed with image, and youth and this trend is only set to continue. Today there are very few music acts that work beyond 30, or have exposure in the Pop realm past that age because we simply don't want to look at them, and their crusty ageing faces. There's just no room for wonderful naffness, everything has to be so edgy, and cool, it's tiring.

Back in the 80's there was at least some hope that if you wrote a catchy song with a pleasant melody you could have a hit record, I just can't see that happening now unless it's a novelty push a pineapple up you arse kind of record.

The worse thing is, it's a great loss. For anyone who has ever had a conversation with a 21 year old that isn't 21, will tell you, they're all idiots. Obsessed with drinkin in the Klub, and having fun, and enjoying life, Yuck. What the hell can a 21 year old tell me about the vicissitudes of life and the pitfalls of love? Phil suffered a divorce after his wife had an affair with the painter and decorator, that's real pain.

So, thank your lucky stars that Phil is out of retirement. He is a walking relic of a different age, soon to disappear into the air tonight, and we'll be left with toddlers shouting their incomprehensible nonsense.

In praise of Human heads and giant carrots

There are many wonderful parts and places of Sheffield. I love how many parks there are and how nearly every bit of grassy mound will be home to someone's appreciative posterior. I love Sheffield's thriving poetry and music scene, and it's DIY and independent attitude to Art and commerce like the Forum shops or Access space or new Roco building, or how the old Woolworths is now an art centre.

I could have written in length about the glorious and inspiring views from Norfolk park, or the elegance of Western park or the splendour of Dam house but instead I've decided to write about the carrot sculpture near Firth park.

Before I get to that I wanted to mention a sculpture in Sheffield that for a long time stood at the bottom of my street. For many years I have lived on Ellesmere road in Pitsmoor and one Autumn I gleefully discovered on my journey to work at the bottom of our street that a tree stump had been carved into a Human head. This certainly beat the usual street art offerings of abandoned Sofas and mattresses that aspiring Tracey Emmins left.

This was a skilfully crafted head and it had apparently sprung up from no where, with no warning or big reveal just appearing one day out of the blue. Every day I would walk past it and it would make me smile a big Chesire cat smile, and it really caught the imagination of the street to. He became the street's central figure for festive celebrations. For Halloween they placed pumpkins around him and at Christmas they attached a Santa's hat and beard. It was great.

Unfortunately the council came along one day and had it removed, maybe thinking that we couldn't be trusted with art as it might lead to some anti social watching of the culture show. I was sad to see it go. Not only because it was a beautifully made head but also because I found it so strange to find it at the end of my street and not in some art gallery that no one visits.

But then I discovered the big carrot in Firth park. Or at least I think it's a carrot, it could very well be a tomato. I have never been entirely sure. It's a sort of mutated vegetable that has been tunnelled into by large hungry worms. However, it's not so much the carrot I like but its location. It's just lumped right in the middle of a slab of pavement on the street and seems completely at odds with its environment, as you're left wondering why is it there? Is it a relic from an old park that they now have built houses on, or is it an arts installation by a well meaning local artist or was it health campaign to remind you to eat your five a day?

Yet, it is its incongruity that makes it so great. If it was in a playground or a park it would be insignificant. It would simply be another play apparatus that would be overshadowed by a slide or a roundabout. But here just in the middle of the street it occupies a place majestic wonder. It turns the street into a playground, into an unusual world of giant vegetables, the grey and dull into something fun.

I think it's a fantastic quirky sculpture and in many ways I don't really want to know why it is there. I'm happy for it to be forever shrouded in mystery.

Some might find me flippant for choosing a carrot sculpture as my favourite place in Sheffield but it's this and other quirky things that make Sheffield for me, such a fantastic place to live.

There are so many wonderfully odd sights that so often go under the radar.

Places like the amphitheatre behind the train station, which you can't look at it with anything but complete disbelief that it really exists. As you question why you have never found yourself there before and why when you tell anyone about it they look you up and down like you've snorted Horlicks and reply 'An amphitheatre in Sheffield, behind a train station, yeah right, good one'.

The City is full of strange buildings and curious anomalies in bizarre places; like the huge coloured brick, half moustached, Minor opposite the COOP in castle market, or Sheffield's own Arc di triumph in the Whicker, or the fact that our Morrissons is a castle.

This to me, makes the city what it is. Beautiful and intriguing but always humble to the point of being afraid of showing of it's own brilliance incase it risks turning into Leeds or Manchester, a fate worse than many deaths.

So, I suggest we all continue to find more giant carrots and tree stump heads, they are the treasured gems of the city just don't expect to find them in the likeliest of places.

Stan Skinny is a poet, comedian and writer that has lived in Sheffield for 10 years. His new spoken word show 'Tell me the lies about Love' (part of the Off the Shelf festival) is on the 2^nd of Nov at the Sheffield University Union building. Alongside this he runs the Shipping forecast a nautical themed poetry and comedy night at the Riverside on the last Thursday of the month and a weekly comedy quiz Quizarama-rama also at the Riverside every Monday. You can visit his website www.stanskinny.co.uk to find out more or follow him on twitter @stanskinny