By Pat Sheil
HISTORY
The Dictionary of Terrible Ideas
Dominic Knight
ABC Books, $34.99
What we have here is The Chaser alumnus, jokester and broadcaster Dominic Knight’s A to Z listing of his pet peeves. Ordinarily, unimpressed whingers who moan and groan about things that annoy them would be my first entry in my version of such a book. “Annoyed people who think you need to know how sick and tired they are of being sick and tired.”
But Knight gets away with his glossary of the gormless for a couple of reasons. First, it’s genuinely amusing rather than annoying. Second, because there’s much here to agree with (his next to last entry, on Zoom meetings, hilariously encapsulates their infuriating, clunky pointlessness), while leaving plenty of fighting room.
Most of the time, he’s right. These really are terrible ideas, and it’s fun to see them being pilloried, but wait a minute. There’s a big difference between a “terrible” idea and a silly one.
Under C, Knight lists colonic irrigation (tick) and cigarettes (double tick – these are both genuinely terrible ideas), but then has the temerity to include the ancient and sacred sport of curling, simply on the grounds that people sliding a stone disc along a lane of ice while frantically sweeping a smooth path is Scottish and ridiculous. Bagpipes, too, are summarily dismissed for much the same reasons, and for the life of me, I can’t see how a fellow whose entire career has been built on a foundation of frivolity can credibly complain about adapting lawn bowls to Arctic conditions and inventing the wackiest musical instrument of all time.
Do bagpipes really belong on Dominic Knight’s list of bad ideas?Credit: Getty Images
Former Chaser member Dominic Knight.Credit: Marco Del Grande
The Scots have a lot to answer for, as do we all, but I can think of nothing finer than sipping an aged Highland malt by a frozen loch, watching demented locals curl and sweep, while a lone piper on a crag above fills the air with a stirring blast of Flower of Scotland.
But by and large, DK’s Dictionary is right on the money. By the time he gets to the letter H, our caustic complainant has really hit his stride. Reading his merciless demolitions of homeopathy, hot dogs and hunting is like watching shameless con artists withering in court under surgical cross-examination.
Sure, it’s always fun to read opinions you agree with, and there are many balloons of baloney in here, which most right-thinking readers will revel in the popping of. Indeed, some of the ghastly notions vilified here are sufficiently egregious as to remind the reader how infuriated they were when they first heard of them, allowing us the bittersweet pleasure of revisiting our outrage.
One of many such entries is music streaming services, which allow infinite downloads of musicians’ work for a pittance, of which 20 per cent of the square root of bugger all ever gets back to the performer or songwriter. It has never been a good time to be in the music business (unless you’re the Beatles, Taylor Swift or in management), but these “services” have won the race to the bottom for the demise of copyright.
Others in this category include robo-debt, influencers, the gig economy and the vuvuzela (every football fan on the planet will remember these cacophonous contraptions destroying the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa).
Inevitably, we have the sitting ducks, like Brexit, non-fungible tokens and QAnon, but being a sitting duck doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be taken outside the city gates to a piece of waste ground and publicly garrotted. That’s what really stupid ideas have coming to them, and Dominic Knight gives them what for, good and hard.
But he’s dead wrong to include bagpipes and curling. He just is.
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