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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Review [published December 2004] Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush Ben Granger Julie Burchill: donchajusluver??!! Well, yes, actually. There once was a time when I agreed with all my Graun reading friends “that bigoted bitch” should be humanely shot, but it seems a very long while ago now. My obsession with her venomous vitriol went from fascinated horror to perverse admiration in the time it took to squeak “public hanging” in a Bristol accent. Every Saturday when I dutifully bought my Graun it was, without fail, to her page I turned first. Whilst my comrades sang “ding-dong the witch is dead” when she left last year, I felt Id lost a limb, an itchy, scabby limb perhaps but a part of me nonetheless. I wasn’t going to follow her to The Times though. Let’s not go nuts here. Now I’m not one to “admire the candour” of ‘politically incorrect’ columnists as a rule. Watching Richard Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens and Taki being sodomised by chimpanzees whilst devouring the bloated corpses of Paul Johnson and Simon Heffer at gunpoint would be my dream reality TV viewing. I’m an overpaid bigot, get me out of here! So why my weak-kneed ardour for a woman unafraid to sing BUY Julie Burchill books online from and the praises of history’s greatest monsters (Thatcher and Stalin) whilst occasionally drawing the ire of the Commission for Racial Equality? The short answer is the sheer energy, insight and wit amongst all the shit. Reading one of Julie’s better columns is to ride the rapids. A violent tug of agreement here, a buffet sideways into the realms of entertaining irrelevance there, recoiling at the scathing extremism whilst simultaneously entranced at its vicious and shameless perversity. And along the way, just occasionally finding something you may agree with that you never thought of before. And yes, I do love a good wind-up merchant. Noone can match her for sheer vicious spite. When she’s massacring the vacuous world of celebrity it reminds me of the old Day Today headline “Crazed Wolves In Store A Bad Mistake Admits Mothercare.” And for all the knee-jerk reaction, I was amazed to find how frequently her targets deserved everything (or at least nearly everything) they got. The bourgeoisie, still dehumanising the workingclass, but cloaking their exploitation under a silky 118 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Benneton-shroud of faux-progress. The ludicrous irritancy of pontificating film stars. The moral, hypocritical black hole of most journalism. The spineless and simpering betrayal of New Labour and the ‘post feminists’ (offering to remove their clitoris and voting rights if they found the new era of relative equality so awful.) She’d left most of her pro-Thatcher phase behind by the time she’d gone to the Graun; this was a brutal patriot-Commie bruiser. I found myself punching the air in agreement (metaphorically of course, I am a Graun reader after all), overjoyed that she’d hit the nail on the head with far greater accuracy than her more measured colleagues. Of course I still strongly disagreed with vast amounts of what she said; the death penalty, Israel, Ireland, invading Iraq, paedophiles and the talent of Gareth Gates springing most immediately to mind. But even then my perceptions were challenged and above all I was entertained. She could even ignorantly defame my idols George Orwell and Mike Leigh and I’d still lap it up. When she went into perversity overdrive, calling for public hanging, and claiming suicides should buck their bloody ideas up I just found the middle-class outrage of those taking the bait on the letters pages hilarious (bringing to mind one of her classic put-downs “now, before you get out your pink Forever Friends notepaper.”). Basically, violently agreeing with about 40% of what BUY Julie Burchill books online from and she said and reeling at the rest was a damn sight more edifying than vaguely nodding at 60% of what Polly Toynbee puts out. I don’t read her Times columns, and by all accounts she’s gone into manic pro-war, extreme Zionist overdrive now, which even I might find too much. But when I hear about her typically savage dissection of the loathsome neo-snobbery of those sniffing at “chavs” I still think “that’s my Julie!” with a warm glow. When it comes to her books though, even a fan such as myself remains a sceptic. There was no way I was going to read her hagiographies of Princess Di and Beckham, no matter what clever class-conscious leaps she was doing to laud her unworthy heroes. And the fiction? I once read a chapter of Ambition and found it pretty awful, an unconvincing English take on Dallas and Dynasty, neither of which I liked in the first place. I actually picked up Sugar Rush, Julie’s lesbian-driven “first novel aimed at a teenage audience” as a kind of aversion therapy. This is a woman who now claims to support George Bush for God’s sake. I needed to quell my ongoing crush for her perversity. Surely this rubbish would put me off for good? Sugar Rush tells the tale of 15-year-old Kim, a middle-class girl at a private school, who is forced into the nearby rough-as-shite comprehensive due to the financial hardship of her stuffy dad who’s been left holding the kids by her feckless mother, herself still 119 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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