Profile of The Curmudgeonly. posted by Richard Seymour

Philip Challinor tells the future , and its horrid. His blog, The Curmudgeonly, is a hilarious series of 'news reports' from the year 2020 - but like most fiction set in the future, it is really about the present. And the best the old curmudgeon (he's only 35) can say about the present is that it isn't as bad as what he just thought up.

Take the following, a satire on the Jerry Springer Opera controversy:

The BBC is set to broadcast the musical Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells despite one of the largest levels of public complaint in the corporation's history.

The stage version of the musical has been running in London's West End for nearly two years, and has been an extremely popular, if controversial hit, consistently outselling even Cameron Windcheater's Carry On Falluja.

The BBC's announcement six months ago that it would be broadcasting the musical prompted an immediate reaction from the tabloids. The Sun objected to the "obscene implications" of the song and dance routine Hey Mr Bluenose, in which most of the adjectives and half of the nouns are replaced by "censorship" bleeps.

"These bleeps carry clear implications that the song contains evil obscenities. We would not want to hear the obscenities, so why must we hear the vile verses which contain them?" wrote Sun editor Michael Portillo in a "The Sun Says Special" column last autumn.

Meanwhile the Daily Maul objected to the song Decent People Shouldn't Have to See This on the grounds that "the lyrics implied that there was something wrong with being a decent person" - an impression that could well cause irreparable moral damage to any children who might be watching the broadcast, the paper said.

Cameron Windcheater. There is a healthy and hilarious drizzle of these Brass Eye-style character names in each report - later on, the Maul's editor is called Gaynor Speedhump. If you're not tittering, you're not paying attention.

The Curmudgeonly doesn't content itself with casually pissing on the inflamed and incensed, however. He likes to give the Prime Minister a gentlemanly kicking whenever the mood takes him:

New measures could soon be put in place to combat the growing "culture of blame" in Britain, the Prime Minister announced today.

"The culture of blame which pertains in this country today is an unhealthy and debilitating trend," the Prime Minister said. "A democratic government cannot allow itself to be swayed merely by the opinions of the public, unless those opinions convey a duly positive and constructive attitude."

The Government is known to be concerned about the resignation of former Minister of Freedom, David Blunted, because of blame attached to him. It is feared that, if nothing is done, blame might also be attached to other ministers, thus limiting their freedom of action.

The 'culture of blame' is one of the most mind-numbing bromides to emerge in political culture for some decades. In some ways, it fits perfectly into New Labour's political language in which verbs are largely subtracted. (No one does anything, things just happen; we can't alter our conditions, just adapt to them; your company didn't sack 200 people, the conditions of the knowledge economy just restructured the market).

Aside from regular updates from the future, the curmudgeon began his blogging career with a series of planetary profiles packed with references that are both esoteric and Aesopian. He is also given to prolific literary reviewing a perusal of which reveals a penchant for the fantastic and, obviously, the satiric.

Finally, Mr Challinor enjoys a touch of post-prandial criticism , particularly if it enables him to detonate a few sarcastic, sinistral lexical explosives under the nose of The Guardian's pusillanimous editor.

Witty and opprobrious, The Curmudgeonly awaits the serenading of some media outlet - so that he can chuck it right back in their fucking face. As a political writer, he is hilarious; as a comedian, he is deadpan. Like the best satirists, he is funny because he is serious. Most importantly, the curmudgeon is never sanguine - in fact, he rather makes the BBC 2's 'Grumpy Old Men' look like a bunch of whining middle-class former coke addicts by comparison.