I was recently looking for something to read in the bookshop at Manchester University, which was a mistake really as it’s a typical uni bookstore; i.e. the graphic novels section contains no Batman and 9 copies of fucking Maus. After fruitlessly trawling for something interesting I happened upon the self-help section and was quickly reminded of an anecdote borrowed from a friend of mine.
Four young men, for reasons known only to themselves, are sat in the front room of their shared house playing that old parlour game where someone has to hold the name of a celebrity up in front of their forehead for everyone else to see, then ask them questions to try to decipher who it is on the card.
On one particular turn, the questioner asks “Do I help people?”
“Yes”, is the response.
“Do I have magical powers?”
“Yes” say the questionees.
“Am I often seen in the company of loyal followers?”
“YES!”
There’s a contemplative pause
“Am I Jesus?” is the confident enquiry
“No.” is the response. “You’re Paul McKenna”
You can see the similarities though, can’t you? After all, where people once turned to The Bible and Mr Christ’s parables to guide them through their lives, now they’ve got the self-help missives of McKenna and co. In these books everything from losing weight, to quitting smoking, to getting a better job to becoming a more effective canoeist (probably) is explained to you in easy to understand (i.e. patronising), step-by-step (i.e. really patronising) guides by the World’s leading experts (i.e. people who got their degrees by mail order from questionable institutions like The Guadalajara Institute of Food Sciences). This is the time of year when people are likely to take stock of their lives and recoil in horror at the sheer naked mess they’ve made of it and therefore it’s boom time for the publishers who can lay off the pointless celebrity autobiographies for a few months (Justin Lee Collins? Really?) and set about helping people to help themselves.
Provided that help comes not from themselves but from the faintly creepy expert pictured on the cover, natch.
Here’s a few of this year’s biggest titles:
Joseph Stalin’s Scorched Earth Diet
A team of military historians and dieticians at the University of Spartak Moscow have combined on this groundbreaking project to use Stalin’s highly self-attritional tactics for halting the Nazi war machine to help shed those Christmas pounds and get you into that bikini this summer. By scoring different types of food according to 1940′s German military hardware (1 tuna sandwich = 1 Panzer tank; 4 chocolate digestives = 2.3 Stuker dive bombers; 1 Dominos pizza = Colonel Walther von Reichenau) and suggesting different dietary techniques as ‘Stalin’s Orders’ (only drink water today; make yourself sick, mash up all your food with a lethal dose of diuretic) you too can protect the Worker’s Republic of You from fascist calories. WARNING: if diet is not strictly adhered to you will have to shoot yourself for the crime of cowardice.
Richard Littlejohn’s Bigoted Way to Happiness
Britain’s very own cross between Ann Coulter and Jabba the Hut shows you how to be happy simply by blaming everyone else for anything that makes you miserable. Why mope around doing a job you don’t like when you can cheerily convince yourself that a cabal of Muslim lesbian extremists are at fault for forcing you to do it in the first place? Suffering through the death of a loved one? No you’re not! You’re just the victim of political correctness gone mad- in the old days people would be dead and continue to live for another 200-300 years! And they wouldn’t need a hi-vis vest to do it. Are you struggling to overcome a crippling addiction to alcohol or drugs? It’s not your fault- not since the EU introduced all those nasty new addictive substances when Britain had once become the Greatest Nation on Earth ™ by having alcohol which did no damage whatsoever and crack cocaine which acitvely repulsed the user after every toot of the crackpipe! You couldn’t make it up! Although, for this to work, you’ll probably have to.
Quit Smoking With Bisto
Using pioneering psychological research, this guide will help you quit cigarettes for good using the hitherto untapped nicotine supressing properties of gravy. Everytime you feel a craving for a smoke just drink 3 pints of piping hot Bisto gravy and feel those urges slip away. This is part of the upcoming Bisto Better Life range, due to include such titles as ‘Career Success with Chicken Stock’, ‘Find Love with Yorkshire Puddings’ and ‘Quit Heroin the Vegetable Broth Way’.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming- Not As Interesting or Sinister As It Sounds
This vaguely controversial approach to psychology and self-improvement is clearly and simply explained as not actually an awesome mind-control art that allows those who master it to have terrifying levels of power over all those they come across. It will help you to alter your behaviour to help you achieve your goals via considerations of the effect of language on self-actualisation and not by teaching you to subtly program all those around you to submit to your every whim and fantasy so that your goals become less about getting a promotion and more about achieving one long round of delirious sexual pleasure amongst people who readily except you as their Earth-bound emperor.
Better Living Through Genocide
If all else fails in your life, fuck it. Kill everyone. A worrying sign of the modern world is that this is currently number 4 in the UK book charts. Even more worryingly, the top 3 places are all taken up with books ‘written’ by Jordan.