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Cold Ticket of the Week

Missed out on a Glastonbury ticket? Can’t afford a flight to Coachella? Good news - they’ve announced a ‘Festival of Brexit’. The festival will take place in 2022, and will be called ‘Festival 2022’.

It’s just the sort of inventive name you’d expect from the creative minds that brought you ‘becoming the laughing stock of Europe’ and ‘allowing Nigel Farage to become a prominent figure in British politics’. Personally, I think GMMNSMT would have been more appropriate.

The festival was initially devised by Theresa May, a politician whose legacy will be future generations asking ‘Who’s Theresa May?’ and future generations’ grandparents replying ‘Oh...HER’. She had originally devised the idea in 2018, being the only person in Britain who witnessed her 2017 snap election and still thought it was a good idea to let Theresa May devise things.

Festival director Martin Green told the Observer that he hopes it will give Britons “a bit of joy, hope and happiness”. A noble aim, but the only way a Brexit festival could provide joy, hope and happiness would be if it ended with Article 50 being revoked.

With Sir Paul McCartney headlining Glastonbury, there are now two forthcoming festivals that will be headlined by a pensioner banging on about yesterday. Although the performers are yet to be announced, we can expect a lineup so grim even TRNSMT will be entitled to look down on it.

No doubt we’ll see performances from lame parody acts with names like ‘Article 50 Cent’, ‘Farage Against The Machine’ and ‘Morrissey’. The event is expected to cost taxpayers £120 million, a figure which would be enough to pay for dozens of hospital beds AND keep Michael Gove in adult nappies for weeks.

A festival is a massive operation, in which people from all sorts of backgrounds with all sorts of different skills work together to ensure that everyone is safe and has access to everything they need. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but it’s better than sitting about miserable on your own. Cough.

Ironically, everyone who shows up to the Festival of Brexit will immediately want to leave.

Lyrical Genius of the Week

Anyone over 25 slagging off pop stars resembles Grampa Simpson shaking his fist. No-one wants to be the old man yelling at a cloud.

At the same time, the chorus of Justin Bieber’s latest single goes: “Yeah you got that yummy yum, that yummy yum, that yummy yummy”. The song’s called ‘Yummy’, by the way.

It’s almost as phoned-in as Babestation from your dad’s mobile. Bieber’s 25. That’s eight years older than George Michael when he wrote Careless Whisper and 10 years older than Lorde when she wrote Royals.

Beach Boy Brian Wilson might feel proud to have written God Only Knows aged just 22, but he’ll kick himself when he realises he could have just rhymed ‘yummy’ with ‘yummy’.

Cheapskate of the Week

A £531,000 donation to the Australian bushfire relief effort sounds impressive. When you realise the person making the donation has a net worth of £89,000,000,000, it starts to look somewhat less generous.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos donated around 0.0006% of that figure. A 2018 Business Insider article put his earnings at £177,000 per minute, meaning it took him a full 3 minutes to earn £531,000. That’s the equivalent of a colleague asking me to sponsor them for Tough Mudder only to walk away with a 5p donation and a broken leg.

Ask Amazon warehouse workers what they think about Bezos’ earnings, but be quick about it if they’re on their timed toilet break.

Ace of the Week

Judy Murray this week uploaded a picture of some mandarins to Instagram with the caption ‘How to say HELLO in mandarin’. Her son Andy replied: “Hi mum...you’ve done it again. Instagram is a visual platform so if you post a picture with half the content cut out it doesn’t work...This just looks looks like a few mandarins scattered on a table...I wouldn’t want people to think you’re a mad old lady. Please do better”.

There are still some who claim Andy Murray is humourless. If you’re one of those who need convincing, Wimbledon competitors were once asked how they eat strawberries, Roger Federer said: “With cream”. Heather Watson said: “With cream”. Andy Murray said: “With my fingers”.

Boys Club of the Week

The Brit Awards faced accusations of sexism as they unveiled a list of nominees that saw female artists vastly underrepresented.

This outdated outlook is, of course, not only confined to the Brits. The Oscars too have faced criticism, with the likes of Little Women director Greta Gerwig snubbed in the ‘Best Director’ category. That lack of female representation in British music is not just reflected in awards, but on stages too.

“It’s appalling to see one female artist nominated alongside 24 male artists in mixed-gender categories” said a TRNSMT booker, adding “How hard is it to find 25 male artists?”.