Playing Margaret Thatcher must be great for an actress like Meryl Streep. Thesps just love it when they get the chance to play vile people from history. Murderers, rapists, sex offenders and the like give an actor the opportunity to feel brave and bold.

And ol’ Streepy knew too well that pretty much everyone on Earth hates Thatcher. This is something that made her ”more interested” in portraying the heartless witch in ‘The Iron Lady’.

And Meryl has some theories on why everyone despised her so much and… well… she’s off the mark really.

The Oscar-winning actress (we’re legally obliged to say that or people from Hollywood come and crack our shin-bones with slender golf clubs) was shocked at the level of hatred for the former British prime minister, which is a clear highlighting of just how little interest she had in the world during the ’80s and ’90s.

Streep said:

“We give our elected leaders iconic stature almost to have things to tear down, to work out all sorts of our own psychological problems and needs and venomous feelings. So I wondered about all the times that Margaret Thatcher was spoken about being unfeeling.

“And I thought, ‘Well, why was that? Was she really completely unfeeling?’ And as a public figure in a much smaller way myself, I understand that feeling of being stripped of your humanity. Was she a monster?

“While we were making the film, people had such strong and particular and specific venom for her. It was sort of stunning. It made me all the more interested in where her humanity lay.”

So, researching the part, you’ll assume that Meryl worked out why Thatcher was so reviled by many Brits, right? WRONG. See, Streep believes the anger directed towards Maggie Thatcher was largely down to the fact she was a woman.

“I did suspect that there was a weird special rage about her because she was a woman. From all sides. The policies that she pursued were the same policies that Geoffrey Howe pursued, although he’s not loathed and detested with the same intensity. And I think that it is a discomfort with, and a confusion about, women in leadership roles.

“For feminists it’s a betrayal because she doesn’t do the right thing, and so you hate her more than you’d hate a man who stood for the same things.”

It may have had something to do with the countless riots that took place under her stewardship, as well as the fact that industrial production fell massively during her government, which is seen as an affront to the working classes. In short, there were nearly 3.3million unemployed in Britain in ’84, compared to 1.5million when she came to power in ’79.

In 1990, when she resigned, over a quarter (28%) of children in Great Britain were considered to be below the poverty line. Thanks to the procedures she put in place, that number kept rising after her time in Downing Street, leading to Britain’s having the highest childhood-poverty rate in Europe.

And she talked funny.

The North of England hates Margaret Thatcher almost unreservedly. Seriously. Being a Tory in Ultra-Labourite Manchester is akin to being a leper. A leper who likes the music of James Blunt. A James Blunt loving leper in a Liverpool FC shirt.

And so, when Meryl Streep appeared randomly at Freya and Graham McAnally’s wedding at Manchester town hall, you’d have to assume only one thing…

…that locals gathered ’round Streep, figured she was the closest thing they’d get to seeing Thatcher in the flesh, and kicked her to death.

According to the Daily Mail, Freya and Graham were tying the knot at Manchester Town Hall on the same day as Streep was filming scenes for Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady.

What a way to have your special day utterly ruined.

Freya said:

‘It was all very surreal – Meryl Streep was standing there dressed as Margaret Thatcher. It almost feels like it didn’t happen. I thought it was amazing, the last thing you expect is an A-List celebrity at your wedding.’

Ah yes! That’s right! It wasn’t actually Thatcher! It’s nice Meryl Streep who was just dressed up as one of the most appalling humans ever spat out of an unfortunate vagina.

And it wasn’t just Streep. The cast and crew were filming at Manchester Town Hall because it looks a bit like the inside of the Houses of Parliament. Alongside the Oscar winning actress was Jim Broadbent (playing Denis Thatcher) and Richard E Grant (playing Michael ‘Withnail’ Heseltine).

The cast and crew clubbed together and gave the couple a card, champagne, flowers, a glass vase and a copy of the film’s call sheet for the day.

Graham, not missing a beat, worried that a bunch of Hollywood stars might upstage his wedding, said:

‘It turned out to be to our advantage as there were more lights around and the town hall had been given an extra clean for the filming.’

And then the locals barged in dressed as miners and kicked Meryl Streep to death.

Possibly.

The best way to win the respect of your acting peers is to go ugly. Monstrously ugly. For example, people fawn over those brave enough to play Hitler. Or a wife-beater. Or some kind of sex offender.

In the case of Meryl Streep, she’s being touted as a likely Oscar winner for her turn as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

It takes nerve to play the biggest on-screen monster since Cloverfield.

Alas, it hasn’t opened on these British shores yet (sad really, it would’ve been perfectly pitched amongst the strikes currently going on – perhaps we can have some more when it comes out, eh unions?) but critics have been making a fair ol’ noise about it.

The Guardian referred to Streep’s performance as “astonishing and all but flawless; a masterpiece of mimicry which re-imagines Thatcher in all her half-forgotten glory,” while the Daily Mail noted; “Streep’s portrayal will, I have no doubt, come to be seen as a magnificent portrait of Lady Thatcher.”

You’ll be thrilled to learn that, in the film, we do get to see Thatcher as a frail old woman, reminding us all that she is indeed, about to die.

Of course, as Hollywood is prone to copy other Oscar winning films, we strongly suspect we’ll be seeing Brad Pitt playing Norman Tebbit and a gritty turn from Angelina Jolie playing Edwina Curry in a biopic about eggs and shagging John Major (played by a hatstand painted grey).

Oscar nominations will be announced on Los Angeles on January 24th, and The Iron Lady is directed by Phyllida Lloyd, which is clearly not a real name.

Splendid.

Daytime television is, by it’s own admission, awful. Never has it been implied that shows like Jeremy Kyle and Cash In The Attic exist to do anything other than while away the hours for bored housewives and jobless shut-ins. A spot of light relief between playing online bingo and masturbating into a commemorative tea towel.

One afternoon, whilst killing time between brunch with Kelly Brook and playing golf on Richard Branson’s nose, flicking through the channels, the term “football” caught the ear. Lo and behold it was a woman on a panel show.

She had the look of someone’s Aunt, one who had once been in a waxing accident and never mentally, or aesthetically, recovered. She proceeded to elaborate about how “unfair” and “blatantly sexist” it was that her favourite reality TV show once had been moved back SIXTY WHOLE MINUTES to accommodate a football match going into extra time.

At first, this squeezed out a small chuckle – oh, that lady doesn’t like football and a lot of men do, how well she has critiqued the human race, *chortle chortle* – and then, a horrid curiosity took over. Jaw-ont-floor, the only feasible thing to do was to simply listen to her and the others batter all the “chauvinists” that had made them wait an hour to see Timmy Mallet rim a dead ox.

Patiently waiting for one of the esteemed guests or the salivating audience to point out that it happened because it was a live event, costing the channel millions and being pumped into homes and pubs up and down the country, alas, disappointment was met because this stupid rant was met with whoops of applause and an involuntary snort, death to men! Those football loving, channel organising vermin!

With no bra to burn and rushing to friends, who had also seen it and were equally miffed, the whole thing troubled in a quickly capsizing brain. For those who hadn’t witnessed this ogrish performance, it was difficult to articulate precisely what had been witnessed.

Imagine someone tried to film an episode of Question Time in Primark. Then imagine they handed out tickets for it with copies of the Sex & The City 2 DVD and crowd-sourced all the topics from The Daily Mail’s online forums and Kerry Katona’s autobiography. Now imagine it’s even worse than that… and you’re half-way there.

‘Don’t be daft’ you might say. You’re completely over-reacting. It can’t be that bad.

And so, it was decided that Loose Women must be given it a second chance and so, hecklerspray watched a second episode in full.

The panellists on show were Chris Evans’ ex-wife, someone from Corrie, the woman from that coupon advert and Arlene Phillips. Some quasi-insulting references were made to their age/weight/former alcoholism and the studio audience rolled about laughing. There’s was a nagging feeling that somewhere in that studio, there was probably some poor boy on work experience, who had the sole job holding the sign that said “laugh”.

This is how sad-clowns must start their careers.

After the formalities, they cracked on with the show and laid into a current news item. Promisingly at first, but it inevitably degenerated into a joke about someone on the panels’ age/weight/former alcoholism and the studio audience rolled around laughing, again.

Various sweeping statements were made on the current plight of the country. At times like this, you begin to shout at the television, offering counter points but it is no good because they can’t hear you, cackling over you with fashion tips, celebrity gossip and the OXO mum’s latest strategy for Afghanistan.

GCSE biology managed to calm fears that the country’s ears were vomiting in unison.

Eventually a celebrity guest was paraded in front of us all. He had a new book coming out and couldn’t wait to tell all the girls about it.

“Oh, I only read Heat HAHAHAHA”

Chirped one of panel. The ensuing awkwardness was side-stepped by some clever editing and ITV’s trademark eight hour ad break before viewers were treated to a montage of the ladies getting pissed at some award ceremony or charity do or whatever.

The show repeated this formula for an hour. With material being at a premium – and by material, read ‘things to talk about’ and not ‘the three remaining polyester threads covering Denise Welch’s chebs’ – time was killed by talking about Carol McGriffin’s drinking problem or Coleen Nolan’s weight, to which the presenters unhinged their jaws and opened their mouths as wide as they could to simulate the act of being shocked.

Simply un-missable TV for anybody who’s ever wondered what it would feel like to be stabbed in the mind.

Suddenly, inspiration hit harder than Sherrie Hewson’s erection. How about an all male panel show, comprised solely of laddish reality-TV rejects and failed boy bands? They could stare down the tops of soap stars who are there to plug an exercise video and offer their own personal insights into current affairs.

‘Yeah, like, my spray-tan place has put the prices up, why can’t we tax the banks for that?’

In the interest of fairness, it should be pointed out that this isn’t the worst thing on television. That show where Gok Wan saves ugly women from certain death each week by projecting their cellulite onto the side of a 40 storey building is more tedious and, if nothing else, it’s a day out for Lynda Bellingham isn’t it?

Anyway, where’s the remote…

This was a guest post written by Adam Clery so give him a big patronising pat on the back or something.

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Carol McGiffin is a terrifying human being. Why? She willingly had sex with Chris Evans for one. Secondly, she willingly works on Loose Women without wanting to open them all up with a chainsaw. Thirdly, it seems she’s obsessed with telling people about the habits of her vagina. Fourthly, her face looks a bit like an out-y belly button.

Now, she’s introducing the pot to the kettle after branding Katie Price a “monster”.

Someone on Twitter compared Carol to the mostly drunk, boob flashing, haggard old soak… and for the life of us, we can’t imagine why anyone would make the connection.

Yep.

Some smart-arse twitter user asked the Loose Women shrieker if she could pinpoint exactly when she turned into Katie Price “with the vodka soaked tweets”.

Barbed.

“I hope you are joking, otherwise you are blocked,” McGiffin responded to the user. She then added: “F**k it you’re blocked anyway. Anyone who compares me to Katie Price is an a**ehole.”

The offended presenter told another Tweeter: “I will not be compared to that monster.”

Monster?

Fair enough, Katie Price is a horrific spectacle at the best of times and yes, there is something slightly Frankenstein’s Monster about her what with all that surgery… but… oh sod it, you’re right.

She is something of a monster, but alas, not a million miles away from your good self. We should know. We’ve had the misfortune of reading your autobiography.

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Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Besides being one S short of having the funniest monster name ever – some people find the Aswang to be truly intimidating. Rumour has it that in parts of the Philippines the streets are desolate as soon as the sun goes down for fear of being eaten by one of these things.

Don’t worry though – these shape shifters don’t usually go after living adults. They like to spend their time slathering mustard all over corpses of the recently dead. Also they sometimes use a proboscis to suck foetuses out of a woman’s woo-woo.

Other than that we’ve heard they’re probably dedicated vegetarians.

In the Philippines – legend of the Aswang has been around for hundreds of years. It’s been described a lot of different ways, but here’s a typical profile, according to Unknown Creatures.com:

“An Aswang is generally viewed as a shape-shifter that prowls the evening looking for corpses, infants, fetuses and sometimes, people to consume. They will usually appear quiet and shy when in human form but at night, they turn into these monsters. They usually have proboscises, used for sucking out children from their homes or fetuses from their mother’s wombs.”

Well off-hand we’d say that description sounds kind of cartoonish. But we may have a different opinion should we ever find a weird super long and hairy tongue probing around our bed sheets looking for us – kind of like this first hand account of an Aswang encounter as found on Djhal107′s Weblog:

“I had a real experienced of seeing this monster, I was a young boy at that time and our house was in a small barrio (small town) with only few neighbors and surrounded with trees. The wife of our neighbor was pregnant at that time and their house was a small hut with windows that cant be closed, which simply means you can see the stars in their house during night time. It was a very noisy mid-night that i could not sleep, our neighbor dogs keeps howling in our backyards. So, I tried to check it, I slightly-opened our window good enough for my eyes to see everything outside, I am fascinated because the moon was so bright and there was no dogs in our backyard so i look at our neighbor’s house and there i saw the [howling] dogs, BUT WHEN I LOOKED AT THE WINDOW, I SAW SOMETHING DARK FLOATING – ITS LIKE A PERSON FLOATING HORIZONTALLY FACING OUR NEIGHBOR’S OPENED WINDOW. I was very scared because its hard to describe that dark floating thing, even the surrounding was clear. I closed the window and went straight to my bed covering myself with my pillow and sleep again.

“On the next day I talked to my friend about what happened last night, and i asked him if there was something unusual that happened in their house that night. He said he and his siblings were guarding their mother all the time and they were aware of the possible attacks of the Aswang. He told me had stepped something like a hairy tail and then he had thrown Garlic unto it and then it suddenly disappeared.”

That’s terrifying, right? But at least now we know the things don’t like garlic. Turn your living room into an Italian restaurant and you’ll never have to worry about Aswangs again. But what can you do if you don’t have those kinds of start-up funds? Don’t worry – there are other ways to defeat this beast – as plainly laid out in a Wikipedia section entitled ‘Dealing with Aswangs’. Here’s a real excerpt – and sorry ladies. You’re out of luck:

“Throwing semen at aswang is… said to irritate them.”

Bottom line fellas – if you see one of these things float in your window you need to ejaculate pronto.

Don’t worry though, women, because spooj isn’t really the only Aswang deterrent. You can also throw salt or household items shaped like a penis. It appears that phallic-shaped toaster you got at your bridal shower could be useful for more that just weiner toast.

We recommend you keep it under your pillow.

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Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Popobawa is a creature not necessarily nailed down in terms of solid description. Some call him a ogre, some a ghost or a shape shifter. What is clear about the creature though, is that as recently as 2006 he’s been blamed for entering men’s homes and sodomizing them in their own beds. The madness went as far as men refusing to sleep at home for fear of being victimized by the winged monster.

Many believe the creature takes human form by day, and lives among the people. Others believe he’s just a lonely, horny gay monster accidentally unleashed on the public back in the seventies. Whatever he is, we have more on him right here.

Wikipedia has a horrifying opening paragraph for the legend of Popobawa:

“Popobawa is variously described as either a ghost or ogre with gigantic bat wings and a giant penis. At times he is simply known as “Imran”. He is sometimes thought to be a shapeshifter who looks like an ordinary human during the day. His presence is usually announced by the sound of scraping claws on their roof and a sharp, pungent smell. Different from other incubus legends, Popobawa primarily attacks men and only in their own beds, resulting in many men sleeping outside in streets or on porches after recent reported attacks.

“He attacks men as they sleep, overpowering them, holding their face to the floor and sodomizing them for up to an hour. People who claim to be victims of Popobawa are mostly poorer residents on the island of Pemba, though other reports have also come from other islands and coastal Tanzania. The victims are threatened with repeated, and longer, sodomizations if they do not let their friends and neighbors know of their experience.”

Usually experiences with the beast happen in one on one scenarios as listed above. In the seventies though, he publicly addressed a group of people at once, using a possessed girl as a mouthpiece. During the speech many of those present claimed to hear a car engine ‘revving and rustling’ from a nearby roof.

A strange piece of the Papobawa story is that his attacks, according to some, spike during times of public office election. The BBC elaborates:

“In recent years the residents on the semi-autonomous Tanzanian islands claimed that Popo Bawa only visited the islanders during voting, such as in the contentious general elections in 1995 and 2000.”

Some argue a political connection. One victim who has spoken to the media about his ordeal is Mjaka Hamad, a fifty-something year old farmer, who said he could feel:

“…something pressing on me. I couldn’t imagine what sort of thing was happening to me. You feel as if you are screaming with no voice. It was just like a dream but then I was thinking it was this Popobawa and he had come to do something terrible to me, something sexual. It is worse than what he does to women. I don’t believe in spirits so maybe that’s why it attacked me. Maybe it will attack anybody who doesn’t believe.”

Well if that’s the only reason the beasty needs to attack your southside, then let us publicly acknowledge his existence. He is very much alive, and may or may not have a stake in the upcoming US Presidential election.

Read More:

The Skeptic-Raping Demon Of Zanzibar – The Committee For Skeptical Inquiry