17 Earthspan

The Ben Chatham Misadventures:
Homespun

1: Chataeu de Impressionist

The Doctor is idly sorting through his favorites of Alien Bondage websites when he realizes most of his harddrive is clogged up maintaining an ionic realm programmed to torture and torment a non-companion called Ben Chatham.

The Time Lord considers. Has Ben learned his lesson and no longer a danger to space time itself? Should he release the amateur archaelogist? Or should he just delete the file and consign Ben to a horrible, fiery death? It WOULD be easier...


In Hell, Ben Chatham is fighting against his imprisonment by being such a whiny little pansy that hopefully the computational matrix that encages him will release him just to shut him up.

He has also started stalking Charles Broxby, who cast Ben aside after he admitted he only has boy toys when he also has a girlfriend to convince the world outside he's not gay. Indeed, Ben cheerfully admits he's "so far inside the closet, he's in bloody Narnia".

Ben creeps through the Tate Modern, breathing heavily as he spies on Charles, insisting that as he has a degree this is upper class social intercourse and not 'clingy stalking like that Tyler slapper'.

When the security guard catches him, Ben pretends to be a Dutch modernist artist called Hans Climt who has pained a portrait of Adam Rickitt falling into a mincing machine entitled "Midnight Motion". The guard breaks all of Ben's fingers and toes and walks off, whistling to himself.

Ben, used to this sort of brutal physical torture, starts to shoot up with morphine to dull out the pain. Soon he is hallucinating of a knight in shining armor skewering him like a pig on his lance and hears a 90s rock group called Morons singing a top ten hit:

"Lying bastard
Says he's got a degree!
He hates all chavs
Like you and me!

What a smooth chest!
YOU LOSER, CHATHAM!
What a smooth chest!
YOU LOSER, LOSER, CHATHAM!"

Ben awakes to find himself being used as a draught excluder in the restaurant at the Tate Modern, mistaken for an installation by two youths in hoodies. Ben screams hysterically that the Chavs have come for his soul, and the youths shake their heads and walk off.

A little old lady passing by, shocked at the intolerance of Ben, rips off his left ear and nails it to a wall.

Charles sees this, gives a donkey-like laugh, and wanders off.

Ben bleeds a bit, and then wets himself. "I knew I should have called myself GUSTAV Klimt!" he weeps before the cleaners arrive, pick him and throw him into a dumster full of asbestos.

Ben crawls out and sees Charles getting into a taxi as he sips a cappucino. Desperately changing tactics, Ben limps up to the taxi and shouts:

"FINE! You homophobic wanker! I'm leaving Cambridge to go to Tellbury in Somerset to take part in a MAJOR, a WHACKING GREAT EXCAVATION of a Saxon Burial Site! Eat shit, Charles! You'll never see me again, you sad, little fuck! You lonely little poof! What do you say to that?"

Charles blinks and throws the cappucino in Ben's face, scalding his features away and leaving him nothing more than a fried egg on stilts.

"Have fun, Chavam!" the driver sneers. "You might actually be able to put something on your archaeological experience CV apart from 'Jacking Off To Tomb Raider'!'"

"Yeah, well, I MIGHT JUST DO THAT! AND I'M IN NO WAY SECRETLY DISAPPOINTED WITH THIS RESPONSE! And I'm not feeling you should be emotionally devastated that you won't see my smooth chest again! Look at my deep eyes? Do you see any tears?"

"Not yet, but soon!" the driver promises and runs over Ben, reverses over him, then runs over him again. The twitching body, covered with tire tracks, claws feebly for a moment.

'D-don't... oh, fuck, my ribs... don't concern yourself... blugh... on my account... ya wuss! Shit, how many compound fractures can a guy get in five minutes, anyway?'

Then, a Morris Minor drives over him and parks.

'Oh... that many...'

The next day, the Morris Minor finally drives off and Ben creeps to the flat and blocks out the agony and torment with a perpetually looped tape of Bowie's 'Sense of Doubt' and waits patiently for Charles to ring him up and beg forgiveness.

Three years later, Ben decides to play hard to get and steals a car and drives to the village of Tellbury. Passing a welcome sign consisting of a blood-drenched skeleton hanging from a tree and a monument marked ONLY THE LOCAL MUST LIVE!!!, Ben crashes the car into a church, smashing down the wall. Ben runs off to the nearest Bed and Breakfast, knocking over a little old lady that is exiting.

Ben decided to call her Margot for some reason, and slaps her whenever she tries to correct him. He orders her to take his bags into the 'domicile' or else he'll have her flogged to death for allowing foreign elements into his air space.

Storming into the best bedroom in the hotel, Ben finds a £600 jacket which he steals. He then 'marks his territory' in the toilet, the pot plant, the bed and wardrobe. He then demands Margot unpack for him or he'll crush her shoulderblades.

Striding downstairs, Ben finds a small petting zoo containing hares and rabbits. Incredibly sexually frustrated, Ben kills every last one and hangs eight on them on a hook from the ceiling. When a small five year old girl approaches and asks why 'Flopsy' is oozing blood from a slashed throat, Ben kindly explains that he eradicates vermin. These were the rabbit equivalent of chavs, damn it!

"I AM NOT BI-POLARRR!" he screams at the dead rabbits.

He then threatens the girl with a shotgun and she runs off screaming.

Then two Midwich Cuckoos wander into the room, stab Ben repeatedly, gouge out his eyes and chew them up. They then hook him up with the hares and laugh insanely.

However, Ben simply comes back to life, as always, kinda like Mike Myers in Halloween, except not as endearing. He screams that he is a higher form of life than chavs like them!

The Midwich Cuckoos skip away, huming 'You loser, loser, Chatham' to themselves over and over again.

Ben detaches himself from the hook, glad he hasn't been anally violated today, but still, the night is young. Ben heads back to the church, gets in the car and drives off to the excavation only to come to a halt when he sees an army of medieval knights charging towards him with lances.

Ben thinks this is another morphine-induced hallucination and drives on ahead, unheeding.

Five seconds later he is skewered on the lance, which enters via his mouth and leaves via his arse.

Just another day in Hell, Chatham-style.


2: The Sign of the Crosssing

Suddenly, the medieval knights disappear and Ben drops heavily to the ground with a very sore posterior. With absolutely no trace of the knights, Ben breaks into the nearby feild and starts eating all the ripe blackberries he can, laughing evilly at the thought of the poor farmer getting up one day to find all his crops gone.

At that moment he is run over by a Morris Minor, driven by a young woman who gets out and kicks him repeatedly. She finds blackberry picking quaint and chavish and so must be punished.

Ben hastily insists he is no chav, but an amateur archaeologist with a first from Cambridge heading to desecrate a Saxon archaeological site. The girl introduces herself as Katie 'All Chavs Must Die' Ryan, project manager at the site. Like Ben, her CV is pretty pathetic - just pleasuring herself while watching Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.

At the site, an old vicar called Father Jack is shouting monosyllabic abuse at the workers until he is run over by Katie and Ben, for having stubble on his chin.

Ben idly steals the dead priest's wallet and finds a petition with 500 signatures promising to unleash the armies of Satan if the archaelogical dig happens. The armies take the form of medieval knights on horseback.

This doesn't ring a bell and so Ben ignores it.

Katie and Ben go to dinner, planning the death of further Chavs. But Ben's simple throat slitting isn't enough for Katie, and desperately he tries to impress her by explaining he travelled with the Last of the Time Lords who found him so irritated he removed him from history and dumped in this false Hell.

Katie finds the story ridiculous and when Ben mentions his pathetic stalking of Charles is told that he is worse than a Chav, he's a gay Chav in denial. For a laugh, she rings his parents and outs them. As his father foams at the mouth and swears to kill himself, Ben hastily hangs up the phone and tells Katie she's a naughty girl.

FIRSTLY, she doesn't believe his wild stories of time travel, aliens and medieval knights, THEN she calls him a chav and NOW she's outed him and got his parents to go on a psychopathic killing spree and she STILL hasn't given him a right good shagging!

Katie bludgens him unconscious, rams a pineapple up his arse and handcuffs him naked to his bed at the b & b. A silver crate sits in the corner, delivered by special courier.

Who could it be from? Ben only told Charles he was coming here. And Paul. And Jenna. And Karen. And all the people at the Tate Modern. And his parents. And posted a live streaming webcam on the net. And hired a few bilboards outside Cambridge. And taken out an add in The Irish Racist. And that's it!

At that moment the crate explodes open to reveal...

"K9!"

“Affirmitive, you bastard. I am K9 Mark 534098. Present from the Doctor-Master. Suggest you make peace with your deities according to your various belief systems. I am here to slaughter you like the pig you are and chew bubble gum. Sensors indicate no bubble gum is available. Processing. I shall now slaughter you like the pig you are..."

Ben is, dare we even to say it, concerned?!?


3: Steady Experiment

K9 extends his blaster and fires boiling oil at the trapped Ben, then absinthe, and then applies electrical current. As all Ben's body hair is electrocuted, K9 extends a metal arm carrying a machete and starts to dismember Ben, explaining the Doctor thought he might appreciate the new technology built into K9.

Ben's remains are placed in bin bags and dumped in the bin. K9 then levitates onto the bed, plays 'Oh Well' by Fleetwood Mac and starts rolling a huge spliff, whistling as he does so.

Meanwhile, Margot opens the garbage bags and pours the contents into a deep fat frier to make a greasy looking English breakfast, despite the screams from Ben's severed head.

The Midwich Cuckoos arrive, jam forks into Ben's head, dip it in batter, fry it and then take it outside for a quick game of soccer. However, this gives time for Ben's body to recorporealize and it lumbers blindly around the place like a headless Mickey auton.

"You silly fuck, we hate you!" the entire cast and crew sings as Ben's head is kicked into a cow pat.

Finally Ben's head re-merges with his body and, removing the forks, batter and dung, Ben decides to ring up Charles every five seconds for the next two days. But Charles has changed the number and left an insulting voicemail message.

Annoyed, Ben heads back into the car and drives to the site. However, K9 has smuggled himself aboard and tries to shoot him and crash the car. Ben dives out of the car as it crashes and explodes with K9 aboard. Ben gets up, dusts himself down and congratulates himself for a brilliant escape from almost certain death.

Whereupon he is run over by Katie in her Morris Minor.

Eventually recovering, Ben heads to the excavation trench and discovers Tony Robinson's Time Team are there to use the trenches as a novel way to break into the nearby bank.

Ben arrives, shoves Katie into a ditch and starts screaming incredibly loudly about how wonderful, sexy and sophisiticated he is and how much cleverer he is in archaeology than Tony 'Baldrick' Robinson.

Tony Robinson takes this calmly and begins to give a long and detailed prospectus of the local Techfield Research Centre, complete with handout and powerpoint presentation. This however is just a distraction while the rest of the Time Team ram a shotgun up Ben's arse and give him both barrels, blowing his head off his shoulders.

At that moment, K9 breaks into Techfield and uses his laser to release a cage full of rage-crazed monkeys who go on the rampage, infecting everyone they can with the evil virus.

By midday, Ben has recovered enough to get to the nearest pub, and stumbles through the countryside as the monkeys attack, foaming at the mouth. Mistaking them for Chavs, Ben places a stone in a sling and slaughters the monkeys in a Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure-style massacre of ludicrous proportions.

Just then, in the tree above, K9 releases a 100 tonne weight on top of Ben. Unfortunately, Ben is now infected with the rage virus and immediately runs to the nearest pub and bites the face off the bartender before racing into the gents. The realization he has got blood on his expensive white shirt and now resembles a chav is enough to shake himself out of the virus.

Emerging from the bathroom he discovers K9 has sewed together the remains of the landlord and uses a brief, convenient lightning storm to revive the creature and sends him to ruthlessly murder Ben.

"Eat hot lead, ape boy!" K9 jeers.

Ben backs away and is suddenly struck by a horrible memory that some guy who sold him an ice cream when he was seven probably doesn't remember him any more. A single tear rolls down Ben's cheek...

Then a grand piano falls through the ceiling and crushes him.


4: Into the Lubricant

The zombie landlord smashes the grand piano apart to get at Ben and K9 repeatedly zaps him again and again, but as Ben is the only real person in hell he cannot die.

This gives K9 the shits immensely.

Finally, his batteries run down and the small splinter of charcoal left of Ben Chatham wriggles for freedom. Several hours and David Sylvian's 'Secrets of the Beehive' later, Ben has regrown his limbs enough to gatecrash in Katie's place and claims she invited him there in breeding bitch lust for his body.

Katie’s face suddenly breaks into a huge grin and she starts to laugh uncontrollably much to Ben's annoyance and then puts his testacles in a vice and crushes them like walnuts.

Ben's eyes fill with tears as he hobbles out, only for K9 to drop from the ceiling with piano wire and tries to garotte Ben with it. Ben's severed head goes flying and smashing into a tacky turqoise vase on the shelf that actually happened to be the one thing Katie cared about in the whole wide world apart from herself and her pathological hatred of chav-kind.

K9 zaps the floor with his lase and both Ben's head and body fall through into the septic tank. A second blast from K9 triggers a methane explosion that obliterates all trace of Ben.

Katie decides to hire a prostitute and walks off. K9 sits on her sofa and watches Robot Wars while making a curious buzzing noise.

Ben's left leg survives and hops in the direction when some scientists find it and, confused, take it back to the lab with all the other distorted animal, human hybrids... or, as they call it...

THE LARGEST CHAV ARMY IN THE UNIVERSE!!!!!!!


5: Consptipation of Terror

Ben regrows his body just in time to see Katie smash her way into the lab with an axe, chanting 'ALL CHAVS MUST DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEE!' over and over again.

Ben flees into the office of the Evil Director James Kunt who is wasted on his drinks cabinet and is trying to seduce his chair, which he calls 'Bruce'.

Ben snaps Kunt's neck and drinks all the brandy in one go... giving him lethal alcohol poisoning! He collapses as his liver disintegrates and wonders if the Chavs will finally consume the world.

That is definitely unlikely, given the way Katie is slaughtering them all and bathing in their impure blood.

She then knocks into the room marked DESTRUCTIVE DEVICE (TEMPORAL), where the DDT is trying to summon armies of chav knights out of history, and hacks it apart.

Immediately, the sky vanishes!

Yes, Katie has unintentionally triggered the destruction of hell, and is unplugging it from the TARDIS energy banks! K9 arrives, explains this, then heads off to get laid.

Ben realizes he has to escape as soon as possible and abandon everyone in Cyber-Hell to die horrible, fiery deaths. He begins to scream hysterically for the Doctor to save him!

In the TARDIS, the Doctor cracks open a can of Ossoban Soul-Killer and calls out, 'Hey Martha, check this out! Any second, that little prick's going to die horribly!'

Martha joins him. 'Is that Adam Rickett?' she asks.

'No, but we can pretend.'


6: Stand And Deliver!

An earthquake ripples through Hell as one by one, the inhabitants start to blink out of existence. K9 realizes he will soon follow and vows to get Ben before the end. As he glides off, Cambridge vanishes into the void, sucking with it Operation Helter Skelter, UNIT HQ, 10 Downing Street and a Wimpy cafe.

Ben is running around in circles, screaming that he is a teapot. Katie bursts in in a bit of cheap Shining imagery, screaming that all Chavs Must DIE!

Ben sculls a bottle of Chardonnay and calls Charles again, offering him one last chance for sex before the end, but simply gets an engaged signal - specifically engaged to Jenna Stannis.

Ben's eyes fill with tears and then his spine is filled with a fire axe. He shouldn't get so distracted at this point.

Katie moves on, littering hell with blood spattered corpses which promptly vanish, screaming hysterically.

Ben removes the fire axe and finishes the wine.

Just then, K9 arrives and begins to bounce up and down onto Ben's head, grinding it into paste before he too implodes into nothingness. Suddenly, a massive breach appears and Ben falls through...

Aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor is horrified! Ben Chatham has escaped back into the normla flow of space time! WHO KNOWS WHAT HORROR THIS COULD DO TO THE WEB OF REALITY?!

It is then he realizes Martha is now swigging single malt and listening to Radiohead's 'Kid A'.

"But that's impossible!" he gasps.

To be continued...