BC Holiday Special II: Firestarter

THE BEN CHATHAM SPIN-OFF ADVENTURES: BONFIRE NIGHT SPECIAL

"BATHFARTER"

Ben Chatham has returned to his Cambridge apartment to find it a crumbling ruin inhabited only by rats, cockroaches and a Chelsea supporter. Ignoring all the notices saying that the apartment is to be demolished due to its absinthe-related health hazard, Ben immediately makes himself at home. Mere hours after his arrival he is slumped on a bin liner listening to a violin concerto from Philip Glass on his iPod, swigging Bacardi and coke, and logging onto Bowie forums and making a total arse of himself. It occurs to Ben he is drinking a symbol of the lower classes and their appalling lack of taste and spits out, keeping only the incredibly expensive special-brand Jamaican rum given to him as a gift in return for him never contacting the gift-giver ever again.

Meanwhile, in Cardiff's Touchwood Hub, Captain Jack Sparrow learns of some strange UFO activity over Cambridge. Not the usual sort of UFO activity, but strange UFO activity. Since neither he nor his team can be arsed to investigate, Jack decides they make use of the wierd prank caller who pesters them all the time, claiming to be an old time travelling buddy of Jack and a really important amateur archaeologist. He texts Ben's mobile and tells the newly-regenerated git that if he wants to have any kind of future he investigate the UFO landings there.

Ben, gripped by the testicles with concern, decides he is no meat puppet and will investigate in his own fucking time. He decides to go to bed early and then sleep through the next day in case there is some kind of heavy work involved, and hopefully by that time the whole thing will have resolved itself without him having to do a thing, but still allow him to take credit.

As Ben rehearses his OBE acceptance speech, he gives himself a tequila slammer and admires his expensive designer blinds which have been used as a latrine by some passing squatter. Seventeen tequila slammers later, Ben is borderline comatose and watches with no interest whatsoever as a string of gigantic explosions outside set a museum and surrounding houses on fire.

Suddenly, a black clad ninja smashes through the window, sumersaults over to where Ben is and places a samurai sword at Ben's throat as it removes its balaclava to reveal... Katie Ryan!

After Ben unceremoniously dumped her in public a month earlier, Katie is utterly convinced he'll have lost the particular braincell holding that information, allowing her to seduce him all over again and turn this incarnation straight. She starts removing his trousers and marvels at the mass destruction of Cambridge Chavs occuring outside. Their unsophisticated bonfire night has annihilated the lot of them.

"I'm gay."

"You're in denial."

"OK. Let us screw.... no, not on the bed! THOSE SHEETS ARE BEYOND VALUE! THEY'RE M&S!"

Ben mumbles that the unnaturally-quick-burning flames outside, being bright purple, suggests the presence of 'pepthaline', an extraterrestrial inflamant.

"This was no bonfire night accident!" booms Ben in a cheap Jaws reference, before passing out and pissing himself.

Realizing Ben is still too lucid for her seduction techniques to work, Katie fits a saline drip containing two hundred per cent proof Greek larger to Ben's arm.

Meanwhile at the nearby park, the King’s College students have organised a charity firework display in aid of the local homeless and are initiating the bonfire. The main organiser Cedric Harcourt speaks into a loudspeaker, defending this incredibly stupid display of pyrotechnics when already half the town is ablaze because frankly, he's a stubborn old queen and no mistake. "Please leave a donation of money or perhaps two eggs and your first-born child on your way out, preferably before the strange purple fire reduces you all to skeletal black husks," he announces before an arm of purple fire shoots out of the inferno and instantly reduces Harcourt to a skeletal black husk.

The audience applaud wildly at this supposed piece of improvisational comedy before a sheet of purple fire burns them all to death.

Suddenly, bonfires all over England turn magenta and the terrified crowds around them are desparate to escape but can only move sluggishly through the security barriers they'd only recently spent hours queuing at in the cold. Even their best efforts are fruitless, however, because within seconds the fire roars and belches again, then spits forth a vast sheet of superheated flame that sears everything within hundreds of meters to ash and bone in the length of time it would take for a single firework to burst across the winter sky.

The elemental fire beast suddenly roars, "WHERE ARE THE PRODIGY?! I CROSSED THE GALAXY TO SEE THEM!!!"

Cambridgeshire continues to be burned to a crisp over the next twelve hours while Katie and Ben go through the first fifty pages of the Chav-Hater's Carma Sutra. The next morning, Ben finally metabolizes enough of the alcohol to realize he is having sex with a creature possessing estrogen and has a full-blown panic attack that nearly cripples him.

"Come on, lets enjoy ourselves and watch the Chavs die screaming," Katie urges before being punched repeatedly in the face by Ben.

Mortified with embarrassment, Ben grabs Katie's head and smashes it against the wall repeatedly. "Look Katie, last night was a mistake. We’d been drinking and stuff," he continues, snapping both her arms, "but really I’m not over Charles. I was thinking of him," he concludes as he picks her up and throws her out the window to the street below.

At the end of the street, a giant creature composes entirely of purple flames is killing and burning everything it can - it has only avoided Ben's apartment because of all the biohazard notices and graffiti saying "For A Refined Time Call Ben Chatham".

Ben looks at this ungodly, counter-intuitive challenge to the world of mankind and decides to make himself... AN OMLETTE!!!

As Ben meditates on trying to remember HOW to make omlettes (all the absinthe having removed much of his memory), Katie climbs back inside, swearing like a sailor and screaming at him for using her affection for his own sadistic ends.

"Look, Katie, you know I’m gay," Ben says reasonably, giving her two black eyes and breaking her nose. "Anyway there's more important things at stake like that alien fire thing," he adds before breaking her ribs and throwing her out the window.

Outside, the flame creature increases in size as it incinerates a Victorian house. Thanks to Ben's incredibly selfishness and stupidity - even by Chatham standards! - humanity and all life on Earth is irredeemably doomed!

Luckily, it transpires this alien is more stupid than the author of Ben Chatham stories and - since it is a living fire and thus threatened by any kind of water, has travelled to the only planet in the solar system that's sixty per cent water during November and, thus, is wiped out of existence when it starts to rain. Worse, the elemental fires ravaging Cambridge is instantly doused, justifying a further budget cut from the fire brigade since a town-wide inferno was cancelled out by a brief shower. The police emerge from hiding and immediately take credit with their new "Tough on Alien Fire Demons, Tough on the Causes of Alien Fire Demons" policy.

Ben stares out the window for a further three hours before suddenly shouting, "Wait a minute! I get it! That creature couldn't survive in Earth's wet climate! So it just went out in the rain! Hah! What a brilliantly original and ironic plot twist! Up your arse, David Renwick! And after I bravely went to bed, got plastered, shagged an emotionally vulnerable fag-shag, and let lots of people die horribly! He shoots, he scores!"

Suddenly Captain Jack rings him for a report: "OK, Mr. Chatham, what's the situation up there? Did you go out and investigate the UFOs?"

"No."

"Did you check the internet? The radio? Local TV? Did anyone report it?"

"I don't know."

"What DID you do?"

"I went to bed. That is how I prepared myself."

"WHAT?!?"

"I've encounterfed several such UFO landings, and it always causes serious problems."

"SO YOU WENT TO BED?!?"

"Yes. My sheets are incredibly exclusive, you know. From Marks and Spencers. Don't worry, Captain Jack, I looked out the window and kept an eye on things."

"And then what?!"

"It's a bit tricky, Jack. You see, there's this slapper I can't seem to shake off. She uses her feminine wiles on me. And some alcohol."

"You were feeding the beast with two backs? There was a UFO landing and YOU WERE GETTING LUCKY!!"

"Lucky? Oh, Jack, I was not 'lucky', I just temporarily forgot I was homosexual."

"WHAT ABOUT THE UFO?!?"

"I forgot about that too."

"Look, is this woman some kind of malevolent psychic vampire that sucks any and all motivational qualities from you and leave you a listless, alcoholic self-hating gimp?"

"Hmmm. Unless she has tampered with my time stream so I was like that before we met, no."

"According to the news, a living fire beast stepped out of the UFO and slaughtered half of England!"

"I don't see what all the trouble is about. OK, hundreds, possibly thousands of people have died in the strange fires, but they were only chavs and other, easily-amused numbskulls who go to firework displays. I was doing far more important things."

"Like?!"

"I was making an omlette."

"Is this some bizarre homage to The Gourmet Detective from Detectives On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown?"

"No, why?"

"You swore to me you could defeat any alien menace with your ingenuity, intelligence, charm and wit!"

"Well, I didn't have to. It rained and killed the monster."

"SO YOU DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING APART FROM DRINKING A HEAP OF ALOCOHOL AND HAVING SEX IN A HIGHLY INEPT AND MISOGYNISTIC MANNER WHILE HUNDREDS DIED?!?"

"Look, the Chatham family motto is: Sleep, Drink And Sex Are FAR More Important Than Alien Fire Monsters! It's how it's been for centuries!"

"What a pile of shiitake mushrooms!" Jack snarls. "That's it, Chatham, you're OUT of Touchwood! And we have SHOCKINGLY low standards, but that has to be the most bowel-looseningly appalling report I've ever got! If we so much as THINK about you ever again, you're dead! Christ, sometimes it's like being in the Ministry of Beating Your Head Against a Brick Wall..."

"Hey, a lesser man would have fled the fires. I stayed indoors all the time!"

"You hid, you sad, materialistic and socially inept git! You stayed inside and LET PEOPLE DIE! You will NEVER be able to justify that to me as brave or calm!"

"I let people die in a brave and calm fashion! And I have an exsquisite taste in designer blinds. Let's see you do that!"

Jack hangs up. Ben shrugs and decides to text Charles Broxby and arrange another orgy, but since Charles last saw Adam Rickitt regenerating into Vicki Pollard, he's fled the country and changed his name. So, after three months, there is no trace of him.

Ben feels hurt for a long moment, then cheers himself up by taking Katie to the local ruins of a coffee bar and jamming her head into the cappucino machine, giving her agonizing third degree burns. As Ben giggles and Katie screams, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Ricky Gervais and Dame Simon Wong Pegg slide horizontally into view.

"As you may have noticed, Ben Chatham is completely unsympathetic to anybody else's pain but his own," Dame Judi Dench begins. "He rudely puts down Katie who quite rightfully storms out of his life never to return, but doesn't feel the slightest pang of guilt. It is the cause of all his unfortunate behavior: his incredible tendancy to cry at the drop of a hat, his propensity for useless information, and his intense stroppiness whenever ANYONE disagrees with him."

"HAHAHAHA!" Simon Pegg laughs. "WHAT A WANKER!"

"Yeah, well, you may be the one laughing right now, but, you know, this story's really about...er, the disableds, you know, trying to cope with aliens," Ricky Gervais retorts. "He mightn't get it right, like, but wha's important is that he tried, you know... that's what I'm about. Retar- I mean, handicapped people need the right to try and save the world. Even if, obviously, they can't what because they're disabled. They deserves the right to take the shot. And fuck it up. I mean, they're only human aren't they? And not, you know, a normal human at that."

An awkward silence follows. Gervais adjusts his tie.

"Besides, he's got a nice chest and everything. So, you know, even though it can seem like it sometimes we're also saying that not all disableds are mingers. Message for the kids."