Dalek Empire IV

- Dustbin Umpire: The Hopeless -

An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Doctor Who Spin-Off Guide Appendix O' Alas Smith & Pallister


Episode 1: Dab Hand

In the latter half of the 43rd Century, the Tenth Dustbin Occupation is well under way. With their cunning STD-turns-you-into-a-Dustbin plague, the Dustbins are once more devastating the Galactic Union of the Milky Way and newly-promoted Brigadier-General Selestru of GUMP knows that the conflict is doomed. Mankind looks completely screwed.

However, the Time Lords of Gallifrey have been watching and come to the awkward realization that this is kind of all their fault as they did sweet FA to stop the Dustbins colonizing the Microsoft-Sans-Serif Galaxy despite the vehement promises of Lord President Romana. And after over two centuries of suffering, pain and misery, she decides it is time for Gallifrey to extract its finger, stop crying into their hexolite goblets of Rassilon’s Red and DO SUMMFIN ABAT IT!!!

Thus, the Time Lords use their mighty powers to search all of time and space for a suitable hero to be brought forward to 4350 AD to fight the Dustbin Empire... but the Doctor’s buggered off to a divergent universe, so one of his companions will have to sort out the mess instead. After looking through all possible companions past, present and future, President Romana chooses the ones that seem to be the least retarded: Vicki Pallister-nee-Cressida from the Trojan Wars of the First Segment of Time, and Sarah Jane Smith from the nebulous UNIT era.

Alas, with their usual complete lack of efficiency, the Time Lords manage to timescoop Vicki just after she left the Doctor, but they miss Sarah entirely and instead remove from his timestream Mickey "the Idiot" Smith instead. Boy, he’ll be a real help fighting unstoppable armies of cyborg mutant psycho-killers, won’t he?

Vicki quickly proves her worth to GUMP and suggests that instead of all this waffle about Humanity sacrificing its principles by becoming Dustbins in ideology and instead build funky armored spacesuits with laser canons for really nifty one-on-one space battles against the Dustbins. Mickey is sent to try and locate suitable cannon fodder to pilot the Kedestran Mk VIII "Spacer" suits but, with his usual elan, grace and style, Mickey immediately crashes his ship into a godforsaken ice moon of Talis Major.

Suspicious of such rash stupidity, the Dustbin Suzpreme orders Dustbins to check out what the hell is going on from. Mickey tries to organize the local Eskimos to fight the Dustbins and thus leads to a near-total slaughter until Vicki turns up with a plasma canon and wipes out the Dustbins, rescuing Mickey who cowers pathetically in the snow.

With the sniveling Smith boy in tow, Vicki leads the GUMP war fleet straight towards the Border Worlds in what seems to a straightforward case of blowing the undying fuck out of the Dustbin fleet. But a nifty neutron-flow-polarity-reverser built by the Cult of Fargo EMPs the "Spacer" ships back to the Stone Age.

Mickey whimpers as the Dustbins move in for the kill.


Episode 2: The Angle of Idiocy

Things actually seem to be looking up for the Galactic Union as the ship with Mickey is blown up by the Dustbins while the rest of the fleet are left sitting ducks. But, showing her usual brilliance, Vicki and all the others – including Mickey – put on the funky "Spacer" suits and attack the Dustbin Saucer. In the next galaxy, the Dustbin Suzpreme is incredibly pissed off at this cliffhanger cheat, especially as it looks like GUMP are going to get their hands on the neutron-flow-polarity-reverser!

The news that Mickey Smith the Idiot has been instrumental in the devastation of the Dustbin war fleet proves a crippling blow to Dustbin morale and a wave of suicidal depression leads to all the Dustbins in the fleet self-destructing, wiping out a civilian planet caught in the middle of the battle.

Mickey is now directly responsible for more carnage than the Dustbins in this series so far, Vicki decides to take him out of the war effort and become a heavyweight boxing champion of the Border World systems. Leaving the Idiot to jog around cities to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger" and experiment with anabolic steroids, Vicki decides the best course of action is to nuke the Healing Zones and cut off the supply of fresh Dustbins.

Of course there are the usual problems as it turns out half the GUMP army are Dustbin agents who try to suicide bomb the fleet from within, and the remains of the human war fleet are reduced to a bunch of jerks in "Spacer" suits lead by Brigadier-General Selestru. And this is BEFORE thousands of Dustbins rise up from the Healing Zones like an unstoppable swarm of armor-plated wasps!

Meanwhile, Mickey decides to give up on his career as a boxer and find a course of action that will benefit all of mankind and more importantly make him a tower of attractiveness to cute white chicks, a plan that will change the face of the galaxy forever.

"I’m gonna seduce the Dustbin Suzpreme!!" Mickey vows.


Episode 3: "Closure" Is Just Another Word For "Propaganda"

Above the Nebula of the Aroused Baboon, the Dustbins and the Spacers face off in a thrill-a-second space battle of stock sound effects, explosions, and William Gaunt screaming "Keep firing! You’re sitting targets!" while Nicholas Briggs squawks "EXTERMINATE THE MACHO WANKERS! EXTERMINATE EVERY LAST MOTHERFUCKING ONE OF THEM!!"

To cut the padding short, after machine-gunning over five thousand separate Dustbins to smithereens, the Dustbin Mothership turns up with and the kid gloves come off. The last GUMP ship is blown up and the Spacers use their dwindling ammunition to disarm the Dustbins’ squeegees rather than blowing them up outright – a course of action that leads to countless deaths of characters we’ve gotten to know but were so obviously dead meat I have singularly failed to mention them.

Brigadier-General Selestru survives though – getting picked up by a surviving escape pod whose only occupant is an emotionally vulnerable large-breasted supermodel with no clothes. Man, some guys get ALL the luck, huh?

Within fifteen minutes, GUMP is completely stuffed and the Dustbins decide to get on with the defeat of mankind, but Vicki’s worked out a brilliant Plan B involving a French Resistance which will spring up and annoy the Dustbins when they completely conquer the galaxy. Personally I can see why she didn’t use this as Plan A.

Meanwhile, ostensibly the main character of the series, Mickey Smith contacts the Time Lords – to woo the Dustbin Suzpreme he needs a TARDIS to take him to the Microsoft-Sans-Serif Galaxy because the ships of the Galactic Union are pieces of shit that can’t break the light barrier. President Romana explains that they’re ever-so-slightly busy at the moment recovering from the end of their civilization after the terrorist group Flexi-Time infected them with a zombie plague, but she can spare her lackey Narvin to give Mickey a lift.

In what has to be the least appealing line up for a Doctor Who spin off road movie, Mickey and Narvin board a coral-themed battle TARDIS clearly based on the BBCWales version – which all TARDISes now have to look like now for various reasons to justify reusing the set.

They arrive in a 74-storey silver tower on the highly-radioactive New Fargo in the Dustbin-occupied galaxy... and are immediately detected by the tin-plated aliens living there. The Dustbins activate the Dab Hand and shut down the TARDIS’s freakily powerful defenses, leaving it slightly less secure than a portable toilet. The Dustbin Suzpreme (on the bottom floor) demands the time travelers surrender immediately. Mickey thinks this is just some awkward Dustbin way of asking him out for a date and immediately leaves the safety of the TARDIS, utterly confident he won’t die.

To the incredible annoyance of Narvin, he’s proved damn right.

The duo are brought before the Dustbin Suzpreme, which is rather oddly sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool. Narvin pulls out a kill-o-zap canon and effortlessly blasts all the Dustbin guards present in thirty seconds flat, bullet time, Matrix-style. If they capture the Dustbin Suzpreme, the entire Dustbin Empire will be compelled to abandon conquest of the Milky Way and come to her aide.

"RELEASE ME! RELEASE ME IMMEDIATELY OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!" screams the Dustbin Suzpreme as Mickey gives her a cuddle.

In desperation the leader of the Dustbin sends out a spam email to her forces in the next galaxy – the Dustbins immediate decide to indulge in the "ethnic cleansing" part of their resume and wipe out every single human being they meet, leaving no survivors.

This kind of screws up Vicki’s Plan B. And the Plan Rest-Of-The-Alphabet too now she comes to think of it. Meanwhile, we get lots more scenes of Dustbins slaughtering infants schools and petting zoos, just in case we didn’t get that they’re all pure evil. Billions of innocent people across the galaxy are slaughtered within moments and the Dustbin Suzpreme gloats that Mickey and Narvin can’t harm her without spoiling their oh-so-brilliant kidnap plan.

"WE’VE HAD ENOUGH ACTS OF WAR TO FILM A SERIES OF BABYLON 5!" screams the Dustbin Suzpreme. "WE WILL EXTERMINATE HUMANITY AND INVADE GALLIFREY... AGAIN! AND THIS TIME, WE MEAN BUSINESS!"

As Dustbins blow up passenger ships, slaves in mines, mechanics in orbit, and bizarrely those Swampies on Delta Magna in "The Powder of Droll", and generally everything that moves, Navin and Mickey engage in a Chuckle Brothers routine as they carry the Dustbin Suzpreme into Narvin’s TARDIS: "To me! To you! To me! You must mind the paintwork!"

Back on Earth, Vicki uses the old "deserted monorail full of cobalt bombs" to wipe out the Dustbin invasion and also 83 per cent of life on the surface of the planet... but it works enough to scare the shit out of the Dustbins as they realize they’re dealing with someone who actually means business.

Narvin, Mickey and the Dustbin Suzpreme leave New Fargo before a singularity bomb Narvin "accidentally" left in the pool goes off and the entire planet vanishes in a puff of inevitability. As Mickey starts putting the moves on the Dustbin Suzpreme, it strikes Narvin that they might have got the Dustbins to abandon their war with the whole universe...

...by getting them to focus entirely on the Time Lords.

"Ah, what’s the worst that can happen?" asks Mickey with a shrug.


Episode 4: The Wanking Wounded

Arriving on Gallifrey and feeling ridiculously pleased with themselves, Mickey offers the prize of war to President Romana: the immensely pissed off Dustbin Suzpreme and a nifty Dustbin laser gun, which Mickey somehow believes will be enough to wipe out an entire intergalactic empire on its own.

Romana is not impressed, especially as the simple find-and-retrieve mission lead to billions of innocents being massacred pointlessly. The Dustbin Suzpreme gloats that, thanks to the wonderful paradoxes of time travel, the Dustbins have retrospectively retaliated against her kidnap, by causing the events of the Gallifrey 90210 spin-off series that has left the Time Lords a doomed, penniless and zombie-infested race totally unable to fight back.

Mickey points out that’s just a fluke, since the whole scheme was to leave the Dustbins leaderless and in disarray – but the Suzpreme laughs in his face. Just yesterday before she was captured, she appointed the Dustbin Formally Known as Si Tarkov as their new, democratically elected Emperor of the Dustbins. Possessing the brain capacity to rule all other Dustbins and guide their dusty destiny, for seventeen long days Tarkov was pumped enough raw gamma radiation to create a league of American super heroes until he became a giant tentacled monstrosity with a huge, bloodshot pink eye.

The supremely ugly son of a bitch was then wired into a fish tank, caged at the centre of a huge, hundred-foot complicated golden Dustbin casing clearly based on that giant metal spider thingamajig from that Harry Potter movie.

With the Dustbin Suzpreme gone, the Emperor Dustbin immediately makes himself incredibly unpopular by demanding that all Dustbins created from virus-infected mutant humanoids be sent to the front lines as canon fodder – before realizing that pretty much covers ALL Dustbins EVERYWHERE. Nevertheless, the Emperor Dustbin decrees that their glorious cause of cleanliness requires them to take on the Time Lords and wipe the floor with them!

Meanwhile, Brigadier-General Selestru and that supermodel return to civilization after a truly frightening amount of sexual intercourse to find that, after their truly monstrous ass-kicking by Vicki and the decision to take on the Time Lords instead, humanity is not completely defeated. So yay us.

After some more introspective misery and self-pity, and a very long rant that the Dustbins didn’t even have the common decency to get beaten by mankind after four long seasons, Selestru and his new girlfriend have a threesome with Vicki, setting to work repopulating the human race. Lucky bastards.

Back on Gallifrey, the events of "The Vengeance of Moby" have taken place (or not... your mileage may vary on this) and the Doctor is dead presumed missing. The Time Lords need a new warrior to fight in the Temporal Difference of Opinion and so, in a sequence that owes far too much to "Alien: Resurrection" for anyone to be comfortable, Romana orders a clone of the Bastard to be created.

In a new Time Lord body uncannily resembling Simon Pegg, the Bastard awakes and, after being told he’s been brought back from the dead to fight a war that will determined the entire destiny of the universe, simply says, "FUCK THIS!" and uses his hardcore Bastard charisma to hypnotize everyone in the room.

It seems he has totally managed to dominate even Romana’s mind... at least until she drop-kicks him in the head. Whereupon Leela grabs him by the bollocks and whispers a threat in his ear so terrifying that the Bastard’s new hair turns white with horror.

Meanwhile, as the assembled Dustbin battlefleet floats rather uselessly above the definition-of-impenetrable transduction barriers of Gallifrey, the Dustbin Suzpreme seduces Drax, who was foolishly left on guard. Fortunately, Narvin of old knew that Drax’s infamous sexual abnormalities would be a liability and so has the Dustbin Suzpreme put up on concrete blocks before having its wheels stolen.

Furious, the Dustbin Suzpreme tries to start a cat-fight with Romana but suffers the ultimate humiliation as her voice is drowned out by a perpetual loop of Soft Cell’s "Tainted Love", stuffing up any and all psychological ploys she may have had on offer.

With the resurrection of the Bastard making news all over the cosmos, the Dustbins prepare for the bearded villain to strike them – not ONCE suspecting that this was a massive distraction to allow Romana to time-loop the entire Dustbin fleet. But the Bastard, living up to his name, kicks out the plug at a vital second – not only shutting down the time loop but lowering the transduction barriers.

Aboard the flagship, the Dustbin Emperor takes this remarkable twist of fate with typical reserve:

"WHO DARES OPPOSE THE DUSTBINS?! GNATS! INSECTS! FLEAS! I SHALL DESTROY YOU ALL, ARROGANT GALLIFREYANS FOR I AM THE EMPEROR OF THE DUSTBINS REBORN! I LEAD THE DUSTBIN UMPIRE FROM THE WILDERNESS AND CULTIVATED PURE AND BLESSED DUSTBIN! I AM FAR MORE THAN LAVROS! I AM THE BEGINNING AND ENDING OF ALL THINGS! THE PATHETIC, SO-CALLED LORDS OF TIME SHALL PAY FOR THEIR IMPUDENCE, PAY MOST DEARLY, PAY THE ULTIMATE PRICE: ETERNITY WILL BE YOUR TORMENT! YOU ARE *SO* SCREWED!!!"


Book(s)/Other Related – Dr Who: When Mickey Met Vicki!
Attack of the Cheese-Eating Space Zombies from Fargo (Canada Only)
The Fury of the Swarm of Recruits on the Home Front of The Last Line of Microsoft-Sans-Serif of the Dustbins


Fluffs – Nicholas Briggs seemed to finally reach the end of the line during of this spin-off audio series.

"Spaceman! I always wanted you to go into Spaceman!"

"YOU ARE PATHETIC, MICK-EY. YOU HAVE LOST AND YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO WITHSTAND OUR INVASION! YOUR PEOPLE WILL BE EXTERMINATED... OI, LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING YOU, GOD DAMN IT! DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME, BITCH!"

"I know I know you know I know. You know?"


Fashion Victims –
The Time Lords’ Hollywoodized battle armor with peacock feathers, crash helmets and go-go boots.


Goofs – MICKEY can fight a guerilla war against the Dustbin Umpire?! This is the guy who can’t defeat WHEELIE-BINS in Cardiff! Mind you, it would explain who exactly was stupid enough to spark off the Third and Final Temporal Difference of Opinion.


Dialogue Disasters -

Vicki discusses Mickey Smith’s reputation –
"I know an idiot when I see one."

SELESTRU: Keep firing men, fire everything at them! Pour it on! Send these metal bastards to hell - and I mean that most sincerely!

SUZPREME: GALLIFREY WILL FALL THE DUSTBINS! YOU WILL NOT WITHSTAND US!
NARVIN: We shall see.
SUZPREME: WE KNOW FOR A FACT THAT YOUR SPECIES IS DYING! NOW YOUR SPECIES CAN NO LONGER REGENERATE, ONCE YOU ARE ALL EXTERMINATED, YOU WILL BE EXTINCT!
MICKEY: How the hell do you know? Are you behind the Dogma Virus?
SUZPREME: NO, IT’S JUST FEMALE INTUITION.
MICKEY: Cool.
SUZPREME: ...IDIOT.

MICKEY: When I’m cornered, when I’ve got no place to go and someone or something is standing in my way and I just don’t care about anything else. It’s like I’ll do anything to knock the bad guys down, take as many with me as I can... It’s how I always win Grand Theft Auto.


Dustbin Triumphs –

MICKEY: Oh, that’s right, babe – I’m having an affair with the top brass! I like em twice my age in stiff uniforms; gorgeous young things like you don’t push my buttons! You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you, but me and the Brigadier are just gonna hijack a spaceship and sail off into space together!
VICKI: Listen, Mickey, you don’t have to fancy me just because I’m pert, blonde, streetwise and cute. But it happens a lot. It’s one of those things, though people do take a stab at chatting me up. You’re not going to get lucky, but you might fail in style.
MICKEY: Hah! There’s ma woman – kit off!
VICKI: Oh, all right, just this once.

The Bastard on Leela –
"Oh, piss off to Japan with all the other blind assassins!"

SELESTRU: The Dustbins are a nightmare come true. They tend to make nightmares redundant.
STEVEN MOFFAT: That sounds like a challenge, boy!

MICKEY: Tell me, baby. Just curious: what’s it like being a girl Dustbins? All the other Dustbins transfixed by your curves, always trying to give you the eyestalk, trying to have a salacious look up your skirt?
SUZPREME: THE DUSTBINS HAVE NO PERVERSIONS!
MICKEY: Oh, boring! Not even hanky-panky?
SUZPREME: WE ARE PURE! WE FEEL NO DESIRE!
MICKEY: You haven’t felt ME yet, babe! BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA-LAKA!!!

DUSTBIN MIKE: COWABU—-
DUSTBINS: SHADDUP!
DUSTBIN MIKE: MAN, YOU GUYS USED TO BE FUN, YOU KNOW THAT?


Viewer’s Quotes –

"YAY! Superheroes beating the shit out of Dustbins and showing them up for the crap they are! Just need the Spacers to be Cybermen and the crimes of Dustbin –vs- Cyberman! will be avenged!"
- Jared "No Nickname" Hansen (2008)

"I couldn’t be bothered to buy this series, let alone listen to any of it. Was it any good? Not that I really care, just curious."
- Nigel Verkoff (2008)

"Um... nope. Not me." - Andrew Beeblebrox (2008)

"Nor me. Got nothing for this one." - Dave Restal (2008)

"Well, that’s THIS section knackered, then, isn’t it?"
- Ewen Campion-Clarke (2009)

"A fifth series of Dustbin Umpire? REALLY?" - Ben Cook (2010)

Noel Clarke Speaks!
"I only had a little bit to do on my last season of Doctor Who when ninja assassins (who turned out to be Nicholas Briggs and Rob Shearman) ambushed me at a Gallifrey convention. They wanted to something called Dustbin Umpire 4 and I had no idea what they were talking about, but I was fairly confident that his toothbrush was loaded, since he was typing out the script with his toe, letter by letter, as we negotiated my fee and the official secret acts. The way I’ve approached it is to think of this was an obstacle to be overcome and then I could bolt."

Maureen O’Brien Speaks!
"I was only in London to go to the dentist and collect my cut from my wimp of an agent when out of the blue I saw two ninja assassins dragging a screaming man out of a hotel and into a blue van. It was then I realized the assassins worked for Big Finish. I don’t go for sci-fi, it does nothing for me, a total turn off but I know a psychopath when I meet one and the only thing that matters is that he didn’t have a reason to kill us both in cold blood."

Thomas Cookson’s Deranged Rantings –
A man who despises modern society, culture, civilization and above all Doctor Who (and who firmly believes all four should have ended in 1979 in a massive thermonuclear war ending the misery of existence) insists on giving his voice over this oft-forgotten niche product:

"Did I ever mention Dustbin Umpire is better than Doctor Who? Cause it is. But it should have ended after Dustbin Warzone, as everything else has been total rubbish! The writer’s heart is no longer in it, with its inconclusive, pointless endings! What do you think this is? REAL LIFE??

I judge Dustbin Umpire to high standards, standards nothing else on the planet live up to, not even Dustbin Umpire, actually. Oh, it’s like Eric Saward only not complete crap! It’s Erection of the Dustbins only with a half decent plot! I had feared Dustbin Umpire would go soft and follow in the footsteps of the safe, child-friendly, drama absent and utterly suspense-less New (spit) Who. Oh, WHY did Nick Briggs fall for the greatest lie of the 21st Century, that RTD’s mean-spirited hostile cliquey boy-band trash craze under the false title of 'Doctor Who' was somehow in any way good?! COZ IT FUCKING ISN’T!! THEY SHOULD EXECUTE EVERYONE INVOLVED AND FILM DUSTBIN UMPIRE INSTEAD!

Oh, if only we could wipe these series from existence (along with Comrades of the Deep, The Twin Double-D Dilemma, Warts & All of the Dustbins and most of the 1980s Bastard stories), eradicate all defectives and purify the canon! I have GIVEN UP on Dustbin Umpire! I BOYCOTT IT! But, you know, I still listen to it because it’s better than any shallow, silly, desperate, cartoonish, embarrassing thing a Welsh pervert can come up with. Or Red Dwarf, for that matter.

God, you’re all filthy, hateful, cowardly creatures - goths and metalheads abd gangs of chavs and emos! You demoralizing, sick, conscienceless BASTARDS! I’m not some neutrotic freak making twisted digs and tirades against sci-fi fans for not agreeing with me! I AM NOT LAWRENCE MILES! I AM A HUMAN BEING! AND YOU WILL ACCEPT MY JUDGEMENT!"


Rumors –

Did we need another series of Dustbin Umpire? Come to think of it, did we need ANY series of it, especially after killing off all the regular cast-members and replacing them with random Doctor Who characters, all of whom note that the Dustbins are boring ranting losers?

Of course, after four series of violence and shocks and trying to do a prequel to the Temporal Difference of Opinion is that there comes a point where you just stop giving a shit about all concerned. When the Dustbins invaded planets and the whole galaxy was literally ripped apart in the first two chapters it was all very affecting and disturbing – well, it was trying to be, anyway. And then, low and behold, we get more of that PLUS an STD plague introduced out of the blue, a desensitizing add-on of more death at a point where even Nicholas Briggs couldn’t give a damn any more!

After four seasons of a nasty parade of pain tormenting the audience identification figures for no real reason whatsoever, Dustbin Umpire is a mess. Yeah, think about THAT irony for a few weeks and try and stay fashionable!

Who cares if this is the only series to explore the story of the front-line soldiers and the real moral death traps of war? It’s MICKEY FUCKING SMITH for crying out loud, the guy who gets back to nature by switching his iPod off for a few hours! If you want to actually say something about the corrupting brutality of war turning men into savages, you should have a character who everyone can agree was a man to start with and not a self-pitying, whiney, self-righteous prick who acts so wronged and hurt and demands that people understand him and apologize to him, as if trying to make the listeners feel sorry for him and bullying them into being on his side? Was Absolom Daak busy?!

Some might say that Dustbin Umpire is a very manipulative series, full of twists, duplicity, vulgar violence and shock tactics. But then again, so is the evening news and that at least is free of Nicholas Briggs and his ring modulator which he has held onto so long the two are starting to fuse on a biological level. Others might that Dustbin Umpire does seem to me to be almost the perfect Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover. But people who think there NEEDS to be a Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover are not only mad, they seem to have confused Star Trek with Blake’s 7. I don’t remember Riker and Worf fighting Dustbins, I don’t recall Kirk getting his end away with Susan Mendez and I sure as hell never heard that bitch Janeway turn out to be a Dustbin Agent. Though, admittedly, that would have made a lot of sense.

You could say Dustbin is far better than Star Trek, with a more actioneering pace, no stuffy or repressed characters and Dustbins as a better technological virus of the Borg. But since Star Trek is ABOUT stuffy and or repressed characters chatting about the Borg, this seems as logical and complaining about the lack of Martian Warships in Spot Goes To The Zoo. Wake up, you idiots.

Dustbin Umpire: The Hopeless also for the first time depicts the anti-Dustbin military as villains on a whim simply to justify one detestable character's obtuse, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing indignation. Well, the other series might have done the same, but no one noticed it at the time.

This series, with its descent into adolescent hypocrisy, audience wrong-footing, self-interested self-involvement and aping the high quality of BBC Wales’ Doctor Who, has utterly destroyed its own fanbase. Well, I say "fanbase", I mean "Tom Cookson". And in this respect The Hopeless is a vast improvement over the last four series.

We can only hope for one last Dustbin Umpire which can be so monumentally smug and disappointing crystalline mockery that all the surviving fans are finally wiped out forever. WE CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN!


"I Lost My Heart To A Dustbin Replicant!" by Black Metal Blood Runs Cold & The CyberGoth Monoids

I’m on a mission to kill every Dustbin that enters my vision
Loaded up with weapons of precision
To burn Dustbins like nuclear fission
Cos you fucked with us Dustbins, but revenge is sweeter than honey
Dustbins gonna get the smash up like they was crash test dummies
"Masters of the universe," you sorry-ass joke
You couldn’t conquer shit when your stair-master’s broke

Oh I heard you got all irate when ya heard me demeaning ya
But I’ll get all up in your systems like a bout of spectrox toxaemia
My disease will have you spraying foam all over your dome
While you spinning like a firework screaming "Loss of control!"
You hear that, Dustbins? Don’t you like my impression?
But you stepped to us with aggression
And still ain’t learned your lesson
I conquer Dustbins like women - twelve in one session!

Don’t need no homing missiles to deliver my kills
I just fight you barehanded and smash my fist through your grill
The galaxy lives in hope of the end of your menace
While we batting your eyestalks in Zero-G tennis
And sent the rest of you to get incinerated in the furnace!

With a whole load of firepower
To smash your Dustbinanium tower
I ain’t fleeing from the realm in mankind’s darkest hour
Cos loyalty to my family and race is what I’m all about
So put your disc in my head and I’m-a spit it back out
My will’s so resilient I could stare a Dustbin out
As this galaxy spins,
There’s a war we must win
So incase I don’t come home, someone tell my next of kin
I stepped to a lot of Dustbins and made em all one
With my twelve gauge plasma rifle that I call fun
I burn like a stitch halfway through an adrenaline rush
This is it today, were going for the final push
You take the piss like the toilet and we’re giving you the flush

Todays the final break through, we gonna smash down your forts
And stick it to you hard, right up your access ports
We’ll blaze a trail through their space fleets, it’s gonna be insane
Dustbins gonna burn in flames
That’ll spell out my name

It’s a revenge that’s raw like spectrox
We’ll be winning this game by dead men’s socks
Just remember all the Dustbins did, that shit was unforgivable
So I remember my training and blast at their peripherals
You’ve enjoyed your spoils of war but now its our turn
Don’t beg my pity Dustbin, I watched galaxies burn
Dump a ton of gasoline on y’all and throw in the match
Try to go to auto defense but your system’s just crashed!