"Are You Quite Finished?" - 4 People Who Just Rabbited On

The ability to gauge roughly how far we are from a smack in the mouth is something most of us learn before leaving school. We can then apply this logic to more grown-up fates, like getting fired or arrested. Or even just making fools of ourselves, or boring everyone.

Granted it can take a bit longer to start caring. An embarrassing Friday-night anecdote is a rite of passage for any teenager, and there are worse places to be in your twenties than the dole queue. But generally speaking, we get there in the end.

Generally speaking. Whether through drugs, privilege or even just genetics, some do not.

1) DAVID ICKE

I'll start with a classic. I've written already about how conspiracy theorists annoy me. But this post-truth race to the bottom, fuelled by the echo chamber of social media, is a relatively new phenomenon. Crazy people have been around forever.

David Icke's basic thing is the Good vs Evil story. He takes the opposite view of George Carlin and sees Earth as being "on a life support machine". As a conduit of The Godhead, he has a duty to spread the word. To his credit, although he touches on wacky things like energy fields of thoughts and colours, he doesn't mention his belief in the interdimensional shape-shifting reptiles known as the Archons and their quest for domination. But he certainly does go on.

When I was about ten, I told my parents I had two brains. I talked about it a lot, which worried them, which spurred me on, until they started looking into therapy for me. But it was just me trying to explain the conscious and the subconscious. How some thoughts are formed as words in my head, while others are more like feelings. I thought I might be unique in this. Maybe I was God? It was worth putting this out there, just in case. They would thank me later.

Enough interaction with other people took the wind out of those sails. Or was that just societal indoctrination? Maybe I should trust my instincts more. Maybe the world has urgent need of me and I'm just sat here taking the piss.

2) KEITH ALLEN

You may know Keith Allen as the father of Lilly Allen. Or as Davos from Game of Thrones - which is actually wrong, despite the fact he looks just like him. Strangely though, he is the father of the actor who played Theon.

A more recent photo, if you didn't believe me.

It turns out there's more - but not much. He was about as obscure in 1989 as he is now. That didn't stop him lecturing a room full of established comedians on what they're doing wrong - loudly and at length. Look at Charlie Higson's face at the start. That vacant, defeated stare. He must have already been going for ages by then - and anyone who's worked in television knows you can't reason with a steaming cokehead. This is just something they will have to live with until a grownup arrives.

She arrives decades too late, of course. Some of my earliest memories are of my parents calmly explaining to me about my "storms". They weren't tantrums. They weren't my fault. Sometimes big feelings come, like a volcano in my belly, but we can learn ways to cool it down. Some slightly later memories are of a smacked arse. Some poor sods get neither of these things, and it shows.

If I were to wake up one morning and be shown a clip of myself acting like this, I would never drink again. I might even find God. Join a cult and start whipping myself. I wonder at what age you can effectively use it in schools - surely any teenager who thinks this performance is somehow cool is already a lost cause? The strange thing is, being "edgy" and "rebellious" (a prick and a bully) is what gave him his career, such as it was. Enough higher-ups really did think this shit was the future.

3) LIAM PAYNE

I almost didn't include this one. Not just because he died (which was very tragic) but because I quite liked him. I hadn't heard of him before seeing this (which isn't a diss; I'm a 40-year-old man) and I immediately began searching for other interviews of him acting the arse. In all honesty, this was it. I may have missed some, but from everything I saw, he was nothing but down-to-earth and lovely. Just a smart, respectful, good guy. 31 is no kind of age.

So the comedy here comes from whatever drugs he's on. (When your behaviour is this bizarre, it surely becomes libellous to say you're not on drugs?) And really, this could be any of us. Any of us who have been mixing with vacuum-headed showbiz folks and been crazy rich for a third of our lives. I have a feeling I'd have been worse - and I was never even good-looking. So I hope we can take all of this as read and not have it derail our enjoyment of this interview. Because it's fucking wonderful.

Notice how he waffles on for a full minute before the interviewer gets a chance to do his job and introduce him. Or even introduce himself - meaning Liam wouldn't have known who this fantasy-land gibberish is even for. He doesn't care. He's in the zone. He's using five different accents and the reveal that his audience is British will do nothing to break his stride.

Oh man, I could talk about this all day and become a big hypocrite in the process. My favourite bit though, is when he reaches out to me personally to make sure I'm doing OK. He's guessed correctly that a bit of drama at a millionaires' circle jerk thousands of miles away has shaken me to the very core of my being - but in that majestic prayer gesture, the beaudy of life shone through. Toby honest witch yore, it was illusional.

4) SARAH BOONE

Another entry associated with a tragic death, I'm afraid. If you weren't following the Sarah Boone case, it was stranger than Spongebob fan fiction. This woman somehow managed to trap her boyfriend inside a suitcase, where he suffocated. This alone will be a mystery for the ages. At first she told police it was a game of hide-and-seek (as you do) gone wrong - then they found a video she made of herself laughing at his pleas for help. She then said she was an abuse victim who'd snapped - then they found videos she made of herself scolding the petrified crap out of him.

She's such a dedicated blockhead, she refused to listen to any of the lawyers she was assigned and kept firing them. She went through not one, not two, but nine lawyers, sitting in jail for four-and-a-half years before her trial could even begin. The prosecution got so fed up they offered a plea deal that would have seen her free in eight years - which she of course rejected. The lawyer she ended up with must have had the easiest job in the world - just do whatever she wants.

"Even when I lose I'll be famous!"

This video is of her allocution - the accused's final speech before sentencing. Your last chance to endear the judge to you. Show them you know what you've done and you're sorry. Even children understand the value of this. Assuming her lawyer even bothered trying though, there seems to be no room in Sarah's head for anything besides her own story - an unbearably insensitive and tone-deaf thesis which takes her twenty punishing minutes. She prefaces it by saying she's had to edit herself down - there's so much more she could have said, you guys - and that this is "the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg". She then begins: "Kentu sukaroi is a kind of Japanese ceramic style which means to repair with gold..." Christ alive.

What follows is probably what you expect. I forgive him for his abuse. I forgive myself for falling in love with a monster. I forgive his family for not helping me - and will underscore this by slandering him lots more, in intricate detail, for the world to hear. The judge took less than 40 seconds to give her life.