The Satisfactory Death of McBride

The highest poetry prize in all blogland (this week) is awarded to Bill Quango MP. Bingo produced a very fine parody indeed. He is the winner of the 'McBride in a Bottle' (One for laying down. And avoiding).
Macbride's Soliloquy: Act 5 Scene 5.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
A creep in this petty place
So like The Day Today.
To spin to the last syllable of recorded air-time,
And all yesterday's news, only gave political fools
A pause for breath.

Out, out, truth vandal!
Life's but a walking shallow, a poor Draper
That cuts and pastes his hour upon the page
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by a half-wit,
full of soundbites and perjury,
Justifying nothing.

'Out, out, truth vandal!' was very good; what really won it for him was the 'poor Draper, that cuts and pastes his hour on the page'. Sublime.

But many other entries were worthy of medals. I won't reprint them in full here here, but I will tell you what caught my eye.

Nick Drew's ballad was splendid. One could imagine it being set to lute and tambourine. 'Now Derek was a therapist (of dubious degree)' was a good pun, and the line that Guido had 'bogeyed Brown' was brilliant, if distasteful. I was reminded of the ballad of Brave Sir Robin in Python's Holy Grail.

Apricotfox impressed me greatly.
'Here lies the rat, McBride.
Nasty, poisonous,vile and snide.
Result of failed spermicide'.
Ouch! What a start. She kept up the invective through 17 lines, too. One of the medallists for sure, foxy.

Alceste responded with an epic, with as simple a rhyme scheme as has ever been produced for 47 lines of verse. But it read very easily.
'Brown is brown beneath the skinside.
Stinking ordure fills his inside.
Moral compass set on sin's side.'
Yes indeed; absolutely. Like Foxy's, this was another dark and smelly concoction, but which got the measure of McBride and Brown exactly.

Welcome back to Newmania who won the bronze medal 18 months ago when idle first tried a poetry comp (for a very witty, but quite disgusting four-liner). Nick Drew won the gold. New readers of this blog might well enjoy the original post, and the results post.

This time, Newmania went Kiplingesque. Rudyard was almost without peer when writing about characters like McBride. Newms has our antihero raging from the scaffold:
'And now there's no sound but his breath and the crowd
And he laughs at their ravenous eyes
"Do you think when I'm gone it won’t carry on?
You think when I die that it dies?".’
Terrific.

Some chap tried a parody of Ozymandias, which spawned a run of re-writes, including a Blake and a brace of Audens, the last of which, Stop All the Clocks, I had high hopes for until it became clear that the least modest I could be would be to mention it in the way that I just have.

I could go on; it was an enjoyable thread, and thanks to all for entering. The temptation is to take an All Shall Have Prizes attitude, but I decided on balance that we had a winner. Some will say that parody is easy compared to original composition. I see it as an art in itself, however, and Bingo wins the bottle.