How I Invented Hip-Hop... and Other Faux-Pas

Some time, presumably, in the fairly recent past, Mr B had an idea. "Hip-hop," he thought, "and speaking in a posh English accent, are very dissimilar. If combined, the contrast could be quite amusing." Indeed, it's an amusing image, that of a jolly old chap with a banjolele rapping about tea and cricket to some heavy old school beats. But a droll juxtaposition is all that it is: it certainly isn't an hour-long show.

Perhaps more egregious is that Mr B doesn't even manage to deliver decent rap, reeling off turgid rhyming couplets with as much variation and flow as a damp teabag. (As an adendum to this, note that tea-based jokes aren't a limitless fountain of mirth, as the "gentleman rhymer" amply demonstrates). It's frustrating, as Mr B clearly has a solid knowledge of and fondness for the themes, form and tropes of hip-hop, and has more than enough charisma as a performer to satirise its affectations and accoutrements. But he has made his bed as the inventor of "chap hop", and it's a small bed to lie in.

By far the best of Mr B's ditties is a lampoon of Tim Westwood – a figure whose astounding failure to grasp the inauthenticity of his own gangsta schtick makes him a deserving figure of fun. But it's hard not to see a certain irony at work here: where Westwood undermines everything that makes hip hop a living, breathing, relevant form of poetry, Mr B does rough justice to comedy's startling ability to satirise the ridiculous.