LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FOLLOWING SCENE, RE-WRITTEN WITH VARIOUS BRITISH SLANG TERMS, IS ONE OF THE LATE PETER FINCH’S MOST FAMOUS MONOLOGUES, FROM THE 1976 MOVIE, “NETWORK.”

HOWARD BEALE:

I don’t have to tell you things are bang out of order. Everybody knows things are snookered. It’s a cock-up.

Everybody’s either been made redundant or they’re scared of being made redundant.

A pony buys a quid’s worth, banks are going belly up, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, right where the Jewish piano is, should a punter try to half-inch what used to be their monthly score. Chavs who should be doing porridge are running wild in the roads and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know their onions about what to do, and there’s no end to it.

(beat)

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to scoff, and we cabbage watching our goggleboxes while some gobby newscasters ear bash us, telling us that this past fortnight alone we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s Sweet Fanny Adams.

We know things are wonky – worse than that. They’re off their trolley. It’s like everything everywhere is going barmy, so we don’t go out on the town anymore. We sit in the gaff, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least bugger off when we’re in our lounges. Let me have my bangers and mash and my gogglebox and my set of wheels and I won’t say anything. Just bugger off.’ Well, I’m not gonna bugger off.

(beat)

I want you to get as mad as a bag of ferrets!

(beat)

I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to Lord and Lady Muck, over at Number 10 Downing Street, because I’m gormless as to what to tell you to write. I don’t have a scooby what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the aggro in the road. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad keen about all this. You’ve got to give a monkey for your fellow man, and the plights they have, for they’re the same as yours and mine. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, Gordon Bennett! My life has bloody VALUE!’

(beat)

So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M BRASSED OFF, AND I’M GOING BALLISTIC!’

(beat)

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m brassed off and I’m going ballistic!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get as mad as a box of frogs!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m brassed off, and I’m going ballistic!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the petrol crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and give all those who wronged you in your life what for: “I’M BRASSED OFF, AND I’M GOING BALLISTIC!”