Things That Definitely Happened in 2020
"Transfer your consciousness to my new premium subscription program," chanted Russell Brand in his hypnotic Essex drawl. The lithe, sprawling old beast had cultivated his audience most effectively, capitalising on 67 years of MK-ULTRA and related social engineering programs, and now the darling little buds were sprouting nicely on the compost-heap of previous counter-cultures. Brand was offering a fully immersive podcast experience, a chance to truly get Under the Skin - or at the very least, Inside the Home Studio - by donning one's VR headset and eavesdropping as Brand conversed with the crème-de-la-crème of the global awareness revolution. Leaked clips of Mikhaila Peterson's interview were removed from YouTube because she claimed that eating beef cured her coronavirus.
Extinction Rebellion co-founder and digital access champion Gail Bradbrook announced that she had changed her first name to Teal, and revised her initial claim that climate-change could be as bad as up to "20 Hitlers", saying that in fact runaway global warming could present a global emergency akin to all of those 20 Hitlers synergizing into one gigantic Mega-Hitler, "kind of like what the Zords did in Power Rangers, but bad, because they're all Hitler, you know?". Bradbrook changed her first name back to Gail after kool-aid peddling New Age Insta-babe Teal Swan threatened her with an astral lawsuit.
The US elections went ahead as planned, with Donald Trump achieving his predicted landslide victory. Nonetheless, Joe Biden remained in good spirits, as he had already forgotten that he was running for President.
Bill Gates announced that his favourite film has always been The Omen, and criticised the Revelation of St. John for being too pessimistic and reactionary. "Hyuk, well, we need to upgrade the global markets, we can't get stuck in the past, now can we?", he said via Zoom link, the harrowing bleats of ritual goat sacrifice distinctly audible in the background until he excused himself to shut the sliding door to the back garden. Gates's latest philanthropic initiative, ChickenNeck2020, was set up to "causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads, and that no man might buy or sell, save he that has an ethical, privacy-protected digital ID in the form of a safely implanted biometric chip," according to the official website.
Boris Johnson was forced to take early retirement after claiming that his 'hero nurses' Jenny McGee and Luis Pitarma were in fact Huawei-powered holograms. "It really is astonishing, you know, what they can- all this technology stuff, it's really quite remarkable... I mean, if we can use Chinese technology to staff the NHS with holographic projections and whatnot, we could save billions for the NHS, billions," he claimed in a bizarre press release.
Arson attacks on suspected 5G masts continued despite Eamonn Holmes's slightly glazed retraction. Ofcom responded by ordering the systematic erasure of any trace of Eamonn Holmes's existence from all available archives. Classic videos of Holmes, such as the one where he's talking to David Blaine who is being all weird and has an eye drawn on his hand, immediately went viral on social media, causing a fake-news crackdown on any material that implied Holmes had ever existed or been on TV, which he couldn't have, because he's not real. The #EamonnHolmesTruther movement began in earnest.
Dominic Raab got so frustrated at people thinking he was Dominic Cummings that he foisted the role of acting Prime Minister on his partial namesake. "If you plebs want that Gollum lookalike instead, then you can all f*** off to Tesco without a mask" he tweeted, to national bemusement.
Keir Starmer proved to be the leader that Labour had been waiting for, centrist but still able to connect with the youth. A meme went viral on social media depicting Starmer underneath the words "this is what Ricky Wilson from the Kaiser Chiefs looks like now, feel old yet?". In an ingenious PR move, he responded by uploading a video of himself dancing and miming "Every Day I Love You Less & Less" to a puppet effigy of Jeremy Corbyn.
Meanwhile, mashup prank artist SwedeMason produced a remix of Kaiser classic "Ruby" entitled "Jimmy", using footage of Starmer publicly apologizing for his failure to follow up evidence against Jimmy Savile while Head of the Crown Prosecution Service: "JIMMY JIMMY JIMMY JIMMY, AAAHHHHH! Due to lack of interest, the investigation is cancelled". Starmer could not be reached for comment.