Selvatico V

Selvatico V: The One You Paid For

William Makepeace Thackeray, in his 1847 novel Vanity Fair, wrote of “. . .a mediocrity which ought to have insured any man a success”. Lacking such a mediocrity by which a faux artist can conform and profit from the world has been a perennial bugbear for an artist as original and committed as Will Franken. To that effect, in the summer of 2025, he reached out to the public, having long forsaken communicating online with anybody save for his devoted patrons. In a nutshell, he asked for financial help and, in exchange, he promised another Selvatico. The response was, to resort reluctantly to cliché, overwhelming. Anybody listening who may have been deluded that Franken harboured any political sympathies on either side of the illusory spectrum will have found themselves delightfully deceived. Charlie Kirk (here recast as Charlie Church) is as disingenuous in his digital conservatism as his passionless interlocutors are ineffectual in their flaccid leftism. An assassin’s bullet kicks things off delightfully as the parodic podcaster Rick Shreld returns to action with blowhard stupidity. Listen out for anti-trans activist-turned-obese-anti-trans-activist Graham Linehan, a round-up of the mundanity peopling the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, King Charles on one of Donald Trump’s golf courses, and set yourselves up as a fly on the wall as BBC executives debate the existence of “a class lower than middle”.