BING
I haven’t got a speech. I didn’t plan words, I didn’t even try to. I just knew I had to get here, to stand here, now, and I knew I wanted you to listen…

Judge Hope goes to open his mouth. Bing shuts him off--

BING (CONT’D)
(addressing Hope directly)

-- to really listen, not just pull a face like you’re listening, like you do the rest of the time. A face like you’re feeling instead of processing. You pull a face and poke it toward this stage and lah di dah we sing and dance and tumble around and all you actually see and hear -- it’s not people, you don’t see people up here…

Bing starts pacing, getting into the flow. The guard eyes him anxiously, seeing if he’s got a chance to pounce.

BING (CONT’D)
... It’s all fodder, and the faker that fodder is, the more you love it, because fake fodder’s the only thing that works any more. Fake fodder is all we can stomach.

He looks up, beyond the judges.

BING (CONT’D)
Actually not quite all. Real pain, real viciousness: that we can take. Stick a fat man up a pole and we’ll laugh ourselves feral because we’ve earned the right. We’ve done saddletime and he’s slacking, the scum, so ha ha ha at him. We’ll happily meld with the sheer callous madness of it because we’re so out of our minds with desperation we don’t know any better. In the audience, people are rapt with attention. They’re actually listening.

BING (CONT’D)
All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That’s how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves; buying shit. “I have a * dream”? The peak of our dreams is a * new hat for our dopple. A hat that doesn’t exist, that’s not even there. We buy shit that’s not even there. Show us something real and * free and beautiful? You couldn’t. Cos it’d break us. We’re too numb for it; our minds would choke. We’ve grown inside this machine, breathed its air too long. There’s only so much wonder we can bear.

That’s why when you find any wonder whatsoever, you dole it out in meagre portions – and only then when it’s been augmented and packaged and pumped through ten thousand pre-assigned filters till it’s nothing more than a meaningless series of lights to stare into while we ride, day in, day out: going where? Powering what? Powering * the whole distraction engine. All * tiny cells and tiny screens and * bigger cells and bigger screens and F**K YOU.

F**k you! That’s what it boils down to, is f**k you! f**k you for being part of this landscape, f**k you for sitting there slowly knitting things worse, f**k you and your spotlight, and your sanctimonious faces and – f**k you, f**k you all for taking the one thing I ever came close to feeling anything real about, anything -- for oozing round it and crushing it into a bone, into a joke, one more ugly joke in a kingdom of millions of them. f**k you for happening. f**k you from me, for us, for everyone. f**k you.

Bing is exhausted. Panting