‘Shaun of the Dead’ sequel ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ hailed as a classic

Simon Pegg’s 2004 zombie spoof ‘Shaun of the Dead’ was an instant hit, but has been criticised for its treatment of zombies as one-dimensional characters with no autonomy, intellect or artistic sensibilities.

His sequel, Operation Raise the Colours, features an even more devastating mass infection event with a twist: the zombies hoist flags on lampposts to mark their territory.

‘We wanted to show zombies as real characters, you know, with hopes and dreams and ladders and flags’, Pegg allegedly told reporters. ‘These zombies can sort of speak – they can string a few words together, it’s gibberish, but it’s their gibberish. Obviously, they’re brain-dead, but they can still function a bit. And tie flags to lampposts.'

The zombie leaders are particularly abhorrent. The one they call ‘Nigel’ leaves a trail of ash and roubles everywhere he walks, and can make women vomit just by speaking to them. The rival zombie leader, ‘Tommy’, is a midget with a pronounced tic, as if he’s done too much coke. In the final climactic scene the two zombie leaders fight to the death, and are buried with full military honours, draped in flags – Nigel in a Russian flag, Tommy in a Union Jack handkerchief.

Image credit: perchance.org

Fat, balding Englishmen to maintain their confident stance on, well, everything

Overweight and under-educated Englishmen have confirmed their intention to continue providing unsolicited wisdom to a world which barely deserves them.

‘Stands to reason, dunnit?’ said one obese cretin whilst painting a Cross of St George on a mini roundabout. ‘British Empire - greatest empire the world has ever seen. Hovercraft, penicillin, jet engines – the modern world wouldn’t exist without Ingerland’.

The EU has expressed ‘deep gratitude’ for the continued dispensation of sage advice from the morbidly obese. ‘We know we don’t deserve you’, sobbed Ursula von der Leyen. ‘We have our own wise men, naturally, but nobody can say it quite like a seventeen stone plumber’s mate with an arsecrack the size of Belgium. Deep down, we all know you’re right and we’re just a bit . . . foreign’.

As well as being demonstrably unforeign, the English patriots can erect flags at heights of up to eight feet, paint red crosses on a white background and display their own flag upside down – skills which would bamboozle Johnny Foreigner. They also have an intuitive grasp of the subtle nuances of football, including ‘why the current England manager is shit’, ‘why your team is shit’ and ‘why everything foreign is shit. Fancy a curry?’

Final word goes to Barry, halfway through his third mini-roundabout this week. ‘It isn’t racist, it’s just a flag, innit. Orford Lane? Nah, place is full of darkies, they’d kill us if we tried to put our flags up there’.

England flies the flag – from a lamp post, covered in bird sh*t.

Across England, an extraordinary movement has taken hold: the mass stapling of £2 polyester flags to any publicly funded vertical surface. Many lamp posts, traffic lights and bus stops are now tangled in sagging St George’s crosses. Forget cricket and warm beer - the true test of patriotism in 2025 is how many metres of fraying polyester you can cable-tie above a roundabout.

The England flag, once a symbol of jubilee celebrations and penalty shootouts, now finds itself pressed into the service of a culture war - like a middle-aged pub landlord forced into active combat because someone on Facebook dared to suggest hummus is nice.

Critics argue that the flags are provocative at a time when tensions around immigration are running high. St George’s crosses have become a fixture at anti-immigration protests, where they are held aloft by people who think 5G is a form of government mind control.

While groups behind the flag phenomenon say their aim is to spread ‘love, unity and patriotism’, some of them have been linked to far-right organisations. Supporters insist they’re just ‘ordinary people’ who enjoy crowdfunding for cable ties, and shouting at strangers outside hotels. “We want people to know that this is a country to be proud of. England still stands tall!” declared Dave Crump from Facebook group Walsall Warriors, as a flag slid slowly down a lamp post behind him, like a pole dancer who’s lost the will to live.

Meanwhile, online crowdfunders continue to raise thousands to buy more flags. Britain may not be able to fund the NHS, but by God we’ll never run out of cheap tat from Poundland.

The irony is that these flags - flimsy, dirt-streaked, and perpetually tangled around themselves - feel less like a proud declaration of national identity and more like a national metaphor. They hang at half mast, limp and rain-soaked, as if to say: this is Britain now. A once-proud island reduced to a damp bit of polyester flapping above a pothole. Much of England now resembles an end-of-empire clearance sale that went horribly wrong in a gale, with seagulls treating the whole enterprise as an avant-garde toilet. The spirit of the nation has been encapsulated by a scrap of cheap polyester, slowly decomposing above a Lidl car park.

The country doesn’t look like it’s flying high – it looks like it’s in tatters and stuck halfway up a lamp post, waiting for the council to take it down, probably sometime in 2031.

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